Harvest

by Robert Pobi

  “Doris Borenstein. Fifty-three, married five times, looks like a taxidermied piranha–”

  Hemingway held up her hand. “Don’t do that.”

  Lincoln nodded an apology. “Sorry. Like I said, these people freaked us both out a little. Ms. Borenstein has no employment history and her name is listed as administrator or senior fundraiser for eleven charities—emphysema, MS, general big-time stuff like that. Nice apartment but she’s cold as a mother-in-law’s love.”

  Lincoln wiped the catsup and mayo off his fingers with a napkin and opened his notebook. “Next up we have Cindy and ‘Ace’ Morgan. Guy builds battleships and shit. Rich Texan. Their place is decorated like Keith Richards’ bedroom. Gold leaf and leopard print and naked gold cherubs bolted to everything. He’s seventy-five. Wears a cowboy hat and sounds like Ross Perot. His wife, Cindy, is thirty-five. Former veterinary technician and before that she was an ‘Internet model.’ They think this is all one big hoot, some kind of role-play or something. They thought we were fucking joking. And you should meet their kid, Miles. Christ, what a goof.”

  Lincoln flipped forward a few pages. “Then we get the McDaddy of them all, Dr. Neal Winslow—chief ornithologist for the American Museum of Natural History. Specializes in endangered and extinct taxa, most notably the—” he went back to his notes and haltingly read“—Pinguinus impennis, whatever the fuck that is. Some kinda bird, I guess.

  “His kid Benjamin is some kind of genius. I mean totally off the charts. Smarter’n any of the other ones, and they’re all weird little rain men. The kid’s ten and has a full scholarship to Harvard. Wrote a collection of biographies of famous people just for the fun of it.

  “Dr. Winslow is something else. Fifteen years ago he busted his back in a car wreck. Spine’s held together with screws. Wife died seven years back—fell overboard on a cruise—inquest reported death by misadventure. Insurance never paid out because they couldn’t rule out murder. Wins-low didn’t contest the judgment. Now he does Scouts with his kid. Owns a bunch of corporations. Lives in the Dakota. Plenty of zeros in the bank. Odd guy.”

  Papandreou nodded over his coffee. “Freak,” he said. “Hunched over like some kind of bird.”

  Hemingway flicked Lincoln’s notes. “What’s wrong with you guys? His back was fucking broken. Don’t be disrespectful.” She leaned back in the chair and knitted her hands together on top of her head and she saw Lincoln’s eyes automatically dial into her bust. “So what don’t we know about these people?” she asked, taking her arms and crossing them in front of her chest.

  Benjamin Winslow

  Donor 9332042

  Age: Ten years, three months, fourteen days

  Dr. Neal Winslow was a single father.

  His wife had promised him that it would be her job, her sole responsibility. He could pretend to be interested on birthdays and Christmas, maybe even Thanksgiving. Parent–teacher nights would, of course, be required at least once a year. He would never have to go to recitals or endure finding a piano teacher, or put thought into the child’s schooling. She would handle all of it. He would be notified of events via a weekly memo. He wouldn’t have to sleep with her. The details would be handled by medical professionals. And it would keep her happy. So he had agreed.

  His wife went to a clinic specializing in such things. The child was born. And soon after, his wife disappeared from a cruise ship somewhere off the coast of Portugal. Her body was found three days later by fishermen, so badly bloated by the expanding gases in her system that they thought she was a blue crab–covered life raft.

  Benjamin became his sole responsibility and he spent countless hours teaching his son, molding him. And by the time he was five, the boy could outpace his father at anything he took an interest in.

  Benjamin had an aptitude not easily measured by standard testing methods but it was generally agreed that he had an IQ that topped 220. The boy excelled at multiple disciplines, not the least of which were mathematics and language. He was touted as a polymath, and Dr. Winslow nurtured his son’s gifts.

  Solomon Borenstein

  Donor 2323094

  Age: Ten years, one month, nine days

  Five husbands littered Doris Bornstein’s past, no small feat for a woman of forty-one years of age. Three had been rich, one had been nice and rich, and one was gay and rich. But they had all been smart. And good in bed. Except maybe for the gay one—unless he was high. But she had come to the table with her own money and had walked away from each without a battle. There had never been any forethought put into any of her divorces: one minute she was contented, maybe even a little happy, the next she was asking for a divorce. The first divorce was over poached eggs; the second, just after coming while he was giving it to her in the ass (the poor sonofabitch never even got to finish); the third, ten minutes after he bought her a nine-million-dollar beach house in Montauk; the fourth, during a Knicks game—she hated basketball—and the last one over a glass of wine on a British Airways flight.

  Of course she was up front with numbers Two through Five about the way she had left the previous marriage(s). Like all men, each thought he was different than his predecessors. And they were, but only from one another. Three years was the average.

  Solomon was conceived when she had been married to Herrik, her gay Norwegian god as she had called him. She had wanted a baby, he had wanted her to have a baby, but they had one rule—he didn’t go near her vajayjay. So they had compromised and opted for a surrogate and a sperm donor. It was amazing what a socioeconomically disadvantaged woman would put her body through for a mere three hundred thousand dollars. Morning sickness and stretch marks? No alcohol or—God-fucking-forbid—drugs for nine months? It was absolutely unthinkable.

  So Doris and Herrik had rented a womb, bought some sperm from the tall smart sexy donor that Dr. Brayton recommended, and settled in for the wonderful role of parenthood. Five months in—while they were on their way to London to see Van Morrison at the Royal Albert Hall—she looked over at Herrik and decided that the relationship had run its course. When they touched down at Heathrow, they each took a different car and had not spoken since.

  Of course she loved her son, Solomon.

  Miles Morgan

  Donor 4032239

  Age: Ten years, two months, three days

  Forney Morgan, who everyone called Ace, had done it all himself. No rich daddy. No bank loans. No credit. And no fucking woman telling him what to do, how to do it, or how long he was allowed to do it for. Amen. Thank you. And fuck the cheese loaf on the way out the door.

  Morgan Industrial was OPEC’s leading manufacturer of petroleum barrels. He had started the business in his garage in Odessa, Texas—marking up outsourced barrels by a buck apiece. By the time Texas was producing nearly three million barrels a day he had gone from brokering to manufacturing. Now, at the Christmas end of his life, his interests had expanded to include shipbuilding—an endeavor that led him to Uncle Sam, for whom he was now producing nuclear submarines. Life was grand.

  And then he found Cindy. Working in the veterinarian’s office where he took Rumsfeld and Adolf—his Great Danes—for their monthly checkup. She was twenty-three and had a big smile and an even bigger pair of tits. He had always been a boob monkey, ever since he could remember. It was good old-fashioned love at first sight.

  She had agreed to a dinner. Over wine they found out that he was almost exactly forty years her senior. And besides her tits, she was fun to listen to.

  She could also fuck the orange off a traffic cone.

  They got married after a quick visit to the lawyer for a prenup that stated, should the best of intentions somehow not be enough, she would be taken care of and he would not lose enough to make him hate her, which seemed like a healthy compromise.

  He didn’t need any of the little blue pills to put the steel to her. When she clamped her cans together, stuck out her tongue, and licked one of her nipples, he almost ripped through his pants.

  Two years in she a
sked for a baby. He thought about it and figured what the fuck? They tried. No pregnancy. She went to a doctor who specialized in correcting those kinds of women’s problems. She checked out. And after two months of prodding, he had grudgingly gone to have the joystick examined. He knew what was up before the visit—an old motorcycle injury. He had been sixteen and the surgeon who had put him back together said that he might not have children. Turned out he was right; the boys just weren’t swimming.

  She had somehow gotten him to agree to the handsome spermcicle people. The joke had ended up being on her; instead of the Brad Pitt model she had ordered, the delivered product bore an undeniable resemblance to the Hamburglar, as if Ace himself had magically entered the very core of the child’s being. Ace loved his son.

  But the kid was a dolt. Yet somehow smart enough to realize that getting angry about it was a wasted effort.

  He also had an unbelievably high pain threshold. Good old farm stock, Ace guessed.

  Fuck Brad Pitt.

  ||| SIXTY-EIGHT

  THEY WERE dealing with a breakfast of BLTs and NYPD travel mugs filled with the precinct’s finest blend from the machine in the corner. Mother Nature had cranked the thermostat back up into the red zone and Hemingway’s skin was having a hard time breathing.

  Papandreou and Lincoln had come by to drop off their interview notes from a night spent running around the city, visiting Brayton’s patients. After a quick rundown, they had left to get some much-earned sleep. True to habit, Papandreou had flicked the television on but left the sound off. Now, an hour later it was still flashing over Hemingway’s shoulder as she put the breakfast away, wondering in some distant corner of her mind if she was having too much coffee for the baby.

  Baby? There was no baby.

  Not yet.

  Not until she decided there was.

  Keep telling yourself that, sister.

  She took another bite of the sandwich.

  Phelps chewed mechanically, his eyes focused on the television. She looked at her watch and figured that the local morning cycle had started, the newscaster delivering the night’s mayhem with insincere gravity.

  Without taking his eyes from the screen, he said, “Hemi, go home. Get some sleep.” He looked ready for the trenches—fresh shaven and smelling of some not-too-bad cologne. “The world can get by without your help for a few hours.”

  ||| SIXTY-NINE

  SHE WAS sound asleep, somewhere beyond the point where a phone call or human voice could penetrate, deep in a slumber only the incessant ringing of the doorbell could shatter.

  She forced an eye open. Sat up. Looked around for a robe. Yanked it on over the nightie she had slept in.

  She moved slowly down the stairs, coming to the main nave of the loft. The place was a mess and it looked like Daniel still hadn’t come home. Her head felt like it was too small for her brain.

  The bell jingled again and she rounded the banister to the staircase. She moved past the four equestrian portraits and almost slipped on the polished wood. She hitched the robe a little tighter. Opened the door.

  She saw a smile. She smiled back. Something came at her. She never registered the blade whistling through her throat but she did feel the giddy high.

  She saw her own blood spurt across the doorway.

  Then she saw nothing at all.

  ||| SEVENTY

  PHELPS WAS still engrossed in the news. He had weathered so many media shit storms that he no longer took it personally. He thought most of the people on television were idiots anyway and he watched with the sound off, reading the chyron and the headlines. More than enough to get the gist of what they were saying.

  He was no longer a young lion but he hadn’t been hit by age as hard as a lot of his contemporaries. Many of them had opted out of active street duty years ago, deciding to spend the tail end of their careers perfecting their Microsoft Office skills. He had never felt the need to slow down. He liked what he did, was good at it, and rarely took his work home with him at night. Why fix what ain’t broken?

  Something flashed across the top of the screen and the announcer stared into the camera, looking graver than she had a second ago. They cut to a remote camera—a live report from the West Side.

  The camera captured a body lying in a doorway, legs inside, torso, arms and head flopped out onto the limestone landing. There was a massive jet of what could only be blood sprayed across the white Sheetrock inside the entrance. The head was twisted on sideways, buried in a mess of black hair. A paramedic stooped and covered the body with a sheet.

  Phelps recognized the door. He stood up, knocking his chair over.

  Across the bottom of the screen the chyron read: Detective Alexandra Hemingway of the NYPD murdered at her home.

  ||| SEVENTY-ONE

  PHELPS STARED at the television for a moment, mouth open, disbelief swirling around in his head like an angry weather system. “Hemi,” he said slowly.

  Hemingway looked up from her sandwich. The tremor of wrongness in his voice made her stop chewing.

  “I think something very bad has happened.”

  She came around to his side of the conference table and looked up, eyes on the screen for a second—maybe two—before she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and was gone.

  Phelps grabbed his holster and ran after her.

  ||| SEVENTY-TWO

  THE STREETS had not yet clogged up with the morning rush hour and Hemingway punched the big truck around the corner in a smoking drift that sounded like an angry Tyrannosaurus rex. The lights thumped and the sirens screeched and she had her foot to the floor as they drifted west, the city’s architecture sliding sideways across the windshield.

  Phelps was belted in, one hand on the holy shit handle, the other on the center console to keep him from slamming back and forth as she screeched through the corners and punched to the red line on the straightaways. A cruiser closed up their path; it had started out in the lead to clear the way but she had quickly grown tired of sitting behind it and had barreled past after two blocks.

  Phelps hadn’t so much as flinched. But he swore.

  The ride usually took about twenty minutes at night, forty in traffic. Hemingway made it in seven.

  They rounded the final corner in a swinging arc of smoke that scattered the reporters lined up at the edge of the road. She didn’t slow, but hammered up the middle of the street, skidding to a stop a foot from the side door of the cruiser that blocked the road.

  She ran through the tape, past the uniformed officer, through two more cops who tried to stop her, and pushed aside the EMT men crouching in her doorway. One tumbled back and fell down the stairs.

  There was a white plastic sheet over the body that lay across her threshold. One of the EMT guys started back up the steps but Phelps stopped him.

  Hemingway stood there, looking down at the sheet. The world went prismatic as tears filled her eyes. She closed them and the tears shook loose. She crouched down, reached out, and wrapped her fingers around the sheet.

  There was nothing else in her focus except her fear.

  She needed to see. Needed to know. And then she could fall apart.

  She needed him. Loved him. He had been taken by a killer who enjoyed disassembling little boys.

  Another bad man who wouldn’t leave her alone.

  She tightened her grip. The plastic was warm and humid, and her hand shook so badly that the sheet vibrated with her touch.

  A big shadow that could only be Phelps blocked out the sun. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  Hemingway pulled the sheet back, and looked down at the twisted black blood-spattered grimace on her sister’s face.

  ||| SEVENTY-THREE

  PHELPS LED her to a cruiser where she took up position leaning against the grill. He pushed a cup of coffee into her hand and she stared at it for a moment as she tried to figure out what had happened. The initial fear and disbelief were replaced by an eerie sense of calm that she knew was a form of shock that would eventually come ou
t in one big scream.

  She had her back to the news cameras parked at the end of the block. She heard Phelps go back to the line, talk to the cops on the scene. He dipped his head into the ambulance. There was a commotion at the edge of her vision.

  Phelps headed back and stood in front of her, shielding her from the cameras. “Okay. Look at me. I am going to tell you something and you have to act like I haven’t said anything because it will be all over the news and you don’t want this guy knowing any more about your personal life.” He stepped in. “Okay?”

  She was back in the present, back to the hot hood of the car and the too-warm coffee in her hand, and the sun already cooking the city. “What?”

  He squared his shoulders. “Daniel’s fine. He’s the one who found her.”

  She stood up, searched over his shoulder. “Where?”

  Phelps reached out, steadied her with a hand on each shoulder. “We walk over nice and slow. What would that film asshole you love so much say?”

  “Bitch, be cool.”

  “Yeah, well, some people got no class.”

  “Where is he?” A tinge of hysteria had crept into her voice and she took a breath, willing the panic inside her to shrink.

  “He’s in the ambulance. He’s fine but he’s in shock.”

  She headed around Phelps, toward the ambulance. She was aware that the cameras were there but she was back in cop mode now. Long stride, hand on sidearm, her eyes hidden by her aviators.

  Daniel was sitting on the edge of a stretcher, his head in his hands—just a skinny guy with long hair and too many holes in his jeans for a forty-five-year-old. There were bloody patches on his chest where he had wiped his hands. His camera bag sat on the floor beside him, the strap smeared with blood.

  Until that second she forgot that he had gone out last night. Iggy, wasn’t it?

  Hemingway snapped her fingers at the tech and when his boots hit the street she climbed in and pulled the door closed behind her. She crouched in front of him, and the grip of her pistol clinked on the frame of the stretcher behind her.