by Robert Pobi
||| EIGHTY-NINE
SITUATED IN the East River, Randall’s Island proper is separated from Queens by Hell Gate, and from the Bronx by Bronx Kill. Though technically deeded as part of Manhattan, it is separated from the city by the Harlem River and runs from roughly 100th to 127th Street.
Home to the New York City Fire Department’s training facility, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s wastewater treatment plant, the seventeen-floor Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a vast patchwork of sports fields and parkland, and roughly fifteen hundred full-time residents, Randall’s Island was also one of the most coveted chunks of real estate in the Northeast. Nature lovers could visit the salt marshes and freshwater wetlands on either side of Little Hell Gate Inlet, and the sports minded could hit the batting cages or driving range.
Under the watchful eye of the Randall’s Island Park Alliance, a vast chunk of the island’s space had been allocated for sports and recreational purposes: there were sixty-three soccer, softball, baseball, field hockey, football and lacrosse fields; twenty tennis courts; and five miles of waterfront pathways. Major track-and-field events could be hosted at Icahn Stadium, a state-of-the-art facility that seated five thousand spectators.
Besides catering to the area’s public schools, the island’s recreational facilities also played host to the physical education programs of many of the approximately nine hundred private schools in the area. Schoolchildren can be found all over the island every day of the week.
———
As Phelps took the car off the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge and swung down onto Randall’s Island, Hemingway marveled at the size of the place. She had paddled its shores when navigating her kayak past Little Hell Gate, and even visited it on a few occasions, but she had never looked at it as a reserve to hunt children. This morning it looked as large as a continent.
Phelps followed the Darth Vader instructions dictated by the GPS, driving past the psychiatric center and then swinging around to the tip of the island where a battery of police cars were ready for the day’s task of keeping the children safe.
Lincoln and Papandreou were already there with the two dozen cruisers and an army of uniformed policemen, most drinking coffee. A few stood off from the crowd, smoking in little groups. Phelps parked off to the side and as Hemingway got out, more cars pulled up behind them.
The plan had come from her office and they had thrown it by both the State Association of Independent Schools, which oversaw the private schools, and the New York City Department of Education, which controlled the public schools—both bodies had rubber-stamped the idea of a police presence for the last games day of the year.
The plan was simple: there was one uniformed police officer assigned as security liaison to each school and it was their job to check the roster of each bus that left for Randall’s Island; that same officer would ride with the last bus to the island and check return attendance at the end of the day when everyone packed up to head home. The math worked out to roughly one officer per seventy-five students plus the hundred extra policemen that would be manning crosswalks, parking lots, paths, the edge of wooded areas, bathrooms, on-ramps, off-ramps, and the island side of the footbridge that connected with Manhattan at 103rd Street.
But the real emphasis—the one Hemingway had tried to keep under the radar—was on the forty-one of Dr. Brayton’s children who would be on the island today. Each had an officer assigned as a shadow—some uniformed, some plainclothes. Hemingway had made the call, stressing that not focusing on these specific children was tantamount to negligence. This translated to forty-one shadows mixed in with the general population of police officers.
Along with the new day had come more heat. Papandreou wore a police T-shirt and jeans with white leather sneakers, Lincoln wore chinos and a Hawaiian shirt, and it was hard to decide who looked like more of a stereotype.
Phelps was in one of his many gray suits, this one a light summer wool. As usual he looked rested and ready. Hemingway had opted for jeans, engineer boots, and a cotton blouse. She couldn’t remember when she had last worn girl shoes.Her badge hung from her neck on a beaded chain and her revolver was on her belt. She started to do the rounds.
She didn’t like that she didn’t recognize many of the cops who had pulled duty; the business of policing ran on respect and confidence, two things that were hard to come by when you hadn’t worked with a person before. But she went through the group, introducing herself and trying to become familiar with as many as possible.
After half an hour of introductions, small talk, and more coffee, she got up on the gate of her Suburban. She went over handheld channels, protocol, and warnings. Then she went over the e-mail that outlined the parameters of their duties here.
By the time the coffee was gone, the sea of uniformed policemen and policewomen knew what was expected of them, but not what to look for; it was the old “anything out of the ordinary directive,” which in New York City had a completely different set of boundaries than any other place on the planet. From the southwest corner of the island they dispersed to points northeast, heading out on foot, bicycle, golf cart, and car.
The buses started arriving around eight-thirty, filled with cheering bouncy children excited that summer vacation was almost here. Hemingway and Phelps made the rounds to the parking lots allocated to busses, intermittently checking attendance with the ride-along officers and making sure that the chaperones were up to speed.
Coaches and gym teachers lugged mesh bags of soccer balls, duffels of lacrosse sticks and baseball bats, and endless pieces of protective equipment. Everyone carried a water bottle. And the kids—from the grade school children to the high school seniors—bopped around with the boundless enthusiasm of youth.
After an hour of making the rounds, verifying that all was well, she headed back to the Suburban. They had a busy roster again today, and she probably wouldn’t sleep for another thirty hours. Who said it was lonely at the top?
Hemingway saw Phelps moseying between two of the soccer fields on the way back to the SUV. He had a pair of old Wayfarers on and she wondered if he realized that fashion had come full circle and he was a style icon among the younger cops in the precinct; some of them sported thin ties and a flat top à la Chuck Yeager and it could be traced straight back to Phelps, an unwitting fashion plate in oxfords.
She nodded a hello and he waved back with a slow-handed boredom that said he had had enough, but she had learned a long time ago that you couldn’t judge Phelps based on his enthusiasm.
He was probably right. After all, what kind of a self-destructive maniac would try to get through this kind of manpower?
The downside to such a massive display of force would be the news teams, contributing the usual more harm than good to the equation.
A breeze blew in off the river, smelling of salt and diesel and a general malaise that experience told her was a mixture of seaweed, garbage, and a long list of chemicals. She lifted her arms to get a little wind under her wings to cool her thermostat. As she stood there, enjoying the flutter of air against her clothes, Phelps came up.
“Hotter’n piss out here,” he said, Oscar the Grouch with a badge.
“Eloquent.”
“Fuck that noise. They don’t pay me to be eloquent.”
He turned to the south and stared out across the water at Manhattan’s irregular skyline. Hemingway kept her arms spread and willed the wind to cool her; all it did was make her sweat a little more. Phelps was right—it was hotter than piss.
“What if he shows up here?” she asked.
Phelps unbuttoned his suit jacket and jammed his hands into his pockets. “He’d have to be insane to try and breach the security here. Anyone so much as goes close to one of these kids and he’ll have a dozen cops bouncing up and down on his skull.”
She closed her eyes and focused on the breeze and for some reason it smelled worse. “Okay, let’s go get some food and head back to the precinct. I want to see what Carson and his
übernerds have come up with.”
As they swung around the asphalt of Wards Meadow Loop and back up to the Triborough hub, Hemingway surveyed the little uniformed specks mixed in among the frenetic flea circus of children. Even from a distance she could see the tension in the body language of the policemen, and she liked that. Nothing keeps a cop sharp like worry. And with nearly nine thousand kids on the island, forty-one who represented flesh-and-blood targets for a man with a saw, there was plenty to be worried about.
More than enough.
||| NINETY
THE DAY was spectacular and he danced among the police officers and children. He did a little boogie at the edge of the field where Johnson’s Academy and Maynard’s Collegiate Institute were in the last quarter of the grade four tournament. He smiled and waved a good morning to the policeman to his left and the policeman waved back, like he had better places to be and bigger things to do than watch a bunch of kids kicking a ball around. And he couldn’t argue with that; he had better things to do as well—Miles Morgan, for example.
He smiled at a couple of the chaperones and they smiled back. It was as if everyone were one big happy family. When he walked over to the water cooler, the lady in the MCI T-shirt asked him if he’d like a drink.
“Yes, please,” he had said, because he assumed that was what she expected him to say. He took the plastic cup, nodded a thank you, and continued on his way.
He had been talking to a police officer a few minutes earlier, asking him what the big fuss was. Pedophile, he had answered. A real sicko, apparently. When the cop had excused himself to go to the bathroom, he had picked up his knapsack and headed out into the fields.
No one saw him. No one acknowledged him. He was invisible here, among his people.
It took fifteen minutes to make it to the lacrosse field where Miles Morgan was finishing his last game of the year—the last game of his life, really. Miles was like all of these boys—pretenders, ignoble blood and poor breeding. Worse than bastards. Sons of bitches.
He found the Morgan kid at the edge of one of the soccer fields. Three cops stood over by the goal, talking. The action over, everyone looked like they just wanted to cool down.
Miles was with some other boys, in the midst of a joke that involved several punches to the smallest one in the group. Miles picked him up in his peripheral vision and stopped, turned. He came over.
“You see all the cops?” he asked, once again demonstrating his finely tuned sense of observation. “Didn’t think you were coming this week.”
He shrugged and the knapsack with the Canadian flag sewn to it shifted on his shoulder. “When have I not come?” he asked.
Miles ignored the response. “Did you bring it?”
“Didn’t I say I would?”
“You want to show me right here?”
They walked back between two buses.
He lowered his knapsack, pulled the two zippers, and pulled out a corner of the shadow box. Three hairy lifeless legs reached for the corner of the box, thick as pencils. “Biggest one in the world,” he said, knowing the boy couldn’t say no. They never did. “It feeds on birds.”
“I can’t pay you here. My money is in my shorts.”
He pretended to think about this for a second. “I know a cool spot that’s pretty private.”
Miles Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Aw, man, they gave us this long-assed speech at school this morning. Said we need to stay in sight and to watch out for strangers. To keep on the fields where our classes are.”
He shrugged. “What do you expect them to say? But all right, if you’re scared to leave, I understand. If I was like you, I’d be scared, too.” He zipped up the pack, stood up—subject closed.
The Morgan boy stopped him. “I really want it. And I’m not scared.”
“Then I have the most private place in the world.”
||| NINETY-ONE
HEMINGWAY AND Phelps were in the cybercrimes lab with Carson, going through the endless data when her cell chirped. “Hemingway,” she said automatically.
“Hemi, it’s Nick. We lost Lincoln.”
She felt something flutter in her stomach. “What the fuck do you mean lost?” At the edge of her peripheral vision Phelps stood up and reached for his coat.
Rising above Papandreou’s voice was the static of cheering children. “Last time I saw him he was talking to the Morgan kid. Maybe five minutes ago. Morgan kid’s gone, too.”
She remembered Ace and Cindy’s son—Little King Switchblade. “What happened?”
“I went for a squirt. I couldn’t’ve been gone for more than five minutes. He was there when I left, standing by the buses watching a bunch of kids. Ten minutes later, he’s AWOL. Poof.”
She turned and headed out of the lab, Phelps holding the door for her. “Where are you?”
“Northeast tip of the island, the parking lot between softball fields fourteen and thirty-three.”
Without asking, Phelps shoved a creased photocopy of a Randall’s Island map in front of her face. She checked the top right-hand corner and located the two fields. “Below the wetlands?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he go? Any holes?”
There was a pause and she could picture Papandreou standing on his tiptoes, squinting into the distance. “Everyone says they were doing their job but you know how it is. You close your eyes or turn your head, and they’re gone. Hey—hold on. Yeah, you know what, he coulda gone that way, sorry—the only way I see out of here is under the railway bridge.”
“You try his cell?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“And he ain’t answerin’.”
“Find Lincoln and find that kid. We lose someone today, we lose this investigation to the Feds. And we’d deserve to.” She checked her watch. “We’ll be there in fifteen.”
||| NINETY-TWO
LINCOLN SCANNED the landscape for reporters; there weren’t any—which was good. But he had lost the kid—Miles—which was bad; Hemingway would throw an Elizabeth Taylor if she found out. And where the fuck was Papandreou? He had gone for a piss—how long could that take, for Chrissake? He reached for his phone, then figured if Nick wasn’t here, there was no point in making him run. He’d go after the little fuck himself.
Lincoln stepped up into one of the school buses, flashing his badge at the driver who was doing his best not to fall asleep. Lincoln grabbed the handle and swung out, using the added height of the steps to scour the landscape.
Where had that kid gone?
And then he spotted him, over near the trees, heading into the scrub on the way to the railway bridge. He caught a glimpse of the boy for a second just as he stepped into the bushes. Then he was gone.
“Thanks,” he said to the driver, and went after the boy. He knew he could get the Morgan kid back before anyone noticed he was gone. He had to.
He moved quickly but didn’t run—if any of the reporters caught sight of him, he didn’t want to look like he was on a mission.
When he hit the trees he turned and looked back at the buses parked like a group of stagecoaches in Indian country. Papandreou still wasn’t anywhere in sight. He looked ahead, toward the architecture of the bridge rising out of the earth, and figured that he could go get the kid and be back before Papandreou knew he was gone.
Like every other kid on the island, the Morgan boy was in blue shorts and a white shirt and he had never before noticed how many white plastic bags were strewn about. They all looked like the kid.
He cleared the trees and came into a field of uneven terrain strewn with rocks and construction castoffs. Sheets of plywood and concrete slag and roofing shingles littered the temporary construction yard and the railroad bridge stretched into the sky above. Lincoln could hear the children’s shouting from behind the treeline and it sounded like a recording from a long-ago time. The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge was ahead, past the railroad bridge,
and Lincoln headed toward it.
Miles Morgan was nowhere to be seen.
He threaded his way across the field, wondering what the fuck the kid was doing over here. If he wanted a smoke there were closer places. He cleared the railroad bridge and then came up on the cracked concrete foundation of the RFK. He looked back toward the sounds of cheering one last time, briefly considered calling Papandreou, then decided that he had come all this way on his own so a few more feet wouldn’t matter. He stepped forward, under the RFK Bridge.
The shadow of the bridge rolled over him like a cloud bank. The heat didn’t abate but the atmosphere changed and the humidity and stench beneath the concrete piling felt like a fever.
The walls of the abutment were spray-painted with graffiti that ran the gambit from sloppily scrawled FTWS and initials to multicolored masterpieces as long as motor homes. The garbage in there was the usual stuff of New York legend and it stunk of piss and damp earth and pigeon shit and the wind pulsed thorough but did little to improve the smell. The birds hidden in the overhead girders cooed like an eerie soundtrack and the sounds of the Triborough traffic rattling over expansion joints echoed down into the dark.
A handful of pigeons scattered and headed out into the sunlight.
The dark played with his head and the other side of the bridge looked like one of those mouse doors from the Tom and Jerry cartoons he had watched as a kid—a small arch not big enough to get a hand into. But it was a hundred feet high and probably fifty wide. And close. All he had to do was get there.
Lincoln moved slowly through the weird shadows, making a concerted effort to breathe through his mouth so he wouldn’t have to smell the sour shit and mud and who knew what the fuck else that was rotting away down here.
He peered into the mottled gray geometry of shadow and the occasional glint of light off of broken glass. Where had the kid gone? Maybe it was time to call Papandreou. And say what? Um, sorry, Nick, I lost a kid—yeah, the dull one. No, that wouldn’t work, they’d be laughing at him for days.
