Harvest

by Robert Pobi

  But something in here was wrong—he could feel it. He couldn’t put his finger on the precise voltage of the problem, but he knew he had to be careful. He reached down and unclipped his service piece and the feel of the pistol in his hand triggered the combat mode setting in his brain. He moved forward, taking controlled breaths.

  Water dripped. Pigeons whispered in the dark overhead. Cars rattled the concrete and steel. And the wind off the East River funneled through, stirring up dirt and dust that stung his eyes.

  And then a soft voice to his right whispered, “Mister?”

  He spun, leveling the pistol at the word. A child huddled at the wall. Miles Morgan.

  Miles whispered again. “He’s in here.”

  At that Lincoln spun his head, scanning the darkness. All he saw was shadow and garbage. And that arch that wasn’t so far away but looked smaller and further away than it had a minute ago.

  He reached for the boy. “Come here, kid.”

  The child’s fingertips touched his.

  Then he saw a second shadow come out of the dark off to his left. He swung the muzzle of his .38 around.

  The figure stepped forward and when he saw who it was, he dropped his gun arm. “Jesus, you’re gonna get shot sneaking around like that.”

  The figure twitched and Lincoln never really felt it. Not even the blood pissing down the front of his shirt.

  He fell over in the filth and garbage under the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.

  And died.

  ||| NINETY-THREE

  LINCOLN WAS dead by the time Papandreou stumbled over him in the shadow of the bridge. His throat was open in a sharp V that went through muscle and flesh and nicked the bone behind. His pistol was in his hand. He hadn’t fired a round.

  A boy’s shoe was found a few feet away and the impressions in the dirt suggested the boy had been squatting there when Lincoln had come across him. Lincoln had knelt down near the child, the boy had taken a step toward him, and it was at that point that his throat had been cut from the other side.

  There were no other tracks; it was as if the killer and child had simply flown away.

  The word ghost was not far from anyone’s lips.

  Papandreou was angry. “No way, Hemi. I’ve known Linc for twenty years and there’s no fucking way some guy with a knife coulda taken him down if he had his pistol out. Lincoln was a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later guy, you know that.”

  “Then what happened in there, Nick?”

  Papandreou stared her in the eye for a second. “I don’t know.”

  The commissioner pulled in an extra hundred uniformed officers and they were canvassing the island from one end to the other. Roadblocks were set up at all exits and every car checked and recorded, the driver’s identification logged. Trunks were opened, duffel bags unzipped, coolers inspected. School buses were loaded back up with the kids and their chaperones and were leaving the island on a ramp denoted for their use; every bus was checked by a five-man police team before being allowed off the island and the name of every driver, teacher and chaperone was recorded. They would find Miles Morgan. After all, a ten-year-old boy didn’t simply melt away.

  Hemingway and Phelps were at the edge of the path, near the tall grass that separated the baseball diamond from the fire department’s training facilities. The heat was stifling. The usual reinforcements had gathered their wagons and were doing their battlefield magic—three Econolines from the medical examiner’s office, a fleet of police cars, and a division command post that was there to coordinate the search for the missing boy. The space-suited technicians from Marcus’s office milled about in slow motion in the eerie light of the halogens and the scene under the bridge looked like a set from a science fiction film, all that was missing were massive egg pods.

  Hemingway left Phelps and moved away from the whirr of the emergency teams, drawn toward the flow of the river at the northeastern corner of the island. She needed to clear her head.

  As she walked across the baseball field the wind came in and picked up dust devils that swirled out over the water. The sound of cheering children had been replaced by the squawk of seagulls flailing in the sky above a garbage barge in the channel and the crack of flames from the fire department’s training facility. A squad of firemen were going through exercises on the other side of the chain-link fence, and smoke and flames billowed out of the brick building like a medieval tower under siege. Dummies leaned up against the fence, fire scarred and dead looking. She headed for the water.

  This one was the death of a thousand cuts. Kids and cops and family and strangers. When this case was over—when this guy was locked away in some concrete hole a thousand miles beneath the crust of the earth—she’d have time to think. Maybe take that trip with her father. Maybe head to Key Largo to spend a little time in the mangroves, kayaking and soaking up vitamin D and recalibrating her life. Maybe even go away with Daniel.

  Maybe paint the guest room for a baby. Maybe not. The future was still wide open. At least for a few more days.

  She stepped off the baseball diamond and cut through the line of police vehicles parked on the service road, walking into the high grass that crawled up a hill, then dipped down toward the water. The natural shoreline was a mix of brambles, shrubs, trees, and bushes woven into a tight green curtain below the broken dirt of the hill. She followed it until she found a cutoff down to the water and stepped off the road.

  The path was a dirt rut that cut through the tall grass, worn smooth, the humps of big stones poking up. She recognized the double trail of a kayak trolley etched into the surface of the earth and the semicircles of toe prints from a shoe that had climbed up from the bank. There was a dock ahead—part of the training facility. The water’s edge was littered with garbage and she stood there doing her best to clear her head and calm her breathing.

  She watched the barge make its way south toward the swirling eddies of Hell Gate. The air above the boat was haloed with a cloud of seagulls that picked at its cargo and filled the air with white noise. The generating plant across the river in Astoria looked close enough to touch.

  Like the birds over the barge, it was as if this bastard had wings. Like some great mythical bird with a razor-sharp beak—but instead of taking a titan’s life, this fucker took whatever he wanted. If she hadn’t lived it, she’d have thought it completely unimaginable.

  Yet here she was.

  At the shore of the river of the dead.

  She spotted some humps in the water to her right, just under the fire department’s dock, almost hidden in shadow. She focused on them for a few seconds, something about them incongruous. A swell from the barge came in and they rolled in the pitch, bobbing up and down. There was an instant as they peaked, then rolled slightly, and she realized that she was looking at the toes of feet pointing at the sky—one shoed, one not—and beyond that a human face riding in the waves.

  A body.

  A boy.

  “Phelps!”

  The sound was ripped away by the wind that carried the dust off the baseball diamond behind her.

  The body bobbed in the water.

  Another wave came in and it rocked once, almost flipped over, and shook loose from the reeds. It spun a quarter turn and edged out between the dock pilings, into the channel.

  Another swell rolled in and kicked it free. It floated out, away.

  Hemingway stumbled down the bank and jumped into the water. In a step she was up to her waist. She waded toward the boy but the hands of the current grabbed him and he moved out toward the channel.

  “Phelps!”

  She dove forward and swam for him with strong even strokes.

  The current fastened its grip on the body and started pulling it down toward Hell Gate, toward the city beyond.

  Her arms dug into the river with solid strokes but her boots dragged her back. She splashed through the chop, heading for the boy. She didn’t look forward, didn’t think about what she was doing, she just concentrated on her strok
e. On moving. On making it.

  The boy swung out with the current and she knew that if he made it into the fast water, she’d never catch him.

  She put a final burst into her kick and lurched forward.

  In a few more strokes her hand hit his stockinged foot. She grabbed it and tried to move sideways but he had just hit the fast water and it yanked her out.

  In another second they’d both get sucked into the current. She swung out, into the heavy pull of the water and pushed the boy toward shore. It had no effect—it was like trying to push a concrete wall.

  She pushed again.

  Then again.

  And finally they began to move.

  The shore started to swing by at speed.

  She gave one final burst of muscle, a mindless thrash that carried her out of the fast water to the slow draft of the shallows.

  And then she was standing.

  She had the boy by the ankle and had time to look at him now. It was Miles Morgan.

  His chest was opened up and filled with water and swirling tendrils of flesh and artery and bone.

  “Hemi!”

  She looked up to see Phelps at the water’s edge a hundred yards back. He stumbled along the rock-strewn terrain under the dock, heading for her.

  She walked the boy in, eased his body up onto the bank where he would stay until the medical examiner’s people got to him. As she dragged him out, the water in his chest sloshed out in a red burp and tentacles of vein spilled down his sides.

  She dropped down on the bank.

  The barge was past now and the final smash of its swells lapped at the shore. Fifty feet south a great blue heron eyed her suspiciously, then raised its beak disdainfully, turned, and flew out over the river.

  She watched the bird for a few strokes of its wings, then turned to see Phelps come crashing through the scrub beside her. Behind him came a platoon of cops.

  He saw the boy laid out on the rock, the yawning mouth of his opened ribs. “You okay?”

  Hemingway coughed, wiped the back of a hand across her mouth, and nodded. “Perfect.” Her eyes went back to the heron heading away. She thought about how an experienced cop like Lincoln had been taken down with a knife. About the corner of the photograph taken from Trevor Deacon’s basement cell. She thought about Dr. Selmer’s throat being cut at a stoplight and about the musical chairs game the boy on the ferry had played.

  Hemingway pointed at the rocks she had just swum through. “Look.”

  Phelps followed her line of sight. He stared blankly for a few seconds then the deadpan expression dropped out of his features and he slowly shook his head.

  About fifteen feet from shore were a pair of rocks. A duck decoy rode the water between them, defiantly facing the current. Its paint was battered and the plastic was sun bleached and dented. How it had gotten here was a mystery.

  “Sonofabitch.” He came over to her, helped her ashore. “You know, for a chick you’re pretty smart.”

  At that, Hemingway smiled grimly. “I get that a lot.”

  ||| NINETY-FOUR

  HEMINGWAY SWITCHED into the spare clothes she kept in the back of the Suburban, one of those old cop habits that she had picked up from Phelps. The clothes she had worn into the river went to the medical examiner’s to be scanned for any trace evidence that might have come off Miles Morgan’s body. They were on their way to the lab and the cherry blinked like a punk rock metronome. She slalomed through traffic in tight throws that pushed the big vehicle’s center of gravity to its limit and when the big truck went up on two wheels Phelps tightened his grip on the holy shit handle.

  Miles Morgan had been taken apart at the water’s edge in a spot upriver from where he had been found floating in the reeds. Nothing but a burnt patch of red-black dirt by the water. The medical examiner called in another team, standard protocol to avoid contamination from Lincoln’s murder; they came down the ramp as Hemingway and Phelps had raced up the other side toward the tollbooths.

  Hemingway punched through holes in the traffic while Phelps called ahead to book the lab time they’d need. Then he gave Dennet a heads-up so he could put preemptive feelers out to the DA; if the science lined up like they believed it would, they’d have the ammunition for a warrant in a few hours.

  The trip to the precinct took seventeen minutes, some sort of a minor miracle in the midday summer traffic. Hemingway stormed through the line of reporters, ignoring their questions, Phelps stuck to her side.

  They ran up the five flights and she made it a full floor ahead of Phelps. The investigation room was stacked with countless bankers’ boxes and Dennet was waiting for them. He was on the edge of the conference table, his hands in his pockets.

  “What the fuck happened at Randall’s Island, Alexandra?” Dennet never used her full first name. No one did. People called her Hemingway, Hemi, or Allie. Never Alexandra. Unless they were pissed.

  “We have it, captain.”

  Dennet let out a breath like he had been kicked in the stomach. “Really? Because a few hours ago you had three hundred police officers at your disposal and what did that get us? Huh? Lincoln is lying in his own shit under a fucking bridge and another boy is on his way to the morgue. So it doesn’t look like you have this. Not a little and not a lot.”

  She pulled the lid off of one of the boxes. “Give me an hour with the lab.”

  Dennet shrugged. “You can have all the time you need, but it won’t do any good. Ace Morgan called in some heavy hitters from the Department of Justice and the FBI. The ink’s not dry on the forms yet but I got a call from the New York Bureau office and they’re in a meeting now. This goes to them before sundown. They’ll keep you on as liaison but the horsepower will be coming from their people.”

  Phelps walked in and sat down, not huffing and puffing but looking like he needed rest.

  Dennet didn’t bother with a hello. He just stood there, his eyes on Hemingway.

  She found the box she was looking for and pulled it out, opened it on the table, then snapped on her latex gloves and removed Dr. Winslow’s invitation for the opera—the one he had printed up at home. She gently slid it into a large manila envelope. “Line up the DA—make sure he’s available to file a warrant with a judge.”

  Dennet shrugged like it didn’t matter one way or another. “You’ve got until the Feds take over. After that, you’ll have to convince them.”

  She held up the envelope containing the invitation. “This is it, Ken.”

  He eyed her skeptically for a second before saying, “You have anything we can share with the press?”

  She put the envelope under her arm and shook her head. “After I make the arrest.”

  “You want to tell me what you think?”

  She came around the corner of the table and stopped. “Just make sure you line up the district attorney. We have this prick, all I need is the legal firepower to bring him in.”

  ||| NINETY-FIVE

  HEMINGWAY PULLED the Suburban over in a no-parking zone, the cherry flashing, a wheel up on the sidewalk.

  Mat Linderer came out the front doors of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. He looked odd out of the space suit Hemingway was used to seeing him in. “We’ll be at the cybercrimes lab with Carson,” Hemingway said, and gave him the envelope. “Call my cell when you know.”

  ||| NINETY-SIX

  THE MASSIVE spreadsheet ran across the wall of monitors in a widening pool of information that had been correlated in every conceivable manner. Alan Carson plucked out the name Hemingway asked him about and loaded it into a deep web search field.

  The first pass brought up nearly sixty-one thousand pages from around the world. Hemingway pushed her notes in front of him and said, “Can you narrow it to anything around—or after—these dates?”

  “August twentieth last year? Sure.” He negotiated through the search fields and punched in the new parameters. The results narrowed from sixty-one thousand pages to just under five thousand. He checked her notes aga
in and began to dig.

  At that point Hemingway’s phone went off. “Excuse me,” she said, and left Phelps standing over Carson’s shoulder.

  “Hemingway.”

  “Detective Hemingway, it’s Mat Linderer from the OCME. I have your results. You were right—”

  Hemingway felt her stomach jump the rails. She closed her eyes and concentrated on Linderer’s voice.

  “—both the invitation and the photograph tacked to the wall in the Deacon residence were printed by the same printer. The feed lines match and there’s a pixel lag that is perfect. The paper is from the same manufacturer but a different batch.”

  Her stomach was back on track and she opened her eyes. “How long to get a report together? Something I can take to the DA.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  She checked her watch. “You’ve got three. E-mail it to me.”

  Hemingway hung up and went back to Phelps and Carson. Carson nodded at the screen. “I can’t find any record of his presence on any flights for the two weeks before the death, but I have this . . .” He used the cursor to highlight a foreign Google page.

  She leaned forward and examined the screen. “It’s in Greek.”

  “Let’s run it through the translation software. It won’t be perfect, but it will give you a pretty good idea of what it says.” He hit a button and a new window opened up.

  Both Hemingway and Phelps leaned forward. Both held their breath. Both read silently for a few seconds until Phelps finally said, “Sonofabitch. You were right.”

  On the morning of August 19th the year before, Dr. Neal Winslow had given a lecture at the Hellenic Ornithological Society regarding the reintroduction of shorebirds to reclaimed habitat. The lecture took place at a library in Athens.

  The next morning nine-year-old Tanya Everett—one of Dr. Brayton’s girls—drowned while swimming with friends, less than an hour from Athens.

  Phelps shifted on his feet. “What do you think?”