A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  Vega opens up the back door of the patrol car. “I need you to wait here for a while, okay?” she says.

  “Is Joshua going to be okay?” Olillia asks, climbing in.

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  She tells an officer to keep an eye on the girl before walking to the tracks. The medical examiner, Tracey Walter, is making her way up the bank to the other side. Vega first met Tracey a few years ago on a case that involved a guy who’d been so high on pain medication he thought he could fly—something he tested from the roof of his house, and something that had proven more difficult than he’d thought. Tracey had been the one to perform the autopsy, and then their paths had met again a few weeks later, this time at a barbecue, where they had friends in common. Their paths kept crossing after that, mostly for work, and then at the gym, then in more social situations, and for the last year they’ve been dating—not that anybody in the department knows. She knows they’d give her shit about it. They’ve both been so busy these last few weeks they’ve hardly had time to see each other. In fact, the last time she saw Tracey was a week ago, and back then her hair was red. Now it’s blond. Tracey had told her she’d had it dyed, and it looks good. It’s the third change in the last year, and sometimes it makes Vega feel like she’s dating different women.

  She catches up to Tracey as she reaches the first body. The school was contacted and a photograph shown to the principal earlier; that’s how the identification was made. They learned from the school that Scott Adams was bright and was well liked, but further questioning revealed that Scott was well liked only by his fellow teammates on the school rugby team, and wasn’t really that bright at all. Even further questioning showed that he was a notorious bully.

  “Hey,” Vega says.

  “Hey,” Tracey says. “This is awful.” She looks down at the boy, and whenever they’re confronted with a scene like this, Vega wants to hug her so they can both remind themselves the world isn’t as bad as it looks. Of course, she can’t hug her. When they’re in the field, or at the morgue, they only ever talk work and they make no references to their personal lives, and when they’re on a date or around friends, it’s the opposite. She doesn’t tell Tracey she likes her new hairstyle, because it’s the last thing she wants to say right now, and it would be the last thing Tracey would want to hear. She’ll tell her later. Tracey crouches down over the boy. “Amount of blood here, looks like the kid never had a chance. Position of the wound,” she says, “I’m guessing the knife sliced right into the aorta, but I won’t know for sure until I get him on my table. He would have gone into shock immediately, and would have died within a minute.”

  “You’ll be able to tell from the angles who stabbed him? If it lines up with the other victim?”

  “There are a lot of variables,” Tracey says, “but I’ll do my best.”

  They walk over to Vincent Archer. Tracey reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small sachet. She tears it open and hands Vega the wet wipe from inside. “Your cheek,” she says, and taps her own cheek to indicate to Vega where she means, and Vega wipes it and sees that it was blood.

  “Thanks,” she says. She balls it back into the packet and then into her pocket.

  Tracey crouches over Archer’s body and looks him over. There’s a fist-sized dent in his skull that will likely line up with the bloody rock a yard away. The rock hasn’t been fingerprinted yet. Nor has Joshua. But they will be. Vega imagines how quickly it all unfolded, this quiet section of train tracks becoming a battlefield—and how close did that train come to hitting Joshua?

  “Are you okay?” Tracey says, standing back up.

  “I’m fine,” Vega says.

  “Ben’s a strong guy,” Tracey says. “He won’t give up easy.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s something else bothering you.”

  “No, really, I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure? You look . . . not so great.”

  “I’m okay,” she says.

  Officers begin erecting tents over the bodies to protect them from the elements, as well as from the neighbors poking cell phones over fences to snap photographs. Tracey goes back to examining the body. Vega thinks about what Olillia said about Scott bullying Joshua at school. That’s what they call in the business a good ol’ fashioned motive. It’s possible Joshua stabbed the boy out of anger, and it so happened Vincent Archer arrived not long after—but she doesn’t think so. She thinks Vincent Archer brought the knife to the scene. She thinks Vincent Archer figured killing two boys instead of one would have helped hide what really went on here today, the same way he was able to hide what really happened to Erin.

  “What do you know about cellular memory?” she asks Tracey. “You in the for or against column?”

  “I ever tell you dad had a heart transplant ten years ago?” Tracey asks.

  Vega likes Tracey’s parents. Tracey’s mom competed in the Olympics thirty-something years ago and came in fourth in the 400 meters, and still jokes about wanting to go back there to try to get a bronze. Her dad practiced medicine until a couple of years back, when he retired.

  “No,” Vega says.

  Tracey stands up and faces her. “He got really sick,” she says. “We thought he was going to die, actually, but he was lucky. He got a new heart. A few months after, he started getting a craving for German beer. Nothing else tasted right to him, had to be German, then he started eating German food too. So I pulled some strings and got hold of the donor file. Want to take a guess as to where the donor was from?”

  “Germany.”

  “Australia,” she says. “Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. Dad’s cravings came from somewhere, though. Could be the donor spent time in Germany. Could be he loved German food. Keep in mind people get transplants every day and never develop any desires, but with Dad it was definitely like somebody threw a switch. Was that craving on a cellular level? Anecdotally, I’d say yes. As somebody who opens up and examines dead people for a living? I’d say no.”

  “So you’re unsure.”

  “I don’t believe in it, but not enough to dismiss it.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Joshua changes out of his uniform and into a hospital gown. What’s left of his shirt along with the rest of his clothes are placed into a paper bag and handed to a police officer who’s so pale he looks as if he might catch fire if he stepped into the sun. Before the officer leaves, he takes Joshua’s fingerprints, then hands him a paper towel to wipe away the ink.

  “It’s so we can figure out which prints belong to who,” the officer says, but Joshua knows what he really means is, It’s so we can figure out if you killed anybody.

  The bandage on his hand is replaced, and the wounds cleaned up again and patched over. Doctors do memory tests. Reflex tests. How many fingers are being held up, can he count from a hundred backwards, what’s today’s date, can he walk in a straight line without feeling dizzy? His mom keeps questioning the doctors, the worry in her voice obvious. He spends forty-five minutes in an MRI having his brain scanned. Afterwards they wait for an hour in an examination room. He feels fine. He wants to go home.

  Dr. Toni comes to see him. She’s edgy and distracted.

  “It’s so . . . so awful,” she says. “I . . . I can’t believe it.”

  Joshua tells her he can’t believe it either. She shines a light into his eyes and looks at them closely. Then she gets him to read from an eye chart. The results are the same as last time. The blow to his head hasn’t made his good eye worse. It hasn’t made his bad eye better.

  “Do you know how Ben is doing?” his mom asks.

  “There’s been no update,” Dr. Toni says.

  “It’s been a few hours.”

  “And it may be a few more,” she says.

  When her exam is done, she leaves Joshua and his mom in the examination room, while a different policeman, this one not so pale, stands outside in the corridor with the door closed. Similar to when his dad died and Joshua had the
operation, the media are stalking for interviews, but so far they’re being kept at bay outside the main entrance. The policeman is there just in case someone is able to sneak through. With the door closed, it’s the first chance they’ve had to be alone since everything happened, and in the quiet his mom begins to softly cry. She’s sitting in a chair while he’s sitting on the bed with his legs dangling over it. He gets down and pulls up a chair next to his mom and takes her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should be stronger. It’s just that after everything . . . I could have lost you.”

  “But you didn’t. It’s going to be okay,” he says, even though it may not be, but he gets now why people say it all the time.

  “I should never have let you walk home.”

  “It’s the curse,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Why do you think all of these bad things keep happening? Me being born blind, my biological parents dying, now Dad has been killed. I’m connected to all of it. The curse is because of me. It follows me everywhere. It got to Erin, and now it’s caught up with Uncle Ben. It even got its claws into Scott, and I only knew him for one day. Doesn’t matter what we do, the curse will always be there.”

  “It’s not a curse,” she says.

  “No? Then what is it?”

  She thinks about it for a few moments, and he doesn’t interrupt her. Then she sighs, as if she’s figured out the answer and is resigned to accepting it. “It’s a combination of bad luck,” she says. “A combination of good people trying to do bad things, and bad people doing worse things.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  Before he can ask her again, the door opens, and Dr. Hatch—the doctor who gave him the MRI—walks in. Dr. Hatch looks like a slightly younger version of Joshua’s grandfather—which, he guesses, makes him an older version of his biological dad. He has a ring of gray hair around the sides and back of his head, and no hair on top, just like another Star Trek captain he’s seen on TV. Joshua wonders if Mr. Fox continued his genetics lesson with a lecture on baldness. If his grandfather is bald, then would his dad have gone bald too? Will Joshua go bald in twenty or thirty years?

  “I have two pieces of good news for you,” Dr. Hatch says. “The first is that you seem fine, and we’re going to let you go home tomorrow morning.”

  “I can’t go home tonight?” Joshua asks.

  “It’s best we keep an eye on you overnight.”

  “What’s the second piece?” his mom asks. “Is it Ben?”

  “Actually, no, but I’ve heard the surgery is going well. The news is about Erin. She came out of her coma thirty minutes ago.”

  His mom leans forward and hugs the doctor tightly before pulling back. She looks embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to do that, but that’s great news.”

  “It’s okay,” Dr. Hatch says, smiling at her. “Makes me enjoy giving good news even more.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She can’t remember anything, and there’s a long way to go, and it’s too soon to know how badly damaged her brain is, but we’re hopeful. I’ll get a nurse to come and get you soon, Joshua, and we’ll get you admitted for the night. Okay?”

  “When can he go back to school?” his mom asks, and Joshua hadn’t even given that a thought. Today they thought he was a freak—what will they think tomorrow?

  “I’d give it a couple of days,” Dr. Hatch says, but Joshua knows there’s more to it than that—it will come down to when the police will let him return. “The nurse will be through soon.”

  “Erin’s going to be okay,” his mom says, when Dr. Hatch has left the room. She turns towards Joshua and hugs him. “See? There is no curse. Erin’s going to be okay, and Ben’s going to be okay too, I’m sure of it, and we’re going to get past this, I promise.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Vega interviews one of the neighbors as a pretext to get inside, and then she asks if she can use the bathroom. Every part of her being feels it. The guilt. She can feel it in her chest, where it squeezes her heart, and in her stomach, where it feels like a boulder. It’s heavy and confining and there’s just so damn much of it. There’s guilt for not having done more to help Ben. Guilt for the way she pointed her gun at Joshua, for the way she yelled at him. Guilt for staying at the scene and not going to the hospital. Guilt for not having faith in her partner when he first started saying he thought somebody was trying to kill Erin.

  She throws up into the toilet and washes her face and stares at her reflection in the mirror. She told Tracey earlier that she was fine, but she isn’t, and she wanted to tell her what was upsetting her, but she couldn’t, not out there with everything going on. All that guilt . . . none of it compares to the guilt she feels for delaying the decision to enter Vincent Archer’s house. The boy on the tracks, even Archer, they’d both still be alive if she hadn’t insisted on waiting for backup. Ben wouldn’t be fighting for his life. She knows there’s a fine line between doing what’s right and bending the rules. She did the right thing—technically—but doing the right thing came at a huge cost. She dries her face, thanks the woman for the use of her bathroom, and returns outside, where the crowd has doubled.

  She makes her way over to Olillia and thanks her for her time, gets her phone number and address off her, and tells her she’s free to head home. “I’ll have some more follow-up questions and will be in touch,” she says.

  “When can I see Joshua?” Olillia asks

  “That’s up to the doctors,” Vega says.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you think happened, or what did happen,” Olillia says, “but Joshua wouldn’t have done anything wrong.”

  “I’ll give you a call later on today, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You said you drove here in your father’s car?”

  “I think I’ll walk home,” Olillia says.

  “I’ll have somebody drive you,” Vega says, and signals for an officer to come over and escort the girl from the scene. “One more thing,” she says. “Don’t talk to any media, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  When Olillia has gone, Vega waves over another couple of officers to let them know she’s leaving, and to ask them to join her. The officer and his partner follow her to Vincent Archer’s parents’ house in case things get out of hand. Giving death notifications is the worst part of the job, even when the person who’s been killed is a rotten son of a bitch.

  She buzzes the gate and this time it’s Robert Archer who answers. He stands with his wife by the door and they watch her and the patrol car roll in. They have their arms around each other, and she knows that they already know what’s coming. Helen collapses into the couch she sat in earlier that day when Vega tells them. She bites her knuckle; sounds of pain occasionally get stuck in her throat and are expressed in large gulps. Vincent’s father fixes himself a glass of scotch and stares out into the yard and doesn’t say anything.

  “If I had . . . If I had helped you the moment you showed up,” Helen says, “you would have found him on time. I could . . . I could have saved him.”

  “Yes,” Vega says, and she knows she shouldn’t say it, but she can’t help herself. “Your son would still be alive, and so would the boy he killed.”

  Helen cries harder then, and Robert turns red and tells her to get the hell off their property. The two officers, a guy who’s been on the force for only two years and a woman who’s been on it for almost ten, give Vega disapproving looks as they go back to their cars. She feels disgusted at herself for saying what she said, but she said it to share the blame. After all, there’s plenty to go around.

  She’s out on the street and on her way to Vincent Archer’s house when Kent calls her. She asks Vega how it went, and Vega updates her, omitting the final bit of the conversation, then Kent tells her how it went for her. She had gone with Detective Trav
ers to break the news to Scott Adams’s family. They found a three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl looking after themselves. When asked, the six-year-old said their mom had gone out for a quick drink, but, because the girl was six, she wasn’t able to tell them where or when. They finally found the mother feeding coins into a slot machine at a local bar with a glass of wine in her hand—obviously not her first. She was stabbing at the buttons trying to win back the rent money she had already lost. She broke down in tears and they drove her home to where her kids were being watched over by a social worker Kent had called. During the trip back, the mom pulled herself together enough to ask if she would be compensated for the loss of her son, either by the man who killed him, or by the police, or by the justice system. “I still have two other mouths to feed,” she had said. “It certainly feels like somebody owes me something.”

  There’s an unmarked patrol car parked out front of Vincent Archer’s house, but no tape or barriers cordoning the house off from the street. It’s been kept that way to avoid any attention being drawn to the scene. Somebody has pulled the front door shut as best as they could after Vega smashed it open earlier today. There’s a mess of splintered wood on the floor next to it. She pulls on a pair of latex gloves and turns on the lights as she moves from room to room. Everything is immaculately tidy. She opens the fridge. It’s full of plastic containers that have been carefully stacked and labeled with the type of meat inside and the expiry dates. An egg carton has the expiry date written on it too. The vegetables all look crisp and clean. There are no dishes in the sink, and she checks the dishwasher to see it full of clean dishes. Perhaps he ran a cycle today. She checks the rubbish bin. It’s empty. There are two large bags of dog food on the dining table but no dog. There’s a knife block with three blades missing. Two of those are in the dishwasher. The third she can’t find. She gets her phone out and sends off a text message.

  In the lounge there’s no TV. There’s a brand-new lounge suite and a log burner and a bookcase that takes up half the width of one wall. There’s a peace lily in the corner that looks healthier than any plant she’s tried to keep alive. The bookcase looks handmade, a collection of modern horror and crime novels fills all but the top two shelves, where carpentry books all neatly stand side by side, except for one that’s lying facedown. She picks it up. It’s a book about reupholstering furniture. Perhaps the lounge suite isn’t new at all, but has recently been given a new lease on life. The coffee table looks handmade too, and, now that she thinks about it, she thinks she can smell paint. The source of the smell is coming from the garage, where a drop cloth is on the ground covered in splashes of paint. This is possibly where Vincent worked on the rocking horse Helen Archer told them about. Looking around the garage at the other things Vincent has created, she has to admit that for a psychopath he was good with his hands.