Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  There’s another crib.

  I take a step back from it. This crib is completely unlike the gleaming, lacquered piece that belonged to the Cogans. Gray wood, cheap metal joints, two missing bars—one on each side. It looks broken down, soft and silvery as a piece of driftwood. It’s also a particularly small crib, and I feel a deep, fluted pang for the tiny baby that would have slept here. An evidence tag says, Wilson.

  This crib could certainly have come from the Lucius area. The Cogans were an anomaly in that neighborhood. I stare at the gray wood.

  I suit up in the Lab, pull on a pair of latex gloves and a lab coat, pull my hair back in a plastic clip, slip a surgical mask over my mouth and nose to protect any DNA evidence. First I bring my eye close to the wood, examining the rippling texture of the grain. I imagine the minute baby fingers that curled around these bars. I can smell the sweet, ancient forest this wood came from—papery white birch. I inhale, detecting traces of eucalyptus and camphor rubs, and perhaps something else that eludes me, slightly chemical—the scent of some sort of medicine, perhaps, or just the joints of the crib. Or the same scent of the Cogan house.

  I imagine the arms reaching into that cradle. Years of parents bending over the bars, admiring their baby’s sleep, standing and watching, scooping up baby. Next, I look under and around the legs and bars: I’d love to go back to the office with proof that there is no killer. To prove it to myself. But it’s easier to prove that something exists than to prove that something doesn’t. I still have to read the preliminary CS report, look at the print images they’ve lifted, and do an AFIS search for fingerprint matches.

  And even then. Even then. I hesitate. I can hear voices down the hall. It occurs to me that Margo has frequently brought up the idea of a killer: she doesn’t want any reassurance. It’s hard to know if she really believes such a thing exists or if she just wants it to, perhaps so that this person can be stopped and no babies will ever die again.

  When I finally return to the office, Margo has left to drop her kids off with a sitter. Sylvie looks up at me. “See anything?” she asks.

  I shake my head. Alyce says, “What’s she going to see?” She tips back in her chair, folds her arms over her head. “The cops’re just bringing cribs in now to cover their own butts. We don’t have time for this. I’m gonna tell Frank to get ’em to knock it off.”

  “But what if there’s something really there?” Sylvie asks. Her face is flat and wide, with a sort of internal blankness that I think might be a great aid in her work. She also sometimes seems to bear a sort of quiet loyalty to Margo—as if they both are in league against Alyce and her overbearing ways.

  “There’s nothing there,” Alyce states. “This baby killer’s an urban myth, dreamed up by a grieving mother who can’t deal with the truth that sometimes horrible things happen for absolutely no reason. She’s got everyone up in arms, running around chasing shadows. But I guess that’s what happens when people get so sensitive they can’t deal with reality,” she says toward the general vicinity of Margo’s empty desk.

  “Come on, Alyce, you’re not being fair,” I say. And stop there. Frank has asked me to “use discretion” in discussing my feelings about the case. I don’t feel up to debating Alyce on this.

  “Fair?” Alyce rolls her eyes. “Why should we even listen to Erin Cogan? Just because she’s the mother? Half the time, I think people who make babies do it just ’cause they can’t do anything else. They throw off some cells, excrete a sperm and an egg, and then they say this zygote is their life’s achievement.” Alyce crosses her arms.

  Sylvie glances at me but doesn’t say anything. Finally she clears her throat. “Well. I’m going on a coffee run,” she says quietly. “If anyone wants anything . . .” She hesitates, then slips out.

  “Great, so now I’m the bad guy,” Alyce says.

  “You have to admit, Al,” I say cautiously. “A fourth crib.”

  Alyce slaps the top of her desk. “Don’t you start too.” Her face is tight and furious. “It’s paranoid nonsense—a waste of precious lab time.” She holds out a couple of folders. “In case you’re curious, we’ve got two separate rape cases this week. One’s a thirty-year-old and the other’s a fourteen-year-old girl. Fourteen years old,” she says, a bit wildly. “I’d say that was a real case, wouldn’t you, Lena? I’d say that was a real tragedy.” She stands and files the folders in the cabinet in a dramatic, aggravated way. As she turns back, some yellow While-You-Were-Outs fall out of her pocket.

  I bend automatically to pick them up. As I do, I read my name.

  Alyce looks at me. Blinks. Smiles a tiny, guilty smile.

  “These messages . . . you’re taking these off my desk?”

  Now Alyce begins to recover herself. “Peg shouldn’t be giving them to you in the first place!”

  I look at the notes—they’re all phone messages from Erin Cogan. Erin Cogan called. E.C. wants to know—progress? Please call Cogan. Wants update. All written in Peg’s round, curling script. “Jeez, Alyce,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I just—” She hugs her arms and looks away. “I can’t deal with that woman. Something about her. The way she came barging in.”

  “Well.” I stack them on my desk. “Even so. Personally, I wouldn’t mind having a little chat with her,” I say to Alyce. “I’d like to conduct an interview of my own.”

  She shakes her head. “You can’t, Lena. You know that. We can’t hold up office time for this stuff. Even if, by the remotest chance, there really was some sort of case here, the detectives have to handle victims and witnesses. You’d compromise the whole case if she gave you testimony that you weren’t authorized to take. Not to mention that evidence handlers have to stay objective. Otherwise, your analysis could be—”

  “I know, I know,” I say, rubbing my eyes, turning away from her. “Compromised. I could be compromised. Supposedly.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “You could be compromised.”

  CHAPTER 17

  IT’S MIDAFTERNOON AND I HAPPEN TO BE THE ONE TO PICK UP when Peg puts the call through from Estelle in Toxicology. “Really, Frank should know this first,” she begins. “But . . . wait’ll you hear this.” Their report shows that the Cogans’ red baby blanket was colored by a dye from Sri Lanka: a relatively safe compound made from tree bark. Estelle notes that the blanket manufacturers—a young, “alternative products” organization called Naked Earth—stated on their labels that they used organic compounds and paid their workers fair wages for local skills. But, she says, the real problem is that the blanket had also been washed with dyes filled with heavy metals—lead, cadmium, and potassium dichromate.

  “What is that?”

  “Chrome. It brightens colors. All these kinds of chemicals are called mordants—they’re used in the dye industry to help fix and stabilize the colors.”

  “So . . . you mean—they’re legal?”

  She pauses. “Absolutely. But chrome is a super toxin—its dye water is considered hazardous waste. Adults can tolerate some exposure to these dyes—though people do suffer chrome poisoning from long-term exposure. A baby wrapped in this blanket, inhaling this much chrome, and put down for the night, would probably go into shock, respiratory distress . . . renal failure.”

  “Could it kill them?” I ask, and peripherally notice that Alyce and Sylvie both look up.

  “Oh, for sure. Within a few hours.”

  “Estelle . . .” I rub my fingertips over my temples, trying to think clearly. “Do you think this blanket was legally manufactured this way or was it doctored?” Alyce stands and moves to my desk.

  She laughs, the old, grim Toxicology Division laugh. “The dyes in this blanket are all industry-grade—they’re not available to the public—but I can’t imagine any big manufacturer deliberately using this much dye—it wouldn’t be cost-efficient,” she adds with a
nother dark laugh. “But some upstart operation that didn’t know what they were doing? Yeah—I’d say it looks like a horrible, honest mistake.”

  I write MISTAKE on my notepad. Alyce reads this over my shoulder, then nods, closing her eyes, one hand over her mouth.

  NO ONE SEEMS to know how to take the news: it carries a sort of guilty relief, such awful implications. And somewhere along the line of evidence collection and analysis, blame will have to be assigned. Still, even Margo seems genuinely relieved to hear there isn’t a killer. That afternoon, Frank and Alyce come into the office with a copy of the toxicology report. He tosses the envelope on my desk and sinks into an office chair. “Congratulations, Lena. You made this call. And I will never again second-guess you,” he says, crossing his long legs (obviously, referring to my flagging the toy box, not my insistence on a murderer). “We’ll disinter the babies’ remains and run chemical analyses. But this is it—this is what killed them. Not the bogeyman. The police have retrieved red baby blankets from three death sites and they’ve been dispatched to two others.” He slides his hand over the top of his head meditatively. “We haven’t started interviewing parents yet—but we tracked the blankets to this one little hippie import dive—Zing something-or-other—out near Solvay.”

  Alyce leans forward over her clipboard. “You knew it, didn’t you, Lena? Right from the start, you said there wasn’t any murderer.”

  “All those mothers,” Margo says quietly, hugging herself. “Tucking in their little babies. Oh my God, it’s too damn sad.”

  “It’s good—you had it nailed,” Alyce tells me. “Just like with the Haverstraws. You went out to that house and zeroed in.”

  “Still, do we know for a fact that the dyes were a mistake?” I say. “Has anyone tracked down the blanket manufacturer?”

  Frank pushes his hands into his pockets, back tilted against the chair. “One of our guys found a manufacturer in Taiwan, but it seems they’re out of business. Probably due to inadvertent poisoning of all their customers. No, Toxicology says it’s accidental—an assembly-line screwup.” Frank stares at the lab report on the desk, and I wonder if he’s thinking about his own children—his grandchildren. “Toxic fucking baby blankets.”

  “Zing Imports is trying to help track down everyone who’s bought a blanket. There was a lot of ten, originally,” Alyce says. “They think it was a one-of-a kind item.”

  Margo asks, “How many does the store have left?”

  “All sold.” She smacks her hands together in a dusting-off motion. “They had them on the shelves for at least four months,” Alyce says. “So there’s a few more out there. . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “Did the parents themselves buy those blankets?” I ask. “Has anyone checked?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I’m sure they did,” Alyce says, shuffling through some notes. “The police interviewed everyone.”

  There’s a sound, a half gesture, from Frank. I say, “Frank, you feeling all right?

  Frank glances at me. “Hmm? What? No, no, I’m fine, I’m fine.” He rolls forward, elbows propped on his knees, his fingers scrubbing through his hair. “We’ll be needing to take another look at SIDS cases in Onondaga County. Put out a warning on the blankets. We’ll also have to meet with all the parents of the deceased. Rob Cummings and the board are in a panic to do damage control—since all these cases had been mistakenly classified as SIDS. They scheduled a press conference this evening—we’re scrambling to contact everyone personally involved before the media does.”

  Margo throws up one hand. “Might as well make it a national search. Who knows where the other blankets have traveled?”

  “Fortunately, that’s not my jurisdiction,” Frank says. “The Feds can take it from here. With my compliments.”

  THAT EVENING, WE’RE ALL subdued. We treat each other gingerly, the atmosphere as contemplative as the mood after a religious ceremony. As my colleagues prepare to head home, Alyce hugs each of us in turn—which is completely out of character. She pats Sylvie on the back and says, “Hey, why don’t we all go out, grab a bite or something?” But it’s so cold that evening that everyone wants to try to get home before the roads are all ice. It’s easily subzero, with a wind chill that could be in the negative twenties. Alyce asks if she couldn’t give me a ride home in the cold. But I’m not ready to go.

  I return to my desk to sort through the detritus of notes, fingerprints, and files connected to the baby cases. In the solitude of the office, I tell myself: So that’s that. But I keep thinking I hear the sound of breathing in the grainy silence; the air smells vaguely milky and sweet, which, I remember, is supposedly the smell of babies. I exhale heavily, stand, and shuffle the Cogans’ file back into the tall cabinet. Then I pull on my parka and, as I walk out, I flip the hood up over my knit cap.

  It’s a big, formless, arctic night, the stars so bright they seem to hiss. I walk with my hands in pockets, arms pressed to my sides. Even in my down parka, the cold is still there. I feel as though my blood is crackling with it, my bones conducting cold like wires. My toes are curled in their boots. I’m worried about my hands and feet, which are chronically prone to frostbite—I can already feel the flashing pain in their tips—the usual prelude to numbness. I try to move more quickly. There’s no one out tonight, just a few cars tunneling through the dark.

  Once I make it back home, I sit on the edge of my couch and pull off my boots carefully. I hold my icy feet. When the feeling starts to return to my toes I shuffle on slippers and go to the window. It’s big enough that I can stand in its frame. Snow flurries have blown across the window, and the cross that I’d seen so clearly last night is barely a dim outline now—practically a figment of the imagination. I feel disoriented by the outcome of the Cogan case. It seems almost impossible to have conjured up a killer as vividly as I did in the Evidence Room, only to learn it was entirely imaginary.

  I touch the frigid glass, startled by a pang of loneliness, thinking of the dead babies, abandoned in their cribs, betrayed (unwittingly) by their own mothers. The feeling moves through me like a musical chord.

  THAT NIGHT I lie in bed with my eyes open, listening to the sighs of the building. I twist in the blankets in a broken, fitful sleep. It takes several hours, but eventually I drift into a dream of invisible demons. They crowd my room. I smell the warm must of their feathers, the oily leather of bat wings. They want to take me away, make me one of them. They wrap talons around my wrists and ankles. I can’t move.

  The nightmare becomes so frightening that I manage to open my eyes and consciousness spills through me. There are no signs of the demons, though I dreamed them so clearly that I look around my room for a few breathless seconds. Finally I fall back, panting a little. My covers are warmed all the way through and the morning air in my room is taut with the cold, silvery as a mercury membrane.

  After a few minutes I get up and check the tarnished bedroom mirror: still human. In the bathroom, I turn the knobs in the shower; they shriek and rattle after a shuddering pause, and there’s a dribble of tepid water. Often there’s no water at all, or just an icy blur of it—too cold to do anything but splash your face. Today it warms nicely and I can get under it. As the warmth sluices over my skin I tell myself, I will put away this case; I’ll move on with my life. Today, things will be different.

  CHAPTER 18

  SYLVIE CALLS TO ME AS SOON AS I WALK IN THE OFFICE. SHE glances over her gray office divider, then whispers, “Alyce is in a crummy mood.”

  I look at her, lower myself to my desk slowly.

  “She’s not happy that we didn’t go out with her last night. She wants us to have better team spirit, from now on,” she says. There’s a folded newspaper in front of her; she’s working on a crossword puzzle. “Well, the three of us, I guess.”

  “The three of us?”

  Sylvie’s gaze moves to the office window. “She was sa
ying that Margo doesn’t fit in—that she’s too concerned with her kids and running around or something.”

  “Alyce should probably get a life,” I mutter.

  She grins. “Yeah, and then Peg came in here talking about those flowers Keller sent. She says you two’ve got a thing going. Is it true?” Her eyes are bright.

  “No, no, no—there’s nothing, we’re not anything.” I try to be nonchalant.

  Sylvie pulls back her long, lank hair with one hand. She lives with her mother and grandmother in an old house on the north side. They attend St. Rose’s every week and she wears a tiny gold cross on a chain around her neck. I wonder idly if Sylvie’s ever been involved with anyone. “I was thinking last night, I’m so glad that we don’t have to look for a killer.” She fingers the cross. “I mean, it’s still terrible for the parents. But the idea of some baby murderer on the loose—it’s just—well, you kind of feel like if it can happen in a place like Syracuse . . .” Her voice trails off; she half shrugs. “It can happen pretty much, like, anywhere. It kind of changes the whole way you see things.”

  “It doesn’t have to.”

  She doesn’t look at me. Then she says, “No, it’s okay. It got me thinking again.” Another glance over the office divider. “You know—going back to school. I don’t know. Trying something else—nursing or teaching or something.”

  “I know,” I say gently. “This is really hard work sometimes.”

  “Yeah.” She stares at me a moment. “Like, I don’t know if I want to spend my life thinking about . . . things like that.” She smiles. “Sometimes I wonder what my grade school teachers, Sister Antonya and Sister Helena, would think of me now. If they knew what I was doing.”

  “Did you think you’d become a nun when you were a little girl?”

  Sylvie lifts her head with a short laugh. “We all did. I liked the way they dressed, the beads, the praying. I got over that by about junior high. So many of them just seem like they’re looking for a way to drop out. I think a bunch of my teachers became nuns because they were so unhappy with other people, the world, just stuff. Not because of God or anything.”