Cry Baby

by David Jackson

  ‘I’m a cop, Erin. Detective Callum Doyle. You can call me Cal, if you want.’

  ‘He’s fucking with your mind, Erin. They do this. Don’t trust him.’

  ‘Shut up, I said.’

  She sees the puzzled look on the detective’s face. She says, ‘You don’t understand. I had to do this. I… I had no choice.’

  ‘Okay, Erin. Then tell me about it. Let’s talk. Let’s both lower our guns, and then we can talk.’

  She’s not sure. Trust this man, or not? Shoot him, or not? But if I shoot him, he’ll shoot me back.

  And if I trust him?

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘All right.’

  She starts to lower her gun. Sees that Doyle is doing the same.

  And then: ‘Damn it, Erin. You are not to do this, do you hear me? I swear I will kill this baby. Is that what you want? You want me to hurt Georgia again? You want to hear her scream like she’s never screamed before?’

  ‘No, please. Please don’t hurt my baby. I… I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Erin,’ says Doyle. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I… I can’t say. He won’t let me…’

  ‘Who? Who won’t let you? Is this about your daughter? Is this about Georgia?’

  She locks her gaze onto him. He knows. He knows about Georgia. My God.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ she says. ‘He won’t let me.’

  ‘Who? Who won’t let you?’

  ‘Shut up, Erin.’

  ‘I… I can’t say. He’ll kill her. He’ll kill Georgia.’

  ‘Enough, Erin! Shut the fuck up!’

  The cop stares at her, and there is some sadness in those eyes.

  ‘Erin,’ he says. ‘Your baby is already gone.’

  His words hit her like a gunshot. What does he know?

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, gone? You mean… dead?’

  The cop nods. ‘Yes. I mean dead. I’m sorry, Erin.’

  She shakes her head. This is too much. He’s hurting her too much. Why would he do this?

  ‘No. He promised me. He said if I killed those people, he’d give her back to me. That’s why I did it.’

  She grabs hold of her jacket and twists the brooch to her face. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Georgia’s alive, isn’t she? You promised. YOU PROMISED!’

  But there is no answer, and the silence seems to her an admission of guilt.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Talk to me. Tell me she’s alive.’

  ‘Erin,’ says the cop. ‘Georgia’s gone. You need to accept that. She’s been gone a long time.’

  The tears are streaming down her face now. ‘You’re wrong. I’ve heard her. Today. Lots of times. I’ve heard her laugh, I’ve heard her cry. It was Georgia. I know it. You’re wrong.’

  ‘Erin,’ says Doyle, ‘your baby has been dead almost a year now.’

  Thursday, January 6

  12.01 AM

  He’s no psychologist. He’s not sure how he should be playing this. Probably getting it all wrong. But he’s got to act like he knows what he’s doing. Got to be the one in control here. Say the wrong thing, and she’ll bring up the gun and it’ll be game over.

  It’s hard, though. Difficult to act rationally when your partner is lying over there in a pool of his own blood, his forehead cut to ribbons. Doyle could so easily start blasting away at this woman. A part of him would feel that was righteous, after what she’s done.

  But a bigger part of him knows that he would regret it for ever more. There is another way to end this. He just needs to get through to her.

  He sees the shock on her face. His words have registered somewhere in her brain. But he has no way of knowing how they are being processed, in the same way he could never cross that divide with Albert.

  The intricate workings of the human mind. How easily they are made to go out of sync. How difficult to put them back in order. Like crushing a sugar cube and then trying to reassemble it, each grain precisely in its original position.

  He wonders if reality is starting to seep through to her. That feels to Doyle to be the right way forward. Hammer home what is real, no matter how hurtful it might seem.

  ‘No,’ she says simply. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve seen the death certificate, Erin. I found it in the drawer in your apartment. She died of meningitis when she was six months old.’

  Images of her apartment come back to him as he says this. Most of the rooms were fairly normal and unsurprising. But then there was the baby room. Every inch of wall space papered with photographs of the child. Every inch of floor space piled high with baby clothes and diapers and formula. Like all Erin ever shopped for was baby stuff. It wasn’t a normal baby room; it was a shrine. He knew that as soon as he saw it. Knew also that the person who had made it that way was severely disturbed. Finding the paper records just helped to flesh out the picture of tragedy and mental decline.

  He watches her reactions now. She looks away from him. Up at the ceiling and then down at the floor as she considers his words. There is pain written on her face, as though she is struggling to dredge up razor-sharp memories that are cutting her inside.

  ‘No,’ she repeats. ‘I heard her. She was crying. She’s alive.’

  ‘I know that’s what you want. You were her mother. You loved her. You must want her back more than anything else in the world. But she’s gone, Erin. All this killing isn’t going to bring her back.’

  ‘He said… He told me…’

  ‘Erin, you know it’s not true. Deep down you know it. That’s why you asked for help. A part of you wanted us to stop you.’

  Her brow creases in puzzlement. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your message to us, Erin. Took us a while to figure it out. Too long, really, for such a simple message.’

  ‘I… I don’t understand.’

  ‘Two-three-one-A-five,’ says Doyle. He looks across at his mutilated partner, at the symbol carved into his forehead, and can’t prevent a groan escaping his lips. ‘And now a B. Two-three-one-A-five-B. Your address, Erin. 231 Avenue A, apartment 5B. You’ve been telling us all along where we could find you. That shows me a part of you understands that what you’ve been doing is so wrong. That’s why I think there’s still hope for you.’

  She opens and closes her mouth. Looks around the room in confusion. The gun is still in her hand, and there’s no sign of her letting go of it yet. LeBlanc still hasn’t moved. He’s dead, thinks Doyle. There’s nothing you can do. Grieve later, but first get through to this woman.

  He says, ‘You need help. Put the gun down. Let me help you.’

  ‘That’s what he said. He was going to help me. He would protect me.’

  ‘Who, Erin? Who told you that?’

  ‘He… he talks to me. He watches where I go.’

  ‘No, Erin. He can’t. Nobody is watching.’

  She reaches up a hand and pushes back her hair, exposing a hearing aid in her ear. ‘Look. He put this here. He talks to me through it, telling me what to do. And this…’ She points to the large brooch pinned to her jacket. ‘It’s a camera and a microphone. He sees and hears everything. He can hear you right now.’

  Christ, thinks Doyle. She’s a mess.

  ‘I saw your records, Erin. Your medical file. You started hearing voices a long time ago. Don’t you remember? You should be taking medication. Did you stop, Erin? Did you stop taking your meds?’

  Her stare becomes that of a wild, frightened creature. She doesn’t comprehend. She has lost touch with reality. And still she waves the loaded Glock.

  ‘I… I don’t need pills. I’m fine. My baby is fine. I’ve saved her. I’m going to get her back now.’

  Shit, thinks Doyle. This isn’t working. And while it isn’t working, LeBlanc’s bodily fluids continue to spread across his floor.

  ‘Erin, I’m going over to my partner now. I need to see how he is.’

  Her weapon hand jumps up, and for a moment Doyle believes a gunfight is about to break out.


  ‘NO! He’s dead. He had to die so I could get my baby back. Leave him.’

  Doyle backs off. He thinks she’s right – that LeBlanc is dead. But he also thinks that if he were to prove her wrong she would freak out. She needs to believe that she has successfully completed her mission. The only way around this is to convince her that there is no mission – that it is all a figment of her disturbed mind.

  ‘Please, Erin. Think about this. When’s the last time you saw your baby?’

  ‘I heard her today. Several times.’

  ‘But when did you see her? When did you last look at her face? When did you last hold her in your arms?’

  ‘Y-Yesterday. Before all this started. Before she was taken from me.’

  ‘Really? Think about that. Think about what she ate. Did you go out with her? Where did you go?’

  ‘I… We went…’

  ‘And her age. How old did she look, Erin? I saw her birth certificate. She should be eighteen months old now. Did she look that old to you? Think about all the photographs on the walls at home. She’s never older than six months in those photos, is she?’

  Erin shakes her head, not in answer to Doyle’s question, but as if trying to cast out the doubts infiltrating their way into her mind.

  ‘We went out. I took her out in the stroller.’

  ‘You never take her out, Erin. Your neighbor, Mr Wiseman, told me all about you.’

  Alarm flashes across her face. ‘What? What did he say about me?’

  ‘He said you’ve got problems. He’s no doctor, but he knows you’re not well. He says he’s never seen a baby since you moved in. Never heard one either. Every time he asks you about Georgia, you make something up or change the subject. And he says… he says you sometimes wander the building at night, yelling and banging on doors.’

  ‘No. He’s got it wrong. That’s Miss Frodely. She’s the one who does all that crazy stuff.’

  ‘There is no Miss Frodely in the building. Frodely was your maiden name. The name you had before you married Clark.’

  The name seems to strike a chord somewhere in the depths of her consciousness.

  ‘Clark,’ she says. ‘Clark.’

  ‘Yes. Clark. Your husband. You left him, didn’t you, Erin?’

  ‘We… we had to get away. He wasn’t good for Georgia.’

  ‘So you escaped. You came here to New York. Only he found you, didn’t he? He tracked you down and came to your apartment.’

  Tears run down her face. She’s remembering, thinks Doyle. She’s coming back.

  ‘He said things. Bad things. He told me Georgia was dead. He said I was sick. He said I needed to see a psychiatrist. But he didn’t realize. I knew what he was really doing. He was trying to get Georgia away from me. Trying to take her back for himself. I could see right through him.’

  ‘Is that why you killed him, Erin?’

  There. There you go, Erin. Remember all that? Remember the visit from your ex-husband that tipped you over the edge? Remember killing him to take away the agony he was bringing to your door? Remember how good you felt then, and how it seemed that killing might be the pain relief you’d been searching for all that time? Remember how your unraveling mind invented the whole abduction scenario so that it could give you a plausible explanation for the absence of your baby and some hope that you could get her back? Remember how each and every killing resulted in you believing that it took you another step closer to the baby that had been so cruelly snatched from you?

  And yet, while all this was going on, do you also remember how you fought against it? Remember those tiny chinks of remorse and guilt that led you to leave the message that told others how to find you, if only they knew how to read it?

  Do you remember all that, Erin?

  She does. He can tell she does. He can see it in her eyes. Recollections drifting back, squirming through the chaotic murk of her thoughts and straining to make themselves heard through all the white noise.

  But then something else clutches at her mind and turns it away. She cocks her head, listening. Her face contorts in fear and panic.

  ‘No,’ she says, but not to Doyle. ‘Please don’t do that. Don’t hurt her again. I did everything you asked. We had an agreement.’

  Doyle calls her, desperate to keep her here in this world. ‘Erin! There’s nobody there. The voice isn’t real. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘No. I can hear him. Plain as day. He’s talking—’

  ‘No, Erin. It’s just a hearing aid. An ordinary hearing aid. It belonged to Clark. I saw it on him in your photographs. You must remember that.’

  She stares at Doyle. Raises a hand to touch the hearing aid. Then she looks at the brooch. Slowly, she reaches under her jacket. Doyle tenses, ready to take her out. But what she produces is a small black box, from which a wire snakes up to her brooch.

  ‘It’s a transmitter,’ she says. ‘It’s how he sees and hears things. It sends him everything. And he tells me what to do.’

  ‘Open the box, Erin. Go ahead, open it.’

  She looks at him for a few seconds, then back at the box. Holding on to the gun, she manages to turn a plastic latch on the box and raise the lid.

  It’s empty. Just an empty plastic container.

  Her mouth drops open. This must be the final piece of evidence, thinks Doyle. Surely this must provide the slap that wakens her from her long nightmare.

  ‘Put the gun down, Erin. Let’s get you some help.’

  She turns her gaze on the gun in her hand, as if only just realizing it’s there.

  Come on, thinks Doyle. Drop the gun. It’s over, Erin.

  But it’s not over.

  It’s not over because somebody breaks the tension. There is a taut balloon in this room, expanded to its limit, and instead of allowing it to deflate softly, somebody sticks a pin in it.

  It’s LeBlanc.

  A cough is all it takes. A single tiny expulsion of blood-stained froth. In that moment everything changes, and Doyle loses his handhold on the woman he was rescuing, as the demons of her dream-world drag her back to them. He hears her cry, hears her deny the truth of LeBlanc’s feeble clinging to life, hears her yell that this cannot be so because of what it means for her baby. LeBlanc should be dead, she pronounces. He should have died so that her baby might live.

  And Doyle hears his own cries. His calling to Erin not to do what she is about to do, not to continue with the inevitable. He calls knowing that it is in vain. He calls as she raises her gun to aim it at LeBlanc. He calls as he levels his own gun and snaps off two shots in rapid succession.

  And then he watches her spin and fall and hit the ground, and he hates that it had to end so wastefully like this.

  He goes to her first, but only so that he can move LeBlanc’s gun from her reach. And then he is at LeBlanc’s side and he is weeping and telling his young partner that everything will be all right, even though everything has gone horribly wrong, and he is barking into his cellphone for assistance, telling them that there is an officer down, a police officer, and they tell him they will be there as soon as they can, and already Doyle senses it will be too late, and all he can do is hold his partner close as he waits for the others to come.

  It is barely a new day, and already the scent of blood hangs heavy on the air.

  1.32 AM

  How much punishment can the human body take?

  Doyle ponders this as he paces the hallway of the hospital. He knows the doctors are working as hard as they can, and he keeps willing them to succeed, but a nagging voice at the back of his head keeps goading him with its suggestions that it’s a lost cause. He lost too much blood, it says. He has too many knife wounds, it says. You took too long to get to him, it chides.

  Fuck off, Doyle answers in his head.

  And then he thinks, Shit, I’m getting as bad as Erin. Arguing with myself like this.

  But there is another dark feeling that keeps haunting him.

  He tries distracting himself. He makes some
phone calls. Asks about Albert.

  His real name is Philip Dorling, but Doyle continues to think of him as Albert. Detectives and the Crime Scene guys went to his home at 304 Avenue D, apartment 2C – the address that Albert gave Doyle in his cryptic way, thereby solving two cases in one fell swoop. What they found there was a story of profound sadness.

  Edifix.

  The construction kits that Albert loved to build. That’s what did it.

  He’d built a fire truck out of the blocks. He was probably immensely proud of it. Probably spent many hours rolling it to and fro on the floor.

  Seems he left it there. On the floor. Where his mother stepped on it while she was carrying a knife she had just been using to slice cucumber. When she landed, the blade pierced her heart.

  That’s how it looks to the cops and techs, and Doyle is happy to accept that story. He understands now why Albert feels such guilt. It was his toy. He left it where he shouldn’t have, and because of that his mom is dead. But still, it’s better than an alternative universe in which an evil, violent Albert plunges the knife into the chest of his own mother. Doyle is glad he is spared that version.

  He wonders now what will become of Albert, and vows that he will speak to him in person. He will do his utmost to convince Albert of his innocence. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t to blame.

  I’m to blame, though, he thinks.

  For Tommy, I mean. I’m to blame for that.

  The only reason Tommy is lying on an operating table now is because he hooked up with Erin, and the only reason he hooked up with her is because I ribbed him about not having a girlfriend. That’s why he’s looking death in the face right now. That’s on me.

  Doyle’s legs suddenly go weak on him, and he has to sit down. It’s the exhaustion, he decides. When did I last sleep?

  He would love to sleep, but he thinks it’s a distant promise. His mind is too full of sorrow and remorse and fear for the life of a young man being operated on just yards away. Through those doors there. The doors through which a middle-aged surgeon is now exiting, heading toward me, his face grim, his scrubs splashed with blood. LeBlanc’s blood.