Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Robert Pobi
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Copyright
Bloodman
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it . . . They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
– William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915
It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished fragment from Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883-1885
TYLER ROCHESTER ENJOYED walking home from school alone; it was a hard-won privilege that had taken negotiation and persistence. Of course, his parents had insisted on a few conditions – which he was old enough to know was just a fancy word for rules – but in the end he had won his independence. And any ten-year-old will tell you that independence is almost as good as cake – the kind with sprinkles.
Tyler was on his way home from the Damien Whitney Academy for Boys on the Upper East Side. Summer break was only a few days away and the city already felt like it was on fire so he allowed himself the luxury of opening the buttons of his school jacket. He also wanted to open his collar but he had spent a lot of time getting his tie just right, with a perfect knot, like Tom Cruise had done in that old movie Mission Impossible.
The taxi dropped him off a block from his home. Tyler stopped for a Coke at the deli, taking a can from the fridge by the fruit stand. He paid the man at the register with his debit card and walked out into the heat.
Tyler Rochester never made it home.
Tyler Rochester had just become a statistic.
THE SUN WAS dropping over the Jersey shore, staining the atmosphere with the orange of late afternoon. The day had been cloudless and only the vapor trails over Newark marred the perfect blue of the sky. The wind was dead and the Hudson was in one of those rare states where it looked like a gently rolling field of dark, heavy oil. Manhattan, stretching ahead and to the left, glowed in the last breath of the afternoon.
Alexandra Hemingway made good time, the swing and grip of the paddle pushing her south, the tide donating a little extra speed. Every time her right arm came up, her shoulder blade clicked, a keepsake from David Decker.
The water headed out to sea, pulled by the unstoppable schedule of the moon. She often passed garbage – mostly the mundane detritus of coffee cups and plastic bags – but every now and then she found some pretty grim things in the water. Anyone who spent time on the river had. When she worked days, she’d often have an early morning coffee with the rowers from Columbia; their superstition was that the season didn’t officially start until they came across a body in the water. Business as usual in the Big Apple.
She had crossed under the George Washington Bridge a few minutes back and the further downstream she went, the greater her speed became. The GPS hooked onto her vest clocked her at nearly three knots faster than she had been just ten blocks back. As the outflow of the Hudson sluiced between New York and New Jersey, it picked up a lot of speed, the faster troughs sometimes moving at twenty-five knots down near Battery Park. To offset the heavy pull of the water she stayed close to shore. Inexperienced kayakers sometimes found themselves washed out past Red Hook and under the Verrazano – not the way she wanted to spend a Monday night.
She had grown up on the waves, her first solo forays out on Long Island Sound in the Laser her father bought her for her tenth birthday. Her passion for the sea had deepened with each new year until now, at thirty-seven, it felt like an integral part of her own biology. She was out here every night before her shift, rain or shine, pounding the water. It wasn’t just a way to keep her body from atrophy, it was one of the few places where she could be alone – a near miracle in a city of thirteen million people.
And other than the morning Mank had been killed, she couldn’t remember a time when she had needed to be alone in her own headspace as much as now.
Today wasn’t about grief, at least not technically. That morning the little stick had turned blue; then the clear solution in the comparative bottles had turned blue; and finally the meter had registered a plus sign. By the time she had chewed open the fourth off-the-shelf home test, she was going through the motions out of nothing more than morbid curiosity.
She had squeezed in an emergency appointment with Dr. Sparks for confirmation. She was with child, in the parlance of Hester Prynne’s time. Knocked up, as Phelps would say. And out of work, as her boss would soon be telling her.
She made the nearly hundred blocks from the GWB to the 79th Street boat basin in a little less than sixteen minutes, not a record in her scull but good time in the clumsy kayak. She was tall, a little over six feet, and she found most kayaks uncomfortable. Even though this was only her second run with the new fifteen-footer, it already felt like an old friend – a good sign.
When she paddled into the marina, the carbon monoxide migration on the West Side Highway was clogged to walking speed in both directions; rush hour had started and people were heading home to suppers of booze, antacid, and reruns of Jeopardy.
Hemingway pulled up to the launch, took off her Ray-Bans, and hopped out into the mid-thigh water. It felt like it looked – warm and heavy. She removed the wheels from the mount holes on the back of the Prowler, lifted the stern, and placed the support posts into the scupper holes. Then she lifted the bow and pushed the kayak up the slope to her truck.
Hemingway pulled the Suburban off the southbound West Side Highway, wove through the Tetris-like traffic blocking the intersection, and barreled east on 27th. She hit the brakes at a red light on the corner of 11th and the truck slid on the condensation that beaded the asphalt, coming to rest at a slight cant. The moon roof and windows were open and humidity misted the leather steering wheel. She thought about running the light to get the air flowing again but didn’t want to get pulled over by a cop – things like that were bad for business. So she waited.
Two kids ambled across the lane. Gangly teens in the standard-issue streetwear of the uninventive: low-slung jeans, trainers without laces, caps locked-on sideways. One wore a Knicks jacket, the other was in a Yankees jersey. It was too hot for the heavy clothing and Hemingway found herself pitying their need to conform. They had that loose-legged walk that speaks volumes to street kids. They crossed in front of her bumper, close enough that a pant leg brushed the fiberglass. The one in the Knicks jacket gave the kayak on the roof rack a once over. He said something to his friend who turned back, his eyes sliding over the hood, past the windshield, to the top of the truck, as if he were staring at a space ship.
Hemingway reached for the radio, cranked the volume, and Andrew WK told her that it was time to party hard.
There was a shadow at the edge of her vision that set off a flash in her circuitry but before instinct converted to action the warm end of a muzzle pressed against her cheek.
“Out the car, bitch,” the voice behind the pistol said.
The flicker of the second guy pulsed in the rearview mirror, heading for the passenger door.
She took her hands off the wheel in an I’ll-do-whatever-you-say gesture that she punctuated by pounding down on the gas.
The big SUV lurched forward, tires screaming. There was a brief snap of time where the muzzle slid back and away from her cheek and she reached up for the wrist holding the pistol.
The truck bucked. There was a snap of bone and the roar of the engine was overridden by a scream. Hemingway pounded down on the brakes and the kid flew forward. His pistol bounced off the dash and ricocheted into the back seat. There was a single panic-stricken flash of teeth, then he spilled forward with another howl. Something solid thumped under her wheel and the truck jolted. The SUV came to a halt before the back wheel finished what the front hadn’t. She came out of the cab with her pistol low, clasped tightly in both hands.
The kid was sprawled out by the back tire, his leg twisted under the truck. His foot looked like someone had unscrewed it. Bones poked through the cuff of his jeans like pale splintered roots. His shoe lay ten feet away.
She spun her head, looking for the second kid. Traffic had stopped fifty feet back, silhouettes behind windshields dropping below dashboards.
Through the windows of the SUV she saw the second target coming up on the back right fender. A little chrome .32 glinted in his fist.
She crab-scrambled sideways and stood up with her pistol leveled at the bumper he’d have to come around. She stepped back from the sweet spot in four long strides, bringing her sights up to adjust for the increased distance. When she reached the apex of the curve, and her sights began to drop, she stopped. Held her stance. He rounded the back bumper, aiming too low; she was fifteen feet beyond where he expected her to be.
“Freeze, idiot,” she said.
But he went for it.
She squeezed the trigger once and he doubled over and somersaulted in a single disjointed cartwheel, capped off with a high-pitched screech. His pistol clattered to the pavement under the cyclopic gaze of the traffic signal a few feet away. He hit the asphalt and his hands went to his groin. Someone to her right honked.
Hemingway stepped forward to the kid under the truck. He had crawled from under the frame and was gasping for breath, like a boated fish. She raised the pistol to his face. “You want it in the head or the heart?” She lowered her sights to the middle of his chest with the second part of the question. It did not sound rhetorical.
The kid looked up, barking a plea out between his jackhammer breaths. “No . . . please . . . Miss . . . I didn’t . . . mean . . . no . . .”
Behind her, the low grunt of a wounded animal and the sound of a body dragging itself over asphalt. Metal scraping on street.
She turned.
Crotch-shot had crawled to his automatic, a black smear shimmering in his wake. He had wrapped his bloody fingers around the grip and was trying to lift it off the pavement. His arm moved as if he were suspended in acrylic; the gun looked welded to the road.
“Hey, fuckface,” she said, and circled around the car, coming up on the kid’s flank in her long-legged stride, gearing it up to a run.
She came at him from his left and he barely saw her coming. She kicked the cap gun out of his hand and threw her foot into the wreckage that used to be his testicles.
He howled and puked a supper of what could only be beer and nachos all over his jacket. He collapsed back onto the pavement with a thud. It sounded like he cracked his skull.
Hemingway stood in the middle of the street, over the vomit-covered kid. She looked back at the one with the broken wrist and Captain Ahab foot. Then she checked her watch: her shift started in a few minutes. Someone honked again.
“You assholes made me late for work,” she said to no one in particular. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed 911. “I should shoot you just for that.”
A couple of tourists on the corner had their cell phones jabbed skyward in the universal YouTube salute. Hemingway raised her arm as if to wave. Then she smiled and gave them the finger.
HEMINGWAY CLIMBED THE steps in morose silence, wondering what she had done to deserve an attempted carjacking. The Suburban was ten years old and not particularly valuable, which was why she used it in the city, so what had that been about? It had to be the kayak. But those kids wouldn’t know where to sell a kayak anymore than they would know where to sell weapons-grade plutonium. Maybe it was the heat. It was like the surface of the sun outside and the humidity was floating somewhere around a hundred percent – with conditions like that it wouldn’t take much to set off the crazies in the city of the dead.
She thought that she had changed her karma or juju or whatever they were calling it these days. But it looked to be just more of the same: old-fashioned bad luck. It had started when Mankiewicz had been killed and for some reason hadn’t let go. Not in three years.
Part of her thought that maybe it was some sort of Faustian bargain that she wasn’t aware of – the bad-luck payoff for an unremembered wish. Only she had never asked for a thing. Except for Claire to come back when she was twelve. And then, twenty-two years later, the strength to walk into Decker’s and finish what Mankiewicz had started. Not much in the way of a wish list. Not really.
The fates had given her Decker. And his men. When she had been done, four of them were dead and Decker was squirming around on the terracotta in his own blood and shit. She had stood over him while her chest made a weird sucking sound. She had raised the pistol, looked into the two rivets of fear that were his eyes, and scooped his brains out with her .357.
Of course it had all been captured by the surveillance cameras and there had never been any charges because video didn’t lie.
Nicky, Decker’s right-hand man, had put one into her shoulder as soon as she had gone in. She didn’t remember much after that, except that she had shot at everything that had moved and more than a few things that hadn’t. When it was all done, there were five dead men on the floor and walls and Hemingway had turned and walked out onto the sidewalk with only that weird whistling coming from somewhere in her body to let her know she was not yet dead.
The sucking chest wound was louder than the whine of the approaching sirens and when she stepped into the sun she realized that the side of her face was lit up with 50,000 volts of pain. She tried to open her mouth and all she heard was a scream that she was sure had come from somewhere deep inside of her.
She sat down on the curb, leaned up against a garbage can and stared down at the pair of pistols in her hands. Then she passed out with her shield hanging from her neck on a length of bloody chain.
When she woke up in the hospital, the shield was still there but half her left lung and a portion of one shoulder blade was gone. Along with a whole lot of blood.
The first thing the doctor said was that her golf swing would never be the same. She tried to tell him that the only time she had held a club was when she had smashed Skippy Cooper’s hand with a Calloway driver when he had tried to feel her up in the pro shop on the night of her sixteenth birthday. When she had tried to open her mouth, she heard that scream again.
Someone – ballistics had never been able to figure out who, exactly – had put a round into her jaw. It had shattered most of the left ramus – a scratch that sixteen hours of reconstructive surgery and some titanium hardware had managed to correct; she hid a lot of the scar tissue with a pageboy haircut that added a little extra architecture to her already angular features. She had only lost one tooth, now replaced with a nice porcelain implant. But it had taken eleven weeks for the damage to heal to the point where she could chew bananas. Three more months until she was able to speak properly.
When she had finally walked out of Flushing Presbyterian she had a lunchbox full of narcotics to help her deal with her repaired body; apparently sedated animals were easier to handle. She had walked away with remarkably few scars – a shiny fifteen-inch strip down her sternum where they had cracked her ribs; four melted patches of skin where lead had burrowed into her flesh; an extra angle to her jaw. She dumped the pills down the toilet when she got home – she had never been a big believer in crutches and she wasn’t about to start. She hadn’t taken so much as aspirin since. Fuck the doctors. And the five men who had tried to put her in the ground with Mank.
She made the top of the steps, walked into the detective’s office, and the room erupted in cheers.
“Nice shooting, Hemi,” Papandreou hollered from the far end.
“Did you have to get the guy in the nutsack?” Lincoln asked. “You’re already on the Interweb – you flipped the bird at two German tourists.”
“At least I smiled at them.” And she went to her office.
Phelps was at his desk, his big feet up on the beaten oak, fingers knitted together on top of his head. “Hey, Hem, you okay?” He was trying to sound casual but she recognized concern in his tone. The father of two boys, she always felt she filled the space of de facto daughter in his life.
“You really worried?”
Phelps smiled, shook his head. “Not about you. But the kid you shot in the pills is another thing.”
She shrugged and sat down. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Yeah, well, don’t it always?” Phelps dropped his feet to the floor, reached forward and picked up a mug with a happy face on the side. Took a sip. “You hungry?” he asked.
“Do you have to ask?”
Phelps stood up and fed one thick arm through a jacket sleeve. “Let’s go get us some food.”
They sat in their usual booth at the back of Bernie’s. The diner was the best place in the neighborhood for sandwiches and coffee and its proximity to the precinct had made it a recession-proof success since 1921. At any given moment – night or day – there were a dozen cops sprinkled around the place, reading papers, writing notes, or simply avoiding going home to bad marriages.
Hemingway was downing the last bits of a chopped steak with mashed potatoes, peas, and gravy while Phelps looked on, astounded. “You know, Hemi, I been eating with you for almost seven years now and I still can’t wrap my brain around how much food you can shovel away.”
“Shovel away?” She smiled over a forkful of peas. “You’re smooth with the compliments, Jon.”
“I’m not kidding.” Phelps shook his head. “In the army I never seen a guy eat like you. And there were some big motherfuckers in ’Nam. That was back before they let chicks into the forces. At least in combat positions.”
Hemingway washed the peas down with a slug of coffee and pushed her empty plate to the edge of the table. “Yeah, well, now they give us guns and shoes and the right to vote. It’s a brave new world out there. The times they are a changin’.”
“Don’t steal my generation’s music, too.”
It was then that her phone rang. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and answered with her usual, “Yeah?”
Michael Desmond, the dispatcher for the detective squads, identified himself. Then he told her what had happened.
She felt the chopped steak twitch in her guts. “Jesus. Sure. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
When she hung up, Phelps was already on his feet. “Where we goin’?”
“East River Park.”
“Who we got?”
She pulled a wallet out of her jacket. “Dead kid.”
“Sure it’s a murder?”
“Unless he chopped off his own feet, yeah.”
THE BONES OF the bridge filled the sky overhead and reflected off the windshield as Hemingway rolled past the police barrier. A uniformed officer in a yellow traffic vest waved her through the utility gate and she parked the Suburban on the grass at the edge of a small park under the shadow of the Queensboro. They sat in silence for a few seconds, each going through their own personal checklist of pre-flight preparations. After a few ticks of the clock the internal monologues were done and they stepped out onto the manicured green.
The circus was in full swing on both sides of the yellow tape. Joggers took photos with their cell phones, excited that something was happening to break the monotony of the health train. A handful of news crews had set up camp at the tapelines on either end of the path, chattering into the cameras like pageant contestants, rictus grins and polished hair competing with non-sequiturs for attention. The reporters had to speak loud to be heard over the traffic of the FDR only a few yards away. Two of the borough’s big forensic RVs were parked nose to nose, blocking off any chance of an errant camera – cell phone or news variety – converting death into entertainment.
They headed for the Jacob’s Ladder pulse of the photographer’s flash behind the RVs, ignoring the white-haloed forms of the news people bottlenecked at either end of the footpath. The esplanade felt weird with no joggers whipping by or rollerbladers barking Coming-through! They stepped off the thin strip of asphalt that cut through the imposed green space and Hemingway spotted a stone on the ground. She reached down, picked it up. It was smooth, the size of a robin’s egg. She slipped it into her pocket.
Phelps watched her, used to the ritual, then headed toward the screens. “When you gonna get tired of doing your Virginia Woolf imitation?”
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
The boy lay on a tarp, eyes pointed at the sky, chin on chest, the pose reminiscent of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter – only there was no tension in the muscles, no flex in the little neck. His clothes were filthy and ripped and stuck to his flesh, one jacketed arm under the railing, reaching for the East River. Queens beyond. He wore a school jacket and tie. His feet were gone.
Dr. Marcus was down on one space-suited knee, practicing his arcane arts on the child. Unblinking. Unmoving. A photographer moved around the tarp, snapping frames. Marcus looked up, nodded an unhappy greeting, and turned back to the body.
Someone came out of the darkness between the privacy screen and the RV and the eerie strobe of the photographer’s flash gave the shape a jittery, unhealthy cadence. Three steps later it morphed into Walter Afonia – an old-timer doing the tail end of forty years at the Seventh, most of it in the detective squad.
“Hemingway, Phelps,” he said in way of a greeting, then nodded at the boy on the plastic. “Kid’s name was Tyler Rochester. Some jogger found him about a half an hour ago.”
“The jogger?” Phelps asked.
“Dentist. Name’s Zachary Gizbert. He was out here doing ankle training – whatever the fuck that means – and found the kid. Called it in on his phone and a car was here in a little over four minutes. A pair of patrolmen from the Ninth pulled the kid from the drink. He was against one of the pilings to the utility bridge.” He nodded at the world beyond the screens. “Gizbert’s back at the station giving a statement. Guy shit himself.” Afonia paused, waiting for someone to crack a smile or tell a joke or cry. No one did. He continued with the same flat tone that had got them to this point. “Kid was dumped upriver. Tide’s been going out for three hours.”
Hemingway turned to Dr. Marcus. “What’s TOD?”
Marcus looked up, nodded. “Two, two-and-a-half hours.”
Afonia moved in beside Marcus and looked down at the kid. “Tyler here made a call from his cell phone at six twenty-one to tell the housekeeper he was on his way home. He took a taxi up Fifth. Got off at the corner, stopped at a deli for a Coke. Paid for the cab and the soda with his debit card. Stepped back out onto the street and off the grid.”
Hemingway stared down at the child, her interpretive software trying to convert the image of the dead boy into some sort of approachable geometry. “What about his cell phone?”
Afonia nodded like he was just getting to that. “It’s not in his pockets. Good guess would be the bottom of the East River. If it’s not, it’s turned off.”
“Anything unusual about the body?” she asked.
Afonia shrugged. “Someone took his feet off.”
Hemingway looked off into the water washing by, thinking of kayaking on the other side of Manhattan a few hours back. The boy had been alive then. Now he wasn’t. All in a few short hours.
Afonia looked down at the kid for a second. Then he swallowed and turned away from the body. “All I know is he disappeared sometime after buying a Coke at six forty-three p.m. and less than three hours later he washes up here. Kid’s family lives up near you. You want this case, you can have it.” Afonia fished around in his pocket, his hand coming out with a pack of Kents. He offered one to each of them, then excused himself for a smoke in the darkness beyond the privacy screens.
Hemingway crouched down on her haunches beside the medical examiner. He didn’t bother looking over; for him, a crime scene was not a place of greeting, it was a place of solemnity.
Clear polyethylene bags covered the boy’s hands, secured with tie-wraps. Inside the foggy plastic his fingers looked scrubbed and clean, in direct contrast to the filthy clothing and matted, tangled hair that knotted on his forehead. Tyler Rochester had been a good-looking kid who would probably have grown up into a handsome man. Only now he would stay ten forever.
After a few silent moments of magic with a black light, the ME said, “His feet were removed by a saw of some sort. Small, serrated blade. Not a bow saw. Something smaller. Hacksaw most probably.” Then he leaned in and pointed at the boy’s left eyeball. “There’s a small puncture through the sclera, right here. I’m guessing premortem but it might have happened in the river. I’ll have a better idea once I have the body back in the lab. Right now, that’s all I can give you.”
Hemingway once again lifted her eyes to the water, to the lights of Queens on the other side, the unblinking square eyes of apartment windows. Over there it looked alive. She turned back to the coroner. Then to the dead boy. “Defensive wounds?”
“His nails look pretty clean but I’ll know a lot more when I get the swabs under a scope. Other than his feet there doesn’t seem to be any signs of struggle or violence.”
The feet were enough.
Marcus stood up and pulled off his latex gloves. “The first cuts are tentative, unaligned. After an inch he hit his stride and did a clean job. But the killer didn’t have any practical knowledge of anatomy. The cuts are too high – he went through the bottom flange of the tibia. Half an inch lower and he would have missed both the tibia and talus – it’s mostly cartilage and it’s a lot easier to saw through.
“I’ll have blood work and a tox screen in a few hours. Come see me in three hours.” He dropped his eyes to the stumps of the boy’s legs, one sticking out of a cuff that the river had not been able to rinse of blood.
Afonia came back in.
“You can go home. We’re taking the case.”
Afonia blinked once then nodded. “I thought you would.”
She turned to Phelps, “Call Papandreou and have him put a list together.” She nodded at the dead boy without taking her eyes from Phelps. “Anyone who’s walked. Countrywide.”
The big cop reached for his phone. “Released in the last six months?”
“Make it twelve,” she said, “I don’t want to miss this guy because he controlled himself for six months and a day.”
THE ROCHESTERS LIVED in a remodeled brownstone that had everything new money could buy. The home vibrated with the comings and goings of busy people, of which only the two duty cops now assigned to the family made any sense.
A wiry man sporting a well-tailored suit and the fluid movements of a street fighter ushered Hemingway and Phelps into the library. He stood at the door as if an invisible fence prevented him from entering the space and introduced himself as Benoit. Then he told them that the Rochesters would be with them in a few minutes and asked if they wanted anything to drink. Phelps waved it away. Hemingway asked for a Perrier. Benoit disappeared.
Phelps finished casing the room and asked, “How much a place like this cost?” Like any good detective, curiosity was built into his genetic code.
“In this neighborhood? Maybe six mil.” She glanced around the room, then amplified the result to include the rest of the brownstone. “The renovating about two. The furniture and paintings another three. Some of it’s good.” She leaned over and examined a bronze jaguar sitting on a painted Pembroke table. “Most of it’s just all right.”
“No shit?” Phelps jerked a thumb at the library walls. “I checked and the books are in Swedish and German. This isn’t a library, it’s a movie set.”
She shrugged again. “They’re supposed to look good, not be read.”
“The rich are different.”
She shook her head. “They’re like everyone else: insecure.”
The low hum of ambient noise beyond the doors of the library went silent and a few seconds later the Rochesters came in, followed by Benoit who had Hemingway’s Perrier on a small silver tray.
Mr. Rochester clocked in at a fit sixty and had the sharp black eyes and firm handshake of a Wall Street poster boy. Mrs. Rochester was younger by two decades and had the unfocused eyes and loose body movements of a Xanax and vodka cocktail.
When everyone was clear on names, the Rochesters sat down and Hemingway nodded at Benoit as he brought her drink over. “Mr. and Mrs. Rochester, I have some very personal questions to ask and you may not want Benoit—”
Mr. Rochester held up his hand and shook his head. “He stays.”
She took a breath and began. “We are sorry for what happened to your son. We want to find who did this and we want to do it quickly. In order to do that, we are going to have to reconstruct his routine. We have one objective: to find the person who did this.”
Hemingway focused on Mrs. Rochester – the mother usually knew the routines, tradespeople, help, and schedules – but she was staring into the past, her mouth open, her eyes red and black from crying through her makeup.
Hemingway looked down at her notebook. “The first thing we need is a list of everyone that you can think of who might have had contact with Tyler. The school has given us a list of their teachers and personnel but we’ll need to know his extracurricular life as well. Doctor, dentist, piano teacher, fathers of friends who have driven him home, any of your people; tutors; maintenance; cleaning crews; household staff; tradesmen – as comprehensive a list as possible.”
Mrs. Rochester’s head bobbed up, as if gravity had let go for a second. She tried to focus on Hemingway. “God, you don’t think that it was someone he knows – we know – do you?”
Hemingway didn’t look away. “We don’t know.”
The woman’s mouth turned down and her eyes began ratcheting back and forth, as if the gearing had suddenly skipped. The tears very quickly started. “Why did this happen to us? All I wanted was a baby.”
Her husband leaned over and put his arm around her. It seemed an awkward, unnatural gesture.
“Just a baby,” she said, hugging herself and rocking slightly.
Hemingway thought of the cells dividing in her own body and she felt a flush of weird shame. “Have you, or any of your people, noticed anything unusual lately?”
Mr. Rochester turned to Benoit, the replicant, who simply shook his head and said in an even tone, “Nothing unusual.”
“At what time did Tyler usually get home each day?” Hemingway kept her eyes locked on Mr. Rochester. A man like him would want to be certain that the detective investigating his son’s murder had backbone; when they had shaken hands he had squeezed a little too tightly, one of those sexist tests men threw at her every now and then – probably his version of the acid test for competency.
It was Benoit who answered again. “He was usually in the elevator by four thirty-seven. Tonight he stayed late to use the library. Tyler is one of those rare children who likes books.” He paused, then corrected himself. “Liked books.” The man had a precise foreign accent that she couldn’t quite place. It had a lilt of French to it but his Rs were a little hard.
“Did he walk to school unescorted every day?”
Benoit again. “Since January.”
“And before that?” Hemingway kept her eyes locked on Mr. Rochester, ignoring Benoit.
Benoit opened his mouth and Phelps interrupted. “Mr. Rochester, you were his parents, you are the best source of information.”
At that, Mrs. Rochester snorted. It was a loud farm-girl guffaw. She stopped when her husband hit her with a hard stare.
“Unfortunately we have been occupied with other things as of late. Of everyone in his life, Benoit knew him best.”
Hemingway’s eyes flicked to Benoit; his face was still molded into that flat battlefield stare his type always had. His head rotated toward her, and she could almost hear the metallic lick of gears and grease in the movement. “Until last week I followed him to and from school each day. I think he knew. I discussed it with his father, and Mr. Rochester agreed that he should spend the last month of the year learning what independence was. This was the first time he walked home without my presence.”
And Hemingway recognized the guilt behind the lifeless eyes. She knew the type; Mank had been like that. If she really wanted to think about it, she was like that too.
“Put a list together of everyone who saw him on a regular basis. Highlight new people in his circles – the last six months or so.”
Mrs. Rochester was nodding off into Mother’s Little Helper Land again and Mr. Rochester looked like it was starting to sink in.
“All I wanted was a baby—” She sniffled, a loud inelegant pop, and wiped her sleeve across her nose. “How could someone do this to him?”
Mr. Rochester’s face tightened.
Hemingway tried to get the interview back. The next question was a tough one, but standard operating procedure. “Is there anyone who would want to hurt you? Past business dealings, maybe?”
Mr. Rochester stared at her for a blank moment, and then his software was back up. He didn’t hold up his hands and give her an emphatic no-fucking-way and he didn’t think about it as if it had never crossed his mind, he simply stared at her and said, “Detective Hemingway, I can in no way think of anyone who would feel that something like this could be even remotely justified. This is beyond retribution, Detective. In any capacity.” And for an instant his eyes found Benoit. They shook their heads in unison.
“Has anyone noticed anything out of the ordinary recently? Anything at all? A new delivery man, or florist, or car detailer? Any new spouses or boyfriends in your social circle? Anything at all might help, no matter how insignificant.” Phelps kept his tone even, direct.
“What can you tell us about Tyler?” Hemingway automatically looked at Benoit but it was Mrs. Rochester who answered from behind some unseen curtain of communication.
“He was a good boy. Funny. Thick brown hair, big brown eyes . . .”
Hemingway remembered the boy’s stare pointed up at the sky and the knot of hair on his forehead.
Mr. Rochester added, “He was gifted. Brilliant.”
His wife waved it away as if that didn’t matter. “He was the fastest runner in the hundred yards at the Randall’s Island track and field day.”
An image of the chop lines through his bones flickered in Hemingway’s head.
Mrs. Rochester continued talking as the medication and misery gave her a momentary reprieve. “Loved baseball and eggs Benedict. He was my gift. And now he’s gone.”
Hemingway folded up her three-by-five, pocketed it, and nodded for Phelps to do the same. These people weren’t going to be any help. Not yet. They were in the early stages of shock. Maybe tomorrow morning. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe never. “We’ll need to speak to you some time tomorrow. If you think of anything in the interim, please let us know.”
Mrs. Rochester repeated, “And now he’s gone,” then faded out again.
Benoit walked them to the door and Hemingway watched the way the rest of the people in the house shied away from him, alpha among the omegas.
Benoit stopped in the foyer with them and asked, “What are the chances you’ll find the man who did this?” There was no hope in his voice, no false buoyancy.
Hemingway did her best to sound confident but Benoit looked like the kind of guy who had well-honed bullshit detecting skills. Besides, they hadn’t started to connect the dots yet. “We’ll pick up a lot of evidence as we move upstream with this. We’ll find this guy. I promise.”
Hemingway held out her hand.
Benoit stared at it for a second before nodding perfunctorily and saying, “I hope you catch this guy before he sets his sights on another child. Have a good night, detectives.”
Then he opened the door.
HEMINGWAY AND PHELPS were in their booth at the back of Bernie’s again. It was late. Bernie had put on his monthly Fiesta Night, ramping up the décor with greasy Mexican souvenirs hung around the joint like props in a film. The place had been packed with Corona-drinking cops with red eyes for most of the night. Now only stragglers remained.
Hemingway had talked Bernie into warming a Tourista Trio up for her – a deep-fried culinary sculpture consisting of three burritos and three tacos on a bed of nachos and cheese topped off with fist-sized scoops of guacamole and sour cream. It was past its prime, and the cheese tasted like electrical cord, but she was grateful for the meal. Phelps was finishing a diet soda and a single soft-shell chicken taco adorned with lettuce and a little salt. Alongside the food their improvised office was littered with notes, case jackets and photographs.
Hemingway knew who would be sitting where without having to look. Most cops were superstitious about things that civilians took for granted, including where to sit in a restaurant. Some chose defensive positions against walls and in corners; some stayed close to the coffee machine so they could order as fresh pots came off the burner; some sat near the windows to watch the world outside. According to the unwritten schedule, this was Hemingway and Phelps’s booth every day from six until three, from three to midnight it belonged to Donny Lincoln and Nick Papandreou, switching squatters’ rights to officers Diego and McManus from midnight to 6 a.m. In a life filled with uncertainty, it was nice to have a table you could depend on.
Hemingway spotted Lincoln and Papandreou ambling over.
Phelps pointed at Hemingway’s plate. “We’re almost done.”
Papandreou threw an orange file on the table, pulled up a chair, and nodded at Hemingway as she put a mouthful of nachos away. “You know, Hemi, for a woman you sure eat a lot of fuckin’ food.”
She wiped her mouth with a napkin and smiled. “I get that a lot.”
“How’s it going with your boat?”
The time Hemi spent out on the water was a rolling joke with some of the other cops. She smiled. “Still floating.”
“You got a fridge on board? You know, for snacks and shit?”
Hemingway stabbed at the guacamole with her fork. “Sure. I keep Pop Tarts on board, just in case.”
Papandreou tapped the orange folder. “Here’s the list you asked for.”
Phelps slurped the last of his soda out of the waxed paper cup, moving the straw around with his lips to vacuum the dregs, then reached for the file. “How many names you come up with?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Hemingway’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. She eyed the two cops, then put her fork down with a clang and wiped her mouth again. “Yes. I do.”
“In the past twelve months, there have been eleven hundred and thirty-one men paroled countrywide who have violent and predatory histories with children. One hundred and eleven women. We ran the MO through the system and came up empty. Lots of child predators out there but none that seem predisposed to this kind of pathology.” Papandreou jabbed a finger at the pile of files on the table. “A lot of bad people on the list but none of them seem right for the job.”
Desmond, the dispatcher, came running into the diner. He looked angry which, along with the wet crescents staining the underarms of his suit, was the usual state of affairs with the man: bad news personified. He spotted Hemingway and headed over, eyebrows knitted together in an indignant V.
“Here’s Desmond,” she said, and pushed her plate away – Desmond was also a spitter.
“Whyintya guys fuckin’ tell me you found them?” he snapped at Papandreou.
“We just got here.”
Desmond fastened his eyes on Hemingway.
“What’s up, Dezzy?”
Desmond’s eyes stayed on her face for a moment, then they dropped to her plate, then back up to her eyes. “Where’s your fuckin’ phone?”
“In my jacket. Right here.” She tapped the pile of linen beside her on the bench. She never carried a purse.
“You ain’t fuckin’ answerin’,” Desmond snapped.
She pulled the iPhone out and scanned the screen. “It was on vibrate. Thirty-one messages.”
Desmond turned to Phelps. “You too, fat man?”
“This ain’t fat, it’s muscle.” Phelps said. He eased his mass back in the seat and his jacket fell open, exposing his substantial gut and an automatic in a shoulder holster. “My phone’s in the car.”
Hemingway’s eyes shifted from Desmond to Papandreou to Lincoln to Phelps then back to Desmond. “Will someone please tell us what’s going on,” she said.
Desmond held out a dispatch sheet. “The medical examiner’s office called. He wants to see you as soon as possible.”
Phelps started to slide out of the booth. “What gives?”
Desmond threw his arms up in the air. “You’d know if you had your fuckin’ phone with you.”
Hemingway pushed the table away and stood up. “You can stop with the histrionics and get to the point.”
“Marcus finished with the kid. The tox screens had a lot to say.”
Hemingway was up now. “Like?”
“Tyler Rochester was alive when someone chopped off his feet.”
THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office was unusually busy for 1.30 a.m. Hemingway nodded a few hellos to personnel as she and Phelps worked their way through the hallways on their way to the lab, a bright space where the white-coated acolytes pried secrets from the dead.
Dr. Marcus was in his usual lab – a meticulously appointed subway-tiled space that contained a dozen glass booths, each with a single stainless steel table over an eighteen-inch square grate in the floor. Several of the cubicles were occupied, the inhabitants covered by opaque plastic sheets. When they walked in, Marcus looked up from a cup of coffee he was examining as if it held great cosmic meaning.
“Hemi, Phelps,” he said.
No matter how many times Hemingway visited the morgue, it always seemed as if its walls off-gassed disinfectant and death.
After a thorough clean up that involved changing his lab coat and gloves, Marcus walked them to the far end of the lab where the Rochester boy was laid out.
The boy was pale and bloodless. There was a cut on his eyebrow that Hemingway hadn’t seen down by the water because it had been hidden by his hair – a white gash filled with pale pink flesh, like a third eye not yet formed. His mouth was slightly open, the almost white tip of his tongue protruding between perfect teeth.
Tyler Rochester did not look like he was sleeping. Or in a coma. Or in God’s arms. He looked like what he was: a dead child with no feet.
The sheet was folded down, covering him from mid-chest to where his legs stopped at the nub ends of bone. Hemingway took up position at the boy’s side. Phelps, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, stood on the other side of the body. It was clear that no one wanted to be here. The job of examining the dead always held a certain intrinsic sadness but seeing a child laying on the slab was tough for everyone, even Dr. Marcus, a man who had spent his career examining tragedy.
Marcus indicated Tyler Rochester’s left eye. It looked like a dried-out cocktail onion pushed into his socket with a little too much force. “The boy had an anesthetic injected into his left eye. Downward trajectory – right-handed. Barbiturate-grade anesthetic. It will take another week for the lab to match the compound but I’d say something like Thiopental. And at this point there is no indication of an analgesic, so he would have felt what happened to him.” Marcus dictated from memory, ignoring the notes on the trolley.
“How long would it take for something like that to take effect?” Phelps’s face was in work mode, an expressionless blend of angles.
Marcus’s head bobbed back and forth as he calculated. “When dealing with a boy this size? Twenty-five, maybe thirty seconds.”
“Was he restrained?”
“No bruising under his throat, so he wasn’t held from behind. No ligature marks on his wrists or ankles, so he wasn’t cuffed or strapped down.”
“And the kid would have felt this?” Phelps waved a hand over the space where the boy’s feet should have been.
Dr. Marcus nodded. “Yes.”
Hemingway ran a hand through her hair. “Have you figured out what he used to do this?”
“It was a hacksaw.”
Hemingway took in a lungful of disinfectant-tainted air and tried to focus on the notes she was taking in her three-by-five. “You still think the killer lacks practical anatomical knowledge?”
Marcus nodded. “Like I said at the river, both feet were taken off too far above the ankle. Anyone with practice would know that half an inch down – between the tibia and talar head – is a lot easier to saw through because it’s mostly cartilage and tendon. And if you look here, at the right ankle, you can see that he doesn’t get the hang of the saw until an inch or so in.”
Hemingway looked up from her three-by-five. She wanted to say that didn’t feel like the work of a first-timer but kept it to herself. “So he jabbed the kid in the eye, waited for him to drop, then went to work on his right foot?”
Marcus nodded. “The boy would have screamed, doubled over holding his eye. As long as the killer left him alone for thirty seconds, he probably wouldn’t have run. He’d have wasted the last half-minute of his life.
“The work was done on a smooth surface. The body was dumped in the water as soon as his feet were removed. There are some abrasions on the epidermal layer on the back of the ankles, near the cut-line – the boy was dragged after his feet were taken off, dumped in the water while he was still alive.”
“How long until he bled to death?”
Marcus shook his head. “The anesthetic slowed his heart rate, ergo his pulse. He didn’t die of exsanguination. He drowned.”
Hemingway looked down at the boy; he looked absolutely horrifying. “How hard would it be to get a hundred-pound kid to a secluded spot by the river? An industrial lot, abandominium, grass yard? Go at sundown. Inject him. After he’s out, place him on a wooden door or old tabletop. Maybe a sheet of plywood. Saw his feet off. Four minutes goes fast. Unless you’re the one being sawed up.” She stared down at the body for a few beats of her heart as the flow chart slowly came together. “If he had a lair, a place where he had taken the boy, there’d be tether marks on his hands. He would have a table for this – a surgeon’s gurney or workbench. Something tailored to his needs.”
“Maybe it’s not part of his fantasy,’’ Phelps suggested. ‘‘Maybe he’s a sporting man. Maybe he gets his jollies from their helplessness – so helpless that they don’t need restraints.”
Hemingway nodded at that. “Maybe.”
Dr. Marcus eyed her over the edge of his glasses. “There are no signs of a struggle. No defensive wounds. No ripped fingernails. There are a few cuts and contusions, most notably the one on his eyebrow, but that is postmortem, probably thumped his head on a rock in the river.” He took his glasses off once again and went through the same ritual of cleaning his lenses with a static-free wipe, no doubt a nervous habit.