Rick Wayne's Blog, page 83

Are you sure this is legal?

03Oct

The hallway smelled like berry potpourri.

“Are you sure this is legal?” the young woman asked.

“Completely,” I said.

She didn’t seem convinced, but she kept walking. She had an afro and a nose ring and jeans too short for her long legs and too skinny for her wide hips. It was quiet. I could hear the stutter of the key as she stuck it into the lock. It clicked and the door swung wide and I stepped into the bright condo.

“Wait there,” I said, holding up a hand.

The ceiling was exposed, loft-style, which matched the bare brick walls—part of the original 1920s structure, the marketing material downstairs had told me proudly. I grabbed the latex gloves from the side pocket of my blazer and pulled them over my hands with a snap. There was a white Turkish sofa with throw pillows, a fancy rug on the hardwood, a TV stand with no TV. The small kitchen table in the nook had four matching chairs. The furnishings were nice but the space was snug, definitely smaller than I’d thought coming into the building from the street. But then, I’m sure that was intentional. High ceilings with equally high windows give you the impression of space and make you feel like you’re getting more for your money.

“Do the wasps cost extra?” I asked.

On the other side of the tall exterior windows was a three-foot-wide balcony. The open space was swarming with circling wasps.

“Gross.” The young woman, Shané, shivered in disgust. “We’re supposed to keep this door locked until the exterminator comes.” Her nose stud must have been new because she touched gingerly every few minutes, like maybe it itched and she didn’t want to scratch. “It’s just,” she went on from the door, “I could get into trouble.”

“I thought you said the resident moved out.”

She looked at the paper on the clipboard in her arms. “That’s what the computer says, but I don’t—”

“Then it’s fine.”

Police generally need a warrant to do a full search of someone’s residence, but we’re always free to inspect anything the general public can see—stuff on the lawn, for example, or whatever anyone is doing in full view of the living room window. But that’s only if the dwelling is occupied. If the resident “abandons” it—if you move out of your house, for example, and put it up for sale—then the police can enter and search without having to meet the criteria for a warrant on the theory that there’s no longer an expectation of privacy.

I opened the cupboards. There was a four-piece collection of plain white dishes and bowls. Looked cheap.

“This unit is pre-furnished? Or whatever it’s called?”

Shané checked her clipboard. “Ummm, yes.”

I was about to shut the cupboard when my eye caught movement. There was a wasp crawling on the lip of one of the ceramic bowls. I pinched it between two blue-latex fingers and squeezed. I dropped the tiny carcass into the garbage disposal and shut the cabinet. I looked around the furniture. At the Turkish sofa. At the ugly modern lamp next to it.

“So all this stuff belongs to the management company, not the lienholder or the resident.”

“Yes.”

“And those?” I pointed to a pair of cubical Uhaul moving boxes, stacked one on top of the other in a corner.

She shrugged. “Are you going to be much longer?”

“Dunno,” I said, walking to the boxes.

“It’s just, I’m not supposed to leave anyone in the units unattended.”

“Guess you’ll have to wait, then.”

I lifted the flaps on the first box. There was an embroidered pillow, three empty picture frames, and some medical texts, the kind a nurse or doctor would have.

“What is this about again?” she asked.

I smirked at the word ‘again.’ She actually hadn’t asked. She’d gotten flustered, as people do when I flash the badge. Now she seemed to be having second thoughts, like maybe she should’ve challenged me more downstairs. She couldn’t have been older than 19 or 20.

I opened the second box. There was a wine journal, a plastic horse figurine with a broken leg, a collection of body lotions, and a mess of other bathroom sundries.

I stood. I looked at the boxes in the corner relative to the rest of the space. “Were these left here in the corner by the resident or were they moved?”

“Umm. I don’t know.”

“Who would?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Anyone?” I asked insistently.

The girl flipped through the print out on the clipboard. “Maybe Kelsey. This was her unit.”

“Is she working today?”

Shané shook her head.

“Do you have a phone number for Kelsey?”

“Today is her day off.”

I arched my back and gave her my best unamused look, making it clear that wasn’t an answer to my question.

“I can see if we have it somewhere in the office,” she said.

“Great. And I’ll need a copy of the resident’s rental application.”

The wasps swarmed outside. One of them hit the glass. Then a second. Like they were mad at something.

“I hate those things,” she said.

They were definitely menacing, with fat black and yellow bands on their abdomens. I walked for a closer look, but as soon as I got within three steps of the balcony, they took off into the air like I was radioactive or something. Their impatient rustle faded, leaving the room awkwardly silent. Shané looked at me sideways, like I was from another planet.

“This unit is now a crime scene,” I explained as I walked back to the door. “A forensics team will be over today to tape and seal it and leave a notice that no one is to enter without police permission. That includes the exterminator and the lienholder and any on-site staff. Got it?”

She nodded. “What crime? Did something happen here?”

“I’ll need that application,” I urged.

I followed her back downstairs where I waited in the unobtrusive, pleasantly lit lobby while Shané tracked down her coworker. I watched a 30-something couple whisper to each other as they filled out paperwork at a little table by the windows.

Amber Massey, it seemed, had been interrupted as she was moving out of her apartment. The trunk of the blue sedan, the one Buddy found, was stuffed with boxes and clothes—not so much to make you think it was all of her belongings, but enough to say she was leaving in a hurry. The rest of the car was clean, no distinguishable fingerprints except the owner’s, as if whoever had taken her had made her drive and was careful not to touch anything.

First priority was to get Forensics through the condo. We needed to confirm identity. It wasn’t enough that Amber’s car was found several blocks form the body. We needed to confirm the woman in the morgue was her. I figured there was enough hair left in the bathroom to get a match.

“I talked to Kelsey.” Shané walked in from the back. She had a paper in her hand.

“The boxes were moved to the corner from the door,” I said preemptively.

I was pretty sure. I just needed confirmation.

“Yeah,” she said with enough audible exasperation to fill a high school. “She said the resident left them, but it’s not all that unusual,” she added. “People are gross. They leave all kinds of things and don’t care about whoever has to clean it up.”

“Does that include pictures and personal items?” I asked. “And do they usually go through the trouble of packing everything nicely into boxes for you?”

She shrugged.

“Is that the application?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t offer the paper to me, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed.

I snatched it.

It confirmed the last resident was Amber Massey. A doctor. Employer listed as Urban Outreach Center, the Bronx.

It was an awfully nice condo for someone who worked at a free clinic.

“And you’re sure Dr. Massey didn’t leave a forwarding address?”

“Who?” Shané asked, touching her nose again like she wanted to scratch it.

“Peroxide,” I said, “every few hours,” and walked out.

The condo building was situated at the corner of a fairly major thoroughfare and a residential side street. The main entrance was off the larger road, of course, but although there was a nice large foyer, there was no parking out front, which suggested that wasn’t how people went in and out with boxes. I walked around the corner and found a double-door entry and a second single door further down. The road was lined with a smattering of trees and a full row of parked cars. Following typical city etiquette, double-parking would be tolerated if you were loading or unloading.

I crossed the street and followed the sidewalk, scanning the roofs and doorways. Halfway down, past two multilevel blocks, I found what I needed jutting from an overhang in front of a public gymnasium. I went inside and smelled sweat and pool water. There was a bulletin board in the entryway and random printed signs hanging on the painted block walls announcing changes to old policies and various upcoming events. I passed a set of bathrooms and turned left and found the front desk. The kid behind it was on the phone and I waited.

In my mind, I kept seeing those long tapered cuts in Amber’s soft, waterlogged skin. Her face nibbled and distorted beyond recognition. The blood and bruising under her skin that had faded from red to brown to yellow. The distended blue veins that snaked through the discoloration. She looked completely inhuman.

When the call ended, I flashed my badge at the kid in a more or less identical repeat of my encounter with Shané. I asked for the manager and was shown to a cramped, window-lined office studded in plaques and trophies where a short, balding man with a firm grip asked what he could do for me. I said I needed the security footage from the 180-degree camera that hung over his side door.

“That’ll be at corporate,” he said. “We can’t access any of that here. For security reasons.”

“That’s fine.” I pulled one of my cards. “But we’ll need it delivered to this address ASAP.”

He took it and read it, as if to make sure it looked genuine.

“Do you know if it has a view of the condo across the street?” I asked.

He said he wasn’t sure and followed that with all the usual queries. What was this about? Had someone been killed? Was the neighborhood safe? I deflected with the usual responses. We’re just following up on a few lines of inquiry. No reason to be alarmed. Anything he could do would be helpful.

“Of course,” he said. He seemed a lot calmer when he realized I was more interested in the condo than his place of business. “I’ll make the call right now.”

I thanked him and took one of his cards from the corner of the desk and said I’d be in touch and showed myself out. I saw him reaching for the phone as I left. There was no telling what the corporate office would say. They didn’t have to comply, of course. They could hold out for a warrant. But in my experience, most business are happy to hand over anything and everything, even sensitive client information, as long as it didn’t affect anyone in their management chain.

Since I was already all the way up in White Plains, I thought I might make a pit stop at the home of Dr. C. L. More, PhD. It was another twenty or so minutes further north still. In fact, that it was such a long drive was half the reason I hadn’t stopped by. The other half was that I was busy. And the third half was that I just didn’t want to see the man.

I looked at my watch. It was just after 11 a.m. on Sunday, which I figured gave me a good shot of catching him. In my experience, most people with office jobs like his stay home and relax on Sunday mornings—if they’re not churchgoers. And after months of therapy, I was pretty sure the good doctor wasn’t vexed by his salvation.

I didn’t know his home address—and technically wasn’t supposed to—but he had a driver’s license, as people do, which meant it was very easy to find, especially since that very morning I had logged into the system to find the last known address of my victim. My fingers fumbled over some keys and oops, Dr. More’s came up as well.

It was a nice house, tucked between some trees at the end of a cul-de-sac. The neighborhood was older and had an apples-and-oranges mix of original and remodeled homes. I imagined the folks in the 1970s split-levels were working families that had lived there from the start, or bought off someone who had. Dotted between were the new-money folks, younger couples with important jobs, who, if they hadn’t razed the original dwellings, had at least remodeled them all to hell.

The doc’s was clearly part of the latter, although the work wasn’t recent. Early 2000s, I’d guess—when there was easy money for that kind of thing. It was already showing some age, but nothing like the pair of older homes on either side. Most of the yards didn’t have fences, even in the back. There was a time it was fashionable to be neighborly.

I parked on the street and walked up the drive, which was almost completely covered in fallen leaves. It was a proper autumn day—overcast and gloomy—and the leaves rustled about with the chill breeze. Winter seemed to be coming early.

I looked at the front windows. I didn’t see any lights. I walked up and rang the doorbell. I knocked. I rang the doorbell again. After a few minutes, I walked through the leaves to the shrubbery under the front windows. The Venetian blinds had been partially turned. It was impossible to see anything in the dark house without getting very close. I leaned across the prickly bushes in my inexpensive suit and squinted. I could feel the points poking my skin through the fabric.

It was definitely dark inside. No signs of movement. There were tribal masks on the living room wall. They covered it, in fact, spaced apart on a 5х3 grid. I could see a few singles hanging around as well: next to a bookcase, in the hall, above the phone stand. There had to be a couple dozen at least, all different. I didn’t see any lights or people.

“You’re not here to trim the hedges, are you? Dressed like that?”

One of the neighbors had walked into the doc’s yard. Mid-60s, I’d guess. He had the appearance and demeanor of a man approaching retirement. I saw a ladder and a rake and some cans of paint in his driveway. His house needed all three.

I brushed my hands together to get the dirt off and stepped forward through the downed leaves. “Do you know the people who live here?” I asked.

“Not well, but we watch out for each other around here.  Who are you?”

I pulled my wallet from my pocket and flashed the badge.

“What is that?” He squinted and took a step closer. “NYPD? Little out of your jurisdiction.”

“Any idea where they went?” I nodded to the leaves scattered across the driveway. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been coming or going much lately.”

“Vacation, I gathered. Can I ask what this is about?”

“Nothing much. I just wanted to talk to Dr. More about a few things.”

“Oh, Dr. More?” He seemed to relax. “He moved out a few months back. A young couple live there now. The Caldwells. Professionals, I think.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No kids,” he explained.

“I don’t suppose you know where I could find Dr. More?”

“I might still have his cell number . . .” He reached for his back pocket.

“It’s alright,” I said, turning for the car. “I have it.”

I glanced one more time at the dark house with the masks on the wall. Then I drove away.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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Who keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?

01Oct

I could tell it was serious by the tone of her voice.

I followed Lieutenant Miller to her office where Craig Hammond, my old partner, was waiting in one of the chairs. His block head had lost a little more hair than when we started running homicides together. But other than that he was basically the same.

“Craig.” I shut the door behind me.

“Hari,” he replied. “How’s it going?”

“I suspect you know.”

He nodded once.

Most of the guys I came up with had morals with square edges and were proud of it. Thing is, time on the job tends to beat on square edges. If you’re hollow, you’ll bend and turn crooked. Craig Hammond wasn’t like that. His time on the job hadn’t bent him, just blunted his edges. And rounded his waistline.

I stood behind the remaining open chair as Miller took her seat.

She came right out with it. “I’ve given the tape Detective Hammond. He’ll be running the case from here forward.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That was quick. I don’t think I’ve ever screwed up that fast.”

“It isn’t a matter of screwing up.”

“Can I ask why?”

Lt. Miller sat with excellent posture like she did when she wanted to assert herself without being threatening. “Yes. You can. But you won’t like it.”

I turned to Craig. He was expressionless. I sat down.

“We got the fingerprint report,” she said. “From the tape.”

‘We.’

Normally that stuff goes directly to the officer in charge—namely, me. But these went to my lieutenant first. I wondered what else was going on behind my back.

“And?”

“No matches. However, the return address—”

“Floral Park,” I said.

“Yes.” She nodded.

“It was Alexa Sacchi’s house,” Hammond added. “It’s where the family was living when she disappeared.”

I examined his face. He was serious. I turned back to Miller. She was, too.

Alexa Sacchi had gone missing at fifteen. It had been seven years since anyone had seen her.

I was scowling. “I worked that case originally.”

“So did Detective Hammond,” Miller said.

“And you trust him to do a better job of keeping a professional distance.”

Miller knew I was repeatedly checking out Alexa’s necklace from storage. I could guess how that looked—like I was holding onto the case, as happens to detectives sometimes, and had lost objectivity.

“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” she said. “But no. Craig and his new partner—” She looked to him for the name.

“Rigdon,” he answered.

“—bring the same prior experience but also a fresh pair of eyes. And since you have a full caseload—”

“I’m sure they do, too.”

“—and no partner . . .”

I nodded. “Ah. Right. So I’m in trouble because no one will work with me.”

“Please brief Detective Hammond on what you have so far. I imagine the two of you have a lot to talk about.”

She said it as if there was more to the comment. Hammond stood and nodded.

I looked between them for a moment. Miller didn’t mean about Alexa Sacchi. She didn’t mean the VHS tape or my being taken off the case. She meant Hammond and I, old partners, needed to talk about my personal situation—the one with Kent Cormack and Dr. More.

I stood and walked out. I wasn’t angry so much as just confused. Well, that’s not true. I was a little angry. But Craig and I knew each other well, and Miller giving the case to him was nothing but a hassle. It didn’t change anything but who did the paperwork. If anything, he got the worse end of the deal.

He followed me in his loping gait down the stairs.

“My treat,” he said.

We walked in silence down the street and around the corner to our favorite little kosher deli. It still had the original 1950s layout, with barely enough room to walk between the long counter, lined with fixed stools, and the narrow two-seaters affixed to the side wall. Each table sported the same cluster of bottles: old-style catsup, spotted mustard in a jar, and the best homemade relish in the city. It was the middle of the afternoon, so there was plenty of space. We sat at the back, near the bathrooms, and ordered coffee.

“Lemme see it.” He smiled at my mouth.

I curled my lip and let him see my missing tooth. I tongued it. First bicuspid, upstairs on the right side.

He chuckled. “Get clocked kickboxing?”

“Rugby,” I said.

“Rugby? But it was kickboxing before, right?”

“It’s called Muay Thai.”

The waitress set the coffees down, spilling a little of mine. I reached for a napkin.

Hammond blew on the hot liquid in his cup. “Ah, right. And what was it before that?” He took a gurgling sip.

I wiped the table and poured the cream. “CrossFit.”

“So what does rugby have that those other things don’t?”

“Who says there has to be anything?”

“You keep cutting your hair shorter.”

I fought the urge to touch it. “Whereas you . . .” I took a sip of my coffee and nodded to his waist.

He patted it. “Excellent detective work.”

It was good to see him. It had been awhile.

He could tell I wanted the pleasantries out of the way already. “Go easy on Miller, huh? She’s worried about you. We both are.”

“This about Miller?”

“No. It’s not.” He sat back in his chair as a new patron squeezed past to sit at the counter a few seats down. “But she’s doing you a favor. She made it clear the department’s fixing to hang you out over this thing, if only to cover their own ass. You’re gonna hafta fight. Hard.”

I nodded.

“So how bad is it?” he asked.

“She didn’t show you the file?”

He shook his head. “Just a verbal summary. Something about a history of epilepsy. Voices. Hallucinations?” He raised his eyebrows in query. “Miller said there was something about a wolf with three eyes or something like that?” He waited for an explanation.

“It was a long time ago.”

“She said the wolf thing was—”

“I meant the stuff from before. I was never diagnosed with epilepsy. I was never diagnosed with anything. I hit puberty and my body wigged out. I was in a hospital for awhile. I was thirteen.”

He shook his head and sat back. “And then?”

I shrugged. “It stopped. The docs said maybe it was something to do with hormones. Our preacher was sure it was the devil.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t. I don’t think about it. Not anymore than I think about pimples or school dress codes. That was almost thirty years ago, man. Men convicted of first-degree murder then are looking to get out soon.”

I could see him studying my face, trying to decide if he believed me.

“No,” I answered the unspoken question. “It never happened again. Not until last year.”

“So it just came from nowhere?”

“Dunno. Gettin’ old maybe.”

“Miller said the doc thinks it was stress.”

I made a face. “Yeah, I heard that. And yes, we were under stress. It was a gang house. Salvadorans. I was there to arrest a suspect I’d been after for two months. Guy was into Santeria in a big way. But it’s not like you and I haven’t been in half a dozen situations way worse than that.”

He nodded in understanding, looking down at his coffee. “The shotgun.”

Neither of us would ever forget it.

“The shit with Cormack was pretty routine,” I explained. “I was at the door. We were about to bust in. Next thing I know, I’m on the ground, convulsing. Cormack and the others went in.”

I paused. “And I wasn’t there to clear my side of the house. Cormack got shot. Face all messed up. Never gonna walk again.”

Craig let me go at my own pace. He just sat there and listened.

“When they found me, I was flat on my back. Did you hear that? Drool on my face.” I took another sip. “I didn’t even remember where I was at first. They said I was speaking on tongues.”

“Tongues?”

“That’s what they called it. Not baby noises. More like gibberish words. I said I was fine but they took me to the hospital. I saw Kent when they brought him in. They’d tried to stabilize him on the scene, I guess, so I beat him there. There were transfer stains all over from where the techs had gotten his blood on them and then brushed or touched something. With all those little smears on him, it looked like he’d been run through a wood chipper. He had a plastic breather on his face. Tubes coming out of every orifice. After a while, his wife showed—”

“That’s enough,” he stopped me.

I took another sip. The mug was thin and the coffee was already getting tepid.

He turned his cup in a circle. “You should’ve come to me.”

“And say what? That it’s my fault Kent Cormack won’t ever walk again? You’d just tell me I was full of shit.”

“Because you are.”

The waitress left the bill upside down on the table as she passed.

I shrugged. “See? I wasn’t wrong.”

“No, you’re not wrong, Har. It’s just funny how every time the shit hits it, the best course of action also happens to be the one where you deal with everything completely on your own.”

“Come on . . . I’m not cutting you out of anything here. It’s precisely because we’re friends that I didn’t want to get you involved. Nothing good is gonna come from any of this and you know it. What kind of friend am I if I let any bit of that rub off on you? You have a wife and two beautiful girls whereas I—” I stopped.

“Yeah.” He rubbed both his eyes with one hand. His thumb and forefingers made circles around his lids. “Jesus, same ol’ Hari.” He was almost laughing in frustration.

I took another sip and pushed the cup away. “Miller seems to think assigning the case to you closes me out. That true?”

“Fuck.” He gave me a sarcastic look. “Of course not. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to play this close to the chest. Now is not the time for you to be bucking orders up and down the hall.”

It also wasn’t the time to argue with him. “Fine. So how do you wanna play it?”

“I’ll hafta run point.” He jutted a finger toward me accusingly. “That’s not negotiable. But . . . I’ll tell you whatever I find. And I’ll use you when I can. Fair enough?”

I nodded. He knew I didn’t think so, but there was nothing for me to say right then.

I shifted in my seat so I could get up in the tight space without knocking anything over.

“I was actually thinking about that fucker with the shotgun the other day,” he said, looking at the oblong scar on the back of his hand.

“Oh?” I settled back into my chair.

“I never cared you were gay, you know.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“But lots of guys did.”

“Lots of guys still do.”

“Which makes it a pain in the ass for anyone who has to work with you, you know that.”

I opened my mouth and he raised a hand defensively and cut me off. “I know it’s not the same,” he said. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, it’s still shit and I had plenty of reasons for picking someone else. But then there was that guy . . . Christ. Who the hell keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?”

We chuckled.

“It’s not like he knew we were coming, right? Couple hours before, we didn’t even know we were gonna be there.” He shook his head. “But out he came. Pants down. Big ol’ beard. Dick still dripping pee. Sawed off in his hands.” His smile faded and he got serious. “If that had gone any other way, one of us woulda wound up like Kent Cormack.”

“Or worse,” I said.

“Or worse,” he repeated. “I keep thinking about what would’ve happened if the door to the bedroom had been closed. I wouldn’t have been able to dive outta the way. Same for the radiator on the wall. It’s not like that drywall woulda stopped anything. Not at that range.”

“You got burned, right?”

He nodded. “There was that chime of metal on metal, and a crack and jet of steam hit my hand. Third degree burn. Boiled in my own skin. And then it was over. Just like that. Seconds.” He snapped his fingers.

We didn’t say anything for a minute.

He sighed and took a drink. “I stepped to the door with my sidearm and peered around and you were already cuffing the fucker and reading him his rights.”

“Why do you think I let you go first?” I joked.

He leaned forward. “You wanna know a little secret?”

I scowled.

“I almost shat myself.”

“What?”

He nodded with a chuckle. “It’s true. That whole time we were there, I had a turd hanging halfway outta my ass. I had to hold that damned thing for three hours. I couldn’t use the bathroom in the apartment. It was a crime scene. And I knew if I ran off somewhere, you and the other guys would put two and two together. So the whole time we processed everything and the photographers took pictures and we took the suspects downtown and debriefed the captain, I was squishing a little turtle head between my cheeks.”

Now it was my turn to let him go at his pace.

“From then on, as far as I was concerned those fuckers could say whatever they wanted. I wanted you watching my back. Two days later I made the request. And I never regretted it, Har. Never.”

“Why do I feel there’s a ‘but’ coming?”

“But you’re stubborn as shit. And selfish.”

“Selfish?”

“Yes. Selfish. When did you decide people were a strange conundrum you can’t be bothered to figure out? You spend all your time catching up on . . . on—” he struggled to find the words. “Talismans and voodoo and shit. And don’t tell me that isn’t the pendant from the Sacchi case.” He motioned to the little silver amulet dangling from my wrist.

I moved it under the table. “How does that make me selfish?”

“Look.” He backed off. “I don’t wanna fight. Okay? All I’m saying is, don’t piss away your career for Kent fucking Cormack.” He squinted in disgust. “It was his case and his raid. He should’ve had twice as many guys covering that house and you know it. And you know why he didn’t, too. As far as a lot of us are concerned, that corrupt piece of shit got exactly what he deserved.”

“Maybe,” I said, getting up from the booth. I took out my wallet and laid a ten on the table. “But his wife and kids didn’t.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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The Ridiculousness of Forever: on immortal characters

Bernard Williams, one of my favorite philosophers, is not well known outside philosophical circles. Inside them, he’s mostly known as an ethicist and moral philosopher, although properly speaking he was not a philosopher at all but a classicist, which is different. He didn’t espouse an ethical theory and in fact was skeptical one was possible — which of course didn’t stop him from looking.

I was introduced to him in college. He was ‘Against’ in a colloquium piece I was assigned called “Utilitarianism: For and Against,” which is what cured me of that affliction. His major contribution to ethical theory was the poking of very large holes in the popular theories of others (Kant, G.E. Moore, John Rawls, etc.) in a work entitled “Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy,” which is not a book I would recommend unless you get a hard-on for moral philosophy like I do.

Toward the end of his life (and just after), his wife organized his many published papers thematically and published them in a series of books, most of which are not for the beginner. Since he was a first-rate intellect, his writing was dense and many of his paragraphs bear re- and re-re-reading (sometimes out of necessity, sometimes for want of an equally challenging editor).

In one of those papers, he dissects the idea of living forever. He meant it in the religious sense, but the line of thought applies to an advanced technological future as well. For reasons stated above, there is no pithy three-sentence summary of the argument, but as a point of reference, he points out that even if there were an infinite number of things to do, if one lived forever, one would still do all of them an infinite number of times — very much like Groundhog Day on the scale of the universe. At some point, existence itself would become a burden, and you would just want out!

The Roman orator Cicero made the converse point in a famous essay translated “On Old Age.” He likened life to a race, and in having run his, he said, he had no interest in going back and starting over. Whatever triumphs and missteps befell him, the race was his and his alone, and he cherished his life as you might cherish a three-legged cat or a slow child — warts and all.

If one lived forever, that would not be the case. It’s not just that the race would never end, which sounds exhausting; it’s that you would bear no intimate relation to your finite past since it would be ever dwarfed by the wide-open spaces of your infinite future. Putting it in terms of land — which is valuable because, as the saying goes, “they’re not making any more” — value requires a fixed supply. Where land is infinite, any random parcel becomes near-valueless because at every point of scarcity, you have merely to take a step and there’s another parcel and another parcel and another parcel.

Because our life is finite, we have the natural impulse to curate it. An immortal would likely have no such burden. Their life is a museum of endless halls. At some point, it would hardly be worth it even to keep up with the dusting, let alone to arrange and rearrange the displays! They would become like sociopaths, in fact. Other people would be like ants — transient things always scurrying about chasing after what never seems to matter.

We see similar behavior already in trust fund kids. Children of great wealth are often listless and shallow for there is hardly any reason for them to struggle and no reason at all to sacrifice. There is no hard-won accomplishment that will leave them better off than simply doing nothing, so there is no reason to, for example, suffer an insufferable job while putting a family member through school and so to feel that great sense of pride when, the deed being done, you watch them walk the aisle at graduation.

This is why the narrator of the fifth course of my occult mystery is trying at the beginning to excise some painful memories. It’s as if they have no value. She’s been “cursed” with her heart’s desire, which is to be young and beautiful forever, and since experience for her is infinite, the pain of the past is only bitter, never bittersweet, and lessons that you or I might cram efficiently into a lifetime for her fill the space of centuries.

CONDEMNED

28Sep

The runoff reservoir was about the size of a large pond. There was no doubt it was man-made. Its sides sloped at a consistent angle and three of its lengths were ruler-straight. The last curved evenly around the border of the city park. Most of the water from the storm had faded, leaving only a marshy carpet of weeds spotted in puddles, which reflected the sun like mirrors. It was clear and quite a bit cooler than it had been yet that season, which necessitated full-length yoga pants under my workout shorts.

To be clear, I’m not a big yoga-pant kinda girl.

I turned from the path and stopped my run at the little neighborhood park. I wiped the sweat from my brow and took a drink from the bottle strapped to my arm. There was a jungle gym and a swing set in a moist sand pit next to the small open lawn. The whole place was surrounded in trees, both along the street and the reservoir. The latter was also lined by a tall fence. Metal trash cans were spaced along the sidewalk by the road. The restrooms were near the street corner. A pair of reflective orange caution barrels flanked the door to the men’s room. A stretch of yellow tape had been wrapped back and forth between them, indicating it was out of order, but the tape sagged so badly I suspected it had been that way for some time. Deep in the bowels of the city, I was sure, a work order was waiting to be taken seriously.

I had instructions, and I carried what I needed in a small jogging pack strapped tightly to my back. I took another drink and walked to the men’s room. I stepped over the sagging tape and went inside. The smell of stale urine was so stout you could almost taste it. I took off my pack and took out the box of sidewalk chalk. It was full of two-inch-thick cylinders of soft pastels.

“Find a leftover,” he had told me, “a hole or nook where people could go but don’t for one reason or another.”

“Such as?” I had asked.

“An empty barrel or a derelict house or the gap in the earth left by the roots of a fallen tree. Or a burrow, but not any inhabited by an animal.”

“How can I tell that?”

He gave me a look. “Put your hand in and feel!”

“Right. Then what?”

“Draw a conjuring circle on the ground. Make it big enough to stand in comfortably but not more. Find north-northeast and mark it with a tick.”

“North-northeast?”

“Yes. The west wind is a real dick. That’s how you say it, right? If he doesn’t like what you’re doing, he’s liable to spit it back in your face. The east wind is lazy, but not so much that you can be careless. Turn just a bit north, but not more north than east.” He held up a finger. “Otherwise the spirits will think you’re addressing the pole star.”

I scowled.

“The heavens. Remember, when they’re not pissed off and blaming the living for something, they’re looking for any reason to ignore us. You have to be insistent, unavoidable, yet still polite enough that they might actually help.”

“Sounds like the DMV.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have been.”

I drew a circle in blue pastel on the dirty floor of the men’s room. I traced it three times just to be sure. I stood inside and took out my phone and found north-northeast and marked it with a tick.

Once inside, he had said, I was to draw symbol. I watched as he drew on the back of the nudie poster. It was the only sizable piece of paper we could find.

He was a good teacher—or experienced, I guess. He made the symbol three times to make sure I could see the ideal shape through the variance of any single attempt. Then he made me copy it three times as well. It was sort of like a lazy eight—or a tilted infinity sign, I guess—with a hook off the side and a knife in the back.

I drew it in chalk on the ground. Then I set the chalk aside and removed the tube of navy blue lipstick from my bag. I opened the cap and twisted and held it in the air.

“Are you sure this will work?” I had asked him.

“Yes, yes. It won’t work for anyone. But it should for you.”

“Why me?”

“Because not anyone can pull a boto.” He meant the carrion ghoul. “However you did, that is how you will do this.”

I looked at the dark blue stick poking up from the plastic case. In the low light, it looked almost black.

I don’t wear a lot of makeup, but I do wear some. For whatever reason, nature gave me good skin and what few blemishes I have never seemed worth much effort. I do like painting my face for special occasions, though. Always makes it seem that much more special. Point being, I’m not exactly a stranger to lipstick. However, I can honestly say I had never applied it to my forehead before.

I drew a solid line straight over my eyebrows. I felt ridiculous.

“Why the forehead?” I had asked.

“You need to make a barrier,” he explained, “like drawing a shade between the world of men and the world of the spirit, which hovers just above our own. Calm your heart. Close your eyes if necessary. That’s usually helpful at first. And listen.”

“For?” I asked.

“You will know.”

I closed my eyes. I took two deep breaths, letting each out slowly through my nose. I let several minutes pass.

“So . . .” I said to the brown-stained porcelain urinals. “Anyyyyyy . . . spirits?”

I waited a moment. I felt like I was sixteen again, sitting in the car on my first date with Sheri McQueen having no idea what to say.

“Any spirits in here?” I repeated. “Any spirits at all?”

I turned a little just to make sure I was facing the right way.

“Anyone feel like talking?” I waited.

Then I added softly “Or am I just talking to myself?”

After five minutes, I’d had enough and moved on to Plan B. I gathered my possessions and walked to the jogging path near the runoff reservoir. I found a stretch of pavement relatively free of weeds, just out of the way so other runners could pass unhindered. I drew another chalk circle. I found north-northeast. I closed my eyes and quieted my heart, then my mind.

I took the loaf of bread from my bag and opened it and threw a slice on the ground. Almost immediately, a squirrel darted across the path and snagged it without stopping. He was up the chain link fence and into the hanging branches before I could even speak.

“Asshole!”

He—or she, I guess—chattered at me from the trees, then proceeded to nibble in frantic tiny bites right in front of me.

I scowled and decided to take a new approach. I started squeezing and crushing the bread in the bag. Then I reached in and crumbled it between my fingers, making grainy pieces that wouldn’t present such an immediate prize. I started tossing the bits on the ground.

It took a few minutes for the first bird to appear, something small I didn’t recognize. But the first few pigeons came shortly thereafter. They scattered when a pair of 20-something joggers went trundling by. The girls both turned their heads to me, looking at the chalk circle and the line of navy lipstick on my forehead. I just waved like it was no big deal.

The pigeons returned almost immediately, and in a few minutes, I had pigeons all around. They chased away the smaller birds and occasionally squabbled with each other, although none of them would get closer than a few inches—except to dart forward for a stray crumb.

“So,” I said awkwardly, “any of you guys see anything weird last week?”

I threw more bread. Pigeons hunted and pecked and squabbled and didn’t seem to care about me one way or another.

I tossed more crumbs.

“A woman was killed,” I went on. “Someone dumped her body in the channel somewhere around here. Ring any bells?”

I tossed more.

“This is so fucking stupid. You’re just fucking birds.”

One of the pigeons lifted his head then and looked right at me. He had the usual blue-gray feathers and waddling gait and looked like a typical specimen of the species. If there was anything different about it him, it was the one tiny white under-feather at the back of his head, to one side, that curled up like a cowlick, or maybe the bill of a sideways ball cap.

Pigeon’s eyes are so big and they move their heads in such rapid jerks that they look constantly surprised to me. I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for more bread or if there was something else.

Then he flew off.

When he landed again on the back of a park bench and turned to me, waiting, I dumped the rest of my bread on the ground, grabbed my bag, and followed. He flew to a branch, then to the roof of the men’s room, over the orange barrels, then to a power line that ran along the street. On and on it went like that. I started jogging after him, one block, then two, when he led me off the path that followed the channel and into an older residential neighborhood. The houses were all single-level, with wood siding and narrow front porches barely a step above the grass. I figured it dated to just after the second world war. The yards were small and lined with half-height chain link fences, leaving residents closer to their neighbors than has been popular in a long time. And none of the lines were buried. A tangle of black cords for phone, cable, and power ran between log poles and the roofs of the houses, sometimes even between them.

Bits of gravel crunched under my feet as I slowed to a walk and looked for my tiny guide, who had moved out of sight. The road had no curb and ended wherever the weeds decided to stop growing. It was the kind of street that always had that one spot that flooded with every rain and made it so you had to go home the back way, or park at the corner and walk. At the end of it was a short open stretch with no dwellings, studded with road signs, like a little forest, where the residential street intersected the much more modern major road, complete with curbs and sidewalks and drainage sewers. A few cars passed in a cluster, as if a nearby light had just changed.

I stopped and turned around. All in all, it was unassuming and quiet.

The pigeon landed on a car to my left, a blue four-door American sedan. At least eight years old. Nothing special. It was parked in a perfect car-sized space between a lean-to shed and a tall slat fence. Grass grew up around it, which is probably what threw off the uniformed officers who did the canvas. It was just old enough to pass for a junker—that is, until you got close and saw where the tires were smashing some of the grass underneath, still green, meaning the vehicle had been driven over it recently.

The fence ran along the car and then in front of it, fencing it off from everything but the shed and making it unclear which of the nearby dwellings it belonged to. I walked to the nearest house and opened the screen door and knocked. A round African-American woman with dyed red hair answered and I showed her my badge. She looked at my forehead and asked if I’d had a problem with my lipstick. She told me she didn’t recognize the car but that the lean-to belonged to the house directly across the street.

Fortunately—or not, depending on your point of view—that house was derelict. There was a CONDEMNED notice glued to the door. I could see why, too. The front porch sagged to the dirt at the far side. I thumbed the corners of the paper, which curled from exposure to wet weather. There was no way the dwelling had been occupied since the car had been driven, at least not legally. Which was smart—no one to complain about the illegally parked car. No cameras either, not in that neighborhood. I imagine they thought it would be months before anyone noticed. I would’ve bet a hundred bucks right then that the house was the crime scene. But the windows were boarded and I couldn’t see inside. There was some colorful graffiti on it, though, which told me what I could go do with myself. And that Rayna was a ‘thot.’ As written, I wasn’t sure it was an insult.

But there was also a symbol, kind of a hook and cross not terribly dissimilar to the one I’d just made in chalk. The thing about graffiti is that it’s made to be cryptic. The really colorful stuff has such highly stylized letters that it’s difficult to read. Gang signs are explicitly not meant for the rest of us, but you better believe they have meaning. Point is, people passing on the street wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual about marks like that on the house.

I walked around to the back and saw more marks and symbols, and more colorful street slang. All off it had been done in the same color and in the same hand, as if made at the same time.

I nudged the back door hard with my shoulder but it didn’t move. I wasn’t about to start grabbing handles or jiggling windows until the forensics guys had a chance to do their thing. The best way to ruin a case was to get impatient and start trampling evidence—or contaminating it.

I walked back across the street, where the pigeon was waiting on the fence by the car, like it wanted a tip or something.

“Thanks,” I whispered as I bent to check the date on the registration sticker on the license plate.

“Yer welcome.”

I turned my face up to the pigeon. He bent his head sideways, like pigeons do, so we were looking at each other evenly. It seemed like he was clinging sideways to a vertical fence.

I stood. I looked around.

No one.

I turned back to the pigeon. “What’d you say?”

He jerked his head the other way.

“You deaf’r sumpn?”

I stiffened straight as the pigeon plucked at a wing feather a couple times and then shook it out.

“Say that again,” I demanded.

“I-guess-that-answers-that-question,” he said very slowly and with more than a little sarcasm.

I don’t know which got me more: that I was talking to a pigeon or that he had such a thick accent. I recognized it. Or thought I did.

“Long ways from home?” I asked.

“Lookit that. A regular Einstein.”

“South Shore?”

“Excuse you. Do I look like a bird brain?” He jerked his head the other way.

“Seriously?”

“Oh-ho-ho, lady’s got a lip! I’m from Philly, ya dumb broad. City of Brudderly Love, which you know nuddin about.”

His wings flapped hard and he flew away.

I watched him go.

“Huh . . .”

I stepped back and looked at the car. I took out my phone and called in the plate number to dispatch. I had to wait a minute, but it was worth it. The response couldn’t have been more perfect.

Amber Massey, MD. Caucasian. Age 32.

Right gender, right ethnicity, right age. No one had reported her missing. I’d already checked missing person reports for a hundred miles in any direction. But then, no wedding ring was found on the body. I’d check marriage records when I got back to the office, just to be sure, but fifty bucks said she was single and lived alone. Family, if any, were probably not local, so not hearing from her for five or six days wouldn’t necessarily raise any alarms.

I walked around the vehicle and looked in all the windows—I didn’t dare touch anything—but there wasn’t much to see.

I was bent over a the driver’s side, peering through the glass, when I heard the flap of wings and the sound of small claws scraping on the hood.

I stood.

“Jimmies,” he said, right near my face.

“Excuse me?”

“Jimmies,” he repeated, head jerking the other way. “That’s what they like. Sugar. Bright colors. Easy to peck, know what I mean? It’s like pigeon crack or sumpn.” He paced back and forth in two-step increments. “You want the good stuff, don’t bring bread.”

“Jimmies,” I said.

“Right. Those bastages’ll tell you aaaaaanything you wanna know. Belieb me.”

“What are Jimmies?”

His head jerked to one side, paused, and then back to the other. “You sure yer okay, lady? You doen need a doctor or sumpn?”

“I’m fine.”

“You know . . . you got lipstick on yer head.”

“What are Jimmies?” I repeated tersely.

“Little colored jawns. Go all over ice cream. Sometimes they put em on cookies. For the kids.”

“You mean sprinkles?”

“Yeah, Jimmies. I’d say ice cream was good too, but some of us are lactose intolerant.” He jerked his head back the other way. “It’s a curse or sumpn.”

“Um. Thanks.”

“Doen mention it.”

Then he flew away again.

“HEY!” I called.

He settled on an overhead telephone line and shook out his wing feathers again.

“Wat?”

“You got a name?”

“Whatdya mean?”

“A name. Something people—pigeons, whatever—call you.”

He jerked his head again. Then back.

“Is this a trick question?” He pronounced the words deliberately, as if he wasn’t so sure I actually understood language.

I thought for a moment. “No.”

He strutted a few steps to the side. “Buddy,” he said. “Or Pal, I guess.”

“Buddy,” I repeated. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

[image error]

 

The reason we burn witches

27Sep

I looked both ways, up and down the narrow dirt gap between the brick building and the high fence behind me. Bits of litter were strewn about, trapped by the tufts of grass that grew from cracks and corners. I checked the roofs and the windows all around—those that weren’t boarded anyway—before setting the plastic grocery bags on the ground and leaning over the slant basement doors. I pulled the wobbly handles and the wood dropped paint flecks like dandruff. The hinges creaked loudly, which for me was a feature rather than a bug. It made sneaking up on whoever was inside very difficult.

I picked up the groceries and walked down the slat steps, my boots crunching tiny pieces of 50-year-old paint. I stopped at the bottom and listened carefully.

Nothing.

In front of me was an old boiler room whose walls at the front and sides didn’t quite make it to the ceiling for some reason. To my left and around to the back was a storage space. The two-story building had once been some kind of church assembly. The church itself stood across the weed-filled lot and was now sealed, having served as a crack house of some renown before recently becoming the scene of a double homicide. Police warnings were plastered all over it. Not that it would keep the junkies out forever—only as long as they felt we were still likely to show up. My visits, if noticed, wouldn’t appear terribly out of place—for a while anyway.

I was making my way to the back when I heard his voice.

“How much longer do I have to stay locked in here?”

I walked around the corner. An old bike with stripped tires and one badly bent wheel lay on its side to my right. In front of me, a sturdy crosshatched metal fence, like a grate, ran from floor to ceiling, separating me from the rest of the space. There was a single gate in the middle, painted the same sea green as the rest of the metal. The room had two thin windows on the left wall, near the ceiling, not more than five or six inches high. Sunlight entered as a pair of angled shafts that struck the opposite wall, just above the homemade wooden workbench that filled it’s length. There was a hutch at the near end and water damage at the back. There were rags piled underneath it, next to a few boxes.

Directly under the windows was a single fold-out cot with a striped mattress, a few old blankets, and one new one, which covered the sole occupant, an African man near 60. In the middle of the room, a brown card table stood defiantly on three fold-down legs next to a pair of matching chairs, one of which had been overturned. The top of the table was nearly covered in wrappers, empty food bags, a couple dirty glasses, and a bunch of crumpled cigarette packs. There was a little ceramic ashtray as well, piled high. On the side it said Greetings from the Grand Canyon.

I took the carton of cigarettes I’d bought out of its bag and pressed it against the grate.

“Is that supposed to make me want to let you in?” the man said without getting up.

He had a heavy African accent that I couldn’t otherwise place and wore a pair of woman’s jeans that were too big for his narrow frame, held by a woven belt, into which had been tucked a pale yellow Statue of Liberty T-shirt. The cuffs of his jeans were rolled over white tube socks. His beard was grizzled, and he had a $5 Casio watch on his wrist. Covering his head was the same white kufi cap he’d been wearing when we first met.

All other things being equal, his encounter with the ghoul hadn’t left him any worse for wear—at least not physically.

“You want me to just leave it out here?” I asked, lifting the bags.

I caught of whiff of human waste then. It wasn’t strong, but it was definitely there. Like the smell that wafted from the bathroom when I was a kid, after my dad was done with it. I resisted the urge to cover my nose.

He rose from the bed and slipped his socked feet into a pair of black Adidas sandals and shuffled across the concrete to unlock the gate. I glanced at the tall white bucket near the back wall. There was a plastic toilet seat fitted on top with a tight rubber seal locking it over the lip of the bucket.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, opening the door with a clatter. “How much longer do I have to stay in here? Like a prisoner.”

I pointed to the latch on the inside of the door, opposite the keyhole on the outside. Anyone with fingers small enough to fit through the grate wouldn’t have fingers long enough to reach the latch. But then, it wasn’t built to be a vault. It was a storage room of some kind. The lock was only meant to discourage the casual thief.

“You’re not a prisoner,” I said. “If you don’t like it here, you’re welcome to take your chances on the street. I doubt she’s going to waste too much energy trying to find you, not if you’re keeping yourself scarce. From her point of view, that’s a win. But if you’re out wandering around—”

“Yes, yes.” He waved me off. “So you said. But here I am living in my own filth.” He motioned to the bucket. “I am not an animal.”

Since the bucket was white and had minimal writing, it was very slightly translucent, and I could see where the bottom was slightly darker, indicating it was roughly half full. Several bare rolls of toilet paper lay on the ground next to it. They had been picked clean of every last pink scrap.

“He’s supposed to come empty that every day,” I said, lifting a fresh package of rolls from the bag and tossing them to him.

“It has been five days,” he said, catching it. “That man scratches his arms and smells of his own urine. He thinks I am as unclean as he, that it means nothing for me to live like this.”

“Yeah, that’s Benny. He’s a junkie. He owes me. Big time. I’ll talk to him about the toilet.”

My guest waved dismissively to the stack of old paperbacks near the gate. Several were printed yellow at the sides of the pages. I had found them upstairs. All late 70s to early 80s.

“I don’t read English well, you know. What I can make out, it’s no sense. Silly stories about fairies and magic.” He huffed. “They don’t get anything right! I’d rather read nonsense.”

He set the package of toilet paper by the bucket. Then he shuffled back to the table.

“Fine. I’ll bring you some Carroll, then.”

“I thought this was supposed to be the land of opportunity,” he said with an exasperated chuckle, as if that were the furthest possible thing from the truth.

“Doesn’t opportunity usually entail risk?”

“Perhaps. But not at a fool’s wages. There’s a reason we burn witches in my country.”

“Centuries of sexism?” I asked.

I set my phone on the table, near the ashtray, and motioned to the image on the screen. “What can you tell me about that?”

He sat down and leaned over it as he ripped open the carton of cigarettes. I had zoomed in on the underside of the tongue, which made the picture slightly blurry. He squinted and reached a finger hesitantly toward the screen.

“Pinch two fingers on the screen to zoom out,” I explained.

He looked up at me, unamused. “We do have smart phones in my country. We’re not all chauvinist barbarians.”

He zoomed out and then back in again, sliding the picture up and down. “I’m not familiar with the sigil, but see how the interlocking pattern is all part of the same line? No ends. I would guess it’s a binding.”

He pulled out a pack and tossed the carton on the table. He ripped the plastic immediately.

“You mean like to prevent her from revealing something?”

He nodded and handed my phone back. “It was not uncommon in the old days to give similar bindings to young people. To prevent them from speaking ill of their ancestors and so inviting their wrath. That is where lip piercings originated.”

“Well, that’s certainly one way to do it.”

He had removed the 30-year-old nudie poster from the wall and left it folded neatly on the workbench. However, he’d left the 1988 Beaches of the World Calendar hanging. September was Hatteras.

He pulled a cig from the pack. “There are places where people honor their elders, where inviting them into the home in old age is an honor reserved for the first born.”

“My parents more or less disowned me when I was 17, so you’re not gonna get a lot of sympathy from me.”

“I see,” he said, glancing over me once as if just realizing I was gay. “In the days when everyone lived and died in the same place, generation after generation, it was easy for the old spirits to find their distant progeny. They merely had to lift their heads from the grave.” He lit the cig and took a draw. “Appeasing them was vital to the health of community. The dead could intervene, if necessary, on behalf of the community. There was a community. Versus this place.” He waved out the windows. “Where you lock your old people away in cages to die alone and unmourned.”

He started coughing and I lifted the rest of the grocery bags from the floor and set them on the homemade workbench.

“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’ll make sure Benny cleans that thing more often. Hopefully you won’t have to be here too much longer.”

He nodded resolutely and I opened the gate, which shuddered in its rusty hinges every time I swung it.

“We could ask the dead woman,” he said, shaking the cigarette wedged between his fingers.

He must have guessed the picture was a homicide. Or perhaps there was something in Bobbi Jo’s mouth that made it clear she was dead—to someone like him, anyway.

“We could ask what happened to her, who killed her, if not for the binding on her tongue. I would need a bit of her flesh or hair, which means the effect would follow. A potent medium could do it, regardless. But I’m afraid I don’t know many people here, and no one with that kind of ability.”

I stood with the open gate in my hand and waited for him. He started coughing again and set his cig on the lip of the ashtray. He got up from the table and shuffled to the bench. His face suggested he was thinking and might have more to say. He opened a white plastic grocery bag and found the anti-mucus tablets I’d been giving him, and a bottle of water, and he used the one to swallow the other.

He cleared his throat and sat back down, picking up his cigarette immediately and taking a drag.

“You can’t figure out who she is, can you?” he asked with a single cough. “That’s why you came here. Grasping for hay.”

“Straws,” I corrected.

“I thought they were the same.”

“Not straw like hay. Straws like what you drink Coke with.”

He made a sour face. “English . . .” he scoffed.

I waited for him to snuff the cig and light another. I leaned against the metal door frame.

“But . . .” He raised a finger. “Others would not share her binding.”

“Others?”

“Witnesses,” he explained.

I shook my head. “We canvassed the whole area. No one saw anything. Her body went into a drainage channel during a big storm, probably at night. We figure the place was pretty deserted.”

“Of people, perhaps. But people are not the only souls in a city. There are animals. Spirits.” He turned to me. “Have you asked any of them?”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

[image error]

Upon yellow-stained parchment the words

The old ones are patient, and not so easily fooled.

. . . kept his wits, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon would reign yet today as lord of the earth. When the kingdom of Solomon, wisest of rulers, was divided by his heirs, Nebuchadnezzar conquered the lands of the Hebrews, along with many others, and took their male youths hostage, both high-born and . . . .   . . . were marched east and sent to study the Chaldean sciences—what the Hebrews called ‘the black arts’—in the hopes that a whole generation would be converted to the Babylonian faith only to return to the lands of their ancestors, marry, multiply, and so erase without bloodshed the famously fanatical cult of Yahweh. For Nebuchadnezzar desired a Babylon eternal.

It was one of these sons of Abraham, a boy named Daniel . . .   . . . excelled at his studies above . . .   . . . and was allowed to interpret the king’s dreams, an honor normally reserved for the High Priest of the Temple of Marduk. But so impressed was Nebuchadnezzar that he dismissed his minsters’ objections and kept the young man’s counsel day and night, often walking with him through the hanging gardens he had built to please his queen . . . had barely noticed them.

I’m not sure Nebuchadnezzar liked what he heard. For Daniel referred to the king as ‘the destroyer of nations’ and said Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, his great legacy, would crumble and fall and be supplanted by mightier empires still, until at last a pinnacle was reached, a precipice from which the world itself would tumble.

The Book of Daniel is full . . . some as obtuse as a pale mirror, and it’s only with . . . You can believe Daniel was a charlatan, or you can believe that his vagary was intentional, that he had witnessed something so terrible, so frightening, he dared not say it outright . For in truth, Nebuchadnezzar was vexed by visions beyond reason . . . where he prayed to his gods first, as all men do. He prayed to the sky god Marduk, who had slain the many-headed chaos dragon and so forged civilization. He prayed to Enki and Ishtar and Enlil. But the gods and goddesses of Babylon were as silent as their stone-walled temples, as still as their marble-faced statuary, and the king despaired.

In a fit, Nebuchadnezzar demanded his priests call upon different gods, older gods whose names had passed from memory but whose crypts could still be found deep under the twice-ancient cities of Ur and Uruk, now part of . . .

And so seals were broken and hymns were sung and sacrifices were made, and with them, a portal was forged, and through it, the old gods were called. After a gap of thirteen days, they answered, and a deal was struck. The Nameless Ones, the ancient lords of the earth, promised the king that his beloved Babylon would never die. He had only to record a tome, which would be whispered to him, one chapter at a time, over a period of six days and six hours and six minutes—a gift to all humankind from the lords of night.

The king agreed and set . . .   . . . but he was not a fool. He knew that which was whispered to him was nothing less than a return to ancient bondage, the architecture of eternal night. So he locked himself in his chambers for many weeks, there to trick the tricksters. He honored his word to the letter but recorded the tome in a language that had never been spoken: its alphabet, his own devising; its grammar, allegory; its syntax, so recursive and arcane that he had hope it could never be deciphered. And when finally he emerged, shrunken and disheveled, to test his creation before the wise men of his court, there were none who could decipher it, not even the brilliant Daniel, and Nebuchadnezzar retired, believing he had preserved . . .

But even a king is human. He couldn’t easily forget the murmurings in the dark, nor the strange and abominable recipes he had transcribed into a stillborn tongue. In the end, history tells us that King Nebuchadnezzar went mad and took his own life. There is no mention, by Daniel or any others, of the book he had composed while locked in his bedchambers, feverishly scratching until his reed split and his fingers cracked and his own blood flowed as ink. But I’m certain they knew of its dark purpose. I’m certain it was why Daniel had called the king ‘the destroyer of nations.’ I’m certain it was why he filled his eponymous chronicle with cryptic warnings about the end of days. For he dared not speak the truth. He dared not reveal to the world that such a book existed. For in the king’s madness, it had disappeared.

. . .

And as for Babylon, she is the name long given to decadence, which rules everywhere.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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Religion is Hitler

There’s a certain class of intellectual that likes to compare anything they don’t like to a religion. But rather than come out and say it, it’s usually posed as a clickbait question — Is feminism a religion? Is the NRA a religion? — so as to maintain the illusion that this is serious intellectual debate and not mere mudslinging.**

Religion, as an ancient and diverse human institution, is incredibly complex. It’s really not hard to find superficial similarities between it and just about any other human activity. A homeowner’s association is a lot like a church, for example: a group of geographically proximate families of similar race, education, and social status form a dues-bound organization that meets regularly to celebrate and argue existential issues relevant to the local community and to make rules that bind behavior.

Is your HOA a church? Story at 11:00.

These kinds of comparisons are not just the junk food of intellectual criticism, they’re actually a punch below the belt because they pretend to be serious where the only real point is to avoid discussion by staining the other point of view as unworthy of it. Because religion is one of the classic blunders, as everybody knows, the lowest form of human thought, and if one believes in a deity, one does so unquestioningly and completely without reflection. (Disclosure: I am not religious.)

Never mind that some of the greatest minds in history — giants of science, art, and statecraft — were devout. The midgets who stand on their shoulders babbling like monkeys are certain they know better, and if they can paint “Darwinism” (or Apple or FOX News or whatever) as a religion, then they can defame it as junk, uncritical, the worst kind of gobblety mumbo-jumbo, without ever having to engage it on the issues, all while appearing critical and reflective — the rhetorical equivalent of faking an injury to draw a red card.

In that way, it’s no different than the tired practice of trotting out Hitler, who’s found eternal life on the internet as everyone’s favorite foil. Both are a good sign that genuine creative thought has already left the building.

 

**see Betteridge’s law of headlines

The life of the flesh

26Sep

The sign on the office door said:

MARTIN CHASE, M.S., J.D.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSOCIATE

I could hear the secretary calling security at the other end of the stately hall. I opened the door and Fred looked up at me, surprised. He’d gained a little weight. He was still thin, but he wasn’t quite as gym-rat-gaunt as he used to be.

“Hi, Fred.”

He didn’t like that name. He said it made him sound like a cartoon caveman.

“How’s the life of the flesh?”

He was just about buried in files. They were stuffed into five stacks of accordion folders and covered every open inch of his desk. The laptop off to one side didn’t even seem used. The power light was on but the screen was dark, as if he hadn’t looked at it in forever.

“Funny.” He hit the intercom on his phone with a manicured finger. “It’s alright, Joanie. You can call off the hounds.”

He let go of the button and motioned for me to sit.

“Nice view.” Out the window was a stunning view of downtown and the East River. It was overcast and I could see the clouds roll. “Fifty-third floor. You’re moving up in the world.”

I looked around the office. The sole bookcase was full of heavy law texts, the kinds that ran in series with identical colored bars across their spines, like encyclopedias. I’m sure everything printed in them was online somewhere, which meant they were just for show, something to put clients at ease, to make the good barrister look serious and well-studied. The legal equivalent of fake fruit in a bowl.

I shut the door and sat down. “Heard from Mom and Dad lately?”

“Really?”

“Just breaking the ice. People tell me it’s polite.”

“Then my answer is a very curt ‘not much.’”

Freddie and I had both written our parents off years ago. To be fair, they wrote us off first. One has to be a little sympathetic, though. It had to be hard for a God-fearing couple to find out that not just one but both of their offspring batted for the home team. Not that our parents were Bible-thumpers or anything—just traditional folks who tried to raise their kids the way they’d been raised. Things might have worked out better if there hadn’t been such a gap between Fred and me. I was older so naturally I blazed the trail. With an eight-year-old son sitting in the wings, they could comfortably blame my illness and everything that happened the year I spent in an institution for turning me gay. Six years later, when Mom caught Freddie with his hands down the pants and his tongue down the throat of the junior varsity quarterback, the reason was equally simple: my “elective” gayness had clearly rubbed off on their baby—the Contagion Model of Homosexuality. Like cooties. It was either that, I suppose, or the belief that God was punishing them for something.

As a young adult, I did what I could to protect Freddie from the worst of it, which meant intentionally stoking their anger so it stayed fixed squarely on me and not my teenage brother. As a result, he’s been able to maintain a strained but minimal relationship with them, whereas, for all I knew, they didn’t even acknowledge I existed.

“Don’t be jealous,” he said. “It’s usually just for help with their phone or computer or something stupid.”

“Since when do they call you for computer help? You’re a lawyer.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come!” he called. “I’m an intellectual property attorney,” he said to me, “specializing in cybersecurity, fraud, and abuse. I know a thing or two. You might be surprised.”

He took a file from an assistant and thanked her.

“Still defending the corporations?” I asked as the door closed again.

“Well, you know how it goes. The little guy doesn’t have any money. That’s your line of work.”

“Not for much longer.”

He squinted at me. “Meaning what?”

“What would I do if I wasn’t a cop?” I asked.

“Christ.” He glanced to the ceiling. “Harry, I don’t have time for existential discussions.” He motioned to the files on his desk. “We’re going to trial in three days. Do you have any idea what that means? Surely you do. You’re a policeman. Woman. Person. Whatever.”

“And if I wasn’t? What then? What kinda life is there as a civilian for someone like me?”

He looked at me. “Seriously?”

I nodded.

He sighed loudly and strummed his fingers on his desk. “Garbage person?”

He saw my face. “I don’t know!” he protested. “Did you ask your friends?”

“What friends?”

“Oh, whatever. You have friends. Everyone has friends. What about Kinney?”

“What about her?” I asked.

“Don’t tell me she’s gone already.”

I turned and looked out the window.

“Shit.” He sighed. “How long was it? Six months?”

Almost a year.

“You know,” he said, “you should probably talk to a professional about that.”

“I was.”

“And?”

“He’s the one throwing me under the bus.”

He laughed. Loudly. And he kept laughing. He laughed so hard, it took him a minute or two to calm down.

“I’m sorry. Really. I am.” He wiped his eyes. “It’s terrible. It’s just . . . it’s so you to alienate your own therapist! Babe, seriously, if a professional couldn’t help you, I don’t know why you would think I could. This is why it’s worth holding onto someone, you know, no matter how hard it gets. People are occasionally useful.”

I looked at the sole picture in the office. Him and Chester. Chesty Chester with the receding hairline and pects bigger than my boobs.

“It’s harder when you’re lesbian,” I said softly. “Harder to find the right person.”

“I suspect that’s true—and not nearly as important as you make it. What about your old partner, the erstwhile Mr. Hammond? Seems to me he was the closest thing to a real friend you’ve ever had.”

I shook my head, still staring out the window. “He’s a cop. I can’t ask him to get involved.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d help.”

I watched a tiny ferry slide across the East River. It left a white V in its wake.

“Fine. Then by process of elimination, Kinney it is.” He crossed his hands on his desk, like this was a negotiation and he’d just resolved it. “Are you supposed to be taking those?” he asked after a moment.

I had been knocking my bottle of pills against my palm: once, twice, thrice. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until he made a comment.

I looked at the white-capped bottle in my hand.

I was never a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure my sessions with the department shrink was covered under the same patient confidentiality as anyone else. I knew Dr. More would issue a report, of course. That was the whole point. But the idea behind soliciting the opinion of an expert is that normal folks aren’t competent to interpret someone’s medical history, not to mention their deeply private thoughts and personal ramblings. But mine had been excerpted verbatim, and in what was supposed to be an interim report only. That was why Lieutenant Miller shared the file with me while it was still being routed to the managers, which was a clear violation of protocol. From her standpoint, protocol had already been violated. She was doing her part to even things out.

I knocked the orange plastic pill bottle against my palm again: once, twice, thrice. The caplets rattled inside like beans in a maraca.

Once, twice, thrice.

“Harriet?”

“Would it kill you to be my brother?”

“I am. This is what siblings do. They give each other a hard time to hide the painfully deep feelings they have for each other.” He clutched at his heart.

I went to stand.

“Fine,” he said to stop me. “You know this kind of thing isn’t me. I don’t do . . . whatever this is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. You know I do. It’s why you’re here interrupting me at the absolute busiest time. So I’m telling you, as your brother, that I think you should talk to Kinney.”

“She made it clear she doesn’t want to see me.”

“As a lover, probably not. I can’t imagine you were any good.”

I scowled.

“I didn’t mean orgasms,” he said with a lilt in his voice. “I’m sure you were queen of the meaty slurp.” He raised his chin in the air. “God knows you’re tenacious enough for that kind of thing. Talk to her as a friend. Someone you used to be close to. Someone who knows you.”

I stood.

“For fuck’s sake, Harriet, at least ask. She might surprise you. She liked you an awful lot, which, you know, is probably why she left.”

“People don’t leave because they care. They leave because they’ve stopped caring.”

He pointed at me dramatically. “And that is why you’re still single.”

I stepped for the door.

“At least ask,” he repeated, this time with a hint of compassion. “If she turns you away, come back and I’ll see if I can sit quietly for 30 or 40 minutes.” He motioned to the stacks of files on his desk.

“You’re a real saint.”

He raised his hands in protest. “Maybe an hour.”

“A whole hour?”

“Please don’t quit,” he blurted.

I stopped with my hand on the knob.

“I’m not sure I could do what I do, you know, if you weren’t out there catching murderers and making the world a better place. For the both of us. I’m not sure I could live with myself, and if I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t bring home the bacon and give Chesty the life to which he’s become accustomed, which means he’d leave me and I’d probably kill myself. I’ll find you a good attorney. I’ll give you money. Ten thousand. Twenty thousand. Whatever you need. Just fight this. Whatever it is. Okay? Please.”

I nodded.

“I love you, sis,” he said.

“I know.” I opened the door and stepped into the hall.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released in early 2018. Hailed as a blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, you can start reading in order here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

Cover image by Lauren Marx

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The wolf with three eyes

25Sep

The package was addressed to me specifically. Not the NYPD. Not Homicide. Not “To Whom It May Concern.” To Detective Harriet Chase at the downtown office. The return address, tucked on a separate label underneath, said it was from Floral Park. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it.

There’s a checklist of things we’re supposed to look for to flag a package as “suspicious.” One of them is that the postmark doesn’t match the return address. That meant, following procedure, I was supposed to get the hazmat guys involved and fill out a bunch of paperwork. So I did exactly what any detective would do. I put on a pair of blue latex gloves and squeezed the darn thing from top to bottom like a kid on Christmas eve. Since it was pretty clearly a VHS tape—it even sounded right when I shook it—and since VHS tapes are almost universally not explosive, or toxic, I opened the package with my trusty pocket knife.

As I carefully worked the strip of clear plastic tape off the fold, I noticed a few fingerprints on the inside. Whoever sent it either wasn’t trying to hide or else had made a serious mistake. I pulled out the cassette—which trailed all of its magnetic tape like intestines. Whoever sent it had yanked every last inch from the rollers and stuffed it into the bottom of the envelope. The cassette’s clear plastic window showed the interior wheels were pulled clean, although thankfully the tape was still attached at both ends, which meant there was a chance of easy recovery.

Upon closer inspection, there was also a trace blood spatter, about the size of a printed apostrophe, on the clear plastic window. Now that was a reason to get people involved. I got up and took the tape immediately to my boss, Lieutenant Miller.

I stood with her in her office, leaning over her desk, where she was examining the tiny splatter from the distance of about an inch.

“In my experience,” she said, “there’s two reasons people send evidence anonymously: guilt or vanity. They’re either afraid—for their safety, maybe, or of being implicated—or they’re frustrated that they don’t have an audience.”

“Or they’re crazy,” I added.

“Or they’re crazy.” She smiled and stood straight. “Fine. Three reasons.”

Lt. Shawna Miller was in her mid-40s with curly brown hair peeking sandy gray at the roots. She was husky but not particularly overweight, and always sharply dressed. Everything I knew about her had been pieced together from odd bits and ends she dropped in conversation. In the few years we’d been working together, she’d made offhand comments once or twice with the subject ‘we’ in a way that led me to think she was married, probably with kids. But she didn’t wear a ring, she didn’t keep pictures in her office, she didn’t talk about her family, and she didn’t come with anyone to work gatherings. I’m certain all of that was so the men in her unit would have no reason to see her as anything but their manager. Not a wife. Not a mother. Just the boss. It kept her a bit at arm’s length from everyone. But in a public bureaucracy the size of the NYPD, that was the best strategy—if you could keep it up over the long haul. Shawna could.

I had the envelope in my hand. I held it up. “Worth checking out the return address maybe?”

“Let’s make sure that’s blood first,” she said, slipping the tape into an evidence bag. “Human blood. And not the sloppy remains of someone’s chili dog.”

“You think it’s a hoax?” I handed her the envelope, which went into a separate bag.

“Probably not, but stranger things have happened. I don’t want to put another one up until we’re sure.”

She nodded toward the big white board in the common space outside her office. It was stuffed end-to-end in multi-colored columns summarizing all our active cases. The label at the top read “The Killing Field.”

She handed me the evidence bags in a way that made it clear they were my responsibility.

“Since you’re here,” she said, nodding to a chair.

My brain immediately started cataloging all the things she might want to talk about in that official way, not least what had happened at the apartment the week before, but ultimately there were too many, so I complied without pause or comment.

She walked toward her office door. “I got an email this morning from Crowley, our erstwhile manager of evidence.” She shut it.

I didn’t say anything. I knew where she was going.

She walked around and took her seat. “He tells me you’ve checked out the same evidence from the Sacchi case seven times in the last few months.” She looked to me for a response. “A pendant or something like that? Is that correct?”

“If he says so.”

I was still wearing it.

Lieutenant Miller scowled. “That case is seven years old. Do I need to be worried?”

“About that? No.”

“I didn’t think so. But I told him I’d talk to you about it. So there. I did.”

I nodded and went to get up.

“That’s not why I asked you to stay,” she said. Lieutenant Miller opened her desk drawer. “For the first three months, you wouldn’t say anything and I had to give an official reprimand.”

So.

It was that.

She produced a thick envelope, the kind that could be sealed with the red string and routed around the office.

“Now . . . you apparently don’t know when to shut up.”

She tossed it across, and I caught it awkwardly, one hand pressing it to my chest. I unwrapped the red string and took out the folder. I flipped through it. I caught the words “grand mal seizures” and “wolf with three eyes” and what appeared to be several verbatim excerpts from a transcript.

I closed the file.

“Nothing to say?” she asked.

I slipped the file back into the manila envelope. “Nope.” I wrapped the red string around the tab.

She looked at me with a mix of confusion and frustration.

I placed the envelope gently on her desk. “With respect, ma’am, I know what I said.”

“Since when do you call me ma’am?”

I shrugged. “It seemed like the right thing to say.”

“It seemed patronizing. You had an obligation to disclose this to the department.”

“I did. At the inquest.”

“You said you had a seizure. Not that you had a history of them.”

“It happened once,” I said.

She pointed to the folder. “According to that, you had to be hospitalized for the better part of a year. I’d hardly call that ‘once.’”

“I meant one episode,” I objected. “Thirty years ago. I was thirteen for Chrissakes. No one could figure out why it happened and no one could figure out why it went away. It just stopped. And for three decades now, it stayed stopped. I had no reason to think it would ever come back.”

She pointed to her desk. “You know what the Cormacks’ lawyer is going to say. That the department is liable. And you know what they’re going to say? That you’re liable. That you withheld vital medical history.”

“I was thirteen,” I repeated.

“Maybe so. But by not cooperating for the better part of three months of mandatory therapy, you made it look like you had something to hide.”

I shifted in my seat. “Is that why you want to wait on the blood analysis? You’d prefer I take an administrative vacay?”

“You’re like a dog with a new toy every time a case comes across your desk. You clamp down and shake and shake and shake until I have to pry it away from you. You’d still be working the Sacchi case if I let you, along with half a dozen other weird cases, all cold.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. More. Fair enough?”

Lieutenant Miller sighed.

“I’m not going to intimidate him,” I explained calmly. “I just want to make sure he understands the damage that report is going to do.”

“You don’t think he did this on purpose?”

She lifted the envelope by the corner and held it like it was a bag of dog poop.

I shrugged. “I’d like to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Life seems simpler sometimes from behind a desk.” Then I added quickly “No offense. It’s just, maybe he didn’t realize how it would be interpreted.”

It was clear she was skeptical, not just about what I said but also whether I even believed it myself.

I didn’t.

She shoved the file in a drawer and I stood with the evidence bags.

Lt. Miller watched me walk to the door. “You need to take this seriously, Detective. The Department will. A man’s life, his family, was already at stake. Now so is your career.”

I stopped with my hand on the shiny silver knob. I knew she felt trapped. On the one hand, I was one of her detectives and she wanted to help, and I appreciated that. On the other, she felt I should’ve known better and was frustrated with me for putting her in a bad spot.

I opened the door.

I didn’t make it back to my desk.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released in early 2018. Hailed as a blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, you can start reading in order here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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I wanna tell you a story

23Sep

So. I wanna tell you a story. About a man named Will King, an NYPD detective, like me.

King investigated the 1928 disappearance and presumed death of 10-year-old Grace Budd, who left her home to attend a birthday party and never returned. There wasn’t much to go on. In fact, there was nothing at all. No body. No eyewitnesses. No physical evidence of any kind. Little Grace simply vanished, so no arrest was made for a full two years—that is, until Charles Edward Pope was accused of the murder by his estranged wife. Mrs. Pope claimed her husband had confessed to her, but since there was nothing for a jury but her word against his, Charles was found not guilty in December, 1930. After spending 108 days in jail on nothing but an accusation, he went home a free man, where I’m sure he had a few words with his wife.

For a time, it seemed like that would be the end of it. But in 1934, four years after the trial and six years after the murder, Grace’s mother received an anonymous letter, purportedly from the killer, which described in bald tone how he had enticed the girl into his room on the pretense of needing help, how he had quickly removed his clothes on her way up the stairs so as not to get her blood on them, how he had strangled her and butchered her body, and how he had eaten it, roasted in the oven, over a period of nine days. The note ended with the “reassurance” that the girl had died a virgin.

“But I could’ve done it,” he said. “If I’d wanted to.”

Mrs. Budd was illiterate and had to have her eldest son read the letter to her, after which she gave it to the police.

Although there was nothing distinguishing about the page, it had been delivered in an envelope that was marred in one corner. Once dampened and viewed under a magnifying glass, the mark revealed an emblem containing the letters N.Y.P.C.B.A., for the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. After interviewing the Association’s employees, Detective King discovered a janitor who admitted to stealing some stationary, although he claimed to have left it in an apartment he had rented on East 52nd. King got the names of all the recent tenants from the landlady, and there in the middle—much to his surprise—he saw one he recognized.

Albert Fish was a real grandfatherly type. He had a bit of a shamble to his walk. He was warm and soft-spoken. He was a father of six and visibly delighted in his youngest grandson. He read the Bible and could quote it prodigiously. By all accounts, he was a liked and respected man, and at 68 years old, with a head of gray hair and that sideways gait, he was the picture of harmlessness. Which is why, without a shred of physical evidence to link him to the murder, Fish had been quickly exonerated, despite that he had actually been the last to see Grace Budd alive—when he accompanied her to the birthday party, with her mother’s blessing.

The landlady on East 52nd informed Detective King that while Fish no longer lived there, he’d been receiving money from his son and was due one more check, which had just arrived. King decided to wait outside the room until his quarry came to collect the letter, whereupon he intercepted the soft-spoken old man and asked him to come to the station for questioning. Fish agreed, but as soon as Detective King turned, the doting, Bible-reading, gray-haired father of six produced a razor blade and tried to slice King’s neck open. He failed and was subdued and arrested and ultimately brought to trial.

After the arrest, Albert Fish claimed to have committed close to a hundred murders in a number of different states, although he was only ever linked to nine and was only ever convicted of one—that of Grace Budd, for which he received the electric chair. Prior to the trial, he described a pair of involuntary ejaculations he’d experienced while he dismembered the little girl’s body, and since it could never be proved whether he had eaten her or not, the motive was described as sexual and no account of the supposed cannibalism was given to the jury.

What is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, is that the kind and elderly Albert Fish, who spent all that time reading the Bible, regularly heard the voice of God commanding him to torture people “with implements of Hell.” What’s true is that he liked to beat himself with a nail-studded board and to stick wool soaked in lighter fluid in his anus and light it on fire. What’s true is that he liked to insert needles in his scrotum. And to leave them there. An X-ray revealed more than two dozen were present at the time of his arrest—so many, in fact, that the electric chair shorted in the middle of his execution and kind old Albert Fish had to wait in excruciating agony, half electrocuted, while they reset the switches and finished the job.

I imagine Detective King was changed by that case. I would’ve been. I bet he was changed by the knowledge that he’d had the killer from the start and had let him go. I bet he wondered how many people had been killed in the intervening years. I bet he never again made the mistake of presuming innocence just because the alternative was inconceivable. I bet he was proud of the fact that he’d finally caught Grace Budd’s killer and had seen him punished. I bet it never made up for all the ones that got away.

Why am I telling you this?

Because despite what you see on TV, or hear from the government, that’s hardly ever how it goes. And I don’t just mean about cannibalism and needles in scrotums. I mean about who gets caught and who gets away.

If you believe the official statistics, just under 2/3 of all murders in this country are solved.

If you believe the official statistics.

But there’s some flexibility, you see, in what gets logged as “solved.” And the aggregate numbers hide a big difference between major metropolitan areas, like New York and Chicago, and the rest of the nation. If you live in a big city, a better rule of thumb is about half.

50/50.

Even with all the tools of modern forensic science, nearly one out of every two urban murderers is never caught—which means you probably know one, at your work or church or school, even though that’s inconceivable to contemplate.

The difference between a cold case and a closed one isn’t skill or perseverance or even luck, which is all that brought Albert Fish to justice. Lots of guys I know have all three of those. No, catching the other half, the half that are almost never caught, requires something else. It requires you to contemplate the otherwise inconceivable—that there really was a voice emanating from Albert Fish’s Bible, an unnatural voice, perverting its word, driving him to kill. Or even that a body can want to be found.

Take the corpse of one Jane Doe, nicknamed Bobbi Jo by the guys in white. Bobbi’s killer took great pains to see that she would never rise from the watery tomb into which he’d placed her. He started by stabbing her thirteen times, after she was already dead from asphyxiation, in a rough checker pattern up her torso and down her back, presumably so that the gas released during bacterial decomposition could escape rather than collect in her body cavities and so bring her to the surface like a human-skinned buoy. Then he strapped exercise weights to her arms and legs—the kind athletes use during heavy workouts—and dumped her body in a drainage channel that emptied into the ocean. He was meticulous, too. He strapped the weights to her body per the instructions, Velcroing them around her forearms and lower legs, rather than attempting a more awkward fit elsewhere. Then he wrapped each weight several times in clear plastic shipping tape, just to be sure.

All other things being equal, she should’ve been fish food. It’s doubtful even her skeleton would’ve been found since that channel, built further out on Long Island, deliberately faced an outward flowing current. But as luck would have it, he dumped her in the channel right before a significant late summer storm brought warm temperatures and several inches of rain. The ME suggested he might have chosen that day specifically on the theory that more water would dispose of the evidence that much faster. And if he hadn’t attached the weights, it might have, because while the channel flooded quickly, the weighted body moved slowly and was diverted at high water to a runoff reservoir, where it sat for days in highly acidic city wastewater. Gradually over the next twelve hours, the rain subsided and the runoff reservoir slowly drained, Bobbi Jo’s swollen, turtle-nibbled, yellow-blue body became just visible under the surface, like an apparition.

She was found by a pair of joggers running along the trail at the edge of the reservoir, which bordered a large city park, and although it was impossible to say where exactly she’d been dumped along the channel’s seven-mile run to the sea, and although the state of the corpse made positive identification a long shot, everyone agreed it was something bordering on a miracle that she’d even been found at all.

I’ve often wondered if that wasn’t what all the old books meant when they talked about the dead coming back, and why people nailed bodies to coffins and weighed them down with stones and the rest. Not that anyone expected they’d rise up on two feet and start walking around and causing trouble for everybody. Rather, that they might simply make another appearance—by whatever means: grave robbers, flash floods, freak gales, what-have-you. That there are forces that can propel the dead back among the living for them to wreak a fresh hell. A dead body can cause plenty of trouble for people without ever moving a finger, believe me.

Of course, everything the forensics guys needed to finish their job was either in or on that body. It was just a matter of diligence. My colleagues and I, on the other hand, were left the task of identifying this woman, of finding her killer, and of bringing some semblance of closure to her family. Only, just like with the Grace Budd case, there was hardly anything to go on. The ME guessed she was in her early 30s—likely 32 or 33—that she was Caucasian, that she’d probably never had children, and that she’d been strangled to death and mutilated postmortem with a kitchen knife in the manner I described. The only feature of real note, and the reason the case made its way to me, versus any other detective in my unit, was the strange knotlike mark that had been burned into the underside of her tongue, like a cattle brand.

I was staring at my computer screen, tabbing tediously through missing persons reports, hoping for a quick match to her general description, when a package was plopped onto my desk. Plain manila envelope. Sealed with clear shipping tape. Machine-printed label. Unmarked VHS tape inside.

And that’s how everything started.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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