Rick Wayne's Blog, page 87

I have a confession

12

Bistro Indigenes was packed with the dinner crowd. Male and female servers scurried about in neat black aprons and matching bandannas. By the time I got there, Amber was already waiting. She was in a dress — fancy casual. And she was wearing more makeup than I’d seen on her before. She looked really nice. But she was nervous. She kept looking around like it wasn’t her kind of place.

I apologized profusely. I repeated how I hadn’t showered and I wasn’t dressed nearly as nice as her and I still had my work bag slung over my shoulder. She told me to stop. That it wasn’t a big deal. That she wasn’t sure if I’d made reservations, so she put our name down, but the hostess told her there was no guarantee we’d even get in before closing time. The place was hopping.

“Shit.” I’d been so preoccupied, that possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Should we go somewhere else?” she asked. It was pretty clear she wanted to.

Someone touched my shoulder lightly and I turned. It was the chef’s assistant, or whatever she was. Milan. She was all class, just like before, in khaki pants and a white-and-rainbow wrap. She looked like an Eastern European model. The cut jewel still dangled from the long chain around her neck. It reflected the light in an odd way. Half of it was tiny rainbows. The other half was dim.

“Dr. Alexander,” she said. “How nice to see you again. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize this was your party.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t think we’d — ”

“Your table is almost ready. Please have a seat and it will be just a moment.”

The waiting booth in the foyer was full of hungry hipsters, but two servers appeared carrying chairs. They set them down for us and left. The people waiting nearby, the ones who’d been standing forever, eyed them — and us — resentfully.

Dr. Massey turned to me, flushed and wearing a bemused smile. “Well, well, Dr. Alexander.”

I shrugged and made bug eyes.

Milan spoke to the host, a thickly mustachioed Salvadoran man with pomaded hair who glanced at us and nodded. A few minutes later, he led us to a table with a good view of the open kitchen. In the center was a large stone-block hearth. A fire raged. It seemed much bigger than it needed to be. Like someone had trapped a devil inside.

We ordered wine, and when the waiter left, there was another awkward silence.

“So . . .” She leaned over the table. “I have a confession. I’m so embarrassed.”

I swallowed. I scanned her hand for a wedding ring. Just as empty as before. I still wore mine.

“I don’t even know your first name,” she said, red-faced. “Your real one.”

I laughed. Three times we’d met, plus a bunch of text conversations between. I guess it never came up. “Uchewe.” I spelled it for her and explained how white folks down south always wanted to call me ‘You-Chew.’

“It’s beautiful.”

“My brother called me Che, but it never stuck.”

“Did something happen with him?” she asked. “Sorry.” She caught herself again. “Is that okay to ask? It’s just, you mentioned him once before, and both times you looked . . . I dunno. Away, I guess.”

I hadn’t realized. “No, it’s okay. He died. That’s all. When I was young.”

“I’m so sorry. How old were you?”

“Fourteen. It’s funny you bring it up. I’ve actually been thinking about him. Don’t know if you heard. The little boy died today. The tenth case.”

“Are you kidding?” Her eyes got big. “Practically the whole city knows. It’s all over the news. They’ve been flashing those dimples at every commercial break. ‘Unknown killer claims the life of a seven-year-old boy. Latest at 11.’ I’m surprised no one’s tried to interview you.”

“I’m sure they would if they thought I was anybody. The police have the case now. I only met him once, but it hit me harder than — Well, I guess I really thought that . . . I dunno.”

“That you could save him?”

I’d been thinking he was Alvin.

“You can’t save people. Believe me.” She made a face, like I had no idea. She took a drink from her wine glass. “They’ll take everything from you if you let them. If that’s why you do it, you’re gonna get burned out. Really fast.”

There was an edge to her then that I hadn’t noticed before. Almost cynical. “So why do you do it?” I asked.

Before she could answer, menus came. A pair of well-dressed servers placed them gently in front of us. They were fancy. Really fancy. Like, leather-bound and heavy. I’ve found that the quality of the menu is usually a good proxy for price. I only mention it because there were none printed. Prices, I mean.

I leaned over the table. “You really don’t have to pay, you know.”

She held up her menu so it covered all but her eyes and whispered. “So nice, right?”

We were both flummoxed by the selection. I don’t know what I expected, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t prix fixe, but it wasn’t quite a la carte either. It was whatever Étranger wanted it to be, and it changed with his mind. That night we had our choice of four set meals, one for each of the seasons, with or without wine and dessert. I ordered Spring and was brought an appetizer of “cud-grass soup with boiled tripe.” I ordered it because it sounded intriguingly distasteful, but the tripe was thinly stripped and tender, almost like the noodles in my grandma’s chicken noodle soup, and the vegetable stock was salty and clear and pleasantly bitter with an aftertaste of jasmine and wild herbs. It actually tasted like I was lazing about in a sun-lit field watching the clouds roll by. The accompanying entree was roast hummingbird with a glaze of sweet nectar served on a bed of stuffed zucchini flowers. It was delicious.

Amber ordered Summer. Her appetizer was a shaved-ice curry that tasted way better than it had any reason to, with a texture sort of like iced coffee. It was creamy and cold and earthy and a little bit sweet, and the spice clung to our lips, which both of us licked two or three times after each bite.

“Wow,” she said.

We shared each other’s dishes and mostly talked about the food. It was easy conversation. Every single dish was a novelty, unlike anything either of us had had before.

When the waiter came after dessert, I could see Amber jumping ahead of me to pay. I thought I might have to arm wrestle her even to see the check. I wanted at least to know how much I was in her debt. But the man explained politely that there was no bill. He had been told that our meal was on the house.

She looked to me for an explanation, but I had none. She said something about me really knowing how to impress a girl, and we got up to go. She’d had a glass or two more than me — it seemed like maybe she had nerves that needed calming — and she touched my arm to steady herself. I held on as we walked to the front. It was nice. We stepped outside, and I turned my head almost incidentally to the side door, the one Milan had led Oliver and me through the other day.

It was open.

Wide open, in fact.

But dark.

“So. Um. Do you want to share a cab? Or something?” she asked.

I turned to her. I could feel the open door behind me. Like a shove from a hard breeze.

I must have waited too long, or maybe it was the look on my face, because she said “Oh my God” and put her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she repeated. Even her ears were red. “I just thought . . .”

She walked to the curb. “Oh wow. It’s been a while since I made this big an ass of myself.”

I wanted to object, but she didn’t give me the opportunity. “It’s just, you know, I met you. And you cared. You really cared. And you seemed lonely, too. And I thought, here we are, two lonely people who care.”

I glanced back to the open door. No movement. No nothing. It had been shut and locked before. It wasn’t exactly a bad neighborhood, but there aren’t many places in New York where people leave their front doors open, especially at night.

Dr. Massey stood on the curb and waited for a taxi to pass.

I walked over and put my hand on her shoulder. Not intimate. But not distant either. Friendly. I squeezed. “I like you, Amber.”

“Me too,” she said. “Maybe a little too much.” A taxi stopped and she turned for it without making eye contact. “Your wife is very lucky.”

She climbed in the back. She didn’t even look at me or say goodbye. The taxi pulled away. I raised my hand, but it was dark and I couldn’t tell if she saw or not.

When the car was no longer in sight, I turned to the open door.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult 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)

cover image by Joel Rea

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The Rat King

11

Thirty-five-year-old Julie Festinger was running with her dog on the border of gentrified Williamsburg. She turned a corner and a feral cat hissed at them from a brick retaining wall. The animal’s fur was sparse — more than three-fourths of it had fallen out — and its eyes were frosted. Her dog barked and the cat rose on shaking legs as if it were going to pounce. Julie pulled her pet back and called the city. By the time the Animal Control officer arrived, the cat was dead. The call was logged and the corpse incinerated.

Just like all the others.

Dr. Chalmers made it clear the case was closed. But she also said “Keep your eye out.” Sure, she probably didn’t mean it. She was probably just trying to save me a little face. But it gave me a shred of plausible deniability.

And the chef knew. My colleagues and I were the dense ones. We didn’t see animals as compatriots. We saw them as vectors. As carriers of disease. As threats. Not as potential victims. But to Étranger, they were allies. Guides, even.

Cats eat rats. Rats eat anything. The city doesn’t record the same level of detail with the animal population as with the human, but they at least had a record of every “work order.” The best I could do was filter by date. I plotted it all on a map, everything they’d handled since Alonso White disappeared. The case management software they used actually made it very easy. The scatter plot was messy, though. Dots were all over the place. But there definitely seemed to be an arc cutting around the east side of the city.

When I restricted the date range even more — since Jayden Cavett died — the pattern became clearer. Fewer dots, but a definite curve. It moved clockwise from the lower Bronx, into Queens and down toward JFK, then around to Brighton, then across the water to Staten Island, which is where the data stopped — at the New Jersey border. I couldn’t say for sure, but it certainly looked like two-thirds of a circle. A big circle — roughly 30 miles wide and centered on lower Manhattan.

I spent the better part of an hour manually removing any obvious outliers and fitting a clean circle to the data so I could see where we would expect similar cases in Jersey. Then I added the location of the gas station where Jayden Cavett died. It was less than half a mile off the line. The apartment complex was a smidge closer.

It fit.

But I had no idea what to make of it. I didn’t want to rush it this time. It was always possible this was chance, that I was seeing a pattern where there really wasn’t one. Modern cities do have a sick kind of circular geography to them. A city center that’s the focus of wealth and trade. Around that, a ring of restaurants and nightlife and hi-rise condos for the single crowd and childless couples who didn’t need lots of space or a good school district. Around that, a ring of urban decay — older, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Less money. More crime. And beyond that, white flight. The wealthy suburbs. What I was seeing could’ve been an artifact of that. Or it could’ve been the cause. I didn’t know.

The perfect test, I decided after staring at the map for half an hour, would be a visit to Hoffman Island. Built from a shoal in the 1800s, it was once used as a quarantine for immigrants entering nearby Ellis Island. Anyone who had indications of contagious disease had to lay up there. It rested exactly on the line of the circle and bridged the water gap between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was tiny, the size of a city park, with nothing but trees and a few decaying single-story structures. Easy to search.

But human visitation was prohibited by the Park Service, who kept it as a wildlife preserve, including for a small population of harbor seals who wintered there. I wouldn’t have minded breaking the law — as public health investigators, my colleagues and I had a somewhat worrying level of authority granted us by the Federal government to do just about anything, usually without a warrant — but the simple truth was, I didn’t have access to a boat, nor was there any way Dr. Chalmers would approve a requisition.

I packed up my tablet and notes and went for coffee. Unlike the multi-borough megalopolis of New York, the Jersey side of the metro was a collection of smaller communities, none of which had all the data I needed in one place. And it wasn’t like I could just focus on those neighborhoods along my data-fit circle. I’d have to do more than just fit cases to it. I’d also have to show that nearby communities, those off the circle, had none. There was no way I could do all that in a day or two, and there was no way I could get away with working on the case even for that long. As it was, I was supposed to be at my desk right then. So I spent the rest of the afternoon at a cafe hunched over my tablet. Just because I sent out my health alert didn’t mean everyone had read it, especially out in the Jersey burbs. I went through the metro sections of the local papers and network affiliates.

Oliver called while I was there. Twice. They’d noticed I was gone.

After 45 minutes of tedious failure, I realized I was going about it all wrong. What I was looking for probably wouldn’t have made the news. I brought up the map again and looked for a town that my data-fit circle ran squarely through, rather than hit obliquely.

East Orange, New Jersey.

I took a train across the river and a bus to city hall. I used my credentials to cut to the front of the line — by then it was near closing time — and got access to the city housing records. I brought up a list of all the structures in East Orange that were condemned and cross-referenced it against all records of sale. It wasn’t a long list, but there were more than I expected. I plotted the locations on my map. Two looked like clear fits. I flipped a coin and hoped luck was with me. It was gonna be dark soon.

Heads.

Abandoned school.

Close enough to walk.

The lot was rimmed in a brand new fence. Clusters of signs warned that it was private property, that it was dangerous, and that there was an organic food center coming soon — none of which were appealing. I didn’t see any construction equipment, just open earth and a square, U-shaped brick monstrosity that had once been an elementary school. Built when Hoover was president.

I walked around to the back, hopped the fence, and stepped through urban decay at its finest. Leaf litter blew about with the regular kind, and the few lifeless trees looked like skeleton hands erupting through the withered earth. It was oppressive. Every single one of the regularly spaced windows was neatly boarded. A ring of graffiti ran around the base of the building like a colorful collar. The ground was damp from an earlier drizzle.

I stepped up cracked concrete and into another world. The graffiti was sparse inside. I could see why. The floor had collapsed and the only path was a dangerous shimmy around the remaining rim at the sides. I didn’t try the upper floor. That seemed like suicide. But the steps to the basement were poured from the same concrete as those up front, and they had held.

It was dark inside. The sun was low in the sky, and if not for the open ceiling, the lower level would have been completely black. I walked over the debris-strewn foundation, around a corner, and into a large open space — what I imagine had been a boiler room. There was a heavy sliding steel door with a shiny new padlock. But that’s not what caught my eye. Along the back wall, barely discernible in the dusk light, was what can only be described as an altar. Small. Maybe four feet high. Made of twigs bound into bonelike bunches that crisscrossed and fanned out like a spine and open ribcage. It was capped in a deer skull. Complete with antlers. A single rat carcass, skinned to the muscle, was propped against it, like it was sitting in judgment over all who stood before it. Big sucker, too. Melted wax from the candle on its head had run over its skinless face and torso and hardened in overlapping dribbles. The candle had burned all the way to the animal’s scalp and left a black and crooked wick inside the hardened remnants of running wax, which poked up like the spires of a crown.

That’s what it looked like. The Rat King.

There were maggots on him. And a wasp.

I had no idea what to make of it. On the one hand, it seemed weird that such a thing even existed. On the other, it somehow seemed right at home in that place. An altar to an unknown god.

I was standing there staring when I felt a long, cold shiver slip slowly down my spine. And then the same uncanny feeling I’d had in the abandoned apartment. Before the dark hole. When I felt like I was being watched.

I turned around in the silence.

I saw a shed by a field of dried corn stalks. A light on a high pole. My brother Alvin. I was with him. We were young.

A door was open.

My phone buzzed and shook me out of the past. I didn’t look at it. Probably the office again. I walked to the sliding steel door with the brand new padlock. I tried the handle a few times. It didn’t budge. I yanked on the lock, but it was solid. I kicked. Nothing.

I looked at the altar.

I walked back up the steps and around the edge of the collapsed floor to the front.

I couldn’t keep doing the same things and expect a different result.

I needed help. But there was no one at the office I could ask. Not even Ollie. Not anymore.

My phone buzzed again. A reminder of my unread message. I sat on the front stoop of the school and took it out. I’d been wrong. It wasn’t the office. It was a text from Amber. She said she hadn’t heard from me and just wanted to know if we were still on.

“Shit.”

Dinner was tonight. That’s why she’d texted me earlier. To engage in conversation. A subtle reminder. I’d told her the other day that I’d get back to her about my schedule and never did.

I looked across the barren lot to the fence line.

I kept seeing a corn field. And a shed. I remembered it. It was behind my Aunt Susan’s house. Alvin and I were there. Mom and I were dropping him off. She told me he was going to stay there awhile. I didn’t want to go home. A light on a high pole clicked on and broke the dusk.

My phone buzzed again in my hand. Dr. Massey was sending messages like you do when you need to hear back from someone but they’re not responding. She said politely that she knew a great little Italian joint not too far from the DoH.

There was no way I could get back to my hotel, shower, and get out to a restaurant before any hour that normal people eat. I’d be late as it was, even if I went directly there. So I texted her back and said I was so sorry. I’d gotten some bad news that day and had been running around for work all afternoon. I was still in jeans. I hadn’t showered. But if she was cool with it, there was this unusual little bistro in Brooklyn I wanted to try.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult 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.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released. Or just leave a tip!

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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Humans aren’t the only animals in the city

10

I called the hospital that night. Finally. Mom was in rare form: Why had I been ignoring her? I never loved her. Not like Alvin.

She didn’t say that last part. But we both knew it was on her mind.

By the time it was done, all I wanted was sleep. I had to get up early anyway. Dr. Chalmers had called a big team meeting. The whole unit. I couldn’t be late. Not again.

Although, as it turned out, I wished I had been. First thing after everyone quieted down, Chalmers chewed me and Ollie a new one. It was short but effective. The department was trying to coordinate a response and we’d gone AWOL and who the hell did we think we were? Etc., etc.

Oliver was right. I probably should have stayed at the office and written up my theory. Trying to explain it to a room full of skeptics — the first time in months there was standing room only in that big hall — it sounded like a stretch. Ridiculous, even. Fair-haired Tucker Davis pointed out from the front row that the hospital report indicated a puncture mark on the boy’s back and his blood had traces of turpentine and a common chemotherapy cocktail.

“Chemotherapy?” Oliver scowled.

“I didn’t think the labs were done,” I said.

Tucker was so calm. Casual. “I ran over after work last night.” Like it was nothing.

He hadn’t told me. He knew damned well I was the lead on the case. I suspect he also convinced the hospital staff to sit on the labs until after the team meeting because they didn’t come across my inbox until that afternoon.

No one snickered, but the silence was patent. Here I was babbling on about predatory Amazonian fungus. And the kid had been poisoned.

I looked to Oliver, but he stayed silent.

Dr. Chalmers said that since it was a poisoning, the police had taken the case, and that there didn’t seem to be any relation between the little boy and the Chinese immigrants. She was about to go on to the next topic when I interrupted.

“What about the junkie couple? Down in Brighton.” I asked. “And the case in Jersey. All of these people with the same unusual symptoms — neutropenia, fungal infection, hair loss. They all show up within weeks of each other, and you’re suggesting that’s just a coincidence?”

“I’m suggesting,” Dr. Chalmers said sternly, “that whatever it is, it’s not a wasp-borne predatory fungus.”

Now the snickers.

“Keep an eye out,” she said. “If anything else shows up, we’ll consider reopening.” I think she felt a little sorry for me. But she was also telling me — in front of everyone — that the case was closed and I wasn’t to work on it anymore.

A couple members of the staff glanced at me to see my reaction. There was no sense in hiding anything. I was angry. Frustrated. But yelling about it on everyone else’s time wouldn’t do any good either.

I looked to Ollie as I took my seat — for a hint of hope, I guess. But he was buried in his phone. He leaned back in his chair while looking at the screen and scratched his side. He had already moved on. We were off the hook. That’s all he cared about. “Alvin” was the NYPD’s problem now.

They weren’t gonna find anything.

Dr. Chalmers went on to other business, but I didn’t listen to any of it. I had started down this path for a lot of reasons, none of which seemed to matter anymore, and in those situations, it’s always tempting to start catastrophizing: that Sowell was gonna let me go, that I wouldn’t get any paper out of my appointment, that I wouldn’t get a job, that I’d be one more PhD working retail.

I didn’t know any of that was true. But right then it sure felt like it.

Later that morning, I was at my desk crunching numbers on Ollie’s Farm-to-Table program when I got a text from Dr. Massey.

     ANY LUCK?

YUP! ALL BAD

She sent a frowny face.

     WHAT HAPPENED?

TELL YOU ABOUT IT LATER

ALONSO FILE TURN UP?

I’LL CHECK

And a few minutes later:

     NADA. I’LL CHECK AGAIN TOMORROW

And then after a bit:

     YOU SURE YOU’RE OK?

I sent a thumbs-up.

Early that afternoon, I got a call from Oliver’s cell. I didn’t know where he was. Probably in a meeting I hadn’t been invited to. With the rest of the team. None of them were at their desks. I was practically alone in The Pit.

He said two words.

“Boy’s dead.”

I stopped. “What?”

He repeated it and my hand dropped.

“Hello?” I heard Oliver faintly through the speaker. The phone was in my lap. “Alex? Are you there?”

Dead.

That wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought. I was supposed to save him this time.

“Hello? Alex?”

This time.

“Yeah,” I said. “When?” I took off my glasses.

“Two hours ago. I just got the call. Thought you’d want to know.”

“Yeah. I did. Thanks.”

A pause. “You alright? You need to talk to one of the — ”

“I’m fine. Thanks for calling. Really.” I hung up.

I put my hands to my eyes and pressed. Hard. I’ve never felt like a bigger failure. Ever. Everything in my life was wrong. And everything that was wrong compounded everything else that was wrong. My marriage was failing. I was probably going to be fired. I’d just been publicly torpedoed by an elitist prick.

It wasn’t even that he did it, I guess, as much as that I should have seen it coming. I was mad at myself. The Tuckers of the world weren’t going to change. I shouldn’t have gone back to the hotel. I should’ve followed up with the boy’s hospital like I had with the ME. I knew the only reason I hadn’t was because of the conversation with Mom. She takes everything out of me. That, and I was sure I was right. Why bother with that extra effort when you already know what the answer’s going to be?

Except that’s not how science works. Good scientists don’t fall into that trap. And I had. I felt worthless. Outplayed. Out of my league. Hopeless. Why the hell had I spent eight years in higher education — and all that money — if this was the best I could do? Tucker made it seem so goddamned effortless. I was the fake.

And now a seven-year-old boy was dead.

Jesus. Seven.

Everything he coulda been.

Gone.

I had to get out of the office. I didn’t care if anyone saw. I didn’t care if Dr. Chalmers called Dr. Sowell that day and I got fired on the spot. Part of me was daring them to.

Go ahead.

Make it worse.

Y’all can’t hurt me.

Fuckin’ street hustler bullshit. We hit stress and we all fall back to our roots. I was standing chest-to-chest with C-Note Wilson, daring him to hurt my family.

I walked to a small park. I got a genuine New York dog from a sidewalk vendor and sat on a bench. It was getting cooler. The leaves were changing. Everything was changing. What the fuck was I doing? I missed my daughter. My wife. My mom. Not the monster she’d become but the woman I remembered from my childhood.

I missed my little brother.

A raven landed on a branch. Then it flapped to the ground. It looked at me. It looked at the hot dog in my hand. I tore a piece off the bun and dropped it. The raven waddled forward fearlessly and deftly tossed the morsel into the air. It swallowed the bite in two snaps of its beak. Then it looked up at me, head turning from side to side.

“Hungry, huh?”

Hungry.

I jumped to my feet and the bird squawked in anger and flew away.

Shit.

I dropped the rest of the dog in the trash and ran for the street.

A predatory fungus wouldn’t distinguish between human flesh and animal. Maybe there were already more cases than I thought.

I called Tucker from the corner as I tried to hail a cab. The phone rang long enough that I’m sure it nearly went to voicemail. He was deciding whether or not to answer.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Alex. You were at the kid’s housing complex the other day, right?”

“Yeah. We missed you.”

“Did anyone find any dead animals?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pigeon. Cat. Anything.”

“Uh, I think so. Yeah, I think some of the guys found a cat carcass or two. Why?”

“Do you know what happened to them?

“We turned them over to Animal Control. Why are you asking?”

“Thanks.” I hung up.

Humans aren’t the only animals in the city that need to eat.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult 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.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released. Or just leave a tip!

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Rovina Cai

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The cockroaches were imported

9

I paid the cabbie and stepped out. Waxman was standing on the curb, waiting for me. I walked toward him and he held up my phone, which I had slipped into the side pocket of his briefcase.

“Clever,” he grumbled.

I stopped ten yards away. “You’re straight as an arrow all right. Through the heart.”

He pointed. “You’re the first one to come through here who’s had half a brain. Don’t screw it up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I took my phone from him and turned to see where we’d stopped.

There was a wide-windowed corner bistro on the bottom floor of a roughly three-story building. It was difficult to say because the upper floors weren’t demarcated. They were lined in giant panes of glass covered in faint reflective film. You couldn’t see inside. Which was weird enough. But on top of that, the newer parts of the building had been added to the remnants of a much older brick structure, but they weren’t so much built onto as inside it, as if the newer building was wearing the old like a turtle’s shell.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

“Look . . .” Waxman began. He was so damned skittish. “It’s better if I do all the talking.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“And if this doesn’t work out, it’s better if no one even knows we came. Just trust me on that. Please?”

I looked up at the sign over the door. It said “Bistro Indigenes” in fancy script lettering. It was certainly a nice place — modest, but definitely upscale, set on a busy street corner opposite a small park. There was a dentist’s office across the side street.

He turned for the door. “Glowing Amazonian mushrooms. It’s just too fucking big of a coincidence. He might know something.” He corrected himself as he walked in. “He will know something. The bastard knows everything. Whether or not he’ll tell us . . .” He shrugged.

“Who?” I asked.

Waxman strode through the little waiting area as if he’d been there before, many times, but I got stuck when a server passed holding — I couldn’t believe it — a plate of flayed salamander on a bed of greens, belly up, its sizzling skin pinned open like a frog in a dissection tray. I did a double-take when I caught a whiff — like a musky grilled fish. It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, but all but a few of the twenty or so linen-covered tables were occupied. A curved counter serving a single row of diners arced halfway around the open kitchen, which looked like a cross between a greenhouse and an assembly line. A round brick oven filled the center and rose from floor to ceiling. A bevy of chefs in black aprons and matching bandannas ran around it and yelled to each other as they pulled spiked husks from strange vegetables and pulverized bone in heavy mortars. It was loud.

“Oliver.”

Female voice.

I turned and saw a short-haired woman approach the empty hostess stand from the interior of a glass-walled wine closet. The legs of her sheer black slacks swung back and forth with casual grace. She wore a white silk top that didn’t hug a single curve and yet managed to let you know they all were there. She had little makeup — she didn’t need it — and a walnut-sized gem dangling from a long necklace. It was clear but not a diamond. But it didn’t look like costume jewelry either. It was cut with a very peculiar geometry, so much so that I did a double-take. My brain didn’t want to accept that shape was possible.

Waxman shook her hand with a grumble and asked for the chef.

The woman politely ignored the question and turned to me. “Milan.” She extended her hand and I took it. She spoke like a woman who had been born somewhere else but had been speaking American English for so long that you almost couldn’t tell.

Oliver jumped in. “This is an associate of mine. From the CDC. It’s important,” he stressed.

“The CDC?” She turned back to me in surprise. “Have we graduated to national health hazard now?”

“Excuse me?”

“Look — ” Oliver started.

“No warrant this time?” The woman Milan scanned his hands.

Waxman responded with half-closed eyes, as if he was tired of repeated himself. “You were warned. Repeatedly. Keeping vermin in a kitchen that serves the public is a violation of — ”

“The cockroaches were imported,” the women explained to me softly. “From Kazakhstan.”

“Is he here or not?”

“I’m sorry. You just missed him.”

Waxman was skeptical. He lifted a finger.

But before he could speak, Milan rested a hand on his shoulder, gently, as if to show him the door. “But it’s always nice to see you, Oliver. Please come for dinner sometime. I’m sure we could comp you a glass of wine.”

He made a face.

A young server presented the hostess with a covered tray. A bit of steam escaped from one corner. Whatever was inside was hot. Milan motioned silently for the kid to leave it on the hostess station as she waited politely to see us out.

Waxman eyed it. “That’s for him, isn’t it?”

The graceful woman gave my colleague a look that, had she given it to me, would have melted my reformed Southern sensibilities and made me slink out the door. But Waxman was Brooklyn through and through.

He crossed his arms.

“Oliver.” She stiffened. “You know I can’t interrupt him when the big doors are closed.”

“Who?” I repeated.

Right then the phone on the podium chirped. It wasn’t a ring. It was more like an intercom.

Milan pressed her lips together resolutely as she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She said nothing. After a moment, she returned it to its cradle. She turned, resigned.

Waxman cursed. “Impatient for his lunch, is he?”

“Apparently you are to relay your message — ”

“Like hell!”

Milan moved her eyes to the guests in the dining room as a warning not to curse.

Waxman froze with his mouth half open. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, barely more than a whisper, so that no one in the boisterous dining room could hear.

“Tell him to go fuck himself.” And with that, Oliver Waxman, MD, turned for the door.

“Hold up.” I was getting frustrated. “Here and back, we just wasted an hour. The mayor’s people are on the TV as we speak. I thought you said this guy knew something about the mushrooms.”

Oliver spun around wearing a look that made me certain he was about to say he couldn’t care less. And then follow that with some choice adjectives. But he never got a chance. The phone chirped again. Milan lifted the receiver to her ear. Again, she said nothing.

She replaced it, grabbed the tray, and walked toward the door with the soft words “Please follow me. Mr. Étranger will see you now.”

I looked to Waxman with a scowl. “Who?” I repeated as insistently as I could.

“Etude Étranger,” he sighed. We walked to the sidewalk and he leaned close. “He’s this French chef. He’s bat-shit crazy.”

“Mr. Étranger is from Brazil,” Milan corrected as she turned left and took us around the corner to an unmarked steel door. “He was only raised in France.” She opened it and pointed to the plain white stairs.

I hadn’t heard of him, but it turns out he’s kind of famous, mostly for the Cirque Gastronomique — this series of ridiculously expensive dinners he’d masterminded, each set in a different exotic locale: an oasis in the middle of the desert, a yurt on the Tibetan plateau, an ice mansion inside the Arctic Circle, that kind of thing. The ingredients were local, organic, non-Western, but the Cirque wasn’t bullshit bourgeois back-to-nature eco-cuisine. They were experimental, modernist gastronomy and they achieved a kind of mythic status in foodie circles, not least because Étranger only held each Cirque once and he wasn’t doing them at all anymore.

The chef must have had the whole building to himself because there was only one door at the top of the stairs. It led to a loft apartment typical of the urban contemporary style: lots of neutral-colored metals, right angles, and glass. But it was still impressive for its floor-to-high-ceiling windows complete with a partial view of the Manhattan skyline. In any normal loft, that’s what would catch your eye. But not at Étranger’s. Fuck, no.

Eight-foot-tall tribal head.

Dark.

Mouth agape.

Staring at you through stitched-closed eyes.

You know those scraggly-haired shrunken heads you see on TV? Imagine its gargantuan evil twin. Eight feet. Right there facing the doorway. Frayed brown twine laced through the lids and pulled tight like an old shoe. The effect is almost physical. You see it and Bam! You’re on edge, half-expecting you’ll turn the corner to the living room and see spear-wielding, arrow-flinging natives hunched over bubbling pots, mixing curare.

Light poured in through the high windows and bounced off the white walls, illuminating the art even under an overcast sky. A long, stone-studded Polynesian battle club hung from the wall next to a six-foot-tall black-and-white photograph of a naked woman in chains resting intimately with a leather-clad pig with a cat-o’-nine-tails in its mouth. I turned away. There was a mummified hand in a glass case. Each finger wore a ring and each ring flaunted a different colored gem. There was a pair of facing burlap couches. In between, a giant stone block carved in bas-relief — Buddhist, maybe — served as a coffee table, despite its irregular surface.

No sooner had Milan had directed us to sit on the couches and wait than my phone rang. I would have let it go to voicemail except for the fact that Waxman’s phone rang exactly one moment after. He and I looked at each other as our phones played musical tag. Same phone. Same ring. Alternating.

Oliver reached into his pocket for his and stepped toward the high windows. I said “excuse me” and stepped back into the short hall with the giant head.

Marlene.

I scowled and answered. “This is Dr. Alexander.”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know who it is.”

“I can’t talk now.”

“Can you ever?” she asked.

Granted. It was a fair question.

“I’ll call,” I said.

“When?”

“Tonight. But I have to go now. Really. We have an interview.”

Nothing.

“Okay?” I asked.

Call ended. Without a word.

I pivoted my feet to head back into the living room — and stopped.

There he was. The man himself. At least, I assumed it was him. The chef. I have to say, he was definitely striking: fit but not particularly tall, mentally alert, eyes narrow and sharp. His great bald head was naked and shiny, as if naturally bare rather than freshly shaven. His skin was a ruddy mix of olive and ocher. His clothes were simple but fashionable — a fancy long-sleeve T-shirt, comfortable slacks, and loafers without socks. He was sort of squinting at me the way Dr. Sowell did at our first meeting. Like my very presence was some kind of magic trick he was struggling to see through. He held a wooden tray in his hands capped with a large glass dome. Inside was a single antler. It was covered in small, seething larvae: maggots, writhing and twisting. It was hypnotic and looked designed to be so, like those horrible modern art installations that are always getting MoMA into trouble with the outrage police. But it wasn’t art. It was chefery.

Deer shed their antlers every year. Certain species of biting flies actually lay their eggs on them so that the developing larvae can feed on the protein before pupation. I asked if it was an experiment. He didn’t answer. He walked to a wet bar at the back, across from those big windows, near a set of French doors, and set it down.

“Please take this to Raul when we are finished,” he said to Milan.

The man had one hell of an accent. Milan had said he was from Brazil, but he didn’t look Hispanic. He looked native. As in indigenous. And while his accent was partly French, it was partly something else — and not Portuguese, which is what they speak in Brazil.

Milan nodded.

They were going to run out of air, I cautioned him — the maggots, I meant.

“By which time they should be good and fat,” he said without turning. And then, after a pause, “They’re delicious stir-fried with saffron and truffle oil.”

He walked around the stone table and sat on the couch facing us, the one in front of those tall windows with the skyline view. Milan sat on the opposite end of the same couch. I thought she might be Étranger’s wife or girlfriend or something. She was certainly the right type for a somewhat-famous man — beautiful, of course, and noticeably younger, but not so young as to be scandalous. Around my age, maybe. But I got the sense real quick that wasn’t the case. They didn’t respond to each other the way a romantic couple would. But they weren’t chilly with each other either, like Marlene and me. They were pleasant. Warm, but respectful of each other’s space. Like coworkers, I guess. Or siblings.

Ollie and the chef barely acknowledged one another. Milan asked us to sit, and we complied. I sat across from her and Waxman sat across from his adversary, whose covered lunch rested untouched and steaming on the irregular table. A bodhisattva. Carved on the table, I mean. Not for lunch.

Silence.

I turned to my colleague, expecting him to speak. He was the reason we were there, after all. But Waxman just looked at the chef like he was having second thoughts.

“Why are you here?” the man asked directly.

My colleague bristled.

“A number of people have gotten sick,” I said.

“Not from anything I have served.” He didn’t say it to me. He hadn’t even looked at me since we sat down. He said it to Waxman. As if the accusation had previously been made.

Ollie stood. Out of the blue. Without a word. Like he was going to leave.

There was another long pause.

“No, sir,” I jumped in. “We think it has something to do with a rare kind of mushroom.”

That did it. The chef turned to me. He just looked. Then in that wonderful accent, “What kind of mushroom?”

“The kind you can’t buy at the grocery store,” Waxman said, taking his seat. “We thought, with your . . . connections, you might know — ”

“I am not responsible for every dangerous food — ”

“I didn’t say that,” Oliver jumped in.

“You barge into my restaurant. With policemen — ”

“You were serving roach meat!”

Now, I hadn’t heard of the man, but it turns out even I had seen pictures of the Safari Gastronomique. There was one in particular that went viral: wildebeest tartare ground with turmeric and tapioca, covered with a goat’s-blood foam sweetened with freshly tapped acacia sap and served with a side of wild beet, mixed legume, and alligator succotash, all in a woven bowl of edible leaves soaked in orange essence and shoyu and then dried. It was dark when the picture was taken and a fire (not in frame) lit the foreground, including the basket and the strong black hand that held it. At the back, you could see the silhouette of a few sparse trees along the horizon of the African plain, stark against the fading glow of the just-set sun. The rest of the picture disappeared into darkness. In fact, it was surrounded in darkness. You could almost hear lions rustling impatiently, preparing for their nightly hunt.

Étranger had allowed National Geographic to cover the safari, and it had been attended by at least one A-list Hollywood actor, a US senator (both names kept secret by the magazine), a suspected member of the Russian mafia, and the president of Eritrea, to name a few. But the best part was how, according to the reporter, the whole meal became unexpectedly ambulatory, moving through the African plains by dusk, because a young Etude had become dissatisfied with the ingredients he’d been provided and promptly set off to find wild replacements. There is even one report on the internet, unconfirmed by National Geographic, that this involved the shooting of a leopard.

The president of Eritrea later claimed it wasn’t a leopard at all but that there was “a large man-eating predator.”

I explained to our “consultant” that the big question was how these people could have eaten the mushrooms. That’s when I noticed his hands. They were tattooed. Both of them. On the palms. The symbols and lines ringed his knuckles before swirling over his lifelines and snaking up to his wrists where they disappeared under the sleeves of his shirt. I tried not to stare. I had never seen tattooed palms before. I haven’t since. I’ve been told the ink doesn’t take.

He scowled at Waxman. I think that’s when it occurred to him why we were there.

Waxman scowled back.

“No,” the chef answered the unspoken question. “I have never served it.”

Oliver raised his hands defensively. “Don’t act like it was a ridiculous question.”

“It’s a foul fungus,” Étranger explained. “Rare and distasteful. There is no reason to eat it.”

“So you’re familiar with it?” I asked.

“Of course!” he said, like I was an idiot. Then he turned to Milan and asked her to remind him to try a hallucinogenic mushroom risotto. It was hushed, as if he’d just had the idea right then and didn’t want either of us to steal it.

I wasn’t sure what to make of him, whether the eccentric genius bit was an act for the tabloids or he really was that clueless. But either way, he was fun to watch. Not because he was particularly handsome or eloquent. It was his demeanor, I guess — careless and aloof. That and the accent — coarse, grainy, and resonant. Since it didn’t belong to any language in particular, the chef had the unusual honor of sounding foreign to absolutely everyone.

But it seemed to me he was just as surprised by the appearance of the mushrooms as anyone else. I looked to my colleague. This had been his play.

I think Oliver was genuinely disappointed. I think he really expected he’d cracked the case. On my lead.

“We’re very sorry to have bothered you.” Waxman stood.

The rest of us did the same.

“If you think of anything else . . .” Oliver said it to Milan, not to the chef.

She smiled patiently, and he walked to the door.

I looked at Étranger. Our eyes met, and I felt then like he was holding back. But not out of guilt. It was something else. Like he had something he wanted to say but couldn’t think of the word in English.

I handed him my card. Milan reached up and took it from my fingers.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.

Oliver was waiting.

Étranger looked to my colleague, then to me. His brow was knit, like he wasn’t sure what was happening. Or what it meant.

I walked after Waxman.

“Doctor,” the chef called.

I turned.

“Humans aren’t the only animals in the city that need to eat,” he said.

“Um.” I squinted. “Okay.”

And that was it. We left.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult 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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We didn’t catch a break

8

We didn’t catch a break. That night, poor blighted “Alvin” hit the local news — anonymous tip, I was told — and the following morning, the entire investigation changed. Ollie was pulled into a phone conference with senior management ahead of a phone conference with the mayor’s office ahead of a press conference later that afternoon. Everyone else poked at their work the way Marigold pokes at food she doesn’t want to eat on the hopes that no one will notice. There was a pervasive expectation that we were all going to be re-tasked just as soon as the higher-ups figured out a game plan.

Tucker had left 98% of the paperwork on the Chinese grocery unfinished on my desk. I saw the stack, sighed, and got to work.

Type.

Scan.

Double-verify.

Stamp.

Sign.

Next.

At some point in there, as my mind was wandering over everything that happened, I stopped the paperwork and brought up the symbol I’d snapped with my phone. I sent it to my laptop and did an image search. Tons of results, of course, but nothing that exactly matched. The closest I found was on some Stone Age rock formations in Australia, one of a set of six all in the same style.

As part of my job, I have access to a web portal for academic papers, otherwise behind a step paywall. I was trying to find any scholarly guesses as to the symbols’ significance, but I’m not an anthropologist and it was slow going.

I was scanning the abstract of my twelfth dead end when I got a single-word text from my wife.

     PLEASE

Mom must have phoned the house again. I imagine Marlene wasn’t happy with that. It looked for sure like I was ducking her now. I sent a reply form the bathroom. When I got back to my desk, the red voicemail light on my desk phone was lit. I listened to the message from Officer Ruggieri.

“Got some info on your missing person,” she said when I rang her back. She sounded like she was fighting a cold. “Local boy. Puerto Rican heritage. Went to seminary out of high school but quit after a couple years. Got involved with a Catholic nonprofit in Spanish Harlem. Various charities after that. Worked his way up. Went to night school in his 40s and got a degree in social work. By the sound of it, he had a real talent for helping folks talk through their problems.” I heard her blow her nose.

“Not a guy who’s likely to get up one morning and walk away,” I said.

“Not at all. Word is he had big plans for himself. Had a big break a couple years ago. There was a jumper on his building and he talked the guy down. In Spanish. Took like nine hours or something like that. Was in the local papers.”

“Doesn’t sound like he had many enemies.”

“None that the officers could find. Everybody talked about him like he was a saint. All kinds of stories. Not saving the world stuff. Just little things. Helping folks find a job or staying late to listen to someone who needed it. Big hands. Big smile. The best man they knew, people said. You think he got sick?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “His symptoms match.”

“Well, I’ll get this summary over to you, along with a couple pictures. Just please let us know if you find anything.”

“Of course. I don’t suppose there’s anything in there about his work at the Urban Outreach Center? In the Bronx?”

Ruggieri said she didn’t remember seeing anything. I asked her to make a note in the file.

“Anything else?” she asked, somewhat sarcastically.

I said I’d let her know. She thought I was being cute and hung up.

Strike . . . Shoot. I didn’t even know what number I was on anymore. Four? Five?

I pulled up my timeline.

Four weeks ago, Alonso White walked out of the Outreach Center and was never seen again. Two weeks after that, Jayden Cavett’s body was found in New Jersey. The following week, NYPD found a pair of homeless junkies in Brighton with near-identical symptoms. A couple days later, I sent out my health alert. Then the five Chinese immigrants. Then “Alvin.”

They were coming faster now. And I’ll be damned if I could see a connection. I had exactly one lead. I took a deep breath. I grabbed my cell and called Dr. Pratt. He even answered.

“What’s the good word?” I asked.

“We were about to call you.” I heard him talking to someone in the background. “Are you sitting down?” he asked.

“What?”

“Stomach contents were inconclusive. But all five of your vics were suffering a raging infection.”

“I noticed.”

“It wasn’t anything I’d seen before. And since you were so nice and patient, I took micrographs and emailed them to a colleague of mine at Columbia, who about shit himself.” I heard laughing. “He’s here with me now. Had to see it for himself.”

“See what?”

“Are you sitting down?” he repeated. “Mycena lucifera. It’s a fungus. Grows on animal tissue. Highly luminescent when flowering, and extremely toxic.”

“Luminescent? As in bioluminescent?” Some kinds of mushrooms glow in the dark, similar to fireflies and angler fish. There’s even a couple species native to North America.

“This one’s exceedingly rare,” he said. “Not discovered until 2009. Big mycology hunt in Venezuela.”

There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to say.

“You there?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“It flowers from the corpses of dead animals and emits a sweet stench, like rot.”

“To attract scavengers,” I said.

“To attract wasps,” he corrected.

Wasps.

That got my attention.

“The wasps walk on the flowering bodies and get covered in spores. They fly away. Sooner or later one of them stings an animal, depositing the spores under the skin, where the toxin kills the animal’s local immune response and allows the organism to get a foothold.”

“Jesus. You’re saying this is a predatory fungus.”

“That’s the theory. The fact is, no one’s seen anything like this before.” I heard him talking to his colleague again. “BUT . . . I’ll be damned if I could find any wasp stings on your dead illegals.”

“So how’d it get in in their system?”

“They appear to have eaten it.”

“Eaten?” I was scowling deeply. “Why would Chinese immigrants have eaten something like that? Where would they even have gotten it?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” he said with a chortle. “After the mycology came back, I reexamined the stomach contents. The mushrooms had been cut and cooked before being chewed and swallowed, so they looked completely ordinary. They were mixed with breading and carrots and peas. The toxin would have kicked in quickly. No more than a few hours. After that, they would’ve been in unspeakable pain. Nausea. Cramps. The works.”

After a while, it flowers. And so complete its life cycle.

Wicked.

I had been right. Partly. It was something exceedingly rare.

But I still didn’t know what to say.

“Scotch,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“We drink Scotch. Single malt.” As if I owed them.

“Well, have one for me,” I said.

The two men laughed and that was it.

I immediately hit the web portal again and found everything written on the species in a single search. It wasn’t much.

What we call a mushroom in everyday life is really just the fruiting body of the organism. The mushrooms on your lawn, for example, erupt from the filamentous network of fungal strands that grow in a wide area under the soil, breaking down and feeding on dead organic matter. The fruiting bodies erupt to spread the powdery spores through the air, similar to how dandelion seeds disperse on the breeze.

But if the mycologists are right, this fungus actually evolved a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive species of jungle wasp. It uses the wasp’s toxin to get a foothold, to spread its filaments under the flesh of the stung animal, at which point it begins releasing its own immunosuppressive cocktail. The animal eventually dies and the fruiting bodies erupt from the corpse, and the whole thing repeats. I’d never heard of anything like it. Just one more way the jungle can kill you, I guess. Along with piranhas and malaria.

Forty-five minutes later, I’d read everything there was on the species. I grabbed my computer and barged into Waxman’s windowless office. It was early afternoon.

“Hang up,” I said as I opened up my computer on his desk and took out my little USB projector.

He looked at me like I was crazy. He hit the mute button on the phone but kept the receiver at his ear so he could listen. “The press conference is in an hour.”

“We got it,” I said.

He looked at me like I was full of shit. “Folks from the mayor’s office are on this call,” he whispered, as if the phone weren’t muted.

I projected my laptop’s screen on his bare wall. It was on an odd angle at first.

Oliver stared at the image for a minute before his mouth fell open. Then he unmuted his phone. “Yeah, I’m gonna have to catch you all later.” He set the phone in the cradle. I could hear the overlapping exclamations from across the room. Then it was quiet.

“Okay.” I got excited. “It gets a little weird.” I brought up one of the web pages I had found.

He read the title. “A mushroom?” he said, scowling. “You want me to tell the mayor’s office that we’re looking for a carnivorous mushroom?”

That was not the response I was expecting. “Well . . .”

“The story on the evening news is about a seven-year-old boy,” he said. “My kid won’t even eat mushrooms on pizza.” He thought for a moment. “Although if they glowed in the dark she might.”

“You can’t believe this is a coincidence,” I said.

“Maybe not. But if you take this upstairs, with only the illegals, the first question you’re gonna get is how your theory applies to the kid, who is the only one anyone cares about right now. And your answer is: I don’t know. You need confirmation, Alex. A second case, at least.” He sighed. “Come on. You know this.”

I nodded. He was right, of course. I rubbed my beard, then my eyes under my glasses. I’d let my excitement get to me.

“You look tired,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You can’t move a city by yourself, you know. Everybody’s gotta do their bit.”

I leaned against the wall. “At some point, that becomes an excuse.”

He snort-laughed. “Maybe. But insulting the rest of us isn’t going to change anything. The hospital pumped the kid’s stomach, right? Go see if they found something similar. Then we can talk to Chalmers.”

“Yeah . . .”

“Come on. Don’t take it so hard.” He scowled at the projection. “Jesus. Carnivorous mushrooms. Where the hell does something like that come from anyway?”

I thought he was suggesting we might be able to track it from its source. I switched the screen again. A single picture in a scientific paper of an odd-shaped mushroom erupting from the deflated, furry corpse of a half-submerged capybara.

Waxman read the summary out loud like it was his own obituary. “ . . . native to the Amazon.”

“Is that significant?”

He stared. “Native to the Amazon,” he repeated.

“Ollie?”

He sat up. “Call the hospital. Ask them — ”

“You already said that.”

“Right. Then go write up a short summary. Right now.” He dug in his desk for his keys. “Don’t say you cracked it. Say you got a lead or a hypothesis or something. Email it out to the team. Let’s make sure your name is all over this one.” He stood.

“What about you?”

“It’s your theory. I don’t need any credit — ”

“No,” I interrupted. “I meant where are you going?”

“I gotta run out. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Run out? Five minutes ago I couldn’t pry your hands from the phone.”

Oliver grabbed his coat from the rack and scowled at me. “Just write the damned summary.”

“Aren’t you gonna need that?” I asked, pointing to the briefcase he had left on the other side of his desk. I bent over and lifted it, showing him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t remember the glasses on top of my head anymore.”

I held it out and he took it. “You don’t wear glasses.” I looked at him skeptically.

He saw my face. “What?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nothin’.”

He stopped in the hall. “Good job, by the way. You’re getting the hang of field work. It’s more about the personalities than the science.” And then he was gone.

I walked to my desk and grabbed my tablet — gift from my wife when I got the post-doc appointment. I brought up the Find My Phone app. I watched on the screen as a blue dot in front of the Department of Health building pulled away.

He must have taken a taxi.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult 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.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released. Or just leave a tip!

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Sarah Mclean

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Something had to give

7

I woke late to my phone ringing under my pillow. I reached for it.

Ollie.

“Well,” he grumbled, “you wanted something big, you bastard. You got it.”

I thought he meant the night before. I thought I’d be in trouble. “Just a flesh wound,” I said, looking at the bandage on the back of my hand.

“What? I mean case number ten. It just came through. Get this. Seven years old. I just got a visit from the boss.”

Dr. Chalmers didn’t come down to The Pit, as we called it — the windowless basement offices of the building — except for promotions and firings.

I sat up. “What’d she say?”

“Nothing. She asked where the hell you’ve been and told me the news.”

I looked at the clock. After 10:00. “When did it happen?”

After my little outing, I let the Jersey police know what I had found at the apartment complex. Then I went to the ER, which took most of the night.

“Boy was admitted to the hospital late last night,” he said. “I was about to head over. Thought you might like to join me.”

I told him I’d meet him there. I hung up.

Shit.

Seven years old.

I looked at my phone. I had unread messages. From Amber.

Dr. Massey.

     NO LUCK ON YET ON ALONSO FILE

HOW IS THE CASE GOING?

I looked around the room. I didn’t like waking up in the hotel. It was the worst part of my day. There was always that moment just after sleep but before I was fully conscious where it seemed like I was back home and my dirty clothes would be on the floor and Marlene would be making racket with my daughter in the bathroom.

But there was none of that.

If my wife had seen how I lived those months in New York, she probably would’ve been upset. It wasn’t just that it was clean, which the housekeeping staff saw to regularly. It was tidy. I picked up after myself like I never had at home. Mostly because I wasn’t taking turns feeding Marigold or putting her down. I wasn’t sneaking away to catch up on my reading, neglecting the dishes, because now I had time. All I had was time. And with no reason to hurry, there was no reason not to tidy up.

And I suppose some part of me knew that if I didn’t do it, no one would.

The effect, week after week, was to make the place look unlived in, and waking up to that — and the quiet — amplified my sense of isolation. I was always happy to step out of the elevator and back into the noise of the world.

I texted Dr. Massey from the train.

                                                                                      NOT WELL. THERE’S A NEW CASE

JUST GOT WORD. 7 YEARS OLD

She texted back right away.

     SEVEN?? THAT’S TERRIBLE!!!

Then, a few minutes later:

     I’LL HAVE JAIME CHECK STORAGE.

ALONSO FILE MIGHT HAVE BEEN

ACCIDENTALLY ARCHIVED

THANKS

I got off the train and moved to a different platform, heading northbound. I was waiting for the train when my phone dinged again.

     WHAT ABOUT YOU?

WHAT ABOUT ME?

KIDS ARE HARD

JUST CHECKING

YEAH

I had almost arrived at my destination when she finally asked.

     NEED A LITTLE SUPPORT?

GUESS WE’LL FIND OUT!

I walked into the hospital. Oliver was nowhere to be found, so I went right up.

We’re not supposed to use patients’ names — to protect their privacy. So I’ll call this little boy “Alvin.” Good kid. Stayed with a neighbor on those nights his mom worked a double shift. She could pick up extra money cleaning the big corporate offices in lower Manhattan, but only when there was a no-show and her employer was shorthanded. She’d work most of the night, get three hours’ sleep, and be back at her day job the following morning.

“Alvin” came home to the babysitter’s apartment, just down the hall from his own, and said he was tired and didn’t feel good. He said he wasn’t hungry. He fell asleep on the couch. Woke up later to vomit. It happens. Kids get sick, as any parent knows. When he did it again and lost consciousness, the neighbor called his mom, who rushed home and found him catatonic. He got lucky and was admitted to a good hospital sometime after midnight. None of the adults had any idea where he’d been playing around the public housing block they called home.

By the time I saw him, he was isolated behind a plastic barrier, which was unnecessary. But then I suspect it had psychological value — for the staff, maybe. He looked blighted, like he was suffering an Old Testament plague. His skin was turning to ash right there in the hospital bed. He was wheezing. His gums were weeping. His hair had thinned to a sparse brown fuzz. His eyes were cracked open, and I could see them turning deliriously under his lids. His young mother was hunched over his bright, starched sheets like a nun at prayer. She had plump cheeks and colorful beads in her hair. She’d tucked his bedding so tight it pinned him down. Like she was worried he might float away. She dabbed the drool from his mouth with a damp cloth.

I picked up a small stuffed bear that had fallen to the floor. She smiled at me weakly then, with bloodshot, too-dry eyes. As if she’d cried all she could. I smiled back and set the bear next to some flowers on a side table. The little card poking from the top of the bouquet suggested they were from her employer. APEX Commercial Cleaning. It was, I imagined, a programmed response from a human resources staffer who had never met this woman. Or her dying son.

Organ failure is sort of like having a body full of wobbling dominoes. As the liver starts to go, toxins build up in the blood, putting more stress on the kidneys and the GI tract and the rest. If they’re damaged as well, the body struggles keep up, and all it takes is one more good jolt and the dominoes start to fall.

After a few moments, Oliver appeared at the door and waved me into the hall. “Chalmers has our colleagues going over the housing complex right now,” he said in a whisper.

I turned back to the room. I shook my head. “They’re not gonna find anything.”

“Oh? And here I thought I was the veteran and you were the rookie.”

Oliver was from a middle-class neighborhood in Rhode Island. I didn’t feel like explaining the ghetto to him. “If it’s not a waste of time, then why aren’t you up there?”

“Someone’s gotta keep an eye on you.”

I made a face. “And there’s no one straighter.”

“You wanna tell me what happened?” He motioned to the bandaged cut on my hand, and then to the dark bruise on the side of my face.

“Fell down some stairs.”

“Doing what?”

“My job,” I answered.

“We should get going.” He motioned to the elevators and started walking. “Did you find anything while you were out working hard?”

“Not yet.”

“Ever the optimist,” he quipped.

“I could be a callous cynic like you.”

“I’ll have you know that Cynicism was a proud school of ancient Greek philosophy.”

“Oh yeah? What is it now?”

He smiled and hit the down button. “You sure do know how to make problems. Day before yesterday, I thought I had a shot at getting caught up this week.”

“Make?”

“I meant find.” He looked at me again and saw something he didn’t like. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Why? Worried?”

“Maybe.” He studied my face. “Kid’s gonna die, you know. You need to be ready for that.”

I scowled and turned to make sure the boy’s mother hadn’t followed us and overheard. “Fuck, man . . . we just walked out of his room.” I felt like I had to whisper.

He didn’t. “All the more reason for you to face it.” Once a child died, he said, the whole city would go nuts. Parents would pull their kids out of school. There’d be calls. Probably an inquest — after the dust settled. “If it gets worse, maybe even charges.”

“Charges?”

“Negligence. For starters.”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s politics. It’s about the threat and getting the story on the news, where it damages opinions, more than the real chance of conviction. But if it sticks, all the better.”

The elevator dinged and I walked away, down a different hall.

“Where you going?” he called, hand on the door.

“Somewhere I can think.”

“Chalmers wants us at the housing complex with the others,” he called. “I’m supposed to bring you.”

“Tell her I fell down some stairs.”

I stopped around the corner and checked my email. I wanted the preliminary report on the undocumented Chinese to be waiting in my inbox with a nice little note from ME. But there was nothing. Not even an acknowledgment of the request I had sent the day before. Just a passive-aggressive note from Tucker Davis, PhD, updating me on yesterday’s activities. All samples were at the lab. Nothing noticeably out of the ordinary.

I saw my message app.

I opened it.

I tapped the phone icon next to Amber’s name.

She answered almost immediately. “Hey, you. I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah.”

She waited a moment for me to elaborate. When that didn’t come, she said “Well, I guess now we know the answer to my question.”

“Just . . . Do me a favor and tell me I’m not screwing this up.”

She made a noise like that was the stupidest thing she ever heard. “Oh please, you are not screwing this up. You’re busting your ass! They are so lucky to have you.”

I felt weak and stupid for calling.

“You can’t do it by yourself,” she said.

“I’m not. There’s a whole team over at — ”

“That’s not what I meant. And you know it.”

I paced in a circle in the hall, head low. I ran my fingers through my beard.

“Look. Kids are the hardest.” She said it like she had experience. “You need someone to talk to. If not about the little boy, then about anything and everything else. Just so you can feel normal and get up the next day and keep fighting. Okay?”

I nodded. As if she could see me.

“I still owe you dinner,” she said.

Amber had offered dinner and a little tour around the city at our second encounter. I had politely demurred.

But I hadn’t said no.

“Please?” she said. “We’re both adults. It’s just fucking dinner.”

I knew that was a joke. It wasn’t like her to swear.

“I don’t know if I can get off tonight,” I explained. “Sounds like we might be working late.”

“Tomorrow then.” She wasn’t gonna let me put her off a third time. “My treat.”

I was going to argue that, but she cut me off. “Don’t you dare, Doctor.”

“I thought I wasn’t a real doctor,” I said. “I’ll text you. Later. After I figure out my schedule. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. And, you know, call before then if you need to.”

“Thanks.” I hung up and looked at my phone again.

Down the hall, a man was arguing with a nurse about his sick wife. I couldn’t get the details, but I could tell he was very good at it. Well practiced at being the squeaky wheel. Probably because he needed to be.

I turned around and walked back to the boy’s room. His mother was still there. No one else dared get close. They seemed like such a lonely pair. I knocked gently.

She turned.

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” I said. “My name’s Dr. Alexander, by the way.” I held out my hand.

She took it. “Nicki.” She seemed so young. “You don’t look like a doctor,” she said.

I smiled. Spiky hair. Bushy beard. Thick-rimmed glasses. Jeans. “You got me. I’m not a real doctor,” I explained. “I’m an epidemiologist.”

I nodded toward her son, like she should look.

She turned and she caught the drool that was running. “A what?” she asked.

I thought about how to explain it. “Doctors worry about the health of their patients. Epidemiologists worry about the health of the community. The folks here are trying to make him better. I’m trying to find what made him sick.”

I waited to see if that made sense, but she gave no indication. “I don’t suppose you could share a picture of your son.”

She looked at me. It took only a second, but I knew I was getting the lie detector test. Folks from a certain part of town grow up with a healthy suspicion of everyone. They have to. Because everyone has a hustle.

I must have passed because she reached to her purse on the floor and produced a phone. The particular model she owned was at least five years old — bought for pennies second-hand, probably. Maybe from a store. Maybe off the street. The screen was badly cracked, but it worked.

Like most parents, she had no shortage of photos. She scrolled through them, one after the other. “How many you want?” She asked, making fun of herself.

I showed her my phone. All pictures of Marigold. “Same.”

She smiled and turned the screen in my hand to see it better. “She pretty.”

I pointed to a photo in her gallery. It seemed like it had been taken by the boy’s school — a close-up of his face and torso. He was beaming. Big bright dimples on a brown cherub face.

She sent it via direct connection and I thanked her as earnestly as I could. I took a step back. It seemed like I should say more then, like ‘We’re gonna figure this out.’ But that felt like a lie. So instead I came back with the stock “We’re doing everything that can be done.”

She nodded.

I don’t think I passed that time. I excused myself and went right for the taxi stand.

I didn’t want to be a liar.

The cab dropped me in front of a building lined in aquamarine tile. Thin metal letters in a 1940s-style font were pinned to it.

CITY OF NEW YORK

OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER

I signed in and was admitted to a back office where a bespectacled woman named Shirley promised she’d be right with me. I was eventually taken to an older, more spartan office just outside one of the examination rooms. A white board covered in colored writing summarized the work in progress. There were at least two dozen bodies at various stages of the autopsy process. My five hadn’t even been added yet, but Shirley confirmed they had arrived and were in the lockers.

I waited by myself for another twenty minutes before a tall, balding, bearded man with a full protruding belly came in and introduced himself as Dr. Pratt. I shook his hand, which felt like it was twice as big as mine. I explained why I was there, and he told me that even if they put a rush on the work, it would take several days at least.

“I don’t need a full autopsy,” I said, trying not to sound frustrated. “At least not right away.” I had a damned good idea of what killed them. I just needed to know what they ate. “Stomach contents,” I said. “And blood work,” I added.

He scowled at me and said my request was duly noted. Dr. Pratt had the manners of a man who spent more time with the dead than the living. He walked to the back without a farewell. I heard the electric lock on the door click as it shut. There was a key pad next to it. No going that way. I was being brushed off.

I stormed into the hall and around to a long stretch of glass used for identification. That’s where the scared and grieving people stood when men like Pratt rolled up the gurney and pulled back the sheet and changed their lives forever. Right now it was empty. It smelled like old carpet.

There was a curtain on the other side of the window, but it wasn’t drawn. I saw Dr. Pratt in the middle of the room, his face buried in a clipboard.

I slammed my phone to the glass. “Alvin’s” smiling, dimpled face.

Dr. Pratt turned.

“Seven years old,” I said as loud as I could without yelling.

His eyes caught the picture for just a moment. He scowled and turned back to his work.

“He’s dying in a hospital,” I said. “Right now. The dead folks in that room with you can wait. He can’t.”

Pratt didn’t look at me. He kept checking boxes on his clipboard form. But he nodded slightly as if to say “All right, all right.”

“Thank you,” I called sternly through the glass. I knocked on it twice in solidarity and walked outside.

I realized just then how tired I was. My knee still hurt from the day before. I felt queasy and realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I’d even foregone my mandatory morning cup of coffee.

I sat on the curb. I still had my phone in my hand and I flipped through pictures of my daughter. I read an email from my wife that included the direct number to Mom’s hospital room and a mostly patient reminder that I said I’d call. People came and went around me and didn’t pay any mind. Everything was going on pretty much as it does.

So here’s the thing. Statistics works. There are a bunch of people in life who say it’s just a fancy way to lie, but it’s actually a really powerful tool. It can be abused. That’s true. But then that’s true of any tool. We don’t burn baseball bats every time some asshole takes one to his wife’s lover. The thing about statistics that gets it into trouble is that it’s not as intuitive as a baseball bat, and regular people tend not to trust anything that can’t be grasped squarely with two hands.

By the numbers, whatever I was chasing could only be one of two things: something completely new to science, which was extremely unlikely — on the order of winning the Powerball — or an oversight, something so rare we just hadn’t considered it. Case #1, Alonso White, was missing. Cases #2 and #3 were dead and buried. It would take a court order to have them exhumed. Jayden Cavett was the responsibility of the State of New Jersey and didn’t have a New York case number. And anyway they’d already cremated her. They don’t fool around these days. It costs upwards of $200 (or more) just to show up and claim a body from the coroner. Burial and funeral expenses fall on top of that. That’s more than some folks can afford.

That meant we only had the little boy and the Chinese immigrants.

And I was out of ideas.

Something had to give.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018.

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You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta

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The worst part isn’t that Alvin died

6

The worst part isn’t that Alvin died. The worst part was that Mom and I never really talked about it. People can get over a trauma. If they deal. But we never did. Mom would never say it, but it was a lot easier for her to raise one son by herself than two. I hear working class folks say stuff like “I didn’t know we went without until I was older.” But if you’re poor, you know. When you’re a kid and you wake up hungry and there’s not a scrap of food in the house, you know. When your mom tries to hide the food stamps in the checkout line, you know.

And then, all of a sudden, there was one less mouth. I’m sure the guilt of that, the unwanted feelings of relief, ate at Mom every day. She soldiered on as best she could. But I could tell something had broken inside her. Something permanent. She started using more. And gambling. I think after so much trouble — one man in prison and another leaving and losing a son and getting hurt so bad she couldn’t work — she felt she had one big win coming. That she was owed it. That if she had faith and played long enough, God would see her through. Her number would hit. It had to.

At first it was pocket money. She’d save up what she could and spend a Saturday afternoon playing quarter slots at the Indian casino across the border in Alabama. After a while, she started carving out twenty dollars here and there from the grocery money. I’d come home from school and get scolded for buying the wrong kind of cereal or getting the good bread. She’d tell me I was selfish and then snap her mouth shut, like she’d just stopped short of comparing me with Alvin, who would never do such a thing.

A dead boy is an angel. You can’t compete. I know. I tried. All through high school I tried. I tried to do everything right. To win Mom’s praise. Maybe even make her feel better. She just seemed so tired all the time. Especially after nights at the casino, three hours away. She’d come back with grocery money and show it to me and say “See?” Like everything was justified.

“I’m gonna quit now,” she’d say. “You’ll see.”

But I knew. By then I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew the difference between a good day at the slots, when she’d come home high and happy, and a good “night” after. Those weren’t the same.

A boy grows to hate his mom for something like that.

Then he starts to dream about getting out.

Mom had been told she had dyslexia when she was a girl. I’m not sure who said it, but I know in her mind it became the reason why she could never do good in school or never get a better job, so it was always real important to her that I make something of myself. She was so relieved the day I got a basketball scholarship to a little college in Ohio. By then it was clear she and I couldn’t live together anymore. Not and stay mother and son.

I thought moving out would fix things. But still we never talked about Alvin. No one even told me how he died. I just assumed. I assumed Curtis Wilson and his crew had caught up to him somehow. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized how stupid that was, that an illiterate fifteen-year-old and his boys weren’t going to steal a car and drive out to the boonies of rural North Carolina, away from everyone and everything they knew, for . . . what? In their eyes, they’d already won. They were kings.

So I called Mom from school. “You never told me what happened to my brother.”

I could hear her shaking her head through the phone.

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

The phone went down and Cliff, Mom’s new boyfriend from the casino, came on to yell at me for making her cry, and who did I think I was, Mr. Uppity College Degree, and he had a mind to drive up there and whoop my ass.

“You ain’t got no car, asshole.” I hung up.

When Cliff left a few years later, Mom hit bottom. She never came back. And I stopped bringing it up.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018.

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You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta

The next chapter is here: (not yet posted)

cover image by Billelis

Introduction to the story:

One of the hallmarks of traditional detective fiction is that the detective doesn’t really change. He — it’s almost always a man — might see his hopes for a bright future raised and then dashed, but fundamentally, Hercule Poirot is the same obsessive compulsive gentleman in each case, Sherlock the same eccentric genius, Philip Marlowe the same sarcastic asshole.

The lives of the people the detective encounters, however, are changed completely. In fact, they’re often devastated! What’s more, since it’s the intricate, personal details of people’s lives that create the motive for murder, the detective, as an outsider, has to eat his way in, like a worm into an apple.

This often requires some unusual plot gyrations. Agatha Christie’s typical solution was to have an “old friend” of Poirot — no one the reader has ever seen or heard before, of course, but an “old friend” all the same — invite the detective to dinner at his remote estate where all the guests are intimately familiar with each other, except the infamous detective. In Murder on the Orient Express, she goes one step further and makes it a sheer fluke that brings Poirot to the scene.

Raymond Chandler did the same kind of thing in The Long Goodbye, but rather than using the old friend bit, he simply manufactures Marlowe a new friend in the opening chapters and asks us to believe they instantly become bosom buddies. Introducing a long lost love is also popular, or a wayward relative, but whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same. Anyone who had any real emotional connection to the dramatic events in the story would be irrevocably changed by them and so couldn’t appear again in the next book!

FEAST OF SHADOWS is a kind of detective story, but an atypical one. First, it’s a supernatural mystery. Magic and the occult are vital to the story. But it also has an unusual structure. It’s told in five courses, as in a meal, from the standpoint of the people who are affected, even devastated, by the events of each mystery. There’s still a “detective” of course, and each narrator encounters him, but he moves in and out of the action (as seen by them) while they desperately try to fix their lives.

This approach changes less than you might think. For example, the classic detective often has his “regulars” who assist him . Where would Nero Wolfe be without Archie Goodwin? Or Poirot without Captain Hastings? As established agents of the detective, these characters can appear out of nowhere with vital information, or just in time to stop a bullet. In fact, authors typically send their detectives’ agents on secret errands, often near the end of the story, for that exact reason. The mission is intentionally kept from the reader so that we can be surprised by the dramatic reveal, where we wouldn’t be if we knew what the detective was up to. In other words, sometimes a mystery works best when we don’t know what the detective is up to.

The first courses of this book also borrow heavily from the thematic and structural elements of classic detective fiction, and in chronological order. The first course is narrated by a “doctor” (a PhD in this case) who meets an eccentric genius and has an unusual adventure, hearkening back to Arthur Conan Doyle. The second course is narrated by a down-on-her-luck young woman caught between various parties trying to get their hands on an ancient artifact (here, a dagger), hearkening back to Dashiell Hammett.

Starting in the 1960s and 70s, solving crimes required more and more forensic evidence, meaning to stay current, detectives need access to the resources of the state, and so the number of fictional PIs (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer) began to decline and the number of police officers (Inspector Imanishi, DI Rebus, Harry Bosch, Clarice Starling) to increase. The third course, then, is narrated by a policewoman and has the structure of a traditional police procedural.

The fourth course is narrated by a little boy and so brings us to contemporary fiction, with it’s emphasis on magical realism and “alternative” protagonists. The fifth brings them all together. With each, the reader learns a little bit more about the mysterious “detective” and the grander mystery that links all five courses into one, the feast of shadows.

 

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Prepare the Way

5

I went to a diner and asked for a booth at the back. I ordered pie and coffee and called my wife. Video chat. She answered and I asked to see my daughter and her big head of frizzy hair. I missed her. She showed me the picture book she’d been reading with her mother. Something about a cat and a magpie. She showed me one of the pages and explained that the magpie was the black-and-white one and that it was one of the smartest animals in the world.

Then she finished her sentence and without pause said “Okay, bye Daddy!” and set the phone down.

I laughed.

My wife picked it up. She was smiling, too. But it faded pretty quick. She looked at me. “She can’t keep calling here.”

“I know.”

“I get why you don’t want to tell her about everything. But you at least have to talk to her. About something. You can’t keep giving that job to me. It’s not fair.”

I nodded.

Mom had been in and out of the hospital for years. She was only 58, but then, that’s what years of drug abuse will do. She swore she was dying each and every time. She was always a lot to deal with. Especially after Cliff left. He was her third husband, the one she met at the casino. I wanted to feel sorry for her, to help, but she made it so damned hard. She was mean. I didn’t mind the awful things she said to me. But my wife . . .

Mom slapped my daughter’s hand once, when she was barely old enough to walk. It wasn’t hard, but it made Marlene hella mad. She tried to be diplomatic, but Mom is so damned sensitive. She said some things about Marlene that are hard to take back.

Not that she ever tried.

Half the time Mom was around, I felt like a hostage negotiator. The rest of the time, the hostage. She, on the other hand, had no problems speaking her mind, no matter the damage, and walking out the door like it was no big deal.

And she’d never talk about Alvin.

“Don’t you say his name!”

I went to a professional for awhile. Before my dissertation defense. I thought talking about everything might help with my marriage. He urged me to take care of myself before anything, which was a nice way of saying I should cut Mom loose, emotionally. I just didn’t know that I could do that. To my own mother. She didn’t have anyone else. Not a single soul.

Now she was back in the hospital and calling the house every eight hours looking for me.

“Please,” Marlene said on the screen. I knew that look. I knew that voice.

I nodded. “I hear ya. Gotta go. L — ” I stopped. Almost said it. Out of habit. ‘Love you.’

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

I was dodging. It’s true. But I couldn’t deal with Mom right then. She could wait until the morning.

I pulled out my tablet and read everything I had on Alonso White. The mere fact that there were a couple articles in the paper meant the case had gotten some attention. He was something of a local saint, which meant the police had taken his disappearance seriously. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could add, especially so late in the game.

I moved to the next case file. I had called my colleagues across the river in New Jersey two weeks before and gotten them to email me the autopsy of 19-year-old Jayden Cavett. There were pictures inside taken when she was alive, along with those of her corpse. Pretty white girl. Shoulder-length hair, bleached and colored pink at the tips. Damned skinny though. Sunken eyes. Definitely looked like a user. Not smiling. One of her nostrils was pierced and there were about two dozen rings running up the sides of her ears. When she was found, she was wearing a commercial cassette tape as a necklace. She had a thick chain looped through the holes. “Operation: Mindcrime” by Queensrÿche. Cause of death: heroin overdose.

I worked for the Federal government, and official government policy is that drugs are a law enforcement issue, that the best use of taxpayer dollars is police officers with guns rather than doctors or public health officials, and that the best way to stop the epidemic is to choke the supply at the border and incarcerate users, casual or not.

Which do you think is cheaper, by the way: long-term incarceration or outpatient treatment?

Something like 40–50,000 people overdose every year in the U.S. For comparison, around 30,000 die in automobile accidents. But that wasn’t always the case. People used to die in car accidents a lot more. But seventy years of common-sense safety regulation have resulted in a near-constant decrease in automobile-related deaths, even as the population went up and there were more and more cars on the road.

The War on Drugs, on the other hand, has been raging for decades, and the rate of overdose — not just the absolute number, mind you, but the rate per 1,000 people — reaches a new all-time high every few years. Jayden Cavett’s addiction had followed a typical course. She was arrested last year with her then-boyfriend, 24-year-old Chris Bonn, for possession of crystal meth. The pair had brought the drug to a rave and were spotted by plainclothes officers stalking the crowd. But it wasn’t her first offense. Jayden had been sexually assaulted by her step-father when she was thirteen. Jayden’s mother took some convincing, however, and didn’t divorce the guy for another 22 months, which meant Jayden spent almost two years living side-by-side with her rapist. Mom tried to make up for it by buying Jayden her first bag of weed. The pair apparently argued constantly, and Jayden left at age 17.

At the time of the concert, Jayden was working as a waitress at a bar and grill, a big corporate chain that had a ‘zero tolerance’ drug policy. After being released on bond, she was subsequently fired. With a pending conviction and no job, Jayden had to move in with a friend, but that didn’t last long and she ended up sleeping on the couch in her mother’s apartment. Only life with Mom was just as difficult as ever, maybe more so, and the stress and shame pushed Jayden deeper into an already festering addiction. She left home on November 9th to buy drugs and was never seen again.

Her body was found two weeks later outside a gas station bathroom. She had large amount of heroin in her system and dried blood under her nose. The autopsy revealed several irregularities. Her forearms were crisscrossed in thin, fresh scratches that ran around the much older puncture marks over her veins, and large swathes of her hair had fallen out. It wasn’t pulled. There was no trauma to the scalp. It had just fallen out. And her white blood cell count was life-threateningly low.

But then, drugs are a messy business. Since they’re sold by raw weight — rather than by regulated dose — dealers often cut their supply to increase the street value, and it’s not unusual for a busy coroner to find all kinds of anomalies. An average bag of cocaine, for example, is likely to be 25–30% pure, which means it’s 70–75% something else. But since dealers are not particularly intelligent people, law enforcement agencies have found all kinds of crazy additives, from common items like maple syrup and chlorine bleach to more “exotic” stuff like elephant sedatives and even anthrax.

Of those forty or fifty thousand Americans who overdose every year, almost two thousand come from the greater metropolitan area of New York — about six per day, on average, across jurisdictions. But of course it doesn’t come evenly like that. Some days there’s none. Some days there’s twelve. Jayden was the fourth OD that day in Jersey alone. Police did a canvas of the area around the gas station, but predictably no one had seen anything, and so the “investigation” into Jayden Cavett’s death ended on the coroner’s table. Her body was never claimed, and she was cremated by the state.

Dr. Chalmers called while I was at the diner. My phone rang as my head was turned and I was staring at a white paper takeout bag two tables over. I got up and asked if I could see the bottom. They looked at me like I was nuts, but they complied.

Black circle with the letters CE.

Sold all over the city apparently. I sighed.

“Thanks,” I said.

I was getting nowhere.

I paid my bill and took a train across the river and a city bus to the gas station where Jayden had been found. It was a typical corporate joint — no mechanic or oil change bay or anything like that. Just a convenience store in the center with exterior-facing bathrooms on one side. That’s where she’d been found. Sitting against the wall between the men’s and women’s bathroom. The police had interviewed the staff. In the wee hours of the morning, no one had seen anything.

But the covered pumps were well lit — owners were worried about crime, I suppose — and the bathrooms blocked the view from one side of the convenience store, meaning that, from anywhere inside, there was only one way to look out. If Jayden had come that way, she would’ve been spotted, especially looking like she did, which suggested she had to come from the back, where she was found.

I stood in front of the bathrooms. Someone had done a poor job removing a swath of graffiti. The doors were metal. Heavy. And locked. To use them, you needed to get a key from the staff. I think that’s where she was going. To the bathroom. When she realized she couldn’t get in, she collapsed against the wall and never got up.

I turned around. I scanned everything in view slowly.

An 80s-era four-story office building with a high wall around the car park.

A 24-hour laundromat.

A kebab joint.

A pay-by-hour lot.

Straight ahead, across the street and one block back, was an abandoned apartment complex. Looked like it was in the middle of being demolished. There was a fence, but it had been broken through and bent in several places. Inside were three identical blocks, parallel to each other, each two stories tall. Their lower halves was covered in faux stone, which was falling off in rectangular panels. Their upper halves were all shingled, like they used to do back in the 70s, except for where the windows poked through. Most of those were boarded. Demolition had started. I saw a pair of those giant movable trash bins they roll in for renovation projects — big metal monstrosities that get dropped off and hauled away by semi. Pieces of broken drywall poked up at an angle. Looked like they’d been there for a while, exposed to repeated bouts of rain and sun.

I crossed the street and squeezed through the fence. Each of the three buildings on the lot had an open stairway at the middle. From there, residents could turn right or left into the central hallways that led to the individual units on the first or second floors. The roof of the first structure had been torn down by a backhoe, or so it seemed. The whole front of the building had been ripped open. There was no way in. I walked to the second. The aluminum gate that blocked the central alcove was locked. But it was old and worn. I grabbed the bars and shook and it rattled loudly.

I stepped back. I figured it wouldn’t take much to get it open.

There was a long, U-shaped metal bar in the debris — bent, but workable — and I wedged it between the gate and the wall. I pulled. When that didn’t work, I pressed hard against it. Still didn’t work. I took off my bag and bounced against the bar, over and over, with my arms out, using my momentum to increase the force of my weight. Harder and harder and harder. I gritted my teeth. I growled. It felt good. Like letting off steam. Harder and harder.

It snapped. The metal bar tore the back of my hand as I flew forward into the faux-stone siding. My cheek got scraped pretty bad. It stung when I touched it. I twisted my knee as I fell. And I felt like an idiot. But it had worked. I hadn’t actually broken the lock, but I’d bent the aluminum catch for the deadbolt. I got up and touched my face again gingerly. That’s when I noticed my hand was bleeding. I had some tissues in my bag, and I held them firm over the wound as I walked up the steps.

The air smelled of stale urine and old wood, and there was a slight metallic tinge underneath, probably from the exposed pipes. Piles of debris had been left by the workers. Doors were either open or missing. Several walls were bare to the interior. Insulation hung unevenly from the ceiling. The whole thing reminded me of a roadside carcass that had yet to be scavenged clean.

I turned down the left hall — the floor occasionally bowing under my weight — and saw nothing but trash and waste. I turned and walked the opposite way. I was almost to the far end when I stopped suddenly.

I walked back.

Just past the third door from the center there was a long narrow hole, about knee high, where two boards had been knocked out. The wood was thin. It was also old and dry. The splinters were bent outward. Toward the hall. All the other debris bent in, as if the workers had been standing in the rooms with hooks, pulling it all down.

I knelt and looked closer.

Tiny wisps of longish hair were snagged between the splinters. I reached in and pinched them between my thumb and forefinger. I brought the strands to my eyes. Light color. Tipped in pink.

I looked through the hole. Why would she squeeze herself through such a small space? I could barely get a leg through, let alone the rest of me. But Jayden Cavett was petite and emaciated. Still, the struggle had clearly left its mark on her arms. It couldn’t have felt good. Especially in her condition. She must have really wanted to get out.

The door to the room was wide open. But that’s not to say it had been. Had someone locked her inside?

I walked in. A pair of old mattresses had been fixed over the windows. Along with the boards on the exterior, they blocked most of the afternoon light — all except a thin shaft that snuck in at the top. The mattresses probably muffled sound as well. Brown wall peeked from irregularly torn wallpaper. Over it, someone had recently spray-painted three big words in yellow-green:

PREPARE THE WAY

Underneath was a symbol: an upside down triangle offset with swooping curves tipped in little circles.

I snapped a picture with my phone. I looked again. I reached up to touch it. But stopped. I felt like I was being watched.

I turned my head and listened.

Nothing. It was quiet. Not even the distant rumble of a passing car.

I caught movement. Something small. Behind me.

I turned all the way around.

There was a jagged hole in the opposite wall, about chest height. It didn’t go through. It just exposed the interior space, which was dark enough that I couldn’t see anything. A wasp walked along the lip. Another flew out of it, lazily, and landed on the ceiling. I saw its antennae move and its wings twitch as it crawled.

I scowled. There are all different kinds of wasps in the world. Not all of them have wings, but they’re all nasty, vicious creatures — aggressive and armed. Wasps account for four of the six most painful stings in the world, and unlike bees, which sacrifice themselves for the hive, wasps don’t die after stinging you. They can go right on doing it. Over and over and over.

Many species of wasp hunt benign or outright helpful species like bees and ants, while others live as parasites. In some species, the female wasps use the barb on their abdomen to inject their eggs into the bodies of caterpillars, which get eaten alive by the babies from the inside out. Still others are vampires, living entirely off the blood of the creatures they paralyze and drain.

Two more insects flew lazily out of the gap. They seemed oblivious to my presence. They were busy preparing for winter. They had nothing to fear from me.

That hole, though.

Dark. Still.

I had the most uncanny feeling then.

I remembered my brother Alvin. And a shed near a corn field.

I heard a creak in the hall.

I turned my head and listened again.

But there was either nobody there, or they were doing the same as me — breathing shallow, trying not to make a sound.

A minute passed like that. Then two. My legs were getting stiff. My sore knee burned. But I didn’t dare shift my weight.

Three minutes. Four.

I took a single step.

Nothing.

I took another. I listened by the door. I peered around the frame. Slowly.

But the hall was empty.

I let my shoulders drop in relief. For all of two seconds. Then I got the hell outta there.

 

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You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta

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I had one lead

4

I had one lead, and it came from my only friend in the entire city. I watched her sort the stacks of identical plastic trays that filled the back of the delivery van. Meals on Wheels. The trays were empty. Sanitized. Just returned from the commercial wash.

I nodded to the load. “I thought you were a doctor.” It was a joke. To an M.D., us Phds aren’t “real” doctors.

She laughed sarcastically. “Yeah, well, we do it all here.”

Amber Massey, MD, had sandy brown hair that she tucked behind her ears, a pert nose, bright blue eyes, and a once-athletic build that now hovered, like so many of us, on the unhealthy side of fit. She was originally from Waco but had gone to school on the East Coast. Shortly after completing her residency, she joined the Urban Outreach Center in the Bronx with the idea of spending a few years giving back to the poor and unfortunate before settling into a career as a general practitioner in her native Texas. That was five-going-on-six years ago.

I knew her because she was the first physician to report a live case — as in, a patient that hadn’t died. As far as we knew anyway. A man named Alonso White.

Unfortunately, Alonso was missing.

“We’re staffed mostly with volunteers,” she said. “Like Jaime here.” Dr. Massey smiled at a skinny teenager who shuffled enthusiastically down the steps and stuck out her arms for more trays. “We’re luckier than most, though. We have some wealthy benefactors who like to use us as a tax write-off. Keeps the clinic going, at least. Most of the food is donated from area grocers. Stuff that’s about to go bad.”

“So give me something to do,” I urged.

“Please! You’re doing enough.” She lifted a stack of trays so large I wasn’t sure she could see around them and turned for the back door of the center.

I shifted the bag strapped over my shoulder, grabbed a much smaller stack, and followed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on!” she objected with a snort. “You think anyone in this city would have cared about a crop of dead illegals if not for that alert you sent? Stop selling yourself short. You’re the only one in the entire DoH who gives a shit. About any of it.” She shook her head and added softly, “What are they gonna do when you leave at the end of the month?”

I followed her into a long carpeted room where a group of volunteers, mostly women, were checking, sorting, and counting the trays. There was a small stack in the corner with pink instead of gray lids.

“Trust me,” I said. “You’re the only one who’s gonna be sad to see me go.”

Opposite the tray-sorting line were two long tables with empty lunch bags — bleached white paper, like I’d seen in the basement of the Chinese grocer. “What are those?” I asked.

“The meals in trays” — she pointed — “get delivered to the elderly and homebound. The bag lunches we hand out from the back of the center to whoever comes. Until we run out.”

“How long does that take?” I walked over and lifted one of the bags. Black circle on the bottom with the letters CE.

Amber gave some instructions to young Jaime, who scurried off to complete them, before walking over to me. “Not long. But don’t change the subject. I am going to be sad. Which reminds me, my offer still stands.”

I scowled.

“Whatever,” she scoffed. “You can’t go back to the hotel and watch porn every night.”

A plump woman with cornrows, late-40s, was sitting at the table nearest me. She smirked and turned away.

“You busy later?” I asked her with a smile.

She looked me up and down wearing that smirk. “Mmm-hmm . . .”

Amber had already walked into the hall, and I hurried to follow. “It is getting a little boring watching the same flick every night.”

“They only have one?”

“With black girls, yeah.”

“Ouch!”

That was another running joke. She knew I had a mixed marriage.

Dr. Massey led me through the center and around a corner to the clinic side, where a pair nurses sat before computers and completed federal claims forms, one after the next. She bent over a wide file cabinet. It was open and stuffed tight with color-tabbed files. She had to grunt just to separate them enough to leaf through.

“Let’s see . . . Alonso, Alonso, Alonso. Where are you?”

Fifty-four-year-old Alonso White had been a colleague of Dr. Massey’s, of sorts. He was a clinical counselor by trade but worked as a community organizer in Spanish Harlem, and occasionally in the Bronx. He volunteered regularly — not just at the Urban Outreach Center but also at area churches and food banks — and had dreams of going into politics. Dr. Massey noticed he didn’t look well and asked him to stay late one evening. Alonso mentioned he’d been feeling nauseated and weak since the day before, and that some of his hair had come out in the shower. His chest and forearms were flushed. Amber urged him to go to the ER but said he was noncommittal.

“He’s a workaholic,” she had explained at our first meeting, “like a lot of us in the trenches. There’s just never enough hours in the day, even to do the minimum. You always go home to a warm bed having left someone else in the cold.”

Alonso had thanked her for her concern and left and that was it. Shortly thereafter, his extended family reported him missing. He wasn’t married and had no children, other than the dozens he had mentored throughout his life. I was hoping to get Dr. Massey’s notes and lab results. Now that I had official approval to work the case, I needed to build a database.

I watched her scowl as she shuffled through the over-stuffed cabinet.

“Data entry is a low budget priority,” she said without turning. Then after a moment, “That’s odd.”

“What?”

She looked around. She lifted a stack of files on the printer and flipped through them. “It’s not here.” She stood and rested her hands on her full hips.

After several more minutes, she recruited help from the others, and it was clear that the clinic was understaffed.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea where he could’ve gone.” I asked.

She sighed and ran her hands through her hair in frustration. It fell in front of her lips. “We didn’t even know he was missing until later. Like I said, he mostly worked East Harlem. When we found out, we were all pretty broken up about it. He was one of the good ones. He did a lot of work with at-risk kids. There’s no telling how many he got off the streets.” She crossed her arms across her chests, which pushed up her cream-colored breasts.

I tried not to look.

Young Jaime appeared in the door and said there was a problem with the tray count.

Amber covered her mouth and sighed in frustration. “I’ll be right there.” She looked at me apologetically.

I smiled and nodded and showed myself out, fiddling with my wedding ring the whole way. I walked through the front doors and down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk. There was already a line forming at the corner of the building. It looked like those old pictures you see from the 1930s — guys queued up for a bowl of soup, or to see if there was any work that day. A police car rolled past and the officers inside scanned the line of people on the sidewalk. Most turned away. It seemed like cheating to me, like hunting for deer at a feed stand. I watched the patrol car roll around the corner and drive off slow.

I took Detective Rigdon’s card out of my pocket and gave him a call. He answered and I told him who I was.

“Southern boy,” he said. “We’ve just about wrapped it up here. Your guy is still going through the boxes, though. He didn’t seem very happy you weren’t around.”

Tucker would get over it. I explained my problem.

“One missing person? Out of the whole city?” He said it as politely as he could.

“I’m ambitious.”

He laughed.

I told him I didn’t mind doing the legwork. I just needed a place to start. He gave me a name. Officer Stacy Ruggieri, Missing Persons.

“She can give you whatever we have. Just don’t get your hopes up. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, “the interpreter finally showed up and I have to finish thoroughly interviewing the old Chinese couple.”

My turn to laugh.

It took twenty minutes of navigation through the NYPD switchboard before I finally reached the right desk. Ruggieri had the competent directness of a woman who knew her job and was happy to help as long as you knew yours and didn’t waste her time. It wasn’t long before I tripped that threshold. She said pretty much the same thing as Rigdon, but she at least agreed to pull together a brief and get it off to me as soon as she could.

I thanked her and ended the call.

Strike two.

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cover image: “Debtor’s End” by Piotr Jablonski

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The police had taped off one side of the street

3

The police had taped off one side of the street. A patrolman directed a white delivery van around, and it slowed as I passed. Someone had hand-painted an irregular box on the asphalt in front of the grocer, twice as long as the van, with three-foot letters that looked like they were drawn in crayon. NO PArKInG. Red paper lanterns hung over the road from a wire that zigzagged between buildings. I imagined they were there for the tourists, just like the trinket shop across the street, which had plastered every open space with red-on-yellow posters announcing they were going out of business. Everything 80% off. I’m sure they nabbed quite a few out-of-towners with that gag.

The grocery store where the bodies were found was a kind of co-op. The cluster of blue-and-white signs out front was completely in Chinese, except for the very bottom, which said “Frest Fruits & Vegetable’s.” A handful of uniformed police and some guys from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the bold letters ICE on the backs of their jackets — milled out front in two separate groups: smoking and nonsmoking.

Just down the road, a cluster of traditional Chinese oculists had each used the same eye symbol to announce their services. Some of the signs were flat to the store front. Others stuck out like a marquee. Some were high above the door. Others were at window level. All of them peered at me curiously through the paper lanterns as I stepped across the street.

An NYPD detective, African-American, nodded to me as I approached the yellow tape. “You the guy from DoH?” He was about like you’d expect. Loose suit. Thinning hair. Growing belly. Introduced himself as Rigdon. Seemed decent enough.

I shook his hand, which was far bigger than his height suggested. He had wedding band on one finger, a fat varsity ring on another, and a small gold cross around his neck.

“No sign of violence,” he explained as I followed him up the three short steps to the door. “The M.E. is thinking natural causes.”

The central walkway was flanked by two small stores on each side: a butcher, a grocer, a fishmonger, and a general store. It smelled like there’d been a fire. Roast duck hung by the neck in a glass case. Green and white produce was neatly stacked in wood crates. I saw a couple kinds of hairy fruit I didn’t recognize.

“All the way to the back.” He pointed. “The door to the stairs was unlocked when the ICE guys got here. We called it in and HQ said something about you guys asking for folks to be on the lookout for this kind of thing.”

Yay for bureaucracy.

At the back of the linoleum hall, just past the bubbling, open-topped aquariums full of swimming fish, were two wide open doors. The one on the right led to a staircase that went up. The one at the back was dark. A much less sturdy wood-plank staircase went steeply down to a basement.

Detective Rigdon stopped at the threshold.

“Any idea what it was used for?” I asked.

“Storage, it looks like. But we’re not sure. You guys aren’t the only ones late to the party. We’ve been waiting three hours for an interpreter.” He nodded to the produce shop, where a uniformed officer had detained the elderly grocer and his wife.

“Please take copious notes,” I urged. “Anything might be helpful. Anything at all.”

“Right,” he said. But his heart wasn’t in it. “You’ll need this.” He handed me a tubular LED flashlight, barely bigger than a pair of AA batteries. Then he waved a big hand to one of the techs, a man in a white body suit, booties, and blue latex gloves, who walked over and handed me a medical mask and gloves of my own.

“It’s not infectious,” I said.

“Bet your life?” Rigdon asked.

I dropped my shoulder bag by the door and put the mask over my beard. I started on the gloves as I walked down the dark steps. No one followed me. Disease does that to people. It’s never rational.

“You’re not coming?” I asked.

He snorted.

The single bare lightbulb suspended over the landing wasn’t enough for the steep staircase, let alone the cramped, 10 × 10 room at the bottom. I clicked the button on the flashlight and ran the beam over the stacks of cardboard boxes. Green Chinese lettering. Food products, it looked like. We’d have to catalog it all. I thought that sounded like a good job for someone who wasn’t lead on the case. Tucker, maybe.

I reached the uneven brick at the back in four steps.

Rigdon must have been listening, because just then he called down. “On your right.”

I swung the light and found a jagged hole chiseled in the concrete floor. It looked like the gasping mouth of someone just about to go under and drown. Four wood slats had been drilled to the wall below it, making a simple ladder.

I shined the light and saw another concrete floor at the bottom, rough and uneven, as if it had been poured in a hurry by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. It was also dull and stained with age. It could have easily been decades old.

I held the light with one hand and steadied myself with the other as I climbed down. Luckily, it was a short trip — the room wasn’t even tall enough for me to stand. But it was a good thirty feet long. I thought it might have been a coal bin, or maybe a secret dugout for hiding booze during Prohibition. The air was still and musty and hinted of dust and sweat under the overpowering pungent odor of days-old diarrhea.

No wonder the others didn’t come. I coughed once and choked back two more as my eyes started to water.

I swung my flashlight around. Five still figures lay at various places around the gray space, some sitting, some collapsed in a fetal position. I couldn’t see anything but what my beam directly illuminated, so I kept it moving back and forth between the motionless inhabitants. They looked like they had died in pain and total darkness. Three men and two women. All Asian. Aged 30 to 60, roughly. Easy enough to peg as undocumented. Their teeth were bad, they were malnourished, and they each wore an odd mix of castoff clothing.

I looked up. It would be easy to stack heavy boxes over the hole to seal it. No one would know. And no one underneath that low ceiling would be able to get enough leverage to push them off.

I shuffled in a hunch to the nearest body, a man of about 50. His eyes were closed. He was in cargo pants and an XXL Justin Bieber T-shirt that reached almost to his knees. The skin of his arms, neck, and face was splotchy and swollen in a latticelike web characteristic of some kinds of fungal infection. And there was an ashen pallor on top of that, as if whatever had killed him had also caused his epidermis to turn to dust. The woman next to him was the same. I ran a single gloved finger over her arm and looked at the residue. The couple’s hands rested next to each other on the floor, as if they’d been holding onto each other before death.

Husband and wife, probably.

I looked between them. His eyes were closed. Hers were cast down. I imagine he went first and she reached over and shut his eyes. There were dry tear paths down her ashen cheeks.

Say what you will. All they wanted was a shot at a better life. I wondered then if the five of them weren’t a family of some kind: older husband and wife, two adult children, and an aunt, or maybe a family friend. Or a stranger. No one knew. And no one would know. They had no documents, which meant they had no identity. Not even names. Whoever they were, whatever dreams they’d been chasing, it was lost.

I looked at the father, at his scalp. I reached up with a gloved hand and ran my fingers through his dark hair. Tufts came free. I shook them off and shuffled to the back. I shone my light around the floor and found a couple white paper bags crumbled in a corner. Someone had brought food at some point. Days ago, by the looks of it. They’d finished it all. Nothing but crumbs and wax paper. No marks on the bag except on the bottom. A black circle with the letters CE inside. No receipt. Could have been from anywhere.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Then again. Then again.

Three messages.

I turned with a shuffle. My legs were stiff from squatting, and my knees were starting to hurt. I looked around the long, narrow room. I looked at the hands of the husband and wife. Fallen. Almost touching.

I shuffled back to the makeshift ladder and climbed out.

“Get what you need?” Rigdon asked as I walked up the stairs to the top.

I shook my head and stripped the latex from my hands. “I don’t suppose we could get a rush on stomach contents?” I picked up my bag where I had left it.

“Oh sure,” he said as he patted his pockets. “I think I have a pocket knife around here somewhere.”

I made a face. I took out my phone and looked at it.

YOUR MOM CALLED

SAID IT’S SERIOUS THIS TIME

I CALLED THE HOSPITAL

DR AGREED

KNOW U R WORKING

JUST THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO KNOW

MAYBE YOU COULD CALL LATER?

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Uniforms are canvassing now. We’ll keep you guys in the loop. Anything else you’ll have to get from the ME. Stomach contents included.”

I walked outside and ran my eyes down the street. People were going on with life like nothing had happened. Sweeping. Buying food. Doing everything they could to not look at us. “I’m sure no one saw a thing,” I said.

Whether they did or didn’t, it didn’t matter. I knew how it went.

He nodded. “That’s how it usually goes around here.”

He studied me for a moment. It was subtle but I caught it.

“What?” I asked sarcastically. “I don’t look like a hood rat? It’s the beard, isn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Harlem? Bed-Stuy?”

I shook my head. “A-T-L.”

“Ah, a southern boy.” He put on an accent for me. “Welcome to New Yawk.”

I took out my phone again and fired off an email to the medical examiner’s office requesting a rush on stomach contents. And a blood culture. I sent another to Oliver requesting someone start the wonderfully exciting process of cataloging samples of everything in the shop and sending them to the lab.

I looked back at the store. At the old grocer. We’d have to shut him down. It would take weeks to process everything.

I walked down the block to the 80%-off store — going out of business but shelves fully stocked. I bought my daughter a good luck charm, like a necklace or an amulet I guess. A Chinese dragon and phoenix entwined around each other. I figured I could borrow any luck it brought until I got it home.

I stood on the street and looked up at the bright sky between the lanterns.

Five people. Dead no more than two days. And we had no idea what caused it.

I needed to find victim #1.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018.

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You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta

The next chapter is here: (not yet posted)

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