Rick Wayne's Blog, page 88

Local politics lives and dies on two things

2

It was like walking into a convention. The door at the back opened to a busy lecture hall. Stepwise rows of long tables faced the white boards at the front. The folks scattered about the chairs were looking at their phones or talking to each other in hushed voices while the single speaker, a full-figured black woman in a maroon dress suit, pointed to the writing on the boards, or to the projection overhead, and barked orders. I took a seat and waited for someone to call my name, or at least tell me where to stand. Half an hour went by. A middle-aged redhead with gray roots and tired eyes sat next to me and I leaned over to ask where I could find Dr. Angela Chalmers, the director of my unit, and she pointed to the woman at the front.

“Is the new guy here yet?” Dr. Chalmers called. “From the CDC?” She was a formidable woman, despite her stature. Most of the time she didn’t look at you when you spoke. She’d be too busy approving requisitions, or whatever, and nodding along. But when you said something that warranted a gaze, it was right to your core. That woman had fingernails like daggers, pistols for eyes, and a voice like a rifle.

I stood, expecting her to call me to the front for a round of introductions.

“You’re with Ollie,” she said and turned away. And that was it. That was my welcome to New York.

Ollie was Oliver Waxman, M.D., a career bureaucrat and my senior partner for the duration of my stay in New York. Sort of like a mentor, I guess. I met him in his office — a windowless, underground box permanently stained nicotine-yellow despite that it had been decades since anyone had been allowed to smoke in the building. Waxman’s credenza had been there at least as long as him but it held nothing but a stack of files and a single framed picture of a kid. A young girl. The overly bright fluorescent lighting made his comb-over look moist, like the sheen of butter on a rising loaf, and he kept pressing it flat with his palm. Then he would rub the furrow between his eyes. He was baking under pressure.

He extended his hand. I took it and he pointed to a seat where I met a short battery of questions. Ollie had that New York brusqueness that no one from New York seems to notice. Yes, I said, I am married. Marlene. Just one: an almost-three-year-old daughter, Marigold. Oh, and a cat named Vector. No, no picket fence. The beard doesn’t bother me. Yes, I like it that full. Doctorate in bioinformatics and a master’s in epidemiology. The Epidemiological Intelligence Unit. It’s a post-doc. No, not as fancy as it sounds. Supposed to give bench scientists some field experience. Yes, very excited. Happy to get it.

He gave me my network credentials and a squat, coffee-brown desk in a half-height cubicle where I spent the next several weeks squinting at a screen through my glasses. A big part of my job was tabulating statistics on a new kind of food-handling program we were testing. The science was mundane. A well-trained undergraduate could have done it. That wasn’t the purpose of the field program. The field program was there to teach us how things worked in the real world. And in that, it was successful.

New York City crams a population of nine million — that’s larger than countries like Israel or Switzerland, by the way — into five small boroughs. Those boroughs sit inside a wider metropolitan area, stretching from New Jersey to Connecticut, that holds nine million more with a combined GDP approaching all of Canada. Besides the numerous mega-hospitals — each like a small town — there are a few thousand nursing homes, at least as many clinics, and countless doctors’ offices, dentists, and counselors. There’s a hairstylist and nail salon on every corner, and of course innumerable restaurants, from the five-star palaces in midtown to the food trucks lining the park. There are coffee shops, delis, butchers, bakeries, fishmongers, grocers, creameries, school and hospital cafeterias, packaged food manufacturers, food service suppliers, and the distributors and resellers who move it all around. And then there’s all the stuff people put in their bodies that isn’t food: pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, “alternative health” devices, prophylactics, and sexual aids, and the pharmacies and sex shops that stock them.

The Department of Health was responsible for overseeing all of it. Which was impossible. It was a feat just to keep up with complaints. They had a whole consumer contact center that handled hundreds of calls and emails — thousands in a crisis — by the time you finished your morning coffee. They conducted a dozen or so inspections every single day of the week — some scheduled, some by surprise. I got to go on a few. I learned two things: there is very little oversight, and health inspectors, who have roughly the same education as police officers, are at least as corrupt.

A little less than three weeks from the end of my 90-day appointment, I was sitting in the big team room doing exactly what I’d seen everyone else doing that first day: staring at my phone and waiting for Dr. Chalmers to say something that involved me or my team, when I heard her voice over the din.

“Alex!”

That’s what everyone called me. I guess it was easier than my first name. So Dr. Alexander became Alex.

I stood.

“See me after.”

“But it wasn’t me, teach,” I objected.

She turned and shot me a look over the rim of her glasses.

I was part of a joint program set up by the city, state, and federal governments to test active monitoring in the nation’s largest urban centers — a reaction to several high-profile outbreaks everyone likes to pretend weren’t as scary as they sounded. It’s no accident that the first case of Ebola in the U.S. was in a major city like Dallas. If an epidemic ever does come, it isn’t going to start in Des Moines or Tucumcari.

New York, L.A., San Fran, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, D.C., and Atlanta. That’s where people overwhelmingly enter the country. That’s where pretty much every peer-reviewed epidemic model puts Patient Zero. So that’s where you start.

Something something needles and haystacks.

After the meeting, Dr. Chalmers walked up the steps of the hall to the back and pointed at me to follow her. There was a crowd waiting outside, but she waved them away with those dagger-like fingernails and motioned for me to follow.

“You’ll like this,” she said as she held up one of the files from the stack in her arms. “Just in this morning from the NYPD.” We got to her office, and she tossed it on the side table and took a seat. “Someone actually read your health alert. Color me impressed.”

I’d been allowed to include a ‘Health Alert’ — four sentences of white text in a red box — in the department’s monthly blast email, which went to just about every hospital, clinic, lab, doctor, dentist, podiatrist, chiropractor, and nursing home in the tri-state area, as well as most of the relevant governmental and non-governmental agencies.

She looked at me like she was waiting for me to gloat. “We’re officially labeling them Cases 4 through 9. Congratulations.”

“Four through nine?” That meant five people had gotten sick. At the same time.

I opened the file as Dr. Chalmers summarized it for me. “Undocumented Chinese immigrants. Found in a basement in Chinatown this morning. Police are there now. You still want it? Or should I give it to another eager beaver? Like Tucker Davis.” She was being sarcastic.

“He’d do such a good job with it, too.” I was sarcastic back.

“Then talk to Ollie. Tell him I gave you the green light. And get over there right away. They’re waiting on us. And watch the tone,” she added with a raised nail. “Everyone already thinks I give you special treatment.”

“I could pretend to be afraid of you. Like the rest of them.”

“Out.” She pointed stiffly to the door and returned to her work. And that was it.

Five minutes later, I was standing in front of Ollie’s desk. He got up the moment I told him and shut his door.

I watched him. It was odd.

“Why are you chasing this?” he asked.

The question surprised me. I’m sure he saw it on my face.

“Nine people in a city this size,” he said. “It’s nothing. You’d do more good handing out health citations to the homeless.”

He sat down and so did I. Apparently we were going to have a talk.

“Dr. Chalmers doesn’t think so,” I said.

“You think that’s why she approved this? Because she agrees with you?”

I scowled. I had no idea what he was implying.

He snorted at me. “You know, I talked to your boss the other day. Your real boss. Back in Atlanta. The good Dr. Sowell.”

“And?”

“He seems to think you’re a political hire.”

“The CDC isn’t staffed by appointment.”

“No. But the people at the top answer to those who are. And Sowell seems to think you were some kind of diversity case left over from the previous administration.”

“He said that?”

Oliver smiled. “Not in so many words.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I just want to know the angle.” He nodded to the file Chalmers had given me.

“Angle? Why do you assume this isn’t straight?”

Waxman scowled and dug in his desk for his heartburn chewables. He popped one into his mouth and held the open bottle toward me. I declined.

“I know what Sowell thinks of me,” I said. “I’d love to explain why he’s wrong in very precise language, but I have a wife and a child and I can’t work a post-doc forever. I need a job. A real one. And since I’m not gonna get a good letter from my boss, my only hope is you or Dr. Chalmers and a good published paper. Not food-handling stats, Ollie. Something that gets my name out there. Something unique.”

“And that’s it?” he asked between chews. “There’s nothing else?”

I squinted hard and took off my glasses. “Can I ask you a question?”

He nodded.

“Without being out of line?” I put my glasses back.

“Spit it.”

“I just wanna know if you have this talk with the white guys who come through here.”

He stiffened. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just wondering why I’m being asked to defend my desire for future employment.”

“No one’s asking you to defend anything.”

I pointed with my thumb back toward the office. “Tucker spent ten days chasing a nonexistent pertussis outbreak. He got a buncha ‘attaboys.’ Not an interrogation.”

“Tucker’s smart enough to know the commissioner wants ammunition in the public relations fight against the anti-vaxxers.”

“Tucker’s dad is a professor at Johns Hopkins,” I said. “And a former chair of the Association.”

Oliver snorted. “Okay.” He tossed the file back to me. “You’re right. About everything. Have at it. Your appointment’s almost up anyway. Your choice. In a couple weeks, you’re Sowell’s problem.”

The implication was clear: I wouldn’t remain Dr. Sowell’s problem for long. “Does that mean I can stop crunching the numbers on the Farm-to-Table Program?”

“Christ.” He twisted his face in disgust. “Don’t sound so broken up about it. That one happens to be mine, you know.”

I got up. “I know.” I smiled.

He got serious. “Chalmers is gonna give you enough rope to hang yourself. Just don’t hang the rest of us out with you.”

“Meaning?”

His chair creaked as he leaned back. “I get it. You see the guys with the pedigrees snatching up all the jobs and you’re worried where that leaves you. But you’ve been after Chalmers about this thing for weeks. In the team meeting. Where notes are kept and emailed out to everyone under the sun.”

“Isn’t that what it’s for?”

“Jesus. Don’t be so naive. You ever watch the local news?”

I stood with my hand on the door. “Not if I can help it.”

“You should. If you’re serious about staying in public health. Local politics lives and dies on two things.” He held up fingers. “Crime. And health. Last year, the department was all over the local outlets for a couple weeks straight after the commissioner yanked an ad campaign, a PSA combating teen pregnancy. Placards at bus stops and subway stations and shit like that.

“The week before, one of the network affiliates asked for access to a confidential program tracking rates of HIV in the sex-worker population, which they thought would make a nice nightly lead and salaciously sell some advertising.” He waggled his head with the alliteration. “We said no. Two days later, they ran a story on the PSA. Swore up and down the two were unrelated. Suddenly we were flooded with calls. The mayor’s office, too. As if no one had noticed the signs plastered all over town until they were on the television.”

“They probably hadn’t,” I said.

“The NAACP didn’t like it because it made a young black girl the poster child for the issue. The conservatives didn’t like it because not a single ad used the word ‘abstinence.’ The liberals didn’t like it because we didn’t explicitly hold boys accountable. You know whose campaign that was?”

I shook my head.

“Chalmers,” he said. “A black woman who put herself through a PhD program while raising two kids. By herself. Didn’t matter.” He leaned over his desk again. “Let’s say you’re right and you find something. Couple cases of avian flu. Homeless people shitting in the water supply. Something to get you noticed. Something worth writing a paper on. Everything you collect could be interpreted as evidence that an assistant director of this department repeatedly ignored warnings from her staff.”

I scowled. I let go of the door.

Waxman saw my face. “Don’t believe me? Okay. Let me spell it out for you. You don’t get to be three rungs down from the mayor of a city this size without making enemies. You don’t want to look up one day and find yourself on their side.”

I imagined that was true. Dr. Chalmers was an ax. And Oliver sure as shit wouldn’t stick his neck out for me.

“So, if I find anything,” I said, “we take it to the boss first and let her run it upstairs.”

He nodded sagely. “Or into the ground.”

I looked at the man. At his well-lit comb-over. “And what about you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about me.” He smirked. “I’m usually straight.”

 

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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I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta

I’m posting chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order starting today!
1

I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta. We’d been living in Greenville with my mom’s second husband, who just up and left one day and Mom said there wasn’t any reason for us to stay. Terence. That was his name. Everyone called him “BeeGee,” for Big Goon. That man could eat. I suspect eating big was the only reason he ever held a steady job. He’d come home and sit in the middle of our old couch, which sagged permanently from his weight, and eat and watch TV and fall asleep. On weekends, his friends would come over and bullshit and shoot bottles in the back yard and argue with each other about whose turn it was to buy the weed. The only time BeeGee paid attention to Alvin, his son and my half-brother, was when he walked in front of the television or left his toys out back.

The three of us went back to Asheville at first, which was where I was born and near to where my dad was incarcerated — not that we visited. I never knew him. I was two years old when he was convicted of possession. His sixth month in, he assaulted a guard and got the max. I thought we’d stay in Asheville, since we had roots and all, but after a year, Mom said she was tired of small-town men and we packed up and moved to Georgia.

Our first home in Atlanta was a pay-by-week motel with one bed and no door on the bathroom. Mom counted out her dollars and cents on the little table by the window and gave me enough for a trip to the store. I came back with a drink in one hand and a mess of plastic bags in the other. That’s when I saw him — legs first, sticking out from behind a brick corner. One of his shoes had come off. The other had a hole in the toe. I thought it was a junkie passed out in the alley. They were always around and nothing to be worried about as long as you were careful. Only the really crazy ones ever got violent. I kept walking and turned an eye as I passed, just in case, and that’s when I saw the blood. It had run across the pocked pavement and made an uneven puddle, like a long-fingered grasp, before it had dried in the hot sun and turned dark. Flies danced over it like grains of rice on a hot plate. They landed on the man’s open eyes, which stared through me out to the horizon. They crawled over his lashes, but he didn’t blink.

That was my welcome to the big city. I told Mom and she called right away to see if we could move early into the rental house she’d found near the park. The man said no at first, but she made some kind of special arrangement and we were carrying boxes the next day.

I liked being close to the park. I could play ball any time. Back in Greenville, our neighbors across the street had a hoop on their garage and they let me use it whenever I wanted. I spent hours and hours out there. Usually when BeeGee and his friends were carrying on in the house. The hoops at the park didn’t have any nets, and the pavement was cracked and turned to gravel in spots, which hurt if you fell on it, but that was all the more reason to keep your feet. There were kids my age there, and I met some guys, Curtis and Kwon and one other whose name I forget. We played two-on-two, with the neighborhood girls chatting and watching from the sidelines.

I was new, so I didn’t know enough to let Curtis win. Even at fifteen, Curtis “C-Note” Wilson was the king of our block. Or so he thought. I sunk the winning basket from the three-point line and the girls hooted. I turned to smile and C-Note pushed me and swung a fist. I’d gotten into a few fights before, but I wasn’t a fighter. I reacted more with panic than anything. I pushed to avoid the swing and for a moment there was an awkward, grappling struggle. When he couldn’t overpower me easy, he let go and went for a gun, a fat revolver with a taped handle, stashed in his jacket by the fence. I remember seeing the tips of the rounds in their chambers, pointed right at me. There was a long moment where that barrel was at my chest and nobody moved.

I don’t think he would’ve shot me, even if the girls hadn’t been sitting right there. In fact, I suspect they were the real reason he pulled it in the first place. He wanted to show how powerful he was.

Just don’t kid yourself that it was only about a basketball game.

Where I cam from, there were rules to being a man. Rule number one is that you take care of your own. Any man who couldn’t do that was a punk. Like BeeGee. Which is why Curtis Wilson never went after me — not directly. He went after my little brother, Alvin.

School started the week after the confrontation in the park and C-Note and his boys ran into Alvin coming home from his first day. They knew who he was and decided to send a message. They called him names and pushed him around. But Alvin wasn’t a punk either. He talked back. Acted like he was his big brother. Curtis and the crew got mad, so the next morning they waited for Alvin by the wig shop at the end of the alley and pushed him down and took his shoes. Right off his feet. Punched him hard, too, so he’d stay down. Right in the chest.

“But I didn’t cry,” he told me later. He was so proud. All of eleven years old.

By the time he got back home, Mom and I had already left, so Alvin didn’t have anywhere to go. He skipped school and spent the day by himself, wandering around outside the house in dirty socks, until our neighbor, Mrs. Hattis, asked him inside.

“You did all right,” I told him later, rubbing his head.

He smiled up at me. He always needed a lot of reassurance then. After BeeGee.

The next week, Curtis and his boys cornered Alvin again and told him he’d have to sell drugs for them. He said no and Kwon pushed him down. Curtis kicked him. Hard. Over and over. And stomped on his head. He bled that time. Cried a little, too. When he got home, he laid in bed and cried some more.

I remember standing at the crack of his door and seeing him wiping the tears from his little face. I remember listening from the next room as Mom talked to her cousin about me and how I didn’t have no sense, just like my dad, and how we might have to move and how we didn’t have the money for it. The doors in that house were made of plywood and didn’t block a single sound. Not that any of it was a secret. We all knew what would happen. Once guys like that get you on the ropes, they don’t stop. We all knew it was just gonna get worse and worse until I joined the gang. Or Alvin did. That’s how thugs get power. And politicians, too. They make it so going along is the best of a bunch of bad options.

I started walking Alvin to school and cutting class early so I could walk him home. I explained to my sixth-period teacher, Mr. Odell, what was happening and he let it slide.

“As long as you keep up with the homework,” he said. “No slippin’!”

One weekend around then, I went to the store. Mom was home so I didn’t think there’d be any trouble. I came back and Curtis Wilson and his boys were in front of our house. They always ran together — for protection. They weren’t the only crew stalking our block. Alvin was on the sidewalk with some of his friends. C-Note was trying to get him to take a hit from a glass pipe. Said he needed to know the merchandise, because now he worked for him. He wore dark sunglasses and a white shirt and a crisp ball cap on his head. I don’t think he cared much if Alvin actually smoked it. He just wanted to show everyone who was boss.

Mom was watching from the front porch. C-Note told everyone she smoked crack, that she’d bought from him even. She didn’t say anything. I was so mad. Looking back, I’m sure the other kids already knew. We all knew who was using and who wasn’t. But in my adolescent mind, the fact that no one had ever talked about it meant it was still a secret, so when Curtis said it out loud, right there in front of everyone, I felt so ashamed. I wanted to scream at him that my momma didn’t do that. That she wasn’t no junkie. That she was good to us. But mostly I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to come down off the porch and tell Curtis Wilson to stop bothering us and go home. But she couldn’t. Not without making things worse. So she just stood there and took it. Just like everyone else.

I ran up, dropped my groceries on the lawn, and pushed C-Note and we stood eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose, chests puffed like a couple goddamned gorillas.

“Whatchu gonna do?” His breath stank.

Old Mrs. Hattis next door came out then, screamin’ and hollerin’ about the noise. She had jar-bottom glasses damn near half-an-inch thick and went around saying things like “I don’t see so well no more.” Maybe that was true. But she heard just fine. She knew what she was doing.

I shoved C-Note off me and he made a gun with his fingers. The hammer of his thumb fell as he walked backward, smiling, and he made a noise with his lips.

Mom was mad. I’d only made him angry, she said. Only made things worse. I was just like my dad. And now those boys were gonna take her baby.

“I can take care of myself,” I said. All of fourteen and stupid.

She looked at me with hate in her eyes. “I didn’t mean you.”

Sure enough, two days later, in the dead of the night, shots were fired into our house.

One-two-three-four-five.

I can still hear it. The crack of the gun. The chime of broken glass. The muffled crunch of bullets piercing wood. Thump-thump-thump. The sound of screeching tires. My mom on the floor in the hall screaming at the top of her lungs, reaching out to her two boys.

After a few minutes of trembling silence, the world returned. A dog barked in the distance. We felt each other for blood. A couple of the neighbors came. They knocked and we went outside. I remember being surprised it was still so damned humid, even at 4 a.m. Only now it was dark and there wasn’t even a breeze. It was stifling.

The police came and talked to everyone. They hadn’t seen anything, they said. No, they wouldn’t give a statement. They didn’t have anything to say. They just came out when they saw the sirens. That was all.

Alvin and I didn’t go to school for a week after that. Mom eventually got ahold of Big Goon, but he said no. So she sent Alvin to stay with our Aunt Susan, who lived with her husband and their three kids in the hills of North Carolina, back near where we were born. It was just temporary, she told me, while we figured out a way to get some money and move to a new place.

We never saw him again.

 

art by Denis Forkas

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Tell me again how you found this guy

16Oct

I had lunch at his bistro, out in the hip part of Brooklyn. That set me back a nice chunk of cash. Craziest menu I’ve ever seen, too. Shit like smoked quail eggs in cubes of maple gelatin. Or fondue of pig’s blood reduction — whatever that is — served with maize fritters. Or a test tube set of chilled teas, arranged from light green to dark brown and filled with tapioca balls, each injected with a different essence: cinnamon, bergamot, chiles, lemongrass, etc. Bite down and the flavor erupts and mixes with the tea. But my favorite was the charcuterie plate — had to look that word up — with sausage “caramels” and this sweet, taffy-like cheese you have to cut with scissors and chew really slow. If you bit hard, it damn-near cracked your teeth.

The place was packed. And there were a ton of reviews on all the restaurant apps, everything from “Best meal I’ve ever had” to “A complete travesty of cuisine.” The Department of Health apparently shut him down over the summer. He had to go to court and everything, and for awhile, there was some question of whether he’d reopen. But he did and was all the busier for it.

I’d learned enough to be very suspicious of reversals of fortune like that — not just the rebound, but getting shut down in the first place. Seemed to me someone was using magic against him. Seemed to me he was using it right back. I’d hoped to get a look at him while I was there, but he never showed. Everything’s made by his assistants, the ones in the dark bandannas and matching smocks. From what I read online, that’s usually how it is. Verhoeven was right. The man is a recluse. No fancy black-and-white head shot on his website, no press releases, no interview in Gourmand magazine. Reams have been printed on his cooking, but everything there is to know about the man could fit typed and double-spaced on a single sheet of paper.

Etude Emile Saint-Antoine Étranger. Real name unknown. Born fifty-some years ago in a remote village in the Amazon. He was taken from his parents as an infant — he never knew them — and raised by the village shaman to be his replacement. On his thirteenth birthday, young Etude had to prove his manhood or whatever, so he was sent out to live on his own in the jungle. He survived, obviously, although rumor is he bears a serious wound on his chest.

When he came back, his village was gone. Erased. Loggers had moved in. Cleared the whole area. Nothing but stumps and ash. Kid probably thought the end times had come. Supposedly he lived on his own for a while. Then he was found by some French anthropologists, husband and wife. Doctor and Doctor Étranger-sur-something-or-other. They take the kid back to France, write a bunch of papers on him and his people — in French. It was fun tracking those down, let me tell you. Had to call in a favor with a guy at Interpol to get me hard copies. Anyway, they give him a Western education, only he’s a genius or whatever, so he just absorbs it all. And then some. Somehow he ends up at a fancy cooking school of all places. But he never finishes. He leaves France in a hurry, in fact, and is still wanted for questioning, which is why my contact in Paris was only too happy to help. Not that he gave me any details.

For most of the next decade, he travels all over the world doing these crazy dinners, his Gastronomic Circus or whatever. I don’t even know how to describe it. He did this one in the Australian outback where he trapped poisonous snakes, barbecued their meat, and deep fried the skins like a pork rind. After they puffed up crispy, he tossed them with chili seasoning and served them on top of the meat. Fucker totally made a name for himself, too. But after several years, he shut it all down, completely out of the blue.

“Look at this,” Hammond said from the seat next to me.

A vintage black Jaguar purred as it rolled to a stop in front of the bistro down the street. From where we were parked, we could see the back of it clearly. It looked awfully familiar.

“Is it just me,” he said, “or does that look like the car from the video?”

The chef didn’t have any cars registered in his name. We’d checked. So I snapped a picture of the license plate, which hadn’t been visible before.

We watched in silence as the man himself walked out of the plain, unmarked door just down from the restaurant, bald head and everything. He was even wearing the same coat.

Hammond started the car as I took a few more pictures.

“Who’s driving?” he asked.

I shook my head. A man, it looked like, but I couldn’t see.

The Jag pulled away and we followed. It was a sweet car, too — an MK10, four-door, all black. Late 60s I’d say. We tailed it north to the office of a commercial moving company, strictly nonresidential, specializing in large items, like art for offices and expensive factory equipment. He met with them while Hammond and I waited down the road and across the street.

“Think he’s going somewhere?” I asked.

Hammond nodded. “So tell me again how you found this guy.”

“I never told you a first time,” I teased.

“Come on,” he chided. “Twenty million people in this city. We got a random picture of one. You go away and come back a couple days later with a name. How’s that work? And don’t say facial recognition because we didn’t have a shot of his.”

“He’s not in any of the databases anyway,” I said. “I already checked.”

“That’s what I’m saying.” He turned to look at me. “This guy’s a ghost. Here he’s implicated in at least three murders, the disappearance of Alexa Sacchi, and God knows what else, and we got no way to find him. And yet, you pull his name out of thin air. How does that work?”

“Magic,” I said with a smile.

He made a face.

“Look. I took a gamble and it paid off.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough that I didn’t mind leaving it there.

Hammond turned back to watch the door down the road. The Jag was nowhere in sight.

“You don’t wanna tell me,” he said, “that’s your prerogative. Just don’t insult my intelligence, all right? Is it a fucking deal?”

I scowled. “Whatever. You don’t get to pick and choose what you wanna know and what you don’t.”

“What are you talking about?” He got defensive.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. I mention anything to do with the occult, anything at all, and you cover your ears and start making baby nois — ”

“No, no. I do not.”

I’d try to talk to him a couple times. I tried to talk to him after the Sacchi case. We had a row. I realized that I’d be on my own after that, for anything that mattered anyway, so I put in for a transfer.

“Target’s on the move,” I said flatly.

The black Jag appeared and took Étranger stepped from the office door as the black Jag pulled up with perfect timing. They drove a few miles down the road to a florist, where the chef spent all of five minutes before coming out with a tasteful bouquet.

“Going to see a girlfriend?” I asked as we pulled into traffic.

Hammond laughed. Genuinely. He just looked at me and shook his head.

“What?”

“For all the women you’ve dated, you’d think you’d be able to tell the difference.”

“The difference between what?”

He put the car in drive and pulled out. “That was a funeral arrangement, you dope.”

“How could you tell?”

“You didn’t see the white lilies? And the fern branches? In a short round pot?” He nodded to me earnestly. “Give a gal something like that and she’s liable to think you’re being a snot. Or want her dead.”

I didn’t say anything.

“How do you not know that?” he asked.

“Whatever, man. Flowers are flowers. I get whatever looks nice. Or whatever she says she wants.”

“By ‘she’ do you mean the one with the colorful hair and the yoga legs?”

“Yoga legs?” I turned to him. “That’s what you remember?”

He shrugged. “What was her name again? Kinsey?”

“Kinney,” I said after a moment.

“Ah,” he said in understanding. He got from my tone that we weren’t together anymore. “She liked you,” he said. “She liked you a lot.”

I didn’t reply, and he waited a few minutes before asking. “You wanna talk about it?”

I made a face. “What do you think?”

“I’m just asking,” he said holding up a hand.

I watched the Jag, which was several cars ahead of us in traffic. We were inching toward the freeway. It took us another twenty minutes to get there, after which we wound through Queens and crossed the river before turning north up the FDR. Hammond followed at a safe distance. That we were following a vintage car and not just another silver SUV made it easy enough to spot even if we lost sight for a minute.

“You think I don’t listen to you?” Hammond asked out of the blue.

I squinted at him. “What?”

“You said I don’t get to pick and choose what I wanna know and what I don’t,” he explained very deliberately, like he wanted to be sure I understood his meaning. “Does that mean you think I don’t listen to you?”

I kept squinting at him as he changed lanes on the expressway. “What’s with you? You on estrogen pills or something? Got testicular cancer?”

“Close, actually.”

He pulled a stick of gum from his pocket. He handed it to me, but I refused and he unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. I could smell the mint.

“Dinah and I got this gal we talk to,” he said. “You know, a complete stranger you tell all your secrets to. But I like her, believe it or not. She doesn’t let me get away with the bullshit. Not that I’d ever let her know that. Anyway, the consensus seems to be that I’m not a very good listener.”

I shook my head with a smile, choking back the easy jibe.

“Laugh all you want, Chase. Some of us take our relationships seriously.”

“That’s not why I’m laughing. I’m laughing because it took you almost 50 years to figure that shit out, you big clod.”

He nodded solemnly — like it was my words, versus what everyone else in his life had been telling him, that clinched it.

“You’re not a bad listener,” I explained. “You’re just selective. When you wanna be, you’re Mr. Fucking Rogers.”

He had to think about that awhile. He shook his head. “In the session the other day, I was distracted. Dinah thought I was mad, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Cerise.”

“Who?”

“The Chinese girl, the one I almost locked up. She wasn’t much older than my girls. I sent her to you. Did I tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“The night she disappeared. She started talking about . . . All that kinda stuff.” He waved a hand. “She had a tarot deck and was talking curses and shit and I thought ‘Oh Christ. Here we go.’ And I told her to talk to you. I thought you could sort it all out. I didn’t wanna deal with it. I already had a caseload up to my ball sack and I didn’t want to waste time wading through all the — ” He stopped.

We watched as the Jag exited the expressway. Hammond hit the blinker and we followed into Spanish Harlem.

He sighed, like he was sorry he mentioned anything and wanted to wrap it up. “So now I’m wondering if I treat all the women in my life that way.”

“What do you mean?” I knew he didn’t mean me. In Craig Hammond’s mind, I wasn’t a woman. At least not like that.

“I’m just wondering how many times I’ve sent the girls to their mother like that, when they were worried about school or some boy or something, because I was too busy trying to put some asshole away.”

“Naw,” I said. “I don’t see it. No offense to Dinah, but you’ve always been a better dad than a husband.”

He nodded again, wistfully.

I turned to him. “You wanna talk about it?” I asked with a wry smile.

He snorted. “Fuck you.”

The Jag pulled into a three-story public parking garage.

“Shit,” he said.

If we followed them right behind, there’s a good chance we’d be spotted. If we rolled around the block, we’d probably lose them on foot.

“There,” I pointed.

Just inside the alley between the garage and a hair salon there were three open spots, reserved specifically for police. Hammond pulled in as I pulled the car’s department registration from the glove compartment and tossed it on the dash.

We jumped out at the same time.

“You go east,” he said, and took off the other way.

I moved down the alley, eyes scanning the parking garage for any signs of the Jag or the man in the fantastic coat. But there was nothing. I ran out to the main road at the far side of the alley which was lined with single-story shops on both sides of the street, the kind with narrow facings crammed full of wares where the signs displayed the brands for sale rather than the name of the store. Men’s clothes, a couple ladies boutiques, a Farmacia Latina proudly displaying the Puerto Rican flag, a combo wig shop and hair salon, a convenience store, a falafel shop, a taqueria, and more, all the way down to the train tracks that ran over the street two blocks from me.

Cars were parked at meters along the street, and there was the usual forest of telephone poles and street signs. With the crowd, I didn’t have any trouble keeping cover. And the chef wasn’t hard to spot, not with that bald head and that pot of bright flowers cradled in his arm. He’d crossed the street and stopped two blocks down in front of a large mural painted on a brick wall facing the main road. It was a swirling, floral, blue-and-white tribute to a goatee’d man, whose likeness took up most of the image. He was looking up and away to the horizon warmly but resolutely. Smaller depictions, presumably scenes from his life, fell away on both sides of his head in turning band of flowers and curls. Most of it was done in white paint. The shading and contrast was all the same tone of gray-blue. The sidewalk underneath was filled with flowers and votive candles of all kinds.

The chef added his contribution, which looked horribly formal and out of place, before stepping back to admire the image. I took the opportunity to snap a photo of the mural from my perch behind a parked car on the other side of the street. A quick image search told me this was a memorial to a local man named Alonso White, who had apparently died the year before. We were coming up on the anniversary. He blew himself up in some Wall Street office the very same night Kent Cormack was shot, the night I had my first seizure in decades.

I read as much as I could about the deceased. He seemed like quite the saint — community organizer, ordained priest, some political ambitions but nothing to get anyone worried. All in all, a stand-up guy.

I glanced up from my phone every few seconds to check my quarry, who seemed to be paying his respects, when suddenly I looked again and he was gone. I turned my head right, then left, and spotted him walking down the road under the train tracks. I just had time to see him disappear around the corner on the other side.

I ran after, drawing a screech and a couple honks when I crossed the road, but as soon as I took the same turn, I ran right into a dead end. I slapped my hand against the wall of brick, just to make sure it was real. I spun and scanned the street in every direction. But he was gone.

“Shit.”

That’s when I saw someone on the roof of the building across from me — a big guy in a leather coat. He turned and walked away before I got a good look at him, but I’m positive it was the driver of the Jag.

I’d been made.

rough cut from my forthcoming supernatural mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS. Like it? Leave a tip!

art by Piotr Jablonski

But not too late for what?

22Oct

“I said, he’s not here,” the nurse stressed.

I motioned back to the narrow waiting room, whose handful of occupants were watching me out of the corners of their eyes like school kids afraid to be called on in class. “So none of these patients are his?”

“Dr. Caldwell has taken Dr. More’s patients while he’s on sabbatical.” She was around 60 and work no makeup. Her hair was parted in the middle and fell below her ears in curves. There were three thin, parallel scars on the side of her face near her right eye.

“Funny, he never mentioned a sabbatical. That kind of thing takes some planning, doesn’t it? Seems to me a professional psychologist might let his patients know if he were planning an extended absence.”

“All his patients were made aware. Perhaps he told you and you didn’t listen.” The implication was that I still wasn’t.

“I’m sure I would’ve remembered,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to take that up with Dr. More when he gets back.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Your questions have been asked and answered, Detective. This is harassment.” She picked up the receiver to the phone like she was going to dial 911 or something. “Please leave.”

“If he’s not here, then you won’t mind me looking in his office.” I started around the desk.

She replaced the phone quickly and stepped in front of me. “This is private property. You c can’t just walk in.” She pointed to one of the younger assistant nurses, who was staring at the confrontation in disbelief. “Kay, please dial the police and tell them we’re being harassed.”

The young woman picked up the phone but hesitated.

“You keep using that word,” I said to my adversary. “Is it supposed to scare me?

What’s wrong with a quick peek? If you have nothing to hide, I mean.”

She crossed her arms and planted herself.

I turned to the younger colleague. “Well? What are you waiting for? Call.”

The elder nurse sighed and turned for the door to Dr. More’s office. It was already shut. She pulled a mass of keys from the waist of her scrubs and locked it. I caught the sign on the next door down. It said DR. ALAN CALDWELL, same last name as the couple who moved into More’s house, according to the neighbor.

I walked forward and opened it over the nurse’s objection.

The interior was more or less the same as More’s: a nice glass-topped desk, some chairs, fancy framed degrees with giant matte borders, a sofa to one side, a credenza at the back. There were tribal masks on the wall, and when I turned my head to look, I caught a glimpse of a wasp. It crawled through the eye of a faded Balinese mask and disappeared.

The nurse moved me back and shut the door. She shouted something. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw her lips move. I saw her brow crease in anger. And I saw her breath.

I looked around the waiting room at the shocked faces, staring at me in confusion and fear. I looked at the pair of uniformed security guards who walked, as if in slow motion, through the office door. I couldn’t hear any of them. The whole room was silent. But their breath puffed from their mouths like they were standing in the dead of winter. I could see it billow from their nostrils like steam.

I started shivering. I could see my own breath, too.

“No . . .” I could feel it coming. I could feel it out there. Waiting.

The dire hunter.

I pulled free of the first guard’s grasp and stormed through the door, room still shrouded in silence. I skipped the elevator and went right to the stairs. I made it two flights before I was shivering so bad that I couldn’t walk. It was like I’d been sleeping in snow. I was chilled to the core.

I fell back against the block wall and slid down until I was sitting with my back to the corner of the stairwell landing, shivering. Teeth chattering. Not that I could hear anything, but I could feel them rattling against each other.

I stared ahead at a tree line. White-barked birch trees with bands of black stood in an irregular row, marking the boundary of the forest. The interior was dark. It was nighttime. The only light was reflected from the moon, which I couldn’t see. I was squatting in a clearing, staring at the silent forest. Everything was still. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. The only smell was snow.

I squinted into the darkness, between the branches. It was in there. I knew it. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew it was in there, looking back at me. The wolf with three eyes. I knew it had been stalking me through the still forest. I couldn’t see it. But I knew. I caught glimpses of it’s footprints in the snow from where it had walked out of the clearing and into the forest, which was still lush, despite being under a blanket. Here it was seemingly the dead of winter, yet none of the leaves on the trees have fallen. In fact, they were still green as spring. The branches were topped with snow, but the leaves were full. It was quite a sight — incongruous and beautiful. I think it meant it’s not too late.

But not too late for what?

 

a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS. If you enjoyed this, leave a tip!

A man who could make magic

13Oct

“I want everyone to behave themselves,” Anson Verhoeven warned from behind the counter. His white Amish beard quivered when he spoke. He looked to be pushing 90. He breathed through his mouth and stared worriedly over the rim of his glasses at the three of us in his shop.

There were two men at the register. Verhoeven had wrapped something for them in gray paper, like blank newsprint — a book or a box of some kind. The one on the left took it without taking his eyes from me.

“Is this a real Mexican standoff or are we just measuring dicks?” I let the door close behind me and stood in the center of the room, between the neat bookshelves.

Spellman’s Rare Books & Antiquities was always so tidy. And there was always a slight floral scent hanging over the smell of candle wax and the vanilla of old books.

I didn’t know the two men glaring at me, but I knew the look: hollow behind the eyes. They were zombies. In the old sense. Men whose souls had been ripped from them and sealed in urns. Living slaves.

Granny’s boys.

They walked toward the door, one passing on either side of me. I got my weekly quota of menacing glances. But that was it. The door closed behind them with a jingle and Anson and I were alone.

“Well,” he sighed with some relief. “Look what the cat dragged in. Word around town is that you’re causing lots of trouble.”

“Is that what those two said?”

“Not just them. You’re causing quite a stir in our little community.” There was fountain pen, inkwell, and old pad of paper on the counter, and he started putting them away underneath. I couldn’t tell if he was just being tidy or if he didn’t want me to see any hint of what he’d just sold. “Do you have any idea what you imprisoned the other day?”

I glanced around the shop at all the old books neatly arranged by category and size and locked securely behind glass. “Not sure what the proper name is. I call them carrion ghouls. Pretty old one, too, from the looks of it.”

“Pretty old?” he scoffed. “From what I heard, the only human language it spoke was Aramaic, which suggests the last time it walked among us, that was a common tongue.”

“Am I supposed to know when that was?”

“A really, really long time ago.”

“So who let it out?”

“Something tells me you already know.” Verhoeven tilted his head back as if to get a good look at me. “How did you get it out? Or is that a trade secret?”

I held up the talisman dangling from the chain wrapped around my wrist.

He whistled. “May I?”

I unwrapped it and handed it him.

He examined it closely. He ran his thumb over the polished black stone at the center.

“Obsidian?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Blood of the earth,” he corrected.

“I thought that was oil.”

“No . . .” He made a face like that was the dumbest thing ever. “Oil is organic matter, the liquefied dead, plants and animals that grew from the earth but are not of it, the way we all grow from our mothers’ wombs. This is tektite, a clot of blood from the mother herself.” He handed the amulet back to me. “Forged by the heavens.”

“Heavens?”

He sighed. “When a meteor strikes the earth, it flash-melts the surrounding rock, casting off a molten splatter. Just like the blood at a crime scene.” He eyed the talisman. “It’s quite valuable. Are you sure you won’t part with it?”

“It’s not mine to sell,” I said.

“What about the wand?”

“You know about that?”

“I told you. You’re causing quite a stir.”

“I only have the one piece,” I explained.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. There are some who would buy it on the mere hope that it might be repaired.”

“I’ll think about it.” I held up the talisman. “What about the carvings on the silver?”

He made a noncommittal shrug. “Arabic, maybe. Difficult to tell. They’re quite worn.”

“I noticed that.” I wrapped the chain around my wrist again.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “the Arab world was overrun with evil spirits from Central Asia. Djinn they called them. Out of necessity, their alchemists became experts at crafting wards and prisons. Where do you think the tale of Aladdin and the lamp comes from?” He looked around the shop. “There’s a book around here somewhere with the original story. Quite a bit darker.”

“You mean Disney got it wrong? I’m shocked.”

“Oh, you can’t blame them. It was Scheherezade who bastardized the old tales, just as the Brothers Grimm did in Europe. Those greedy fools have caused more — ”

“If you have a minute,” I interrupted, “I was hoping you could identify someone for me.”

“Identify? I don’t know anyone. And if I did, I still don’t.”

I had the printout from the Massey case, the still image from the security footage, folded in my jacket pocket. “You recognize this man?”

“I told you — ” He stopped. He fixed his glasses and tilted his head to look down longways at the paper I had handed him. His expression dropped like a rock.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

He stared blankly. He pulled off his glasses and let his hands fall to his side.

“Anson?”

He raised the printout. “I’d heard the rumors these past few months but . . .” He looked at the printout again and raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t want to believe them. For all our sakes.”

“You have a name?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be doing you any favors by telling you.”

I waited. I thought he might ask for the wand in trade. Or the talisman. I was contemplating how much they were worth to me.

But he didn’t. “Etude Étranger,” he said with perfect enunciation. “He’s a chef. Or at least, that’s how the rest of the world knows him. He has a little bistro over in Brooklyn. Easy to find. He’s not hiding. Not that you’ll ever get your hands on him.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” I said.

“HA!” he scoffed again. “He has a sanctum above his restaurant — the most heavily warded chamber on the planet. Impenetrable, for all practical purposes. Trust me. People have tried. That man has more enemies even than you.”

“Impenetrable, huh? So if I go down there and fire a bazooka at it, it would what? Bounce off the windows?”

He leaned closer. “No. It would probably misfire in the tube and kill whoever launched it in the process, leaving Étranger’s sanctum perfectly intact.”

“So who is he?”

He put his hands on the antique oak counter. “Does this look like a help desk?” He pointed to the sign above a nearby bookshelf.

THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY

“I’d recommend Massius Crane’s seven-volume history for that.”

“And how much does that run?”

“Seeing as how there are only four known copies, and I have the complete set, nine thousand four hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. Plus tax.”

“That’s very precise.” I leaned over the oak so that the talisman clinked on it. “Come on, Anson. I’d hate for Granny to hear a rumor that you sold this to me.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“If you’re gonna be a dick, trust me, I got no problems being a dick back.”

“Sell me the wand,” he said.

I tapped the printout. “Who is he?”

He moved his shriveled lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth. It made his beard shake. Then he leaned back and thought for a moment, as if that were not an easy thing to explain. “Tell me something, Detective. Have you ever wondered why there isn’t more magic in the world?”

“What do you mean?” It seemed like there was already plenty to me. I was having a hard time keeping up.

Verhoeven scowled at me like I was a child. “You think it’s an accident that every ancient civilization on the planet, even those never in contact with each other, from the Incas to the Chinese, believed in sorcery and demons and witchcraft? As if that’s just some fluke?”

I shrugged.

He got up and walked to the bookshelf against the far wall. He lifted the keys from his belt, unlocked the glass case, and pulled down a large text, one of a series of seven large volumes with old-style cloth binding. The spines had the title, “The Reign of The Masters,” in block letters over the name of the author, Massius Crane. The final volume was quite a bit smaller than the others.

Verhoeven brought the tall book to the counter and flipped through the pages. “The Masters. Also known as the High Arcane. Fodder for conspiracy theorists all over the world. You can even find them on the internet, or so I hear.” He glanced up at me.

“You use the internet?” I asked sarcastically.

He looked disgusted again. He spun the book and pointed to a black-and-white illustration, like something from the Victorian era. It was a grand stone chamber. Great columns ran along the sides and held up the roof. At the end was an impressive stone edifice, like a tall judge’s bench, behind which sat seven robed elders. The one at the center sat a little higher than the others. High above them on the back wall, an eye-shaped cavity had been cut into the otherwise smooth stone. The spikes of the giant crystal inside radiated out, just a bit off-center.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the top of the image.

“That is the Great Eye. The Eye of Annemundu, forged at the dawn of civilization, two-and-a-half millennia before Christ, by the high priests of Sumer for the first god-emperor in history.”

I looked closer. “What is it? What are these rays coming out?” I traced a finger along one.

“The Eye is — or was, rather, a seeing stone, a great crystal whose gaze pierced minds and mountains. Annemundu, who is said to have reigned for 90 years, used it to find and destroy those who plotted against him — or even contemplated it. He despised deliberation and enforced a uniform order, an orthodoxy without argument or dissent, where everyone agreed on everything and the unorthodox were put to death. He called it peace, for there were none left to oppose him.”

“What does this have to do with the chef?”

He ignored me. “No one is quite sure what happened to it. But stone carvings that survive from the time suggest that Annemundu’s rule was lengthy, brutal, and absolute, but that in the end, he died, as all men do. The reigning theory is that the Eye was smuggled out of Mesopotamia by parties near the emperor who feared another absolute despot. What we know for certain is that it disappeared from history — completely — for the better part of three thousand years, until it was discovered in the thirteenth century inside the sacred keep of the Knights Templar, who seem to have stumbled upon its hidden resting place while on holy crusade and taken it as plunder without realizing its purpose or power.

“After the Templars were betrayed to their deaths by Philip IV of France, the Iron King called a group of wise men, masters of the occult, from all around the Mediterranean world and sent them to the Templars’ island in the Adriatic to catalog and organize the knights’ vast collection, gathered over two centuries of conquest in the Holy Land, and it was then that the Eye of Annemundu was recognized. The wise men, whom the king had granted only the nondescript title of ‘master,’ wasted no time.

“Mr. Crane suspects their aims were modest at first. But as their power grew, so did their intentions. For six hundred years, from the fall of the Templars the start of the great war, ‘The Masters,’ as they became known, used the Eye to scour the earth. Every magical artifact that fell into their gaze was taken and imprisoned — locked away in a place that erased all memory of it. They sent agents to follow the ley lines that circle the globe and to seal the portals at their intersection, cutting us off from the other realms, friend and foe alike. Ancient treatises were taken and buried. New ones were forbidden — or else had to be written in codes and cyphers approved by The Masters, who began modestly referring to themselves as the High Arcane.

“By the sixteenth century, the seven elders of the order included representatives from all the major civilizations, from the Far East to the New World, and any man who sought power on any continent had first to earn their favor. Those who resisted, or even simply opted out — the woodfolk and the free practitioners of wildcraft — were labeled witches and burned alive.” He looked to me for a reaction.

I shook my head. “Why? Why go to all that trouble?”

“Power,” he said flatly. “It’s no accident that the men who built the modern world were all members of secret societies steeped in the occult. Many of the Founding Fathers of this very country were inducted into the secret order of the Masons, vassals of The Masters.

“A machine is predictable, you see. It can be controlled — measured and changed — just as a wristwatch parses and dissects time. But magicks defy all of that. They’re immeasurable, uncontrollable. And accessible. Remember, Merlin was a peasant boy.”

He closed the book and retrieved another from the shelf, an earlier volume in the same series. He flipped to another page. “Here.”

It was like a scene from an old epic, the Iliad or the Ramayana or something. I saw an army of men carrying round shields and snub swords, a line of archers, flying monsters, an army of skeletons erupting from the earth, a giant bull raging through the clouds, a mounted king, a lighting bolt from the sky striking a giant three-tailed scorpion, a magic hammer, a blind priestess, a bearded wizard and his seven acolytes, and on and on, all locked in a great conflagration.

“Once the world was in chaos,” he said as I studied the page. “Monsters raged and dragons flew. Small groups of men armed with magical weapons took down entire empires and raised up new ones. How do you think Alexander conquered the world? Only to lose it all at his death?

“The Masters’ great enterprise, their solution to the Problem of Evil, was to use the Eye to buy the very same peace as its creator. And slowly but surely, bit by bit, over six long centuries, magic all but went out of the world.

“There were skirmishes, of course, with outlaws mostly. But it wasn’t until the seekers of the dark found their holy book that there was outright war.”

“Holy book?” I looked up.

He shut the volume in front of me.

“The Necronomicon,” he said, “penned by Nebuchadnezzar and lost since the fall of Babylon. Written in blood on its pages were spells to cast darkness, not just over the human heart but the world itself. Suddenly, artifacts and people could be hidden from the Great Eye. Agents of the dark walked unhindered and unseen. Armed with the mad whispers of their gods, the warlocks pursued a hundred-year war to destroy the High Arcane and all who followed them.

“So it was good folks everywhere had to make a terrible choice: stand idle, or join their own oppressors in the fight against something even worse — the eternal night. It wasn’t until the second half of the last century that they were finally defeated. And only at great cost.” He shook his head. “I was a boy at the time, but I heard the stories. How The Masters’ spies had tracked the Necronomicon to Siberia, where Rasputin had hidden it. How, in an act of incredible daring, they smuggled it to the Caucuses, where it was destroyed by a bastard magician from a tribe whose name is not spoken. It was the end of history, we were told. And so it seemed, for a time.” He nodded to himself.

“Until?”

“Until . . . in the aftermath of the war, driven by greed, men penetrated the last soft places of the world, and out of the clear-cut jungle — out of nowhere — a young man appeared, half naked, eyes painted in blue dye, born of a people spared the ravages of history. A man who could make magic. Not the repetition of some crusty old spell. Real magic. New magic.”

He slid the creased printout over the book. “It was around then that a new book appeared. And another battle, if you believe the rumors, where the Great Eye cracked. Without the source of their power, the High Arcane fell. And, well . . .” He motioned out the windows. “The world is as you found it, stumbling back toward chaos.”

“So this guy’s a wizard or something?”

“NO!” Verhoeven shook his head. “He’s not a wizard! He doesn’t build flying contraptions and anoint kings with magic swords. He’s a shamanic sorcerer! An agent of chaos. A practitioner of the oldest magic in the cosmos. Which is why everyone has been happy to leave him locked away in his sanctum all these years.”

I squinted at the photo. “So why make an appearance now? Why kill a random security guard and an art student and a doctor at a free clinic? What does someone like that have to fear from them? What does he want?”

Anson simply shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Who would?”

He thought for a moment. He looked at me gravely. “There is someone.”

“Who?”

“You know her, actually.” He nodded toward the front door. “She’s a big fan.”

I scowled. “Fuck . . .”

rough cut from the third course of my forthcoming supernatural mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS. If you liked it, leave a buck in the Tip Jar!

art by Matt Taylor

Just don’t let your mom see

04Oct

I sat in the car for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. The Cormack’s teenage daughter was flirting loudly with a neighborhood boy on the front lawn. She was around sixteen or so, not much over five feet with blonde hair, a baby face, and growing hips. It was chilly out, and both her and the boy had their sweatshirts zipped and hoods up. They were smiling and talking softly. Every now and again, she would say something in a teasing voice and he reach forward and try to tickle her. She would dance out of the way and let out an exaggerated yelp, regardless of whether he had connected or not.

Mrs. Cormack opened the front door. “Brooke,” she called to her daughter, “that’s enough. Come in the house, please.”

I got out of my car. I was easy enough to spot sitting behind the wheel just down the road. No sense in waiting anymore.

“But you said we could say goodbye!” the girl objected.

“Brooke,” her mother urged sternly. That’s when she saw me walking up the sidewalk. She stiffened.

“Mom! We might not ever see each other again!”

“It’s okay,” the boy said under his breath.

Mrs. Cormack watched me. I stopped at the end of the driveway. I didn’t want to intrude.

“Brooke. Now,” she said in a stern monotone.

The girl saw me and turned back to her mother. “Just a few — ”

“NOW!” the woman yelled.

The girl threw her arms. “But we have all day to pack.” She pointed to the open garage.

It was three-quarters full with lawn care equipment, bikes, shelving, storage — even a table saw — such that both the Cormack’s cars had to be kept on the drive. There was a pallet of flat moving boxes resting next a freezer.

“I said . . .” Caroline Cormack stepped forward and took her daughter’s arm. “Get inside right now.”

“I’ll see you later,” the boy said, stepping back.

Brooke pulled free. “God, you’re being such a bitch.” The girl stormed into the house and slammed the door.

I watched the boy trot down the street without looking back.

Mrs. Cormack crossed her arms and looked at me angrily. I think she was deciding whether or not it was worth it to speak her mind — to finally tell me what I’m sure she’d been thinking for months — or to just ask me to leave so she could deal with her child.

From where I was standing at the end of the driveway, I could see young Brooke walking diagonally across the back yard toward a sloping ditch at the back of the property. She must have gone right through the house and out the back. She had her hood up and her hands stuck in her pockets, brooding.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Cormack asked.

It was more civil that I expected, and I hesitated.

“There’s nothing for you to say,” she told me. “You’re not welcome here.”

I nodded in understanding. “Of course,” I said. “Please tell him I stopped by.” I turned to leave.

“It should’ve been you who was shot.” She glowered for a long moment. Then she wrapped the folds of her cardigan around her and walked inside. I heard the door shut and lock. She even pulled curtains across the narrow windows that ran down either side of the frame.

A few moments later, the garage door started rumbling down.

I looked at the cars in the drive. A luxury sedan and a full-size SUV. They weren’t exorbitant. The SUV was at least three years old and the sedan a little older. Neither were top of the line. Neither were outside the reach of a frugal detective. But both were definitely nicer than my car.

I walked along the neighbor’s yard to the ditch that ran along the back of the houses. There was a row of young trees, the kind that survived by growing at the thin margin between public and private property where workers on both sides were sure it was someone else’s job to clear them. Past that was a grassy slope that ended at a concrete-lined ditch, long overgrown — a holdover from some earlier use of the land. At the other side was a fence and then more housing.

The girl, Brooke, was sitting on the embankment, out of sight of the house. She had a lit cigarette. There was an old pile of butts at her feet and quite a few others scattered around. The area around her had been mostly cleaned of overgrowth, I suspected so the neighborhood kids could gather there and do some skating.

Brooke had a lighter in her hand and was flicking it over and over like she wanted to do something with it.

“Looks like we had the same idea,” I said.

I surprised her. She glanced to me and then quickly turned away. Her legs moved like she was going to get up. But she didn’t. I suspected that was because she didn’t want to risk being seen by her mother, who would no doubt soon discover she was gone.

“Can I bum a light?” I asked.

She extended the lighter without looking at me. I took it and pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of my sport coat. I rolled the end in the flame to char it.

She either got curious what was taking so long or smelled the smoke, because she turned her hood enough to catch a glimpse.

“You smoke cigars?” she asked.

I took a puff with the end in the flame and it flared. “Bother you?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know girls smoked cigars.”

“Girls can do whatever they want.” I handed the lighter back.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?” She watched as I took a couple puffs to make sure it was lit.

“What’s it taste like?” she asked.

I looked at the cig in her hand. “How old are you?”

“How old were you when you started?” she asked, turning away from me a little.

I made a face. “Good point.” I handed her the lit cigar.

She took it and held it awkwardly. She barely touched it with her lips. The stream of smoke rising from the lit end sputtered as she drew, but it was weak and she barely exhaled enough for me to see. She made a sour face and handed it back.

I took the cigar and sat down — not close to her but not far either. We sat there smoking for a few minutes in silence. She finished her cig and lit another.

“Why did you come here?” she asked.

“Same reason you did. Needed a break after — ”

“No. I mean why did you come?”

I shrugged. “Dunno. Seemed like I should at least stop by. Pay my respects. Say I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

I turned to her. “What do you think?”

She shrugged. “People say my dad was . . . You know, that he was going to be arrested. And stuff.”

“Who told you that?”

She shrugged again. “No one.”

“Well, even if he was, he’s still your dad.”

“Yeah.”

“You got anyone you can talk to?”

She shrugged a third time, as teenagers do.

“I had a hard time with my folks when I was around your age.” I waited to see if she got it. I don’t think she did. “When they found out I was gay.”

Her face got a little pink. “I’m not gay,” she said meekly.

I snorted in humor. Smoke blew from my mouth. “Yeah. I wasn’t saying you were. Just that I know how important it is to have someone you can talk to. Just because you’re not the one in the wheelchair doesn’t mean you’re not having a hard time with all of this as well.”

“Yeah.”

I waited to see if more came. It didn’t. “That was all.” I stood. “Thanks for the break.”

“What do you do?” she asked. “Like, what department are you in or whatever?”

“Homicide.”

“So you find killers.”

I nodded. “I try.”

“Who do you talk to? About the bad stuff?”

She was a sharp kid. “I had a doctor. For awhile.” I took a long puff on the cigar. “That helped,” I lied.

“What happened?”

“He said I was crazy.”

She smiled and exhaled just short of a laugh. It was genuine. “Really?” Her posture relaxed.

I nodded.

We were quiet for a minute. I was still standing. She was still sitting.

“Mom says we’re gonna hafta sell the house and move someplace. I’ll have to change schools. And she was looking for jobs. On the internet. I saw it in the browser history when I went to look for this video my friend sent me the other day so I could show Jordan.” She stopped, but I could tell there was something else. “She was looking at divorce lawyers,” she said. “I don’t think she contacted any of them. But. She was looking.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t read too much into that. People, ya know, sometimes they just need to think about those kinds of things so they can deal. Or so they can work through things and see what’s a good idea and what isn’t.”

“I know. Trust me.” She rolled her eyes. “I know my mom. But it’s just, like, she was looking, ya know? I know how she feels about my dad. But she was thinking about leaving him. He’s in a wheelchair. He can’t breathe without that machine and everything. And she was sitting downstairs looking.”

I waited again.

“I think she thinks he’s guilty.” She looked to me for confirmation. “You know, of all that stuff. So she was mad because now she has to take care of him and we’re gonna lose the house and everything and we don’t have any money and we have to get a lawyer because the Department won’t pay for anything.” She shook her head. “And I don’t think she knows what to do.”

I think Brooke wanted me to confirm her suspicions. That was why I’d been allowed to stay.

Word around the precinct was that at the time of the shooting, Kent Cormack was days away from facing formal charges: conspiracy, money laundering, obstruction of justice. After the shooting, the Department was facing a large payout — not just medical bills but disability pension and all the rest. Some of that gets paid through insurance, of course, but just like with regular folks, large claims affect premiums, and Cormack’s bill was going to be measured in millions across the rest of his life.

Thing is, he hadn’t been formally charged, let alone convicted. And there was some question now of whether he ever would be. The lawyers said, even given the evidence, it would be hard for a jury to convict a permanently disabled police officer who’d been shot in the line of duty, especially once they saw him. Kent Cormack couldn’t go anywhere without a cluster of machines to keep him alive. And of course the PR people chimed in. How it would look to the public if the Department started prosecution now? It would’ve been one thing if he’d already been under indictment, but to charge him after he was shot, when he could barely speak, would seem not just callous but cruel. They pointed out that the union reps would play to that. Legally, they had to. Cormack was a member, and just like anyone, he was innocent until proven otherwise. If they didn’t represent him to the fullest, he could sue the union as well.

So the Department found a bureaucratic solution. They neither filed charges nor paid his claim. Part of that was probably greed. But part of it was that the brass didn’t want to support a dirty cop for the rest of his life.

The Cormacks got a lawyer, of course. But that left the suit a civil rather than a criminal matter, and it made the Department the defendant, both of which made for much softer headlines in the papers — not necessarily good, but better than any alternative. I imagine the idea was that a settlement would quietly be reached, charges would be forgotten, and the city would have a much, much smaller payout. And of course, what happened after the money ran out was the Cormacks’ problem.

“What’s your dad say about all this?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He doesn’t say much. It’s hard for him to talk. It’s like he wants to see me, but then he gets embarrassed and doesn’t want me around.”

“How does that make you feel?”

She shrugged again. “I dunno. Hurt, I guess. But I’m not mad. I just feel bad he’s in his room by himself all the time. Mom barely says two words to him anymore.”

I nodded. She finished her cigarette and crushed it.

“I should go,” she said. She stood. “I’m supposed to be packing.”

I dropped the cigar and pressed the lit end gently with my boot. “This kinda thing is hard for everybody,” I said. “I don’t have a magic wand, but — ” I stopped. “Well, technically there’s one in my bottom drawer, but it’s broken.”

She made a face like she wasn’t a kid and knew better than to believe me.

I reached into my side pocket and handed her my card. “You don’t have to use this. Sometimes it’s just nice to know there’s someone you could call if you needed to.”

She just looked at it at first. I held it closer and she took it.

I watched her walk diagonally up the grassy embankment. “Just don’t let your mom find it.”

a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.

If you enjoyed this, leave a tip!

You can read the chapters in order:

1-A simple exorcism

2-I wanna tell you a story

3-The killing field

4-Signs

5-Are you sure this is legal?

6-Who keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?

7-The disappearance of Alexa Sacchi

art by Zach Montoya

The Disappearance of Alexa Sacchi

01Oct

It was only later that I came across Detective King and the Albert Fish case, and all the others the department conveniently files under the same heading — which is to say I didn’t start my career as the NYPD’s resident occultist. And I can’t say I ever intended that. It’s not like you know where you’ll end up when you step off the straight and narrow. But there was never any doubt why I did it. I had a clear reason. I wanted to save a child.

Alexandra Sacchi — Alexa to her friends — wasn’t a normal girl. She didn’t just have Down’s Syndrome but autism as well. Not that she threw tantrums or had any of the other awful stereotypes. She could talk more or less as well as any kid, except with a very minor impediment, and she liked to draw. She was good at it, in fact. But she did have some odd difficulties looking after herself. Food preparation, for example, always eluded her, which meant she ate a lot of crap. Her friends said they’d often walk into a room to find her sitting silently by herself, drawing animals and monsters, surrounded by empty packages of junk food, chocolate-colored crumbs at the corners of her mouth.

Alexa’s mother was an alcoholic with a history of bad decisions, and all of her children were in and out of the foster system. It was during one such stay that Alexa’s foster parents noticed she would speak to imaginary people and talk about them casually as if they were real. When it was suggested they weren’t, Alexa became confused. She assumed everyone had seen and heard the same things she had. She suspected her foster parents were trying to trick her and became increasingly sullen with occasional tense outbreaks. She was eventually hospitalized, and stayed there until she was a teenager, when she was released to her older half brother, Dominic.

Dominic Sacchi was a young man at the time, but he was working successfully as a professional stage magician, and he had recently married another young performer, Palmer Bell, a fortune teller and tarot card reader whom he had met on the job. The couple worked for a touring sideshow and freak act called The Dani Rose Circus, and their relationship was by all accounts pretty toxic from the start. Dominic, well-groomed and handsome, had been involved with Dani Rose, seventeen years his senior, right up until a week before his marriage to Ms. Bell, all of 20. Witnesses reported it wasn’t long before the couple started arguing, usually over Alexa, who was difficult to care for. Police were called on two occasions — once in Atlanta and once outside Tokyo, where the circus had accompanied a music festival. None of the officers involved had much to say. Run-of-the-mill “he said/she said” domestic disturbances, I was told, as if two sets of cops from two jurisdictions in two completely different countries were reading from the same script.

Then, about seven years ago, on the night of October 24th, Dominic Sacchi called police and claimed he’d been attacked by his wife, but when officers arrived — this was in London — he recanted and said there’d been a misunderstanding and that the sliver cuts on his hands and face were the result of an accident with a new act he was developing for his show. He showed the officers a collection of throwing knives and said his wife wasn’t even home, that she was with their daughter in the city and had been all night, and that Alexa would corroborate his story.

Two weeks later, The Dani Rose Circus was in the middle of a four-night stretch in Brooklyn when both Dominic Sacchi and Palmer Bell didn’t show up for work. Dani Rose checked their rooms, where she found all of their belongings, including dirty clothes on the floor and a hair dryer still plugged into the wall. But no family.

Dominic was traced by his cell phone to a rent-by-week motel in Flushing, where he was alone and panicked out of his mind. Neither his wife nor his 15-year-old daughter were anywhere to be found. Clearly distraught, he claimed Palmer had left him and took the girl, and the shock and embarrassment drove him to flee the circus. He just couldn’t face his friends and colleagues, he said — especially the domineering and vindictive Ms. Rose, who was “as jealous as a polecat.” The responding officers weren’t convinced, however, and the case was remanded as a possible homicide to me and my then-partner, Craig Hammond.

Thing is, it’s hard to prove a murder when you don’t have a body, or even evidence of one. But when one day turned to two, and two days turned to a week, and a week turned to a month and there was still no sign of either Palmer Bell or the girl, everyone suspected the worst.

Certainly, the more Hammond and I dug, the more we got the sense that there was definitely something very wrong. For one, Palmer’s parents hadn’t heard from her since she quite literally ran away to join the circus at 17, despite having been an honors student and an active member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They hadn’t gotten a single email or text message — that is, until she miraculously showed up at their house the week before our call. She was still there, they said, although when we talked to her, she predictably contradicted her husband, whom she claimed was the one who had left, taking Alexa with him.

To make matters worse, we had no witnesses. To anything. No one would talk to us. They would never say that, of course. They would just say there was nothing to tell. But in my experience, everyone has something to tell. Even when they don’t know anything at all, people will fill your ears with gossip and speculation. Hammond and I got the distinct impression they’d been intimidated — at first we thought by Dominic. But the more we pressed, the more we realized the person they really feared was Palmer Bell.

I did find one acquaintance, a sword-swallower turned dog groomer named Bea Wimbly, who’d had a falling out with the couple over their treatment of Alexa and who subsequently quit the circus. Bea agreed to talk to us, but only off the record. She wouldn’t testify to anything, she cautioned. Then she told us a story that still gives me chills.

Bea said she noticed spots of blood on the back of Alexa’s blouse, and when she asked the girl about it, she casually reported that Palmer had sewn a crystal into a cut in the middle of her back, where she couldn’t reach. Bea was of course skeptical of such a story, but when she asked why Palmer would do such a thing, she was told it was to drive away the evil presence that possessed her. Spooked, Bea Wimbly immediately looked under the girl’s shirt, over her protests, where she discovered a long cut along the spine. It had been sewn shut with twine. And there was a hard bulge under the skin.

Ms. Wimbly immediately opened the wound with scissors and removed a crystal shard. But as soon as she tried to clean and bandage the wound, Alexa turned violent and nearly stabbed Bea with the scissors resting on the ground. The girl ran home and Bea called social services.

The next day, Palmer Bell showed up at Bea’s door. At first she denied everything, but eventually she declared, in hushed tones, that it was in the girl’s best interests, that Bea had no idea what was going on, and that Alexa’s business was hers and Dominic’s and no one else’s. Bea said she was given a very vague threat, something about her needing to stop worrying about other people’s families and pay more attention to her own, lest anything bad happen. She said she thought it was odd given that she was childless and single.

Two days later, Bea’s best friend, an eight-year-old black lab named Betty, who minded her every word, bolted out the door of their apartment — as if driven by a terrible fright — and was struck by a car and killed. Bea left the circus and never returned.

Then there was the case worker who oversaw Alexa’s release from the hospital the year before her disappearance. The woman said it had been welcomed, that institutionalized kids with a severe mental handicap often never leave, especially as they get older. Someone like Alexa required plenty of patience and care. The only real oddity, she said, was Ms. Bell’s insistence that her name be left off all the documents and that Dominic should be affirmed as the girl’s sole guardian, despite that the couple were legally married.

Hammond asked why she would release a difficult, mentally unstable child into that kind of home environment and got a defensive, roundabout reply and that same feeling that she’d been another victim of intimidation. Whatever her initial reservations, it seems the woman justified it to herself on the grounds that no couple was perfect and that the alternative for Alexa was life as a ward of the state.

“Alexa wanted it,” we were told. “She wanted a home, same as any other child. I didn’t want to be the one to take that away from her.”

Everyone knew the girl was the key to the case. But she’d vanished without a trace.

Detective Hammond and I instructed Dominic Sacchi not to leave the state. When he did anyway, a warrant was issued, which was executed several days later by a Virginia state trooper. Dominic was brought back to New York, along with his now-ex-wife, and both were charged with felony child endangerment and second-degree murder. But without any physical evidence, and without the testimony of Bea Wimbly, who staunchly refused every request, the prosecution had nothing but the secondhand accounts of Dani Rose, who took the stand in studded leather and whom the defense easily painted as a jilted lover. Both Dominic Sacchi and Palmer Bell were found not guilty and released.

I had my theories about what really happened, about the crystal and strange murmurings we heard when we bugged the Bell residence. But I couldn’t convince Hammond to take them seriously. A few months after the acquittal, I requested a transfer, which was approved, and I moved downtown.

To this day, the disappearance and presumed death of Alexa Sacchi remains officially unsolved.

a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.

If you enjoyed this, leave a tip!

You can read the chapters in order:

1-A simple exorcism

2-I wanna tell you a story

3-The killing field

4-Signs

5-Are you sure this is legal?

6-Who keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?

art by Yuri Schwedoff

Who keeps a shotgun in the bathroom?

29Sep

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

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

“Craig.” I shut the door behind me.

“Hari,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“I suspect you know.”

He nodded once.

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

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

She came right out with it. “I’ve asked Detective Hammond to take the Massey case.”

“Can I ask why?”

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

The blood on the VHS tape was found to be human — female in particular. Human blood on an object mailed anonymously to the police is suspicious enough to warrant being investigated, which meant I was given the green light to check the condo in White Plains. Fingerprint identification from the shipping tape and DNA on the blood would both come later, but we all assumed the latter at least would belong to Dr. Massey. She was missing, possibly dead. Someone wanted us to find her.

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

“We got the fingerprint results,” she said.

‘We.’

Normally lab results would go directly to the officer in charge — namely, me. But here they went to my lieutenant first. I wondered what else was going on behind my back.

“And?”

Hammond answered. “They belong to Alexa Sacchi.”

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

“The fingerprints on file are old,” he explained, “but the lab guys feel pretty certain it’s a match.”

That meant the prints on the tape were older, which suggested they were recent — which was just insane. Alexa Sacchi went missing at fifteen. It had been seven years since anyone had seen her. Just like with Grace Budd, she’d been presumed dead. There’d even been a trial. As with the Budd case, the defendants had been exonerated for lack of evidence.

Lt. Miller stayed cool. “I’m sure Detective Hammond and his new partner — ” She looked to Craig for the name.

“Rigdon,” he answered.

“ — will figure it out.”

I was scowling. It didn’t make any sense.

“I imagine the two of you will need to talk,” she said knowingly.

Hammond stood and nodded.

I looked between them for a moment. Miller didn’t mean just about Alexa Sacchi or what possible relation she could have to the disappearance of Dr. Massey. She didn’t mean being taken off the case. She meant Hammond and I, old partners, needed to talk about my personal situation, the one with Kent Cormack and Dr. More.

I stood and walked out. I wasn’t so much angry as just confused. Miller giving the case to Hammond was a hassle but it didn’t change anything but who did the paperwork.

Craig followed me in his loping gait down the stairs.

“My treat,” he said.

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

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

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

He chuckled. “Get clocked kickboxing?”

“Rugby,” I said.

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

“It’s called Muay Thai.”

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

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

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

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

“Who says there has to be anything?”

“You keep cutting your hair shorter.”

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

He patted it. “Excellent detective work.”

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

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

“This about Miller?”

“No. It’s not.” He sat back in his chair as a new patron squeezed past to sit at the counter a few seats down. “But she’s doing you a favor. The department’s almost certainly gonna hang you out over this, if only to cover their own ass. Unless you fight. Hard.”

I nodded.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“She didn’t show you the file?”

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

“It was a long time ago.”

“She said the wolf thing was — ”

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

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

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

“What do you think it was?”

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

I could see him studying my face, trying to decide if he believed me. He wasn’t trying to hide it.

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

“So what happened? It just came from nowhere?”

“Dunno. Gettin’ old maybe.”

“Miller said the doc thinks it was stress.”

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

He nodded in understanding, looking down at his coffee. He knew I was talking about the fucker with the shotgun. Neither of us would ever forget it.

“The shit with Cormack was pretty routine. I was at the door. We were about to bust in. Next thing I know, I’m on the ground, convulsing. Cormack and the others went in.” I paused. “And I wasn’t there to clear my side of the house. Cormack got shot. Face all messed up. Never gonna walk again.”

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

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

“Tongues?”

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

“That’s enough,” he stopped me. “I get it.”

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

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

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

“Because you are.”

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

I shrugged. “See? I wasn’t wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shifted in my sit, preparing to get up.

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

“Oh?” I settled back into my chair.

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

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“But lots of guys did.”

“Lots of guys still do,” I added.

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

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

We chuckled.

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

“Or worse,” I said.

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

“You got burned, right?”

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

We didn’t say anything for a minute.

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

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

He leaned in. “You wanna know a secret?”

I scowled.

“I almost shat myself.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Selfish?”

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

“How does that make me selfish?”

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

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

a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS. You can read the chapters in order:

1-A simple exorcism

2-I wanna tell you a story

3-The killing field

4-Signs

5-Are you sure this is legal?

Are you sure this is legal?

28Sep

“Are you sure this is legal?” she asked as the key went into the door with a stutter. The lock clicked and the young woman with the afro swung open the door.

I stepped into the condo. There was a white Turkish sofa with throw pillows, a fancy rug on the hardwood, a TV stand with no TV. The small kitchen table in the nook had four matching chairs. The furnishings were nice but the space was snug, definitely smaller than I’d thought coming into the building from the street. But then, I’m sure that was intentional. High ceilings with equally high windows give you the impression of space, make you feel like you’re getting more for your money.

On the other side of the tall exterior windows was a three-foot-wide balcony. It was swarming with very large birds — black with scruffy collars and bare heads. One of them spread its wings and swiped its claws at another.

“Buzzards.” The young woman, Shané, stepped past the kitchen area and through the living space to the balcony windows. She had a new nose stud, which she touched gingerly every few minutes, like maybe it itched and she didn’t want to scratch. “Go on!”

She waved her arms at the birds. They didn’t move.

I looked up. The ceiling was exposed, loft-style, which matched the bare brick walls — part of the original 1920s structure, the marketing material downstairs had told me proudly. I grabbed the latex gloves from the side pocket of my blazer and pulled them over my hands with a snap.

“It’s just,” Shané went on, “I could get into trouble.”

“I thought you said the resident moved out.”

“She did but — ”

“And the mortgage company has started foreclosure?”

She looked at the paper on the clipboard in her arms. “That’s what the computer says, but — ”

“Then it’s fine.”

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

I opened the cupboards. There was a four-piece collection of plain white dishes and bowls. Looked cheap. “This unit is pre-furnished? Or whatever it’s called?”

Shané checked her clipboard. “Ummm, yes.”

I was about to shut the cupboard when my eye caught movement. There was a wasp crawling on the lip of one of the ceramic bowls. “You might want to call an exterminator.” I shut the door, trapping it inside. I looked around the furniture. At the Turkish sofa. At the ugly modern lamp next to it. “So all this stuff belongs to the management company, not the lienholder.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“Guess you’ll have to wait, then.”

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

“What is this about again?” she asked.

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

“A package was sent to the police.” I didn’t say it was sent to me personally. “This apartment was given as the return address.”

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

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

“Umm. I don’t know.”

“Who would?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Anyone?” I asked insistently.

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

“Is she working today?”

Shané shook her head.

“Do you have a phone number for Kelsey?”

“Today is her day off.”

I arched my back and gave her my best unamused look.

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

“That’d be great. And I’ll need a copy of the resident’s rental application.”

A pair of buzzards squawked at each other and spread their wings in aggression.

“I hate those things,” she said. “They’re so gross.”

They definitely were shady looking. And big. I walked for a closer look, but as soon as I got within steps of the balcony, all the birds squawked and flapped and flew away. And that was it.

Shané looked at me like I was from another planet.

“About that application,” I said.

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

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

“The boxes were moved to the corner.” I was pretty sure. I just needed confirmation.

“Yeah,” she said with enough audible exasperation to fill a high school. “She said the resident had left them by the door. It’s not all that unusual,” she added. “People leave things sometimes.”

“Things like pictures and personal effects?” I asked. “And do they usually go through the trouble of packing everything nicely into boxes only to leave a couple by the front door?”

She shrugged.

“Is that the rental application?”

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

I snatched it.

The resident’s name was Amber Massey. A doctor. Employer listed as Urban Outreach Center, the Bronx. It was an awfully nice condo for someone who worked at a free clinic.

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

“Who?” Shané touched her nose again.

I walked out and left her with the young couple.

Since I was all the way up in White Plains, I decided to make an unscheduled pit stop at the home of Dr. C. L. More, PhD, which was further north still. In fact, the distance was half the reason I hadn’t stopped by yet. The other half was that I was busy. And the third half was that I just didn’t want to. It was just after 11 a.m. on a Sunday, which I figured gave me a good shot of catching him. In my experience, most people with office jobs like to stay home and relax on Sunday mornings — if they’re not churchgoers, that is. I was pretty sure the good doctor wasn’t vexed by salvation.

I didn’t know More’s home address — and technically wasn’t supposed to — but he had a driver’s license, as people do, which meant it was very easy to find.

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

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

I parked on the street and walked up the drive, which was nearly covered in fallen leaves. It was a proper autumn day — overcast and gloomy — and the leaves rustled with the chill breeze. Winter seemed to be coming early. I looked at the front windows. I didn’t see any lights.

I walked up and rang the doorbell. I knocked. I rang the doorbell again. After a few minutes, I walked through the leaves to the shrubbery under the front windows. The Venetian blinds had been partially turned. It was impossible to see anything in the dark house without getting very close. I leaned across the prickly bushes in my cheap suit and squinted. I could feel them poking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you say that?”

“No kids,” he explained.

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

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

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

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

 

a rough cut from the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS. You can read the chapters in order:

A simple exorcism

I wanna tell you a story

The killing field

Signs

Signs

26Sep

The sign on the office door said:

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

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSOCIATE

I could hear the secretary down the hall calling security.

I opened the door and Fred looked up at me, surprised. He’d gained a little weight. He was still thin, but he wasn’t quite as gym-rat-gaunt as he used to be.

“Hi, Fred.” He didn’t like that name. He said it made him sound like a cartoon caveman. “How’s the life of the flesh?”

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

“Funny.” He hit the intercom on his phone with a manicured finger. “It’s alright, Joanie. You can call off the hounds.” He let go of the button and motioned for me to sit. “I’m assuming you didn’t get in here, unannounced, by asking nicely.”

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

Freddie and I had both written our parents off years ago. To be fair, they wrote us off first. One has to be a little sympathetic, though. It had to be hard for a God-fearing couple to find out that not just one but both of their offspring were gay. Not that our parents were Bible-thumpers — just traditional folks who liked BBQ and football and who tried to raise their kids the way they’d been raised, which was the only way they knew how.

Things might have worked out better if there hadn’t been such a gap between us. I was older so naturally I blazed the trail. With an eight-year-old son sitting in the wings, they could comfortably blame my illness and everything that happened the year I spent in an institution for turning me gay. Six years later, when Mom caught Freddie with his tongue down the throat of the junior varsity quarterback, the reason was equally simple: my “elective” gayness had clearly rubbed off on their baby. After all, there’s no shortage of pastors on the internet who’ll explain in a calm and rational tone that that’s exactly how it works — the Contagion Model of Homosexuality. Like cooties. It was either that, I suppose, or the belief that God was punishing them for something.

I should probably add that they were never physically abusive. It was all a lot more subtle than that — not that that’s any excuse. As a young adult, I did what I could to protect Freddie from the worst of it, which meant intentionally stoking their anger so it stayed fixed squarely on me and not my teenage brother. As a result, he’s been able to maintain a strained but minimal relationship with them, whereas, for all I knew, they didn’t even acknowledge I existed.

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

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

There was a knock on the door.

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

He took a file from an assistant and thanked her.

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

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

“Not for much longer.”

He squinted at me. “Meaning what?”

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

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

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

He looked at me. “Seriously?”

I nodded.

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

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

“What friends?”

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

“What about her?” I asked.

“Don’t tell me she’s gone already.”

I turned and looked out the window.

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

Almost a year.

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

“I was.”

“And?”

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

He laughed. Loudly. And he kept laughing. He laughed so hard, it took him a minute or two to calm down. “I’m sorry. Really. I am.” He wiped his eyes. “It’s terrible. It’s just . . . it’s so you to alienate your own therapist! Honey, seriously, if a professional couldn’t help you, I don’t know why you would think I could. This is why it’s worth holding onto someone, you know, no matter how hard it gets. People are occasionally useful.”

I looked at the sole picture in the office. Him and Chester. Chesty Chester with the receding hairline and pects bigger than my boobs. “It’s harder when you’re lesbian,” I said softly. “Harder to find the right person.”

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

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

“Why?”

“Because he’d help.” I watched a tiny ferry slide across the East River. It left a white V in its wake.

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

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

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

I was never a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure my sessions with the department shrink was covered under the same patient confidentiality as anyone else. I knew Dr. More would issue a report, of course. That was the whole point. But the idea behind soliciting the opinion of an expert is that normal folks aren’t competent to interpret someone’s medical history, not to mention their deeply private thoughts and personal ramblings. But mine had been excerpted verbatim, and in what was supposed to be an interim report only.

That was why Lieutenant Miller shared the file with me while it was still being routed to the managers, which was a clear violation of protocol. From her standpoint, protocol had already been violated. She was doing her part to even things out.

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

Once, twice, thrice.

“Harriet?”

“Would it kill you to be my brother?”

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

I started to stand.

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

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

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

I scowled.

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

I stood.

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

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

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

I stepped for the door.

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

“You’re a real saint.”

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

“A whole hour?”

“Please don’t quit,” he blurted.

I stopped with my hand on the knob. “What?”

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

I nodded.

“I love you, sis,” he said.

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

From the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.

Read the first part here.

Read the second here.

Read the third here.