Prepare the Way

I had one lead The worst part isn’t that Alvin died

Prepare the Way

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

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

I laughed.

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

“I know.”

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

I nodded.

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

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

Not that she ever tried.

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

And she’d never talk about Alvin.

“Don’t you say his name!”

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

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

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

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

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black circle with the letters CE.

Sold all over the city apparently. I sighed.

“Thanks,” I said.

I was getting nowhere.

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

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

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

I turned around. I scanned everything in view slowly.

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

A 24-hour laundromat.

A kebab joint.

A pay-by-hour lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I walked back.

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

I knelt and looked closer.

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

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

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

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

PREPARE THE WAY

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

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

I turned my head and listened.

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

I caught movement. Something small. Behind me.

I turned all the way around.

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

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

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

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

That hole, though.

Dark. Still.

I had the most uncanny feeling then.

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

I heard a creak in the hall.

I turned my head and listened again.

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

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

Three minutes. Four.

I took a single step.

Nothing.

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