The problem was me
The residential street was upscale but not posh. Recently gentrified. It was also quiet, especially that early in the morning. I was leaning against a tree when she came out, box in hand.
“Dr. Alexander.” She stopped in shock on the stairs of her upscale three-story condo building. “Jeez. You surprised me.” She stepped down slowly with a bemused smile. “What are you doing here?”
“Going somewhere?” I nodded to the car parked at the curb. The trunk was open. There were suitcases and a couple boxes, just like the one in her hands.
She lifted it as if to show off and smiled. “After what happened to Alonso, I figured it was finally time to get on with my life.” She nodded. “Not exactly the best circumstances, but I’m pretty excited actually.” Her smiled faded. “Are you okay? You don’t look so well.”
“We didn’t talk about the fieldwork I did in Africa, did we? For my dissertation.”
“I’m so sorry,” she interjected as she walked to the trunk. “I know it’s rude, but I really can’t talk right now.”
“I never thought I’d see that many dead people again.”
“Dead people?” She set the box with the others and turned. “What are you talking about? Are you sure you’re not sick?”
“I couldn’t figure it out,” I said. “I knew I had all the pieces. But I just couldn’t figure it out.”
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said and turned back for her purse.
“No one was supposed to care, right? Half a dozen junkies die every day in this city. Every day. Plus a couple homeless people. No one gives a shit. It’s not like they get an obit in the paper. You said it yourself. No one would have cared about a bunch of dead illegals, either. Not if I hadn’t sent out that health alert. Just like no one cared about Jayden Cavett.
“But Alons . . .” I raised a finger. “He was the one that didn’t fit. And of course the little boy.”
“Dr. Alexander, you’re worrying me.” She had her hand on her purse. But she hadn’t bothered to get her phone. Hadn’t dialed that ambulance.
“There are more out there,” I said. “Aren’t there? Bodies. Dozens, I’ll bet. In a ring of death. Glowing with dark light. Light that doesn’t come from the sun.”
She just looked at me. Not like I was crazy. Not like she was confused. There was just nothing. She had no expression at all.
“When we spoke on the phone, you said I needed to have someone I could talk to about the little boy. But I never said he was a boy. I still have the texts. All I said was that there was another victim who was seven. I never gave a gender.”
I thought she might protest then, pretend that she had heard it somewhere she couldn’t have or that it was a lucky guess. But she didn’t.
“He didn’t hit the news until later. There’s no way you could have known. I blew it off at first. But my mind wouldn’t let it go. I must’ve read our texts hundred times.”
A car passed on the quiet street. I watched it disappear. “My guess is Jayden was an accident. Something went wrong. She got out. She was a tough one. Had a hard life. But then, you all had to expect a couple of them would be found. Sooner or later. That wasn’t the problem. Nooo. The problem, as you so eloquently put it, was me.”
She stepped up onto the curb. But still her face was blank.
“It must have taken a lot of planning. That means you couldn’t have done it by yourself. Those wealthy investors you mentioned. The ones who liked to use the Outreach Center as a tax write-off. Have offices downtown, do they? How many similar places did they fund? It’s a good way to exert influence over who gets hired into key positions, right? Like a clinic ‘director’ who runs a Meals on Wheels program.
“Three years and still waiting on your license to show up from the city. Something tells me it isn’t coming.
“The trays in the corner. The ones with the pink lids. Is that how it worked? You and your colleagues across town spend a few months casing the neighborhoods. Get to know all the usual clientele. Identify the candidates. Poorest of the poor. Runaways. Homeless. The mentally ill. Folks desperate for something to eat. In a metropolis of 18 million, I bet you were spoiled for choice. And when the time was right, you slipped them a different tray. The one with the mushrooms baked into a pot pie.
“I bet it was going great, too. Until I sent out that health alert, right? Suddenly, you panicked. All that planning. No one was supposed to notice. No one was supposed to care. They never had before. You couldn’t just sit by and hope for the best. Not after all that work. Preparation. You couldn’t just leave it to chance. You had to know what we knew, how close we were. You needed a way to keep tabs on the investigation. You had to get close to me, to know if your plan was in jeopardy.
“That’s why they picked you, right? To come forward. The pretty southern girl with the heart of gold trying to do good in the big city. You practically threw yourself at me. Of course, killing me would only raise questions, make it look like I was onto something. But, if you could discredit me . . .
“The Alonso file wasn’t lost. It wasn’t lost because there never was one. Because Alonso White was never sick. You made it up. But the best lies have just enough of the truth to be convincing. My mom taught me that. That’s why you picked a real person, one who’d really gone missing weeks before. A neighborhood saint whose shocking disappearance had even made the local papers. Someone we had to care about, at least enough to show up at your door. But someone we’d never find. Because your people had already taken him.
“And sure enough. You sent your report to the DoH and I jumped. I showed up at the Outreach Center that same day. And now you knew who was running the investigation. Alonso was your colleague, you said. Your patient, even. So you had legit reasons to ask all kinds of questions. You were good, too. Really good. I never once suspected. And why wouldn’t I share? We’re all on the same team, right? That’s how science works.”
I shook my head. “Jesus. Ollie tried to warn me . . .” I said softly. “And you found exactly what you needed. You found out you had nothing to fear from me. I told you straight up that the investigation hadn’t even been opened. That I was acting on my on time. So it all looked cool. You were safe.
“But then ICE found the illegals, and the DoH got a call. That damned health alert was linking things together that should’ve stayed separate. The case was officially opened, and you had to shut it down quick. Throw us off the scent. Shouldn’t be that hard, right? I mean, what sane person will believe a story about a carnivorous jungle fungus? All you had to do was give the nice, reasonable city managers over my head a genuine reason to doubt.
“Most people don’t even have a clear idea of what chemotherapy is, let alone where to get the cocktails. But a doctor would. Wouldn’t be too hard either, if she was bold and unscrupulous. And pretty.”
“You’re deranged,” she said softly. “Listen to yourself. You’ve been working too hard. You should get some rest.”
“What’d you do?” I asked. “Camp out on the street until you found the cutest little made-for-TV face you could? He was groggy when he got home. Passed right out. Because you sedated him. Not enough to put him under. Nothing that would show up on the labs. Maybe just a whiff of ether. Wouldn’t take much with a seven-year-old. He didn’t tell his babysitter he’d been injected with something because he didn’t know — through his back into his abdomen where it would mimic the symptoms of a tummy ache. I bet you even waited with him for a bit. Just to make sure he came out of it okay. Did you walk him home? Hold his hand? Ask him questions about school? Send him upstairs so he’d be sure to be found when the time came? Yeah. I bet you did. Such a nice stranger lady. It’s never a woman, right? Stranger danger. It’s always a dude.
“Jesus . . .” I shook my head. “You killed a little kid just to drag a red herring across the trail. But I gotta hand it to you. I really do. It was brilliant. It fuckin’ worked.”
I stopped, mouth open. I didn’t know what else to say.
“What are you gonna do?” she asked calmly. “Call the police with this fantastical tale?”
“And tell them what? That you’re part of some cult or something that’d growing a toadstool ring thirty miles wide? That you ritually slaughtered an innocent man so you could open a doorway and summon the devil?”
“Ha!” She laughed. Genuinely. “Is that what you think? That we’re some kind of devil worshipers?” She shook her head. “There are older gods than devils. Before The Masters. Before Christ. Before Moses. Before the high priests of civilization tried to take it all for themselves. Real gods. Powerful gods. Who don’t hide in some distant heaven. Gods who move over the world and reveal themselves to us. With agony. And delight.” She ran her hands up her arms.
I knew I was right when I showed up. I’d figured it out the night before. Lying awake. Trying to make sense of it all. But there was still some part of me that wanted to believe I was wrong.
Seeing her face then, it made me sick.
She could tell. “You’re right. Junkies and homeless die in droves. Every day. And no one cares. You know why? Because they’re not worth caring about and the righteous know it. They’re filth. Parasites. Dozens of them just went missing and there’s not a single story on the news. So go back to Atlanta, Dr. Alexander. Go back to your wife. Beg her to forgive you for whatever stupid thing you did. Raise your child. For as long as He allows. Because that’s the best you’re going to have.” She stepped close to me. Her face was within inches. I could smell her toothpaste. “There’s nothing for you here. We’ve been here since the beginning. We’ll be here at the end. And the world belongs to us now, and there’s nothing you can do. You’re just like the rest of them, an insignificant little worm,” she breathed. “An insect on the back of something so large and mighty, you can’t hope to comprehend it.”
She had me there. I used to think I was a pretty smart guy. But now it felt like I barely knew anything anymore.
“You’re right,” I said with a slow nod. “I am.” I shrugged once.
She smirked at me sarcastically. She looked at my lips.
I nodded toward the sidewalk behind her. “But he’s not.”
Amber spun and saw the chef standing stone-faced with his hands in the pockets of his fantastic coat. He was pale. He looked worse than I did in the greenhouse, in fact. But he was alive.
She stepped back toward her house, right as Mr. Dench stepped through the front door. He’d gone in from the back and made sure it was empty. Next she tried to get past me, but I stepped into her path as Milan, in the Jaguar, slowed to a halt in the street. The big engine growled.
I glanced to Dr. Massey’s neck and saw the symbol on a chain, the same one I saw on the wall in Jersey — an upside down triangle with swooping ends tipped in tiny circles. I guess there was no reason for her to hide it now.
Dench came down the stairs and she eyed him defiantly. I could see the bulge of his gun in his coat pocket. I’m sure she could too.
She gripped the amulet around her neck, closed her eyes, and whispered softly in fervent prayer. She was serious, too.
All I could do was stare as the wackest shit I have ever heard came out of her mouth.
Dench took her arm. “In the car,” he said.
Dr. Massey turned for the black Jag, but Dench stopped her.
“Not that one.”
He meant her car.
She looked at him again. I think she understood then. She understood that Amber Massey, MD, had quit her job the day before. She’d told everyone she was moving away and said her goodbyes. She’d packed up her belongings early one morning and drove off from an empty apartment. She wouldn’t be missed. Not for months.
The chef approached her. “You will tell me everything you know about a man named Lyman Sinclair.”
“Go to Hell,” she sneered.
“I have been to Hell,” he said. “You may give them my regards.”
She pulled. But Dench held on. He pushed her into the car.
Étranger looked at me. Like he was waiting for me to come.
“I don’t wanna know,” I said.
He nodded and got in.
Milan was smirking at me playfully from the driver’s seat of the Jag. “Don’t look so dour,” she said through the open window. “We found them. Finally. Thanks to you.”
I stood in the street and watched the others drive away. “What are they gonna do to her?”
“You were right the first time. You don’t wanna know.”
My face flushed with guilt. And shame. And anxiety.
I thought about Alonso White. And the Chinese couple, who wanted nothing but a better life, holding hands in death. I thought about little “Alvin” with the cherub face and the dimpled smile.
I got in the car next to my new friend.
“Maybe it doesn’t feel like it yet,” she said. “But you were a soldier today.”
“Soldier?”
“In a war. A very, very, very old war.”
“I thought the war ended.”
She looked down the empty road. “A wise man once told me that civilization is a boat that sails on a sea of war. You picked a side today.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Cemetery.” I sighed. “Then the airport.”
I wanted to pay my respects. Then I wanted to get the hell outta New York.
I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.
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The next chapter is: A great oblivious god
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