Every Crooked Path Page 4

  Even after all these years he remembered what it was like to wake up in that hospital bed and find out that he had been dead.

  He’d coded, as they called it, then been resuscitated. Fractured ribs. Bruises and contusions. And he’d lost his spleen, which left him susceptible to infection.

  His little brother and his uncle had not been so lucky to be brought back.

  You never get two chances at the moments that come your way. And you don’t know how many more you’re gonna have.

  He came to the poster of Gracie, set down the tube, unlocked the hinged Plexiglas covering that protected her from vandals and graffiti artists, and swung it to the side.

  The girl had playful, slightly mischievous eyes. She was sitting on a hospital bed, holding a stuffed lion cub. The caption above her head was different than Derek’s: YOUR COMPASSION CAN CHANGE A LIFE FOREVER.

  Each development campaign had its own slogan.

  And its own child.

  Mascot.

  No. It’s not a mascot. It’s a child!

  Francis had visited Gracie twice in the hospital and had made balloon animals for her.

  Even though he was still learning how to do it and wasn’t very good, she hadn’t seemed to mind and kept the misshapen dog there in her room even after the air had leaked out and the balloon sat limp and wrinkled and distorted on the windowsill overlooking the city.

  It was still there when they took her body out of the room. Francis had noticed it in the trash can when he went to see her and found the bed empty, found that he had come in two hours too late.

  He’d taken it home as a reminder of their visits.

  Now it sat in the windowsill of his apartment.

  +++

  After he was done replacing Gracie’s poster with Derek’s, he rolled up her poster, slid it into the tube with the others, and then fastened the Plexiglas cover back in place.

  There were no rules about what he was supposed to do with the old posters after he’d taken them down.

  “Where should I put the other ones?” he’d asked the man who’d been in charge of the volunteers seven years ago when he first started helping with the posters.

  “They’re paper, right?” He was poring over a pile of forms strewn across his desk. “You can recycle them, maybe?”

  But to Francis, there was something about depositing the posters into a recycling bin that didn’t feel right. For some reason he felt like doing that would have disgraced the children. So, from the beginning, he’d taken the old posters home, back to his apartment.

  Now, as he rode the 7 train to Junction Boulevard, he thought about how late it already was and if he should really go online when he got home.

  He wasn’t sure he would do it, even when the train stopped and he left, carrying the cardboard tube, and walked the three blocks to his place.

  Even then he wasn’t sure.

  Inside his apartment, Francis popped open the tube, removed the posters of Gracie, laid eleven of them on the stack of other posters near the window, then, taking the remaining one with him, he picked up four pushpins and walked to the living room wall.

  There was just enough room for Gracie between Kevin and the window.

  After pinning the poster up there, he stepped back and looked at the wall.

  At the children.

  Twelve of them.

  Mascots.

  No! Children!

  He was running out of room. He would need to start using the hallway unless St. Stephen’s found a cure soon.

  At the far end of the room his laptop was waiting on his desk.

  Go online. She’s usually on at this time of night. You could chat, just for a few minutes. It wouldn’t hurt anything just to chat.

  He stared at his computer.

  You’re not harming anyone, Francis. She said she was eighteen. Dr. Perrior told you it would be good for you to meet people your own age.

  But that’s not my age. I’m ten years older than her.

  But your dad was twelve years older than your mom when they got married.

  I know, but he was forty-four and she was thirty-two. It’s different when you’re that age.

  Well, anyway, you’re just chatting online. It’s not like you’re ever going to meet her.

  He didn’t want to chance using his real name, not with his career and how things would look if it leaked out what he was doing here, so he used the screen name Jared4life73 and made sure the browser was set to private browsing.

  Clicking to graciousgirl4’s Krazle page, he sent her a message: “U still up? It’s me.”

  Why would it matter if people found out? You’re not sending or receiving obscene material. It’s just a friendship.

  But it just wouldn’t look good. It wouldn’t reflect well on the ICSC.

  He got ready for bed, but the voices didn’t leave him alone. They kept arguing with each other, arguing, arguing, arguing about whether or not he should be chatting with graciousgirl4.

  When he returned to the computer he found that she’d replied, “Yah. Couldn’t sleep. Whatcha doin?”

  After a moment’s hesitation he picked up where he’d left off, chatting with the girl who’d told him that she was eighteen, but, based on the subjects she said she was studying in school, he wondered if she might be just a little bit younger.

  6

  Thursday, June 14

  I rose before dawn and slipped quietly into Christie’s room to get my running clothes. She stirred slightly in her sleep, but I did my best not to disturb her.

  After changing into shorts and a T-shirt, I headed outside.

  The air was sharp and surprisingly brisk for a June morning, but it felt good. Invigorating.

  They say this is the city that never sleeps, but it certainly does doze at times, and just before sunrise is one of them. A few other runners were out, but for the most part the sidewalks were empty.

  Though I’d been here for a couple of years now, I still considered myself a newcomer to New York City.

  It was the only major city I’d ever encountered where the terms “downtown” and “uptown” were antonyms rather than synonyms.

  It was terribly confusing to me at first when people spoke about taking a subway downtown or uptown, and only when I found myself at the wrong side of the line did I realize they weren’t talking about the same thing, but were actually talking about heading in opposite directions.

  Today it took a couple of miles before I started to really loosen up and get into my stride. At six-minute-thirty-second miles, I figured I had just enough time for my eight-mile loop.

  Last night’s events rotated through my mind and seemed to bring up even more questions about the homicide the evening before. Did the USB flash drive contain anything relevant to the investigation? Would the remote control units contain any identifiable prints? If the jumper was Stewart’s killer, why did he choose to take his own life? And who was the guy, Ted, whom he’d told me we hadn’t been able to protect?

  In New York City, with few alleys or dumpsters, people put their garbage out along the curbs at night to get picked up the next morning. If you get up early enough to run, it’ll still be there lining the sidewalks.

  Today, as I passed a small deli, one of the bags of garbage twitched.

  Though it startled me at first, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen that happen and I knew what it was: something inside that bag was alive.

  A couple of years ago when I first moved here, I’d seen a garbage bag like this one quiver and it’d shocked me so much that I’d lurched to the side and wrenched my ankle on the curb.

  I’d just gotten back from teaching a weeklong course in Johannesburg, South Africa, on geospatial investigative techniques, and we’d visited a few orphanages on the morning before my flight home.

  Both orphanag
es had signs asking mothers not to leave their babies in the nearby fields (“velds”) or the garbage piles, but instead to set the child in a bin there outside the orphanage and to ring the bell so a caregiver from inside would know there was a child waiting and come to take it in, or “fetch it,” as they say in South Africa.

  Yes, they actually had to politely request that new mothers not commit infanticide by leaving their babies in garbage dumps to die.

  This is our world.

  And so, that day when I first saw a black bag shiver on the streets of this city, I thought I knew what was inside it and my fingers were shaking as I tore open the thin skin of plastic.

  But there wasn’t a baby in there.

  Instead a thick-bodied rat stared up at me, bared its teeth, but then, when I didn’t come closer, it lost interest in me and went back to rooting through the food scraps someone had discarded.

  They say there are twice as many rats as there are people in this city. Who knows? I just know that at night they get into the garbage bags and animate them, a bit like insect activity does inside corpses.

  The body seems to shiver, and at first, despite its bloated appearance, you catch yourself thinking that the person is alive. You see that slight movement of the skin and it’s enough to throw you off, enough to make you think that, despite the smell, you might have made it in time.

  But then, when you get closer, you realize what’s really happening.

  The skin is moving in those tremors and ripples because of the maggots and worms squirming just beneath it.

  So those were the things I thought of as I ran alongside the garbage bags of the magnificent city opening its eyes around me: rats and corpses and babies left to die.

  +++

  By the time I’d made my circuit and was on my way back to Christie’s apartment, the morning was already warming up, and a wide-open, cloudless summer sky was beginning to unfurl above me, flower petal blue.

  When I came through the door, the aroma made it clear that Christie had put on some coffee.

  A sweet, nutty smell. Unmistakably Peruvian.

  Actually, I only had twelve possibilities to choose from, so it wasn’t too hard to nail it. I’d brought her some of my favorite roasts for the times when I was over here.

  Grown at nearly two thousand meters above sea level, with a gentle, medium body and a mellow sweetness, Peruvian is perfect for a breakfast or morning coffee.

  Christie popped her head out of the bedroom. “How was your run?”

  I was still thinking of that quivering bag of trash. “It woke me up even more than I anticipated.”

  “And your arm?”

  “I hardly noticed it.”

  “There’s some first aid tape and bandages beneath the sink in the bathroom.”

  “Thanks.”

  She asked how I’d slept, and after I told her fine, she informed me that Tessa was in the bathroom getting ready.

  With just that one shower here, we needed to tag-team it, so after grabbing some coffee and adding a little honey and creamer, I took a seat at the breakfast nook, logged in to the Federal Digital Database on my laptop, and proofread the transcription of my report from last night.

  I filled in a few details, and then submitted it to Peter DeYoung, the Assistant Director who was in charge of the joint task force I worked with.

  The report was definitely going to raise some eyebrows, especially the part about me shooting the man in the leg in order to protect the lives of the people below us.

  Could prove interesting.

  As I was finishing up my coffee, Tessa left the bathroom wearing the pajama pants and oversize T-shirt she liked to lounge around the house in, and retreated down the hall to her bedroom to get dressed for school.

  I showered, replaced the dressing on my arm, and threw on some clothes. Christie slipped into the bathroom after me to finish putting on her makeup.

  Tessa was at the breakfast nook when I returned to the kitchen for some food.

  Now she had on a black long-sleeve T-shirt with the somewhat disturbing logo of one of her favorite bands, House of Blood, splayed in full color across the front. Despite the fact that it was summer, she’d chosen a maroon skirt over black leggings.

  As a vegan, she zealously avoided all animal by-products, and now took a bite of her soy-milk-soaked granola.

  “So, I found a link to a news story this morning,” she said.

  “What story was that?”

  “It had to do with what happened in the apartment building in Manhattan last night. The guy who jumped. You were there, weren’t you?”

  I couldn’t imagine that the Bureau would have released my name already. “What makes you say that?”

  “I heard you and Mom talking last night. You said you were with a guy when he died, that you weren’t able to stop him. I figured it was the same deal. Then, with the videos people uploaded, well . . .”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It was me.”

  She took another bite. “So, why’d he jump?”

  “I don’t know, not for sure. He seemed afraid, but even with that, any time you try to decipher someone’s motives, it’s a guessing game and you can never be sure you’re right.”

  She looked at me curiously. “Why would you say that? Cops are always trying to find out people’s motives. It’s, like, the first thing they look for.”

  “True—all too often that is the case, but it shouldn’t be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s simply not possible to climb into someone else’s head and determine with any degree of certainty the motive behind his actions. All of us are influenced by a myriad of factors—some conscious, some unconscious—even when we perform the simplest of tasks. Take your outfit for example. Why’d you choose it? Maybe to express yourself, or to fit in, or because you thought it would look cool, or—”

  “To rebel against my mom, or my other clothes are dirty or whatever. Okay, yeah, I get it. And how could you be sure which one it was if you tried to guess?”

  “Right. We might have half a dozen different motives all present at the same time. So who’s to say what someone else’s motive was, especially in something as psychologically complex and traumatic as murder?”

  “Or suicide.”

  “Well, it’s still murder. It’s just that you aren’t around to stand trial for it.”

  “Huh, yeah. I never thought of it quite like that.” She contemplated things for a moment. “So, why are they always looking for motives, then?” But before I could respond, she answered her own question. “Probably ’cause it makes us feel safer, right?”

  “Safer?”

  “I mean, if you can boil everything down to one specific reason, put a name to it, categorize it, you know—jealousy, revenge, a thrill kill, whatever—it’s easier to accept it. It’s the senseless crimes that scare us the most. That’s why, when there’s a school shooting and the kid kills himself when it’s over, they’re all, ‘What was his motive?’ and they search through his social media posts and stuff like that to see if he was bullied, or whatever. We want to pin a reason to it or else we get terrified anyone else might do the same thing. Including us.”

  “I think you might be onto something there.”

  I finished eating and was rinsing out my bowl when she said, “I heard they don’t call ’em successful anymore.”

  “Successful?”

  “Suicides. They call ’em completed because to say it was successful seems to be putting a positive spin on things and it might be triggering for someone.” She spooned out the final bite of her cereal. “So, what was it like, though?”

  “What was what like?”

  “Being there when the guy murdered himself. When he jumped.”

  It was hard, I thought.

  “It was sad,” I said.


  “How many times have you been there when someone’s died?”

  I didn’t reply right away. “Too many.”

  She accepted that and silently cleared the table, then checked her text messages as she went to grab her backpack for school.

  Christie came into the room twisting her left earring in. “What was all that about, with Tessa? Successful suicides?”

  “Last night she heard me telling you about the jumper. She was asking about motives, about how many people I’ve seen die.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m thrilled to hear that.”

  “She’s just an inquisitive girl. You know her better than I do, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

  “I suppose.” But she didn’t sound entirely convinced. “So, will I see you tonight? Carve out some time? There’s something I’d like to talk about.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Don’t worry.” She gave me a quick kiss. “It’s not you. There are just some things I need you to help me sort through.”

  “We’ll have to see how things go today, but I think I should be able to come over.”

  “Let me know.”

  “You sure you don’t want to talk about it now?”

  “Later, when we have more time.”

  Then we all took off: Christie for work, Tessa for school, and I left for the FBI Field Office to start trying to untangle what’d happened last night and what it might have to do with the homicide in that same apartment the evening before.

  +++

  Maybe it was force of habit, maybe it was just prudence, but before walking out the door, Francis deleted last night’s chat and double-checked to make sure his Internet browser’s history was cleared.

  You shouldn’t be doing this, Francis. Not someone in your position. Not someone who knows the things you know. Promise me you’re not going to chat with her again tonight.

  He was about to argue with himself, but realized that this time the voice was right.

  “I promise,” he said aloud, then closed his eyes and repeated it as if it were an incantation that would come true if he said it often enough. “I promise. I promise. I promise.”