Lorenzo awoke that morning at eight-thirty, the latest he’d slept since he’d stopped drinking eight years earlier. He dimly recalled a confused dream about Bump, then realized it wasn’t a dream. The phone had rung at two-thirty—Bobby McDonald calling to inform him that his partner had got his ass kicked, been gang-jumped while walking to his car on Hurley Street, the final score three broken ribs, a fractured eye socket, and no positive IDs.
Flinching, Lorenzo now recalled that he had meant to jump out of bed and make it to his partner’s bedside at the medical center, but he had obviously laid back down at the end of the conversation for what was intended as a few more minutes of shut-eye. His failure to rally for Bump left him feeling vaguely ashamed, but then another foul flashback, his long one-on-one with Brenda over in Freedomtown, left him feeling flat-out disgusted.
Earlier in the previous day, when they had had their long, hot God-versus-therapy pep talk in the empty apartment overlooking the crime scene, Lorenzo had considered Brenda’s inability to give it up as a failure on his part; he had failed to get her to the place where she needed to be mentally in order to say the words. But last night, over in Freedomtown, he had done everything but show her his ass, and as far as he was concerned, she was the one who had come up short.
His only misgiving, in retrospect, was his declaration that this would be their last “quiet talk”; he might as well have told her straight-out to get herself a lawyer who would instruct her to shut her yap. But no matter now. His time was over and he was done with it, ready to hand the investigation, and Brenda, over to the FBI, as agreed. Finally rolling out of bed, he called McDonald and threw in the towel. They set up a meeting for eleven o’clock with the FBI, and running out of the house with a prepped toothbrush in one hand and two powdered doughnuts in the other, he figured he had just enough time for a bedside visit with his partner before his debriefing.
Driving over to the medical center, Lorenzo realized that he had forgotten to bring his asthma spray. The midmorning air was already dense with some kind of superheated toxic crud, and he had to pull over to a drugstore to buy an over-the-counter inhaler, the harsh solution and propellant of which, he quickly discovered, made him feel like he was taking deep drags off a cigar. Twenty minutes after making his purchase and after perfunctorily glad-handing his way through the reception area, the elevator, and the fourth-floor nurses’ station, Lorenzo walked into Bump’s semiprivate room. The bed was blocked from his sight by three visiting patients and a nurse.
At any given time there were always a goodly number of Armstrong tenants checked into the medical center, and apparently, once the word had gone out about the beating, at least these three had decided to make a call. They stood around the bed in thin hospital-issue seersucker bathrobes and cardboard slippers—two relatively young women, who Lorenzo knew were battling AIDS-related illnesses, and an older, heavier woman who suffered from diabetes. The nurse, too, was Armstrong-bred, born, raised, and still living there, her parents having moved in the day the houses opened for business back in 1955.
“Damn!” Lorenzo announced himself, after putting on his happy face in the hallway. “This like some, some block party in here!”
The three women greeted him loudly but the sight of Bump’s face made Lorenzo go deaf. Broken blood vessels had turned the whites of his eyes a vivid red, and there was a bulge, as if someone had slipped a large marble under the skin between the corner of his left eye socket and his left temple, the bulk of it so pronounced that it gave that side of his face an Asiatic slant. The unearthly tint of his eyes, matched by the brilliant natural orange of his beard, made him look like a Scottish demon.
“Damn, boy!” Lorenzo locked in his grin. “You look like Damien or something.”
“Ask Big Daddy, Kath,” Bump addressed the nurse with a little too much animation. “Lorenzo, I’m trying to pull her coat about Shuckie. True or false, he’s gettin’ that little gangster man walk, right?” He turned his head back to the nurse before Lorenzo could respond. “I’m serious, Kath, I think it’s high time you laid on some of that Mommy stick with him.”
“Well, I tell you,” she said in a low murmur of concentration. “You see him out there messin’ up? You do your job.”
“Hey”—Bump waved a hand—“that goes without saying, Kath, but what I’m sayin’ is that the bud’s gotta be nipped in the bud. It’s gotta be handled in-house, otherwise me and Lorenzo, alls we can do is, you know, snip it as it grows, but the shit’s gonna pop right back up again, you know what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.” The woman was calm, as if she understood that Bump was just yakking to drown out the terror, busting a nut to act like he was still out there working Hurley and Gompers, patrolling the towers. “And he’s got your schedule down cold, Kath. Nobody could ever accuse him of being a dummy.”
“I hear you,” she said again.
“A knucklehead yes, but not a dummy.”
Lorenzo could hear the panic that fueled Bump’s chatter, intuiting that it wasn’t the trauma of the beating itself that was driving him now—the damage probably looked a lot worse than it was—but the fear of the unknown: potentially a diminished capacity to do the job, physically mentally or even the possibility of losing the job altogether. For a cop like Bump that would be the spiritual equivalent of death, the utter annihilation of identity.
“Big Daddy.” One of the younger women, Lorraine Powell, spoke his name in a hoarse drawl, standing there dying, holding an unlit cigarette. “You best catch these niggers.”
“I’m on it,” he said absently, entertaining a nightmare vision of Bump over the coming years locked into lawsuit after lawsuit with the city.
“We all gonna be on it,” said the other young woman, Doris Tate, three kids and a college degree, also dying.
“Y’all got some friends around here, boss.” Lorenzo beamed down at him, took another hit of that caustic spray.
“You got that right,” the older woman, Betty Castle, said, bobbing her head. “Like, no offense to the police in general, but I can’t see hauling my behind out of a hospital bed to come down an’ visit too many of y’all, if you want to know the truth.”
Bump took Betty’s hand. He started crying, covering his demonic eyes with a forearm, the sudden movement making his IV bag sway on its stand.
“Hey Bump.” Doris Tate put a hand on his chest. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take your beating, you take my virus, what you say.”
Bump laughed, or at least stopped crying. “Let me talk to my man here, OK, ladies?” The women trailed out and Lorenzo watched them leave, his face averted from Bump, giving his partner time to regain his composure.
“Your family come by yet?” Lorenzo finally turned. Bump nodded slightly, looking off. Lorenzo pulled the curtain. “You know who did it?”
“Yup.” Bump nodded tightly. Lorenzo waited. “Brenda Martin.” There were no tears anymore.
“Who?” He took another hit of spray.
“She’s killing us, Lorenzo.” Bump wiped his blood-drowned eyes. “Either you wrap this fucker up or you give it over to someone who can.”
“Done,” Lorenzo mumbled, hating the taste that word left in his mouth.
Two blocks from the medical center it dawned on Lorenzo that he could’ve gotten his regular prescription Ventolin inhaler from Chatterjee or from any number of doctors in there whom he had come to know from years of rapes and assaults. Looking at his watch, he saw that he had just enough time to turn around and make a quick Ventolin run, but before he could manage a full 360, his cell phone rang.
“Lorenzo?”
“Who’s this?” He straightened out and headed back to the hospital.
“This is Karen Collucci.”
“Hey. You off on the hunt yet?”
“What are you doing right now?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“I got a meet with the FBI.”
“Do me, do yourself a favor. Pull over to the curb, and hear me out.”
A few minutes later, the Crown Victoria was heading off in yet a third direction, this time toward the parking lot of Saint Agnes, where the search party was in its final moments of shaping up before hitting the wrecked, overgrown campus of the William Howard Chase Institute. On the way over, Lorenzo called Bobby McDonald again, told him that Brenda had just asked to talk to him—not exactly true—and secured for himself another temporary reprieve before surrendering the investigation.
Karen Collucci had told him that Brenda refused to go out on the search unless he was part of it, but the leader of the Kenters still wanted Lorenzo to keep his distance from Brenda after she had seen his face. He could understand Karen’s strategy of separating, in Brenda’s mind, the centurions from the housewives, but since she had gone and asked for him…
Whatever the logic, Lorenzo knew that the only reason he so readily agreed to become part of this torturous and lung-searing exercise over the next few hours was the quickening of his blood when Karen had uttered her name, Brenda. He still wanted, craved, just one more encounter, and he’d take it any way he could.
But the price would be high, Lorenzo knew, envisioning the William Howard Chase Institute on a day like today, anticipating the interminable slog through a swelter of crumbled outbuildings, knee-high grass, sinkholes, and wild bramble—the visceral wallop of expected mortifications making him reach for his spray again.
The Chase Institute was in shambles, nothing more than an urban ghost town—half wilderness, half living menace—but Lorenzo had heard on more than one occasion from a local history buff, a lieutenant in Narcotics, that at its inception the Chase Institute for the Mentally and Physically Incapacitated had been a world-class showcase. The lieutenant had shown him archival photos of the 1904 ribbon-cutting ceremony, in which a top-hatted fat cat in a wicker-backed wheelchair, William Howard Chase himself, offered to the world a trim, bucolic seventy-five-acre campus consisting of ten residential cottages for adults, two larger dormitories for children, two workshops, a rehabilitation-oriented gymnasium, a Universalist chapel, a dining hall, a five-acre truck farm, and a small theater. The buildings had been constructed of limestone, the lieutenant had said, the grounds surrounded by lush forest, the air scented by the sea, the faculty idealistic, and the trust fund flush.
In its first few decades, the institute became the standard by which all other rehabilitation facilities were judged, but the crash of 1929 wiped out the institute’s trust fund overnight, and the state of New Jersey, faced with the dispersion of seven hundred incapacitated patients, stepped in and took title. This, the lieutenant had said, was where the place became fascinating from the criminologist’s point of view. By the mid-1930s the Chase Institute was more commonly referred to as William Howard Disgrace, a surly and abusive little corner of hell, greatly overpopulated and understaffed, owned and operated more by the poorly paid attendants than by the administrators, in the same intimate way that prisons are owned by the guards.
It became a dumping ground—the new influx of patients mostly abandoned by guilt-ridden, financially strapped families—and with this class of patients, this new breed of staff, there followed decade after decade of deteriorating service, murderous abuse, and two-fisted thievery. The once-pristine greens were overrun with weed and brush, the broad, flower-trimmed pathways cracked and pot-holed, and the limestone on many of the buildings seized and split by the tenacious growth of creeper vine. Ground-maintenance equipment disappeared, was reordered, and disappeared again. In the infirmary, drugs were more pilfered than administered, the staff finally taking to ordering directly for themselves. In the dining room, meat, canned goods, boxed goods, and dairy products were routinely resold to local supermarkets and groceries. The workshops were routinely stripped of tools and machinery.
Anything that could be requisitioned from the state—window glass, bedsheets, athletic supplies, Bibles, wheelchairs, shoes, roofing tiles—disappeared once it was received. There was organized pimping of the younger patients, both male and female. There were unexplained pregnancies, disappearances, deaths. Mildly retarded children grew to severely retarded adults without ever leaving the grounds.
Four decades of systematic plunder and mayhem finally came to a dead halt in the summer of 1967, when a reporter from the Dempsy Register going undercover as a newly hired orderly vanished three days into his assignment. Within a week, the institute was flooded with state investigators, local police, and the press.
Chase became a dark star—this Lorenzo remembered on his own—yielding weeks of national media coverage. After six months of investigation by the state, the gates of William Howard Disgrace were finally padlocked. It took another two years to truly shut it down, two more years to successfully relocate all of the three thousand patients who had been imprisoned there, including two old men who had come to Chase as children during the First World War. Within months of the last relocation, the forest began closing in again, reclaiming the campus with supernatural speed. By the early 1970s, the William Howard Chase Institute for the Mentally and Physically Incapacitated looked like nothing more than an overgrown outpost of Magna Graecia, most of the cottages and outbuildings barely visible from one to the other, lush veins of green bursting through the crumbling cement of a fifty-year-old pool, three times Olympic size, that had never seen a drop of water. And after all the hearings, investigations, audits, and commissions launched in 1967 came to an end, the reports published, the players dispersed, there was not one successfully pursued criminal prosecution, nor was the reporter ever found, even though half the grounds of the institute had been backhoed into a moonscape. This, too, as the lieutenant would have put it, was fascinating from the criminologist’s point of view.
As Lorenzo pulled up alongside the church, he saw that the parking lot was overflowing with volunteers, the primary vibrations coming off that teeming square those of hyped boredom and physical distress, the people more than ready to roll.
As he hauled himself out of the car, the heat hit him like a hangover. Scanning the scene, he spotted a gaggle of Kenters hovering by the open side panel of their red van. Lorenzo assumed that Brenda was holed up in there, an animal trapped in its own burrow. Searching for Karen, he found Jesse instead, staring at him with concern from across the hood of his car.
“You look like shit,” she said.
Lorenzo shrugged, then coughed, his lungs feeling as if they had been scoured with steel wool, the sensation having less to do with the asthma than with the promiscuous overuse of that piece-of-shit inhaler. He stood spread-legged, sun-dazed, staring straight through Jesse and breathing open-mouthed like a beached fish, as if his nostrils were inadequate for the task.
“Hey.” Karen abruptly materialized before him from out of the mob. “Glad you could come. You ever do this before?”
Lorenzo wiped the sweat from his eyes. “Found a body in a junkyard once.”
“Yeah?” Karen squinted. “Were you in Vietnam?”
“I believe I was.” He massaged his chest. “But if I was, I was too high to remember any of it.”
“You too, huh?” Karen laughed, a guttery rumble that, despite his distress, kind of piqued his interest.
“Where she at?” Lorenzo started to move for the red van. “In there?”
Karen reached out. “Hold on,” she said, snagging his elbow. “We’ll go over, say hello, but then like I told you on the phone, I want you to hang back today, OK? You can stay with me.” Although he understood her motives, Lorenzo shot her a look both quizzical and territorial. “Trust me on this,” she said. “It’s enough she knows you’re here.”
A moment later, peering into the cool dark of the van, he saw Brenda pretty much as he had imagined her, raccoon-eyed and taut, fending off the world and all its treacherous kindness. “Hey,” he wheezed, stooping over, his palms pressed into his kneecaps.
“Are you going out?” Brenda asked in a hoarse rasp of her own.
“I will if you will.” He grinned encouragingly, his lungs feeling both puffed and dented. Standing back up, he tottered sideways, the parking lot coming at him like a dream, Lorenzo thinking, And this stuff here is paved.
The broad center drive of the Chase Institute campus, which began on the other side of an unlocked mesh fence three blocks from the church, was flanked by low brush; beyond that lay thick woods and the crumbling limestone remains of abandoned cottages. The procession of volunteers and media people stretched in an undulating formation that lurched, pinched, and bulged like heated wax. Despite the humidity-drunk straggle of the line, the volunteers had been specifically assigned placement in the march, shaped up by platoon in the order of designated search areas. Every fifty yards, the front two groups would peel off, one to each side of the road, then hop into their tick suits, broom handles clattering and rolling away from them, as their team leaders gave last-minute lectures.
Karen’s group, smaller than the others, consisting of Marie, Teenie, Brenda, Jesse, Lorenzo, and Elaine, was at the tail end of the parade. Lorenzo overheard so many roadside briefings as they trudged along that after a while he felt he could lead a search party on his own. Shooters and reporters assigned to groups farther ahead in the procession tended to furtively drag their feet until they found themselves abreast of Brenda, then took some quick footage or barked some hit-and-run questions before Karen chased them off.
Brenda herself was in Discman mode again, staggering forward, her face opalescent, bubbling with sweat, incapable in Lorenzo’s estimation, of finding a lump of coal in a snowball right now. Sporadically, she would throw him a nervous glance, but Lorenzo abided by Karen’s request and kept his distance, only once getting close enough to hear the music leaking out of her headphones, different from the usual, religious and grand.
“How long you think this will take,” Lorenzo asked Karen, as they reached the simmering crest of a long, tortuous rise in the road.
“That depends on Brenda,” Karen said.
“I’m just asking—” Lorenzo cut himself off to conserve his wind, willing himself to refrain from taking another hit of his spray.
“OK, guys.” Karen steered them to the edge of the road. All the squads that had been ahead of them were gone now, having suited up and followed their leaders into the woods.
Lorenzo watched as Jesse eased the packaged paper suit from beneath Brenda’s elbow, dropped to one knee before her, and flapped it full-length out of its machine-precise fold. “Raise up.” She patted Brenda’s calf, waiting to work one leg of the suit over a sneaker. “Hold on to my shoulder.” As ponderous as a circus elephant, Brenda lifted her left foot, lost her balance, and fell backwards onto a ledge of bramble. Jesse twisted around and looked up at Karen. “She’s in no shape for this.”
“Why don’t you let Elaine help her out.” Karen nodded to the woman whom Lorenzo considered the eeriest Kenter, trim, humorless, gray-haired, but with a startlingly young face, all eyes and clenched jaw muscles. When he had been introduced to her the night before, she neither shook his hand nor looked him in the eye.
“Jesse, you go with Teenie and Marie,” Karen said. Jesse seemed stricken by the suggestion but was gently hustled away by the mother-daughter team before she could register a word of protest, the smooth play evoking in Lorenzo the notion of slick bouncers, top-notch people handlers, their one-track sense of mission granting them a kind of psychological brawn.
“So you never did this before, huh?” Karen asked Lorenzo, as she knelt before him and worked the suit up over a size-thirteen construction boot.
“Hell, no. I’m a city boy born and bred,” he drawled, embarrassed by Karen’s having to help him suit up. “You do your canvass last night?”
“Yup.” Karen worked on his second bootie, Lorenzo almost tipping over, his asthma making him feel, as it often did, like his body was some kind of inflated cage.
“And?”
“Nothing.”
Lorenzo grunted.
“You surprised?” she murmured.
“Well, I’ll tell you.” He reached down and worked the suit up his legs. “Come this afternoon? FBI’s gonna come in and take over.”
“The Seventh Cavalry, huh?” Karen worked on her own suit.
“I don’t know about all that,” he muttered, experiencing once again how truly loath he was to hand Brenda over, call it quits.
“You see those three idiots with the machetes?”
Karen pointed out a trio of tricked-out rangers, replete with maroon berets, hacking their way through the brush about fifty yards away. “We always get a few like that,” she said, zipping herself into the suit, then pulling up the hood. “Rambo knives, berets, full camo. I promise you, they’ll be the first to fold. We got retirees out in these woods that are gonna last twice as long as those clowns.”
Zipping himself in, Lorenzo felt the heat treble, trapped and recirculating inside the paper, felt even his shins dripping, the factory smell of the pulpy-textured material like shredded cedar, adding a layer of suffocation all its own.
“Yeah, there you go.” Karen pulled up his hood for him, tying the drawstring under his chin. “We have something like a thousand of these in my basement. Didn’t pay a dime. These broomsticks? The Gatorade? The buttons, the coffee, the fruit, the pastry? We pay for them with certificates of appreciation. Everybody wants to go to heaven.”
Twenty yards away, Elaine was working the elasticized wrists of the suit over Brenda’s bandaged hands. Swaddled in white, Brenda looked like a penitenté. Several yards beyond them, he saw Jesse, eyes trained anxiously on Brenda and Elaine, being worked into a suit by Marie.
“You sure I got to wear this?” Lorenzo licked his heat-caked lips. “Because I’m feeling a little cloudy in the chest.”
“If you don’t,” Karen said, producing an aerosol can, “you’ll be sorry. Close your mouth and cover your eyes.” She sprayed Lorenzo’s face with insect repellent, then the backs of his hands, Lorenzo getting a taste on his lips, bitter and wrong. “Here you go,” she said, handing him a broomstick. “Walk where I walk.”
Lorenzo saw, sliding through a break in the brush behind Karen, Elaine leading Brenda by the hand, steering her around brambles and stumps. Elaine was wearing jeans and, despite the heat, a turtle-neck.
“Where’s her suit?” Lorenzo asked, pointing.
Karen turned. “Elaine?” She fanned away something with wings. “Elaine doesn’t wear suits. She says they get in the way of her instincts.”
“Jesus,” Marie muttered, her team catching up to them, Jesse bringing up the rear. “Anything taking a bite out of Elaine’d go insane.”
“We kind of give Elaine her head,” Teenie added.
“Yeah?” Lorenzo gasped. “Why is that?” He realized within a few steps that he needed the stick as much for support as for exploration.
“Because,” Karen said, “Elaine’s son was, was abducted.”
Lorenzo was surprised that Karen, of all people, had trouble saying that word. Teenie and Marie peeled off again, began staking out their turf, Jesse reluctantly tagging after them.
“About four years ago, in Nutley?” Karen began, her eyes searching the forest beneath her feet. “It was like our second or third kid. We were pretty raw, but we gave it our all. We combed every goddamned forest, field, drainpipe, creek, bay, everywhere, and she was with us every minute. And, you know, we still post flyers, get, you know, computer-generated portraits with age enhancements posted around, but Elaine, we kind of adopted her. She comes to us, says, ‘If I can’t find mine, let me help find someone else’s,’ goes out on every search, never gets tired, and, you know, off the record? I think we’re the only thing that keeps her from doing herself in. Broke up with her husband, I don’t even think she has custody of the kids. Maybe she does now, I’m not—”
“Why’d you put her with Brenda?” he asked, inhaling something that flew into his mouth, his eyes instantly filling with tears as he tried to bring it back up.
“You OK?”
“Why?” he persisted, in a hoarse strangle.
“Why?” Karen shrugged. “Sympathy.” Lorenzo hunched over and coughed out something small and black, the effort jacking his pulmonary distress up another notch. “Let me tell you something about searches like this,” Karen said, her eyes still trained on the ground. “This place, Chase, it looks enormous, right? It’s not that bad. When you got a road like the one we just came off of? We usually never look more than two, three hundred feet from that road, you know, on either side.” She poked through a thick mat of last year’s fallen leaves until she hit the unbroken topsoil. “I mean, basically, you just get off the road and look for the first line of heavy cover. You know, brush, overgrowth, whatever…”
Lorenzo could hear a mosquito singing inside his hood, slapped himself upside the head, then hunched over again, clutching his knees, taking five. Karen waited for him.
“We figure, somebody’s gonna transport the body, they use a car, need a road. Then they’re gonna have to go in somewheres where they can have privacy for twenty, thirty minutes for the burial. But if it’s more than three hundred feet from the car, they have to be Superman, so they’re going to look for a spot not too far but far enough. So ninety percent of the time? We’re talking two, three hundred feet from the road. On the other hand”—she hesitated, drew a breath—“today I think we’ll go into it a little deeper than usual.”
“You tell people they’re looking for a body?” He peered up at her from his resting crouch.
“Hell no. I tell them we’re looking for clothes, we’re looking for signs of human habitation, we’re looking for any kind of, of discordance in nature. You never tell people you’re looking for a body. Never.”
Lorenzo watched Elaine lead Brenda down a slight berm to a shallow, brackish stream, Elaine clearing it in one stretched stride. Brenda, staring straight ahead, stumbled, went down on one knee into the water, stood up, and staggered on, docile and blind, the leg of her suit streaming a muddy drool.
“Hey.” Lorenzo touched Karen’s arm, laughed his angry laugh. “You see that? What you doin’ to her?” he said, trying to come off affable.
“We’re helping find her child,” she answered evenly. “Watch your step.”
Jesse, Marie, and Teenie came crackling through some underbrush, emerging a few yards from Lorenzo and Karen, mother and daughter tight-lipped with concentration, eyes trained like beams as they poked and sorted through the ground before them. Jesse had eyes only for Brenda, Lorenzo recognizing in her anxious, possessive gaze his own agitated sense of being off balance out here in this world of surly nature and hidden agendas.
Through the trees, he could see other volunteers, dozens of them working their respective turfs—walking, prodding, cautiously forging ahead in silence, the baggy-hooded white tick suits evoking in Lorenzo’s mind a B-movie impression of soldier-scientists tentatively advancing on a meteorite or a downed spaceship. Karen stopped by a cluster of tin cans, their labels obliterated by a uniform orange coat of rust. Using her stick to separate them, she rejected her find: too old.
Picking up the drone of a nonstop mutter, Lorenzo turned to see Elaine, several yards to the left, leading Brenda by the wrist now and maintaining some kind of monologue. Brenda trailed her with a floppy skip, trying not to fall again. A finger of sweat sluiced its way from the nape of Lorenzo’s neck to the waist of his boxers, then ran horizontally along the damp band. He took a small hit of spray, which did nothing but set his already inflamed bronchial passages on fire.
“You want to know how to look?” Karen asked, eyeing a downed candelabra of branches, then squinting up at the tree from which it had broken off. “It’s easy, it’s like meditation. You do it enough, your brain can go off, have sex or something, your eyes’ll go on automatic pilot. First thing, you look for contrast—dark, light, smooth, rough. You look for rich grass, deep green, greasy-looking, fertile-looking, in a place where all the other grass is pale and scrubby. You look for flowers where you shouldn’t expect to see them. Like here…” Karen took Lorenzo by the elbow, brought him over to a clump of tiger lilies growing on a slant off the raised lip of a depression. “What the hell are these doing here?” Karen asked, frowning at their ruddy splay. “It’s not the kid. He’s not going to grow flowers after only a few days, but that’s the idea, see?”
She began to move on, but suddenly she backtracked to the tiger lilies, a scowl on her face. “Well, something’s making this grow.” She tore off two feet of orange hazard tape and tied it to the nearest tree. “We’ll just put a dog-ear on that, come back later.”
“Whoo…” Lorenzo exhaled softly, a cry for help made ineffective by pride.
“And you look for heel marks.” Karen said, continuing her lesson. “A body is heavy. The guy’s gonna sink a little carrying it, even if it’s a child, because you got to remember they’ve been carrying that kid all the way from the car, so they’re gonna start getting a little lead in the legs.”
“Huh,” Lorenzo said, seeing Brenda through the dapple, the very thought of breaking her down right now, the stamina that would require, making him buckle at the knees.
“You look for reddish soil—that’s subsoil—clay balls. Guy digs a grave, he’s flipping the layers of soil. You see any color that’s different from the surrounding earth? Could be, could be. That’s how we found Kent. I saw the, the red, I saw the clay balls, I saw—” Karen cut herself off, made the sign of the cross so quickly Lorenzo almost didn’t catch it.
“See, let me explain something. Most people, they say we’re trying… they say, like, we’re crackpots. They try to cubbyhole us, try to dismiss our, our, commitment.”
“Huh,” Lorenzo grunted, not really listening, just trying to breathe.
“They say we’re bored housewives, we’re compensating, we’re trying to make our own lives a little more interesting to ourselves. Well, I will grant them this. Finding a lost child? Alive occasionally? It does kind of make your day.”
Off to the left, Lorenzo saw Brenda flop on a stump, her head between her knees, Elaine standing over her, mouth still going. Lorenzo could faintly pick up the monotonal flow, as steady and driving as the heat.
“Bored,” Karen said acidly. “You see Teenie over there? Her daughter, her girl, has got Down’s syndrome, OK? Teenie’s brothers? She’s got two brothers. Bobby, he’s a lawyer, and James, he’s retarded, he still lives at home with Marie, his mom. Another woman, Grace? She’s in the hospital right now, her kid’s got CP. My son, Pete?” Karen shot a quick glance in Jesse’s direction, her face tightening. “The point is, Kent? The first boy we found? He had Down’s syndrome too. Are you hearing this, Lorenzo? Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, retardation—don’t you think that each and every one of us has our hands full at home? Don’t you think each and every one of us wouldn’t kill for some kind of vacation? Go out, get bombed, sleep late, have a sex life, for Christ’s sakes… But with Kent, with our own kids, it’s the helplessness that gets to you. Some bastard taking advantage of that helplessness. So we do it out of rage… And we do it out of love.”
Lorenzo saw Brenda hauled to her feet, Elaine half carrying her now, using the broom handle as a staff, talking, talking…
“Here, see that?” Karen pointed to a depression that seemed to be filled with dead leaves. Using her pole, she started flipping them aside, then saw that the ground at the base was the same color and texture as its surroundings—a natural sinkhole.
A faint breeze wafted through the woods, cooling, then chilling the perspiration inside his suit. He began to sweat again, the combination of humidity and asthma so debilitating that the simple untidiness of nature—a dip in land, a felled, half-rotted tree—seemed to him an insurmountable obstruction.
“And here.” Karen tapped a downed branch that lay suspended over the ground, each end resting on a rock. “Does that look natural to you?”
“No way,” he said mindlessly.
“Looks like somebody balanced it there, right? You look around, you see any other branches like that? Maybe somebody’s trying to establish a perimeter. Maybe it’s a little telltale trap to let the guy know his hideout’s been discovered. Guy comes back, sees the branch is off the rock—he knows it’s time to move on out. See what I’m saying? So you look for any unnatural symmetry, any patterns. This one bastard, he’d lay out twigs in a row like fallen dominoes, go out and do his thing, come back, see if anybody broke the line. You got to look for that.”
“I got you,” Lorenzo said, then chanced a last hit of spray.
There was a commotion far off to the left, white suits scurrying like snowmen in hell. She took a hand radio from inside her suit. “What’s up.”
“We had a little bit of a personal meltdown out here, Karen,” a male voice answered.
“OK.” She signed off.
Through the trees they watched two snowmen transport a third in a fireman’s carry, followed by a fourth snowman with a shoulder-mounted Betacam.
“See these here?” Karen pointed to a crater maybe twenty feet across that hosted weeds, ferns, and the ubiquitous arms to heaven. “You know what this is? This is from when they were digging around for that reporter thirty years ago. There’s something like fifty holes like this around here. Christ, talk about not dying in vain. The guy should be canonized. They closed this place down? It was like closing down Auschwitz. Do you have any idea of the generations of children, generation after generation of children that suffered in there?” Karen thrust her pole like a sword in the direction of the hospital grounds, which were not yet visible.
“Thousands, thousands, that, that, died, that were abused, neglected, forgotten, that just, just, pined away.” Karen paused to brush some spittle from the corner of her mouth. “We find toys up there sometimes—old rubber dolls, a picture book, wooden blocks, forty, fifty, sixty years old.” Karen’s jaw locked at a slant. “Anyways, these craters? We don’t go in them. We leave them for you guys, because these suits are great for bugs but they don’t do shit against copperheads.”
They worked their way through the woods, Lorenzo trudging after her like a hunchback, his booties totally gone from tramping through brackish rivulets and dry rocky soil. To their left, Brenda and Elaine plodded on, Elaine as taut and tuned now as she was before they had entered these woods, Brenda, like Lorenzo, careening from tree to tree. As far as reading the lay of the land, Lorenzo remained blind, but Karen tagged three possibles—two patches of deep green grass and a small cluster of cigarette butts—explaining to him that digging a grave does bring on a case of the nerves, and a pile like that in a contained space suggested the spoor of a chain-smoker out here in the middle of nowhere.
The first of the institute’s ruined buildings were now visible about a football field’s length ahead, the cottages mostly camouflaged by vegetation but the more imposing children’s dormitories behind them rising above the tree line, high monolithic fortresses, shadowed and square, standing between the forest and the afternoon sun.
“Look, see that?” Karen pointed out a scatter of boxes covering a sandy patch of the forest floor, maybe a hundred or more. “Marie,” Karen called, Marie coming over again, trailing Teenie and Jesse. Karen used her stick to flip the lid, revealing snug stacks of roofing tiles—brick-red, wave-patterned adobe-style shingles. “This used to be the pickup spot when the staff was selling stuff out of the institute.”
“You should’ve seen what we found out here five years ago,” Marie said, her chin over Karen’s shoulder. “It was like a flea market. They must’ve run like hell when the investigators started showing up.”
“Just left everything.”
“Blenders, sneakers, aspirin, silverware, garden tools.”
“You know who took it all?” Karen wiped her face.
“The cops?” Lorenzo said reflexively hunched over again, bug-eyed, biting at the air, telling himself to be still, very still. From his crouch, looking up, he tracked Jesse’s distraught gaze to Brenda, sitting on yet another stump, hands on knees, Elaine leaning over her, rubbing her back, talking, talking, talking, Brenda starting to rock.
“Why’d you say you put Elaine with Brenda again?” Lorenzo asked in a high wheeze.
“Sympathy.”
“Sympathy,” he repeated, waiting.
“I never lost a child, Lorenzo. Did you?”
“Not really,” he said quietly, thinking, Not exactly.
“Anyways, the cops?” Karen continued. “Most of them, they’re friendly to us and all, but basically they don’t really like us because they think we’re all, like, adrenaline over procedure, you know? And we think they’re a bunch of lazy bastards. You know—they put out a poster, call it a day. Or, you know, they’ll like this one possible perp, so they go after him and if that doesn’t pan out they fade. So what we got to do is keep their interest up, you know, because otherwise … You got to keep it hot, you got to keep it in the news, you got to keep coming up with fresh stuff—a slipper, a brother-in-law, a jawbone. I swear, half the shit we come up with? We just make it up—new witnesses, new evidence—just to get it back in the news. But you know, some of those guys, the detectives? We know some great ones. These guys, they’re like you, Lorenzo.”
“Oh yeah?” Not having heard a word, Lorenzo was striving for that one elusive gulp of air, the one that would only be acquired if he could just get his pectoral muscles to rise up a tiny bit more.
“These detectives, there’s only a few, but they never give up, never.”
He shaped his lips into a straw, just wanting a sip, settling for a sip. He had been told that, when his father died of an asthma attack, his last words, spoken to his wife, were, “This the one, baby.”
“Doesn’t that sound like you, Lorenzo?”
Vaguely aware that she was trying to hustle him in some way, he managed to cast a glance toward Brenda and Elaine, then back up at Karen. “You know something?” he gasped. “With this heat out here? Brenda. I don’t think she’s gonna make it…” Nodding in agreement with himself, he sank to his knees, then flopped facedown onto the forest floor.