Specimen Days

Cat had blue-tagged it, sent it down the funnel. Then, three days later, she'd heard that ping in the back of her mind when the report came in. Explosion on Broadway and Cortlandt, right by Ground Zero, at least one splattered, two likelies, maybe more. She had by then talked to dozens more potentials, among them a guy who said he was posing as a gay man and going to gay bars to slip poison into other men's drinks, thus helping to eliminate a few of the people who were sucking the sap from the Tree of Life. She'd talked to an elderly male Hispanic who was going to machete the staff of the public library, main branch, unless they tracked down whoever had been writing insults about him in the pages of the books.

She'd started making lists again. She'd been trying to kick the habit. But after the man who was going to dice the librarians hung up, there it was, right in front of her, in Sharpie on a Post-it:

Harm is in the books Kill the harmless New broom?

It wasn't crazy. These were her notes. A psychologist took notes. Still, hers could run a little loose. She'd crumpled the Post-it and thrown it away. Given the current climate, she didn't like the idea of somebody finding those particular words in her handwriting. And okay, she didn't like the fact that she hadn't fully realized she was doing it.

Maybe Simon needed to take her away for a few days. Maybe a dose of beach and room service, a dose of pure, undivided Simon, would help her feel less edgy.

She'd toss his BlackBerry into the surf, if it came to that. She'd drown it in her pina colada.

When the news arrived, Cat heard the ping but couldn't quite remember the call. It came to her with the particulars, which rolled in an hour-plus after the incident. Two splatters, not just one, and barring further developments it seemed that the vaporized one had been rigged with explosives. The other had been identified as Dick Harte, real-estate developer, part of the World Trade rebuild, whose third left-hand finger, wearing a wedding band, had been found on a WALK-DON'T WALK box.

Right. Going to blow somebody up, thought I should tell you. Jesus.

Cat retrieved her report, notified Pete Ashberry. If this kid was the one, she had missed it.

She declined Pete's offer to go home early. She sat out the remainder of the day, waiting to hear whether they'd picked up any more fragments from the site. She talked to a man who was going to fire-bomb a Starbucks (no specifics of location) because they insisted on hiring nigger whores. (She dutifully declined to mention the shade of her own skin but did put a hex on the fucker, telepathically.) She talked to another man, Slavic accent, who was going to kill the deputy mayor (why the deputy mayor?) because, as far as she could tell before he hung up, it just seemed like an interesting thing to do.

She kept all her pens in her drawer, off the desktop. It was a little like quitting smoking.

Pete came to her cubicle at five minutes to five. He was as big as a file cabinet and about that exciting. But he was a decent man; he wore his troubles bravely. His wife was going blind. His daughter had married some ecocultist who'd dragged her to Costa Rica to live in a tree.

"Now what?" Cat said. She was in no mood. She should sweeten up she had after all quite possibly missed it but if she went all nice and apologetic now, if she started acting like someone who needed forgiveness, she might never get back to herself. Screw them if they wanted her meek.

Pete stood in the opening (you couldn't call it a doorway; it was just the point at which Cat's four-feet-by-five-feet bled into the greater fluorescence) with his mouth settled. Pete was the only brother in deterrence. His skin was varnished mahogany, his hair an incongruously beautiful silver-gray. When he was stern and focused, you could put a can under his upper lip and push his nose to start the opener function.

"They got a left forearm," he said. "They got half a sneaker, with half a foot inside. It's a kid."

"Jesus."

"You ready for this? Kid walked up to this guy, hugged him, and self-detonated."

"Hugged him?"

"Witness says so. White kid, wearing a baseball jacket, very regular-looking. This is from both our reliables. It's only the one who says he saw the clinch."

"Fuck me." "Fuck everybody."

"Who does Dick Harte turn out to be?" she asked.

"Speculator. Not Don Trump, but big. One of the people who make the high-rises rise."

"Funny business?"

"Nothing yet. Lived in Great Neck with wife number two. Some kids, some pets. You know."

"Think he knew the boy?" "Hope so."

Everyone would hope so. Everyone would be saying a silent prayer right now, to the effect that the kid had been Dick Harte's illegitimate son, or that they'd been having sex in a park in Great Neck, or whatever. Just don't let it be random.

"Shit."

Pete said, "We don't know it was your caller."

"I have a feeling, though."