Specimen Days

Did you talk to my brother? Jesus fucking Christ. One kid self-detonates and his little brother calls to check up on him. A picture was emerging there was that, at least. A missing kid with a younger brother-assuming it was true, and who knew? would be much easier to track down. Were they the sons of cultists? That was more of a rural thing, messianics who raised children deep in the woods, taught them to hate the sinful world, and congratulated themselves for doing God's work. It was more Idaho or Montana, these righteously murderous families who'd gone off the grid. But the five boroughs had their share, too. Hadn't they just arrested a guy who'd been keeping an adult tiger and a full-grown alligator in his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? They were everywhere.

She could have kissed Pete when he finally returned. "What's up?" she said.

"Phone's on the corner of St. Nicholas and 176th. Out of the way. No kid on the scene, no witnesses yet."

"Shit."

"You're okay?"

"Yeah."

"I'll check back again soon."

"Thanks."

She was sequestered now. She was bound to her cubicle, on the off chance of a callback. Momma is waiting. Call her. She'll never leave you alone.

* * *

The morning passed. Cat did some filing, caught up on her e-mails. She had one caller, at eleven forty-five, asking for Cat Martin, and her short hairs stood up, but it was just Greta, her only female regular, calling to tell her that the explosion had been caused by the unquiet spirit of a slave girl who'd been murdered on the site in 1803 and that the only way to appease her was to go there immediately and perform the rite of extreme unction. Greta lived on Orchard Street, had been a seamstress for more than fifty years, had eight grandchildren, was probably a nice person.

We all want the same things. She kept hearing the kid's high-pitched, tentative voice, his strange courtliness. There was how to put it an innocence about him. Subject matter aside, he had sounded for all the world like a decent, ordinary kid. That was probably drugs, though. Or dissociation.

Pete stopped by periodically, bless him, to tell her they hadn't found anything, and at twelve-thirty to bring her a pizza from Two Boots.

"Seems like a good day to say 'screw the diet,'" he said.

Pepperoni and mushrooms. He knew what she liked. She offered him a slice, which he accepted.

"How serious you think this is?" he said. "Not sure. What's your gut telling you?" "That it's small but looks big."

Cat folded the tip of her pizza slice, took a big voluptuous bite. Was there anything, really, as delicious, as entirely satisfying, as a slice of pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza?

She said, "You think it's only these two kids." "Yeah. Think Menendez brothers."

"A truly whacked-out fourteen-year-old, no longer with us, and his impressionable younger brother."

"Our first copycat."

She nodded. Since 9/11, they'd all been puzzling over the dearth of follow-ups. Not Al Qaeda that was the concern of other departments. Cat and Pete and the rest of deterrence had been wondering why more ordinary American citizens hadn't used it as inspiration. It had been the terrorists' gift to the violently deranged. You could blow up a garbage can now you could yell "Fire!" in a goddamned theater and cost the city of New York another billion or so in lost tourist revenue.

She said, "Receiving their instructions from?" "A higher power. You know."

She knew. Nine times out of ten, the ones who followed through were obeying someone or something. They were servants to a cause.

"First one said people have got to be stopped," she said.

"My guess? Dick Harte was having sex with both of them."

"There are no reports of missing kids from anywhere near Great Neck."

"He's got wheels. There are kids everywhere."

Cat said, "I don't quite figure Dick Harte as somebody who drives around looking for little boys to have sex with."

"Happens all the time."

"I know. I'm talking about a feeling, that's all."

"Okay," Pete said. "Dick Harte is a God-fearing family man who's never touched anybody but his two wives. Why does the kid pick him?"

"I'm just throwing this out. I predict that sooner or later we'll track a missing and find a father who's been torturing his boys all their lives. Older one gets to an age and decides it's got to stop, somebody's got to pay. But he can't bring himself to kill his father. He picks some guy who looks like his father. Same age and weight."

"Possible."

"If the kids weren't local, if they weren't the sons of people the Hartes knew, it suggests they were the kind of boys who could be picked up by a stranger in a car."

"Which happens all the time," Pete said.

"Absolutely. But something in these kids' voices, especially the second one… I don't picture them hanging around a park, waiting for some guy to pull up in an expensive car and suck their dicks for ten dollars. It doesn't click for me."

"Hey, you're the one with the pee-aitch-dee." "For all the good it's done me."