Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

We both went to the railing, to look down at the water rolling below, unbroken by anything that resembled a hand or a foot or a scrap of material. It had been too long. Far too long.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve already been in.”

“No, don’t do that,” said Shigawa’s partner, coming to join us. His name tag identified him as Schiller.

“Somebody’s got to,” I said.

“In a couple of hours it’ll be daywatch,” Schiller said. “The county can send some divers out. They’re trained for this.” Schiller was clearly a newly minted EMT, and I’d seen the expression on his face before, a hard fixed look that young rookie cops affect when they don’t want the world to see that the job hasn’t made them jaded and world-weary yet.

I shook my head. “No. This can’t wait.”

“Why can’t it?” Schiller asked, his face empty with incomprehension.

I did not want to put my body back in that opaque, dirty water, did not want to get it in my ears and eyes again. But I had to. In my mind was the image of a child’s body under that brackish water, scudding along the bottom of the canal, perhaps sucked against some natural barrier or manmade screen, hair floating, maybe rolling over and over like a log for hours. I couldn’t imagine leaving him or her there, like a piece of trash, while we went off for dry clothes and breakfast. I tried to find the words to express that to Schiller and couldn’t. But I didn’t have to.

“If you don’t understand why, she can’t explain it to you,” Shigawa said.

There was a beat of silence as Schiller looked away from me, to his partner, registering the minor betrayal. “You don’t have to take an attitude about it, Nate,” he said, and walked away.

I swung a leg over the railing again.

“I’ll be right up here,” Shigawa said.

“I know,” I said. “See you soon.”

Inthe end, we had the whole 911 experience, a fire engine and an MPD cruiser joining the ambulance at the scene. The MPD officers were Roz, a sergeant in her fifties with short sandy hair, a former K-9 handler rumored to have no less than eight dogs at home. She was acting as the field training officer for a rookie, Lockhart, who looked like a teenage girl in a police officer’s uniform.

Beyond the emergency personnel was a semicircle of neighborhood people. Maybe the noise had woken them, or perhaps they’d already been starting their day when they heard the commotion. It was after five now, the sky turning a pale electric blue.

The kind of people who show up at accident scenes are often derided as morbid sightseers, but more than once they’ve supported my faith that people essentially want to help each other. One woman, seeing my drenched clothes, went to retrieve a long-sleeved thermal shirt and sweatpants that belonged to her husband; I gratefully accepted them and awkwardly changed in the crew space of the fire engine at the curb, taking an extra moment afterward to sit and draw strength from the dry warmth and unfamiliar musk of the clothes before emerging again to see the aftermath of the terrible little tragedy.

I found the body about where I expected to. The intensity of the spring runoff had created a vertical nest of branches and twigs up against the opening where the canal went under the street. The barrier had caught all kinds of things in its embrace, beer cans and scraps of tarpaulin, the plastic rings that hold six-packs together. And amid all of that, the soft flesh of a little boy.

“You need to get looked at,” Shigawa said now, by my side. “Why don’t you ride back in with us?”

“No,” I said. “I’m all right.”

“There are infections you can get,” Shigawa said. “You should see a doctor.”

“No,” I said flatly. I disliked sounding argumentative, but I couldn’t tell Shigawa the reason behind my refusal. Everyone’s afraid of something, and in my case, it’s going to the doctor.

“Actually,” a new voice intervened, “we’re going to need Detective Pribek for a statement. That’ll be downtown.”

It was Roz. I didn’t know her well, but felt very grateful to her just then. “She’s right,” I said to Shigawa. To Roz, I said, “I have to drive my own car. It’s around here somewhere, and that way you won’t have to bring me back afterward.”

“That’ll be okay,” Roz said. “Lockhart, why don’t you ride downtown with Detective Pribek?”

There’d reallybeen no need for it, but I’d sensed that sending Lockhart with me had been Roz’s casual way of laying a comforting hand on my shoulder after the morning’s events. At the precinct, no one was available to take a statement right away, so Lockhart left me at an unoccupied desk to wait. There, lulled by the familiar sound of the dispatch radio and swaddled in a strange man’s clothes, I rested my head on my folded arms and slept.

The three brothers were Croatian.They’d been in America about eight days, living with their parents in the crowded home of their assimilated aunt, uncle, and cousins, who’d been in Minneapolis over a year. The boys still weren’t totally on Central Time, and they often woke when their father and uncle got up at four to go to their jobs at a snack-foods plant.

The brothers were also enamored of their cousins’ bicycles, which they had just learned to ride. That morning, awake and adventurous as kids of that age often are, they went out for a ride after their father went to work, even though they’d been forbidden to take the bikes out without supervision.

It was the boy perched on the handlebars that had gone over the railing when his brother lost his balance and let the bike wobble. That same brother, the oldest, had jumped into the water after him. He’d survived the rescue attempt; it was the younger brother, small and thin, who’d been sucked down to die.

The parents had insisted on coming downtown the day after the accident to thank me. They were accompanied by their relatives, who spoke fractured but passable English; I was accompanied by our department spokeswoman, who seemed as uncomfortable as I was. It was an encounter that was linguistically awkward and terribly sad, and I wished they hadn’t bothered.

I hadn’t been back at my desk long when my lieutenant stopped by, on his way out.

“Detective Pribek,” he said. “How are you.”

William Prewitt, in his mid-fifties, had a way of asking questions that often didn’t sound like questions.

“Good, thanks,” I said. “And you?”

“Fine,” he said briskly. “I might have something for you to run down. A small thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

“We’ve been hearing some rumors, just a few whispers, about someone practicing medicine without a license,” he told me.

“Sounds like a job for the State Board of Medicine to me,” I said.

“This isn’t a simple licensure issue, like a doctor forgetting to send in the renewal paperwork,” Prewitt corrected me. “We’re not at all sure this guy is really a doctor. He’s probably just passing himself off as one. He’s also possibly operating out of a public housing building somewhere.”

“That’s daring,” I said. “Has this guy botched anything and dumped someone on the ER doorstep?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Prewitt said. “But we really don’t know very much. It’s just a subtle, persistent rumor. There may be nothing to it.”

There were two ways that statement could be interpreted. It could mean, This case is probably a dead end, so I’m kicking it down to my youngest and least-experienced investigator, the one who’s already under a cloud around the department. Or he could be saying, This is a tricky case with few leads, one that needs to be handled carefully. Show me your stuff, Pribek.