Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

Bernie Horowitz, in the sergeants' office, said, 'You didn't hear? We got a child torture-murder in Encanto Park. Little kid taken from his house sometime this morning, his mother didn't even know he'd gone until she called him through for lunch. Thought he was quiet because he was reading comic books. Some sicko had taken him out to the park, abused him, and then tried to eat him. Avery and Timms were cruising the park after a noise complaint, somebody down on the bandstand with a ghetto blaster, and some kids flagged them down. That's how they found him. At that stage he was still alive, but he didn't make it. Timms went on home already, but Avery's trying to be tough about it.'

'A mistake.'

'Tell him that. I'm just glad it wasn't me. I've seen most things, but I can't take child abuse.'

When I went past the locker room again, I heard Avery saying, too loudly, I was covering him over while we waited for the ambulance to get there, and he was thanking me… I got into uniform and then went up to see if I could find Lieutenant Michaels. He'd come in early and all of the officers were now in some kind of meeting concerning the murder, so I took the spare chair by his desk and waited.

On the other side of the partition wall, I could hear somebody on the phone. Yeah, I saw the body, he was saying. Believe me, you do not want to know.

Damn it, I had something here. I wasn't exactly sure what, but I couldn't wait to tell Dave and see what he thought.

He came through from the meeting a couple of minutes later. He left the office door wide open like he always did, and as he dropped his sheaf of mimeoed notes onto the desk and walked around behind it to sit, he said, 'I hear you've got a theory for me.'

'Not a theory, Dave,' I said, 'but it's a line I think we ought to follow.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Fire away.'

So then I started to tell him about my morning's work, and after a couple of minutes I was starting to be sorry that I'd even begun. It was like when you try to tell somebody about a dream you had which made perfect sense at the time, but then you can feel that sense slipping away even as you speak. I was okay on Mercado keeping three empty shells in a darkened motel room as he cruised the city's parks and playgrounds, but beyond that everything started to sound very shaky. Michaels stopped scanning his meeting papers as he listened. I hadn't meant it to come out as any kind of a theory, but that's how it was starting to sound; and after another minute or so, he cut in.

'Alex,' he said, 'we don't have a sequence here. Nobody walked out of the hospital.'

'But what about the witnesses?'

'One heavily-doped Reverend and a psychiatric patient who has regular conversations with dead presidents. Are these witnesses you'd care to take into court?'

'I've had worse. What about the stolen clothes?'

'Just another petty theft from the County General. According to the patient's brain scan, he'd no right even to be breathing. Can you imagine those doctors being wrong?'

'I can imagine them seeing the proof and then firing a few junior people and saying it was what they'd always suspected,' I said. I'd stopped subscribing to the popular view of doctors as gods walking the Earth when I'd butted heads with a group of them ten years before, and Dave knew all about it. He conceded the point with a brief smile, but that was as far as he was prepared to take it.

'Listen,' he said, 'I think I know why you're doing this. The dead stay dead, Alex. It's about the only damn thing we can be sure of in this world. What we're looking at here is a case of bodysnatching for the usual kind of reason.'

The usual kind of reason being the desire of close relatives to avoid identification so that they couldn't be stiffed for the medical bills… something else that I knew plenty about. I didn't like the sympathetic streak that had crept into the Lieutenant's manner here, and I also didn't like the feeling that I was somehow being managed. I could see that I was on the road to nowhere, and that it was time to let the whole thing go. It was out of my system and I couldn't ask for more than that.

Michaels said, 'Look, what you've said is noted. If we get any more and it's enough to be worth passing along to the detective division, I'll do it. But until then, what have we actually got?'

'Nothing,' I said, and I stood up to leave.

I was halfway out of the door when something else occurred to me. I said, 'Tomorrow's supposed to be a leave day for me. Is that going to be cancelled now?'

'No,' he said, 'the manpower side of it's all covered. Stay home and relax, you've done two straight weeks without a break. Don't you have anything fixed?'

'Yeah,' I said, remembering. 'I'm going on a picnic.'

The rest of the day was more or less normal. The detective squad diverted most of its personnel into the new investigation, and the uniforms added extra patrols of parks and playgrounds which were now mostly deserted anyway.

Life went on.

'You told a lie,' Loretta said to me the next morning.

'When?'

'When you said that you weren't going to spend any of your own time on this. I heard you go out at the crack of dawn yesterday.'

I'd been telling her about how I'd almost made myself look like one of those guys who stands on street corners and shouts about the FLYING SAUCERS that are in the sky above us RIGHT NOW and the government knows it but WON'T TELL THE PEOPLE. We'd walked all of the way around the city zoo's three different habitat zones and had finally come to rest on a bench near the birds of prey. School holidays and yesterday's scare had made the zoo a popular place to be, but there was so much of it that it still seemed to be almost deserted. Georgie, with the typical perversity of small children, had paid far less attention to any of the exotic breeds than she was now paying to a tray of day-old chicks in a low shed across the way; she was pressed up against the window, watching them as they milled around like street extras in Blade Runner.

I looked at Loretta. She was shading her eyes against the sun, smiling. I said, 'I couldn't sleep, that was all.'

'I've been watching you, Alex,' she said. 'You're a workaholic.'

'A workaholic wouldn't have made such a hash of the lieutenant's exam.'

'I don't mean in that way. But outside of the job, what else do you do?'

'Lots of things,' I said uncomfortably. 'I've done evening classes. I'm in a couple of clubs.'

'The evening classes were in law, and the clubs are rifle clubs.'

'I told you that?'

'You did.'

'Are you saying that I'm dull company?'

'Not at all. But I'm wondering what I'll have to do to keep your interest. Perhaps if I went out and committed a robbery, then you could catch me and put the cuffs on me.'

I feigned surprise. 'That the kind of thing you're into?'

'If that's the kind of thing that it takes,' she said. The way that the shadow was falling across her eyes, I couldn't see how serious she was being. Perhaps that was deliberate.

Georgie came over then, and said, 'Mom, if we get the right kind of eggs, could I try hatching them?'

'And then what, sugar? I don't think Mr Peabody's likely to let us put a hen run in the trailer park.'

I could just imagine it; first the hen run, then a few cars up on blocks, then a moonshine still, and then the rest of us sitting out on our porches playing banjos. And in the middle of it all, old Peabody the site manager with his hand clutching at his heart and with his lips barely moving.

I said, 'Try suggesting it at school. That way you get all the fun, and somebody else gets all the problems.'

'Yeah,' Georgie conceded, seeing all of the gleam slowly fade from her plan. 'But then they'd be everybody's.'

She thought it over for a moment longer, and then seemed to sense a new tactical avenue; she said, 'How about a cage bird?'