The Chalk Girl

‘But it hasn’t rained for days.’ Mallory bent low to examine the exposed earth and sparse weeds trampled by the wheels. ‘The dolly’s load was heavy going in and a lot lighter coming back out.’

Light by one body? And might that body belong to Coco’s missing uncle?

Mallory, a born-again believer in sky rats and blood rain, was looking upward as she entered the thick of the trees. It was Riker who saw the patches of human flesh between the leaves of foliage on the ground – then the profile of a face – and now the fronds of a fern were pulled away to expose a naked man lying on his side. Wrists and ankles tied by rope, the body was bent backwards like an archer’s bow. Riker reached down to touch the flesh. Cold and rigid. Late-stage rigor mortis? The one visible eye was sunk deep in its socket, and the bluish skin was mottled.

‘Textbook dead.’ Riker called out to the ranger on babysitting detail. ‘Get the kid outta here!’

As the ranger’s cart drove off with Coco, Mallory shouted at the two uniformed officers, ‘Nobody gets past you! Got that?’

The patrolmen stood guard by the fallen fence while the detectives made a closer inspection of the nude corpse. ‘Dark brown hair,’ said Riker. ‘I’m guessing this isn’t the kid’s Uncle Red. Maybe we still got another body to find.’

He heard the rats before he saw them, quick scrabbling through the underbrush, then twitching into view, dozens of them. The first one to jump the dead man sniffed out the soft delicacies of the eyes. Riker, a man with a fully loaded gun, not a shy or retiring type, was scared witless, but he would not run. Like Mallory, he stood his ground while rats ran around their shoes to get at the body. ‘Hey!’ he yelled, waving his arms. That should have scattered them, but the critters seemed not to notice. All the rules of rodents were suspended today, and all that he could count on was the fact that vermin carried ticks and fleas and plagues from the Middle Ages. And their teeth were so terribly sharp.

His partner picked up a rock and nailed one rat with an all-star pitch. Oh, bless Lou Markowitz for teaching his kid the all-American game of baseball – and trust Mallory to pervert it this way. Calm and composed, she snapped on a Latex glove, then picked up the bloodied rat by the tail and dangled it. The rest of them lifted their snouts to sniff the air. She swung the limp rat wide of the corpse, and it sailed past the startled patrolmen to land on the path by the carts.

Setting an example for the other rats? No, not quite.

The vermin swarmed toward the smell of fresh, flowing blood and gnawed on their not-quite-dead brother rat. The carnage on the path was a frenzy of ripping teeth, blood fly and whipping tails. Mallory’s early childhood on the streets had outfitted her with all the ugliest shortcuts for pest control.

One of the patrolmen called out, his voice young and hopeful, ‘Can we shoot ’em?’

Without a direct order from a superior, these patrolmen would be sent to NYPD Hell if they discharged their service weapons – even for the just cause of protecting a crime scene.

Riker gave them a thumbs-up, and the two officers whiled away their time picking off rats with bullets. Bang! went the guns, Bang! Bang! All around them, screaming birds took flight. The rats that were still alive remained. Still hungry.

The detectives knelt down beside the naked victim. Riker guessed that rigor mortis had set in hours ago. The bound corpse was frozen in his hog-tied pose.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Ligature marks on wrists and ankles were crusted with old blood from a struggle to get free, and that had probably attracted the rats, though the abrasions showed signs of early healing. How long had this body been lying here? A piece of duct tape dangled from the dead man’s chin. Another piece clung to the side of the face, and rough threads from a burlap weave were caught between the lips.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Mallory looked up, and Riker followed the line of her gaze. His eyes were not so young, and he had to squint to make out the slack shape of green material hanging from a high bough of the tree, and there was a gaping hole at the bottom of this empty bag. Giving up the only vanity of his middle age, he donned a pair of bifocals to see twigs and branches bent and broken where they had slowed the progress of a falling body.

His partner leaned over the rigid corpse at their feet. With one gloved hand, she lightly touched straight lines of sticky residue where the tape had once covered the eyes and mouth. Here the skin was raw. ‘He rubbed his face against the burlap to get the tape off.’

And patches of dried-out skin had come off with it. How long had this poor bastard gone without food and water?

‘Okay, we got a real sick game here,’ said Riker. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a wad of wax that plugged an ear cavity. ‘Our freak’s into sensory deprivation. No sight, no hearing, just starvation and slow death.’

The detectives heard the buzz before they saw the insects that always came to lay their eggs in decomposing flesh. The first fly landed to crawl upon the dead man’s eyeball.

The corpse blinked – and then it screamed.

FOUR

Before they can grab me, I warn them that I have superpowers. I can run like a rabbit, shiver like a whippet, and I can scream like a little girl. The three of them look at me like – what the hell? This buys me a few seconds, and I jump into the slipstream of a passing teacher. At lunchtime, they come along every few minutes like taxicabs.

—Ernest Nadler

The victim had lost consciousness again as he lay at the foot of the hanging tree.

A tube connected the naked man to a bag of fluid held high by a paramedic, who used his free hand to swat bugs. His patient hovered between the status of a corpse and a live carry. ‘Starvation ain’t the problem,’ he said to Detective Mallory, ‘and those rat bites won’t kill him, but dehydration’s a bitch.’

‘Best guess,’ she said. ‘How long has he gone without water?’

The paramedic shrugged. ‘I’d say three days at the outside. Any longer than that and he’d be dead.’

Though the victim had been freed of bindings, his body was still frozen in the captive posture when he was lifted onto a stretcher and carried through the woods to a waiting ambulance.

Two patrolmen strung yellow crime-scene tape from tree to tree in a crude circle. One of them stopped to shout at a taxpayer, ‘We’re not selling tickets! Get lost!’

And the civilian yelled, ‘I’m from the Times!’ which made him a reporter and thus a legal kill in the codebook of the NYPD.

Mallory turned her eyes up to the high branches of the hanging tree and the remnants of the empty sack that had gone unnoticed by paramedics. She had no interest in what happened to the reporter as long as the carnage stayed on the other side of the yellow tape. Except for the Times interloper, panic had emptied the Ramble of people, and she still had hopes of keeping secret the detail of the burlap bag.

But then the man from the Times yelled, ‘You gotta come with me! There’s a bag in a tree – rats running in and out of it – bloody rats!’

‘Rats are climbing trees now?’ The patrolmen laughed.

The detectives did not. Together they walked toward the path, and Riker said, ‘Check out the bloodstains on the guy’s shirt.’

The man with red spots on his shoulders yelled, ‘I’m a photographer! I got pictures!’ He held out his cell phone to the approaching detectives and pointed to the image on the small screen. ‘See?’ There was only time enough for him to blink before his phone disappeared.

The civilian was staring down at the empty palm of his hand – while Mallory, the best of thieves, clicked through his pictures, a portrait of Coco among them, and she transmitted them to her own cell. While the man she had robbed was trying to find his voice and a suitable tone of outrage, she said, ‘This is an idiot-proof camera. How could you screw up these shots?’ Oh, and now they were all gone – erased. Well, accidents would happen. She saw a word forming on the man’s lips.