Specimen Days

'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.'

'So you think the guy they really want to kill is their father.'

'Don't hold me to it.' 'Wouldn't think of it.'

'I predict we'll find a citizen who's so stressed about his oldest boy running away he's been torturing the younger one double. The kid'll turn out to have been privy to the plan, he'll be taken from his fucked-up home to a differently fucked-up home, where he'll live and get treatment until he's old enough to go out and get a job and have a family and start torturing his own sons.'

'You take a dim view,' he said.

'And you don't?'

'Why would a kid like that quote poetry?'

'Good question. Are they checking Whitman for that 'in the family' shit?'

'All done. It's not from Whitman.'

'Too bad.'

'Yeah.'

* * *

She spent the day waiting for a call that never came. It was funny she usually felt grotesquely popular here on the job. She was sought-after. Today she just sat by the phone, begging it to ring, like a high school girl in love.

She tracked down a Whitman scholar at NYU, one Rita Dunn, and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Otherwise, she killed time. Filed a few more things. Got to some old reports that had been languishing in a bottom drawer.

She stayed an extra hour, then packed it in. She had her cell, of course if the kid called back, they could patch him straight through to her wherever she was. She walked home through the dusk of another perfect June day among citizens who refused to shed their habits of looking suspicious to her. The guy nervously unloading boxes from a bakery truck, the jogger in Princeton sweats, even the blind man tapping along with his cane they all seemed like potentials. They were, in fact, all potentials. Everyone was. The trick was to keep living with the conviction that almost everyone was actually harmless. It was the job's central irony. If you weren't careful, you could get as paranoid as the people you dealt with.

Were all the same person. We all want the same things.

Her apartment felt particularly small. It had a way of expanding or contracting, depending on how the day went. Today it struck her as ludicrous, these little rooms in which she, an expensively educated thirty-eight-year-old woman, found herself living. Remember: it's a prize. In today's market, a dinky one-bedroom on Fifth Street cost a grand and a half, minimum. Be grateful for your rent-controlled life. Embrace the fact that you live above the poverty line.

She went to pour herself a vodka, decided against it. Better stay stone-cold sober, in case the kid should call. She made herself a cup of tea instead, took her Whitman down from the shelf, and curled up on the love seat with it.

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you.

Whitman, Walt. She hadn't thought about him, really, since college. Yes, she was an avid reader, but she wasn't the kind of person who sat home at night and read poetry for pleasure. She knew the basics: America's great visionary poet, alive sometime in the 1800s, produced in his long life this one enormous book, which he kept revising and expanding the way another man might endlessly remodel and add onto his house. Big, white Santa Claus beard, floppy hat. Liked boys.

He liked boys, didn't he? Was that true? She paged through the book.

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly, Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

Right. What else?

The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran
from their long hair,
Little streams passed all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

Would the kid have read that? Maybe, maybe not. He'd quoted from the opening stanza, nothing more. A