The Absence of Mercy

8

Sam Garston was the sort of man who made it seem as if the job of county sheriff had been established not so much because there was a need for it, but because the Jefferson County legislature realized that they needed to come up with some way to make use of the man’s talent and steadfast dedication to public service. Having moved his family to the area thirteen years ago, Ben had not known Sam for as long as some of the true locals. Nevertheless, his position as medical examiner brought him into contact with Sam frequently enough that he felt he knew the man fairly well. He was not surprised, therefore, to find a Jefferson County patrol car parked in front of the Coroner’s Office at nine o’clock on this bright Saturday morning and the six-foot-five, 260-pound chief of police leaning casually against the wall of the building, waiting for Ben to arrive.

“Good morning, Chief,” Ben greeted him as he ascended the six steps to the building’s front door.

“It’s a nice one,” Garston agreed amicably, squinting slightly as he surveyed the blue sky above. His left thumb was tucked casually into his gun belt, and the large man seemed to lean against the building with enough purpose to make one wonder whether he perhaps moonlighted as a structural support beam for the CO’s front exterior façade. As Sam pushed away from the building’s wall with his right foot Ben could almost feel the CO shift slightly as it resumed responsibility for the entire weight of its frame.

“Thought I might actually beat you here this morning, Sam,” Ben commented as he unlocked the front door and stepped inside. A fine mist of dust floated within the identical sunbeams cast through the lobby’s two large front windows. The CO was old, erected at least eighty years ago, and had served as county post office for many distinguished decades before its eventual reassignment. The floors were swept and mopped five days a week by a janitor who took pride in his work and did his job well. Nevertheless, the dust inhabiting the old building had apparently decided long ago that it had a right to be there, and returned every evening after the lights went out and the place was locked up tight. It provided a familiar welcome on mornings like this when Ben was the first to arrive and startle it up from its resting place on the wooden floorboards.

“You won’t be beating me anywhere showing up at nine A.M.,” the big man countered. “Far as I see it, day’s almost half over. Been up since five-thirty, and waiting here for you since eight. Hell, I’m almost ready for lunch.”

Ben unlocked the door to his small office, and the two men entered. Ben walked behind his desk and sat down in a swivel chair on plastic rollers that tilted slightly to the left. Garston stood next to the only other chair in the room, his head nearly brushing against the low tile ceiling. His massive frame eclipsed the token ray of light emanating from the hallway just outside, and Ben switched on the desk lamp.

“Have a seat, Sam,” he said, indicating the vacant chair. The chief descended upon the hapless piece of furniture, which groaned in modest protest. The look of guarded anticipation that darted across Sam’s face suggested to Ben that more than a few chairs had failed him unexpectedly during his tenure on this earth. Ben was grateful when this one did not. He liked Sam, who was sharp as a tack and conducted his job with surprising kindness and decency.

“Looks like this one’s gonna hold,” Sam observed, optimistically glancing down at the chair beneath him.

Ben smiled. “If it don’t, we’ll take it out back and shoot it.”

“Won’t be the first time,” the chief commented. He interlocked his fingers and cracked the knuckles loudly, the noise reverberating off the walls of the small office. It was a bad habit he’d abandoned twenty years ago at the request of his wife, but it occasionally resurfaced during times of stress. He looked up guiltily. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem.”

Sam took a deep breath and let it out. “So, what’ve you got?”

Ben opened the left drawer of his desk and pulled out a dark green file. It contained multiple photographs and his typed dictation from the night before. “Young kid, as you know,” he began. “I’d say about fourteen.”

“We think we have an ID on the victim,” Garston said. “Kevin Tanner—a fifteen-year-old high school student from a neighborhood adjacent to the spot where the victim was found. Apparently, he didn’t come home last night. Wasn’t reported missing until this morning, about two and a half hours ago. Kid’s mother and younger brother are out of town visiting relatives, and the father works nights at a shipping company in Steubenville. Father came home this morning to an empty house and became concerned. Contacted us at six thirty A.M.”

“This Tanner kid might have just gone over to a friend’s house overnight, or left early this morning before his old man got home from work.”

“Not likely,” Sam replied. “Father says his son wouldn’t spend the night at a friend’s house without checking with him first. He also says he got home a little before six this morning, so it would’ve been pretty early for the boy to be up and out of the house. Also, the family has a dog. The animal urinated on the carpet overnight. Father says he’s never done that before. Probably hadn’t been let out since Mr. Tanner left for work at five P.M. yesterday afternoon.”

“Long shift,” Ben commented.

“He works twelve-hour shifts a couple of days a week. The father’s description of the boy matches that of the victim. He’s down at the station right now filing a report. They’ll keep him for some brief questioning, but we’d like to get him over here to ID the body after that.”

“That’ll be ugly,” Ben said. “The body’s in pretty bad shape. Someone did a number on this poor kid.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam cracked the knuckle of his right index finger. Pop! It sounded like a firecracker within the tight confines of the office, and Ben jumped slightly in his seat. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

The pathologist looked down at the report in front of him. “Well, there were multiple stab wounds from an unknown instrument,” he began. “I don’t think it was a knife. The entrance wounds measure about 0.75 by 0.9 centimeters, and all appear to be made using the same weapon.”

“Screwdriver?”

“Maybe. There’s a wound entering the neck and extending to the skull base. That would mean the instrument was at least six to eight inches long. There were eight stab wounds to the head itself. Two of them pierced the skull.” He was sliding pictures across the desk as he spoke.

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, that takes some force—or at least determination.”

“Or rage,” Sam commented, studying the pictures.

“The attack was extraordinarily violent,” Ben continued. “The victim was bitten by the assailant several times. In fact, he wasn’t simply bitten—he was ravaged. There are several large avulsion injuries to the soft tissues of the face, neck, and chest where the skin has been partially torn away.”

“Consistent with bite wounds?”

“It appears so.”

“Could the bite wounds have come from an animal, perhaps one that came across the body after the boy had been murdered?”

“Unlikely.” Ben shook his head. “Most animals have much sharper canines than humans, and a different dental structure. These serrations along the wound edge”—he pointed to a picture lying in front of them on the desk—”are consistent with a human dentition pattern.”

Sam studied the picture for a moment. “I see what you mean,” he said, and when he looked up at Ben his face was slightly ashen. “It just seems so… savage. I don’t understand it.”

“I haven’t gotten to the best part yet,” Ben replied.

“You mean the fact that the victim’s genitals were discovered in the woods fifty yards from the site of the body?”

“Yeah. That won’t be easy for the father to hear about.”

“Then I suggest,” Sam said, eyeing Ben from across the table, “that you don’t tell him.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Ben said. He swiveled around in his chair so that he could look out through the open office door while Sam shuffled through the photographs sprawled like fallen soldiers across the desk. It was Saturday, but the Coroner’s Office was beginning to come to life. Tanya Palson, who tended to most of the clerical responsibilities of the office, had arrived and could be heard at the front desk answering the phone.

“There’s one other thing you might find of interest,” he commented as Chief Garston continued to study the photographs in front of him.

“What’s that?” Sam asked, eyebrows raised slightly.

“I think the perpetrator was left-handed.”

“Yes, I was just noticing that,” Sam observed. “The puncture wounds to the body are clustered along the right chest and flank. Assuming the assailant was facing the victim, he must’ve been holding the weapon in his left hand.”

“Exactly,” Ben concurred. “Also, the two head wounds puncturing the cranium follow a trajectory through the brain that angles slightly to the victim’s left. They enter through the coronal and sagittal sutures.”

“The what?”

“The skull is actually made up of several different bones which merge together during early childhood along what are called suture lines. They’re weak points in the skull.”

“Fault lines,” Sam suggested.

“Yes,” Ben agreed, “in a manner of speaking.”

“So he got lucky, then?”

“Perhaps. But there were eight wounds to the skull, and all of them were clustered around the suture lines. I think,” Ben said thoughtfully, “that maybe he knew what he was doing.”

“What are you saying?”

“My overwhelming impression”—Ben looked somberly across the table at the Jefferson County Sheriff—“is that he’s done this before.”

Pop! Pop-pop! Sam’s knuckles sounded off beneath the table.

“Yeah.” Ben nodded.

In the front room, the phone was ringing. “Coroner’s Office,” Tanya answered. “How can I help you?”

Ben gathered the photos and returned them to the olive file marked simply “John Doe.” “Do you want to see the body?” he offered.

“Not really,” Sam replied. “But they tell me it’s part of my job.”

“I thought you had detectives to take care of this stuff.”

“Oh, he’ll be by soon enough,” Sam answered. “Carl Schroeder. Good man. Fifteen years on the force. He’s questioning the boy’s father right now. It’s his case.”

“Okay. Then, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here?”

Sam stood up slowly. He was such a pleasant man that you forgot how physically intimidating his size could be until he was standing directly in front of you. “I’m the chief,” he said. “I have an overriding responsibility to protect the citizens of this county that goes well beyond any single investigation. What happened yesterday…” He seemed to mull it over in his mind, searching for the right sentiment. “What happened yesterday offends me, Ben—and I aim to take a special interest.”

At that moment, Ben was very glad to be on the right side of the law. “I see.” He nodded seriously, then gestured toward the open door and the autopsy room just beyond. “Well, …this way, Chief.”

The two men filed out of the tiny office and made their way toward a lonely shape lying patiently on a steel table in the next room.

9

Eleven A.M., Coroner’s Office. Ben sat in his small office and waited. Chief Garston had received a call from Detective Schroeder that he was on his way to the CO with the boy’s father. That had been ten minutes ago. It was not a long drive.

Sam had gone out to stand on the front steps of the building. Reporters had been gathering since 9:30 A.M., and they were expecting a statement from the chief regarding the results of the autopsy and the early progress of the investigation. Sam hoped his appearance would draw their attention while Detective Schroeder ushered Mr. Tanner into the CO through the back door. It wasn’t a flawless plan, but it was the best one they had.

Ben could hear Tanya fielding calls at the front desk. The phone had not stopped ringing since Ben’s arrival, and he simply wished it would stop. Then again, he considered, the silence might be worse. He sat at his desk and tried to focus on something—anything—except for the covered figure in the next room.

Sam Garston, he considered, was an interesting man. His formidable physical characteristics and dogged devotion to his job suggested a no-nonsense approach to life. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his continued success throughout the course of his career. But there was also a different side to him, one that Ben had come to witness on at least one occasion previously.

Two years ago Ben had had the unfortunate responsibility of performing an autopsy on a four-month-old infant from Pleasant Hill. The child had come from a nice, hardworking middle-class family from a suburban neighborhood just north of Steubenville. The father wrote for the sports section of the local newspaper, and the mother took care of their daughter during the day while simultaneously managing to run a small online resale business from their home. One Friday evening they’d hired a babysitter so they could catch a movie at the local cineplex and dinner at a popular Italian restaurant afterward. When they’d come home that evening, the babysitter was watching television in the family room and the child was asleep in the upstairs bedroom. They’d popped in to check on her, paid the sitter, and the father had driven the teenager home. When he returned, he’d found his wife waiting patiently for him in their bed, naked under the covers. They had made love, and had fallen to sleep amid a discussion about their plans for the upcoming weekend. All of this had been documented in their statement to investigators the following day. When they went into the little girl’s room the following morning, the child was dead.

On the surface, it sounded like a case of SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome, a term used to describe an unexplained infant death (what used to be called a “crib death”) during the first year of life. The autopsy, however, had identified retinal hemorrhages—small areas of bleeding in the back of the eyes. The postmortem had also discovered multiple subdural hematomas, a type of brain injury commonly seen with shaken baby syndrome. Ben had contacted the investigating detective with these preliminary findings, and both the parents and the babysitter had been brought to the police station for further questioning. Most of the focus had been on the teenager, who adamantly denied shaking the infant the night before. The child, she reported, had been sleeping when she arrived. An hour later, she’d gotten her up for a feed and to change her diaper. The infant slept through most of it, showing little interest in the bottle. The detectives interrogated the girl for several hours at the station. They had reasoned and bargained with her. They’d lied to her about factitious evidence proving the case against her, eventually scaring her into tears. Throughout everything, however, she had stuck to her story.

Sam had stopped by Ben’s house that night with the investigating detectives. The girl’s story was convincingly consistent, they informed him. She was either innocent or an exceptionally good liar—which left one or both of the parents as the only remaining suspects. The detectives wanted to know how hard they should press the parents, and whether the evidence from the autopsy suggested one more than the other as a likely culprit. The mother and father were already traumatized, Sam noted, and they didn’t want to go after them unnecessarily. It was a fragile situation.

Of the two detectives accompanying Sam that evening, one of them—a small, wiry man named Harvey Nickelback—had not exactly been in agreement with the cautious approach Sam had asked them to take.

“I don’t see why we have to pussyfoot around this,” he’d objected vociferously, tracing the outline of his thin mustache between his right thumb and index finger. “This kid had retinal hemorrhages and a head full of blood. That’s pretty convincing evidence for child abuse, as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s why the case is under investigation,” Sam had replied. “If this death was due to shaken baby syndrome, then whoever did it will go to prison.”

“All right, then,” Nickelback agreed ardently.

“But we have to be careful,” Sam continued. “I don’t want to go after these parents with everything we’ve got until we’re fairly certain that we’re going after the right people. Keep in mind that they’ve just lost their only child. They’re in a world of pain right now.”

“Or guilt,” the detective countered.

“Probably both. But we only have one chance to do this right.”

That was the thing that had impressed Ben the most about Sam: the delicacy with which he had handled the situation. He’d never mentioned it, but Ben thought that perhaps Sam had had an instinct about the case—somehow sensing that things didn’t quite fit together in the way that they should, although he probably would’ve been hard-pressed to explain why. In the face of nearly overwhelming evidence, he had asked the detectives to wait, to suspend their judgment a bit longer. In the end, it had been the right thing to do. The forensic chemist’s report that had landed on Ben’s desk the following week had identified high levels of glutaric acid in the infant’s organs, particularly in the brain and muscles. The abnormal levels raised suspicion for the possibility of a rare metabolic disorder, glutaric acidemia type 1, in which the body has difficulty breaking down various amino acids. The accumulation of the metabolic by-products, the report went on to explain, often results in multiple clinical manifestations, including mental retardation, alterations in muscle strength and tone, and hemorrhages in the brain and eyes that can be mistaken for child abuse. That explained the retinal hemorrhages and subdural hematomas Ben had discovered on autopsy. The forensic chemist’s findings had changed everything, for it became clear that the infant had not been the victim of child abuse, after all, but rather had died from complications of a rare genetic disorder. Sam’s instinct to wait, therefore, had been correct.

“—evenson?”

It had been a remarkable thing, that intuition, and—

“Excuse me. Dr. Stevenson?”

Ben looked up from his desk, his eyes clearing. The CO’s secretary stood in the doorway of his small office, looking in on him.

“What is it, Tanya?” he asked.

“That was Detective Schroeder on the phone,” she said. “He’s here with the boy’s father. They’re pulling into the parking lot now.”

10

Phil Tanner was a tall, lanky man with a weathered face and a darkened, sun-battered complexion. He still wore his work clothes from the night before—faded dungarees and an old navy blue button-down shirt that bore the unmistakable bulge of a pack of cigarettes (Marlboros, if Ben had to guess) in the front pocket. Detective Carl Schroeder stood beside him, wearing a dark suit with a maroon tie. His black gelled-back hair matched the color of his shoes perfectly. He was shorter than both Ben and Phil Tanner by several inches, but his build was lithe and wiry, the eyes cool and watchful, and Ben imagined that in a physical altercation the detective was a force to be reckoned with. Schroeder introduced the two men in a brisk, practiced manner.

“Mr. Tanner.” Ben greeted the boy’s father, shaking the large, calloused hand extended in his direction.

The man nodded slightly, saying nothing. He stood tense and rigid in the hallway.

“Sir, I know this must be an extremely difficult time for you,” Ben continued. “You are welcome to come sit in my office for a moment until you feel that you’re—”

“Where’s my boy?” Tanner responded, looking over Ben’s shoulder into the next room. His voice was deep and gruff, the product of too many years spent smoking too many cigarettes.

“Well, we were hoping you could identify—”

“Let me see ’im then.”

“Yes, of course,” Ben agreed. He led the two men into the next room. He had taken as much care as possible to prepare the boy’s body—his face, anyway—for viewing. His injuries had been severe and disfiguring, and Ben was no plastic surgeon. Suddenly he wanted more time to work on the boy, especially that gaping bite wound across his left cheek. He’d been able to pull the wound edges together using a series of horizontal mattress sutures, but now it didn’t seem nearly sufficient to withstand the eyes of the boy’s father.

“The wounds were fairly extensive,” he explained to them, somewhat apologetically. “There’s been some significant disfigurement to the face.” Ben carefully folded down the edge of a cloth blanket he’d placed over the body prior to their arrival. He tried to brace himself for the father’s response.

Phil Tanner was quiet for a long moment, studying the boy’s marred but placid appearance. He looked upon him with a surreal and uncertain fascination. In the front room the phone rang, and Ben heard Tanya answering it. “Coroner’s Office,” she said, and Ben silently kicked himself for forgetting to have her put the phones on hold during the visit. The sound seemed to break Phil Tanner’s trance, and he looked up at them with confusion.

“That ain’t my boy,” he said, and Ben exchanged a surprised look with Detective Schroeder.

“That’s not your son, sir?” Schroeder asked.

“No,” the man answered. He shook his head as if to clear it. “Wait. That’s not exactly right. What I mean to say is that, yes, it is my son, but it… it’s just that he don’t look like my son.” He searched the faces of the two men standing before him, attempting to make himself understood.

“He’s sustained some injuries that alter his appearance,” Ben explained again.

“I can see that for myself, Doctor.” Phil Tanner’s eyes flashed at Ben, who took an involuntary half step backward. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Take it easy, Mr. Tanner,” Detective Schroeder interjected in a calm and level voice. “Something like this always comes as a great shock. I can assure you that Dr. Stevenson was not implying—”

If Phil Tanner heard him, he didn’t seem to notice. His left hand groped beneath the blanket, finding the boy’s cold, insensate hand. He grasped it tightly.

“Kevin?” he asked, puzzled and unbelieving. “Kevin? Kevin?” His voice rose steadily in pitch and urgency each time he spoke the boy’s name. The words echoed slightly off the room’s concrete walls. They had a hollow, lonely sound, like a knock at a door that will never be answered.

At last Tanner looked up at Ben, his eyes pleading. “That ain’t my boy, is it, Doctor? I mean… Jesus… Tell me this ain’t my son lyin’ here on this table with his face torn to pieces! Tell me that, won’t you, Doctor?!”

“Mr. Tanner, please,” someone said without much conviction. Ben wasn’t certain if it had been Detective Schroeder or himself.

“Kevin?” the boy’s father went on, his voice continuing to escalate. “Kevin? Son?! Kevin?? Tell me this ain’t you!! Kevin, are you dead?! ARE YOU DEAD, BOY?!!”

There was no answer from the form beneath the blanket.

“What did they do to you?!” he asked the dead boy lying pale and mute before him. “WHAT… DID THEY DO TO YOU?!!”

At that last tortured utterance, Phil Tanner’s feverish eyes leapt up at Ben and fixed themselves upon him as if Ben, himself, had been responsible for the boy’s death.

“I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY DID TO MY BOY!!” he said again, only this time it wasn’t a question but an accusation. Ben took another step backward. His left hip bumped into a small metal table supporting an electronic scale. The scale skittered to the edge of the table, hung on precariously for a brief moment, then went crashing to the tiled floor below. The sound was thunderous in the small room, and Ben could hear Tanya’s voice calling from the front desk, “Dr. Stevenson? Is everything okay?”

“That’s enough, Mr. Tanner.” Carl Schroeder took the man by the arm and tried to lead him away.

“FUCK YOU!! I WANT TO BE WITH MY SON!!” Tanner protested wildly, trying to shake off the detective’s grasp.

“You will spend the night in jail if you don’t get a hold of yourself,” Schroeder said quietly but sternly. “That’s enough!”

Phil Tanner looked from the detective, to Ben, to the body lying on the table before him. His eyes were wide and uncomprehending. The muscles of his neck and forearms bunched and jerked beneath his blue shirt, and Ben thought to himself in a strangely detached way that if Tanner leapt for him across the table, he would break to his right and make for his office. If he could get the office door closed, he’d be out of harm’s way long enough for Detective Schroeder to subdue the man. Fight or flight, Ben thought randomly. Let Schroeder do the fighting; he was trained for it. Ben would opt for the latter.

Suddenly, as quickly as it had come, all of the struggle within Phil Tanner was gone. His eyes appeared to clear a little, but the inner strength he had brought with him when he arrived was gone. His shoulders slumped forward, his body bending at the waist as if he’d been sucker-punched low in the gut. A calloused hand touched the table where his son lay supine beneath the sheet, but Tanner would not look at him. For a long time he said nothing, staring at the broken remnants of the tattered scale splayed out across the floor. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted like that.”

Schroeder placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You’re under a great strain, sir,” he observed. “Under similar circumstances, I don’t know if I would’ve behaved any differently.”

“Well, I’m sorry anyway. It’s just…” For a moment his face struggled for control. “It’s just that I… well… I don’t want him to be dead.” This last part came out so softly that, if there had been any other noise in the room, Ben would not have heard it. Phil Tanner’s eyes filled with tears. “When I got home this morning and he wasn’t there… and then they told me that a boy had been found in the woods… I just…”

“It’s okay,” Schroeder said. His voice was calm and empathic. Ben stood in silence, studying a thin strip of grout between the floor’s tiles as if it were the most interesting thing he’d ever seen in his entire life.

Tanner looked up at the detective. “I just didn’t want it to be him. I thought… you know… I thought maybe I’d come here and it wouldn’t be him. I wanted it to be someone else’s son. Not Kevin. Not my boy. That’s what I was hoping for. I wanted it to be someone else’s goddamn son. Can you… can you believe that?”

“Yes, I can,” he answered.

Phil Tanner stood next to the table, head low, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. He stood like that for a minute or two, and none of them spoke. Then, suddenly, he looked up as another realization occurred to him. “Oh my God,” he said. His eyes revealed a sickening dread. “What will I say to his mother? She doesn’t know. How am I going to tell my wife that our boy is dead?”

The intrusive ringing of the phone at the front desk had finally stopped, and the CO was quiet and still, at least for the time being. The only sound in the room was the shushing cadence of breath that slid slowly in and out of each chest but one.

There was nothing else.

11

“You’re not going out tonight, Thomas. End of discussion.” Ben was tired of arguing, and he was through being reasonable.

“Fine, Dad!” his son yelled back, throwing up his hands in frustration. “Whatever you say!” He stormed out of the kitchen and up the stairs toward his bedroom. Six seconds later came the sound, and the subsequent reverberation, of Thomas’s bedroom door being slammed shut hard enough to make the pictures in the downstairs hallway rattle.

Joel sat quietly at the kitchen table, pushing string beans around the perimeter of his plate with his fork. He’d wisely decided to stay out of the fray. His father looked down at the remaining vegetables. “You planning on eating those?”

“No,” Joel replied honestly.

Ben continued to look at him, eyebrows raised. Joel stared back, mentally preparing himself for the stand-off. Nobody told the Punisher—his favorite comic book hero—to eat his vegetables, he thought crossly. You’d get so far as “Pardon me, sir, but are you planning on eating—” Then, blam! You’d be staring down the barrel of a 0.45 long-slide.

“I guess you’re prepared to sleep in the kitchen tonight then?” Ben asked. “You want your pillow?”

Joel sighed, rolling his eyes. Alex looked up at him from where he lay on the floor next to Joel’s chair. Two abandoned string beans also lay on the floor next to the dog, Joel’s failed attempt to feed the beans to his canine companion. Apparently, Alex didn’t care much for string beans, either.

“Dad, I’m full. This is my second helping.”

“That’s your first helping,” his father responded. “And don’t think I didn’t notice those two beans on the floor next to Alex, too.”

“I dropped them. Honest. It was an accident.” He looked over at his mother for support.

Ben shook his head. “Give me at least some credit, son.”

“How about if I eat three beans?” Joel suggested.

“How about if you eat all of them?” his father responded.

“Okay, I’ll eat half,” Joel agreed, and shoveled the appropriate number of beans into his mouth, chewed them up, and swallowed them in one giant gulp followed by a milk chaser. “Now, may I be excused?”

“Yes, you may,” Susan said. “The rest of those beans will be waiting for you at breakfast.”

“Thanks, Mom.” He jumped out of his chair and darted from the room. Alexander the Great immediately got up and followed him, the boy’s 180-pound shadow. Joel’s parents watched him go. For a moment they sat in silence at the table, enjoying the sudden tranquillity that their son’s departure had left in its wake.

“I’m going to go talk to Thomas,” Ben announced.

Susan placed a hand on his sleeve. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“He needs to check his attitude,” Ben said. “I’m not going to have him yelling at his parents and slamming the bedroom door just because he can’t go out with his friends.”

“Let him be,” Susan advised him. “He’s sixteen. You remember what that was like? He’s got so many emotions churning around inside him that he can barely see straight.”

“I still don’t like the yelling. We’ve never tolerated that before. I don’t see any reason to change course now.”

“That’s true. But he’s right, Ben. What are we doing telling him he can’t go out with his friends on a Saturday night?”

“We’re trying to keep him safe, that’s what we’re doing. A young boy Thomas’s age was just murdered in our own neighborhood. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask him not to go out at night for a while.”

“That was eight weeks ago, and it happened in broad daylight,” Susan reminded him. “Should we be keeping him home during the day, as well?”

“It’s a parent’s responsibility to act in their child’s best interest. The first priority is keeping our boys safe.”

“But we can’t always do that,” she pointed out.

“We can try,” he told her. He stood up, filled a kettle with water, and placed it on the range to boil. “Maybe we should think about getting out of town for a while.”

“We have responsibilities—obligations, Ben.”

“A few weeks is all I’m suggesting.”

Susan shook her head. “I have a private practice to run—a full schedule of patient appointments. You have a job. The kids have school. We can’t just pick up and leave.”

“You might think differently if you’d seen the body of that boy, Susan. He’d been ravaged—his features mutilated. The person who did that to him is still out there somewhere. Do you get that?”

Susan looked at him from across the room. Her face was a mask: set, composed, and completely unreadable. Ben didn’t care. Right now all he could think about was the safety of his children.

“It won’t make any difference,” she said at last.

“What?”

“You want them to run like cowards? Is that what you want to teach them?”

“I don’t care about teaching them anything right now,” he said. “I want them safe.”

“But you can’t make them safe, Ben.”

“I can try,” he replied. He could feel the emotions warring inside of him: anger, fear, and frustration. He almost didn’t say the words that came next. If he hadn’t—if he’d taken a moment to think before speaking—things might have turned out differently for them.

“Someone has to,” he said.

The room was very quiet for a moment.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked finally, her voice low but rock steady. “You think I don’t care about the well-being of our boys?”

“That’s not what I said.” He was backtracking now, a little too late.

“You think that you actually understand what love and protection are? Do you?”

“I…”

“You have no idea about the measures I am prepared to take—that I have already taken—to safeguard the lives of those children. You have no idea, Ben.” She shook her head in exasperation. “I would do anything—anything—for them. Do you really mean to stand here and tell me that I wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t mean to imply…” He trailed off, not really knowing what he’d meant to imply.

She stood there, regarding him with a look of defiance and contempt. “I believe that we both would do whatever we could to protect our children, at whatever cost is necessary.”

Ben sat down in a chair, or rather collapsed into it. His fingers kneaded his right temple where a dull headache had begun to blossom. “And how do you plan on fighting this?” he asked.

“As a family,” she replied. “We have to take care of each other. Just as we always have.” She studied him from across the table for a moment. “They’re safer here with us than they would be anywhere else without us.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m certain.”

She took his hand in her own and held it. “You know I love you.”

“Yes, I know th—” he began, but she held up her hand, indicating for him to be quiet.

“You know I love you,” she said again. “And I would never break up this family.” Her eyes continued to watch him, and Ben knew enough this time to be silent. “I will fight for them. I will do whatever it takes to protect them. And I would fight for you. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She glanced down at their hands, folded together on the kitchen table, then looked up at him again. “And Benjamin?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you ever think or imply otherwise. I won’t tolerate that form of betrayal from you.”

She watched him for a moment to make certain he understood, then slid her hands away from him, stood up, and left the room.

12

That night Ben went to bed early, feeling broken and exhausted from his arguments first with his son, and subsequently with his wife. His interactions with Joel at the dinner table hadn’t been particularly stellar, either, now that he thought about it. Susan had told him that they didn’t take sides, that they were a family. That was all well and good if you weren’t the one on the outside looking in, if you weren’t the odd man out. But that was exactly how he had felt lately, with all of them. The problem was, none of them had seen that boy’s body that night. None of them had tried in vain to sew up the boy’s face so it didn’t look like someone had taken a huge bite out of it—which, in fact, they had. His wife and children had the luxury of thinking about that violence in an abstract way. He did not.

Despite his best efforts to keep the lines of communication with his family open, things had been strained between them over these past two months. How could they not be? To make matters worse, Ben hadn’t been sleeping well, and he felt perpetually fatigued and irritable. Last Wednesday, he caught himself dozing off at work right in the middle of reviewing a pathology slide of a needle biopsy from a breast mass. He was looking at the specimen under the microscope and started to hear the sound of snoring. When he glanced up, he realized that he was the only one in the room and that the snoring had been his own. The slide had fallen off the microscope’s stage and onto the counter, cracking the cover slip. What in the hell was I doing catching a few winks in the middle of a cytology exam? he’d flogged himself. Sorry about your invasive Stage IV breast cancer, ma’am. It probably could’ve been properly diagnosed and treated five years earlier if I hadn’t been taking an afternoon siesta while examining your biopsy. That had been completely unacceptable.

The thing of it was, he kept going over the kid’s autopsy in his mind: driving to work; walking up and down the aisles of the local supermarket; having dinner with his family; and certainly lying awake at night, staring for alternating periods at the ceiling and the bedroom clock. He kept picturing the postmortem examination—his mind running over the details repeatedly in the same way that his gloved fingertips had traced a line from puncture wound to puncture wound that day. It seemed to him that there was something he’d seen but not quite noticed, some detail he had overlooked. The consequence was that the small frame of a young boy now lay still and muted beneath the ground without, at the very least, the justice his death demanded.

Ben turned onto his left side and stared at the empty space in the bed next to him. It was still early, but Susan would be coming to bed soon. They didn’t play that one-of-us-sleeps-on-the-couch-after-an-argument game. She would come to bed and, when she did, he would apologize for being such a jerk. Tomorrow morning he would apologize to Thomas, as well. Susan was right. He couldn’t lock his boys away in a vault for the rest of their lives just because he was afraid for their safety. Thomas was a sophomore in high school. By next spring he’d be driving, and in a year and a half they’d be poring over undergraduate catalogs together, planning visits to college campuses, and filling out admission forms. Ben only had a short period of time left with his oldest son before Thomas headed out into the broader world for good. Now was the time to be bolstering his son’s confidence and encouraging his independence, not stomping all over it. Things could be better again, he reminded himself. We just have to stick together as a family, that’s all.

He lay there for another half hour, listening to the sounds of the house. He could hear music coming from Thomas’s room down the hall. Susan was on the phone downstairs, giving admission orders to a nurse for one of her patients who required hospitalization tonight. Joel was giggling as he played with Alex in the living room. The big dog’s thudding tread echoed through the house as he chased down whatever object Joel was throwing for him.

Twenty minutes later, Ben heard the sounds of Joel preparing for bed. Water ran in the upstairs sink as his son brushed his teeth, and a few minutes later he could hear his wife tucking Joel into bed. The sound of music coming from Thomas’s room continued at reduced volume after Susan asked him to turn it down just a bit. No protest there. Thomas responded differently to her than he did to Ben. The two seemed to have a special connection, and for a moment Ben felt a surge of jealousy and resentment. It seemed like it had been that way for as long as he could remember.

The bedroom door opened, and Susan’s silhouette appeared in the entrance. “You still awake?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Ben spoke up. “Still here.”

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

“Me, too.”

She brushed back his hair and planted a kiss on his forehead.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he told her.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” she replied. “You’re worried about the kids. That’s your job as a parent.”

“No, but lately I’ve been afraid to even let them out of my sight. That’s not good for them, it’s not good for me, and it’s not good for our relationship as a family. I can change that. I’m going to try to loosen up a little.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”

He watched her proceed to the doorway leading to their bathroom, watched her pass through, shutting the door behind her.

Somewhere in the midst of the next few minutes, while he waited for her to return to their bed, thinking that perhaps they would make love, the stress and exhaustion that had been chasing him over the past eight weeks finally caught up with him, and at last he slept. In his dream, he was standing with his family on the platform of a vast subway station. A flurry of passengers scurried around them, making their way toward a massive steam locomotive, which waited silently on tracks that passed into the tumescent mouth of the subway tunnels at either end of the platform. Fastened to a wall high above the platform was a large clock whose minute hand emitted an audible clunk with each sixty-second progression, and the train’s conductor watched it from his position with strained intensity.

Although they stood together, Ben and his family, the crowd seemed to pull at them with the momentum of a brisk stream. Already he could see Joel wandering off a few paces to his right. An old man in ratty clothes sat on one of the platform’s few benches, holding a small piece of glass—a specimen slide with a transparent cover slip on top—pinched between his thumb and forefinger. A small biopsy of tissue was trapped beneath the slip, and it appeared to writhe and struggle as Joel reached a cautious hand in its direction.

“Joel, don’t touch that!” Ben called out, moving quickly toward his son. “It’s dirty!”

But already Joel had grasped the slide in his small, delicate hand and was examining it with fascination as the thing beneath the slip—pink and vascular and pulsating slightly—continued to squirm.

“No! Put it down!” Ben yelled as Joel began to lift the cover with his careful fingers. Free of the slip, the specimen shot up the slide toward the boy’s hand with horrible, blurring speed. His son dropped the slide, but not before the thing disappeared beneath the sleeve of his jacket. A moment later, he began to scream.

Ben lurched forward and spun the child around to face him. Staring back at him was the tattered face of Kevin Tanner. The sutures Ben had placed in the autopsy room had sprung loose, and the gaping bite wound hung half open once again, seeping some yellow, putrid fluid from its recesses. “Joel!” he called into the boy’s face, but Joel was gone and all that remained in Ben’s arms was the corpse he had examined in the CO two months before.

He lifted the dead child into his arms, unable to leave him lying crumpled and deserted on the subway station’s floor. Ben turned back to what remained of his family, but the spot where they’d previously stood was now empty.

“Aalll abawwwed!” the conductor called into the crowd, and the pace of the foot traffic quickened. People began running toward the waiting cars, jostling with one another on the steps for purchase. An old woman was knocked to her knees by the surge of would-be passengers, and Ben watched helplessly as she was trampled underfoot in the mounting stampede.

“Aaaalll abawwwwed!” the conductor called out again, and this time the remaining crowd on the station’s platform erupted in panic. The stairs leading into the passenger cars were hopelessly clogged, and people began climbing on top of one another in an effort to squeeze through the cars’ open windows. A middle-aged man with a developing paunch grabbed a lady of perhaps seventy by the hair and yanked her from the steps in order to make room for himself. She went flying backward and landed gracelessly on the platform, the back of her head striking the tile with a sickening crack.

Ben continued to scan what was left of the crowd for his wife and son. Did they make it onto the train? He began walking along its length, looking into the cars as he went. The body of the boy grew heavy in his arms. A piercing whistle filled the station and steam spewed upward from the locomotive’s smokestack. The coupling rods began to move, driving the massive steel wheels that propelled the train forward.

Finally, at the second-to-last car, Ben spied a familiar face hanging out through one of the open windows.

“Sam!” he yelled, craning his neck backward. “Sam, it’s Ben!”

Chief Garston looked down at him casually. “Oh. Hi, Ben.”

“Sam, I can’t find Thomas or Susan. Have you seen them?”

“No, I haven’t seen them,” he responded. Then, with more urgency: “Hey, you’d better get on the train.”

“I can’t find my family,” Ben repeated. The train was starting to pick up speed, and he had to walk quickly along the edge of the platform—stepping over several bodies as he went—in order to keep pace with the car Sam was in.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about them,” Sam chuckled reassuringly. “I’m sure they’ll be fine. But—say!—you’d better worry about yourself. You don’t want to be left standing here when this train leaves the station. That wouldn’t be good at all.”

With growing unease, Ben realized that Sam was right. He didn’t want to be left behind—but now the train was moving too fast for him to climb aboard. If he tried, he would be swept neatly beneath the wheels and crushed in an instant.

Ben’s feet slowed, and he came to a shuffling halt. The last car was past him, heading into the tunnel. He stood alone on the platform, except for the dead boy in his arms and the few scattered bodies lying motionless around him. As the train began to disappear, he saw Sam Garston’s receding face looking back at him, hanging half out of the open window. His friend looked a little sad.

“So long, Ben,” Sam called out to him, his voice small against the background of the rumbling machine. “Take care of that boy of yours.”

The last passenger car vanished into the darkness. For a few seconds Ben could still hear the sound of the wheels moving along the tracks. Then all was still. He stood holding the dead boy and wondering what was next for him, until a tentative voice floated up to his ears. It was little more than a croak, and it came from the lifeless thing that he held in his arms.

“Father?” it said. But Ben was too afraid to look down.