Rogue Read online

  “First of all, that’s nonsense. I never said those things or behaved in that or anything even remotely close to that manner.” I honestly didn’t remember if I had or not, but I need to protect myself, and while I don’t want to play this card, I do it anyway. “Secondly, this is a level-three offender who has done not one but two stretches in prison out-of-state for sexually assaulting girls under the age of thirteen. You’re telling me you believe him over me?”

  “Normally no, of course I wouldn’t. But given your recent behavior here, I’d be remiss in my duties as the head of this office if I didn’t take Copeland’s complaint seriously. I managed to talk his attorney out of filing a formal complaint, so there’s nothing in writing and there won’t be any investigation or paper trail documenting this ever happened. You’re welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I reply reluctantly.

  “Are you telling me Copeland made this all up?”

  “Yeah, Roz, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  She lets her pen rest in the corner of her mouth and watches me awhile. “Here’s what I’d like to do,” she says. “I’d like to put you on temporary leave—with pay—and I’d like you to submit to a full physical as well as a general psych evaluation.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Do I look like I’m anything but serious?”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Well then there’s a chance this could get messy, because I can’t keep ignoring your behavior. This is a sensitive job with sensitive responsibilities—you know that—I can’t have loose cannons working in this office. I can’t have it, Cam. Got me? I don’t care how many years you have in or how good you are at your job.” Rosalind calms a bit. “Whatever the problem is, let’s figure out what it is now and get it handled and then we can all move forward. That work for you?”

  It doesn’t, but I don’t have much choice, and we both know it. “When would this paid leave begin?” I ask.

  “Immediately.”

  “I have some paperwork I’d like to finish up today and—”

  “I’ve already assigned it to Sanchez, no worries.”

  “What about my new case?”

  “Clark’s going to handle it.” Rosalind places her pen down on the blotter, delicately, as if she’s afraid she might otherwise break it. “I can’t have you in the field or even riding a desk until I’m certain you’re fit for service. I’m sorry.”

  I nod, feel my face flush. “So how does this work from here then?”

  “You can go on home. The department will be in touch regarding the general practitioner and psychiatrist they’ll want you to see. Once the results are in, we’ll take it from there.”

  “Okay then.” I stand, grab my briefcase and try not to show any emotion.

  “Cam,” Rosalind says, standing as well. “I…I’m sure things will work out. You’re a valuable asset to this office and have been for a long time. Your health and well-being is what’s paramount here, I want you to understand that.”

  “I do understand. It’s fine.”

  “Go home, get some rest.”

  Barely able to contain myself, I leave the office.

  But I can’t go home. Not yet.

  * * *

  Outside, I stand at the corner like a misplaced statue, traffic and people moving all around me like ghosts. I am alone in a city of hundreds of thousands. Cold and distant and so close I can reach out and brush it with my fingers, it’s the same Boston I know so well, but also different somehow. Nothing seems quite right. Not here. Not anywhere.

  “Cam!”

  Accompanied by a sound reminiscent of horse hoofs striking pavement, Marianne Feeney hurries toward me with an awkward clopping gait, running in high heels as she hastily wrestles herself into a waist-length jacket. Twenty-seven, she possesses a head of thick shoulder-length red hair, striking emerald eyes and a pale, freckled complexion. From a family of hard-boiled Boston Irish cops, Marianne has only worked in the office for the last three years. Predominantly trained by me, she spent most of her first two weeks shadowing me while I showed her the ropes. Since then we’ve had a good working relationship, and she still comes to me from time to time for advice. Of all my coworkers, she’s the only one I consider a friend. But when I left the office after my meeting with Rosalind, no one, including Marianne, looked at me or said anything.

  “Hold on a minute,” she says breathlessly, sidling up next to me. “Look, I want you to know that—”

  “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

  “Roz called us all into the office one by one,” she explains, snagging a renegade strand of hair with her fingers and hooking it behind her ear, “and asked us about your behavior because she’d seen it lately too. I didn’t want to say anything but—”

  “Marianne,” I say firmly. “It’s okay, relax.”

  “I just want you to know I wasn’t throwing you under the bus.”

  “I don’t think that, it’s fine.”

  She frowns. “I’m worried about you, all right?”

  “I know. Thanks, I—”

  “That’s why I told Roz what I’d seen.”

  “I understand.”

  She inelegantly adjusts the waistband on her skirt, then straightens her blouse. Regardless of what she wears, clothes always appear ill-fitting on Marianne, and she often seems uncomfortable in her own skin. “That day I found you crying at your desk you—Cam—you didn’t even know who I was. You were sitting right in front of me, but you weren’t there, not really. You were gone.”

  “I haven’t been myself lately. I’m exhausted.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing else going on? If you need to talk about it, I—”

  “No. I appreciate it, but no. I just haven’t been feeling well.”

  She watches me with her brilliant green eyes, weighing the validity of my response. I trained her well. Marianne knows bullshit when she hears it. “Remember what you told me when you were training me?” she asks, stepping aside so a group of people can pass and cross the street to the next corner. “You said this job can take a toll on us if we’re not careful. The things we see and hear and deal with on a daily basis wear on us and can get into our heads. They get inside us, and they break us apart if we let them. That’s what you said.”

  I smile at her fondly. “I remember.”

  “You’ve been working this gig a long-ass time. You need a break.”

  “They want me to get a physical and a psych eval.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “Don’t have any choice. Not if I want to keep my job.”

  “Then do it.” She steps closer and places a hand on my shoulder. She smells fresh and clean, like a heady deodorant soap. “Get some rest and get away from this place awhile. Let the doctors do their thing. When you feel better, come back.”

  “What if I don’t feel better?”

  “None of us can do this job forever.”

  “I’m not in my twenties like you,” I remind her sullenly. “Little long in the tooth to be starting over from scratch, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Come on.” She rolls her eyes and flashes a bright smile. “You’re only in your early forties. And besides, no job is worth your health and well-being. No job.”

  “That’s good advice,” I tell her, “sounds familiar.”

  “I had a good teacher,” she says with a wink.

  I reach up and gently touch her wrist. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah, I better get back up there. But if you need anything, don’t hesitate, okay? I mean it. I’m around if you need me.”

  Her hand slips from my shoulder, and as I release her wrist, her hand slides into mine. I give it a squeeze. “Thanks, kid.”

  Marianne smiles and moves away, her hand pulling free as she’s swallowed into a wave of people surging along the sidewalk like a single frantic organism. The last thing I see is that mane of red hair vanishing into the crowd. Like fire, I think. Like fire...

  Wi
th the flames of a different fire—a distant and ancient fire, an unholy fire—inching closer, I turn and hurry across the street, disappearing into a crowd of my own.

  * * *

  Sometimes I take the train, but I drove to work that day, because I knew I’d be spending quite a bit of time in the field. A hard rain was falling, pouring from the heavens and soaking everything down. Rumbles of thunder growled in the distance, as if from some giant monster meandering across the city. Everything seemed slightly askew. Darker…little colder...the city quiet beneath the steady deluge. I’d always found it strange and wondrous how rain often silenced the world, leaving only the sounds it made, its rhythms flowing like the breath of a greater, unseen consciousness.

  Somewhere in all that rain, even before I’d reached my destination, I could sense some…other… something more there with me, whispering and laughing. But the words were gibberish, and the laughter had nothing to do with joy, only madness and wrath.

  It was the laughter of demons.

  I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, and considered it nonsense that belonged in horror movies or scary novels, not the real world. Nonetheless, I was badly shaken, so I focused on the cadence of the windshield wipers, and it all eventually faded away, lost in the downpour. Yet something remained. There, with me, inside me, and I could do nothing but pretend it was all in my head—as if that somehow mattered—a dream, a fleeting thought I could escape simply by dismissing it.

  I went directly to my first appointment, a new register I needed to take care of as soon as possible. In a less than desirable neighborhood in Dorchester, I found myself standing on the run-down porch of a duplex littered with bags of trash. In the far corner, an orange cat nibbled food from a plastic bowl. The animal glanced up at me with disinterest, then returned to its breakfast. I knocked on the front door.

  I heard locks disengage and then the door slowly creaked open. A rotund man about my age stood before me in a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top T-shirt. Bald but for sprigs of hair jutting out on either side of his head, he was unshaven and looked as if I’d wakened him. His eyes…there was always something in their eyes…something wrong…broken maybe. Some might call it evil.

  “Alfred Copeland?” I asked.

  The man looked beyond me at the street and then up to the sky, like he’d only then realized it was raining. “Yeah,” he said in a gravelly voice.

  “Cameron Horne, Office of Public Safety and Security.”

  After I showed him my ID, he stepped back and allowed me entrance. “Didn’t think you’d be coming this early,” he mumbled, straightening what little hair he had with his fingers. “I would’ve been, you know, ready.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I assured him. “This won’t take too long.”

  Copeland’s first-floor apartment was all but empty. No furniture, sheets tacked up over the windows. In the kitchen, an overturned box of cereal lay on the counter next to a bowl of soured milk, and, as I placed my briefcase on another section of counter, I glimpsed an empty adjacent bedroom with a bare mattress lying on the floor. Two magazines and a roll of toilet paper were next to it. I glanced at Copeland. The look on his face told me all I needed to know. Over the years I’d come to know that look quite well. He was nervous and didn’t want me there. But then, registrants never did.

  “Just moved in,” Copeland said with a smirk, like he saw something familiar in me. Drifting over to the bedroom doorway, he casually pulled the door closed. “I start work tomorrow, so hopefully I can get some furniture and basic stuff soon.”

  I’d read his file previously. A convicted pedophile and sexual sadist, Copeland had been incarcerated twice in his native Rhode Island for sexually assaulting young girls. None of his victims were more than thirteen years of age. Upon his release from prison, he’d moved to Massachusetts. “Where are you working?” I asked.

  “Diner a couple blocks over. Washing dishes and busing tables.”

  “What brings you to the Commonwealth?”

  Copeland scratched at his crotch. “Do I have to answer that?”

  “I’m not a police officer, Mr. Copeland, I’m a public servant. My job is to get you registered with the Commonwealth and track you as a registered sex offender in our system. The more cooperative you are, the smoother this will go and the less chance there is other authorities will need to become involved, understand?”

  “Sure, I get it.” On the far side of the kitchen was a small bathroom, the door ajar. Copeland closed it as well. “I just wanted a fresh start, you know? Had my fill of Rhode Island, figured I’d give Mass a try.”

  “Are we alone here, Mr. Copeland?”

  He smiled, his thin and badly chapped lips parting to reveal yellow and crooked teeth. “We’re never alone if we walk with the Lord.”

  These types always claimed they’d found God in prison. The question was: which god? I offered a quick and officious smile, then released the locks on my briefcase and flipped it open. “I mean are we alone here in your apartment?”

  “Sure, I live alone,” he answered with that same creepy smile on his face. “But you already know that. You got the file on my whole life, right? There’s no problem with me living in this place, is there?”

  “Not so far,” I told him. “It’s an appropriate distance from any problem areas.”

  “Problem areas,” he chuckled.

  I gave him a look that made it clear I wasn’t interested in exchanging small-talk or pleasantries. But he seemed unfazed and didn’t look away. “Do you believe in the Lord, Mr. Horne?” he asked, his dark eyes disturbingly gleeful.

  “I’m not here to discuss my personal beliefs.” I located then removed the necessary forms from my briefcase. “We just need to do some quick paperwork and then I’ll go over a few things with you and be out of your way.”

  Thunder rolled as rain lashed the building, spraying the few dirty, uncovered windows, and further blurring the world outside. I watched the water sluice along the filthy panes. There was something mesmerizing about it, as if I’d never seen such a thing before. Suddenly everything felt like a dream. Slower…indistinct…distorted…and an odd whisper…

  “I know you, Horne. I know you.”

  And then I could hear Copeland talking again, and although I knew he was only a few feet away, it sounded like his voice was coming from a great distance. His speech took on an odd, clipped tempo, but I could no longer make out what he was saying.

  It sounded as if he’d begun to pray.

  * * *

  When I close my eyes, the memories recede and fade to shadow, replaced with a vision of a rickety old elevator. I’ve seen this elevator before, but can’t remember where or when. The doors open and an operator dressed in a formal and dated uniform waits for me, his hand poised above the row of buttons. He has no face, only smooth skin, cracked and dry like a desert floor where his eyes and nose and mouth should be. Yet he turns his head to me, as if he can see. I know the moment I step inside and the door slides closed behind me, the cables will snap and the elevator will plummet, falling through the shaft and screeching like a wounded animal. And then it will disappear into the bottomless darkness below, the faint echo of my screams in its wake.

  I open my eyes and find myself sitting alone on a bench in the Boston Common not far from the Duck Pond. After parting ways with Marianne, I remember walking the streets in a daze, along Boylston Street to St. James Avenue, past the Park Plaza and onto Stuart Street, and finally into Chinatown. After wandering Chinatown awhile I made my way to the Theater District and then back over to the public park. With no idea how long I’ve been sitting on the bench, I check my watch. It is late morning. I’ve killed a couple hours.

  My thoughts shift to Remy. I dread having to tell her what’s happened at work, but I can’t very well keep it from her either. Since school is out at two, she’s usually home well ahead of me, so rather than wander the city all day, I decide to walk back to my car, drive home and wait for her th
ere.

  As I stand and turn to leave, a group of young mothers walk by, pushing their babies in strollers and chatting amongst themselves. One of them, a stout woman with dark blonde hair, stares at me as if not quite certain what she’s looking at. She holds my gaze for several seconds, then separates from the others and slowly approaches me. As she stares, I force a smile, unsure of what else to do, but she doesn’t return it. Instead, she continues to gawk at me, baffled.

  While still trying to figure out what I’ve done to warrant such a reaction, an old homeless man with a wild shock of white hair and a matching beard sits down on the far end of the bench and rummages through a wrinkled brown paper bag in his hands.

  “Are you a sheep among wolves?” the woman suddenly asks. “Or are you a wolf among sheep?” She crouches and quickly adjusts the straps on the stroller holding her baby in place.

  “I don’t…understand…”

  “Pardon?” She looks at me as if for the first time.

  “Why did you ask me that?”

  She smiles pleasantly. “I’m sorry, are you speaking to me?”

  Now it’s my turn to stare.

  “I didn’t say anything to you,” she tells me. Her smile slowly fades, replaced with a troubled frown. She stands and hurries away.

  Cackling laughter returns my attention to the homeless man. Filthy and wearing a long ratty coat, his feral, bloodshot eyes bore straight through me with an intensity somewhere between fear and desperation. His breath is sour and nauseating, and as he laughs even harder, his hair falls across his face. He leaves it there, one eye peeking out at me from behind the long, filthy strands. With a revolting squishing sound, something that resembles a huge slimy maggot pierces his eyeball, wiggling lose from the inside, and writhes its way free. It falls into the waiting bag in his lap. Still laughing, the man quickly rolls the top closed, his lone eye blinking and leaking blood and pus.