Vespers Read online

  “With exposure suits, which are thick and heavily insulated. They’ll have self-contained breathing apparatus, goggles, and electrical gloves and boots tight at the wrists and ankles. They’re to get in,” he lowered his voice, “recover the bodies, and get out. Once they do that, we’ll go in again, this time a little deeper.”

  Joyce said, “The problem is that if the bats-not the large one but the ordinary little ones-decide to attack, all of your protective clothing may not be enough.”

  “The team will also be armed.”

  “Bats are notoriously uncooperative targets.”

  “Look, Doctor,” Kilar said. “I don’t know enough to argue with what you’re telling me. Do you know Al Doyle at pest control?”

  Joyce shook her head.

  “He’s a good man. He’s on his way to the site, and he’s going to be running that side of things. He knows the weaponry, and he says we’ll be all right. But if you’d like to come along and advise him-”

  “Lieutenant,” Joyce said, “these bats aren’t pests. We’ve tested saliva we found in the wounds. They don’t appear to be sick or rabid.”

  “Al’s still in charge,” Kilar said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said through her teeth. “The way the attacks start and stop all seem to be tied to geography. That’s not typical bat behavior-it’s not typicalpest behavior. This is a pattern no one’s ever seen before. Not me, not a rat catcher, not anyone. What I’m saying is you have to approach this very, very carefully.”

  Kilar’s radio came to life. The dispatcher informed him that the mayor’s limousine was on the way. The lieutenant said he would inform the medical team, then come downstairs to meet him.

  “As I said,” Kilar told Joyce, “if you want to give us the benefit of your expertise, I’d love to have it.”

  “Thanks for the invitation, but I think I’ll tackle this from another direction.” She excused herself, then left.

  Kilar glared at Gentry and stepped closer. “I lost some good people today. You oughta know when to back the fuck off.”

  “I’ll back off when I’m sure more good people aren’t going to be butchered-”

  “Thanks for the advice. If you find out anything about this perp, something I can use, you’ll let me know?”

  Gentry nodded. Kilar returned to the hospital room.

  Gentry ran after Joyce. He caught up to her, and the two walked quickly toward the elevator.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “I am. You’re not having a very good afternoon.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I thought it was obvious back there. Another case of SDS.”

  “SDS?”

  “Swinging dick syndrome. The idea that men do things better.”

  “Another? Is that what you thought I was doing in the tunnel?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Oh, come on, Nancy! I thought I explained-”

  “You did. I never said I believed you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t SDS,” Gentry said. “And neither is this. The lieutenant may not have much of an imagination, and I can’t say I blame him for not believing there’s a giant bat on the loose. But he cares about the problem and he did want your help. He asked you to come to the command center.”

  “In support of his man.”

  “No. But it’s like anyplace else. There’s a pecking order-”

  “A pecker order, you mean.”

  Gentry swung in front of her and stopped. So did she. “Look, I’m not saying that doesn’t exist in the NYPD. But that’s not what you got from the lieutenant and it’s not what you got from me. You have to believe that.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, then moved around him.

  He turned and walked with her. She reached the elevator and jabbed the button.

  “Let them stick to their ‘pecking’ order,” she went on. “Only if they do, there’s going to be a lot less order and a lot more pecking. The kind you saw in the tunnel. This isn’t a job for pseudo-experts.”

  The elevator arrived and they stepped into the empty car. Joyce leaned against a corner, her eyes downcast.

  “Like I said before, Nancy, I’m sorry this hasn’t worked out the way you wanted.”

  They were quiet for a moment. It was the silence of cooling off.

  “I can’t remember,” Gentry said. “Did I ever thank you for coming?”

  “I wanted to come.”

  “Well, thank you anyway. Whatever this thing is, we’re going to figure it out and lick it.”

  She was silent again. Gentry didn’t know what else to say, so he said nothing.

  When the elevator door opened, they walked down a crowded corridor toward the Eleventh Street exit. Gentry had to hustle to keep up with the woman.

  “Whatare you planning to do?” he asked.

  “I was thinking about heading back to my office and getting on-line,” she said. “I’m relatively up-to-date on all the current bat literature, but I could’ve missed some research somewhere. Occasionally the reports about bats show up under different headings.”

  “You mean like dead livestock or missing persons or things like that,” Gentry said.

  She nodded. “You may also be onto something with that Hudson route you mentioned before. I want to check it out.”

  “Y’know, I have access to a lot of reports that aren’t a matter of public information.”

  “That could be useful.”

  “I was thinking that maybe we should pool our resources.”

  “Don’t you have cases and crimes to work on?”

  “Always. But this one’s got me hooked. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He smiled at her. “What about you?”

  “My assistant Marc will cover the school lectures.”

  “Excellent. So how about it? We can work together.”

  She thought for a moment. “Sure. It makes sense.”

  “Then I have a suggestion. The subways are going to be screwed up for a while, and getting to the Bronx will be a pain. My apartment’s a short walk away. Why don’t we go there?”

  “Nice one.” She allowed the hint of a smile. “You inviting me up to see your guano?”

  “Absolutely. It’s a babe magnet.”

  Her smile flowered a little more.

  “You can use my computer, and if you’re hungry we can eat. Also, if they find anything in the subways, I’ll hear about it and we can go right over.”

  Joyce nodded. Now Gentry smiled.

  Fortunately, the mayor was arriving as they were leaving. The cluster of reporters gathered outside-Kathy Leung among them-failed to notice Nancy Joyce.

  Gentry stopped at a pay phone and called NYPD ICCU, the Inter-city Correspondence Unit, also known as the Stat Unit. He wanted to get them working on the bat attacks as soon as possible. This small division, which is composed mainly of civilians, primarily involves itself with collecting information from and disseminating information to police departments in other cities. The wait time for information is typically a day or two. But Gentry got preferential treatment. That was because he made it a point to remember the birthdays of key personnel with flowers or Knicks tickets. It was a habit he’d started during his days as a narc, when he couldn’t afford to wait more than a few hours for background checks on possible perps in Bridgeport or New Haven or White Plains.

  Gentry asked Max Schneider to go back a year and check bat assaults in the northeast and up into Canada. Max promised to beep him as soon as he had something.

  Ten minutes later, after paying for a sausage and onion pizza at a small shop on Hudson Street and Eleventh, Joyce and Gentry were on their way to the detective’s apartment.

  Eighteen

  Nancy seemed a little more relaxed on the way to Washington Street. That allowed Gentry to stop thinking about her long enough to try and buy the idea that there could be a big bat under the streets of Ne
w York. Not a “giant” bat. That was too much. It was the stuff of fairy tales, like a dragon or a centaur or a flying horse. A “big” bat was like a python or a great white shark or a condor. Though it was a hell of a lot more than you wanted to meet in the woods or on a beach or on a hillside, it wasn’t something that defied reason.

  But even “big” bothered him, and his mind continually returned to logical explanations. A psychotic or sociopathic killer, as Lieutenant Kilar had said. Cultists. Pro-hunting radicals. An animal that had escaped from a zoo, like the big cat that ran free for several days down in Florida a year or so back. Or even like the ostrich that got its feathers up somewhere in South Africa and killed a woman by raking her to death with its claws. Gentry still wasn’t entirely convinced that this wasn’t the work of a mountain lion.

  Yet Nancy and certainly her mentor believed in the big bat. Gentry could still hear Lowery responding, “Such as?” when Nancy said there had to be another explanation. He seemed so confident. Hell, maybe he was. Gentry didn’t like the man, but he hadn’t liked a lot of people, starting with the street scum he used to use as informants. Not liking them didn’t make them wrong.

  Thinking about dragons led Gentry to dinosaurs, and something suddenly occurred to him.

  “ Nancy,” he said, “if there is a big bat, could it possibly be a throwback of some kind? I remember when I was a kid reading about a prehistoric fish that somebody found. It was about five or six feet long, ugly-looking thing. And it was still alive.”

  “That was different,” Joyce said. “The fish was a coelacanth. It was discovered off South Africa in 1938.”

  “But it was prehistoric.”

  “Not exactly. It wasn’t a product of genetic declension. It was an animal that was thought to be extinct but had simply gone unchanged since prehistoric times.”

  “Got it. Like cockroaches.”

  “Exactly like cockroaches. Science comes across those once in a while, like the Blewitt’s owl that was thought extinct for over a century and was found a year ago in the woods of India, alive and well.”

  “That’s too bad, about the fish. I thought I had something.”

  “Evolution doesn’t work in reverse,” Joyce said. “Elephants don’t suddenly become woolly mammoths and cats don’t become saber-toothed tigers. Once an attribute is discarded, it stays discarded.”

  “But didn’t someone find woolly mammoths frozen somewhere in Siberia?” Gentry asked. “Weren’t they perfectly preserved and didn’t people even eat the meat?”

  Joyce smiled slightly. It was a warmer smile than before. “Did you also read that when you were a kid?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. I read a lot back then. Books, comics, baseball card backs, cereal boxes. My mother left home, my dad worked, and we had shitty TV reception.”

  “You also said something like that back at Grand Central. About loving to learn things when you were a kid.”

  “I did love to learn. That’s one reason I became a cop. To follow clues. Figure things out.”

  “Well, the thing about the mammoths is that they were dead. Even so, the fossil record doesn’t show anything resembling a giant bat. Like cockroaches and the coelacanth, bats have been around for more than fifty million years in more or less the form that you see them now.”

  Gentry was silent again. This left him where he started, and his mind went looking for sensible explanations.

  “Genetic drift is a possibility,” Joyce said, thinking aloud.

  “Which is?”

  “New animals sometimes evolve when a species splits into two or more new forms. That sometimes happens due to geographical isolation. Genetic recombination is also a possibility.”

  “Is that the same as recombinant DNA?” Gentry said.

  “Yes,” Joyce said. “It’s genetic engineering performed by nature. Sometimes chromosomes inherited from the parents swap segments because of physical breakage.”

  “Because of-?”

  “Could be a number of things. Radiation. Chemicals. Internal mechanisms we don’t understand. That can set up all new hereditary patterns.”

  “How long does genetic recombination usually take?”

  “It can happen quickly or it can take years. Two parents under six feet tall can produce a child seven to eight feet tall. Or the height of humans can increase steadily over centuries. There are no rules.”

  They reached Gentry’s apartment building. The front door was propped open with a wedge. One exterminator was spraying the hallway, another was in Mrs. Bundonis’s apartment. The scent was like mildew. Gentry walked in holding the large pizza. Joyce was right behind him holding her nose.

  “How’s it look?” Gentry asked the woman spraying in the corridor.

  “Like your usualcucaracha infestation,” the middle-aged woman said as she continued spraying.

  “Usual?”

  “Hit-and-hide. They’ve got legs designed for running and antennae that tell them where to run. Toward food, away from danger. They pour into a place and then they seem to disappear. But they haven’t. They’re hiding in every damn place you can think of. In drains and behind cabinets and under refrigerators or stoves or toilets. They’re also in some places you wouldn’t think of, like Mr. Coffee filter pots and inside computer printers.”

  “Did you ever hear of a swarm this size?”

  “I never see a swarm of any size. I usually get someplace after most of them are hiding.”

  “Right,” Gentry said. “But have youheard of one? Why would they swarm in the thousands?”

  “Roaches are funny. They find all kinds of reasons to move around. A change in temperature, a flood, a food shortage-”

  “Predators?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Bats?”

  The exterminator shrugged. “Why not? I found some kinda foul dung down in the basement. Could’ve been guano.”

  “Any idea how bats might have gotten in there?” Gentry asked.

  “There’s a drain in the floor down there,” the exterminator told him. “Looks like it once emptied into the river, probably as part of an old sewage system. I found it when I saw cockroaches coming out from under an old desk and moved it. The metal drain cover was rusted. This close to the water, everything rusts. Your super’ll have to get that taken care of. Maybe bats or even seagulls found a nest of roaches near the river and started feeding on them. One nest spills into another, that one into another-pretty soon you have a stampede.”

  Gentry thanked the woman. Then he and Joyce squeezed by her.

  When they reached the apartment, Gentry handed Joyce the pizza and pulled his keys from his pocket. “This place was not exactly clean when I left.”

  Gentry stepped into the short hallway and switched on the light. The first impression wasn’t as bad as he expected. Ahead, in the small living room, the blinds were up and the sunlight made things seem a little cleaner. And he’d thrown out the Thai food he’d been eating, so the cockroaches wouldn’t get it. To the right, the bedroom door was shut. The detective took the pizza back, then held it high so Joyce could enter. She walked in and he kicked the door shut with his foot. He watched her slender form as she moved ahead, framed by the bright window.

  “Very sunny,” she said.

  Joyce turned around in the living room and then faced him. He couldn’t see her expression, but he could feel her eyes. His breath came a little faster, and he felt a kind of longing that he hadn’t experienced in a very long time. He turned away-not to avoid the feeling but to freeze-frame it.

  He walked into a small kitchenette to the left and put the pizza on a tiny drop-leaf table. “Where do you live?”

  “Up in the Bronx.”

  “Is it pretty safe where you are?”

  “Very. I carry a thirty-eight when I go to work. Licensed and loaded.”

  Gentry shot her an approving look. Not because she was a lady with a gun but because she was smart.

  “You take it to a firing range, keep it
in good shape?”

  “Oh, yeah. I grew up with guns. The thirty-eight was a high school graduation present from my dad.”

  “We’ll have to go shooting sometime.”

  “That might be fun.”

  Gentry went back to the pizza. He wasn’t thinking about bats just then. A lot of longings were coming back.

  He pulled a cookie sheet from under the sink and aluminum foil from a cabinet. “How long have you been at the zoo?”

  “Going on three years.”

  “I bet there’s a lot of competition for jobs like that. Curators and heads of departments, that sort of thing.”

  “It’s pretty intense.” Joyce’s voice had dropped a little and she did not elaborate. She ambled toward the computer, then turned back. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Actually, yes,” Gentry said. “Boot the computer. Just turn on the surge protector under the desk-everything else’ll come on.”

  Joyce bent over the folding chair. The surge protector was lying on its side on the floor amid a cluster of dust bunnies. She switched it on. The computer and monitor snapped to life.

  Joyce got onto the Internet and typed in two keywords:bat andanomalies. She sat back as Gentry put the pizza in the oven, then poured Cokes for them both.

  The first list of ten articles and Web sites popped up after a few seconds. Joyce scanned the headings. The first article was about bats that had recently been lured from caves to farms in Colorado in the spring and so far ate nineteen million rootworms, saving a fortune in pesticides. There were also articles on the reproductive habits of the world’s smallest bats, on bats that lived more than twenty-five years, and on tiger moths that emitted high-frequency clicks that disoriented attacking bats and forced them to break off their attacks.

  “Anything?” Gentry asked as he brought the Cokes over.

  “I’ve seen most of these,” she said. “Nothing helpful unless you want the latest information on the bumblebee bat.”

  “Which is?”

  “The world’s tiniest mammal,” she said. “From Thailand. Smaller than a penny.”

  “Why couldn’t we have been infested with those bats?”

  “Because then you’d really be miserable,” Joyce replied. “I had one fly in my ear while I was sleeping. You think a mosquito at night is bad? Bumblebee bats buzz and bite and leave very tiny, wet droppings that run into your ear canal and harden very, very fast. Not fun.”