Vespers (7 page)

“Are you a bat expert?”

“I’m working on it, Detective.”

“All right,” Gentry said. “What do you make of about two feet of bat guano piled next to subway tracks under Grand Central Station? Enough of it to make a man pass out. Also a massive cockroach exodus, apparently from a pile of guano inside an apartment wall?”

“I’ll get Dr. Joyce,” Ramirez said.

Gentry smiled. He liked that about today’s young people, too-the smart ones knew when to duck.

He was on hold for less than a minute.

“This is Nancy Joyce.”

Gentry recognized the husky voice from the newscast. It sounded thicker now, probably from lack of sleep. But it still sounded nice.

The detective introduced himself and told her about the guano in Grand Central and also in Mrs. Bundonis’s apartment. When he was finished, Joyce was silent.

“Doctor?” he said, after a long moment.

“I’m here.” Her voice no longer sounded groggy. “I was just thinking.”

“While you’re doing that,” he said, “I was wondering. Have you found out anything about the deer?”

“We don’t know much about that yet,” she admitted. “There are large marks in the hide, backbone, and organs. They look like teeth, though they could have been made by an unserrated knife. The animal appears to have been killed by a large predator, but there were no bark splinters in its hide.”

“Bark splinters? From the tree?”

“Correct. Meaning it wasn’t dragged up. And there are fractures along the right-side ribs. Those could have been caused in an attack-you see it in bear assaults all the time-though the breaks appear to conform with the shape and size of the limb I found it on.”

“Wait a second, Doctor. Are you saying the deerfell onto the branch from above?”

“Fell or was dropped,” Joyce said. “Maybe from a plane or a helicopter-we just don’t know. The carcass is with Dr. Nadler. Even-toed ungulates are Caryn’s bailiwick.”

“I see.” Gentry couldn’t decide whether this was comical or sick.

“Detective, can you find out anything more about the guano in Grand Central?”

“Like what?”

“I need to know more about the dimensions and consistency. It’s not uncommon for bats to nest in subways, tunnels, and basements. But a two-foot-high mound of guano, even if it’s only a foot in diameter, would take a hundred bats about a week to produce. And that’s if they were all living on one vertical post.”

“Is that unlikely?”

“With all the subway traffic in those tunnels? Yes.”

“Al Doyle at the Health Department says we get plenty of bats in the tunnels,” Gentry said.

“He’s correct,” she said, “only they don’t stay there long. Bats don’t like loud noise, wind, bright light, or moving objects.”

“I see. Then how do you explain the guano?”

“If I had to guess, I think someone’s playing a trick on you.”

“Subway workers aren’t noted for their sense of humor,” Gentry said. “And even if that were true, it wouldn’t explain the guano I found in my building.”

“True,” Joyce admitted. She was silent again. Then she asked, “Can someone take me to where the guano was found?”

“Absolutely,” Gentry said. “I’ll arrange it. When can you-”

“An hour,” she said. “Meet me at the upstairs information booth in Grand Central. What are you wearing?”

“I’ll find you,” Gentry said. “I saw you on TV last night.”

“Fine,” she said and hung up.

Gentry placed the receiver back in the cradle. Women didn’t seem to want to stay on the phone with him today.

After calling over to Captain Moreaux at Metro North to make certain that Arvids was still on post this late in the morning, Gentry left his office. As he stopped to write his destination on the blackboard, Captain Chris Sheehy entered the station house.

“Good morning, sir,” Gentry said as the short, round captain walked past.

“Good morning,” Sheehy replied. He stopped. He seemed uncharacteristically chipper. “Detective Gentry, do you know what the sweetest thing in the world is?”

“I think so.”

“No, Detective,” Sheehy said. “It’s not. It’s payback. Three times in the last month I was supposed to have breakfast with Captain DiFate of Central Park. I got paged away each time. So we made a deal. The next one who canceled had to pick up dinner-not breakfast-at the Old Homestead. Well, guess who got nailed this morning?”

Gentry smiled. “Not you.”

“Not me.”

“I’m happy for you, Captain,” Gentry said.

“Bless the beasts and children,” Sheehy laughed as he walked toward his office. “Especially the beasts at the zoo.”

Gentry’s smile evaporated. He put down the chalk and called after the captain. “What happened at the zoo?”

Captain Sheehy stopped. “An attempted jail break,” he said. “Seems a couple hundred bats in the bat house decided they didn’t want to live there anymore.”

Gentry walked up to Forty-second Street and headed east to Grand Central. This time his mind was not on the sunshine.

According to Captain Sheehy, Captain DiFate said that the bats at the Central Park Zoo had gone wild shortly after sunrise. They were trying to escape through the two grated air ducts in the bat house. So far they hadn’t succeeded, though DiFate said that many of the bats were bloody from the effort and still wouldn’t give up. He added that the police deployment had nothing to do with the bats per se. It had to do with zoo and park authorities being concerned that nearly one hundred squealing bats might upset the other animals. They didn’t want people trying to get in to see the “wild” lions and trumpeting elephants.

Captain Sheehy added that he wasn’t worried about the bats in Central Park or Westchester or anywhere else. If they got loose in the city and the Health Department couldn’t handle them, NYPD sharpshooters would. “Skeet,” he called them with a chuckle.

Gentry wasn’t so sure about that. Any animal that could terrify a cockroach had his cautious respect. He hoped that Nancy Joyce had an explanation for what was going on.

Gentry entered the busy terminal and headed toward the grand staircase on the western side of the concourse. Just like when he walked home at night, he loved the crowds. The life. The energy. He needed to get that back. As he walked, he looked up at the newly restored constellations on the hundred-foot-high ceiling. It was green and bright, and it helped take his mind off bats. He thought back to how his father used to tell him about the constellations. Only in New York would builders have been audacious enough to block out God’s heaven and put up one of their own. He admired that.

Metro North ran most of the trains coming in and out of the city from upstate New York and New England. They had their own police force, which was chartered by the city and worked closely with the NYPD. They were based in the most elegant headquarters in New York: the former Vanderbilt apartments. The rooms, made of marble and stone, had been erected in 1912 for the convenience of the family that ran what was then the New York Central Railroad.

Gentry paid a call on Captain Ari Alberto Moreaux. When Moreaux was the operations coordinator for Midtown South, he worked closely with Gentry at SNEU. Moreaux got burned out just nine months before Gentry had his own problem up in Connecticut. The long hours and slime stains they all had to deal with were bad enough. But for Moreaux, the capper came when a major heroin dealer got stopped on lower Broadway for a routine traffic violation. The officer found a joint in the car ashtray. One of Moreaux’s undercover boys was in the car with the dealer and saw two years of work going down the toilet for a simple pot bust. Instead of letting the cop arrest the dealer, the undercover guy flashed his badge to the traffic cop, blew the scumbag dealer away, and put a “throwaway” in the hand of the corpse-a gun he kept for just that purpose. The traffic cop covered for him and said the dealer reached for the gun to discourage the arrest. Moreaux couldn’t take it anymore. Now, as the captain freely admitted, he was happy to be dealing with the menace of drunken commuters, panhandlers, and cigarette smokers who lit up while they were still inside the station.

It was good to see Moreaux. He still had his son Jonathan’s framed second-grade history report on the wall, a one-pager on the origin of the wordcop. Gentry hadn’t known until he read that when the New York state legislature gave the city its first police force in 1845, the officers had refused to wear uniforms. As a compromise, they agreed to wear copper badges to identify themselves as peace officers-hence the name.

Jonathan Moreaux was now a “copper” cadet himself.

Gentry explained to the captain that he wanted to take Dr. Joyce out to the tracks where the guano had been found. Moreaux had no objection and asked the desk sergeant to radio Officer Stiebris. The rookie was told to meet Detective Gentry and Dr. Joyce at the main information booth in half an hour.

Gentry thanked Moreaux and they agreed to have dinner the following week. Moreaux said he’d picked the spot, someplace he could get a burger instead of the stomach-burning shit Gentry ate. Then the detective went downstairs to wait beside the small kiosk.

As Gentry stood there, he watched the midmorning crowd. The people were mostly commuters hurrying from the tracks on the north side of the station to subways and exits on the south, west, and east. Very few of them bothered to look up at the constellations.

That’s what the world is all about,Gentry thought. Rushing. Rushing to work, rushing from work, rushing to entertainment and shopping and eating. It was ironic. Gentry had the siren at his disposal, but he rarely rushed anywhere. His life on the force had been about patience and waiting. Cooling off arguments when he was on the beat. Nurturing the trust of gang members when he was undercover. Taking part in stakeouts. When he was off duty all he wanted to do was relax. With a lady if possible, but alone was fine too.

Gentry saw Nancy Joyce coming toward him from the east side of the terminal. That was where the Number 5 subway train would have dropped her. She was moving briskly against the human wave, ducking and weaving gracefully. The scientist was slightly shorter than he’d expected, about five-foot-five. She was carrying a bright orange shoulder bag and was still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing on television the night before.

Gentry stepped away from the kiosk to greet her. She had a firm handshake. She made and held eye contact. She really did have beautiful eyes.

“Thanks for coming,” Gentry said.

“Thanks for calling.”

“I don’t know if you heard, but there’s been some kind of bat uprising at the Central Park Zoo,” Gentry said.

“I know. That moron Berkowitz called as I was leaving. I sent my assistant Marc to have a look.”

“How bad is it over there?”

“It must be pretty bad if Berkowitz called,” Joyce said. “He’s not really a bat guy, he’s a rodent guy. Handles everything from chipmunks to chinchillas. He waited five hours before calling-doesn’t like anyone messing with his fiefdom, especially if it’s a woman.” Joyce shook her head. “The joke is, if Berkowitz’s rich wife hadn’t given so much money to that place through all her not-for-profit charities, he’d probably be writing flash cards instead of helping to run a zoo.”

“You know, I never realized that about-”

“Berkowitz?” Joyce said. “Oh, yeah. The man’s great at self-promotion. He brings his cuddly little animals to schools and goes on TV, but he doesn’t know half as much as he should for that job.”

“No,” Gentry said. “I never realized that chinchillas are rodents.”

Joyce looked at him. Then she looked down, embarrassed. “Yeah. They are.” She suddenly seemed to have the weight of all those constellations on her back.

“Y’know, when I was a kid I used to love learning things like that,” Gentry said.

“Me too. Look, I’m sorry.”

“About?”

“I shouldn’t have gone off like that. Patronage in science is a major sore spot with me.”

“Patronage bothers me, too,” he said. “The worst thing about it is when we have to do their jobs plus ours because they’re incompetent.”

She looked back at him. There was a hint of a smile in her eyes. “Right. I’m also very tired, which isn’t helping my mood any.”

“Understood.”

Joyce seemed a little peppier now. “You want to get going?”

“We’re waiting for Officer Stiebris. He knows the way. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

Joyce nodded. She leaned heavily against the information booth.

“You want some coffee?”Gentry asked. “Maybe a bottle of water? We’ve got a long hot walk ahead.”

She shook her head. “Thanks, though.”

“So, the last day’s been pretty tough?” Gentry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Whatdo you think is going on?”

“I wish I knew. The only universal explanation I can think of is that we’re seeing some kind of bat dementia, though there’s no precedent for it and I have absolutely no idea what could be causing it. The initial lab results from the two patients and the deer carcass came in just as I was leaving. Unfortunately, they don’t tell us very much.”

“What do they tell you?”

“In terms of the two people, nothing more than we already knew. In terms of the deer, only that there’s definitely bat saliva in the blood. But it’s possible the vespers simply lit there-”

“I’m sorry. The who?”

“The vespers. Vespertilionids,” Joyce said. “That’s the breed of bat we’re dealing with.”

“Oh.”

“It’s possible they landed on the deer after it was already dead,” Joyce continued. “But vespers very rarely eat meat, and they definitely aren’t scavengers.”

“Unless they were suffering from dementia, as you said.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, though we haven’t exhausted all the tests, we didn’t find any kind of microbe in the saliva that might cause the bats to act this way. In fact, except for rabies there reallyisn’t a condition we know of that would do this. And rabies wouldn’t cause the kind of-I’ll call it cooperation, for lack of a better word, that the witnesses reported.”