Autumn was greying like a cancer patient. Her leafy hairs thinned day by day, sodden entrails smudging the pavements as people trudged on, unencumbered. Day by day the condition afflicted upon New Haven worsened until the Yalies were packing to flee the country, some to write dissertations in Nicaragua or fly home to shit in gilded toilet bowls. The leafy scent faded in Erik’s windowless flat.

Most of the day had been spent ogling a dead woman’s detached finger while her husband sobbed by the periphery of the crime scene; watching the new recruit, one Janos Quested, swiftly process the samples swept up by the forensics department. Later that day the school neighboring their HQ was flooded by song and a young girl approached him to offer a slice of her birthday cake.

He accepted the cake, but wasn’t able to recall what he’d done with it.

Time fled by in this business. Erik whittled the time by diving back to the cold cases, people who’d been missing for months now with no new leads. He checked the Twitter page for tips, phoned some families, failing more than not to pick up anything concrete. It was easy to get lost in the motions, to swim with the tide until time faded into a nonentity.

Someone rapped their knuckles hard against his door. “Time to clock out.”

His own knuckles jumped like ticks against his rosewood desk. Erik jumped off of it, threw his suitcase over his shoulder and exited the room. The whole office had been evacuated of life. The only sign of it was in the frosted door swinging hauntingly in his face.

His cellphone vibrated in his coat pocket: we’ve got something you might want to see.

*

East Rock Park, the yellow-black police tape, sunset spilling over the haphazard maze of them. Officers and labbies scuttled around the area like late invitees to a barbeque. Erik had grown up watching ducks kick through the murky green waters, picking crumbs he threw at the shore. Took his two girls here, kissed them each on their cheeks, felt his hoeey lump of a heart swell when Wand tickled him to the ground. Same tree, same hills, clouds like cotton candy spun in the sky.

Everything was the same.

He got out and there he was, Officer Janos Quested, leaning against a tree bark some distance from the scene. Erik sidled up to him and the man nodded at the corpse splayed before them.

“Young one,” he said, as if a smaller body made the case more somber somehow. Quested was just as much of a kid in this game, fresh out of the academy, his face a tad too handsome for the job. It was the kind of face Erik always saw on victims, and recruits. Smart, but not smart enough to make it to college; parents or uncles or some other relatives mentioned the police force and then here they were, sorry kids riding on the delusion of a stable, well-paying career.

Erik bent under the tape. There was always war on the streets, everywhere in America, Poland too. He sucked in a breath at the sight. He let his eyelids flutter for a moment to rinse his memory and ground him to the moment. 5^th January. A little over a year. This was happening now.

“Lehnsherr, good to have you here. On time.”

“Save it, assistant head.”

Lieutenant Nur was an asshole, but more passively so than Grey. And he was head now, at least temporarily.

The labbies were going in and out, sealing swabs in plastic bags. Erik caught a whiff of cigarette smoke in the air. When Nur understood why Erik was tilting his head, he stomped away, voice rising above the noise of flashing cameras and punctuated mutterings.

Erik stepped closer to the corpse. The boy couldn’t have been more than five years old, eyes glazed over, dried blood on his lips. The sweater he’d been wearing had been pulled off of him and thrown some distance away, a scrunched mass of pink with a blood red blotch over it. A star had been carved into the boy’s heart and a maple leaf laid on top of it. There was a pillow under his head, feathers sprouting out of it.

The Maple Bird again.

Too much, not enough. The memories accosted him: skinny winter on a Sunday morning, thawing ice, vapor trickling together on the inside of a glass kettle. It shone with a friendly blue light, but it was never very smart to trust in these things, the good things, because life had a way of ripping them away. The inkling came when Erik had drawn a line on the pad with his fountain pen, pre-dipped, and came away with nothing but a scratching sound. Door slamming, the stabbing pain in his knees when he stumbled and the frost bit into his skin. He had his fucking boxers on; their blood got all over his legs and seeped under his skin for weeks, mingling with his own.

“Officer?” Quested’s voice, closer now.

Erik had to step away. Scratch scratch scratch. A million birds chirping and guzzling, parrots and parakeets, which one? A leaf. Maple. The air was stained with the iron tinge of blood, anchovy-sweat and a sweetness he couldn’t distinguish.

“Yeah. A moment, please.”

Blood thudded in his ears. The sun fell away. Some office workers had emerged from their cubicles nearby, eyes fixed curiously on the scene. Pictures were snapped and Erik felt a lot like a celebrity then, in particular the ones who yell at their fans to fuck off when they ask for autographs. By the time Erik turned back, most of the officers had gone home. The body was still there, a black mound under the shade of a tree. His face had fallen away as dusk crept over them.

“You’re not allowed. You’ll fuck up the body.”

Nur was fending him back with one arm. Erik pushed against him, but the man was stocky and more powerful than he looked.

Erik stared at him. The silence spoke all his words, the ones that curled in the darkest recesses of his mind. The ones that would get him dishonorably discharged if he were to give them auditory manifestation. So the staring continued for what might’ve been hours, but Erik knew this game. He could play it very well indeed.

And at last, the slight furrow in Nur’s brow, the breath that slipped out between his lips. The truth was that they’d done most of the sampling and the body would be sacked by the end of the day anyway. Better this than have Erik tearing through the morgue.

“Hurry up, then. Don’t mess anything up.”

Erik crouched down next to the body and closed his eyes, saw how the killer went into this. It had to be someone the kid trusted. The park was always packed during Saturdays. People would be getting on with their own lives, oblivious of the slights around them. It would’ve been easy to bring the boy along, stab him and walk away, wholly anonymous.

He had a charming face. Freckled, like Wand, but he was sickly plump in a way that suggested canned sardine on bread for dinner. Erik pried his lips open and noted the mess of his dentition. He would’ve been the sort of kid who never spoke in class, the one bullies picked on, sneered at. These types usually killed themselves.

“Missing Persons?”

“None matching.”

Nur shuffled his feet next to Erik, the incessant noise of leather squeaking strangely comforting this time.

“I can put someone else in charge of this one.”

Someone else, Erik laughed. Grey was out and John was dead and he had the fantasy of putting Maple into someone else’s hands. Erik’s fist throbbed and Nur, however incorrigible, sensed it. He curled his own hands. Erik stood up.

“Stay the fuck out of this,” he said.

You have to let go. It wasn’t your fault, Erik. Mrs. Moira’s voice was echoing vacantly in his mind, a ghost from another past.

Something was returning to him, the man prisoners crapped themselves over in interrogation, the rolled sleeves and broken skin and vicious snarl. The man inside him, the one he’d set aside.

Maple wanted him, the beast, the anger, and Erik would give it to them.