The Collector

Friday Afternoon

For my paid subscribers, here is the next installment of “The Collector,” and for my free subscribers, a little taste of what Friday afternoon the day of catching a homicide looks like for our ADA Chloe Stern.

If you are new to “All These Worlds,” “The Collector” is a crime novel that I wrote a few years ago and then put aside while focusing on my science fiction writing. For five years, I was an Assistant District Attorney in The Bronx. To this story, I bring both my experience as a prosecutor and my knowledge of the art world.

I hope you have as much fun reading “The Collector” as I’m having rewriting it for you! If you like what you see, please subscribe to “All These Worlds” for full access to the first three chapters!

I will continue to publish chapters for my paid subscribers every few weeks!

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

Homicide calls left Chloe feeling hallow, drained and somehow disoriented, like the world had suddenly and irrevocably shifted axis. Most cops and ADAs she knew didn’t think too much about the victims. Their focus was on the doer. Finding him if he was unknown, or locking down the case if the killer was known. But Chloe could never get the victims out of her head. The worst was when they were killed somewhere other than home. At least when the victim was at home, there were pictures and the way they lived. She could have some impression of them other than just as the end result of whatever had landed them in the morgue. That image of someone whole, smiling with their arms wrapped around friends or laughing at the camera on the last day of school. Even a porno playing on the big screen TV that they shouldn’t have been able to afford with the subsidized Section 8 housing and lines on the coffee table. Shot in the head, jacking off and mid-snort. It didn’t matter—it was who they were, and that’s what drove her. But when she found them like this, dismembered in a clearing or shot crossing the street, falling to the ground dead in just another anonymous intersection, it seemed like they’d never had a real place in the world or been a real person. They were just another dead thing. It made her sick with a need to find out more—to see them whole, for better or for worse.

It was just noon when Chloe arrived at the office. She still had a full day of work ahead of her, and homicide duty wouldn’t end until the following morning. It wasn’t The Bronx of the 70s and 80s, where two or three homicide runs a night was commonplace. But it was possible, and she could never sleep waiting for the phone to ring. And the truth—the shameful secret that no ADA ever admitted out loud, but it was true of every single one of them: They wanted that call. Homicide duty was twenty-four hours of sickening, shameful excitement. Not that she actually wanted someone to die, it’s just that people would die, and if they had to die anyhow….

When the call didn’t come, it was a letdown. Or if the call came, but the victim was a pregnant mom or some toddler caught in a crossfire or beaten to death, flung out a window because the baby-daddy said, “If I can’t have him no one can,” she’d nearly vomit with the shame of it. Like, somehow, it was her fault just for wishing for it, that a baby was dead.

She walked up the hall to her office, scalding hot street cart coffee in hand. She couldn’t wait to put down the case, drop the white folder on her desk, put her head down on her arms, and close her eyes for a few minutes. But when she stepped through the door, a familiar figure was bending over her desk, picking up one of her pictures. As lean as he was, he took up all the space in the room, sucking out the air until there wasn’t a molecule left and she was suffocating. Kirk Hamilton was the last person she wanted to see right now.