Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock Page B

to his apartment, buzzed, angry, and at loose ends. Home was a one-bedroom condo in Clinton, the neighborhood formerly known as Hell’s Kitchen. Duncan had bought it a little over a year ago, not long after breaking up with Lily. He hadn’t really planned on buying an apartment, but after a few years at the firm he’d paid off the worst of his student loans, set up a basic investment plan, bought himself a high-definition TV and all the other electronic gadgets he desired, but as his salary steadily increased he found himself accumulating more savings than he’d known what to do with. A six-figure down payment for the apartment had taken care of that.
    In a way it’d seemed like a sort of admission of defeat, buying an apartment for himself in his early thirties. He’d dated a lot when he’d first gotten to New York, but had had only a couple of serious relationships in his eight years in the city. At first Duncan had blamed his job—the seventy-hour workweeks, the travel, the daily unpredictability as to when he’d be able to leave the office. The demands certainly did make sustaining a relationship more difficult, but there were plenty of big-firm lawyers in New York, and at least some of them managed to pull off domesticity.
    It was easy to blame your upbringing for the failures of your adulthood. Duncan had been raised by a single mother: his parents had split when he was four and his mother had never remarried. His father had remarried and had two children, forming a new family that Duncan had never felt much part of, for reasons that were both obvious and difficult to acknowledge.
    His dad’s second wife was black. Duncan’s relationship with his stepmother and half siblings would undoubtedly have been plenty complicated without race coming into play; he never knew how much of the awkwardness between them was related to his white mother and Caucasian appearance, and how much was simply due to his being the offspring of a prior marriage.
    This reminded Duncan that he owed his mother a phone call. She’d left a message last week and he’d never gotten around to calling her back. Duncan talked to her only every few weeks, generally saw her twice a year at most, some years not at all. He generally went back to Michigan for either Thanksgiving or Christmas, work permitting, but it hadn’t last year.
    Duncan’s mother, Sylvia Connell, had been born in Mason, a small town in mid-Michigan. She’d been the first person in her family to go to college, coming to Detroit to study social work at Wayne State just as the city’s white flight had really started kicking in. After graduation she’d taken a job as a caseworker in the state’s Child Protective Services, investigating claims of abuse and neglect.
    It was a tough, sometimes even dangerous, thankless job, and whatever idealism had originally prompted his mother to do it had burned away a long time ago, replaced by steely anger. She was fearless, frequently putting herself into situations that Duncan suspected a cop would hesitate to step into. Sylvia had once been followed home by a biker gang after she’d taken away a member’s kids. More than once she’d been threatened seriously enough that the police had gotten involved.
    But the case that had marked her the most had undoubtedly been the death of Shawna Wynn. Shawna, at fourteen months old, had been the first child (but not the last) to die under Sylvia’s watch. Shawna’s parents had split up, and her mother had complained to protective services that her father was abusing Shawna on weekend visitations, though without any proof to support it. Complaints arising out of joint custody were common, and were generally taken with a grain of salt, as often they were motivated by battles between the parents.
    Sylvia had interviewed the father, paid an unannounced visit to his home on a weekend. She hadn’t observed everything suspicious, but had planned to do a follow-up a month later.
    Two weeks later