Free Ten Days in August by Kate McMurray Page A

yes,” said Roosevelt. “I look forward to that.”
    And so, fifteen minutes later, Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt gave Officer Charles Haas a commendation for beating a dog suffering from heat sickness with a cane instead of just shooting it. Roosevelt gave the man a cane made to commemorate the occasion. Andrew was disgusted. But far be it from him to argue with Roosevelt about what constituted masculine heroism.
    After that bit of pomp, Roosevelt retired to his office, so Andrew went back to his desk to try to catch up on the ever-growing pile of paper. A report from an officer in the Seventeenth Precinct sat in the pile: dead woman found on Third Street off the Bowery. The apparent cause of death was a knife wound to the chest.
    Andrew’s memory was hooked. He sifted through the coroner’s reports he needed to sign off on. Nearly every person who had died in New York City the day before had passed out from some heat-related illness, but there was also the report Andrew wanted: woman with unknown identity dead of a knife wound to the chest. Except the woman was actually a man in a dress. And the man’s torso was covered in shallow wounds.
    Andrew ran to the telephone and asked the operator to put him through to the Seventeenth Precinct. When Andrew got to the dispatcher, he said, “I need Hank Brandt.”

    A dead horse sat like a mound in the middle of East Fourth Street. Flies buzzed about its heavy body and the scent of flesh rotting permeated the air. Hank hurried past it, although it was the third such horse he’d seen since he’d left the precinct house. The smell was so putrid that if he saw one more dead animal in the middle of the street, he might vomit. As it was, he barely held on to his dignity in this heat.
    Heat and death were everywhere. That was all this miserable week had brought him. He’d spent a significant portion of the morning at the home of a woman who was convinced her elderly husband had been poisoned, but it became clear quickly enough he’d simply expired in the heat. The hospitals had been swarmed with people flagging under the relentless, inescapable dread of August, and the morgues could not keep up with the demand.
    Hank would be forever grateful to Andrew for pulling the one coroner’s report out of the mess of others he’d surely had to sort through. Hank had worried briefly the dead man in the dress had been Nicky, but the body had been found before Hank had last seen Nicky. They couldn’t have been the same man.
    That report could easily have been lost because everyone was suffering under the heat. Stephens had said with some mixture of horror and detachment that children were dropping like flies in the tenements.
    The heat would break, but the toll on the city once the dust cleared was unimaginable. Commissioner Roosevelt had compared it to a cholera outbreak in a meeting the day before.
    Hank couldn’t identify the sudden swooshing sound behind him, but then he realized someone had turned a hose on First Avenue. Children ran naked through the erupting water. Word had come through the precinct in the morning that the commissioner of public works had been instructed to “flush” the streets, but Hank wondered if this was merely a way for the city to help those suffering the worst effects of the horrific heat.
    This had been going on for four straight days. How many more could they really take?
    A few minutes later, Hank arrived at a nondescript building. The front door was wide open, as were all of the windows. Curtains from the third floor billowed out of the building as a gentle breeze moved through, but the breeze wasn’t enough to do much more than furnish the citizens of New York with the memories of cooler days.
    Hank pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped some of the sweat off the back of his neck and his mustache. Trying to look presentable was likely a futile enterprise, but he wanted to try. He