“Wait, what? Your couch?”
Wait, what. The train began to slow, and Kristin heard those two syllables echoing in her head. Melissa looked up at her, clearly wondering if it was okay to tell her friend about the couch. She shrugged. It was fine. The doors opened, and she herded the children into the car, the last of the commuters—the women as well as the men—making way for her and the two girls. She half listened as Melissa told her friend about the blood on the sofa, and then the blood on the walls and how there was a blank spot where once there had been a famous painting.
“It wasn’t that famous,” she corrected her daughter.
“No?”
“Nope.”
Wait, what? The words continued to reverberate inside her. A Ramones song? No. Something else. Someone else. It didn’t matter. This morning it simply felt like the story of her life—at least her recent history.
…
“Yes, that’s her,” Richard murmured, his voice wan. “She said her name was Sonja.” The pathologist was a muscular guy perhaps five or six years his junior, with hipster eyeglasses—thick black frames that made him look like he should be an Apollo 11 engineer—unruly black hair, and a nose that clearly had been broken at least once. Maybe twice. He had introduced himself as Harry Something. Richard had already lost the fellow’s last name, but he thought it might have been Greek. He’d pulled the sheet down only as far as the bottom of the girl’s chin.
Beside him was a New York detective, a fellow who reminded Richard a little bit of his father: they had the same dark bags under their eyes and the same ring of short white hair running along the back of their heads from ear to ear. Richard’s father had retired a couple of years ago; he guessed this detective would soon. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a white oxford shirt without a necktie. He looked more like an English professor than a cop.
“You’re absolutely sure?” the detective asked him.
“I am.”
“I mean, given the decomposition—”
“It’s her. I’m sure.” He was relieved it wasn’t Alexandra, and that made him feel both a little guilty and a little unclean. The sensations were related in a way he couldn’t quite parse here among the morgue’s cold lines and antiseptic counters. Its balneal tiles and polished chrome. Its Proustian-like aroma of biology lab. Harry, the pathologist, had warned him that the odor from the cadaver would dwarf that smell, but still the stench from the body had caught him off guard. He’d nearly gagged. The girl, now a mephitic shell, reeked of decay and dirty water, and he’d taken a step back—away—so the principal smell was the combination of disinfectant and bleach that had greeted him the moment he’d walked in the door. The stench of formaldehyde. But he had recovered. Breathing only through his mouth, he leaned in again. He had, to use an expression his brother sometimes used—and always in the context of endeavors that in point of fact demanded neither heroism nor spine, such as downing a shot of particularly wretched tequila or agreeing to bowl one more game at some trendy bowling alley in the small hours of the morning in Soho—manned up. The corpse had been found in the water beside an old dock in what had once been the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was bobbing like a buoy against one of the pilings, trying to wend its way to the shore.
“Now that you have her—her body—will you be able to figure out who she really is?” he asked the detective.
“Maybe. But not likely. Not from this,” he said, waving his hand over the sheet. “Those guys we busted earlier this week? They’re the clues to who she really is. Where she’s from. They know where their friends got her.”
“So…they…did this to her.”
“Yes. They did. At least that’s what common sense would suggest.”
“God. So awful. So sad,” Richard found himself murmuring. He looked around the windowless room, at the half-open refrigerated locker from which the body had been removed so he could ID it. In an adjacent room—a room with brilliant white walls, bright surgical lighting, and a sloping autopsy table with drains for the fluids that flowed from the cadavers as their mysteries were plumbed with scissors and bone saws and jugular tubes—he heard a radio. He heard a song. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” He’d watched his father-in-law dance with Kristin to that song at their wedding. It wasn’t Sinatra himself, of course, but the live band had done a beautiful cover. He hoped someday he would dance to that song at Melissa’s wedding. He tried to imagine her at twenty-five, but couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
“So, those guys in jail,” he asked the detective, “are they talking?”
The detective shook his head. “A few are already back on the street. And they all have very good lawyers.”
“But they will? Eventually?”
“Talk? Hard to say.”
“Are they all this violent?”
“Some are. Some are just businessmen. But these dudes—the ones who most likely did this? I would say they’re not real big advocates for the sanctity of human life. Why?”