Suddenly exhausted, her vision blurring, Angie glanced at the clock in her kitchen. Almost 2:00 a.m. She replaced the binder, followed by the bagged sweater and teddy bear. She snapped off and trashed her gloves. If she was lucky, she might be able steal a couple hours of sleep. She shunted the dead bolt home on her door and clicked off the lights in her living room. She went into her bedroom and took her uniform out from the back of her closet. She hung it on the outside of the closet door and sat down on the edge of her bed. She stared at it—the black pants, black shirt, the badge on the sleeve, the name tag on the left breast that said, PALLORINO.
The last time she’d worn it was on a sweltering July day just over six months ago. For her old partner Hash Hashowsky’s funeral. Her chest tightened at the memory of the lone riderless horse with Hash’s boots hanging symbolically from the stirrups. A sea of uniformed officers, some in black, some in red Mountie serge, had followed the horse to the plaintive tune of Scottish bagpipes and the cry of gulls. The downtown part of the city had come to a stop. Emotion flooded her eyes, and she swiped it away angrily. He’d been her mentor. Her friend. She’d loved Hash like a father. At least he’d never let her down like her adoptive father had with his lies. And heaven alone knew who her real biological father was. The thought struck her—what would Hash advise her to do in the face of probation?
He’d tell her she’d worked her ass off to become a damn fine detective, and throwing it away now over a twelve-month period of discipline would be a fool’s game. Angie inhaled deeply and squared her shoulders. She clenched her hands over her knees. And Maddocks was right—if she did swallow her discipline and stay with the MVPD, she’d have access to law enforcement databases that would otherwise be closed to her.
She could take it one day at a time. And she didn’t have to start until 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. That gave her time enough to potentially get her evidence to a private lab before reporting for duty. At least the techs could commence working on her samples. Just the idea of pending results—new clues—would keep her going through the first day. And then when she returned home tomorrow, she could dig into Detective Voight’s case notes and other material.
Angie brushed her teeth, crawled into bed, and clicked off her bedside lamp. As she drifted into the darkness of sleep, a faint and distant sound reached her. A female voice. Singing. Soft, like a lullaby . . .
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,
byly sobie kotki dwa.
A-a-a, kotki dwa,
szarobure, szarobure obydwa.
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,
There were once two little kittens.
Ah-ah-ah, two little kittens,
They were both grayish-brown.
Ach, ?pij, kochanie,
jesli gwiazdke z nieba chcesz-dostaniesz.
Wszystkie dzieci, nawet ?le,
pogr??one s? we ?nie,
a ty jedna tylko nie.
Oh, sleep, my darling,
If you’d like a star from the sky, I’ll give you one.
All children, even the bad ones,
Are already asleep,
Only you are not.
She could see a dark room. A shut door. A small band of purplish light seeping through a barred window up high near the ceiling. She was lying on a bed. A hand held hers. Skin cool. Soft. It was a nice feeling. Another hand brushed hair back from her brow . . .
Ach, ?pij, bo wla?nie
ksi??yc ziewa i za chwil? za?nie.
A gdy rano przyjdzie ?wit
ksi?zycowi b?dzie wstyd,
ze on zasn?l, a nie ty.
Oh, sleep, because
The moon is yawning, and he will soon fall asleep.
And when the morning comes,
He will be really ashamed,
That he fell asleep and you did not.
CHAPTER 15
Kira Tranquada loved her job.
She was the youngest identification analyst with the small identification and disaster response unit—the IDRU—at the BC Coroner’s Service, and she’d come into work the instant she’d heard about the latest floating foot discovery. That was four days ago. The lab had gotten to work immediately on the evidence brought in by the RCMP to see whether a viable DNA sample could be extracted.
It wasn’t the first dismembered foot she’d worked with. Determining the origin and identity of these notorious floating feet was complicated. Ocean currents could carry the dismembered body parts as far as sixteen hundred kilometers—or around one thousand miles—and the currents in the Strait of Georgia where the majority of the feet had been found were highly unpredictable. Human feet also had a tendency to produce adipocere, a soaplike substance formed from body fat, which could conceal the scientific clues that helped determine postmortem interval. Under optimal conditions, a human body might remain intact in water for as long as three decades, meaning that the feet could have been floating around for years. But that length of time in water could also degrade DNA.
The driving force in aquatic taphonomic patterns—the rate at which a body decomposes in water—is oxygen. In highly oxygenated water, a corpse can be reduced to a skeleton within half an hour to a few days, consumed by scavengers ranging from sharks to smaller fish and squat lobsters, Alaskan prawns, Dungeness crabs, and small amphipods commonly called sea lice, plus other organisms. In those instances, feet encased in protective shoes would disarticulate from the skeleton, and if there was air in the soles, they’d float to the surface pretty fast. But for a body lying in an anoxic underwater area, for example in a deep gulley full of silt and sediment, anthropophagy—the consumption of a corpse by organisms and predators—would be virtually nonexistent. This, plus an alkaline pH and anaerobic bacteria, would be ideal for the formation of adipocere from body fat—more frequent in a child. And while adipocere, which is sometimes referred to as grave wax, could make determining postmortem interval very difficult, it did preserve other forensic evidence. Bottom line, Kira and her team had managed to get viable nuclear DNA from this little foot without using terribly lengthy or complicated procedures. She now had a profile, and it was being run through their geographic information system.
“It’s not going to go any faster if you hang over my shoulder like that, Tranquada,” Ricky Gorman muttered as he tapped at his keyboard. “Why don’t you go get me a coffee or something and chill?”
Kira punched Ricky in the shoulder in mock rebuke. He was the IDRU’s GIS whiz. Most armchair crime aficionados tended to associate GIS with the geographic profiling of the hunting habits of serial killers, but Ricky’s expertise lay in the compilation of a multifaceted database of unidentified human remains and missing persons reports from around the province. And BC had the highest number of unidentified bodies in the country. This was partly due to the wild, mountainous terrain, the raging rivers, the miles of shoreline riddled with coves and islands, hostile weather, and sheer size—uninhabited for the most part—with borders that stretched from the Washington to Alaska and the territories. It was why the IDRU had been formed under the Coroner’s Service umbrella in 2006, and they consistently had about two hundred files under open investigation, with more added as others were solved.
Ricky was among the first to have created a GIS program that specifically used Google maps for human remains investigations, and his systems had helped find an identity match for many of the floating feet, which had made headlines around the world.
“Sugar and cream?” Kira said.