He transferred the stare to me. “I am not accustomed,” he told me, “to having my post-mortems interrupted without an excellent reason. Do you, or does your colleague, have an excellent reason?”
So much for Richie getting on Cooper’s good side. And that was the least of our problems. Whatever flak Quigley had been giving Richie in the squad room was nothing to what he could expect from now on, if he didn’t get his arse back into the morgue and see this thing through. We were talking lifetime nickname here. Cooper probably wouldn’t spread the word—he likes being above gossip—but the glint in the assistant’s eye said he couldn’t wait.
I kept my mouth shut while Cooper worked his way through the external examination. No more nasty surprises along the way, thank Christ. Emma was a little above average height for six, average weight, healthy in every way that Cooper could check. There were no healed fractures, no burn marks or scars, none of the hideous spoor of abuse, physical or sexual. Her teeth were clean and healthy, no fillings; her nails were clean and clipped; her hair had been trimmed not long ago. She had spent the little life she had being well taken care of.
No conjunctival hemorrhages in her eyes, no bruising to her lips where something had been pressed over her mouth, nothing that could tell us anything about what he had done to her. Then Cooper, shining his pencil torch into Emma’s mouth like he was her GP, said, “Hm.” He reached for his tweezers again, tilted her head farther back and maneuvered them deep into her throat.
“If I remember correctly,” he said, “the victim’s bed held a number of ornamental pillows, embroidered with anthropomorphic animals in multicolored wool.”
Kittens and puppies, staring in the torchlight. “That’s correct,” I said.
Cooper pulled the tweezers out of her mouth with a flourish. “In that case,” he said, “I believe we have evidence of cause of death.”
A wisp of wool. It was sodden and darkened, but when it dried out it would be rose pink. I thought of the kitten’s pricked ears, the puppy’s hanging tongue.
“As you have seen,” Cooper said, “smothering often leaves so few signs that it is impossible to diagnose definitively. In this case, however, if this wool matches that used in the pillows, I will have no difficulty in stating that the victim was smothered with one of the pillows from her bed—the Bureau may well be able to identify the specific weapon. She died either from anoxia or from cardiac arrest pursuant to anoxia. The manner of death was homicide.”
He dropped the tag of wool into an evidence bag. As he sealed it, he gave it a nod and a brief, satisfied smile.
The internal exam gave us more of the same: a healthy little girl, nothing to say she had ever been ill or hurt in her life. Emma’s stomach contained a partially digested meal of minced beef, mashed potato, vegetables and fruit: cottage pie, with fruit salad for dessert, eaten about eight hours before she died. The Spains seemed like the family-dinner type, and I wondered why Pat and Emma hadn’t eaten the same meal that night, but that was a small enough thing that it could easily go unexplained forever. A queasy stomach that couldn’t take cottage pie, a kid being given the meal she had refused at lunchtime: murder means that little things get swept away, lost for good on the ebb of that red tsunami.
When the assistant started stitching her up, I said, “Dr. Cooper, could you give me two minutes to go get Detective Curran? He’ll want to see the rest of this.”
Cooper stripped off his bloody gloves. “I am unsure what gives you that impression. Detective Curran had every opportunity to see the rest of this, as you call it. He apparently feels himself to be above such mundanities.”
“Detective Curran came here directly from an all-night stakeout. Nature called, as it does, and he didn’t want to interrupt your work again by coming back in. I don’t think he should be penalized for having spent twelve straight hours on duty.”
Cooper threw me a disgusted glance that said I could at least have come up with something more creative. “Detective Curran’s theoretical innards are hardly my problem.”
He turned away to drop his gloves into the biohazard bin; the clang of the lid said this conversation was over. I said evenly, “Detective Curran will want to be here for Jack Spain’s post-mortem. And I think it’s important that he should be. I’m willing to go out of my way to make sure that this investigation gets everything it needs, and I’d like to think that everyone involved will do the same.”
Cooper turned around, taking his time, and gave me a shark-eyed stare. “Simply out of interest,” he said, “let me ask: are you attempting to tell me how to run my post-mortems?”
I didn’t blink. “No,” I said gently. “I’m telling you how I run my investigations.”
His mouth was pursed up tighter than a cat’s arse, but in the end he shrugged. “I plan to spend the next fifteen minutes dictating my notes on Emma Spain. I will then move on to Jack Spain. Anyone who is in the room when I begin the process may remain. Anyone who is not present at that point will refrain from disturbing yet another post-mortem by entering.”
We both understood that I was going to pay for this, sooner or later. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
“Believe me, Detective, you have no reason to thank me. I have no plans to deviate one iota from my usual routine, either for your sake or for Detective Curran’s. That being the case, I feel I should inform you that my usual routine does not include small talk between post-mortems.” And he turned his shoulder to me and started talking into the hanging mike again.
On my way out, behind Cooper’s back, I caught the assistant’s eye and pointed a finger at him. He tried to do perplexed innocence, which didn’t suit him, but I held the eye contact till he blinked. If this story got around, he knew where I was going to come looking.
The frost was still on the grass, but the light had brightened to a pearly pale gray: morning. The hospital was starting to wake up for the day. Two old women in their best coats were supporting each other up the steps, talking loudly about stuff I would have been happier not hearing, and a young guy in a dressing gown was leaning beside the door and having a smoke.
Richie was sitting on a low wall near the entrance, staring at the toes of his shoes, with his hands dug deep in the pockets of his jacket. It was actually a pretty decent jacket, gray, with a good cut. He managed to make it look like denim.
He didn’t look up when my shadow fell across him. He said, “Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. Not to me.”
“Is he done?”