3
Unromantic little secret: half of being a Murder D is managerial skills. Trainees picture the lone wolf heading off into the wild after shadowy hunches, but in practice, guys who don’t play well with others wind up in Undercover. Even a small investigation—and this wasn’t going to be small—involves floaters, media liaisons, the Tech Bureau and the pathologist and the world and his auntie, and you need to make sure that at any given second all of them are keeping you up to speed, no one’s getting in anyone’s way and everyone is working to your big plan, because the buck stops with you. That slow-motion silence inside the amber was over: the second we stepped out of the house, before we even stopped walking quietly, it was time to start people-wrangling.
Cooper, the pathologist, was outside the gate, tapping his fingers on his case and not looking happy. Not that he would have anyway: at his best Cooper is a negative little bastard, and he’s not at his best around me. I’ve never done anything to him, but for some reason all his own he doesn’t like me, and when an arrogant bollix like Cooper doesn’t like you, he does it right. One typo on a request form and he sends it back and makes me start over, and forget putting a rush on anything: my stuff waits its turn, urgent or not. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, flaring his nostrils like I smelled. “May I ask whether I resemble a waiter?”
“Not at all. Dr. Cooper, this is Detective Curran, my partner.”
He ignored Richie. “I am relieved to hear it. In that case, why am I waiting?”
He must have spent the delay coming up with that one. “I apologize,” I said. “There must have been some misunderstanding. Obviously I’d never waste your time. We’ll leave you to it.”
Cooper gave me a withering look that said he wasn’t falling for it. “We can only hope,” he said, “that you have managed not to contaminate the scene too extensively,” and he brushed past me, tugging his gloves more firmly into place, into the house.
No sign of my floaters yet. One of the uniforms was still hovering around the car and the sister. The other one was at the top of the road, talking to a handful of guys between two white vans: Tech Bureau, morgue. I said to Richie, “What do we do now?”
As soon as we got outside he had started jiggling again: whipping his head back and forth to check out the road, the sky, the other houses, drumming a little two-fingered tattoo on his thighs. The question stopped him. “Send the Bureau in?”
“Sure, but what are you planning on doing while they work? If we hang around asking ‘Are we there yet?’ we’ll just be wasting their time and ours.”
Richie nodded. “If it was up to me, I’d talk to the sister.”
“You don’t want to go see if Jenny Spain can tell us anything?”
“I figured it’s gonna be a while before she can talk to us. Even if . . .”
“Even if she makes it. You’re probably right, but we can’t take that for granted. We need to keep on top of it.”
I was already dialing my phone. The reception felt like we were in Outer Mongolia—we had to head down to the bottom of the road, clear of the houses, so I could get a signal—and it took a bunch of complicated back-and-forth calls before I got hold of the doctor who had admitted Jennifer Spain and got him convinced I wasn’t a reporter. He sounded young and viciously tired. “She’s still alive, anyway, but I can’t promise anything. She’s in surgery now. If she makes it through that, we’ll have a better idea.”
I hit speakerphone so Richie could get this. “Can you give me a description of her injuries?”
“I only examined her briefly. I can’t be sure—”
The sea wind whipped his voice away; Richie and I had to bend close over the phone. I said, “I’m just looking for a preliminary overview. Our own doctor will be examining her later, one way or the other. For now, all I need is a general idea of whether she was shot, strangled, drowned, you tell me.”
Sigh. “You understand this is provisional. I could be wrong.”
“Understood.”
“OK. Basically, she was lucky to make it this far. She has four abdominal injuries that look like knife wounds to me, but that’s for your doctor to decide. Two of them are deep, but they must have missed all the major organs and arteries, or she’d have bled out before she got here. There’s another injury to her right cheek, looks like a knife slash, straight through into the mouth—if she makes it, she’ll need considerable amounts of plastic surgery. There’s also some kind of blunt trauma to the back of the skull. X-ray showed a hairline fracture and a subdural hematoma, but judging by her reflexes there’s a decent chance she’s escaped without brain damage. Again, she was very lucky.”
Which was probably the last time anyone would ever use that word about Jennifer Spain. “Anything else?”
I could hear him swigging something, probably coffee, and swallowing a huge yawn. “Sorry. There could be minor injuries—I wasn’t looking for anything like that, my priority was getting her into surgery before we lost her, and the blood could have covered some cuts and contusions. There’s nothing else major, though.”
“Any signs of sexual assault?”
“Like I said, that wasn’t top priority. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see anything that would point that way.”
“What was she wearing?”
An instant of silence, while he wondered whether he had got it wrong and I was some specialized kind of pervert. “Yellow pajamas. Nothing else.”
“There should be an officer at the hospital. I’d like you to put her pajamas in a paper bag and hand them over to him. Make a note of anyone who touched them, if you can.” I had chalked up two more points for Jennifer Spain being a victim. Women don’t wreck their faces, and they sure as hell don’t go in their pajamas. They put on their best dresses, take time over their mascara and pick a method that they believe—and they’re almost always wrong—will leave them quiet and graceful, all the pain washed away and nothing left but cool pale peace. Somewhere in what’s left of their crumbling minds, they think that being found looking less than their best will upset them. Most suicides don’t really believe that death is all the way. Maybe none of us do.
“We gave him the pajamas. I’ll make the list as soon as I get a chance.”
“Did she recover consciousness at any stage?”
“No. Like I said, there’s a fair chance she never will. We’ll know more after the surgery.”
“If she makes it, when do you think we’d be able to talk to her?”
Sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. With head wounds, nothing’s predictable.”
“Thanks, Doctor. Can you let me know straightaway if anything changes?”
“I’ll do my best. If you’ll excuse me, I have to—”
And he was gone. I put in a quick call to Bernadette, the squad admin, to let her know that I needed someone to get started on pulling the Spains’ financials and phone records, and put a rush on it. I was hanging up when my phone buzzed: three new voice messages, from calls that hadn’t got through the shitty reception. O’Kelly, letting me know he had wangled me a couple of extra floaters; a journalist contact, begging for a scoop he wasn’t going to get this time; and Geri. Only patches of the voice mail came through: “. . . can’t, Mick . . . sick every five minutes . . . can’t leave the house, even for . . . everything OK? Give me a ring when . . .”
“Shit,” I said, before I could bite it back. Dina works in town, in a deli. I tried to calculate how many hours it would be before I got anywhere near town again, and what the odds were of her making it that long without someone switching on a radio.
Richie cocked his head, questioning. “Nothing,” I said. There was no point in ringing Dina—she hates phones—and there was no one else to ring. I took a fast breath and tamped it down at the back of my mind. “Let’s go. We’ve kept the Bureau boys waiting long enough.”
Richie nodded. I put my phone away, and we headed up to the top of the road to talk to the men in white.