“Keller Duseky is driving you to the Cogan house.”
“Do you want to talk to him?”
“No, no, no. No—that’s fine. It’s spectacular. Go over there. Solve crimes. Make friends.”
I regard the phone for a moment, then close the hinged top and hand it back to Keller. “Frank says hi.”
Keller smiles. He has nice even teeth. “I’ll bet he does.”
We turn onto Route 297, northwest toward Solvay, and the tightly constructed, urban neighborhoods give way to painted fences, larger, wooden two- and three-story houses. I watch a fog of drizzling branches and backyards melting.
“So, yeah—um, you been an evidence specialist for long?” Keller asks.
“Fingerprint examiner. Eleven years now.”
“Eleven? Jeez—you started young.”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“Ah—” There’s a small catch in his voice. I startled him. Or embarrassed him. He rubs his lower jaw with his hand. “Okay, sure, that makes sense. Though, I mean, you seem like you did.”
“Did what?”
“I mean—” He looks at me. “Just, like, you went to college.”
I squint at him. “Do I?”
He swallows, keeps his eyes glued to the road. “Can we pretend I didn’t just say any of that just now? I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
Another long pause ensues. The car windows fill with the white blur of Onondaga County—decommissioned dairies, onion fields under sparse snow. A landscape of unemployment and acid rain. I feel the blue mood vapor that comes over me whenever I leave the city. “Sure is a lot of fuss about one case,” I murmur before I remember I’m not alone.
Keller looks at me, startled and uncertain, as if about to defend the fact that we’re driving out to the house. “Why?” he asks. “Don’t you think it’s—what?”
“No, it’s just—I don’t know. Everyone’s so worked up. And now there’s a reporter,” I say dolefully.
“Oh.” He adjusts his grip on the steering wheel slightly till it’s a perfect ten-to-two. “Oh, I don’t think that’s anything to worry about too much.”
The shadow of a highway overpass skims by. I speak slowly, trying to gather thoughts, “It’s just, part of me”—I wait a beat, cogitating—“thinks the Cogans have a lot of money and a lot of influence, and it’s all sad, and we’re not going to find anything.”
“Yup,” he says. “I hear you.”
“Yeah, but then another part of me thinks—what if I’m wrong? What if there really is some horrible ‘story’?” I hold my arms tightly crossed.
“But isn’t that the best part of the job? The not-knowing—the hunt?”
I sink lower into the seat. “Not if I have to be interviewed about it.”
We settle back to watching the road. Keller’s driving seems to have leveled out. His hands rest easily on the wheel. “Nothing to it—smile a bunch and don’t say much. What the hell. Reporters.” He says lightly, “I used to be married to one.”
“To a—you mean, a reporter?”
He nods, eyes ahead. “She was in the newsroom at the Herald-Journal. That was a good while ago—last I heard she was at the St. Pete Times.”
“Was that, like, exciting?”
He shrugs and looks at me. “Business news? Besides, it really was years ago.”
“You don’t look old enough for anything to be years ago.”
“I’m thirty-one,” he says dryly, then adjusts his mirror again.
“I was married too.” I’m frowning at the vents streaming hot air. Outside, the winter trees are pencil drawings all around us. “I guess I still am. Technically.”
He fiddles with the heat dial. “Yeah. Actually. I was wondering if—I was wondering about that.”
I sit back and comb my fingers through the bottom of my hair. I feel a prickling along the tops of my thighs. The Chevrolet seems overheated and dry. “You were wondering—what?”
He takes a breath. “You and Charlie—are you—you know, pretty well broken up now? As in, seeing other people?”
My smile feels numb. “Yeah. That’s pretty safe to say.”
He makes a quiet sound, a sort of affirmation. He looks at me, smiles, squints back into the glare, then shrugs. “I don’t mean to be, um, forward? We don’t really know each other—I mean, whatsoever, really—but it just seems like . . .” He looks out his side window, quickly, as if embarrassed by whatever he hasn’t managed to say.
I wait a moment. “Well, this is a lot more fun than driving around with Charlie.” Then I frown, feeling disloyal. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it,” I say.
He glances at me.
As we get close to Lucius, on the western edge of Onondaga County, we exit onto a single-lane road, then ease up behind a big, slow-moving SUV. Keller makes an exasperated grunt and nods at the big car rumbling through the snow: “Nightmare.”
I peer at the back of the car—it’s so big that it looks empty, as if no one is driving it. “Whoever that person is in there,” he says, “they’re in prison. If you ask me.” He tugs on the top button of his shirt, beneath the round knot of his tie. “I can’t help it—I feel like for most people, life really is a dream. They don’t know why they eat too much, or spend their days working crappy jobs to half afford big cars they don’t need. They hear that the earth is messed up, but it’s all a sort of dream.” Now he holds his hand still in the air between us, as if it’s turning into a mist. “They don’t know how to wake up, or even if they really want to. They know they’re not going to live forever, but that’s just another part of the dream.” He drops his hand. “Jesus, somebody shoot me before I talk again.”
“No, it’s good,” I protest. I recognize Keller’s attitude: cops feel this way—that civilians are basically children. “You remind me of my neighbor, Mr. Memdouah.”
“Your neighbor? What’s he like?”
I refold my arms, don’t respond.
He rubs at his temples with the tips of his fingers. “Anyway, that isn’t what I’ve been meaning to say—I mean—I’m trying to ask if—if sometime maybe . . .”
I slide my hand inside my satchel, hold my keys just for something to hang on to.
“If you’d consider having dinner . . . you know—with me? Just something really, like, no big deal, you know?” he says meagerly. “No big deal. I mean. Either way.”
I seem to hear something running over the top of the moving car, hooting and chittering. “Did you hear that?”
Keller taps the brakes. “What? Hear what?”
“No, never mind.” I slip my hand out of my satchel. Hold it shut firmly on my lap. “I’d love to get dinner with you,” I say.
He nods vaguely, as if he’s too weak for words. “Great, great,” he whispers. He coughs, regains more of his voice. “Maybe this Friday, maybe?”
“Well . . .”
The road we’re on rises alongside a greenish half-frozen river. The slope of the opposite side of the river is steep and rambling with birch. I hear a low, charged hum from beyond the trees, a distant engine, and then a train whistle.
Now Keller’s face is harder to see; the trees have gotten thicker and converge on the road, making a cave of pine branches; the light comes in sudden flashes over his face. I can see that he is smiling, but the corners of his smile are drawn up and his skin looks overheated, as if a smile isn’t quite the right expression for his feelings. It comes to me then, finally, what I’d been noticing in the car—his gestures and rigid neck and restriction: Keller wasn’t just nervous about riding with me. Through the entire ride, he’d been holding something shut inside him, hard and tight. He was struggling with some sharp fear—I’d call it terror, except that he has it so perfectly—even expertly—under control. His eyes flicker once
in my direction, and it’s in his face: I almost comment on it. But then we pull in front of the crime scene, and when I look again, the fear is gone.
CHAPTER 9
IT’S A THREE-STORY COUNTRY MANOR, PAINTED WHITE WITH BLACK trim and black shutters—a handsome, finished look, as if someone had polished it. Their grand house with its long-distance view is set in a part of New York that is, for the most part, poor and rural. Velvety green countryside, vast canopies of trees, clear, stone-colored brooks. And families with too many children, rusting cars floating in the wild fields and toxic canals. Drinking water that reeks of sulfur and chlorine. Now a row of velvety firs flanking the Cogan property and lining its flagstone walk is already bound with yellow crime scene tape. Across the street, a row of pigeons watch from the telephone wire, pale as bisque statues.
I so rarely visit crime and accident scenes that they can stupefy me a bit—like finally meeting someone after you’ve talked with them on the phone for weeks. Usually there’s a sort of excitement in the aftermath of a violent crime, a sense of urgency, for both victims and investigators. But because this death occurred weeks ago, and the nature of the death is so unclear, people here seem distracted, even bemused. Someone skids on a patch of ice and whoops. Todd Haynes, the department spokesman, is lingering in the driveway in his gray suit, but there don’t seem to be any reporters or news vans in the vicinity. One bored patrolman guards the perimeter, chatting with a few onlookers.
The lovely Cogan house glistens in the high noon, a powder of unsettled snow swirling over a frozen underlayer. I’m struck by the apparent wholeness and innocence of the place, its wide-open front door leading to an interior that looks, from here, as tranquil as a fishbowl. Which is part of the treachery of crime scenes: you may see an immaculate lawn, walkways trimmed with violets and bachelor’s buttons, windows glinting spotlessly; inside, each room held in perfect equipoise, till you come to the one place—the kitchen floor, or the tub, or the bed in the last room—suddenly gone wild with blood, old black blood, the struggle radiating from the walls, shredded sheets, a porcelain lamp shattered, a constellation of shards strewn across the floor. And sometimes, as with the Cogan case, there’s no hint of violence anywhere.
The investigators work efficiently here—their faces self-possessed as engineers’. Bruno Pollard has seen us park and he moves quickly toward the car, pulling on the collar of his parka. His face looks wind-burned, and his words come in steaming puffs. “Lena, excellent, excellent—I’m glad that Frank still lets you out of the Lab once in a while.” He waves at Keller—“Hey, man”—crooks an arm around my shoulders, and steers me toward the house. “So the thing is—the trail, whatever it might’ve been, is freezing cold. Tundra. Nonidentifiable prints on prints . . . Frank filled you in?”
Keller hangs back by his car: I glance at him over one shoulder and wave but can’t tell if he sees me in the entry. Pollard is already leading me into a foyer where we stop to slip paper booties over our shoes. Then we move to a cavernous living room where two investigators, a man and a woman in lab coats and masks, are twirling brushes over objects on an oak mantelpiece—ceramic figurines, a ship with billowing sails. They look up, the woman’s eyes narrowed above her mask.
“So this is it.” We stop in the center of the room, which is outfitted with cocoa-colored leather couches and a massive, mission-style coffee table. Bruno gestures around. “Unfortunately, the Cogans have been pretty much living here since the death—nearly six weeks now—they only cleared out yesterday. So, the evidence?” He lets his hands rise and flap back. “Who knows? We’re going to sweep the place and go. Fast.”
“Fast because you don’t really think there’s a murderer?” I ask and notice one of the investigators look back over his shoulder. “Or what?”
Pollard smiles, seems about to say something, then stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Come on.”
We enter a narrow hallway—pass several doorways, another inspector (gloves, mask, lab coat, half-moon glasses with a chain dangling from the ear pieces). Then we climb a staircase to the second floor and head to a room at the end of the hall. It has the neutral air of a guest room—navy wallpaper with slim nautical stripes near the crown molding, a motif of sailboats steaming across the top of each wall; the floor is covered with a matching navy rug.
“This was the nursery?”
“You betcha.”
I can see how all this blue paint would set off the red cradle, make it a gorgeous ruby of furniture, and the child within another gem, set upon a cushion. But I feel a terrible sympathy for the isolation of Matthew Cogan, and in turn, feel my own chord of loneliness, a distant bell. Surprising that the grief-stricken mother I’d met had kept him in such solitary confinement.
“Did they move any furniture out?” I ask. “I mean, besides the crib.” The only other furniture in the room is a small desk and a shining walnut dresser with brass handles pushed against the wall. On top of the desk there’s a screen and radio device that I realize is a baby monitor.
Bruno smiles grimly. Bruno and his staff are in charge of evidence collection—they assess crime scenes, gather transportable evidence, do preliminary checks for prints and dust nontransportable surfaces. They are, in essence, the front line—among the first to confront the crime scene. “Aside from that cradle, this is the whole deal. One good thing—the Cogan woman said they barely went in here after the baby died, so if it’s true, we might still be able to pick something up.”
Two police detectives, unidentifiable in masks, one sliding on new gloves, come into the room a moment, look at the windowsill, then go out, murmuring to each other. I hear one say in a low voice, “. . . in the Haverstraw case.” Both of them cant their heads, sneaking glances at me.
I nod at the windowsill. “Erin Cogan said she heard footsteps over her head—any signs of the window being opened?”
“Painted shut. If someone came in, it wasn’t there.”
I squat to the low pile carpeting, flat and silky. “Footprints? Fibers?”
“Aside from family and staff? Nada.” Pollard pulls a chewed-up pencil from one pocket and jots something on a pad. “Listen . . . so the other baby deaths in Lucius? We’re looking at the theory they’re related.”
“But I thought you said just a sweep and go. Like, just to remove doubts.”
Pollard rattles the pencil between his fingertips and he closes his eyes a moment. “You’ve seen the examiner’s report? The babies’ autopsies all showed the same trauma to the lungs and esophagus.”
“Yeah, yeah. But . . . so? That type of injury’s consistent with SIDS.”
“Well, now there’s another theory—it could be a kind of inhaled gas or poison—possibly a type of chemical burn—”
“A chemical burn? What kind of chemical?”
“They don’t know yet. We’re working with an outside lab epidemiologist. If there was a poison or a gas, it’s something slick. Something someone would’ve had to go to a lot of trouble acquiring—or cooking up in their junior chemistry set.”
I stare at him. “You mean you think someone deliberately exposed the babies to a gas? How’d they sneak something like that into the house?”
“Don’t know. A cylinder? Could’ve been environmental too. They ruled out radon here a little while ago, just finished mold field inspections, but we’ve got people looking into leaks.”
I rub the nape of my neck. When I roll my head backward, I can hear vertebrae cracking. “So if it’s environmental, there’s no killer.”
“Well—if the babies were deliberately targeted?”
None of this strikes me as the shortest distance between two points. I can’t help thinking of Alyce’s comment: If the Cogans weren’t rich . . .
Still, I try to will myself to concentrate. As Bruno launches into a dissertation on environmental gases, protocol calibration, and source testing, I st
udy the room. Ceiling, windowsill, the walls—all smooth as sighs. I realize it’s not paint but an expensive fabric wallpaper—not the sort of material that will take prints—though there’s a hundred types of powders and chemicals we could expose it to, to try and gas up half a fingertip. It won’t tell us a thing besides, perhaps, the fact that the parents never entered the nursery and a half dozen Mexican domestics and several Swedish au pairs worked in this house.
Bruno follows me as I walk around the room, eyeballing wallpaper. “We’re going fast, but that doesn’t mean we’re not taking the case seriously,” he says. “We’re checking everything.”
“Because the chief thinks we should or because you do?”
He smiles, crosses his arms, lowers his voice. “Between you and me? No. I don’t believe it. The chief doesn’t believe it. But the harder we push, the faster we finish.”
Bruno excuses himself to take a call, leaving me alone to size things up. I take another look around and this time I notice a small wooden chest on the floor painted nearly the same shade of blue as the walls. It’s about two feet high and three feet long and has a padded fabric top printed with tiny mermaids. The chest isn’t flagged by investigators: it seems they’ve missed this piece.
I pluck a couple latex gloves from the box on the floor and snap them on. Squatting, I flatten my hands and press on the corners of the lid with my palms, lifting it open. Inside is a tiny red blanket and a jumble of plastic baby toys. The blanket is made of some sort of bright, synthetic fleece and I note, idly, that it isn’t a good match with the crib. Then I notice something dark, half buried beneath the heap of plastic blocks and rings, I reach in carefully, wishing I’d brought my kit—really, I should be using forceps—and, using the tips of my index and middle fingers, I extricate a little furry toy monkey. It’s wearing a red fez and holds a pair of cymbals. It’s an unusual object, full of intricate details—the monkey has a loopy smile and someone has painstakingly painted white stars of light on its pupils. There’s also a windup key in its back—which must have still been partially wound because suddenly the thing lurches in my hands and stutters its cymbals together. I jump up with a tiny scream, dropping it back in the box.
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