Neve prodded the boy’s tightly rounded belly.
“Three days.”
Oscar nodded. “Snatched pretty soon after we interviewed him.”
“Who by?”
Oscar turned off his flashlight. “By whoever paid him for information about the sewage-plant augers.”
When they climbed back up, Haig was waiting. Beside him stood Kace, her notepad ready and a small, strange smile on her face.
“Isn’t fishing a tonic?” Haig asked Oscar. “You know him?”
“You know we do. We interviewed him about a body found at his workplace.”
Haig nodded. “I read that in your report. About the Jane Doe.”
“She’s not a Jane Doe anymore.”
The inspector raised his eyebrows just a little, and lit another cigarillo, cupping the flame against the stiffening wind.
“Have your people got a time of death?” Oscar asked.
Haig shook out the match and tossed it over toward the river. “I invited you here to answer questions, not ask them.” Oscar felt the skin of his stomach grow tight and cold. “So you were the last to see Purden alive?”
“No,” Oscar replied. “That would have been his murderer.”
Haig nodded slowly, then looked at Kace. She reached into a pocket and handed Oscar a small sealed evidence bag. Inside was Oscar’s business card. A smooth crescent of blood had turned a coppery brown in the corner, leaching and spreading through the damp cardboard.
Kace said, “In your report you said that you returned to Purden’s place of residence and he was gone.” She watched Oscar, dark eyes sparkling. “So you still had questions to ask him?”
Oscar could feel heat radiate off Neve beside him. She began, “What are you suggesting?”
“Detective Kace is not suggesting anything,” Haig interrupted, his voice light. “Merely wondering. Although you are desperate for a conviction.”
Oscar shook his head. “I don’t think you know me very well, Inspector.”
“Oh, I think I do.” Haig drew smoke deep into his lungs. It puffed out as he spoke. “I know when you start something you want to keep going till it’s finished. With little regard for the people involved. No regard, some would say.”
“This isn’t my style.” Oscar gestured down at Purden’s body. “We both know whose style this is.”
Haig said nothing.
“And I found your little present,” Oscar said. “On my garage floor.”
Haig leaned back as an errant flashlight beam sliced over his face. His smile was dazzling white; his eyes were glacier cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He gestured.
Oscar handed the card back, and Kace slipped it into her pocket with a conjurer’s deftness. Haig turned to his people and clapped his hands cheerfully. “All right, let’s pack this up.”
Haig headed toward the stairs rising to the main road. Kace closed her notebook, smiled at Oscar, and headed off into the assembly of officers. Neve turned to Oscar.
“Not good,” she observed.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The storm broke. Rain smashed down on the car roof, and the windshield wipers slapped hard, failing to keep up. Oscar switched on the headlights and drove slowly, the downpour grinding the peak-hour traffic down to a crawl. He had to divert to a side street because tired uniformed police had blocked a road while firefighters sprayed foam into a burning car. In the street parallel, a construction site was a blaze of spotlights behind a gauze fence—pile drivers and diggers rammed earth and air with steel and noise. A banner read THATCH CONSTRUCTION.
Ten minutes later, they were outside the former convent where Neve lived. The rain continued its rowdy dance on the roof and hood. She didn’t move to get out.
“You’ve ID’d the girl’s body?”
“I think so.”
“Where is it?”
“Kannis’s.”
Neve didn’t hide her disgust. “That sleaze.” After a long moment, she asked, “How?”
Oscar told her about Gillin’s external autopsy, the violent hysterectomy, the hairless bands around the dead girl’s forearms, the trip to Elverly, and the visit to the Roths.
“Paul Roth,” Neve said, frowning. “You think he killed his own stepdaughter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does Haig think you killed Lucas Purden?”
“I don’t know.”
She watched him, troubled. “If Haig had anything to do with Penny Roth’s death, if he’s tied up with Paul Roth, this case is dead already. Worse than dead. Dangerous.”
“They don’t know where the body is. I just need the coroner to authorize a DNA test of Carole Roth, and once Penny is formally ID’d I’ll find a way to search Roth’s house. There’ll be something there, always is.”
He felt rotten telling her another half-truth. If Roth was involved, he was smart enough to have already cleaned his house from basement to attic and torched any paper trail.
The rain started to ease.
Neve shifted in her seat, and said quietly, “Have you signed my transfer?”
“Yeah. It’s at home,” he said. It was in his pocket, unsigned.
“Tomorrow, then?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Go in, get an early night. You’re probably exhausted after yesterday.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going home.”
Yet another lie.
He watched her run across the street through the drizzle. He knew he should pull the transfer request out right now, sign it, and give it to her. Get her well away from this investigation, from Haig. He just couldn’t picture the Barelies without her. She was good. She was nice. And while she was in the office, pounding away at the performance summary, he could stay out on the case with some tiny hope that he’d still have a job next week.
A few days. He’d talk her around.
Chapter 14
The pastries looked mummified. Oscar picked the one that felt least like wood, then squeezed chicory essence from a tube into the bottom of a foam cup and depressed the lever. A wheezy trickle of steaming water dribbled into the cup. He dropped a coin into an honesty box beside the dispenser; a man behind the counter gave him a fraternal nod. Across the cafeteria, two officers on night shift chewed automatically while they read newspapers. On the far wall was a rising arc of plaster patches, reminiscent of china wall ducks, where an officer had decided his dead brother could just stop following him around and emptied his service pistol. Two and a half years, and still the patches hadn’t been painted.
Oscar sat and ate. The tough pastry forced him to chew slowly, allowing him time to think.
Perhaps Haig had not personally killed Lucas Purden, but Oscar could imagine the inspector standing in the corner of a room, asking polite questions while another swung a hammer into the boy’s knuckles. Oscar found himself watching the cafeteria doorway for arrivals. He was in trouble.
The Industrial Relations floor was silent. Little puddles of light picked out the sharp edges of empty desks and the curves of chair backs. Neve had again left their desk covered with neat stacks of folders. He balanced the computer keyboard on top and filled out a Form Five, requesting a DNA sample from Carole Roth. He thought for a moment, then added Paul Roth’s name to the form and clicked Print. While the old machine in the center of the empty office warmed up, he logged on to Prophet and searched for “Roth, Paul.”
The system coughed, rallied, and spat out the unsatisfying answer that Oscar had expected. Roth’s name was mentioned on dozens of files as defense counsel, but he had no criminal record. The only hint of besmirchment was a parking violation in 2006, left unpaid while he and Carole honeymooned in the Loire Valley. An appeal was made upon return, and all fines were paid.
Oscar exited Prophet and typed “Chaume, Anne” into the search engine and waited.
Anne Isabelle Chaume was the daughter and only child of hotelier Sidney Chaume, a man who made headline
s in the early nineties when he married the much older Daphne Carter, widow and heiress to the Carter mining fortune. More headlines were made when Daphne died just two years later, succumbing to bone cancer that the press speculated Sidney Chaume must have known about. Sidney weathered the storm, comforted perhaps by his nine-figure net worth. When Sidney died five years ago, Anne inherited the entire Chaume Carter fortune, including Chislehurst, a five-acre property dominated by an imposing nineteenth-century manor regarded by many as the finest residence in the state, perched at the top of the Heights. During probate, Anne engaged the services of Paul Roth.
The search also brought up photographs of the beautiful Ms. Chaume at various gala events and fund-raisers; one photograph showed her looking almost luminescent in a bridal grown, smiling widely next to her groom, a handsome young man named Liam Moreley. Moreley had been due to inherit the Moreley yacht-building company from his father, but did not live to do so. Six years into his marriage to Anne Chaume, he contracted a parasitic infection while holidaying in Egypt and was unlucky enough to sustain organ damage that saw him fatally degenerate over the next few months. Oscar flicked through photos taken just weeks before Gray Wednesday of the funeral service at St. John’s Cathedral—Anne Chaume’s eyes were sparkling spots of aquamarine in a sea of black.
Oscar looked up and realized that the Industrial Relations floor was silent—the printer had long finished its work. He stood, and then stopped suddenly. The dead boy was in the corner, standing beside the stationery cabinet. Oscar stared, unnerved. This was the first time the boy had shown himself in Oscar’s workplace. When the boy saw that Oscar was still watching, he nodded and raised a hand to his chest. Oscar looked away and hurried to the printer. He retrieved and signed the Form Five and went to his in-tray to look for an envelope. In the tray he found a note from Foley: “A chick named T called. Said u’d know who. Call her. Foley. PS Get a fucking secretary. PPS Need 2 pick ur brains when u have time. PPPS How’s Neve?”
Oscar addressed the envelope to Moechtar, pigeonholed it, grabbed his hat and jacket and—staying well clear of the dead boy—went to the elevators.
While Tanta finished with a client, Oscar held off the chill by shuttling like a loom up and down the wet street. From the shadows, men and boys watched him pass, unsure what to make of him—too shabbily dressed to pickpocket, too sure-footed for a Delete addict. In confusion, they let him pass. From an alley came a mélange of smells: coal smoke, raw fish, an unusual tang of herbal incense. He paced.
Finally, Tanta’s door opened and a man shouldered past Oscar and up the street. Oscar climbed the narrow stairs. Tanta was behind a gauzy curtain, washing herself in a bowl from which rose fragrant steam. She was cranky.
“That friend of yours, Foley,” she said. “He’s a dirty motherfucker. Doesn’t know how to speak to a lady.”
“That’s true.”
“Does he have money?”
Oscar changed the subject. “Purden’s dead,” he said. “He’s been found. You can stop asking around.”
“I heard. The river.” He watched her silhouette as she toweled herself front and back. “This isn’t about Purden. It’s about your symbol.”
She emerged, tightening a silk gown about herself. She reached into a purse hardly larger than a wallet and produced a tiny notepad. She wrote an address. “Ask for Dalmar.”
Steel girders cantilevered into the night sky like the massive feelers of some alien craft. In the deep shadows under the stadium, dozens of dark figures shifted in the gloom—thieves, dealers, whores of all ages and flavors. Nestled not far from a bus interchange and one entrance to the tunnel city of Hades, the stadium was a dangerous place to solicit: a thorny blueberry patch within a minefield.
Oscar scanned the murky walls of the coliseum, counting the gate numbers as he passed. He found the gate number that Tanta had written on her note. He stepped cautiously into soupy darkness.
He could just make out figures ahead—men or women, boys or girls, it was impossible to say. The air was thick with the tang of Delete smoke and the milky cloy of semen.
“Hi there,” said a voice. It sounded like a child’s.
“Dalmar,” he said.
The shapes moved. Oscar found his hand reaching inside his jacket. Then a stranger’s hand took his. He tried not to jump.
“I’m Dalmar.” A girl’s voice.
Her hand squeezed once, then opened on his palm like a tiny bowl. Understanding, Oscar reached into a pocket and pulled out the last twenty he’d been saving. It melted away faster than a snowflake.
“Oscar,” he said.
“The astronomer?”
Something clicked and rubbed. Oscar’s eyes were adjusting to the minelike gloom. The girl was small, and he could see her smiling up at him as she detached a prosthetic calf and scratched her stump.
“Astronomer?” Oscar said.
“A joke, hon.” The little prostitute strapped her leg back on. “You’re looking for the star, right?”
“Yes.”
She asked, “Do you have a car?”
The roads shone like black ribbon. As Oscar drove, Dalmar ate crackers from the car’s glove box, speaking around mouthfuls. She hadn’t always worked off the streets, she explained. But some guys like girls with quirks, so why not ride that wave? She had enjoyed long-term employ at a brothel in Spring Hill, a half mile out from the city. Not plush, but not bad—it had once been an art gallery. Dalmar had suffered a few knocks about the head as a child (hard to run away with only one leg, ha-ha) and so had wondered if the whirring sound she heard while men grinded away on her front or back or face was real or just inside her skull. So one evening, on a break between clients, she decided to trace the whirring sound, and followed it, louder and louder, down the alley adjoining the former art gallery to a room.
“It was like being caught in a fucking karaoke film clip,” Dalmar explained. “All billowy curtains and shit, whoosh-whoosh. Pushed through. Smelled of incense and that mystic shit. There’s a card table with silky shit on top, a mirror made of some shiny metal shit, maybe brass, and then more of those fucking curtains. ‘Hello?’ I say, and the whirring stops. The curtain opens, and there’s this nice-looking bitch with her arms covered in—” She hunted for the word.
“Shit?” Oscar offered.
“Clay. Potter’s clay. And an oven.”
“A stove?”
“No, a clay oven.”
“A kiln.”
“Yeah. An oven for clay,” the girl said, as if he was a cretin, and pointed him down a side street. “She made little clay things: animals, moons, stars, shit. And she had a nice little kitchen, little bed, radio. Nice.”
The pottery-making fortune-teller’s name, the young prostitute explained, was Florica. No more a real name than Dalmar, ha-ha. Still, she offered to read Dalmar’s palm.
“ ‘You will meet a number of men,’ she says. ‘No fucking shit,’ I say.”
She and Florica became friends, of sorts, with Dalmar going behind the brothel to visit her on cigarette breaks. One night a few weeks ago, Dalmar visited Florica and found her agitated—“all nerves and shit”—and Dalmar followed her back through her curtains. “An’ I see all this mystical stuff pinned on the walls. Sketches of stars and crosses and weird writing like fucking Korean shit. All held up with thumbtacks.
“ ‘Whatcha working on?’ I ask her. ‘A sculpture,’ she says. ‘Like Michelangelo?’ I say. ‘Mike-a-who?’ she says, and then she says, ‘You better go; my client’s coming.’ I ask if he’s got money, and maybe he could come next door and ask for Dalmar, all the usual shit. But she’s shooin’ me out, and shuts the door behind me. She don’t let me in after that. Couple nights later, I get to work, and there’s no work.”
“No customers?”
“No work. The brothel, the old gallery, Florica’s place—all just a pile of ash.”
“When was this?”
Dalmar thought. “Four, five weeks ago. Turn here.”
> Oscar steered the car down a back way as narrow as a canal. The lane was just wide enough for two cars to pass if their side mirrors kissed, and the choked baritone of his wounded exhaust rattled off the dumb faces of brick buildings. Clots of rubbish accreted against fences. His headlights reflected from tiny eyes that scurried away, taking long, pink-gray tails with them. A house with stairs disconnecting and yawning into darkness. A small tiled building, all arches and swoops of stained stucco with a refrigerator hanging out a second-floor window—thieves had found it too awkward to fit, and now its open door gaped over the rampant weeds below. A building with a cornerstone carved TURIN AUCTIONS. Beside it, a chain-link fence around a field of ash.
“Yuh-huh,” Dalmar said.
Oscar parked and they both got out. The air was cold, and his skin goosepimpled. He flicked on his flashlight and shined the beam through the temporary fence. Weeks of rain had pummeled the ash of the burned building into glossy mounds of black mud; sharp, charcoaled stubs of posts thrust up from them at odd angles, like witches’ teeth from diseased gums.
Dalmar sighed. “They say it was that fucking bitch’s clay oven.”
Oscar asked, “Did you see this client she spoke about?”
The girl shook her head. “I had to get back to work anyhows. Speaking of which”—she nudged her body against him, and the prosthesis groaned—“do you have any more money?”
“I don’t. Sorry.”
She nodded regretfully. “I’ll take your car, then.”
She swung a bottle into his head. It exploded on his skull and inside it like fireworks. Time and gravity slipped away from him and he realized that he was on the ground, with a hand rummaging through his pockets. He heard her say “Fuck!” and then a frantic, silvery jangle.
He forced himself to his knees, swaying.
In double vision, he saw that she was trying to unlock the door of the sedan, but the fickle lock had foiled her.
“Fuuuck!” she screamed again in frustration.
He pulled himself up using the fence wire and reached inside his jacket.
“Stop,” he managed to whisper.
“Fuck you!” the girl spat, and threw the keys at his face. He managed to jerk his head aside, but a jagged nickel edge caught his ear and the keys clattered onto the dirty footpath. The girl ran away down the street, her uneven footsteps echoing long after she was lost in shadow.
The Broken Ones Page 17