Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  He folded back Pat’s skin—delicately, holding the flap between thumb and finger—and pointed with his scalpel, to make sure Richie and I both saw exactly what he meant. “Absent any other wounds or any medical treatment, this injury would have resulted in death within approximately twenty minutes, as the subject gradually bled out into the chest cavity. As it happened, however, this sequence of events was interrupted.”

  He let the skin drop back into place and reached to pry up the flap below the collarbone. “This is the wound that proved fatal. The blade entered between the third and fourth ribs, at the mid-clavicular line, causing a one-centimeter laceration to the right ventricle of the heart. Blood loss would have been rapid and extensive. The drop in blood pressure would have led to unconsciousness within fifteen or twenty seconds, and to death perhaps two minutes later. The cause of death was exsanguination.”

  So there was no way Pat had been the one who got rid of the weapons; not that I thought he had been, not any more. Cooper tossed his scalpel into the instrument tray and nodded to the assistant, who was threading a thick, curved needle and humming softly to himself. I said, “And the manner of death?”

  Cooper sighed. He said, “I understand that you currently believe a fifth party was present in the house at the time of the deaths.”

  “That’s what the evidence tells us.”

  “Hmm,” Cooper said. He flicked something unthinkable off his gown, onto the floor. “And I am sure this leads you to assume that this subject”—a nod at Pat Spain—“was a victim of homicide. Unfortunately, some of us do not have the luxury of assumption. All of the wounds are consistent with either assault or self-infliction. The manner of death was either homicide or suicide: undetermined.”

  Some defense lawyer was going to love that all over. I said, “Then let’s leave that blank on the paperwork for now, and come back to it when we’ve got more evidence. If the lab finds DNA under his fingernails—”

  Cooper leaned over to the hanging mike and said, without bothering to look at me, “Manner of death: undetermined.” That little smirk slid over me, to Richie. “Do cheer up, Detective Kennedy. I doubt there will be any ambiguity as to the next subject’s manner of death.”

  Emma Spain came out of her drawer with her bedsheets folded neatly around her like a shroud. Richie twitched, at my shoulder, and I heard the fast rasp as he started scratching at the inside of a pocket. She had curled up all cozy in those same sheets, two nights ago, with a good-night kiss. If he started thinking along those lines, I would have a new partner by Christmas. I shifted, nudging against his elbow, and cleared my throat. Cooper gave me a long stare across that small white shape, but Richie got the message and went still. The assistant unfolded the sheets.

  I know detectives who learn the knack of unfocusing their eyes at the bad parts of post-mortems. Cooper violates dead children searching for signs of violation, and the investigating officer stares intently at nothing but a blur. I watch. I don’t blink. The victims didn’t get to choose whether or not to endure what was done to them. I’m spoiled enough, next to them, without claiming to be too delicate even to endure looking.

  Emma was worse than Patrick not just because she was so young, but because she was so unblemished. Maybe this sounds twisted, but the worse the injuries, the easier the autopsy. When a body comes in macerated to something from an abattoir, the Y incision and the grating snap as the top of the skull comes off don’t pack much punch. The injuries give the cop in you something to focus on: they turn the victim from a human being into a specimen, made out of urgent questions and fresh clues. Emma was just a little girl, tender-soled bare feet and freckled snub nose, sticking-out belly button where her pink pajama top had ridden up. You would have sworn that she was only a hairsbreadth from alive; that if you had just known the right words to say in her ear, the right spot to touch, you could have woken her. What Cooper was about to do to her in our name was a dozen times more brutal than anything her murderer had done.

  The assistant took off the paper bags tied over her hands to preserve evidence, and Cooper bent over her with a palette knife to take fingernail scrapings. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “Interesting.”

  He reached for tweezers, did something finicky at her right hand, and straightened up holding the tweezers high. “These,” he said, “were between the index and middle fingers.”

  Four fine, pale hairs. A blond man crouched over the pink ruffled bed, that tiny girl fighting— I said, “DNA. Is there enough there for a shot at DNA?”

  Cooper shot me a thin smile. “Control your excitement, Detective. Microscopic comparison will, of course, be necessary, but judging by color and texture, there appears to be every probability that these hairs come from the head of the victim herself.” He dropped them into an evidence bag, pulled out his fountain pen and bent to scribble something on the label. “Assuming the evidence bears out the preliminary theory of suffocation, I would theorize that her hands were trapped beside her head by the pillow or other weapon, and that, unable to claw at the attacker, she pulled at her own hair in her final moments of consciousness.”

  That was when Richie left. At least he managed not to put a fist through the wall, or puke his guts onto the floor. He just turned on his heel, walked out and closed the door behind him.

  The assistant sniggered. Cooper gave the door a long, chilly stare. “I apologize for Detective Curran,” I said.

  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 droppe
d 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?”

  “He’s done with Emma. He’s about to move on to Jack.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Richie said softly, to the sky. I couldn’t tell whether he was swearing or praying.

  I said, “Kids are hell. No way round that. We all act like it’s not a problem, but the fact is, it kills every single one of us, every time. You’re not alone there.”

  “I was sure I could handle it. Definite.”

  “And that’s the right way to think. Always go in thinking positive. Doubts will kill you in this game.”

  “I’ve never gone to bits like that before. I swear. At the scene, even: I was grand. Not a problem.”

  “Yeah, you were. The scene’s different. The first look is bad, and then the worst’s over. It doesn’t keep coming at you.”

  I saw his Adam’s apple jump as he swallowed. After a moment he said, “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

  The words sounded like they hurt his throat. I said, “Are you sure you want to be?”

  “All I ever wanted. Since I was a kid. Saw a program on the telly—documentary, not made-up crap.” A quick squint my way, to check if I was laughing at him. “Some old case, a girl that got killed down the country. The detective was talking about how they solved it. I thought he was the smartest guy I’d ever seen, you know? Way smarter than college professors and people like that, because he got things done. Things that mattered. I just thought . . . That. I want to do that.”

  “And now you’re learning to do that. Like I told you yesterday, it takes time. You can’t expect to have the whole thing sussed on your first day.”

  “Yeah,” Richie said. “Or else your man Quigley’s right, and I should fuck off back to Motor Vehicles and spend some more time arresting my cousins.”

  “Is that what he was saying to you yesterday? When I was in with the Super?”

  Richie rubbed a hand over his hair. “It doesn’t matter,” he said tiredly. “I don’t give a damn what Quigley says. I only give a damn if he’s right.”

  I dusted off a piece of wall and sat down beside him. “Richie, old son,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”

  His head turned towards me. He had that food-poisoned look again. I gambled that he wouldn’t puke on my suit.

  “I’m betting you know I have the highest overall solve rate on this squad.”

  “Yeah. I knew coming in. When the Super said he was putting me with you, I was only delighted.”

  “And now you’ve had a chance to watch me work, where do you think that solve rate comes from?”

  Richie looked uncomfortable. Clearly he had asked himself the same question, and hadn’t managed to come up with an answer.

  “Is it because I’m the smartest guy in the squad room?”

  He did something between a shrug and a wriggle. “How would I know?”

  “In other words, no. Is it because I’m some kind of psychic wonder boy, like you see on TV?”

  “Like I said. I wouldn’t—”

  “You wouldn’t know. Right. Then let me say it for you: my brain and my instincts are no better than anyone else’s.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  In the thin morning light his face looked pinched and anxious, desperately young. “I know. It’s true just the same: I’m no genius. I would have liked to be. For a while, when I started out, I was sure I was something special. Not a doubt in my mind.”

  Richie watched me, wary, trying to work out if he was getting told off here. He said, “When . . . ?”

  “When did I figure out that I’m not Superboy?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  The hills were hidden in mist, just snatches of green appearing and disappearing. There was no way to tell where land ended and sky began. “Probably a lot later than I should have,” I said. �
��There wasn’t one moment that sticks out. Let’s just say I got older and wiser, and it became obvious. I made a few mistakes I shouldn’t have made, missed a few things that Superboy would have spotted. Most of all, I worked with a couple of guys along the way who were the real thing: what I wanted to be. And it turns out I’m just about smart enough to spot the difference when it’s right in front of my nose. Smart enough to see how smart I’m not, I guess.”

  Richie said nothing, but he was paying attention. That alertness was rising in his face, edging out the rest; he almost looked like a cop again. I said, “It was a nasty surprise, finding out that I was nothing special. But like I said to you before, you work with what you’ve got on hand. Otherwise you might as well buy yourself a one-way ticket on the train to failure.”

  Richie said, “Then the solve rate . . . ?”

  “The solve rate,” I said. “My solve rate is what it is for two reasons: because I work my arse off, and because I keep control. Over situations, over witnesses, over suspects, and most of all, over myself. If you’re good enough at that, you can compensate for just about anything else. If you’re not, Richie, if you lose control, then it doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are: you might as well go home. Forget your tie, forget your interrogation technique, forget all the things we’ve talked about over the last couple of weeks. They’re just symptoms. Get down to the core of it, and every single thing I’ve said to you boils down to control. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Richie’s mouth was starting to set into a tough line, which was what I wanted to see. “I have control. Sir. Cooper got me off guard, is all.”

  “Then don’t be off guard.”

  He bit down on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah. Fair enough. It won’t happen again.”

  “I didn’t think it would.” I gave him a quick clap on the shoulder. “Focus on the positive here, Richie. There’s a decent chance that this is the worst way you’ll ever spend a morning, and you’re still standing. And if it only takes you till your third week on the job to find out that you’re not Superboy, you’re a lucky man.”