Cold Shoulder (13 page)

L
ORRAINE WAS up and cleaning the apartment before Rosie was awake. She put some coffee on to brew while she stacked and folded her sheets and bed linen. She had a plastic bag full of laundry ready to take to the laundromat, and was mentally compiling a list of groceries.

Rosie eventually surfaced, glowered and established her usual early-morning gloom. Lorraine’s hyperactivity served only to increase it.

‘You want any laundry done?’

‘Jesus! I don’t know at this hour, do I?’ Rosie banged open the cupboards as Lorraine started up the vacuum.

‘Can you just
leave
that until I had my breakfast?’

Lorraine picked up the laundry and walked out. She had it spinning when she took off for the nearest grocery store, the same shopping mall where the attack had occurred. She didn’t give it a second thought — all that seemed far in the distance and, in any case, she wasn’t anywhere near the parking lot.

It had been a very long time since Lorraine had shopped or bothered to choose food. She wandered up and down the avenues of goods, and the effort of concentrating on what she wanted to buy became more and more difficult as the Muzak attacked her in one ear while a bubble-gum voice belted out ‘sales of the day’ in the other, enhanced by the high-pitched
ping
of computer cash registers, a clicking she couldn’t identify, bells ringing from check-out assistant to floor manager as prices were asked, or assistants screamed conversation and the
peep-peep
of each article as it was passed over the automatic price scanner.

It seemed to Lorraine that only she was aware of the sounds. She noticed all the other shoppers were moving like lightning — it seemed that their sole intention was to get from A to B at the fastest possible rate. Carts collided, there was heavy breathing from a customer if she took too long weighing food. Not until she got to the freezer side did it occur to her that maybe the customers were moving so fast in the grocery section because they had just suffered frostbite in arctic temperatures. Nothing was familiar; had it really been so long since she had done something as ordinary as going to a grocery store?

No matter how hard she tried, Lorraine could not get the polythene roller bag open. Her tomatoes were still on the scales as she battled with her bag that — she felt sure — was only a single strip of plastic. ‘Excuse me, could you show me how to get this open?’

The pink-gingham-clad shelf filler didn’t look up from her task of stamping the canned peas, with what looked like a small Sten gun. Now Lorraine knew what the
click-click-click
noise was and she waited until the gun had ceased firing before she wafted her unopened bag. ‘Is there a trick to this?’

The assistant stuffed her gun into her pocket, and without uttering a word took the bag, licked her forefinger and thumb, rubbed them over the serrated edge, shook it open and returned it to Lorraine.

‘Very hygienic. Thank you!’ Lorraine turned back to her scales with the waiting pound of tomatoes only to discover someone else had tipped them out.

She bought salad, yoghurt, fresh fruit, oranges for juice, some wholewheat bread, cereal and nuts. She was picking up some cherries when it started. She steadied herself, and pushed her cart over to the freezer section. Her whole body began to shake and she could feel perspiration breaking out all over. As she opened the ice-cream freezer, the gust of chilled air reminded her of the morgue and the first time she had had to take prints from a corpse. She had not shown any disgust, or emotion, but had clung to the fingerprints card, the black ink roller.

‘Get the prints, Page, and bring ’em up to records.’

Lorraine had lifted the stiffened hand. She was a black woman, about fifty years of age. Lorraine didn’t look at her face, but forced herself to concentrate on taking the prints. No sooner had she uncurled one dead finger than it recurled, the woman’s hands tightening like fists. Lorraine was unaware that the team were all watching her, giggling like schoolboys as they saw her struggle. Eventually she had forced the woman’s hand to lie flat, palm upwards, but just as she began to roll on the black ink, it had taken on a life of its own, curling so tightly around Lorraine’s fingers that she could not release them. The watching men broke up, and only one of them had the decency to feel sorry for her. He was not much older than she was, but the team had shown him the ropes — unlike Rookie Lorraine: she was to be their entertainment. She watched as he hit the elbow of the deceased, which opened up the fist long enough for prints to be taken. She had laughed, treating it all as a big joke. But she’d had nightmares for weeks of being trapped by the dead in that hideous vice-like cold grip.

‘Please shut the freezer doors,’ snapped a gingham-garbed floor manager as she marched past. Lorraine rested her head against the fridge door, as the sweating subsided, but her hands were shaking. She didn’t understand why she had suddenly remembered that incident.

When Lorraine got home, Rosie was sorting through the help-wanted ads, checking the possibles. By mid afternoon, she had made a few calls, but found no work. She sat watching television, and eating the nuts Lorraine had brought home. She paid scant attention to the announcement that a seventeen-year-old girl, Angela Hollow, nicknamed Holly, had been found brutally murdered.

Lorraine blew dry her hair, then rubbed moisturizer over her face and neck, and into her hands. She was sitting on Rosie’s bed, smoothing cream into her fingertips when Rookie Lorraine Page appeared again. The rubber gloves she wore to examine a corpse always made her hands dry, and she kept lotion in her locker. The others teased her about it, but it wasn’t just the dryness — it was the stench. No matter how fresh the corpse, there was a sickly sweet smell to it. Lorraine never wore perfume, so the moisturizer not only felt good, but smelt clean and fresh. As she massaged her hands, it started again. She was powerless to stop the memories.

They say your first homicide is the one you remember most clearly. Lorraine had been summoned to a domestic and her car had been first on the scene. The small house had looked so neat from the outside, so normal, so quiet that she and her partner had radioed back to base to double-check the address. A neighbour had called to say they had heard screaming and gunfire.

Lorraine tried the front door. It was open. The woman’s throat had been slashed, as had her arms and chest. She was wearing a cotton shift, nothing else, and there was so much blood that the material was a bright vermilion red. They found her husband in the front bedroom with his head blown apart, the gun still in his hand. Blood had sprayed over the walls and soaked into the blanket on the bed where he was lying. The third body, that of a twelve-year-old girl, was in the back bedroom. She had been killed by a single knife wound to the heart. She was tucked up in the bed, the covers up to her chin, one arm around a doll, as if peacefully asleep. Subsequently they discovered pornographic material and videos of the child and the dead man. Lorraine never forgot viewing those wretched home-made films, just as she never forgot how innocent the little girl had looked with her doll. She learnt from that incident never to judge by appearances: the family with no previous criminal record, the suburban couple with their respectable jobs, played out in secret a despicable game of perversion on their own child. It was a hard and brutal lesson for a twenty-year-old rookie cop. Worse followed, but sitting in front of Rosie’s dressing table, the memory of that first suicide came back. Lorraine felt icy cold, as if she was standing in the morgue, as if the child’s murder had just happened, as if the little girl was calling out to her.

Rooney stared at the body, moving around the stretcher, pulling at his nose. The hammer blows to her face had broken both cheeks, her nose, and the right side of her jaw. The wound to the back of her head would have killed her, as it had cracked open her skull. She had no other body scars, no new skin abrasions or bruising, and her fingernails were intact, but there was evidence of previous beatings. At seventeen years old, Angela Hollow, blonde, about five feet seven, with a good figure, had three previous arrests for prostitution.

Rooney thanked the morgue attendant and returned to his office. Bean was waiting. He had interviewed Holly’s pimp and four other girls who had seen her on the evening of her death. No one had seen the man who had picked her up, but one witness remembered the metallic beige car. They had not glimpsed the driver as he had been on the far side of the road. All they remembered was seeing Holly cross the road at about nine thirty. She had not been seen since.

Rooney looked through the statements and tossed over the file he had been given by Colin Sparks. ‘Have a look at that, Josh. I want the blood group checked out against that girl we got and on the Hastings guy.’

Bean left the office, but returned immediately with a lengthy internal fax. ‘You better look over this, it just came in.’

Rooney nodded. ‘Angela Hollow. It’s a fucking hammer again.’

As he went out, Bean heard Rooney swearing. The fax sheets were the result of his previous evening’s calls. Three more girls, in different areas over a period of seven years, had all been killed by hammer blows to the back of the head, and suffered severe facial injuries. All were hookers of different ages, their bodies left in the trunk of a stolen vehicle. No witnesses. Each case left open on file. Three murders, Angela Hollow made it four and Maria Valez five, the woman from the wreck, still unidentified, six, and if the killer had also murdered Norman Hastings it was now seven. If they had all been killed by the same man, as Rooney began to suspect, he had better start gathering the evidence to link them together. He was now about to launch a multiple murder inquiry.

Later that afternoon he got the first verification. The blood found inside the stolen Hastings car matched the retained blood sample from the murder case handed to him by Sparks. The killer of Maria Valez had left no other incriminating evidence behind, but Rooney made a note that she had, like the woman in Hastings’s car, put up a struggle. According to the autopsy reports, she had clawed and scratched her assailant: blood samples had been taken from beneath her fingernails. None of the other women had struggled: they had been killed by the blow to the back of their heads.

Rooney summoned Mr and Mrs Summers again, hoping they would be unable to identify the corpse from Paradise Apartments as the woman they had seen in the mall car park. If it were not her, then what they had witnessed in the car park, the woman in Norman Hastings’s car, was a failed murder attempt, possibly by the same killer. It also meant that Cinderella was still alive and, once again, a vital witness — or accomplice.

As they had been throughout, Mr and Mrs Summers were eager to give every assistance. They had never been to a morgue before or played a part in any criminal investigation let alone a murder inquiry. Rooney decided they should see the body together, and he accompanied them into the viewing room.

‘Okay, she’s behind the curtain. We can turn her around, get any side you want to see, right or left. You just take your time…’

He pressed the buzzer for the curtain to move away from the screen window.

The dead woman had been cleaned up, her hair washed and combed, and they had also had her face repaired, covered and filled in by a qualified cosmetic mortician. A little trace of make-up served only to enhance the deathly pallor and her eyes were closed.

Mrs Summers let out a gasp. She stepped closer, but her husband remained where he was, staring through the window. It was the husband Rooney concentrated on; he had been close to the woman for longer and had spoken to her.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Summers.

‘I don’t know…’ said her husband.

It’s her — look at her hair, it’s the same hair.’

‘Maybe.’

Mrs Summers turned to Rooney. ‘I’m sure it’s her.’

Rooney nodded, then looked at Mr Summers. ‘What do you think? We can turn her round if you like?’

‘No, no, I think my wife is right. She’s the woman I saw.’

Rooney asked if he was positive that it was the woman he had tried to help in the parking lot that afternoon.

‘Yes,’ Mr Summers said firmly.

Rooney returned to his office. Bean was waiting for him: he had received confirmation via police records, and they now had an ID of the victim. The dead woman Mr and Mrs Summers had just identified was Helen Murphy, aged thirty-nine, a prostitute, mother of three children, all in care. Murphy had been reported missing three weeks before she was found.

The Summerses’ mistaken identification left Lorraine in the clear yet unaware of how valuable a witness she was, just as it meant that Rooney and his team were no longer looking for her. Instead they focused on trying to find a link between the dead women and Norman Hastings.

But Rooney was still not satisfied. He looked over the report and asked if dental records were available, remembering that the cab driver had said the woman had a front tooth missing. Helen Murphy had false teeth. Rooney was anxious to bring the cab driver in to view the body. He was not as positive as the Summerses: she was similar and had the same colouring, he said. Eventually he agreed that it was probably the woman he had picked up. Rooney conceded that Helen Murphy was the woman from the car park, which meant there would be no further visits to Rosie’s address. That line of inquiry was now closed.

It was five o’clock when Rooney faced his team. He had requested extra officers and an incident room. They waited patient as he shuffled his papers. ‘Okay, this is Helen Murphy,’ he began. ‘Prostitute, blonde, aged thirty-nine, body found in the vicinity of the derelict Paradise Apartments in the trunk of a wrecked car, she had been there for approximately two to three days.’

The men stared at the blow-up pictures. Next to appear were Angela Hollow and the stolen vehicle, then Maria Valez, and three more unidentified females. Lastly there was a photograph of Norman Hastings and his car.