The Broken Ones (18 page)

The door opened a few centimeters before a chain clacked taut. A young woman with thin lips and a boxer’s jaw looked out through the gap.

Oscar showed his badge. “I’m Mariani.”

The young woman’s lips crushed to a tighter line.

“Who is it?” Neve’s voice came from somewhere in the apartment.

“Your partner,” the girl answered coldly, her eyes locked on Oscar. Her hand tightened on the door, ready to close it if Neve said to.

“It’s okay, Alex,” Neve called after a pause. “Let him in.”

Alex hesitated, then unlatched the chain and stepped aside for Oscar. She was low-set and looked powerful enough to carry a goat up a muddy riverbank. She watched Oscar with unreserved dislike.

“Tell him to wait,” Neve called from down the narrow hallway.

Alex raised her eyebrows at Oscar. He nodded and looked around.

The former nuns’ quarters were compact but comfortable. Small touches gave it warmth: placemats on the old coffee table, a tiny vase holding nasturtiums, a Chinese table runner over the sideboard. By comparison, Oscar’s house looked like a ransacked crypt. On the breakfast bar were three small stacks: envelopes, cover letters, and résumés.

“In here,” Neve called.

Oscar looked around at Alex; she pointed permission with her solid chin.

Oscar passed through darkness toward the orange glow of a kerosene lamp; it made a billow of steam glow like smoke above a lively bonfire. Working hot water. The door was open.

“Come in.” Neve’s voice was clipped by the deadening steam.

Oscar entered.

She sat on the toilet lid wrapped in a towel. Her legs were bare from the thigh down. Oscar felt awkwardly drawn to look at them and fought to keep his eyes on hers. Her jaw was set and her expression was difficult to read.

“I don’t like you coming to my home,” she said.

“I called,” he replied.

She kept watching him and said nothing. He felt a twinge of pride—she’d learned well in the past twelve months when to ask questions and when to use silence to rattle the interviewee. She was a good cop.

She pulled a damp strand of hair behind one ear, and the towel around her chest shifted a centimeter lower. Oscar didn’t know where to look now, so he picked the drain grate on the floor. “Moechtar gave me your transfer request.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw her muscles twitch. “I wanted to tell you this morning,” she said. “But you were busy.”

Oscar nodded.

“He also told me we’re offline,” Neve continued. “It would have been nice to hear it from my so-called partner.”

“I just stole a body.”

She blinked. “You what?”

He told her about the visit to Dianne Hyde, the race to the crematorium, the installation of the body in Kannis’s cold room, the discovery that no postmortem had been performed—and that the dead girl had hazel eyes. By the time he finished, the steam had vanished and the bathroom was cold. Neve was staring at him.

“Do you have any idea how many parts of the Crim Code you’ve violated?”

“A few. Nothing serious.”

She shook her head. “You have to take it back—”

“Were you listening?” he interrupted. “Someone wanted the body gone. Someone with clout enough to spook a career pathologist. If we take it back to the morgue, the same thing will happen.”

She watched him warily. “What are you thinking?”

“It stinks of Haig.”

“Oh, Oscar.”

“Haig has a rep for making this kind of stuff happen. He wanted Moechtar to have me hand the case over to Homicide.”

“Then tell Moechtar.”

Oscar snorted. “He’s an accountant.”

“He’s our boss.”

“He won’t care,” Oscar said. “He’ll take the path of least resistance and say give it to Homicide.”

“Ethical Standards, then.”

“They’re idiots.”

“Since you left.”

Oscar shrugged.

Neve rubbed her face, frustrated. “So, what then? What’s your grand plan?”

“Let’s find out who she is, then we can go to Moechtar. Once we have her identified, we’ll have a better idea of why Haig wanted her to vanish.”

Neve stared at him. She wore an expression that Oscar couldn’t quite pin down. It looked hurt and pitying and confused. He watched her stretch a finger up toward his arm, but before she touched it she drew back and clutched the towel tighter around herself. The skin on her legs and arms was goosepimpled.

“There is no ‘we,’ Oscar.”

Oscar’s jaw was so tight it hurt. “I need your help.”

“You need help,” Neve agreed, “but not from me.” She looked up at him, her face set harder now. “I won’t report you, Oscar, but I’m sure as hell not signing up for this Jonestown jaunt of yours.” She looked down at the damp tiles. “I’m sorry.”

The sergeant on shift in the Fingerprint Bureau glared at Oscar suspiciously as he handed over the cards on which he’d rolled the dead girl’s prints.

“Late,” she said.

“Isn’t it?”

Her stare weighed a ton. She cast a warning glare over her shoulder at him, then went to the Morpho terminal and scanned the card. She returned ten minutes later, shaking her head.

No matches.

He returned to his office, printed blowups of the photographs he’d taken of the symbol, put them into an envelope, and drove to Gelareh Barirani’s flat. He slipped them into her letter box, then headed back toward home. It was after eleven, and the moon loitered over the city. Milky light fluttered down through clouds as fine as feathers, turning the wet roads silver and casting shadows as black as ink.

Haig.

It made sense, to a point. Yes, Haig wanted the case. Yes, Haig had the connections to fast-track a cadaver’s destruction and the history of intimidation that explained a public servant fleeing town on a moment’s notice. But why murder a young girl? Extortion? Although Oscar had seen even the least likely people charged with the most repulsive of acts, he couldn’t picture Haig involved in torture. The mutilation, that unsettling, cruel symbol, made even less sense. Haig was pragmatic, if nothing else. No. If Haig was involved, it was as a facilitator. He was working for others. But Haig wasn’t charitable; he worked for a fee—either favors or cash. Neither was easy to trace.

Oscar pulled into the driveway and his headlights blared on the graffitied shutter door to his garage. He left the car running and stepped out to undo the padlock. As he stooped to kneel, something shifted in the shadows across the street, and his heart jumped to a sprint. A poinciana tree spread dark fingers over the footpath behind him, and in the shadows below it was the dead boy, his pale face hovering like a moth.

Oscar didn’t want to turn away from him; the feeling of being watched was a regular itch between his shoulder blades. Even after all these years, he disliked knowing that the dead boy might be behind him. The boy was confusing. On one hand, he seemed to shun Oscar, rarely appearing in a small room with him. But outdoors and in large spaces, he was never more than twenty or so yards away, silently staring. Was he bound to Oscar, as if by an invisible lead that allowed him no farther away? When Oscar drove, he watched the windows, kidding himself that he wasn’t looking for the boy. Did he fly behind the car like a ghastly banderole as Oscar drove? Or did he flicker between places, jolting from here to here to here like a face glimpsed across platforms through a speeding train? Oscar didn’t know. The boy was simply there, whenever he paused at traffic lights or arrived at his destination, watching, sometimes shifting on his spectral feet as if anxious to pass on a message then flee, yet he never advanced or retreated. On the one jet flight Oscar had taken since Gray Wednesday—a trip to Melbourne for his uncle’s funeral—he’d clicked his seat belt and looked up the aisle. In the alcove where the flight attendants prepared the meals stood the boy, shyly stooped, not seeming to notice when people stepped through him, watching Oscar through those empty, well-like sockets. Was he as resentful as Oscar about being shackled to a stranger? Did he blame his
living, breathing anchor for his torment? It was hard to read a face from thirty paces; harder still when that face had no eyes.

Oscar slid a key into the padlock. And the boy took a step toward him. Then another.

The hairs on the back of Oscar’s hands rose. In three years, the boy had never taken more than a step toward him. What if the ghost kept coming? What if he put himself in front of Oscar’s face and never left, forcing him to stare forever into those socket holes where eyes should be? Would he go mad? Would he, like so many killers he had interviewed, fumble for a weapon and stab or swing or shoot, his mind snapped and screaming?

“What do you want?” Oscar said. His voice sounded as dry as old paper.

The boy took another step closer and stopped. His pale fingers opened and closed, as if in indecision.

Oscar forced himself to turn away; his heart jolted behind his ribs as he turned in the glare of the headlights and undid the padlock. When he lifted the shutter, the beams speared into the dark.

At first, he had the irrational thought that Sabine had left her purse on the garage floor. But Sabine had left a long time ago, and this was, on closer look, too misshapen to be a purse. He stepped into the cold garage, his legs throwing long spindly shadows. He stopped next to the object on the dirty concrete. It was a dog’s head, resting in the very center of the garage. Its lips were drawn back in a terrified snarl. The eyes were gone, and the headlights shone in slick, purple sockets. The fur was stained magenta with blood and other fluids but had once been tan; the muzzle was narrow and pointed, the black flesh of the nose bisected by a deep cut. It was Terry/Derek, the yapper from down Oscar’s street.

He knelt and looked closer.

Flesh and tendon and blood vessels hung from the base of the dog’s skull like wet streamers from a grotesque party favor. The head hadn’t been severed; it had been torn from the body. And the skull itself seemed askew, all odd, lazy angles and frowning asymmetrically in on itself. Crushed, Oscar realized. It reminded him of the lizard and rat heads that Sissy would occasionally leave as gifts or trophies on the back doormat. Oscar stood and turned a slow circle. Dust rose in the beams of the headlights like tiny cold sparks. Nothing else seemed
amiss. Suddenly, something clapped in the darkness, and Oscar’s head jerked up. Twelve feet above the concrete floor, a bank of hopper windows lined the far wall—three large frames with flaked paint and glass caked with grime, each hinged at the center. One clattered, swinging loose in the wind. Loops of narrow chain ran from each frame to a hook set at shoulder height. The chain of the loose window dangled, unhitched.

Oscar carefully pulled the window closed and threaded a cold metal link over a hook.

He returned to the head and cautiously paced around it, searching the dust for footprints. The only ones he saw were his own. Had a person done this? No man he knew had the strength to wrench the head off a dog and crush its skull. Had the dog been caught under a truck, its jamming wheels ripping the head off?

Oscar went outside and inspected the ground under the windows. There were no telltale depressions from ladder marks. He returned inside, pulled old brochures from a box against the wall, and scooped the head off the slab; as he got another grip on it, he could feel that it was still a little warm. He took it out and dropped it in the gutter; the broken plates of bone ground together like pieces of a smashed bowl in a small, wet sack. He idled his car into the garage and drew down the shutter; it clattered as loudly as a train, then fell to a silence so profound that the click of the padlock echoed up the street. He looked around.

The skull was a lump in the gutter. The street was empty, except under the dark coral branches of the tree across the road, where the dead boy stood watching. When he caught Oscar’s glance he deliberately looked up to the wispy clouds.

Lose the hat
, the blind woman had said.
You need to watch the skies
.

Oscar hurried home.