The Broken Ones (30 page)

“Mariani!” Foley called.

Oscar left the parking officer holding the ticket, the scales in the man’s mind teetering unpleasantly. “What?”

“Ah, fucksticks, Prophet’s just crashed,” Foley said. “But there were three kids missing.”

Oscar felt his throat tighten. Three?

“Did you write them down?” he asked. Another awkward silence. “Okay, listen—”

“Wait, no, wait!” Foley said, and Oscar could almost hear him concentrating. “Three, all girls. One was Penelope. Penelope something. And one’s surname was White, something White. Fiona? Faye?”

“And the third?”

“Tara something. No, not Tara. Taryn.”

What drew Oscar’s attention was Taryn Lymbery’s shoes. Sneakers, scuffed but neat, matching in style but one notably smaller than the other. They sat at the bottom of the small wardrobe under a hanging bouquet of dresses.

“Intellectually disabled,” Oscar said.

“That’s right,” Leslie Chalk said softly. She stood in the doorway, stiffly upright and motionless. Her hair and clothes were impeccably neat, but the shadows under her eyes were as dark as bruises. “From birth. Fetal alcohol syndrome, we think, though Taryn never knew her mother.”

Oscar closed the wardrobe. “When did you notice she was gone?”

“This morning.” Chalk’s smile was tense and fragile. “Breakfast time. Taryn would never miss breakfast. She loved breakfast.”

On a chest of drawers as compact as the wardrobe was a photo of Taryn Lymbery holding a lamb at a zoo. She looked about twelve in the photograph, which, Chalk had told him, was a little more than three years old. Taryn’s hair was a dirty blonde, her glasses thick, her eyes a
little closely set, her smile wide and genuine. In the photograph, she cuddled the lamb with unreserved delight. Oscar looked over the rest of the room. Her bed was rumpled, but the single bed opposite was neatly made.

“And her roommate?”

“Becky sleeps like the dead.” Chalk rubbed her hands together. “We searched the grounds. I went to the train station and showed the stationmaster her photo. Her backpack is gone. Underwear. Her good pair of shoes.”

Oscar opened the top drawer. A tiny harvest of balled socks and underpants, a threadbare training bra. “Have you contacted her family?” he asked.

Chalk nodded. “I rang her aunt in Perth. She’s never visited. She needed some reminding that Taryn even existed.”

Oscar went to the barred window.

“How did she get out?”

Chalk sighed. “Every child here with mental capacity knows the keypad code for the front door. We change it each week, but as soon as one spies a staff member using it, the jungle drums get it around.”

In the next drawer, summer clothes, mostly untouched. In the bottommost he found a small wooden box. Inside was a broken seashell and a small floral printed envelope with no card or letter inside. A treasure box without treasure.

“Do you think she ran away?” Oscar asked.

Chalk shrugged. “I thought she was happy enough. Of all the girls here, she seemed most content. But when they reach an age, they all get notions, to visit a boyfriend or girlfriend or the movies or the beach.”

“Tell me about Frances White.”

He opened the other file he’d requested from Chalk’s office. The single photograph attached was of a tall, unnaturally thin girl with long features and a toothy, awkward smile.

“Frances.” Chalk smiled fondly at the picture. “What a lovely girl. A hair-trigger temper, but a dear thing.”

“Same deal?”

“Absconded in the night? Yes.”

Oscar looked between the bars out onto the gloomy greenery. He
couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to escape these small rooms and shadowy halls.

“Three kids in a month?”

He turned back to Chalk. All her muscles were tight with tension.

“I don’t like it any more than you do, Detective.”

As he watched her, she folded her arms tightly around herself. It was clear that she wanted him to go. Yet she waved anxious fingers at the window. “Can you get someone here to take fingerprints, all that stuff? The officers this morning weren’t too enthusiastic.”

Oscar shook his head. “Scenes of Crime won’t come out for a runaway that’s only just logged with Missing Persons. Unless there are signs of abduction, no one will do anything till Taryn’s been gone twenty-four hours.”

“Can’t you pull some strings?”

Oscar felt a blush of embarrassment crawl up his neck. “Not really.”

“Oh,” Chalk said. “I see.” He saw something flicker behind her eyes, but it was gone in an instant. She frowned at him. “Are you the only officer taking these disappearances seriously?”

Oscar didn’t want to tell her the truth. He met her stare until she looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry, though.

“Who was on shift last night?” he asked.

The answer came as no surprise. “Lauralie Kenny was in here—it was Lauralie who did the head count this morning. And over in B-Block was Zoe. Zoe Trucek.”

Lauralie Kenny was a big girl whose whole soft body shook as she cried. Elverly’s break room was a section of side-entry vestibule that had been sheeted in with fibrous cement and frosted glass. There were two chairs, a round timber table, and a sink with a bench just wide enough for a toaster and a breadbox. A row of timber lockers ran along the old wall to the far end of the room, where tall windows looked out onto the rambling grounds.

“I couldn’t help it,” Lauralie said, sniffing back snot. “I din’ mean
to. I come in here just for a tea. It was late. I just put my head down for a second, I swear.”

She dissolved into another silent quake of tears.

Oscar put away his notebook. “How long were you asleep?”

Lauralie wiped her eyes and licked her large, formless lips. “Two and a ha … two and a ha-ha …”

Oscar nodded; he got the picture. Two and a half hours: a wide window of opportunity for any would-be abductors. If every coherent child in the place knew the access code, it wouldn’t have been hard to bribe it out of one with a little gift. He rubbed his hand—of all the wounds on his head and body, the one that hurt most was the spot where Zoe had nicked him with her knife. Why a knife? What was she afraid of?

He looked over his shoulder at Chalk.

“I need Zoe Trucek’s home address.”

The house was empty: a gutted shell with broken windows, no furniture, strange unsavory stains, and reeking of urine from a dozen species. Ceilings sagged and wall sheeting had been kicked in. The toilet pedestal had been smashed off its moorings and sat like a broken tooth in a room that smelled of shit and dead things.

Walking back outside, Oscar called Elverly. He got the crying girl, Lauralie, and asked when Zoe Trucek was next on shift. The day after tomorrow. Was there a phone number for her on file? No. He ended the call.

A false address, and no phone number. His most interesting lead could be anywhere in this city of a million citizens.

Chapter
19

T
hree disabled girls gone from Elverly in a month.

Oscar walked up the fire-escape stairs from the headquarters basement garage against a nearly silent tide of public servants all taking the quickest route down to the ground floor and out into the late afternoon.

Three. He could almost believe it was a sad coincidence were he not convinced that the remains in Kannis’s cold room were one of the missing, and were one of Elverly’s caregivers not following him. He had to find Zoe.

He climbed straight up to the ninth floor and along the plush carpets to Moechtar’s office, then pulled off his hat and knocked.

The inspector was behind his large desk, packing up papers, ready to go home. He looked up at Oscar through doll-like eyes, with no hint of emotion.

“Detective. You’ve been out.”

“Yes, sir.”

Moechtar checked his watch and decided he had a moment. He sat and flipped through the contents of his in-tray. “I have your request for DNA samples.”

“Yes, sir. Carole and Paul Roth. I believe the Jane Doe we pulled from the sewage plant is their daughter.”

Moechtar nodded. “This requires the signature of the coroner or an acting coroner.”

Oscar wasn’t sure where this was going. “I believe so, sir.”

“When I couldn’t raise you, I took the liberty of ringing Forensic Services to see if we couldn’t find a”—Moechtar paused—“less intrusive way of identifying the cadaver. Forensic Services said they don’t have that cadaver.”

“Someone fast-tracked it to the crematorium,” Oscar said. “I have it.”

Moechtar watched Oscar with a more fixed attention now. Not exactly interested but with a distinct lack of uninterest.

“Someone at the morgue made a mistake?”

“I don’t think so, sir. The body was signed for destruction by a state pathologist named Tetlow. He left town the same morning. Bribed or threatened, I don’t know, but that’s why I didn’t return the body to the morgue.”

Moechtar stared at him for an unsettlingly long time. “Why haven’t you told me any of this?”

“I wanted to have something firmer for you first, sir.”

Moechtar rubbed a manicured thumbnail thoughtfully.

“You say you have the girl’s body.”

“Yes, sir. Quite safe.”

“And it’s against this body you want to compare samples from the Roths?”

“Just to identify her, sir. They’re not suspects yet.”

Moechtar nodded and fixed his eyes on Oscar. “The cadaver has to go back.”

Oscar blinked. “I don’t trust—”

“It
has
to go back. I can’t approach the coroner and ask for his name on a court order if proper process isn’t being observed.” A light frown line appeared on Moechtar’s smooth forehead. “Already this is messy. Very, very messy.”

“Sir—”

“We’ll have to look into what happened, how that body was released prematurely. But, Oscar, I want you to return that body. I’m not actioning this until you do.”

Moechtar put the form back in his in-tray and looked up at him, as if inviting argument.

“Yes, sir,” Oscar said quietly.

Moechtar checked his watch and stood to put on his coat. He kept his back to Oscar, who realized that he had been dismissed.