The Broken Ones (34 page)

Fifteen minutes later, rain arrived, and with it came the Homicide branch: a fat detective sergeant and young Detective Constable Bazley. When Bazley saw Oscar, he instinctively flinched, then composed himself and put on a vulpine grin. Oscar knew from the smile what Homicide’s finding would be.

Oscar crossed the street and headed for his car. He slowed when he saw a sleek white patrol cruiser parked behind it. Its driver silently wound down the window.

“How was your party, Mariani?”

Oscar walked over to Haig’s car. The ice in his chest spread into his skull; he felt untied and cold. A pendulum had swung a full arc, from
the brilliant sense of aliveness looking into Anne Chaume’s eyes to feeling numbed and emptied now. His hands were white fists. From under the bandage on his cut knuckle, fresh blood wept.

“You did this,” Oscar whispered.

Haig looked up at him, impassive. “You’re a fool, Mariani.”

Oscar’s fist struck forward. But Haig was quicker. He caught the blow and firmly pressed Oscar’s wrist down on the doorsill. Oscar knew the man could break it.

“A fool,” Haig repeated. “I asked you to give me this case. A good cop’s dead now. A waste.”

Flames reflected in Haig’s eyes. Kace was a shadow in the backseat.

Oscar slowly twisted his wrist. Haig didn’t release the pressure, so the pain was searing. Oscar wondered, with every heartbeat, when his bones would snap—he realized he didn’t care if they did. Skin tore on the rubber of the sill, and blood trickled, lubricating Haig’s grasp. Oscar’s eyes and Haig’s were locked. Oscar pulled his hand free.

“Too far, Haig.”

Bleeding, he went to his car, got in, and drove off. His hands on the steering wheel felt disconnected, not his own, and the view through the windscreen could have been a movie projection. He wondered with a little curiosity whether those remote hands might jerk the wheel and steer him into a power pole or another vehicle or over a bridge. They didn’t. They took him to Neve’s apartment building.

He went up the stairs slowly and knocked at the door.

Alex’s face was wet and her eyes were red. She took aim and slapped Oscar as hard as she could.

Chapter
22

B
lood and fire.

She smelled them, even from afar.

They roused her from her slumber, made her listen.

Voices. They were faint, but the words were right. The air was right. And the smell—the scents on the air of tender flesh and clean fire were
more
than right.

She rolled, stretched her claws. No. She did not want to be bidden. The howling of the dying dumb thing repulsed her.

Oh, but the smells! Her mouth watered.

The words, the asking, the call, the pull, the—

Flesh
.

Sweet, clean
blood.
Sweet, clean
flesh.

She was displeased. She could come and go as she wished now. Why should she listen to these requests? But her stomach growled. She was still hungry.

She rose and called her favored pets.

Chapter
23

T
he city straddled the river like a wide saddle hung over a thin crooked spine. But this morning the city was erased, hidden in fog, and the snaking river was invisible under a cobweb-white shroud.

Oscar drove slowly; he’d had less than two hours’ sleep. He followed his headlights away from the city, along the river, then across one of its many bridges to a suburb where picket fences were bared like teeth through the dreamy fog and the trunks of old trees lined the quiet streets in rows, gray as the shins of bony gods. He checked the address, parked, and entered a neatly painted gate. At the front door hung a brass ship’s bell. He rang it and waited.

A man makes assumptions that, when proven false, surprise him with their shortsightedness. A man hardened to major crime has no problem believing that a mother could choke the life from her infant, that a clergyman could be caught with a suitcase full of church money and a dead transsexual in the trunk of his car; that a ten-year-old could be found with twists of licorice in one hand, twists of iron bar in the other, and the pulped head of the shopkeeper he’d robbed at his feet. But to discover that Benjamin Moechtar lived not in some strange, dry little storeroom among pinned hexapods but in a pleasant house with an attractive family and an Airedale terrier made Oscar wonder what a poor judge of character he was.

Moechtar answered the door, held back his excited dog, and led Oscar through his home. The two children, a girl and boy, smiled at Oscar, then went back to the toy castle she was building and he was destroying. The boy giggled as he knocked over a tower of colored
blocks, and looked over to an empty chair in the corner for approval, and giggled more. Children had ghosts, too, Oscar knew. Back when he could afford newspapers he’d read a theory that children born after Gray Wednesday would grow up without fear or wonder at their invisible playmates. Their ghosts would be no more remarkable than shadows, and when these children were middle-aged the world would speculate what an unhaunted life could have been like. With Neve’s family all gone, Oscar wondered who would get her. He hoped it would be a little girl.

“And my wife, Susan,” Moechtar said as they walked through a kitchen of clean lines and tall windows.

Oscar shook hands—Susan Moechtar looked ill, and he noted a box of cold-and-flu tablets near the kettle. But her husband seemed unconcerned. “Have you had breakfast?” Susan asked.

“I’m fine,” Oscar replied.

“Coffee?” Moechtar offered. “I’ve just made some.”

“There should be a law against Ben’s coffee,” Susan said, waving them out. “Go talk, I’ll bring you some fresh.”

Moechtar motioned Oscar toward the back door, and he could see the tension in his inspector’s shoulders.

The yard was a subtle watercolor in grays and greens: trees and hedges wrapped lush arms around puddles of grass the color of wet jade. Rising from the mist was the prow of a boat carved from crystal: a greenhouse, its glass fogged. Oscar followed Moechtar across mossy flagstones to the glass door. Stepping into the warm, wet air was like blinking awake in a jungle—a sudden assault of color and scent. Hundreds of beautiful, strange flowers. Orchids, Oscar realized. Not so far from bugs.

“You read my report?” Oscar said.

“Hold these.”

Moechtar put into Oscar’s hands two plastic spray bottles and reached for a box of fertilizer.

“Neve and Kannis were murdered,” Oscar continued. “Someone knew Penny Roth’s body was there and went to destroy it. They were seen by Neve and Kannis and had to kill them.”

“Keep still.” Moechtar took a tiny measure and scooped crystals into each bottle. “With their own guns? How did the killer convince Detective de Rossa to surrender her firearm?”

Oscar held the bottles steady while Moechtar topped them with water.

“Or killers,” Oscar said. “They put a gun to Kannis’s head and said to Neve, ‘Drop your weapon or we kill this guy.’ What would she do?”

Moechtar twisted spray heads onto the bottles. He handed one to Oscar and pointed to the lower row of broad-leafed, whip-stalked orchids, then turned his back and began to spray the opposite row.

Oscar continued, “I want their deaths to be part of my investigation.”

“Detective Bazley from Homicide has the case,” Moechtar said after a long moment. “He’s treating it as a double manslaughter. Detective de Rossa failed to identify herself to Gregos Kannis, who shot her as a trespasser. She returned fire in self-defense.”

Oscar saw how tightly he was gripping his own bottle and forced his fingers to relax. “That’s bullshit. Least-resistance, no-class bullshit.”

“I’m not sure a magistrate would agree with you.” Moechtar adjusted his nozzle, getting a finer mist. “Inspector Haig also wants you to hand your Jane Doe file over to Homicide.”

Oscar laughed.

Moechtar remained silent. The puff-puff of his spray bottle sounded like the hissing of a tropical snake.

Oscar continued, “We had a very solid ID on Penny Roth. Distinctive scars from surgery when she was a child. She’s not a Jane Doe.”

Moechtar cupped a leaf as delicate as rice paper and sprayed it. “There were several propane and liquid-petroleum gas bottles at the scene. Forensic Services agree the body is probably a girl’s, but it’s burned bone. The attending pathologist doesn’t think she can determine cause of death from the remains.”

Oscar remembered the worried strain on Dianne Hyde’s face. No doubt she was shitting herself that this charred little boomerang had come back to her morgue.

He asked, “What about DNA? Is there tissue they can sample? Bone marrow?”

“They’re going to try.”

A glimmer of hope flickered in Oscar’s mind. He checked his watch. Still an hour before his meeting with Carole Roth. “If the coroner lets us take a DNA swab from Carole Roth, we can make a match—”

“Carole Roth died this morning,” Moechtar interrupted. “An overdose of imipramine.”

Oscar blinked as if slapped. He tried to corral his thoughts, but they had bolted in all directions.

“Dead?”

“Oscar.” Moechtar had stopped spraying and was staring at him. Oscar suddenly registered the anger pouring off his inspector. It was an odd sensation, like seeing a butterfly suddenly present a stinger dripping with venom. “Take just a moment to see how this looks from my shoes. My detective refuses to give a murder case to Homicide. Fair enough, she
did
have some occult mutilation. But when the cadaver is released from the state mortuary because of a paperwork slipup—”

“There’s no way—”

“—does he tell me, his inspector? No. He takes the body and hides it in a blackmarket butcher’s cold room. Was it even the same cadaver that left the morgue?” Oscar opened his mouth to protest, but Moechtar held up a hand.
“I
believe you. But a skeptic—a defense lawyer doing his job, for instance—could argue it could have been
any
girl’s body you had in that cold room. You say the dead girl was disabled. Do you have any reliable witnesses?”

Oscar thought about Teddy Gillin, a disbarred doctor who spent his days half-shot at the racetrack. “No.”

“Then you tag the deceased as the stepdaughter of a prominent, well-respected barrister.”

“A DNA test—”

“And let’s for argument’s sake say Mr. Roth did agree to that, and you did get a DNA sample from the deceased Mrs. Roth, and it did match. So the burned skeleton we have back at Forensic Services is Penelope Roth. We can’t determine cause of death, let alone pursue a murder investigation. Now Detective de Rossa and a member of the public are dead as well. To say we’re worse off than we were two days ago is an understatement.”

Moechtar’s eyes were small, unblinking chips of stone.

He continued, “An inspector under pressure would be tempted to place the responsibility for those awful, avoidable deaths squarely at the feet of the supervising detective who should not have let his partner go out of hours to the premises of a man suspected of dealing contraband. An inspector who didn’t know better might ask, Why didn’t she have backup?”

The door opened and Susan Moechtar entered with coffee cups, milk, and sugar. Sensing the tension, she quickly left.

The greenhouse fell silent. The fog outside killed all noise. They could have been in a capsule under a white, careless sea. Moechtar sprayed the last plants in the row; the white and pink flowers of a dendrobium looked like fleshy fish disappearing into white supernovae. He put down his sprayer.

“Have you made any other headway?”

Oscar thought about it. Some speculation on the symbol, which itself was now no more than unofficial photographs that could have come from any body, anywhere, and a shattered piece of clayware that had no clear link to the charred bones now back where they started, at Forensic Services.

“Not really.”

“Motive?”

Oscar shook his head. “Something ritualistic, but I still don’t know.”

“Suspects?”

Oscar considered: Who had the authority to cow Neve into submission and relieve her of her firearm? Who could have made Dr. Tetlow disappear, and dump Lucas Purden’s tortured body in the river? He said, “I’d like to know where Geoffrey Haig was last night.”

Moechtar looked up. “Why?”

Oscar thought for a long moment. Haig had covered his trail; there was nothing more than veiled threats and shadows. Finally, he shook his head. He had nothing.

“Have you done your operational summary?”

“Neve finished it.”

“And how does it look?”

Oscar hadn’t read it. But he’d read Neve’s face.

“Let me ask it another way,” Moechtar said. “If you were me, would you allow the Nine-Ten Unit to continue?”

“No.”

Moechtar held out his hand for the return of his spray bottle. This informal meeting was nearing its conclusion.

“I expect to face quite a bit of insistence to stand you down, Oscar. The annoying thing is”—he removed his glasses to wipe them, and turned his unblinking gaze on Oscar—“I believe you were actually getting
somewhere. I believe you saved the cadaver with good reason. And I believe you’re right—she was Penelope Roth. Identifying her was no mean feat. And I’m sure there’s more you’re not saying. And don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. I listen too much, I get caught up in the thrill of policing.” He smiled at his own foolishness and replaced his glasses. “I received a report, an informal report, about your disturbance at a party recently. Apparently you were quite distressed, believing you’d witnessed a suicide.”

Oscar felt his stomach tighten. “Oh?”

“The gentleman involved spoke to me off the record, as I’m speaking to you. He was genuinely concerned about your well-being.”

Oscar pictured the counterterrorism sergeant who had been at Jon and Leonie’s apartment.

“That’s nice.”

“I’ve booked you in for a psychological assessment on Monday.” Moechtar watched him. “I trust you don’t object.”