The Broken Ones (36 page)

Three dead matches. Three missing girls. Frances White, missing almost a month, surely dead. Penny Roth, a stack of black bones back at Forensic Services. Taryn Lymbery, missing.

The thought of Taryn’s photograph made his throat go tight—a beautiful, simple thing with thick glasses and a trusting smile. Would she turn up, like Penny Roth, with a hideous symbol carved with an artist’s hand into her belly? No. Penny’s discovery in the auger was a mistake. Haig wouldn’t let that happen again. Taryn’s body would simply disappear.

And Paul Roth? Even Chaume, his richest client, disliked him.

Haig had means. Roth had money. Yet neither had motive. He could picture neither researching the gods of ancient Persia that birthed the foul symbol carved on Penny Roth’s belly. And neither fitted the description of the old man with the ponytail who commissioned the sculptress Florica to make the grotesque idol. With Penny Roth’s flesh now crisped and cindered, the hideous clay idol—now broken just as thoroughly as Penny had been—was the last, tenuous link bearing the symbol.

He thought about the studio behind the incinerated brothel. There had to be more clues. There had to be something he’d missed.

Oscar stubbed out the cigarette, poured his unfinished wine back into the bottle, and grabbed his keys.

It took imagination and some stubborn staring to picture the street as an exclusive row of doctors’ offices and boutique art galleries. In crisp daylight, the narrow lane looked smaller than it had at night, its
buildings more conspiratorial, the rubbish slumped on its footpaths and caught in rusting fence wires more rotted and offensive. Even the sodden pile of ash mud where he’d found the idol seemed unremarkable–just another building, like hundreds in the city, that had burned to the ground.

He parked his car and found curved triangles of glass at the spot where Dalmar had smashed the bottle into his head. He walked slowly to the middle of the lane and looked around, squinting against the rare sunlight. He felt like a man in a small canyon, flanked by gully walls and washes. He turned slowly, a full circle. Nothing moved. Windows were closed or boarded up. No one came out to ask him for money.

Oscar knocked on half a dozen doors. No answer.

He went back to the car and leaned, his arms resting on the roof and his chin nestled on his hands. He cleared his mind and let his eyes roam where they wished.

Just a narrow street. Dark buildings, dirty fences. He forced his body to remain still, his mind to fall quiet. Just look.

Details began to become clear. Someone had jammed a rock up the storm-water pipe in the gutter, and leaves and twigs had accreted behind it. A nail had been driven into the mortar of a nearby building, and a bottle cap hung off it. Tiny white bones, maybe a rat’s, lay picked clean near a sooty patch tucked in a doorway—someone’s fire spot, out of the wind, where they’d cooked dinner.

Blink
.

Oscar felt his heart skip.

He looked up. Something at the top of his vision had blinked red.

He stared, forcing himself to be patient.

Blink
.

And there it was.

Twenty-five feet off the ground, a galvanized-steel arm struck out from a light pole. At its end was, of course, a streetlamp—its Perspex cover hung loose, its bulb gone. But there was something else attached to the galvanized arm: a tiny inverted dome, tinted a dark gray. A CCTV camera. Oscar stared at the dome.

Blink
. A tiny red light.

Most of the cameras in the city had been taken down—there were simply no municipal funds to monitor or service them.

Blink
.

It was working.

A nearby terrace house had a window nearly the same level as the camera. He went to that building’s front door. It had a frosted-glass panel, etched with the logo of a now defunct graphic-design company. He knocked on the glass and waited. No answer. He knelt and peered through the letterbox slot in the door. It looked directly onto a set of carpeted stairs rising into semidarkness. On the stairs was the shadowed form of a large dog.

“Hello, puppy,” he called nervously.

The dog didn’t move.

Oscar found his flashlight in his jacket and shined it through the brass slot. The light glistered off the glazed surface of the ceramic Doberman. He imagined a dozen would-be thieves doing just as he’d done, only without the flashlight, and being dissuaded from entering by the shape of the guard dog.

Oscar pulled out his plastic library card, leaned his weight against the door, and jiggled the bent plastic against the lock tongue, hoping the owner hadn’t deadbolted the door. With a satisfying click, the lock tongue cleared the mortise and the door opened.

Oscar stepped onto a pile of letters, the bottommost yellow and curled with age. The ground floor was office space: two desks, a small meeting table. Bars on the windows. Oscar climbed the stairs and went through a blue door. A narrow living room; flat-screen TV; bookshelves with brassware, including a sextant and a diving helmet; a ghost-faint tang of spoilage coming from the kitchen, where a puddle in front of the fridge had crusted and peeled. He climbed an even narrower set of stairs to the third floor. A bathroom, a linen press, and a bedroom overlooking the street. The bed was unmade: a rumpled mess of sheets that were once white but were now cobweb-gray under fine dust. A drinking glass on the floor, and three empty blister packs of tablets. Ahead was the window Oscar had seen from the street. A pair of curtains hung lank, parted just enough to allow light to fall on the mummified remains of a woman. She sat in a chair, her hands on her lap. Her hair cascaded over her shoulder, and her sunken, dry face peered up at a water stain on the ceiling. Her legs were thin leather over dangling bone. As Oscar got closer, he saw something that made his heart sag. Off the bedroom was a walk-in wardrobe; on its doorway architrave
hung a baby bouncer: a clamp from which suspended a lightweight chain, a spring, and a harness. In the harness was a tiny little skeleton, dressed in pink.

Oscar went to the window and drew wide the curtain.

From here he had an almost clear view of the lot. The light pole was only a few yards away, and the window was almost level with the lamp arm and its gray teardrop camera housing, shiny as mica.

Blink
.

Oscar hurried downstairs to the bookshelves. Among the nautical bric-a-brac was a replica ship’s telescope. He held it to his eye and saw a disorienting, enlarged view of the reversed window logo. He returned to the bedroom window, extended the eyepiece, and focused on the security camera.

Tiny print was wrapped around the top of the Perspex dome: “Astor Security Pty Ltd. For service or repair …”

Oscar wrote down the address.

Chapter
25

A
matter-of-fact chrome plaque declared this to be the address of Astor Security. The gray building was squeezed between a boarded-up nightclub and a boarded-up electrical wholesaler.

There were two doors: a painted steel entry door and a closed shutter just wide enough to admit a car. Oscar ran a shoe sole over the doorstep. It made no mark. Compared with the patina of dust on the nightclub’s step, Astor’s front stoop was spotless. Someone was going in and out. Beside the plaque was an intercom panel with a glass lens. He pressed the button.

There was a long pause. Then a deep voice: “Astor Security.”

Oscar showed his badge to the glass lens.

Another pause.

A buzz. A click. He pushed inside.

“Oh, God, please don’t tell anyone.”

The man’s name was Stuart. He was short, had a melon belly, and his hair had been dyed an unnaturally vigorous brown and was frozen by mousse into an architectural cantilever over his round face. Stuart’s eyes were a freakish violet—contact lenses, Oscar realized—and were wide with apprehension so sharp that it bordered on terror.

“Why not?” Oscar said. “You answered the door.”

“Yes, but no one’s rung the door in years.” Stuart waddled along rich, charcoal carpet through a reception paneled in brushed stainless steel and granite and into a control room that smelled of good coffee. A bank of LCD monitors surrounded the desk. In a far corner was a very comfortable-looking single bed.

“Well,
idiots
have rung,” Stuart corrected himself. “At first, all the religious nuts. Then the
anti
-religious nuts. Then the looters. I’m not worried, the door is steel. But if I
am
worried—” He leaned into a microphone and hit a switch; his voice boomed out of hidden speakers in a gravelly basso: “Leave right now or I’m authorized to remove you from the premises.” Stuart switched off the mic. “And if I’m
really
worried, I have this.” He opened a drawer and let Oscar peek inside. Beside a set of keys and a small box of tissues was a huge chromed revolver.

“Forty-four Taurus,” Oscar said. “Very Clint of you.”

Stuart shrugged, pleased. “Coffee?”

“Real coffee?”

“Of course.”

While Stuart poured, Oscar studied the security-camera monitors. There were five large screens, and each was divided into quadrants showing views from different cameras. The images scrolled through, sometimes coming up with black rectangles where, Oscar guessed, the camera had broken down or been ripped out.

“So, Stuart,” Oscar said, “does Astor Security know you’re here?”

The small man laughed nervously.

“Well, you could say they do. You could
argue
it.” He handed Oscar coffee. It smelled divine. Stuart sat in his Herman Miller chair, and Oscar noted that the fellow wore expensive trousers, Italian boots, and a pinkie ring.

“They keep paying you,” Oscar said. They didn’t just keep paying him: they kept paying him
well
. “An oversight?”

Stuart’s neck grew red. “I’m doing my job. It’s not my fault if they can’t keep their paperwork straight.”

The average wage fell by more than seventy percent over the six months following Gray Wednesday, and never recovered. If slip-through-the-cracks Stuart was being paid at his old rate, he was raking in a small fortune.

“And what happens if you see a crime?”

Stuart reached for a telephone. “I dial the Mobile Support Team.”

“And do they answer?”

Stuart blushed and slurped his coffee.

Oscar pulled out his notepad and showed Stuart the number he’d transcribed from the side of the CCTV camera overlooking the burned-down brothel. “Is this camera still up?”

Stuart flicked a switch and a tiny beam of light shone down onto his keyboard. He moved the notepad into the light and typed in the number.

On the center monitor appeared the streetlamp’s view of the street Oscar had not long left. The camera was framed primarily on the auction house but also captured a good view of the cinder-covered block next door.

“Oh, yeah.” Stuart nodded, recognizing the image. “I used to like this one.”

Because it had afforded the occasional licentious glimpse of call girls, Oscar guessed.

“How long do you keep the tapes?”

Stuart shook his head. “No tapes. All digital.” He cracked tiny knuckles. “The whole system has a capacity of about four months. Then the oldest files are overwritten automatically.”

Oscar said, “Let’s go back five weeks.”

Stuart glanced at Oscar. “I hope you don’t expect hi-res goodness. Our cameras’ default sample rate is one frame every three seconds.”

Stuart pressed buttons, and suddenly the image onscreen changed. Where before there had been black mud and burned posts, there now stood a two-story Colonial building with a set of stairs, filigree iron tracework on an upper balcony, and a narrow lane running down one side. To Florica’s workshop, Oscar thought. A red glowing sign above the brothel door proclaimed: 1001 N
IGHTS
. The shop window next to that door was whitewashed, but Oscar could still read the word “Gallery.”

“Now what?” Stuart asked.

“Play it through a bit.”

Stuart’s fingers moved. The image onscreen shifted, and figures moved even faster than the black-and-white jerkings of an old silent movie. Men sauntered at comic speed, some arriving, some loitering, some leaving. The footpath would fall empty, then someone might run through like a flash. Car headlights came and went like tiny meteors. The door to the brothel would wink, revealing a ruby glow inside and the curved shapes of women in short dresses and high heels.