The Dead Room

She slung a clean towel over her shoulder and carried the ball of sweaty clothes over to the hamper near the sink. She undid the rubber band holding her hair together and caught her reflection in the mirror. Her gaze shifted to a thin but hard white scar peeking out from the greasepaint above her fake cheekbone. The implant had replaced the bone shattered by Traveler’s axe.

Darby wet the towel and began to scrub the greasepaint from her face. Coop stared at her. Their eyes locked in the mirror.

‘Nice six pack,’ he said.

Darby looked at the sink, felt her throat close up. Not from the compliment but from this awkward feeling she’d been experiencing lately – the way Coop’s voice hung inside her chest at the end of the day. Sometimes she caught herself thinking about him when she was alone in her condo. Coop was the closest thing she had to family – the only thing, really, since her mother had died. Darby wondered if this newfound feeling she had for him had something to do with the fact he was being headhunted for a new job. Coop had been approached by a London forensics company that was making new technological advances with fingerprints – his area of expertise.

‘What’s the latest from London?’ she asked.

‘They increased their offer.’

‘Are you going to accept?’

‘Say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘Say you’ll miss me.’

‘Everyone will miss you.’

‘You especially, though. I’ll leave and you’ll lock yourself inside that fancy Beacon Hill condo of yours and listen to John Mayer while drowning your sorrows in Irish whiskey.’

‘Don’t every say that again.’

‘That you’re going to miss me?’

‘No, that I listen to John Mayer.’ Darby grabbed a clean towel from her locker. ‘I need to take a quick shower. Give me five minutes.’

‘Take your time, Dirty Harry.’

4

Darby wanted to get a handle on the crime scene before she reached Belham. She called Artie Pine half a dozen times while driving out of Boston and each time she got his voicemail. On the last call she left a message.

WBZ, Boston’s twenty-four-hour all-news radio station, had the ‘breaking story’. The twenty-second prerecorded audio spot, courtesy of an on-scene reporter, offered up only vague details: ‘A Belham woman and her son were victims in what police are calling a botched home invasion. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and the son is listed in critical condition at a Boston hospital. Belham police won’t release the names of the victims, but a source close to the investigation called it “grisly and horrific, the worst I’ve ever seen”.’

The story ended and switched to the local weather report. More rain and more oppressive humidity. People were running their air-conditioners day and night, putting a drain on the state’s electric grid. A spokesman told people to expect more blackouts.

Half an hour later Darby pulled the crime scene vehicle, a navy-blue Ford Explorer, on to Marshall Street. Residents crowded the pavements around the cul-de-sac, flashing blue and white lights flickering on their faces as they stared across the roofs of three cruisers parked at the end of a driveway leading up to a massive white Colonial home with a wraparound farmer’s porch and an attached three-car garage. Only the middle door was open.

An antique-style lantern light was mounted on each side of the home’s front door. The same lights had been installed on the garage. A wooden fence at least seven feet high separated the driveway and a basketball court from the backyard.

The driveway had been taped off. Darby parked against the kerb, got out and lifted her kit out of the back. All the shades had been drawn on windows facing the street.

Coop moved across the trimmed front lawn, lugging his kit. Michael Banville from the Photography Unit, a big bear of a man who had a permanent case of five o’clock shadow, stood on the porch near the front door, dressed head to toe in a heavy-duty white Tyvek coverall.

Darby turned on her flashlight and made her way to the edge of the lawn to examine the driveway. Bloody footprints gleamed in the bright beam of light. She placed evidence cones next to one.

‘Don’t bother,’ Banville called from the porch. ‘The EMTs left them on the driveway, the walkway and the front steps.’

Must be a hell of a lot of blood in there, Darby thought. She placed her kit on the grass and, watching where she stepped, made her way to the garage.

No cars inside, just mountain bikes and a John Deere ride-on mower. Dark stains on the floor. Motor oil, she thought, until she moved the beam of her light and saw bloody footprints. A single set made by a narrow shoe – a sneaker or running shoe, judging by the shape of the tread marks.

In the back of the garage she found blood smeared against a set of wooden steps leading up to a door.

‘When the queen shows up,’ a man said from behind the fence, ‘are we supposed to bow down and kiss her ass?’

‘When you get a good look at her you’ll want to do more than kiss her ass,’ a different male voice replied. ‘You’ll want to bury your face between her thighs and not come up for air. You ever see her up close?’

‘I’ve seen her on the news a few times,’ the first man said. ‘Looks like that English actress that always makes my pecker stand up at full attention and bark – the one from those Underworld movies, Christ, what’s her name?’

‘Kate Beckinsale.’

A snap of fingers. ‘That’s the one,’ the first man said. ‘The McCormick broad is the spitting image of her but has that nice dark red hair. Wouldn’t mind running my fingers through that while she’s on her knees giving me a blow-e.’

Laughter all around.

Darby shrugged off the comments. She had learned early on that a good majority of men viewed women as nothing more than sexual objects – receptacles solely designed to satisfy a biological urge and nothing more. Pump em and dump em was the phrase she’d overheard around the station, when her male counterparts thought she was safely out of earshot.

‘Listen up, boyos.’

Artie Pine’s voice sounding older, deeper and raspy – a voice ragged from too many cigars, too many late nights and booze. Hearing it brought her back to the long Saturday afternoon barbecues her father had thrown every other weekend right up until he was shot a few months shy of her thirteenth birthday. Pine, a big bowling ball with feet, would sit in a lawn chair and smoke what her father called ‘fives-and-tens’ – cheap dime-store cigars rolled into thin wrappers the size of a pencil, the odour so bitter and pungent it scared away the mosquitoes after the sun went down. Pine would sit in the chair all day, smoking and drinking and telling stories to an audience that always ended with wild eruptions of knee-slapping laughter. He’d ask kids to fetch him another beer from the cooler and always gave them a folded dollar bill.

‘That’s Big Red’s little girl you’re talking about,’ Pine said. ‘When she gets here, make sure you show her the proper respect.’

Darby shut off the flashlight. She made her way back to the front and saw bright camera lights from far across the street. Belham police had corralled the small media crowd behind sawhorses.

Coop stood on the porch talking to Banville. Darby examined the bloody footwear impressions on the blue- stone walkway. Two different sets of footprints. They matched the ones on the driveway.

She joined them and said, ‘The footprints on the walkway and driveway are different from the single set I