clearly not a man planning to throw himself into a scrum. Joe’s eyes wandered around the office. It had a definite academic feel, but enough photos on the walls and odds and ends on the shelves to make it cosy.
‘Let’s go up to the lab and have a look at what you’ve brought,’ he said.
They made their way up two short flights of stairs onto a small landing. An arrow for the lab pointed right, but Neal gestured left.
‘Would you like to see our Rogues’ Gallery first?’
Joe looked at him.
‘The museum,’ said Neal.
‘That would be great,’ said Joe.
They walked through the doorway into the musty chemical air of the small museum. Joe was sucked back in time. Antique mahogany cabinets ran the length of each wall and a heavy mahogany counter sat on top of more cabinets at the centre of the room. Behind each door were shelves of stuffed animals and creatures suspended in jars of murky formaldehyde.
‘Take a guess,’ said Neal, stopping at one of the displays and covering the plaque. Inside, was a large round, delicate-looking object the colour of ginger root, with a strange bulbous growth at one side. Around the back, a hollow was carved out revealing a centre lined with a gaping honeycombed effect.
‘I have no clue,’ said Joe.
‘It’s a camel’s stomach. Those little pockets inside are where they store water.’
‘Wow. That’s not what I expected.’
Neal pointed to another jar in one of the cabinets. There was a long string of what looked like tagliatelle suspended in a greenish solution.
‘Do you eat black pudding?’ asked Neal.
‘Aw, don’t spoil that for me,’ said Joe.
‘Well, this guy is the reason you should always cook it thoroughly. Tapeworm. It’s a big fan of pigs.’
‘I’ll be nuking it from now on.’ Joe squinted into the jar. ‘That’s just way too long,’ he said, shaking his head.
When he turned around, Neal was pulling out trays from a drawer that smelt of wood and naphthalene. Rows of preserved insects were secured onto a cream backing by straight pins. Neal talked through the different species, then stopped eventually to check his watch.
‘OK. The lab,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting to go to. Remind me again what can I help you with.’
Joe lied for a living, but he was feeling a strange compulsion to be honest with Neal Columb. However, he knew he couldn’t. So his compromise was to start with the truth.
‘There’s a forest near my house. I found this empty pupal case there two nights ago. I guess I was just curious. I did a little entomology in college, back in the States, but I dropped out…I’m still fascinated by it, though, but not one hundred per cent clued in.’
Then he moved on to the lie.
‘There was a dead animal nearby and I wondered if it had anything to do with that. Or if you could maybe pinpoint the species of the fly and how long it’s been there, you know…’
‘OK,’ said Neal, reaching out for the small brown pill jar where Joe had put the pupal case. He slipped it under a dissecting microscope and peered in.
‘You’re absolutely right. It is, indeed, a fly pupal case. Now let’s see if we can put a name on the little fellow.’
He pulled out taxonomic guides and looked back and forth between them and the pupal case. Every now and then, he would stop and point something out to Joe. Eventually, he went to a cupboard packed with bottled insect specimens and brought out a jar that held a pupal case and larva, suspended in a formaldehyde solution.
‘Right,’ he said after an hour. ‘What you have is a
Joe nodded. ‘OK. And what would that mean in terms of life cycle…’ He trailed off, hoping Neal would just give him a time frame, so he could find something out that would help Shaun.
‘Well, bluebottles come to the body almost immediately. They have an extremely advanced radar for death. This, of course, won’t happen during the night, but it will during the day. So if your little fox or whatever was killed in the evening, the blow fly would be there the next morning, busily laying anything up to 300 eggs in one go, heading straight for the orifices or wound sites.’ He looked up at Joe. ‘I’m doing it again, telling you things you already know. So I’ll get down to it. Basically taking into account what you’ve told me, I’d say this would mean that your little creature died about twenty days before you found this.’
Joe hesitated. ‘Thanks.’ He tried to hide his disappointment. This put Katie’s death back to the night of her disappearance when the last person to see her alive apart from her killer was poor Petey Grant and before that – Shaun. He threw the pupal case in the bin as he walked back through the campus. His anger he understood, but the emotion that came out of nowhere hitting him like a slap, was an unfamiliar sense of embarrassment.
‘I meant to tell you,’ said Frank, ‘before Shaun was called in yesterday, Joe Lucchesi was here with some new information.’
‘That’s convenient,’ said Richie.
‘Come on now. Our job is to take it all in. Joe was concerned because he thinks someone from a previous case back in New York could be out to get him and went through Katie to do it. Joe shot someone dead last year – that’s not common knowledge – and the man’s friend has just got out of prison and could possibly have come over here.’
Frank watched how Richie’s eyes would glaze over if the conversation stretched to more than a few sentences. His right eye would turn out slightly, then in again as he came back to reality.
‘Why does Joe think that?’ he said eventually.
‘Well, in fairness to the man, he found some evidence outside Danaher’s the other night that was a direct link to the original shooting.’
‘Wow,’ said Richie after thinking it through. ‘That’s weird. There could be something to this.’
Frank strained to find the sarcasm until he realised there was none. He could not understand Richie. One minute he was one way, the next minute he was another. He clung to each new development as if it was a single unit. Whoever was attached to that development was, by Richie’s rationale, a suspect. Suspects walked in and out of his sights accordingly: Petey, Shaun, Joe, Duke Rawlins…
Frank was about to remark on this, give a weights and measures speech, but he was too tired for a head-on collision with the spiky young guard. Instead, he filled him in on more details and left.
Anna was sitting on the sofa with her glasses on, reading a book. Her legs were stretched out onto the low coffee table. Joe walked in and sat beside her. He grabbed the remote control, flicking channels on the muted TV.
‘So you’re not going to tell me anything,’ Anna said. ‘Our son has been lying to us, you’ve been keeping things from me…’
‘Not this again.’
‘Yes, this again. We don’t just talk when it suits you, Joe. This is serious. He lied.’
‘Shaun’s sixteen. He was scared. The last thing you’re gonna do is tell any grown-up that you were having sex, let alone your parents and a bunch of cops.’
She stared at him.
‘What?’ he said. ‘You’ve never lied to your parents?’
‘You were never arrested for murder,’ she hissed. ‘Are you crazy?’
He stood up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
Oran Butler and Keith Twomey sat in an unmarked squad car outside Healy’s Carpet Warehouse. Two other
