He said, “The techs say they got a load done, anyway.”
“Good.” I leaned against the railings next to him and tried to get the coffee into me: one hint of a yawn and Cooper would boot me out the door. “How did the patrol floaters do?”
“Grand, I think. They picked up a few cars coming into the estate, but all the plates checked out to Ocean View addresses: just people heading home. A bunch of teenagers met up in one of the houses down the other end from us, brought a couple of bottles with them, played their music loud. Around half past two there was a car going around and around, slow, but it was a woman driving and she had a baby crying in the back, so the lads figured she was trying to get it to sleep. That was the lot.”
“You’re satisfied that if someone dodgy had been prowling around, they’d have spotted him?”
“Unless he was really lucky, yeah. I’d say so.”
“No more media?”
Richie shook his head. “I thought they’d be going after the neighbors, but nah.”
“Probably off looking for loved ones to hassle; juicier stuff there. It looks like the press office has them under control, for now anyway. I had a quick skim of the early editions: nothing we didn’t already know, and nothing about Jenny Spain being alive. We won’t be able to keep that to ourselves much longer, though. We need to get our hands on this guy fast.” Every front page had run with a howl-sized headline and an angelic blond shot of Emma and Jack. We had a week, two at the outside, to get this guy before we turned into worthless incompetents and the Super turned into a very unhappy camper.
Richie started to answer, but a yawn cut him off. “Get any sleep?” I asked.
“Nah. We talked about doing shifts, but the countryside’s bleeding
“Too creepy for you?”
Richie gave me a wry sideways grin. “I managed not to crap my kacks. Even if it’d been quiet, I wanted to be awake. In case.”
“I’d have been the same. How are you doing?”
“All right. A bit wrecked, like, but I’m not gonna crash out halfway through the post-mortem or anything.”
“If we get you a couple of hours’ kip somewhere along the way, can you take another night?”
“Little more of this”-he tilted the coffee cup-“and yeah, sure I can. Same as last night, yeah?”
“No,” I said. “One of the definitions of insanity, my friend, is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for different results. If our man could resist the bait last night, he can resist it tonight. We need better bait.”
Richie’s head turned towards me. “Yeah? I thought ours was pretty decent. Another night or two and I’d say we’ll have him.”
I raised my cup to him. “Vote of confidence appreciated. But the fact is, I misjudged our boy. He’s not interested in us. Some of them can’t stay away from the cops: they insert themselves into the investigation every way they can find, you can’t turn around without tripping over Mr. Helpful. Our guy isn’t like that, or we’d have him by now. He doesn’t give a damn what we do, or what the Bureau lads do. But you know what he’s
“The Spains?”
“Ten points for you. The Spains.”
“We haven’t got the Spains, but. I mean, Jenny, yeah, but-”
“But even if Jenny was able to help us out, I want to keep her under wraps for as long as I can. True enough. What we do have, though, is Whatshername, that floater-what
“Oates. Detective Janine Oates.”
“Her. You may not have noticed this, but from a distance, in the right context, Detective Oates could quite probably pass for Fiona Rafferty. Same height, same build, same hair-Detective Oates’s is a lot neater, luckily, but I’m sure she could mess it up if we asked her to. Get her a red duffle coat and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not that they’re actually anything alike, but to spot that you’d have to get a proper look, and for that, you’d need a decent vantage point and your binoculars.”
Richie said, “We clear out at six again, she drives up-have we got a yellow Fiat in the pool, yeah?”
“I’m not sure, but if we don’t, we can just have a marked car drop her off. She goes into the house and spends the night doing whatever she thinks Fiona Rafferty would do, as obviously as possible-wandering around looking distraught with the curtains open, having a read of Pat and Jenny’s papers, that kind of thing. And we wait.”
Richie drank his coffee, with an unconscious grimace on each sip, and considered that. “You think he knows who Fiona is?”
“I think there’s a damn good chance he does, yeah. Remember, we don’t know where he came into contact with the Spains; it could have been somewhere that involved Fiona too. Even if it wasn’t, she may not have been out here in a few months, but for all we know he’s been watching them for a lot longer than that.”
On the horizon the outline of low hills was starting to take shape, darker against darkness. Somewhere beyond them, the first light was moving up the sand in Broken Harbor, seeping into all those empty houses, into the emptiest one of all. It was five to six. I said, “Have you ever been to a post-mortem?”
Richie shook his head. He said, “There’s a first time for everyone.”
“There is, yeah, but it’s not usually like this. This is going to be bad. You should be there, but if you’re seriously not on for it, this is when you need to speak up. We can say you’re getting some kip after the stakeout.”
He crushed his paper cup into a wad and tossed it at the bin with a hard downward snap of his wrist. “Let’s go,” he said.
The morgue was in the hospital basement, small and low-ceilinged, with dirt and probably worse things ground into the grout between the floor tiles. The air was chilly and damp, motionless. “Detectives,” Cooper said, eyeing Richie with a faint anticipatory smirk. Cooper is maybe fifty, but in the tube lighting, against white tile and metal, he looked ancient: grayish and shriveled, like an alien stepped out of some hallucination, probes at the ready. “How nice to see you. We will begin, I think, with the adult male: age before beauty.” Behind him, his assistant-heavy build, stolid stare-pulled open a storage drawer with a horrible grating screech. I felt Richie brace his shoulders beside me, a tiny jerk.
They broke the seals on the body bag, unzipped it to reveal Pat Spain in his blood-stiffened pajamas. They photographed him clothed and naked, took blood and fingerprints, bent close while they picked at his skin with tweezers and clipped his fingernails for DNA. Then the assistant swung the instrument tray around to Cooper’s elbow.
Post-mortems are brutal things. This is the part that always catches rookies off guard: they expect delicacy, tiny scalpels and precision cuts, and instead they get bread knives sawing fast careless gashes, skin ripped back like sticky paper. Cooper at work looks more like a butcher than a surgeon. He doesn’t need to take care to minimize scarring, hold his breath making sure not to nick an artery. The flesh he works on isn’t precious any more. When Cooper is done with a body, no one else will need it, ever again.
Richie did well. He didn’t flinch when the pruning shears snapped Pat’s ribs open, or when Cooper folded Pat’s face downwards on itself, or when the skull saw sent up a thin acrid smell of scorched bone. The squelching sound when the assistant dumped the liver on the weighing scales made him jump, but that was all.
Cooper moved deftly and efficiently, dictating into the hanging mike and ignoring us. Pat had eaten a cheese sandwich and some crisps, three or four hours before he died. Traces of fat in his arteries and around his liver said he should have been getting fewer crisps and more exercise, but overall he had been in good shape: no illnesses that showed, no abnormalities, a long-ago broken collarbone and thickened ears that could have been rugby injuries. I said quietly, to Richie, “Healthy man’s scars.”
Finally Cooper straightened, stretching his back, and turned to us. “To summarize,” he informed us, with satisfaction, “my preliminary statement at the scene was correct. As you will remember, I posited that the cause of death was either this wound”-he prodded the gash in the middle of Pat Spain’s chest with his scalpel-“or this one.” A poke to the slit below Pat’s collarbone. “In point of fact, each of these was potentially fatal. In the first, the blade
