The first time he’d shown up here, Oldrich had considered himself lucky to work somewhere so beautiful. He hadn’t minded that the desks on the second floor sat facing each other in claustrophobic, makeshift rows, or that, with the high ceiling and nothing to absorb the noise, the many sounds of the department—ringing phones, conversations, the clank of handcuffs, footsteps going every which way, the squeak of a chair’s legs against the tile—would every day seem to swell into a relentless cacophony that left him with a headache more often than not.
But those days were long behind him. Although his confidence had grown, so had his waistline. His hair had receded. He’d taken to wearing glasses to read and drive. At least the noise on the second floor no longer bothered him.
An hour had passed since he had spoken with Olivia. The file he had referred to when he talked to her was still on his desk. She had called right before lunch, and since he did not expect to find anything useful in it, he had decided to eat first.
He opened the folder. As he browsed through the contents, he found himself thinking that this was about as much of an open-and-shut case as he had ever seen. There was only one thing about it that bothered him (he remembered now it had bothered him at the time, as well): Nothing had ever been dusted for fingerprints. Not even the knife Heather had been stabbed with. But that’s just the way it was with a case like this. No need to run it, the chief of police had said. Forensics had been backlogged for months in those days, and they’d had to prioritize the cases where there wasn’t a clear perpetrator.
He wondered if they still had any of the evidence they had collected from that room.
Oldrich took the elevator down to the basement. Here, the building transformed. It no longer presented itself as a part of the grand architecture that made Prague so beautiful. With cinderblock walls and low-hanging fluorescent lights, it was as utilitarian as the blocks of cement housing that had been erected in the name of communism on the outskirts of the city.
He followed the hallways past a boiler room and a janitor’s closet. The evidence locker was behind the last door on the left. He used his badge to buzz himself in. A uniformed officer so young he might have just stopped wearing diapers manned a desk on the other side. Behind him were rows of metal shelves lined with boxes.
“Got a case I want to check into,” he said.
The young officer, who was preoccupied by something on his phone, hardly looked up. He tapped one finger on the clipboard that was sitting on the desk.
Oldrich knew the protocol. He signed the log, registered the case number he was looking into, and the kid was supposed to go get the related boxes for him. It was about maintaining control of the evidence, knowing exactly what came in and what went out. But after Oldrich signed the clipboard, the kid mumbled, “Go on, get what you need.”
Oldrich grumbled to himself about the kid’s attitude, but didn’t bother to say anything. There were a lot of officers on the force like him. Part of it was because many of them—especially the younger officers—felt like the city didn’t pay enough. Some, for the same reason, took the occasional bribe.
That’s not why you get into a job like this.
He already knew the boxes were labeled by case number and that the cases were in order. He browsed to one labeled RA143352-054, carried it over to a small table in the back of the room, and opened it. There wasn’t much inside. The blood-stained blouse Heather had been wearing. The knife that had been used to kill her. A bedside alarm clock that, the theory was, had been knocked to the floor during the struggle.
Although it hadn’t occurred to him at the time, when he looked back now, he realized forensics had done a piss-poor job of collecting evidence. Maybe, as backed up as they were, they’d known they weren’t ever going to test any of it.
He took out the knife, sealed in a plastic evidence bag, and sat down in the foldout metal chair facing the table. Would it be worth testing now?
What the hell? Why not? At least he could rest easy knowing he had been thorough. Oldrich had been a detective for all these years not because he hadn’t been offered promotions, but because he had turned them down. He liked what he did. And if he was going to do his job right, being thorough was part of it, even when it didn’t make any difference.
Oldrich pulled out his cellphone, called the forensics department. A perky young woman named Basia answered, and hearing her voice made him smile. The forensics department was across town, but he had seen her around his building a dozen or more times. If he was ten years younger, he’d thought more than once, he would ask her out.
Focus.
“What’s your turnaround time for a DNA analysis right now?”
“Two months, I think.”
“I’ve got an old case that’s resurfaced. Any chance I could get this prioritized?”
“What kind of case?”
“Murder. First degree.”
“How old?”
“Fifteen years,” Oldrich said as he put the phone on speaker and placed it on the table.
“That’s old. What makes it so important that you need it now?”
“There’s been an abduction.”
“Oh?”
Oldrich relayed the information Olivia had told him. As he spoke, he picked up the knife and, holding it at each end, turned it over. It was automatic, perhaps drilled into him from so many years of looking for clues. There were, of course, none he would find here with the naked eye. Still, he looked.
“Same people, huh?” Basia said.
“That’s right. Why?”
“It’s not my place
