“Us?”
“Me. You’re helping me get Evan here to the lab without too much… deterioration.”
Lisa hooked an arm under each of Evan’s armpits while Emma lifted from the ankles. The result was that Evan slid down the chair until his hips were hanging inches above the floor. Emma tried to swing the body into the cooler, but it was too low and smacked ass-first into the side. She stopped to shake away the sensation that traveled up her arm of meat slapping plastic.
“A little higher, Lisa.”
They pulled up and out, raising Evan’s torso higher from the floor until he was over the cooler. They lowered him in with a muffled thud. His feet and arms hung out, and his head rolled along the edge of one plastic wall. The movement had wafted the smell around the room. A few hours dead, Evan still smelled like Evan. Less mildewing cadaver and more Lynx body spray and cheap booze.
Lisa kept her head turned so that she could only see what she was doing in her peripheral vision. “What are they going to do with him in Perth?”
Emma didn’t have a good answer. But that was never an excuse when it came to police work.
“Check for biological residue, gunpowder or blood spatter, anything that might indicate foul play.”
“Do you think they’ll find anything?” Lisa looked sideways at the body in the box.
“Maybe.” Probably not.
It was a polite fiction to send the body to a lab when it couldn’t be kept free from contamination. Emma told herself it was possible that some evidence might have escaped her, but it wasn’t very convincing. After a short delay, someone in Perth would confirm suicide as the cause of death.
The lab couldn’t give her an answer. Not one that would satisfy her. Technicians hunched over a centrifuge were not equipped to suss out who was to blame. And murderers didn’t disappear simply because there was no murder. The dispassionate, almost bored look on Lily’s face and the others in the station bothered her. In a village like this everyone ought to know everyone else’s business, but nobody seemed to know anything useful. There was something hiding from her. A fact, somewhere. There had to be.
“Help me get his legs in.”
They tucked Evan’s knees into his chest and pushed his feet inside the edge of the cooler. Then his arms were snugly folded into the space on either side of his torso. It took three tries to get his head into a position that allowed them to close the lid.
Emma stared down at the ordinary plastic cooler, orange with a white lid, covered in layers of indelible grime. She looked at Lisa’s shoes, hoping the other woman wouldn’t feel the need to say any words. She didn’t.
At least Evan would rot somewhere other than this place. Someplace with sunshine and squirrels. That would be more mercy than most of the people here would get.
Emma saw the future telescoping away from her into infinity. No matter how short her time on the island was supposed to be, there was no guarantee that the rest of her life would offer something better than this, if she even got that far. She imagined the prospect of spending the rest of her days with nothing to keep her company but her own thoughts, and her nerves sizzled in panic.
Lisa bent down to grab one corner of the cooler.
“I’ll push if you pull.”
Without a word Emma took a chain and began to pull the cooler out the station door. Its three functioning wheels squeaked while the fourth dragged along beside.
Emma tried not to think about what it looked like inside the box as they bumped their way down the cobbled street to the Post. The only building on the island that ever contained things that could be called valuable, the Post had a safe the size of a large closet. No one ever explained to her why it smelled the way it did, and she didn’t ask. But it had no openable windows and only one key, so it was the most reasonable place to store the body until a boat arrived.
Emma pulled the chain left and right around missing cobbles. At one point a large cavity in the road forced her to make a detour. She pulled to one side and one of the wheels sank into a hidden rut. The cooler came to an abrupt stop and both Lisa and Evan slammed forward with the same bumping sound, Lisa against the back of the cooler and Evan against the front.
“We need to back up a few inches.” Emma put her hands on the corners of the box and pushed it onto a smoother patch of road. She looked around to plan the safest possible route down the street.
To one side, by the church, was the body of a seagull. It struck her that she hadn’t seen many dead birds around the island. Then a skua landed and started pulling pieces off the corpse, scattering feathers. That explained it.
This one must have been very fresh, then, to be lying there in plain view. The skua flipped it over, exposing a pattern of almost blue-gray speckles down what would have been the seagull’s back.
Lisa pulled her back from her thoughts. “Aren’t we a funny pair of pall bearers?” Emma followed her eyes to the handful of observers who had come out for the promise of seeing a dead body. They didn’t lean and whisper but kept the same discrete distance from one another. Most looked disappointed. Emma wondered what gruesome thing they expected, since one or two had been among those who lately ransacked the station.
Don't stop. Don't slow down. Keep working. Do your job. It can't get you if you don't stop moving. Emma never asked herself what “it” was. It stalked her with purpose, but it moved slowly. She knew she could outrun it. This couldn’t be just the day she dragged a dead body down the
