Cardha’s flat lay. He turned off the main road into a small set of apartment buildings, then took another turn and found his way blocked by an ambulance.
“Inspector — we were just sending for you,” yelled a voice from the other side of the ambulance.
It belonged to Robertson, the constable who had changed the nappies on the Mackay child.
“What’s going on here, Sergeant?” he asked the constable.
“Another suicide, looks like, Inspector, according to the ambulance people. Been dead since sometime last night, they think.” Robertson frowned deeply and shook his head. Handling three deaths in less than a week might rate as a record for a constable in the Inverness Command Area as far back as the war.
“Wouldn’t be at 212?” said Gorrie.
“It is, sir. A Cardha Duff, going by the license. Not a good photo.”
“Rarely are,” Gorrie told him, walking up toward the building.
The thing that struck Gorrie immediately was that Cardha Duff could in no way be considered beautiful, especially in comparison to Claire Mackay. Few people looked good in death, and this woman looked especially bad, her nose and eyes swollen red, her mouth frozen in what might have been an agonized shout for help. But even allowing for all that, it was clear that she offered no challenge to Ed Mackay’s wife in the looks department. The most attractive thing about her was her red hair, which even Gorrie, no expert, could tell spent most of the week frizzed into unmanageable odds and ends.
Just now the hair lay matted to one side of her head, a twisted dirty tangle that pointed away from her ghost-white face. Cardha Duff’s body sprawled face-up in front of a TV, a few feet from the couch. Her left arm lay out as if in supplication. She had a bandage at the inside joint of the elbow; she’d obviously given blood the day before she died.
A final act of charity before death.
“Has forensics been called?” Gorrie asked the constable who’d been watching the door.
“On the way, sir. Sergeant Robertson took care of it straightaway.”
The ambulance people stood at the side of the room, waiting to hear what they should do. Gorrie wanted to know how the body was when they found it; they assured him they’d only moved it a little, ascertaining she was dead.
“The neighbor, she saw us,” volunteered the driver.
“Which neighbor was that, son?”
“Gray-haired woman, Mrs. Peters. 213. She thought something was amiss because she didn’t answer to the knock. Came in with us.”
Gorrie nodded. “Now tell me why you think it’s a suicide.”
“Pills on the floor, one near the radiator and another under the sink,” said the other attendant quickly. She had a stud in her nose and spoke with a Lowlands accent — Gorrie wasn’t sure which prejudiced his mind worse.
“And how d’you know that, lass?”
“I’m not your lass now, am I?” She’d flushed, though, and Gorrie waited her out. “I went to use the john and I saw it. I didn’t touch a thing. Not a thing,” she said finally.
“How long have you been on the job?” he asked her.
“A few weeks. What is it to you?”
Gorrie went to the bathroom. Though the scene was now obviously contaminated, he used a pencil to flick on the light, peered in a moment, then lowered himself to his knees and looked around. He could see a small capsule below the edge of the towel rack, near the molding and radiator. Another sat below the baseboard casing.
Cold capsules, he thought, but the lads at the lab would be able to tell. Best to leave them to be photographed for position.
If they were cold medicine, most likely they would match the bottle at the bottom of the empty waste bin — Talisniff. Wife used to give him that for the sniffles. There was another bottle of tiny pills that seemed to be for a thyroid condition, along with the usual feminine paraphernalia.
“Wait in the ambulance would you, both of you,” the inspector told the attendants. “Don’t go until I release you — myself, no one else.”
They would end up staying well past dinner, and Gorrie would feel sorry for being so peevish.
SEVEN
Pete Nimec felt a hand touch his shoulder, and came awake at once. In his home, always within quick reach of a weapon, he could succeed at something more than light sleep. Now he straightened up with a start that jostled his sling seat on its rail.
He blinked away scraps of a horrendous dream brought on by fatigue: Gordian dead on a concrete floor, the killer who’d butchered four of Tom Ricci’s men in the Ontario raid standing over him.
In his dream, the killer had again done his bloody work like a precision machine, but the savage pride in his eyes was all too human.
Nimec tried to imagine how Ricci had been affected by Ontario, imagine what private anguish it had left him to wrestle down in the depths of night.
He took a breath to relax and settled into the canvas webbing of his seat. Master Sergeant Barry, a loadmaster with the Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing — and more specifically, its flying component, the 139th Tactical Squadron — stood before him in the cabin of the Hercules ski bird. He was mouthing words Nimec couldn’t hear.
Nimec held up a finger to indicate he needed a second, then popped out the foam earplugs he was given at the Clothing Distribution Center in Christchurch.
The ceaseless noise and vibration of the engines throbbed into his auditory canals.
Barry leaned forward, cranking his voice above the racket. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Nimec. Captain Evers is a huge booster of UpLink International, and he’d like to show you the view from the flight deck. This close to touchdown it’s really impressive.”
Nimec was relieved. He’d been ready to learn they’d boomeranged again. Air travel from New Zealand to Antarctica took eight hours by turboprop, slightly under that if you caught a nice tailwind. The previous day a heavy fog over the continent had forced his flight to double back just short of the point of safe return — about sixty degrees south, two thirds of the way there — resulting in seven wasted hours in the sky. The day before that one wasn’t quite as bad; his plane had returned to Cheech only an hour out.
Nimec looked up at the young loadie. The Herc’s cargo hold was a crude, bare space designed for maximum tonnage rather than comfort, windowless except for a few small portholes at the front and rear. He felt as if he’d gotten stuffed into the barrel of a rumbling cement mixer.
“Tell me the deck’s got soundproofing,” he said. “Please.”
“New acoustical panels, sir—”
“Lead the way.”
Nimec rose stiffly in his cold-weather gear. The red wind parka, jump suit, goggles, mittens, bunny boots, and thermal undergarments were his own, as were the extras in his packs. At the terminal prior to departure, loaners had been issued to passengers whose clothing and equipment hadn’t met the emergency survival specs mandated by the CDC under the United States Antarctic Program’s rule book.
The same guidelines had required Nimec to be physically qualified before leaving San Jose. This meant a complete medical checkup, which included bending over an examining table for a latex-gloved finger probe, that truest and most humbling of equalizers. He’d also needed to visit the dentist, who’d replaced a loose filling and informed him he was charmed to have already gotten his wisdom teeth yanked, since no one could be PQ’d with any still rooted in his mouth. Because medical facilities on the continent were thinly spread — and pharmaceutical stores limited — a minor health problem like an impacted molar or gum infection could easily become the sort of crisis that required an evac in perilous weather. It was a dreaded scenario that USAP took great pains to
