The mess of paperwork had only one consistent feature: a photograph that always peeked over a stack of old reports in the corner. The visible part of the photograph showed two little girls, each somberly staring at him over the reports as though hiding. Somewhere in the bottom of the photograph, concealed by the paperwork, was Garvey’s ex-wife, seated before the girls and smiling. Some days Garvey felt the urge to lift the paperwork away and to show her as well. On others he felt like piling more on and covering up the photograph entirely so they could not see what he had to deal with each day. But mostly he did nothing, and so his two little girls remained there, yellowing and watchful, and somehow reproachful as he did his day’s work.
That day had dragged on after the morning at the canal, a slow slog of repetitious conversations with starved men and women with sunken eyes. Now at the end he documented it all, scrawling down the essentials, ensuring that they became an immortal part of the Evesden Police Department’s filing system.
He took out a small pad and read what he had written there to remind himself. Then he looked up and scanned the wealth of misery at his fingertips and selected the appropriate report and opened it.
This one a trembling mother who had stabbed her daughter’s lover. The boy had clutched a balcony railing, a pair of knitting shears buried at the base of his neck. Mouth gaping like a fish, blood raining down on the street. Dozens of witnesses had seen her standing at the balcony door, howling obscenities at this terrified, dying thing, but few had stayed, and those who had did not wish to testify. Instead Garvey had spoken to her after. She had listened to him as he told her he understood perfectly, son of a bitch had it coming, why, I got two little girls of my own and if I’d been in your shoes…
At the end of the day she had been led to her cell, confident in his sympathy, assured that the world would turn out all right. He filled out her paperwork and set her judgment in motion. Fed her into the waiting doom that he created.
Garvey wrote it all down. All down.
His hand passed over another report. He remembered it from last May. A woman trampled in a stable, having been led there by a paranoid lover. The man had frightened the horses and then locked the door and leaned against it, trapping her inside. Garvey remembered the musty stink of manure and the scent of animal anxiety that had still sung in the air. He remembered her ribs broken and leaking, viscera pooling from her neck and hip. A jawbone so bloodless it was like old wood. Her killer had been found sobbing in an alley not more than a block away, urine snailing down both trouser legs. When Garvey had gotten ahold of him the trembling man could do no more than mewl “yes” or “no,” but it was all Garvey needed, or at least all that was required by the city of Evesden.
That had been an easy one. Fallen and filed in minutes, hours. Garvey wrote it down, wrote it all down, and as he added on to the report he went over the names in his head. The bronzed list on the Pit wall. Names of the dead, hanging tags and labels for things long since departed. It seemed there were so many these days.
He pulled open a drawer, fingers dancing along the edges of the tomes. He dug up an old report for a fellow detective. He had found a man with the corpse of a little girl in his arms, rocking gently back and forth in the blackened corner of a burned-down building, murmuring, “I just wanted something beautiful. I just wanted something beautiful.”
Garvey remembered it. He had been there. The girl’s dusty skin had been the color of ripe melon, and both their cheeks stained with ashes, like survivors of an immolated world. They could not determine how she had died, since the fracture in her skull could have been accidental. There had been no witnesses, and the man had seemed mad since, so they could not say what had happened, not with certainty. Perhaps he was simply a crazed vagrant who’d stumbled across her where she lay. But a day ago Garvey had tracked down a street vendor who’d heard that the suspect had been awful riled up for young pussy, yessir. Awful riled up, but when wasn’t he? And could you blame him? Could you, really?
Write it down, write it all down, he said to himself. If you don’t write it and file it, then it didn’t happen. Write and keep writing.
Another handful of pages, another memory. He remembered a little black newsie no older than sixteen, shot four times next to a newspaper stand. Keeled over with one hand clutched around the leg of the stand as if trying to anchor himself to life. He had held a sheet of newspaper over his face, trying to prevent passersby from witnessing his death. Some curbside Julius Caesar who considered his fellow man too common to see his passing.
They had not found his killer. It went unfiled. Still he wrote.
Then when Garvey was done he sat looking at this new report. John Doe, found floating in a man-made river, washed away like the other refuse of this city. There were only three pages of it so far. Almost nothing.
He wondered how Hayes would look at it. He probably wouldn’t even bother. That was what made him good, plus the mad gift that ate his brain alive, thought Garvey. But it also made him weak. He would look for the flash and the glitter, things that intrigued and teased him. But without it there was no point to the chase. No fun.
This was not fun. Nor was it meant to be.
“Garvey?” said a voice.
He looked up and saw Collins sidling over, his hangdog face somehow even deeper and sadder in the light of the table lamps. “What are you doing here?” he said. “This isn’t your shift.”
“No, Lieutenant,” said Garvey. “I’m just waiting. I’ve got a body downstairs. Gibson’s going to start in on it in a second.”
Collins shook his head and leaned over Garvey’s shoulder to read his paperwork. His lieutenant was a big man, broad in the shoulders with a walrus mustache, but his droopy, pessimistic demeanor often made people forget his size. On the rare moments when he showed his anger he suddenly seemed to swell up and tower over people. Whether they were errant detectives or babbling suspects, it often had dramatic effects.
“Always gets to me,” he said. “How you look. Most cops, they’d do anything to get away.”
“I know,” said Garvey.
“You think this one’s got any promise?”
Garvey helplessly lifted his hands and dropped them. “It’s a piece of shit.”
“Hm. No one likes a floater, that’s for sure. What about your spook? The blondie, did you bring him in?”
“Yeah. He didn’t have anything. Makes sense. If our boy was McNaughton he was definitely lower-level. Insignificant, I suppose.”
“I hate that little shit. I don’t see why you run around with him.”
“He gets bodies filed.”
“I still don’t like him,” said Collins. “He stinks of that goddamn company he works for.”
Garvey hesitated, tongue between his lips. “Lieutenant?”
“Yeah?”
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“This prioritization thing. I heard that came in from Brightly. You know, over at-”
“I know who he is,” said Collins sharply.
“Well. Is it true, sir?”
Collins eyed him sourly, hunching up his shoulders until the muscles bunched around his neck. His gin-blossom cheeks deepened in tint until they were nearly purple. “You know what, I’m going to suggest you put your attention elsewhere,” he said. He reached out and touched the files on his desk with one thick finger. “Maybe on this, eh? Does that sound agreeable to you?”