“What? Yes—oh, hey. Hi. Hello?”
I’m waving my hands, both hands over my head, here comes someone I recognize. It’s the tough reservist who was guarding the brig when I came to interview Derek, the woman in camouflage who waited impassively in the hallway while I tried to get some sense out of him.
“Hey,” I say. “I need to see the prisoner.”
She marches right over to us, to where I’m standing, halfway out of the car, the car in park, stopped at a crazy angle, engine running, by the entrance gatehouse. “Excuse me? Hi. I need to see that prisoner again. I’m sorry, I don’t have an appointment. It’s urgent. I’m a policeman.”
“What prisoner?”
“I’m a detective.” I stop, take a breath. “What did you say?”
She must to have known I was here, must have seen the car pull up in a monitor or something, and come out to the gate. The thought is strangely chilling.
“I said, what prisoner?”
I stop talking, look from the reservist to the gatehouse guard. They’re both standing there staring at me, both with their hands on the butts of the machine guns slung around their necks. What is going on here? is what I’m thinking. Nico’s not here. There are no sirens, no frantic alarms sounding. Just a distant rotor hum; somewhere close by, somewhere on this sprawling campus, a helicopter is taking off or landing.
“The kid. The prisoner. The kid who was here, the one with the silly dreadlocks, who was in the…” I gesture vaguely in the direction of the brig facility. “In the cell there.”
“I don’t know what individual to whom you are referring,” answers the guard.
“Yeah, but you do,” I say, staring back at her dumbly. “You were there.”
The soldier never takes her eyes off mine as she slowly raises the machine gun to waist level. The second soldier, the gatehouse man, lifts his AK-47, too, and now it’s two soldiers with guns angled upward, the butts of the guns nestled into their waists and the barrels aimed directly at the center of my chest. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a cop, and these are United States soldiers, that we’re all peacekeepers, there is nothing in the world to stop these two from shooting me dead.
“There was no young man here.”
As soon as I am back in the car, the phone rings, and I scrabble around on the backseat, frantic, until I find it.
“Nico? Hello?”
“Whoa. Easy. It’s Culverson.”
“Oh.” I breathe. “Detective.”
“Listen, I think you mentioned a young woman named Naomi Eddes. From your hanger investigation?”
My heart jerks and leaps in my chest, bouncing like a fish on a line.
“Yeah?”
“McConnell just found her, up in the Water West Building. In this insurance office.”
“What do you mean, McConnell found her?”
“I mean, she’s dead. You want to come and see?”
PART FOUR
Soon, They Will
1.
The best thing I can do at present, in this cramped and narrow storeroom with the low tile ceiling and the three rows of long gray-steel filing cabinets, is concentrate on the facts. This, after all, is the appropriate role for the junior detective who has been called to the scene of the crime, as a courtesy, by his more senior colleague.
This is not my murder, it is Detective Culverson’s murder, and so all I’m doing is, I’m standing just inside the door of the dim room, staying out of his way, out of Officer McConnell’s way. It was my witness, but it’s not my corpse.
So—the victim is a Caucasian female in her mid-twenties wearing a brown wool houndstooth skirt, light brown pumps, black stockings, and a crisp white blouse with the sleeves rolled up. The victim bears a number of distinguishing physical characteristics. Around each wrist there is a wreath of tattoos of art-deco roses; there are multiple piercings along the rim of each ear, and a small gold stud in one nostril; her head is shaved, with a light blonde fuzz just beginning to grow in. The body is slumped in the northeast corner of the room. There are no signs of sexual assault, nor indeed of a physical altercation of any kind—except of course for the gunshot wound, which appears almost certainly to have been the cause of death.
A single gunshot wound to the center forehead, which has left a ragged hole just above and to the right of the victim’s left eye.
“Well, it’s not a suicide by hanging,” says Denny Dotseth, appearing at my elbow, chuckling. Mustache, broad grin, coffee in a paper cup. “Kind of refreshing, isn’t it?”
“Morning, Denny,” says Culverson, “come on in,” and Dotseth steps around me, the small room getting busier, more crowded, coffee smell coming off Dotseth, the smell of Culverson’s pipe tobacco, small twists of rug fiber drifting and floating in the dim light, my stomach rising and churning.
Focus, Detective Palace. Easy.
The room is a slim rectangle, six feet by ten, empty of decoration. No furniture except the three rows of squat steel filing cabinets. The lights are flickering a little, two long parallel fluorescent bulbs in a low-hung dusty fixture. The victim is slumped against one of those cabinets, which is slightly ajar, and she died on her knees, head tilted back, eyes open, suggesting that she died facing her killer, perhaps pleading for her life.
I did this. The details are unclear.
But this is my fault.
Easy, Palace. Focus.
Culverson murmuring to Dotseth, Dotseth nodding, chuckling, McConnell scribbling in her notebook.
There is a spray of blood, an upside-down crescent, fanned on the plaster wall behind the victim, unevenly mottled pinks and reds in a seashell pattern. Culverson, with Dotseth hovering over him, kneels and gently eases the victim’s head forward and finds the exit wound. The bullet smashed through the fragile porcelain of her skull, just there, between the eyes, ripped through her brain, and burst out again through the back. That’s how it looks, Fenton will tell us for sure. I turn away, look out into the hallway. Three Merrimack Life and Fire employees are huddled at the end of the hall, where it bends toward the front door of the suite. They see me looking, look back, hushed, and I turn back into the room.
“Okay,” says Culverson. “Killer enters here, the victim is down here.”
He rises, walks back to where I am at the door, and then back to the body, slow movements, considering.
“Maybe she’s looking for something in the file cabinet?” says McConnell, and Culverson says, “Maybe.” I’m thinking, yes, looking for something in the file cabinet. Dotseth sips his coffee, makes a satisfied “ah” noise, Culverson continues.
“Killer makes a noise, maybe announces himself. Victim turns.”
He’s acting it out, playing both parts. He tilts his head first this way, then that, imagining, reenacting, approximating the movements. McConnell is writing it all down, taking furious notes in her spiral flip-top notebook, a great detective someday.
“Killer crouches, the victim backs up, into the corner—the gun is fired—”
Culverson stands in the doorway and makes his hand into a gun and pulls the imaginary trigger, and then with his forefinger he traces the journey of the bullet, all the way across the room, stopping just shy of the entrance wound, where the real bullet continued, penetrated the skull. “Hm,” he says.
McConnell, meanwhile, is peering into the filing cabinet. “It’s empty,” she says. “This one drawer. Cleaned out.”
Culverson bends to check it out. I stay where I am.