“Now, look at this.” She put her finger on one of the lines in the report. “‘The debris field comprises two strips – wood and varnish mixed together – transverse across the back of the sweater, each about four inches wide.’ What do you think of that?”
“I have no idea.”
Polarized light microscopy had separated the wool fibres from the varnish and the wood. There were at least two hundred tiny wooden shards, ninety percent of which were facing the same direction, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, or grass laid down in a footprint. “I’m drawing a blank. Maybe this all happened post-mortem.”
“They had to drag her out of the water, maybe they pulled her up on a dock in the channel?”
That made sense to her. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she felt the door finally closing on their speculations. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “A body sodden with water, she weighs double. They hook her out and pull her over the side of a dock, drag her over two planks. Four inches wide.”
“Combine that with the hemorrhaging in the lungs, calcium and potassium levels through the roof, massive heart failure, you name it. No scrapes, bruises, defensive wounds… where does it get you?”
“I know.”
“She went into the water within a hundred metres of the shoreline but nobody heard her cry for help. How can we not come to the same conclusions the coroner did in 2002?”
“We have to keep thinking this through. If she didn’t kill herself, this is her last chance to be heard.” She looked at the floor, tilting back slightly on her heels. “She was wrecked, right? We talked about this – what if someone knocked her out?”
“You want to make a case for someone injecting her with enough alcohol and Ativan to sedate her?”
“Can we?”
“Why would anyone have had to force her, though?” he said. “Cameron was perfectly capable of getting off her head all by herself, to judge by the collars in her report.”
“Fine. So she gets herself high and hammered. Maybe after that, he talked her into it. Called her stupid, useless. Told her she was better off dead. Gave her enough drugs to addle her.”
“It’s still not murder. And what about the alibi Ilunga says is airtight?”
“He said watertight.”
“I know.”
“Fine – it’s not murder, but maybe it’s something else. Time-of-death, Eldwin is somewhere else, but he’s put the suggestion into her head. Isn’t telling someone to go kill herself a crime?”
“Look, I wanted as badly as you did for this sweater to turn up something conclusive. But it doesn’t. If we try to stretch this any further, we’ll be in Goodman’s league and then it’s the insane leading the blind.”
She absently picked a fry off the plate on his desk. “God-damnit,” she said. “We’ve been wasting time we could have been canvassing, you know.”
“We did our best.”
“Your old boss will be laughing up his sleeve.”
“Let him laugh. But let’s put Plan B into action. It’s time to figure out how to use this bait to get Goodman to show himself.”
She looked forlornly at the useless fax on the desk in front of them, and then shook her head slowly. “I haven’t had to outsmart him before now,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to trying.”
She went back to her room and tossed the lab report on the desk and sat in the chair, looking out the window at the blank wall of a building across the alley from her hotel. She wasn’t sure now how they were going to communicate with Cameron or Goodman, but she felt certain the two of them were still watching her, somehow. Perhaps she would have to wait now until one of them made contact, but when they did, she had to be sure she could control the flow of information.
She hadn’t wanted to risk speaking to Martha the day before, but now she felt she owed her a call, at least to smooth things over as much as she could before she returned home. She reached for the phone, but her hand froze in the air over it. A little uniformed man was bent over backwards on the receiver, his head lolling off his shoulders.
She wasn’t half out of the chair when she heard a slamming noise and Goodman burst from the closet beside the desk and drove her sideways to the floor. She heard herself shout and the pain burst in an electric shower down both her legs as she struggled beneath him, trying to push backwards toward the wall where she’d have some leverage. But he was so much larger than she was and he pulled her back toward the centre of the room, the carpet scraping at her clothes and burning her flesh. She felt him slide his hand down her flank to her holster and she twisted and drove an elbow into his face. He grunted in pain and he fell away, but she saw a flash of black metal pass over her head and she knew he had the gun. He stood and spat a ribbon of blood out of the side of his mouth. “Get up,” he said, gesturing with the barrel.
She stood with difficulty, the familiar feeling of numbness spreading down her backside. Her legs wouldn’t take her weight – whether due to injury or fear, she didn’t know – and she slumped on the floor against the foot of the bed.
“What did you say to her?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Joanne.”
“We said a lot of things to each other.” She leaned against the boxspring, trying to breathe. “I told her the truth about you. How you’d gone rogue well before she met you. It all made sense to her.”
“Sure it did.”
“Oh, and I complimented her on her necklace. You know, the one you give to all your victims?” His eyes were wild. The gun was shaking in his hand. Hazel said quietly, “She didn’t like you paying a visit to Martha, did she? A little too close to home for her, eh? Now she wants out.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “She knows there’s no out except for you doing what we chose you to do. What should have been done in the first place.”
She sneered a laugh. “There’s no should have, Goodman. There’s just what happened. There’s just a broken woman, you, and all the people you failed to protect, all of them still out there shooting themselves full of garbage and filling their crack pipes, if they’re not already dead.” She shifted a little and felt the sensation in her legs returning. “So where is she? Joanne? Did she walk away?”
“She’s exactly where she wants to be. Back with Eldwin, waiting to see how this all turns out.”
“You talked her into it again, huh?”
He took a step toward her with the gun raised and she pressed herself against the edge of the bed, her breath catching in her chest. “How hard would they come for me if I blew your brains out right now? What’s the chance you’d ever be a cold case, Detective Inspector?”
“I think they’d figure out pretty quick I hadn’t killed myself,” she said.
“They’d never rest. Never,” he said. “But why? Why you and not her? Because you’re inside the machine and she wasn’t? You ever thought how lucky you are that your death would actually move people to action?”
“The right kind of action. Due process. A conclusion based on the facts. I wouldn’t expect anything more.”
“That’s because you’re not prepared to see past the surface. I was wrong about you.”
“You’ve been wrong about everything. For one thing, Eldwin was at home the night she died.” He was closer now and she wondered if she could get the upper hand. But she’d have to push herself up from the bed and be on top of him before he could shoot her and she was pretty sure he’d shoot her.