“Nic?” she screeched. “Oh shit. What are we doing—?” She was looking round the morgue, mentally counting all their options. “Let’s think this through.”
Silvio Di Capua drew himself up to his full height, which was still a good measure below hers, and yelled, “No! Don’t you get it? I don’t want to fucking think this through! It’s not why we’re here!”
She’d never made him this mad before. Perhaps that was a failing on her part. This newly assertive Silvio Di Capua seemed a little more human somehow.
“And for God’s sake, Teresa, stop saying ”we.“ ” He calmed down a little now. “They are cops. We are pathologists. Different jobs. Different buildings. Why don’t you get that?”
“Because Nic Costa’s my friend.”
“Good for you. He’s their friend too, isn’t he? Don’t they get the chance to be heroes sometimes? While we settle down to a nice routine of cut and stitch and let things run their natural course?”
“Natural course?” Her voice was a touch too loud. She was aware of this but it didn’t help somehow. “Have you been following the events of the last couple of days, Silvio? What the fuck is natural about any of this? Also—”
“No, no, no…” His head was down, bald scalp shining under the harsh morgue lights, long hair, even more lank than normal, unwashed for days, revolving around his podgy little shoulders.
Monkboy’s miserable face rose to greet hers. “Promise me, Teresa. Promise me you won’t go anywhere this time. Promise me you won’t set foot outside this place. Falcone’s handling this kidnapping crap himself. It involves ransoms and money and surveillance and all those things we know nothing about. Let’s stick to what we do for a living, huh? Just for a change. You shouldn’t be involved in these things. If you’d been here more we wouldn’t be in this shit in the first place.”
“You sound like one of them,” she said.
His flabby cheeks sagged as if they’d been slapped. “Maybe. But it’s true.”
“I know that. It’s just—” How did she explain this? There was something irredeemably personal about what had happened two days before. It wasn’t just her own near-death. The memory of Randolph Kirk, Booger Bill, nagged at her. He’d died in her presence, his rustling shade had somehow whistled past her, too busy to say goodbye.
After he called someone.
Booger Bill. Mister No-Friends, whose personal habits surely precluded closeness of any kind, except when wearing a mask and dealing with doped-up juveniles.
She looked at Monkboy. “Didn’t you find anything useful in Kirk’s pockets? An address book or something? A note with some numbers on it?”
“No,” he said sulkily. “And before you ask—yes, I looked.”
She bunched up her sizeable arms, folded them on her chest and began to walk. “Everyone’s got to write things down from time to time,” she said, moving briskly across the morgue, towards the storage drawers, Monkboy in her wake, whining every inch of the way.
Teresa Lupo found the one with Kirk’s name on it and pulled the handle, listening to the familiar sliding noise, steeling her nose for the inevitable rush of chemical odour that always followed.
“What are you doing?” Monkboy moaned. “We’ve finished with him. We got a whole load of others standing in line.”
“Well, tell them they can wait.”
Randolph Kirk looked pretty much like any other dead person post-autopsy. Stiff, pale and somewhat messed around. Monkboy never was any good with a needle and thread.
She took a long, professional look at the cadaver in front of them, and picked up each dead wrist in turn. “Has he been washed?”
“Sure!” Monkboy answered. “And I gave him a manicure and dental floss too. What do you think?”
“Just wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
She was starting to get annoyed with him now and didn’t mind if it showed. “Wondered, as it happened, whether he’d got around to scribbling something on his hands or his wrists. Something like a phone number. Disorganized people do that kind of thing. Or am I not supposed to know that? Doesn’t it fit the fucking job description?”
“Yes,” he answered mutely. “Sorry.”
She went back to the desk, retrieved her notes from the previous day and called Regina Morrison, heard the surprise at the end of the line.
“You have the time to call me?” said the dry Edinburgh voice. “I’m amazed. Things can’t be as busy as the newspapers say.”
“Oh, but they are,” she snapped. “Busier, actually. Now can you tell me please, Regina? Did Randolph Kirk keep some kind of personal address book at the college? Did you pick that up on your rounds?”
There was a pause on the end of the line. Teresa had remembered enough to pronounce the woman’s name correctly. That wasn’t enough, though. She wanted some deference, and right then there just wasn’t the time. “No. So this isn’t a social call?”
“What about a pocket diary? Did you see him use something like that? One of those electronic organizers perhaps?”
A long sigh made its way out of the earpiece. “Clearly you didn’t spend enough time in Randolph’s company to gain a true picture of the man. That was the most messed-up technologically challenged disaster of a human being I ever met. I wouldn’t trust him in the company of a toaster.”
“Damn. So you’re saying he just kept it all in his head?”
“All what? He didn’t know anyone.”
But he did. He had to. He made a call and then the crap hit the fan. Except it couldn’t be like that. The crap had to be on its way already. All she’d done was accelerate it a touch, speed up the machine a little. Nevertheless, he made a call.
She slammed down the phone, aware that Regina Morrison was, to her astonishment, uttering noises that sounded very like an offer of dinner.
“What is wrong with these people?” she wondered out loud.
She walked back over and stared at the corpse of Randolph Kirk, wishing she could wake him up for one minute and ask a few simple questions.
Her head was back in Kirk’s office now, watching him work at his nose with that disgusting piece of cloth.
“Booger Bill, Booger Bill,” she whispered to herself, aware that Monkboy looked ready to call in the men from the funny farm at any moment. “Never in my life have I seen a handkerchief in that condition, not even in the middle of a flu epidemic. ”Not even—“
Monkboy watched her, petrified. “You’re not leaving this room,” he warned. “I will lock that door, I will swaddle you in bandages, I swear—”
“Oh my God,” she gasped, then foxed him altogether. She was smiling beatifically.
“Please—” he whined.
“His clothes, Silvio. I want them. Now.”
THEY ARE DRESSED, moving, through the door, out into the cold and the caves, his legs as heavy as lead, detached from his control. She has to help him round this baffling labyrinth of tunnels, stumbling in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by the random bulbs that hang from the ceiling.
Stay in the shadows, he says. Until I tell you.
They enter another room and she holds him, keeping them both close to the wall, in the darkness. It’s a large chamber, one he remembers, well lit in the centre. He notices now that there is a table at its centre, dusty, with rickety chairs, maybe as many as twelve. An ancient wand—his head searches for the name Teresa Lupo gave it, thyrsus—lies at one end, in front of a chair that is high-backed and grander than the rest. A theatrical mask, with the familiar gaping mouth and dreadlocks, sits next to it, black-eyed, a dead totem, waiting to be reanimated.