The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  “You read my report?” Oscar said.

  “Hold these.”

  Moechtar put into Oscar’s hands two plastic spray bottles and reached for a box of fertilizer.

  “Neve and Kannis were murdered,” Oscar continued. “Someone knew Penny Roth’s body was there and went to destroy it. They were seen by Neve and Kannis and had to kill them.”

  “Keep still.” Moechtar took a tiny measure and scooped crystals into each bottle. “With their own guns? How did the killer convince Detective de Rossa to surrender her firearm?”

  Oscar held the bottles steady while Moechtar topped them with water.

  “Or killers,” Oscar said. “They put a gun to Kannis’s head and said to Neve, ‘Drop your weapon or we kill this guy.’ What would she do?”

  Moechtar twisted spray heads onto the bottles. He handed one to Oscar and pointed to the lower row of broad-leafed, whip-stalked orchids, then turned his back and began to spray the opposite row.

  Oscar continued, “I want their deaths to be part of my investigation.”

  “Detective Bazley from Homicide has the case,” Moechtar said after a long moment. “He’s treating it as a double manslaughter. Detective de Rossa failed to identify herself to Gregos Kannis, who shot her as a trespasser. She returned fire in self-defense.”

  Oscar saw how tightly he was gripping his own bottle and forced his fingers to relax. “That’s bullshit. Least-resistance, no-class bullshit.”

  “I’m not sure a magistrate would agree with you.” Moechtar adjusted his nozzle, getting a finer mist. “Inspector Haig also wants you to hand your Jane Doe file over to Homicide.”

  Oscar laughed.

  Moechtar remained silent. The puff-puff of his spray bottle sounded like the hissing of a tropical snake.

  Oscar continued, “We had a very solid ID on Penny Roth. Distinctive scars from surgery when she was a child. She’s not a Jane Doe.”

  Moechtar cupped a leaf as delicate as rice paper and sprayed it. “There were several propane and liquid-petroleum gas bottles at the scene. Forensic Services agree the body is probably a girl’s, but it’s burned bone. The attending pathologist doesn’t think she can determine cause of death from the remains.”

  Oscar remembered the worried strain on Dianne Hyde’s face. No doubt she was shitting herself that this charred little boomerang had come back to her morgue.

  He asked, “What about DNA? Is there tissue they can sample? Bone marrow?”

  “They’re going to try.”

  A glimmer of hope flickered in Oscar’s mind. He checked his watch. Still an hour before his meeting with Carole Roth. “If the coroner lets us take a DNA swab from Carole Roth, we can make a match—”

  “Carole Roth died this morning,” Moechtar interrupted. “An overdose of imipramine.”

  Oscar blinked as if slapped. He tried to corral his thoughts, but they had bolted in all directions.

  “Dead?”

  “Oscar.” Moechtar had stopped spraying and was staring at him. Oscar suddenly registered the anger pouring off his inspector. It was an odd sensation, like seeing a butterfly suddenly present a stinger dripping with venom. “Take just a moment to see how this looks from my shoes. My detective refuses to give a murder case to Homicide. Fair enough, she did have some occult mutilation. But when the cadaver is released from the state mortuary because of a paperwork slipup—”

  “There’s no way—”

  “—does he tell me, his inspector? No. He takes the body and hides it in a blackmarket butcher’s cold room. Was it even the same cadaver that left the morgue?” Oscar opened his mouth to protest, but Moechtar held up a hand. “I believe you. But a skeptic—a defense lawyer doing his job, for instance—could argue it could have been any girl’s body you had in that cold room. You say the dead girl was disabled. Do you have any reliable witnesses?”

  Oscar thought about Teddy Gillin, a disbarred doctor who spent his days half-shot at the racetrack. “No.”

  “Then you tag the deceased as the stepdaughter of a prominent, well-respected barrister.”

  “A DNA test—”

  “And let’s for argument’s sake say Mr. Roth did agree to that, and you did get a DNA sample from the deceased Mrs. Roth, and it did match. So the burned skeleton we have back at Forensic Services is Penelope Roth. We can’t determine cause of death, let alone pursue a murder investigation. Now Detective de Rossa and a member of the public are dead as well. To say we’re worse off than we were two days ago is an understatement.”

  Moechtar’s eyes were small, unblinking chips of stone.

  He continued, “An inspector under pressure would be tempted to place the responsibility for those awful, avoidable deaths squarely at the feet of the supervising detective who should not have let his partner go out of hours to the premises of a man suspected of dealing contraband. An inspector who didn’t know better might ask, Why didn’t she have backup?”

  The door opened and Susan Moechtar entered with coffee cups, milk, and sugar. Sensing the tension, she quickly left.

  The greenhouse fell silent. The fog outside killed all noise. They could have been in a capsule under a white, careless sea. Moechtar sprayed the last plants in the row; the white and pink flowers of a dendrobium looked like fleshy fish disappearing into white supernovae. He put down his sprayer.

  “Have you made any other headway?”

  Oscar thought about it. Some speculation on the symbol, which itself was now no more than unofficial photographs that could have come from any body, anywhere, and a shattered piece of clayware that had no clear link to the charred bones now back where they started, at Forensic Services.

  “Not really.”

  “Motive?”

  Oscar shook his head. “Something ritualistic, but I still don’t know.”

  “Suspects?”

  Oscar considered: Who had the authority to cow Neve into submission and relieve her of her firearm? Who could have made Dr. Tetlow disappear, and dump Lucas Purden’s tortured body in the river? He said, “I’d like to know where Geoffrey Haig was last night.”

  Moechtar looked up. “Why?”

  Oscar thought for a long moment. Haig had covered his trail; there was nothing more than veiled threats and shadows. Finally, he shook his head. He had nothing.

  “Have you done your operational summary?”

  “Neve finished it.”

  “And how does it look?”

  Oscar hadn’t read it. But he’d read Neve’s face.

  “Let me ask it another way,” Moechtar said. “If you were me, would you allow the Nine-Ten Unit to continue?”

  “No.”

  Moechtar held out his hand for the return of his spray bottle. This informal meeting was nearing its conclusion.

  “I expect to face quite a bit of insistence to stand you down, Oscar. The annoying thing is”—he removed his glasses to wipe them, and turned his unblinking gaze on Oscar—“I believe you were actually getting somewhere. I believe you saved the cadaver with good reason. And I believe you’re right—she was Penelope Roth. Identifying her was no mean feat. And I’m sure there’s more you’re not saying. And don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. I listen too much, I get caught up in the thrill of policing.” He smiled at his own foolishness and replaced his glasses. “I received a report, an informal report, about your disturbance at a party recently. Apparently you were quite distressed, believing you’d witnessed a suicide.”

  Oscar felt his stomach tighten. “Oh?”

  “The gentleman involved spoke to me off the record, as I’m speaking to you. He was genuinely concerned about your well-being.”

  Oscar pictured the counterterrorism sergeant who had been at Jon and Leonie’s apartment.

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’ve booked you in for a psychological assessment on Monday.” Moechtar watched him. “I trust you don’t object.”

  Oscar said nothing.

  “You have two days. Take them as bereavement leave. I he
ar your father’s sick, so you could take them as family leave. It’s up to you. I’d be grateful, before you do, if you get that summary report onto my desk. Remember that I’m the one who signs your transfer to wherever you go.”

  At his desk, he felt Foley’s stare and the eyes of a dozen public servants. He ignored them all and read the report that Neve had prepared—the operational summary of the Nine-Ten Unit’s activities over the past twelve months. It was a gallows confession. The tens of suspects he’d let off on Clause Seventeen rang a resounding knell of failure. He’d acted like some frontier judge, holding court for thirty minutes before deciding whether the accused should face the judicial system or all but go free. And he’d let off so many. He might try to shift them around like the three cups in the short con, but they kept delivering the same result: he’d screwed up. The numbers didn’t lie, and in these days of tight belts with new holes, numbers were everything. If he was lucky, he’d be demoted and shipped to a flyspeck town in the middle of nowhere. More likely, he’d be cashiered for negligence—and a stain like that would prevent him from getting even a forestry job like the one Jon had tried to help him with.

  Neve’s dead.

  The thought steamrolled any concern he had for himself.

  If only he’d signed that fucking transfer slip in the first instance, she could be settling into a new, dull job checking requisition forms for the Fleet Management Branch, or cross-checking the serial numbers of stolen Blu-ray players in Property Crime, instead of lying cold in a steel drawer.

  Dead.

  His phone rang. It was Jon.

  “I heard,” Jon said, softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Not your fault, mate.”

  There was a hint of a lie in Jon’s voice. It was his fault. All his fault.

  “Thank you.”

  “We should talk. Grab a beer. My shout.”

  “Yes.”

  He hung up. It would have to be Jon’s shout. Oscar had no money at all. He’d be lucky if he was just pensioned off; more likely he’d be fired and charged with negligence, maybe even with interfering with a corpse.

  And who will pay for Megan’s care?

  The thought suddenly chilled him.

  Megan.

  Elverly.

  He had to talk to Zoe Trucek.

  The fog persisted. It closed the gravel drive to Elverly House down to a strip of gravel bounded by unkempt hedges and silvery willow leaves wrapped in gray, steamy silk. If Oscar let himself, he could imagine he was on a bridge, or on a mountain pass, or driving down a tunnel of different silk, heading toward something poisonous and hungry. Then Elverly House appeared through the fog. While the gauzy air made most things seem light and weightless, Elverly instead looked dusky and laden, like some ancient clipper lost and adrift—but not empty.

  It was still early. A portly girl rocked from foot to foot, unsure whether to let him enter before visiting hours. He decided for her and gently pushed past.

  He took off his hat and asked, “Is Zoe Trucek on?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Where?”

  “I’ll look,” the girl said, and cast a glance inside the office. “She’s just due to start. Try the break room—our lockers are there.”

  As he headed up the tiled hall, he saw in a mirror that the girl was reaching for the telephone.

  Mist glowed outside the tall windows of the break room. Zoe Trucek leaned against the windowsill, arms folded as she watched him. As Oscar stepped closer, Zoe’s face appeared in the exact opposite way that Elverly House had emerged from the fog: not dark from light but white from shadow. Her sharp jaw was clenched and her green eyes glittered. She took in Oscar’s face, the grazed skin and the bruises, and her eyebrows rose impatiently.

  “Three girls missing,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zoe’s eyes slid to check the doorway.

  “You wanted to know whose side I’m on. Why?”

  Zoe tried to push past him. He slammed an arm across the doorway. It was like their dance in the hydrotherapy room, only no knife.

  “What do you know about Frances White, Penny Roth, and Taryn Lymbery?”

  “I know Penny Roth is charcoal.”

  “You followed me again?”

  “You shouldn’t flatter yourself.”

  He grabbed her shoulders. “What did you see?”

  Zoe dug her nails into his hands. “Do you know how long it took me to get this job?” she hissed. “Chalk will be here soon. If she sees a cop interrogating me, she’ll think I’m a thief.”

  His grip tightened. “My partner was killed,” he said. “Her name was Neve.”

  “You should take better care of the people you’re responsible for.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you see the morning Taryn Lymbery went missing?”

  “Nothing.”

  He didn’t loosen his grip. “We can do this at headquarters.”

  “We can do it on the moon; you’ll hear exactly the same thing.”

  Her eyes were hard. Scared. From up the corridor came voices and the stopwatch clicking of approaching footsteps.

  Zoe shook off his grip.

  “I followed you,” she hissed. “But you can’t even keep your own people safe.” She vanished behind the dimpled glass. A moment later, Leslie Chalk appeared in the doorway.

  “Detective Mariani?”

  Chalk looked as if she’d rushed the last leg of her makeup and was not pleased about the fact.

  “Mrs. Chalk. How are you, after that death in your family?”

  The question threw her, and she took a half step back. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “Unexpected deaths are the worst ones.”

  She nodded curtly, and then shook her head as if to dislodge this unsettling line of questioning.

  “Did you interview Zoe all right?” she asked.

  “She didn’t have anything useful.”

  Oscar watched her. She took another barely perceptible step back, as if she was regretting blustering in on him. She nodded. “Yes. The same when I asked her. The help around here is half-blind, I swear.” She raised her chin. “Can we call Missing Persons again?”

  “I guess.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell on the break room. Realizing that Oscar wasn’t going to leave in a hurry, Chalk inclined her head.

  “Would you like to see Megan? She has a visitor.”

  The inquest into the accident that had crippled Megan McAuliffe had been a hurried affair, one of thousands backlogged after Gray Wednesday. When he was let off with a small fine and a warning, Oscar had felt a flutter of relief that still disgusted him. Anthony McAuliffe had shouted for more. In the courtroom, McAuliffe had looked his age, just over forty. Now, three years later, the man was old. His hair had gone gray and his skin had an unhealthy tan with a crosscurrent of jaundiced yellow. He wore a dirty orange shirt with reflective strips across the back and baggy blue pants that were more patch than trouser. Council work was hard to get and poorly paid, but when the universities pinched their belts or closed their doors the literacy level of road crews climbed dramatically as liberal-arts graduates and journalism lecturers joined their poorly paid ranks. McAuliffe had been a humanities professor; now he looked like a criminal. He held Megan’s hand while she snored. His eyes were red.

  “You,” McAuliffe said when he saw Oscar.

  “Me,” Oscar said. “Can I come in?”

  McAuliffe ran his eyes over Oscar, taking in the wounds on his face, the bags under his eyes, his own patched clothes. He grimaced and shrugged. Oscar stepped into the room.

  In sleep, Megan’s face had lost its angry, frustrated twist, and she looked almost like any other teenage girl. But the air around her smelled sour. It was her father; from McAuliffe’s skin rose an invisible cloud of sweat and alcohol. Oscar felt a flurry of anger. How much of the cash that Oscar slipped into McAuliffe’s letterbox
was he blowing on home-distilled ethanol? He bit his tongue.

  “How is she?” Oscar asked.

  “Destroyed,” McAuliffe said.

  If the word was aimed to hurt, it was a bull’s-eye.

  “Are you coping?”

  McAuliffe returned his eyes to his daughter and watched her for a long moment. He slowly shook his head.

  Oscar wondered if he should put his hand on the man’s shoulder. He didn’t want to, and he hesitated so long that the moment passed. They sat and stood there, watching Megan’s chest rise and fall under the blankets.

  “Contraception,” McAuliffe said at last. “They say she’s got periods and they need to put her on the pill.” He looked up at Oscar. “It’ll cost.”

  Oscar tasted bile. But he nodded.

  He wasn’t sure how many minutes passed, but eventually he slipped silently from the room.

  Chapter 24

  The Bordeaux was the color of ox blood. Oscar filled his only wineglass to the middle, lifted it, toasted Neve, and drank.

  Outside, sunshine was burning off the fog and setting the sky into a white blaze so bright that it made eyes so used to rain and gloom sting and water. So he’d drawn the curtains. Besides, drinking was always easier in the dark.

  “Sissy!” he suddenly called.

  The cat didn’t come. Maybe it had smelled failure and madness on him, and had gone to find more reliable lodgings. Smart cat.

  Oscar drained the glass. Refilled it. Drank. The Bordeaux was good. He’d heard that the French police had also experimented with units similar to the Barelies; they’d shut them down nearly eighteen months ago after it became apparent that some officers had not only drawn up a price list outlining the costs involved for a suspect wishing to be relieved of his murder charge but had also value-added by offering citizens advice on how to commit murder and blame it on ghost-driven insanity. Oscar toasted that enterprise.