The cold room

SIX

There were times when I felt sorry for my commanding officer. Born into a cop family that traced its roots to an ancestor who’d joined the New York Metropolitans shortly after the Civil War, Drew Millard seemed to pass most of his time playing catch-up. Ranger Millard was the ancestor’s name. He’d risen from obscurity, in the course of a career that spanned three decades, to the rank of Inspector, roughly equal to today’s Chief. That was just before Teddy Roosevelt forced Ranger to surrender his badge in the wake of a corruption scandal.

Notoriously brutal, Ranger had worn shoes even a hard man would have difficulty filling. Meanwhile, his direct descendant was soft in body, mind and spirit. Drew’s gut was flabby, his blue eyes pale, his soft ass shapeless. Wheedling was the tactic he normally used to motivate his detectives, often beginning his sentences with a nearly fawning, ‘C’mon, guy’.

Millard was sitting behind his desk when I walked into his office, dealing with his share of the paperwork generated by the train derailment on the prior morning. He seemed unusually cheerful, if a bit harassed, as he motioned me to a chair. ‘Let’s hear it,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened this afternoon.’

Millard wanted to know why I’d attended the autopsy, which I was not obliged to do. I presented him with the mysteries, the pink lividity, the head wound, the evisceration, the possibility that Plain Jane Doe was exposed to cold before and after her death.

‘The way the ME put it,’ I concluded, as I had with Bandelone, ‘time of death might be anywhere between a few days and a couple of months ago.’

‘So you’re saying the case isn’t going anywhere until she’s identified?’

‘The ME recovered a decent set of the victim’s prints. They’ll go over to Missing Persons tomorrow morning. Missing Persons also promised to fax me a list of all females reported missing in the last month. I should have it within the hour.’ I shrugged and smiled, my intention to play the role of amiable, semi-competent investigator for all it was worth. No sense, after all, in raising expectations. ‘I don’t know, boss. I got a bad feeling here.’

‘C’mon, guy, don’t be so pessimistic.’ Millard spread his arms and smiled encouragingly. ‘What about the witness?’

‘The witness describes a middle-aged white male with squinty eyes and a van that might be any year, make, model and color. Unless I get lucky and identify the vic, I got no way to find either.’ I paused for a moment as Millard nodded agreement. I’d returned to the precinct after the body was removed, with Clyde Kelly in tow, then created a case file while Kelly turned the pages of a mug book. The file was now on Millard’s desk. Apparently, he’d taken the time to read it.

‘What do you make of the way she was disemboweled?’ he asked. ‘What’s that about?’

‘I don’t know? Jack the Ripper?’ I shrugged off the idea, then drove the message home again. ‘Until she’s identified, it’s all a guess.’

Millard began to fiddle with the case file. He opened the cover, sifted through the Complaint Report and my investigator’s DD5s, then closed the file before rotating it 180 degrees. Finally, he said, ‘You got a photo?’

I showed him the same photo I’d shown Bobby Bandelone. He passed it back to me after a quick glance. Again, I shrugged and smiled. ‘CSU couldn’t free up a team, what with the derailment. I did the best I could.’

‘It ain’t the photo, Harry, it’s the victim.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Ya know, in a way, the derailment was a lucky break. The reporters would’ve jumped all over this on a slow news day. How long until we hear about the prints?’

I glanced past Millard’s shoulder, through the dirty window behind him. I was looking west, over a furniture warehouse and across Union Avenue toward Manhattan. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving in its wake a strip of yellow that brought the upper stories of the Empire State Building into sharp relief.

‘We’ll get fingerprint results the day after tomorrow,’ I continued. ‘If she was a prostitute or a drug mule, most likely she has a record.’

Millard nodded judiciously, then laid the palm of his right hand over his chest. ‘So, whatta ya wanna do here?’

I leaned back in the chair and crossed my legs. ‘Well, boss, showing this photo to the hookers up on Broadway, it’s gonna get us exactly nowhere. So I think I should concentrate on missing females who fit the victim’s general description, eliminate them one by one. That way, you won’t be second-guessed somewhere down the line.’

Millard smiled. ‘In case she turns out to be somebody?’

I returned his smile, finally looking up to meet his eyes. ‘Exactly,’ I said.

I went home that night to an empty apartment for the first time in many months. There was a message on the answering machine from Adele. She’d arrived safely, was very tired and expected to retire soon. I should call her the following evening at my convenience. At the end, she paused for a moment before saying, ‘Bye-bye.’ Not, ‘Love ya, honey.’ Not, ‘Miss you already. Bye-bye.’ And what I wondered, as I heated a can of soup in the microwave, was whether last night’s romp had really been a bye-bye fuck. So long, baby, it was fun while it lasted.

I ate standing up by the kitchen window, the cooling soup on the counter before me. Outside, in the landscaped plaza at the center of Rensselaer Village, the leaves on the plane trees lay motionless, as though exhausted. I could smell the dead air on the other side of the screen, redolent of the garbage bags piled in front of the building for collection tomorrow morning. Summer in New York, a condition from which residents have fled for three hundred years. I dumped the dishes in the sink, grabbed a beer and headed for my air-conditioned bedroom, settling on the bed. It was a mistake. My thoughts turned to Adele, to her weary, distant tone, and I couldn’t get her out of my head. I told myself that I was reading too much into a brief and simple message. If Adele seemed reserved, so what? Adele was reserved at the best of times; reserve was one of her assets, it leant her an air of mystery and assurance.

But I couldn’t convince myself. Like all interrogators, I live by my gut, and my gut was telling me that Adele’s sudden trip to Maryland was more about flight than her mother’s gastro-intestinal problems. No, Adele had been drifting away from me for some time and now she’d taken that extra step the distance was physical. The saddest part was that I might have asked her what was wrong at any point. And I might have continued to ask until I got an answer.

I hadn’t because I had feared the answer. I’d been through the separation process many times, both as dumper and dumped. I knew that what awaited me on the far end of any break-up was a loneliness so intense it bordered on fear. A loneliness that would soon drive me to the bars in search of any female willing to put her arms around my waist.

Long ago, as a boy, I’d gone through a phase where I tried to earn the approval of my druggie parents by transforming myself into the perfect child. (God knows, tantrums and whining were of no use at all.) That meant becoming a little adult, responsible, industrious, eager to please. The effort was doomed from the beginning and I gave up after a couple of years. I would always be an afterthought in my parents’ lives and there was no bridging the gap.

‘Oh, there’s the kid. How’s it goin’, kid?’

I’m good at self-pity. No surprise, as I lived on it until I was old enough to go out on the streets of the Lower East Side and forge alliances strong enough to substitute for family. Then I abandoned my parents as surely as they’d abandoned me, my rejection of them so complete that I did not — and wasn’t tempted to — attend my father’s funeral.

I rolled off the bed, walked to my sweltering office and waited impatiently for my computer to load. Then I pulled up the image of my victim and created a flier I could pass out. I included my name and rank, an untraceable cell-phone number that I routinely gave to informants, and the simple fact that Plain Jane Doe had been murdered.

Though I tried to focus my thoughts on the long search ahead, I couldn’t shake off the images presented by Clyde Kelly: the fat man with the narrow eyes; the body dragged over the dirt and weeds; the victim’s chin coming up until her dead eyes met Kelly’s, until she spoke to him, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ If ever anyone had been abandoned, it was my victim, half frozen before her death, eviscerated afterward, finally left to the mercy of the sun and the flies.

In the space of a few seconds, I recalled the late afternoon thunderstorm, the clouds flying up and the hail that pounded her body, and the lightning that burst all around me, listening until the noise overwhelmed every other sense. I told myself to let Adele go, if that was what she wanted. I told myself that my first obligation was to this slain girl and I could not abandon her, come what may. Of course, I knew, even then, that I wasn’t about to let Adele go, not without a fight. But that wasn’t really the point. No, the point was that Jane Doe #4805 had a right to justice, my personal problems be damned. Adele was a big girl. She had a good job. She could make her way in the world. For Jane, there was only me.

I went online and dragged up a list of Polish churches in New York. As expected, the largest was in Greenpoint, but there were others in each of the city’s five boroughs. Eventually, I would visit them all. I knew this even before Jane’s prints cleared every database maintained by New York State or the Federal Government without turning up a match. I knew that if there was even the slightest chance that Jane could be identified through her fingerprints, the men who disposed of her body would have cut off her hands.