Red on Red (12 page)

In the morgue basement, there were four IAB men in the room, bunched into a corner, in full hazmat gear—white jumpsuits, masks, booties, and hair covers. The dress code at the core of a nuclear plant was more casual, and Nick almost expected to see them clutching one another’s hands. The gauntlet had been laid down for Esposito; he couldn’t be weaker than them. There was some distance between the two stainless steel autopsy tables, which was a relief, and the ME who had their suicide was cute, which was a welcome distraction. She had short, spiky hair, and wore a low-cut T-shirt and jeans. Her protective gear consisted of latex gloves. Esposito moved ahead of Nick to take a place by the table, giving the IAB detectives his back. The body was covered by a sheet. Esposito put on gloves, giving the wrist a loud snap on each; he raised his hands and limbered his fingers, as if an orchestra awaited his signal. He gave a curt bow to the ME. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor. Detective Esposito.”

“Likewise, Detective. Is this your case?”

“No, it’s my partner’s, Detective Meehan. Doctor …”

“Pryor. Pleased to meet you.”

“Dr. Pryor, Detective Meehan. I’m merely consulting in this matter. Shall we proceed?”

Esposito put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. Dr. Pryor raised her eyebrows and looked back and forth between them; Nick was not inclined to give anything away. He shrugged, and she picked up her scalpel. Esposito never looked at the table, never took his eyes off the doctor; his repulsion and attraction were dueling and profound. A glance in the wrong direction, and his breakfast would erupt from him like a geyser, over the living and the dead. Dr. Pryor seemed almost amused. She had work to do, and even if Esposito was being ridiculous, he was not getting in the way.

“What do you think of this, Detective?” she asked demurely.

Esposito refused to lower his glance and declaimed, “Ah, typical … liver specimen … touch of fever, maybe.” His voice dropped to a more intimate timbre. “Are your eyes green or brown? Do they change in the light?”

Dr. Pryor smiled, though it was hard to tell whether it was because of the compliment, or the fact that it was not the liver but an elbow to which she had directed his attention. Nick had never been to an autopsy so rife with sexual tension, and hoped he never would again. He put it out of his mind once the doctor cut the Y incision into the chest of the Mexican girl, who seemed smaller now, dark and pale in marked zones, where the blood had settled. Dr. Pryor didn’t look up when she asked questions, and Nick didn’t look up when he answered. The Mexican woman seemed so much younger than she had in the park, in the night and the rain. There were bruises on her arms and legs.

Behind them, another assistant sawed through the breastbone of the other body, cracking open the rib cage. Gloppy handfuls of organs—liver, heart—were lifted out and weighed, and blood samples were scooped up from the abdominal cavity with a stainless steel ladle. The IA crew clustered still tighter. When Nick turned around, he could smell that the other assistant had moved on to the bowel.

Dr. Pryor continued to cut. “So, what’s the story?” she asked.

“Weird one. Hung herself in a tree, with yarn.”

“Any note?”

“No.”

“Background?”

“What you see is what you get. No ID. Mexican, I guess. Ever see this kind of suicide before?”

“No.”

She kept on cutting, and Esposito averted his gaze as high as he could. Dr. Pryor laid the scalpel down, and traced her hands down the lifeless arm, tenderly, it seemed.

“Look at this poor girl. She went through a lot. Took a few lumps. Somebody beat her up, not just once. The bruises look older, and there’s no broken bones in the X-ray. No defensive wounds, no skin under the nails. We’ll clip them, but they looked clean. The ligature, it’s classic, suspended vertically. There’s violence here, probably domestic violence, but I bet nothing on record. Nobody beat her to death. It’s more like she quit
fighting. It’s a suicide. Just because I’ve never seen it before doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know of any documented history of yarn-related suicidal asphyxia, but I bet there’s not much yarn-related homicidal asphyxia, either. On her jeans, on the inside of her knees, there’s dirt, decayed vegetable matter from the bark, like she humped her way up the tree. Shoes, too—the soles and insteps. And on her hands, the same stuff. Nothing’s final until the toxicology comes back, but I don’t think there’s anything for you guys here.”

Esposito stared with determination at the ceiling as he announced, “Doctor! I concur!”

Dr. Pryor either coughed or laughed, turning quickly away, but when she faced Nick again there was no trace of a smile. He was caught up by the hand closer to him, the pale band of flesh where the ring had been, and the smudged abrasions on the fingertips, as the doctor had pointed out; the color of the palm was muddled, bricky purples and browns. There were marks there, black script, that had nothing to do with the patchy lividity. He tried to make it out, the bad handwriting on the bad hand:
E-S-P-E-R-
?
N
?

“Doc, have a look at this.”

She came around to the other side, and lifted the wrist. It was loose, long past rigor mortis. Esposito stepped aside, quickly. The letters were legible, and she called for an assistant to come over. The back of the hand was laid flat on the table, as the assistant put a four-inch ruler on the fingers to show the scale, snapping pictures from several angles. Dr. Pryor leaned in to study the hand, and Esposito inclined his head delicately, so he could see Nick and not the cadaver, and winked. Nick heard the whine of the saw again and turned around. They had cut through the skull of the other body and popped it off like a bottle cap; the face was peeled down like a rubber mask. The corner foursome packed in still tighter—they could have fit into a phone booth now—and it was hard for Nick not to give the high sign for Esposito to look at them.

Dr. Pryor was nose-close to the hand. Nick told her what he thought. “Doctor? Do you speak Spanish? I think it says ‘
esperan,
’ and I don’t know what that means. ‘
Esperar
’ is ‘to hope.’ It seems like the last thing you’d say in a suicide note, talking about hope, but maybe she hopes for better in the next life, hopes her family understands, that kind of thing.”

“Mmm.”

“Huh?”

“No, that’s good, that’s interesting,” said the doctor, laying the hand back down, gently, as she straightened up. She spoke quietly, for only her detectives to hear, as if she had an inkling there were two dramas taking place. “But I do speak Spanish, and that’s not what it says.”

“Oh?”

“It doesn’t say ‘
esperar,
’ or ‘
esperan.
’ It says ‘
aspirina.
’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘Aspirin.’ Underneath, you can almost make out the word for ‘tampons.’ I think it’s a shopping list.”

“Oh.”

No hope, only a headache. Nick knew the feeling, but he was chagrined that his insight had proved a false start.

“If you have other things you have to do, I can handle it from here. Detective? Detectives? I’ll give you a call if there’s any other questions.”

“Doctor, I do have one last question.”

“Yes … Detective Esposito?”

“Is that paper cup on the counter there full of water, or … yucky stuff?”

“Water. Yucky stuff is not kept in paper cups.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Detective? Shall we go?”

“Yes, Detective. Thank you, Doctor.”

“Thank you both.”

“The pleasure has been mine,” Esposito said.

As they walked out, Esposito snatched up the paper cup. The brain had been lifted from the second body, and after the other pathologist gave it a few earnest glances, it was plopped without ceremony onto the hanging scale. Nick didn’t think any of the IA people were mindful of the direction from which the splash came, as Esposito tossed the water at them. There was a gagging sound from one, then another, and there may have been a third, but Nick did not wait to see how many of his colleagues Esposito had taken down.

W
hen the Brooklyn Bridge loomed up, they left the highway again for downtown, passing the squat cube of police headquarters to cut behind the court building. Esposito parked the car next to a fire hydrant, and they stepped up to a nondescript steel door on the side of the court. They were buzzed into the cages where they had dropped off Malcolm Cole the night before. Central Booking had always had its own brand of air, sometimes stronger and sometimes milder but always the same blend of resentment and despair and days-old underwear funk. It smelled better when they let the prisoners smoke. The light was oily and yellow, somehow congealed but weak, as if it came out of a can. Nick looked around at the cops and was reminded that this was a place where it was not possible to look forward to work. They would search prisoners and subdue them when necessary, shuffling the paperwork for the hours or days before the defendants were brought upstairs to see the judge, where a new round of chances awaited them. For a cop, it was like being the attendant of a broken elevator, forever getting stuck between floors. Someone had scrawled on the wall, “Thank you for not caring!” The sergeant behind the desk didn’t look up when they approached. “What’s up, Sarge?” Esposito asked.

The sergeant continued to cross-check lists of names. “Prisoner?”

“Malcolm Cole.”

“Tier three. Purpose?”

“We need to take him out for lineups.”

That wasn’t true, Nick knew, and it troubled him briefly to consider that if Esposito ever lied to him, he was unlikely to catch him in it.

“ID?”

Esposito produced his ID card, which the sergeant did not pretend to examine, and they left. Esposito gave Nick his gun to hold, and he walked to the back, past the first holding cells. Plastic crates held sweating half-pint cartons of skim milk and stacks of tongue-pink baloney sandwiches on industrial white bread, packed in wax paper. Most of the perps had settled in, had found a spot where they could sit and wait in a half-daze, metabolic rates winding down to the lowest setting—breathe and fart. “Ooohh … Yo!” “Sorry …” “Yo! That’s not funny, that’s nasty!” “Sorry, yo, can’t help it.” A few others waited by the bars, alert, ready to argue, ready for anything, anyone, for a sympathetic judge that might happen by, a radical minister, for a drunken workman to drop a steel file; they reminded Nick of the liveliest puppies in the pet store window, desperate to be noticed, to be the first to go home. It didn’t work that way here.

One called out to Esposito as he passed the cell, “Yo, you a lawyer?”

Esposito didn’t stop, but held up his cuffs, giving them a jingle.

“Damn!”

As Esposito and Malcolm returned from the passage a few minutes later, the same voice called out, joined by a few others. “Be strong!”

“Be cool!”

“Don’t say nothin’!”

Good advice, all in all, late as it was. Malcolm had made his statement hours before, on video, at the precinct. Three minutes with a tech guy who was text-messaging during the confession and a DA with a bad head cold, sneezing through the monosyllables of how Malcolm had shot Babenco and why. “Anything further you’d like to add?”

“I’m sorry, I guess.”

Now the door buzzed again and they stepped out into the city air, and you could catch hints of ocean and hot dogs, freedom and home. Nick had been inside for less than ten minutes, and the wind on his face felt like a governor’s reprieve; for Malcolm, he couldn’t guess how it felt. Malcolm looked both more tired and better rested than when they’d left him last. He stretched his lanky frame and unkinked his neck. His eyes scanned the street, wary and wistful, and he stood still for a moment, before he looked at the detectives and smiled.

“This feels nice. Even a day like today, thank God. You know?”

Nick was impressed. He remembered the day after his own mother
had died; his prayers had not been ones of gratitude. And he had not spent the night before on a cell bench. Was it a gift, to be able to switch like that, from here to there, from now to the next thing? Esposito had other concerns. “Yo, Malcolm, you got some serious jail breath! We gotta get you some mouthwash or something, man. You’re taking the curl outta my hair.”

“Let’s do it. Believe me, I know.”

They got into the car and headed uptown, snaking through the Chinatown streets. Nick sat in the back, behind Esposito and beside Malcolm. Esposito rolled up onto the sidewalk and stepped out, the keys still in the engine. He ducked into one store, then another, returning with arms laden with bags. He tossed them onto the passenger seat and headed back into the street, demanding a place in traffic with a long blare on the horn. Malcolm seemed intrigued by the sudden stop, seemed taken by the fraternal tone, as Esposito had intended.

“That’s the problem with Chinatown. I could tell the best stories, tell the best lies, say why I need a discount, government discount—it’s for an orphan, it’s an emergency—and they don’t understand a thing I say. Plus, there’s no time …”

They cut onto Canal Street, with the markets and stores full of alien fruits and vegetables, barrels on the sidewalk with live carp, turtle, and eel, the windows crowded with ducks hung upside down. Esposito shook his head.