The arson investigator’s voice comes through his mask as if up from a bathtub. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Bobby nods.
It takes them half the day to get the body up. They’re all down there, sweating their balls off in masks and hazmat whites and the firemen trying to shore up the whole basement and make sure it doesn’t collapse on their heads. To dig up the body, they have to send someone out to the special-equipment warehouse in Canton to get the right tool, which looks like a jackhammer with a putty-knife blade, but it cuts a perfect rectangle in the floor that looks, appropriately, like a coffin.
They keep taking trips upstairs to the grotto outside because, even with the masks and oxygen, it’s easy to get dizzy down there. Brian Shea and half a dozen Butler guys watch them from the little tables out back of the bar, ask them why they’re not somewhere fighting real crime, maybe busting the niggers before they can come in here and fuck up the schools and every other fucking thing by Thursday.
Gregor, one of the crime tech guys, has a smoke with Bobby, and Bobby asks why they’re choosing to bring out the body with the soft cement and dirt still encasing it.
“Evidence,” Gregor says. “We don’t know what mighta leached in there.”
Guys with the ME’s office carry the body out in a black bag while they’re sitting there, and Bobby and Gregor step aside while the guys load it into the morgue van. Bobby catches Brian Shea watching from across the way. Brian’s a cold fish, a hell of a poker player, Bobby’s always heard, but he looks pretty sick right now, like his stomach is filling with acid.
Bobby shoots him a broad smile and a big salute.
Down at the morgue, they cut away the cement and dirt around the body and bag it all. Then they clean the corpse and straighten the legs and arms as best they can.
“Cause of death?” Bobby says.
Drew Curran, the medical examiner for this shift, grimaces at him. “This is my first look. Can you give me a second?”
Bobby sighs and reaches for a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke in here, Detective.”
A few minutes later, Drew says, “Oh, yeah, we got it.”
Bobby comes out of his seat.
Drew peels back a puckered hole just below the left rib cage. “Someone shoved a five-inch blade right under her ribs and straight into her heart. Could’ve been looking in her eyes when he did it.”
Bobby looks at her now, this child who came out of Mary Pat Fennessy’s womb less than eighteen years ago. Even with the early stages of decomposition settling in, he can see what a pretty girl she was. Not just pretty but... soft. The mother is all hard edges and angles, a jawline set in permanent opposition, thin lips usually one curl away from a sneer. The mother is built for battle. The daughter, on the other hand, seems, even in death, to have arrived from a fairy tale. As if she’s not dead but merely awaiting the restorative kiss of the prince, who, even as Bobby and Drew stand there, nears this building and the end of his quest.
“What’d you say?” Drew asks.
“Nothing,” Bobby says. “Nothing.”
“You got what you need?”
“Yeah,” Bobby says, and leaves.
Next time she calls is halfway through his shift.
“We went by your place looking for you.”
“I’m not there right now,” she says.
“That’s probably a good thing.”
“I understand you may have taken a body out of a burned building recently.”
“We did, yes.”
“Has it been identified by next of kin?”
“We’re waiting on next of kin to arrive.”
“Would next of kin have to worry about arrest?”
“For what?”
“You tell me.”
Neither speaks for a bit.
“My dad,” Bobby tells her eventually, “was the best housepainter you ever saw. Inside, outside, didn’t matter. He was a magician with a brush or a roller. People would ask him questions, though, about wood rot and load-bearing walls, even the electrical. My father would say, ‘I do one thing better than anybody by
“Sounds like a cool guy,” Mary Pat says.
“When he was sober, yeah, he was.” Bobby realizes how much he misses the old bastard in that moment. “I’m a homicide investigator. I don’t investigate arson. That’s what arson investigators are for. I don’t investigate assault and battery. I don’t concern myself with someone, say, who claims he was forced at gunpoint to shoot heroin into his veins.”
“Well,
“Right?” Bobby chuckles. “You should hear the one about the kid who was threatened with castration.”
“Here?” Mary Pat says. “In the United States of America?”
“We suspect so, yes.”
“What is happening to this world, Detective?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Fennessy. I really don’t.”
The silence on the line is comfortable until Bobby rips the Band-Aid.
“Can you meet me at the city morgue, 212 Hester Street, in two hours?”
Her tone darkens to pure black. “I’ll be there.”
