4

There was nowhere to park—every inch of Ferguson Avenue within sight of the building was full of patrol cars and unmarked sedans.

Os took a handicap spot in the parking lot behind the building and got out of the Jeep. He took a few steps back and looked at the worn exterior of the building—the structure was dated, and no one seemed committed to anything resembling upkeep. He crashed into the first wave of blue when he rounded the corner. Cops in uniform crowded the entrance. A few seemed to be doing some half-assed crowd control, but most of the unis seemed to be standing around talking. There weren’t any reporters around yet, and people didn’t usually approach a huge crowd of cops. Crowd control was just a formality.

As Os got closer to the building, he noticed the flower bed had been trampled in several spots. Os immediately got pissed that the flower bed wasn’t taped off for forensics to photograph. He was about to yank one of the unis blabbering his way through crowd control when something caught his eye. Os turned to the flower bed and stepped up onto the concrete-block border. With his eyes, Os followed the footprints and flattened flowers to a huge puddle of vomit. The puddle was full of undigested food and Os knew whoever had puked had been eating pizza not too long ago. Five feet over was another puddle. This one was older than the first and mostly foam and bile. Os’s heart sank as he saw a third puddle a few feet away from the second. The flower garden wasn’t evidence; no perp had run through it. The first responders on scene had thrown up their dinners after going inside. Os stared at the vomit and wondered what would have caused three cops to do that? Cops had tougher stomachs than most seagulls. Os had seen corpses and then gone out for wings. He had eaten burgers after pulling charred bodies out of auto wrecks. He had never once lost his lunch on the job. The army had taken that cherry and ruined his appetite for months until he had become blissfully desensitized to every type of human cruelty. Os had seen plenty of fresh-faced newbies toss their guts at the sight of a fresh body, but he had never seen three people react so badly at a scene. Os tore himself away from the flowerbed and weaved through the crowd of cops to the entrance. Along the way, he caught the eye of several of the uniformed cops standing around, but they quickly broke away from his stare so they could look at the ground. Everyone was talking in low tones—another bad sign. Cops were the best at making the worst jokes. Os could remember a joke to go along with everybody he had ever come across. The jokes weren’t usually his, but a few of them were. A quiet crowd of cops was bad.

None of the unis stopped Os as he walked through the front door of Julie’s apartment building. Someone had wedged the door open to avoid having to use the buzzer. Inside the door were the plainclothes detectives. It was weird how the police on scene organized themselves into groups based on their spot in the food chain. Plainclothes stood with plainclothes inside the building while the uniforms stood farther away from the scene outside on the pavement. Os knew many of the faces inside the entryway, and he stopped when he saw Paul Daniels.

“Paul,” Os said.

Paul looked up from the floor and gave Os a nod.

“You just get here?” Paul asked.

“Got called down ten minutes ago. You?”

“Heard it on the radio and showed up when they said it was one of us.”

“Julie,” Os said. His voice cracked a bit when he said her name, and he cleared his throat to cover it.

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Julie.” He didn’t have to clear his throat after he said her name. “It’s bad up there, Os. Real bad. You don’t want to go up.”

“Jerry told me to get down here. Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”

“Don’t have much of a choice then,” Os said.

Paul shrugged, and Os shouldered his way through the rest of the crowd to the elevator. The entryway was tight with bodies and the smell of body odour and aftershave. The crowd ended suddenly as though the plainclothes cops were standing on the edge of a cliff. No one wanted to be near the elevators. Os stepped into the empty space and hit the up button. He could feel the eyes of the other cops on his back, but he didn’t turn. He was thinking about Julie and what was waiting for him upstairs. When the doors opened, Os stepped into the car and pressed the number nine.

The ride was fast. The elevator was an old model, and whoever designed it wasn’t worried about comfort. Os felt the machine’s acceleration in the pit of his stomach as it climbed the shaft, and the abrupt halt on the ninth floor buckled his knees a little bit. When the doors slid apart, Os saw the final link of the police food chain; an inspector, two superintendents, and the deputy chief were standing in the hall. All four men looked at Os, still standing in the small metal box that brought him up, and waited for him to justify being on a floor with men who were all above his pay grade.

“Jerry MacLean told me to come up,” Os said as he stepped onto the ninth floor.

The deputy chief, a pale man in his late fifties with buck teeth and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes nodded and said, “Jerry.” The deputy chief’s words were so quiet Os almost didn’t hear them. Usually a crime scene was alive with people moving around and investigating, but on the ninth floor of 110 Ferguson Avenue South, the deputy chief’s words were just loud enough to get Jerry to come out of an open door like a dog being called to heel.

When Jerry saw Os, he jerked his head towards the open apartment door he had just left and walked back inside. Os walked forward and the four men stared at him as though they were conducting a silent evaluation of his every step. He barely noticed the looks; he was focused on the door.

From the entryway, he could see the living room on the right and the kitchen straight ahead. Everything in the living room was as neat as Os had remembered. No flat surface was without some kind of decoration. Scented candles, vase arrangements, and picture frames all sat at perfect angles. The flowers in the vases were all fake, and the pictures all looked like they had been liberated from an ancient photo album. Os walked straight ahead and within two steps he was in the kitchen. The floor was clean and the sink was spotless. Julie still stuck to the habit of wiping down the stainless steel so it looked like new. Outside of the kitchen was the dining room. To call the space connecting the kitchen and living room a room was generous; it was wider than a hallway, but barely big enough for the table and chair that had been put there. Os edged past the table into the living room and saw Jerry, who had been waiting on the other side, turn to lead him down the short hall to the bedroom. Os hadn’t realized how slow Jerry had been moving; Os passed the bathroom and then almost walked into Jerry. The big detective sergeant took a deep breath and stepped into the final room. Os took a breath of his own and then followed. He saw the bed and then a second later he saw the hall again as he rushed for the bathroom.

Three tours in Afghanistan, twelve years on the job—none of it made him ready for the bedroom. Os threw up at the sight of a body for the first time in almost thirteen years. He dry heaved into the toilet; his head deep in the bowl. The drink he never got a chance to have would have made things louder and messier. All that came up was a bit of bile that Os spat into the water. He slowly lifted his head out of the toilet and got to his feet. When he turned his back, he saw that the door was closed and Jerry was inside. The fat man took up a lot of space in the small bathroom. The vanity lights over the sink were powerful, and the high-watt light bulbs mercilessly showed the awful state of Jerry’s skin. His nose was a nest of broken purple veins, and his cheeks were pocked with the scars of childhood acne. Os could also see that Jerry had missed a spot on his neck when he was shaving. The fat man’s jowls probably made a spotty shave a regular occurrence. The lights also made it easy to see that Jerry was pissed.

“Shit, Os,” Jerry whispered. “I put you on this because I told the white shirts you could handle it. I know she’s one of our own, but I thought . . . fuck, I don’t know what I thought.”

Os knew what Jerry thought. Os had heard the jokes about him being the tin man—all shield, no heart. The jokes started soon after Os used some Pashto with a witness. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that Os had spent some time in Afghanistan. The next day, his locker had sand inside it and someone sent a police dog with two takeout containers taped to its back that were supposed to look like camel humps over to his desk. That should have been the end of it, but cops are nosier than high-school girls. A couple of cops figured out exactly where Os had been and what had happened there. Afghanistan was officially adopted by the men in Central as the reason Os was such a mean bastard—that and a rumour around the station about how close he came to failing the police psych profile. Os didn’t fight any of it. After the tin man shit started, people made less small talk and everyone stopped telling him to calm down or to chill out when he got a little out of control. When he got physical during an interrogation or an arrest, everyone just backed away like Os had a doctor’s note that said he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. Truth was, his behaviour had always been anti-social. While other kids were playing high school football, Os’s parents put him in boxing. His father saw what Os was going to be early on, and he made sure that if Os was going to be hitting people, he would at least be wearing gloves. After high school, the army was the obvious choice—no gloves in the army.

“I mean, you’ve seen worse, right?” Jerry said. “You can handle this. The brass in the hall are seriously up my ass. We can’t fuck this up.”

Os shouldered Jerry out of the way and ran the tap. It was clear Jerry had more to say, but Os ignored him and angled his mouth under the faucet so he could gulp from the weak stream of water. The fucking guy was worried about how he looked to the four in the hall, when one of their own was lying just a few feet away. If they had been off duty, Jerry would have been picking up his teeth.

“I’m fine, Jerry. Let’s go.”

Os walked out of the bathroom and went back into the bedroom. He was hoping the scene would be less shocking the second time around, but it wasn’t. The second time, knowing what was waiting for him, was worse. He brought his eyes up from the floor and slowly looked from the parquet flooring to the bed.

Os could see only a patch of white comforter through the strands of brown hair fanned above Julie’s face. The rest of the bed was the deep kind of red that could only be blood. It was almost impossible to believe the human body had enough blood to stain a bed like that, but Os had also never seen a body killed the way Julie had been. She was naked, with each limb tied to one of the bedposts. Her arms and legs were stretched tight. Her hands and feet were secured by what looked to be torn sheets. The left side of Julie’s face was caved in at the jaw line. Whatever had hit her had shattered the bones in her face. Os wanted to keep looking at Julie’s face; he didn’t want to look any lower, but it had to happen. He lowered his eyes and took a sharp breath in through his nose; it was the kind of breath he usually took when he had cut himself badly and was waiting to see the blood to prove it. Julie’s abdomen had been cut open with three long incisions and her flesh had been folded back, as though it was two window shutters. The blood that spilled out onto the bed came from Julie’s pregnant belly. Only, she wasn’t pregnant anymore. Her umbilical cord lay on top of her naked thigh like a blood-stained blue snake. The cord had been cut cleanly—just like her belly. Julie looked like a lab dissection—some experiment done on a pillow-top mattress. Tears streamed down Os’s cheeks, but only Julie could see them. Os didn’t run this time; he was frozen in place—almost as still as the body in front of him.

Jerry was right. Os had seen worse, but it was different overseas. Anonymous faces on dead bodies, limbless unknown victims, mutilated strangers; this was different. The blood, the humiliation, the total disregard for another person was the same, but none of the bodies on the other continent had been carrying Os’s baby.

Os ran his sleeve across his face and erased the tears. He took a deep breath in through his nose and let it out slow. Then, he turned to Jerry and said, “I got this, Jerry.”

“I want this solved, Os. I want the son of a bitch who did this caught, and I don’t care how it gets done.”

There it was again. Os was being given permission to get his hands dirty. It was destined to happen, but it was nice to know there wouldn’t be anyone looking to complain about it. Os was already thinking about what he was going to do to the fucker when he realized Jerry hadn’t stopped talking.

“You, Woody, and Dennis will report to me every three hours, and I’ll pass everything along to the deputy chief.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Os said. “Wood’s my partner. We don’t need Dennis for shit. This look like an open-and-shut case to you? ’Cause that’s all he’s good at.”

“Not your call, Os. Now do me a favour and take a step back.”

Os had pushed Jerry against the door. He wasn’t thinking straight; his mind was on the baby. Could anyone have lived through that? There was so much blood, so much brutality. Did the baby have a chance?

“Babysitting Dennis is just going to eat up time, which is something we don’t have.”

“Dennis is a lot of things, Os. But on paper, he’s a fucking case clearer. He clears almost as many murders as you and Woody. He’s in. The brass wanted my best and they got it. End of story.”

Os could feel his fingernails biting into his palms.

“Fine. Fucking fine. Get everyone out of here. Everyone. From the brass to the rubbernecking unis, all of them need to be gone. Then get forensics up here.”

Jerry didn’t say anything; he rubbed his chin and nodded. Os could tell he was trying to figure out the politically correct way to tell his four superiors in the hallway that they had to leave.

“Paramedics were already here?”

“Yeah, Os, they came in right after the first two constables got here.”

“What did they say about the baby?”

“It ain’t here, Os.”

“They know whether or not it was alive after it was cut out?” Saying the words out loud made Os want to put his fist through the wall.

“Far as I know, they showed up and saw Julie was already dead. They didn’t touch the body. There was nothing they could have done for her. I called the coroner after I got here.”

“I need you to get downstairs to organize the unis. Get a few up here to work a canvass. We need to know who saw what.”

Jerry looked at the door, but his feet stayed put.

“Jerry, I said I got this. Get everyone moving.”

“Right, right. I want an update in three hours.”

Os followed Jerry to the propped-open front door and closed it behind him. Os put his back against the door and slid to the floor. He sat and cried for the first time in a long time. He bit into his fist, stifling the sound. No one could know about Os and Julie, or the baby. He knew cops; if they found out he was the father of the baby ripped out of the dead cop on the bed, they would look hard at him. Julie had never said anything about him to anybody, he knew that for a fact, but if he volunteered the information that he was the father of her child, it wouldn’t take long for everyone to link the bruises on Julie’s face eight months ago to Os. The baby was like a time stamp on an email that connected Os to the time he lost his temper with Julie. He knew how it would look. He had no alibi—it wasn’t like the meth-heads could vouch for him. It was better to shut his mouth. If he talked, he would be a suspect, and suspects aren’t allowed to stay on the case they’re suspected of committing. Os needed to stay on it. He was going to find whoever murdered Julie and the baby, and he was going to kill them.