At the Brogan house on Arboretum Avenue, no one is sure what to do about the dead dog, and it falls to Detective Nora Fox to make a decision. It is the last thing to be settled before the crime scene is released. The body still lacks formal identification, but by a process of elimination, it is almost certainly that of Ralph Cowley – Ken Fowler didn’t get to talk to him, but there is a Dave Ricks Graphic Design consultancy on West Wacker in Chicago, and the receptionist told him Mr Ricks was unavailable because he was in a meeting, not because he was dead. The medical examiner has done his work, and the body has been removed, and the police photographers and technical specialists have taken their shots and collected their samples. Fragments of police tape litter the trampled lawn as Officer Colby and Nora Fox stand in the dark above the exhumed body of the grotesquely mutilated dog.
‘We can’t just leave it here,’ Colby says.
‘Him,’ Nora says. ‘Mr Smith was his name.’
Her tone is harsher than she intends, anger at the savage who did this seeping into it, and Colby winces slightly, as if he has been rebuked.
‘We’re not going to bury him again either,’ she says. ‘If there’s … it’s for the family to decide. If there’s anything in the garage … canvas tarpaulin, or a tent or something? And then they can bury him, as a family, when the whole thing …’
Nora lets her voice trail off. It’s understood that the whole thing could end in a number of ways, most of them excluding a scenario in which the reunited Brogan family congregate together in the backyard for the burial of their pet. Colby nods quietly and immediately heads for the garage.
Nora looks back to the turreted Queen Anne cottage in the woods that is the Brogan house, and wonders if they were tempting fate, living out here like this, then briskly dismisses the superstitious nature of the thought, and sets her mind to run over what has happened since she left Monroe High School library.
Firstly, Danny Brogan’s traveling companion, Jeff Torrance, was shot dead earlier in the afternoon outside a Ruby Tuesday’s chain restaurant in Rockford, Illinois. Ken Fowler had already got plates from the DMV for a red 1976 Ford Mustang registered to Jefferson Torrance, Spring Harbor, Madison WI, and added it to the BOLO alert when it emerged that Danny Brogan had taken off in it. An eye witness saw Danny hovering over the body, hands and face covered in blood. Initially the Rockford Police assumed that Brogan had shot Torrance, but once the forensic pathologist from the University of Illinois showed up, his preliminary findings made it clear that, from the nature of the impact wound and the angle of entry, the shot had been fired from some considerable distance. Nonetheless, Brogan was still being pursued, and now the highway patrol had a vehicle to watch out for.
Secondly, Nora has called Cass Epstein at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. Nora and Cass are members of the same book group, and when the book of the month was Conspiracy of Silence by Martha Powers, with its themes of adoption, the discussion had quickly moved, as book group discussions will, from the book to the issues themselves: what rights do the birth parents, the foster parents and the adopted children have, and who takes precedence? Nora knows she can get access to information based on a warrant or if she can demonstrate it’s a vital part of her investigation. She doesn’t have the former, and doesn’t know yet if the latter applies. But it’s Halloween tonight, the Bradberry fire was on Halloween thirty-five years ago, and Nora doesn’t think much of detectives who think having a bad feeling means anything, but … she has a bad feeling. So she calls Cass and asks her if she can identify the surviving Bradberry child, the three-year-old girl who got away. She tells Cass it may form the background to an investigation she’s conducting, and it might be very helpful, and two people are dead already, so time is a factor. She oscillates between calm, because Cass is highly resistant to bullying, and a bit of, well, bullying. And Cass says the office is nearly closed, and she will have to weigh Nora’s application on its merits, and she may not hear back from her until tomorrow, and Happy Halloween! So much for the book club network.
Officer Colby returns with an old plaid suitcase that doesn’t lock properly and is covered with mold.
‘It’s so cold in that garage, the body’s not likely to decompose,’ he says, and Nora nods, and Colby gingerly scoops up Mr Smith’s body and drops it in the case, and folds the lid over and carries it across to the garage. When he comes back, Nora tells him he can leave. She stays, staring at the house, and pacing the backyard, opening the rear gate that gives out to the Arboretum and walking the earth that has been turned, a Maglite the size of a ballpoint pen guiding her eye. She always does this, like a criminal herself, returning to the scene of the crime just to see if there’s anything they’ve missed. And there is always something. It takes her half an hour, rustling leaves with her feet like a dog, or a child, crunching dead apples into mulch, until she spots something glittering in the forest scurf. She takes tweezers from her bag and picks it up and inspects it. It’s a small oval medal, silver in shade but not silver, probably nickel, with a cross and an M on one side and an engraving of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the other, and the words around the engraving, in tiny print: O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
A Miraculous Medal, she recognizes it immediately: Gary was Catholic and used to wear one, got a kind of illicit thrill from wearing it when they had sex that Nora eventually began to find creepy. But then, Nora never believed in God. Her parents were all, ‘We don’t want to impose anything on you. When you’re old enough, you can figure it out for yourself.’ Nora often wonders if this was the right approach, or if faith is only something you have if you contract it as a child. Not that she necessarily misses it, or at least, not day to day, but she does sometimes envy people who believe, even when it lapses. There’s something there they can go back to, and often, when the going gets tough, they do. And she doesn’t actually think her parents, who were self-absorbed flakes who divorced when she was ten so they could make two other self-absorbed flakes’ lives a misery, had any real intellectual rigor to their non-faith-based method of parenting. She reckons they were just too lazy to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.
She stares at the medal. Maybe there are prints on it, she thinks, popping it into one of the self-sealing evidence bags she’s never without. Maybe it just narrows the suspect range down to Catholics. Or maybe it was Ralph Cowley’s.
O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
Her phone vibrates. She has a new text message.
Info on your desk dropped it in as I was passing hope it helps Cass x