Jenna switched off the lamp on her desk and shrugged on her quilted brown parka. ‘That’s me for tonight,’ she told Detective Brubaker, who was still hunched over a pile of paperwork. He was appearing in Municipal Court tomorrow, giving evidence in a case of two young girls who had died after taking contaminated ecstasy tablets.
‘See you, sweet cheeks. Have a brewski for me, will you? I won’t be through till way past midnight.’
Jenna paused beside Detective Brubaker’s desk. ‘Gerry?’ she said.
Detective Brubaker caught the seriousness in her voice. He took off his reading glasses and looked up at her.
‘What is it? Not that daughter of yours giving you trouble again?’
‘No. Nothing like that. I was just wondering if you think that I’m likeable.’
‘Likeable? What kind of a question is that?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling that I put people’s backs up. You know, losing my temper too quick, opening my yap and putting my size six sneaker in it. That kind of thing.’
Detective Brubaker made a moue. ‘Nah. I don’t think anybody gets too aerated when you say what you think. Now and then it might be better if you kept your opinions to yourself. Like Sergeant Mulvaney’s hairpiece. The poor guy’s real sensitive about it.’
‘I know he is. But, my God. He could have warned us he was going to walk into the squad room with Punxsutawney Phil on his head.’
Detective Brubaker couldn’t help smirking. ‘Let me tell you this, Jenna. Most of the guys don’t believe that women should be detectives at all. They think women should be home doing the laundry and baking brownies and changing the kids’ shitty diapers, and that every night they should welcome their husbands back to the bosom of the family with a cold beer and a warm blow-job. They certainly don’t believe that women should be detectives who say it the way they find it.’
He replaced his spectacles and went back to his paperwork, but Jenna stayed where she was.
‘But, what?’ she asked him.
Detective Brubaker looked up again. ‘Did I say “but”?’
‘I’m a trained interrogator, Gerry. I know when somebody has a “but” on the tip of their tongue.’
‘OK. You asked me if you were likeable, and you are. I like you. You’re sassy and you’re funny and you’re tough and you’re good at what you do. Underneath, I think all of the guys like you, too. It’s just that they’re scared of you. In fact I think that they’re scared of most women, especially women who talk back to them and won’t take any bullshit.’
‘Hm. I think you’re just trying to get into my thong.’
‘I didn’t know you wore a thong.’
‘And you never will, Gerry. Not for sure, anyhow. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK? And – you know – thanks for the heads up. I’ll try not to be so goddamned outspoken in future, especially when it comes to toupees. I’d hate it if everybody in the district thought that I was some kind of harridan.’
She was making her way to the squad room door when her telephone rang. It had a particularly loud, unpleasant jangle that always left a salty taste in her mouth.
Detective Brubaker waved his hand dismissively. ‘I’d leave it, if I were you. Go home.’
Jenna hesitated. She was very tired, and she was anxious to get back in time to make sure that Ellie had eaten a proper supper. Ellie was neurotic about her weight at the moment, almost to the point of anorexia, and Jenna was growing increasingly worried about it. She knew what it was like to look in the mirror every morning and see a big-breasted, big-bellied, big-hipped lard-butt staring back at you, even if you didn’t really look like that at all.
The phone kept on jangling and she knew that she would have to answer it. She went back to her desk, put down her pocketbook and picked up the receiver. ‘What?’
‘Jenna, it’s Dan. I’m at the Nectarine Tower Apartments on North Nineteenth. Up on the roof. We have two DBs up here.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Dan. I thought you were supposed to be home.’
‘Well, yes, I was on my way. I’d even bought myself a pizza at Dolce Carini. But I saw two squad cars and a bus pulling up outside and I couldn’t very well drive past without checking what was going down here.’
‘You’re not on duty, Dan. I’m not on duty. Our shift is over, and I’m frazzled. Why didn’t dispatch put it through to Smith and Collard?’
‘Because I told them not to. I told them that you and me would handle it.’
‘And why the hell would you want to do that?’
‘Because three eyewitnesses say they saw something drop out of the sky. Something dropped out of the sky and they heard screaming up on the roof and when they went up to see what it was all about, they found these two DBs. They’ve been ripped right open, Jenna. I mean they have literally been torn to shreds. I never saw anything like it.’
‘Something dropped out of the sky?’
‘That’s right. All three witnesses saw it. Or at least they caught a glimpse of it.’
‘Do they have any idea what it was?’
‘They’re not sure. One of them only saw its shadow, but they all agreed it was like some kind of a bird, even though it wasn’t a bird. Like, it had wings. But two of them agreed that it had horns, and one of them said it had bulging eyes like Don Rickles.’
‘Don Rickles? I don’t believe this. Two people were ripped to pieces by something with wings that looked like Don Rickles?’
‘I guess it was the eyes, that’s all.’
‘Jesus. And you thought you and me needed to take this case up for why? Because of that statue that fell out of the sky?’
‘Well, yes. You have to admit they could be connected. The horns. The bulging eyes. The feet that looked like claws. It all seems like kind of a coincidence.’
Jenna took a deep breath.
‘You still there?’ Dan asked her.
‘Yes, I’m still here, for my sins. Give me ten minutes. I have to call home first.’
‘The crime scene team have just arrived. My God. One of them barfed. One of them actually barfed.’
Jenna hung up. Detective Brubaker looked across at her and said, ‘No peace for the wicked, hunh?’
‘Two DBs on top of the Nectarine Tower Apartments. According to Dan they were both torn to pieces.’
She punched out her home number and waited for Ellie to pick up. Detective Brubaker stretched and said, ‘It totally beats me, you know. Homo sapiens has been living on this planet for five hundred thousand years and we’re still tearing lumps out of each other. Homo sapiens? More like homo asinus.’
Ellie answered, ‘Mom?’ She sounded tired, or dreamy, as if she had just woken up. Jenna hoped she wasn’t high. Some of her school friends had been caught last week taking mephedrone, and she knew for sure that several of them regularly smoked weed, particularly that Ricky Martinez.
‘Hi, baby. Listen, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’m sorry. Something real important came up and I have to go deal with it.’
‘A murder?’
‘Yes, well, something like that. You don’t want to hear all the grisly details. Did you eat the lasagne I left you? I made sure I left you only a small piece.’
‘I ate some of it.’
‘You ate some of it? Ellie, it was only a mouthful to begin with.’
‘I had lunch. I wasn’t hungry.’
‘So what did you have for lunch? Come on, tell me the truth.’
There was a pause, and then Ellie said, ‘A Kellogg’s cereal bar and half an apple. And a diet Dr Pepper.’
‘OK, fine,’ Jenna told her. Maybe a Kellogg’s cereal bar and half an apple wasn’t a banquet but at least she had eaten something, and she didn’t want to make Ellie feel any more stressed about it than she did already. ‘I’ll see you when I see you, OK? And don’t stay up too late.’
‘Kids today,’ said Detective Brubaker, as Jenna hung up. ‘When we were young, my mom put us on the Earring Diet.’
‘Oh yeah? What was that?’
‘You sat down at the table, you said grace, and you ate what was put in front of you. If you didn’t, you got a smack round the head, which made your ear ring.’
‘Yeah, those were the days,’ said Jenna. ‘If I did that today, I’d have to arrest myself for assault.’
*
She parked around the corner on Brandywine Street and crossed over North Nineteenth Street to the Nectarine Tower Apartment building. The entire street was already jam-packed with squad cars, ambulances, a van from the medical examiner’s office and press trucks. She pushed her way through the crowds and up the steps to the building’s main entrance, showing her badge to the two young officers standing in front of the revolving door, although she knew that they knew perfectly well who she was.
Dan was waiting for her in the lobby, talking to the doorman. When it was first opened in 1968, the Nectarine Tower had been the second most fashionable address in Philadelphia, after the Metropolitan, but these days it had a dated, worn-out look about it. The lighting in the marble-floored lobby was dim, and the brown leather couches were sagging, and the bronze finish on the elevator doors was badly discolored. Even the gold braid on the doorman’s maroon uniform had started to fray, and he could have used a shave.
‘I’ve managed to ID them,’ said Dan, as Jenna came click-clacking across the lobby. He flipped open his notebook and said, ‘They were two friends from different apartments who used to go up on the roof to smoke, because their wives wouldn’t let them do it indoors. Chet Huntley, thirty-nine, and William Barrow, fifty-two. Huntley was an insurance assessor and Barrow was an electrical contractor. As far as I can tell they had nothing in common except that they both enjoyed a cigar and they both supported the Phillies.’
‘Are the witnesses still here?’ asked Jenna. ‘This time I need to talk to them.’
‘One of them lives in twenty-one-oh-nine. She’s the one who saw the bird-thing the clearest.’
‘The one who thought it looked like Don Rickles?’
‘That’s right. Her name’s Mary Lugano. The other two live in nineteen-twelve and seventeen-twenty-three respectively. Christine Takenaka and Kenneth Keiller.’
‘Which of them found the bodies?’
‘Mary Lugano and Kenneth Keiller and another resident from twenty-oh-six.’
‘They’re OK? They’re not in shock or anything?’
‘Lucky for them they didn’t really see too much. It was pretty dark, up on the roof, and all they could make out was one of the vic’s heads, and a leg, and the floor all covered with blood. They came straight back down and called nine-one-one.’
‘OK,’ said Jenna. ‘Let’s take a look.’
They went up in the elevator to the twenty-second floor. At the back of the elevator car there was a brown-mottled mirror, and Jenna thought what a mess her hair was, and how tired she looked. These days she found herself wondering more and more frequently why she had chosen to join the police department. Even after all these years, her job frequently gave her horrific nightmares. It had broken up her relationship with Ellie’s father Jim, and with several of her closest friends, and she always looked as if she had been dragged backward through a briar patch.
If she quit, though, she knew that she would miss it from the very first day. It was a curse, but it was a calling. It was like being a doctor, or a nun. She had told Sister Mary Emmanuelle that she couldn’t understand how she could spend her entire life in prayer, but in reality she did understand, only too well. Just like Sister Mary Emmanuelle, she had no choice.
When they reached the twenty-second floor they stepped out of the elevator, crossed the corridor to the stairwell, and climbed up the last flight of stairs. Outside, the roof was brightly lit with portable halogen lamps, and cameras were flashing like summer lightning. Ed Freiburg and two other forensic investigators were waddling around in their noisy blue Tyvek suits, taking photographs and measuring the blood spatter and collecting samples of tissue and skin. Off to the left, two police officers were leaning on the low railing that surrounded the roof, talking to one of the medical examiners and deliberately keeping their backs to the horrors behind them.
The lights of the city twinkled all around them, and a soft damp breeze was blowing. Jenna stepped forward two or three paces, but no further, because of the dark shiny blood that was splashed across the concrete, as if somebody had thrown it from a bucket.
Dan had been right. The two victims had been torn to pieces, but much more explosively than Jenna could have imagined. They reminded her of a young woman who had been hit two years ago by an Acela express locomotive out at Norwood, and whose head had been found seventy-five feet further up the track than her feet, with every other part of her body littered in between. Both Chet Huntley and William Barrow had been ripped apart in a similar way, which indicated that they had been struck by something traveling at an extremely high velocity, and of considerable mass. And at a low angle, too.
Ed Freiburg stood up. His Tyvek suit was smeared with crisscross patterns of blood, like an action painting. He lifted his glove in greeting when he saw Jenna and he called out, ‘Come around the edge of the roof – that’s it, over to your right. There’s not too much residue there.’ By ‘residue’ he meant blood and skin and smashed-apart flesh.
Jenna circled around the roof to the north-east corner, balancing on her toes as delicately as a tightrope walker. Ed Freiburg came over to join her, wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve. Resting in the right angle between the two low retaining walls was a man’s torn-off head. Jenna guessed from his age and appearance that it was William Barrow. He was balding, with gray curly hair, and a bulbous nose. His pale blue eyes were wide open and he was staring upward with a concentrated look on his face as if he were trying to identify the stars.
His torso had been hit so hard that it had burst into pieces, and his skeleton and all of his internal organs had been scattered from one side of the roof to the other, a distance of more than a hundred feet. His feet were lying in the south-west corner, still wearing a pair of brown sneakers, with his shin bones protruding from them like turkey drumsticks.
Chet Huntley’s body was spread out diagonally across William Barrow’s, from the north-west corner to the south-east, so that between them they formed a grisly X. Where the remains of their two bodies intersected, there was a bloody confusion of ribs and livers and sloppy heaps of intestine. Ed Freiburg’s assistants were painstakingly trying to separate them, by hand, and heap them into evidence bags.
‘No sign of the unfortunate Mr Huntley’s head,’ said Ed Freiburg. ‘Guess it must have bounced clear off of the roof when he was hit. I sent one of my people down to street level to see if they can locate it.’
‘Ever see anything like this before?’ Jenna asked him. Unexpectedly, a sharp surge of bile rose up in her throat and she had to cover her mouth with her hand. In spite of the breeze, there was a strong smell of human insides up here on the roof.
‘I once saw a guy who was tied to two automobiles, which then drove off in opposite directions. That was in the days when “Little Nicky” Scarfo was in charge. But I never saw anything like this. These two guys are standing here, having a quiet smoke, when something that must have weighed the best part of seven hundred pounds hits them by surprise at – what? – a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, at least. Probably a whole lot faster. And simultaneously tears them open, too, with a jagged instrument of some sort, like three baling-hooks.’
‘According to Dan, at least one of the eyewitnesses thinks that it was some kind of massive bird.’
‘Yeah, he told me. But, come on. What kind of bird do we know of that could do this? The giant roc, from Sinbad the Sailor? That’s the only one I can think of. The roc was supposed to be able to pick up elephants and fly away with them. But here? Tonight? A roc? In Philly? I don’t think so.’
‘Two of the witnesses said it had horns and one of them said it had bulging eyes.’
‘Yeah – like that statue we picked up this morning. Dan told me about that, too. He seems to be convinced that there’s a link between them. But you don’t seriously think so, do you? Whatever that was a statue of, it was carved out of solid limestone. Whatever killed these guys, it was living and breathing and it was plenty mean.’
It was cold and ugly and ill-intentioned. That was what Sister Mary Emmanuelle had told her. I felt its malevolence.