Last to Know: A Novel(17)

Lost in thoughts of a family she had never had, Bea looked infinitely sad. Tears stood in her eyes. “I wish I could live with them,” she said suddenly. “The Osbornes. They are my ideal.”

Looking at the pathetic child-woman standing in front of him, wrapped in the voluminous folds of the too-big terry robe and with that lost look in the back of her wide blue eyes, Harry wondered if he could do something about that. The Osbornes’ busy, bustling family house would be a better place than a hotel room for a recently bereaved young woman, alone in the world.

He and Rossetti said goodbye and walked away, then his phone buzzed. “Yeah?” He clamped it between chin and shoulder, turning to wave to the girl. Rossetti marched alongside him, phone also in hand, checking with the precinct. Then, “Jesus,” Harry said. “Okay, we’ll be right there.”

Rossetti looked inquiringly at him.

“They found Lacey Havnel’s body near the house an hour ago, it’s on its way to the coroner now.”

“Bingo.” Rossetti grinned, high-fiving. “Now we can wrap this whole thing up and let that young woman get on with her life.”

“Maybe,” Harry said, heading for his car, but then Rossetti always thought Harry stuck to the noncommittal until he was super-sure of his facts. That’s what made him a good detective.

“Except this time,” Harry said, “there’s a knife sticking out of her right eye. We’re looking at murder, Rossetti.”

*

The cold white room at the morgue was lined with refrigerated steel cabinets where bodies were stored pending autopsy and release for burial. If there was an ongoing investigation, as there was now, the body could be stored indefinitely.

Rossetti turned up his coat collar. “I hate this part,” he muttered, standing next to Harry in front of the wall of cabinets, each with a label giving the name of the deceased. If it was known, that is. Often it was not.

Lacey Havnel however had not yet graduated to a cabinet. She lay on one of the metal tables, zipped into a dark-blue plastic body bag under which Rossetti could make out her toes and the bump that was her head. He thought she looked very small under that plastic.

Murdered bodies were never a pretty sight but this time Harry had to stop himself from drawing in a shocked breath as the assistant unzipped and he found himself looking at the charred flesh and the staring still-open left eye of the woman who was Bea Havnel’s mother. A knife, approximately six inches long, protruded from the right eye socket. The flesh of the forehead was burned black, her hair was gone, and the rest of the face was unrecognizable as that of a woman.

“She might be anybody,” Rossetti said, turning away. “How do we know she’s who we think she is?”

“We won’t until we confirm dental records,” the assistant said.

“She was found just outside the burning house,” Harry told him. “Bea told us her hair was in flames and that she had run.”

“She didn’t tell us about the knife in her eye.” Rossetti’s gaze met Harry’s. “Tell me now, Detective, why did she not tell us that little detail? And anyhow, why would anyone knife a woman already burning to death?”

Harry looked again into the open staring left eye of Bea Havnel’s mother. “Who the f*ck knows,” he said.

The police photographers had already taken pictures at the scene, now they came to photograph the body in detail. One more gruesome fact that Harry would not tell her daughter.

“I’m certain drugs are involved,” he said to Rossetti. “One way or another. And our first task, Detective, is to find who Divon is and exactly where he is.”

Rossetti stalked thankfully outside with Harry.

“That was an old kitchen knife in her eye,” Harry said, “A Wusthof.” As a cook himself, Harry knew about knives and had a collection of which he was proud. “It takes a lot of force to stab somebody, you need to put a lot of weight behind it.”

“Even in the eye?”

“Our killer may not have been aiming for the eye, maybe Lacey Havnel moved, tried to get away and that’s just where he happened to get her.”

“Lucky him.” Rossetti hunched into his coat collar, still cold. “The question is why.”

“Find Divon,” Harry said, “and we’ll find out.”





13


Paris


Mal knew it was trouble when instead of the text with the flight information she got a phone call.

She was back in Paris, sitting at a tiny faux-marble table in the Café Les Deux Magots on boulevard Saint-Germain, peacefully occupying herself looking at the small stone church in the square opposite, which she knew to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest in Paris, which information gave her a nice sense of history and of being part of a greater scheme of things. If only it were not for the phone ringing. Of course it was Harry.

“What?” she asked, knowing it was trouble.

“You know what,” Harry said. “Mal, it was unavoidable, I’d just finished talking to you when right before my eyes the house on the opposite bank burst into flames, and this girl with her hair on fire threw herself into the lake.”

“And the brave detective rescued her.”

“To serve and protect, that’s the police motto.”