World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(11)

“Forty-two days,” I say. “So you’re saying there is no chance?”

“No. Listen. Officer. I am saying there is less than that. There is less than no chance.”

I thanked her politely for everything and went downstairs and finished packing.


*

“You know, I hate to say it,” says Cortez, carefully constructing a hand-rolled cigarette. “But this is a very attractive girl.”

I look at him sharply. There is nothing in either his tone of voice or his salacious expression to indicate that he does, in fact, hate to say it. He’s needling me is what he is doing, saying exactly the thing I will find most unsettling. Other people have enjoyed teasing me in the same way: my old friends, Detectives McGully and Culverson. Nico, of course. I get it. I know what I’m like.

“I’m just saying.” Cortez lights a smoke and enjoys a long, satisfied inhale, contemplating the girl’s slim body with open appreciation. I don’t say anything, not wanting to give Cortez the satisfaction of even a joking rejoinder, no mild “ha-ha” or straight-man rolling of my eyes. I scowl, waving cigarette smoke away from the unconscious young woman, and he stubs the thing out on the floor.

“Oh, dear Palace,” he says, and he yawns and stands up. “I’m going to miss you when I’m in heaven and you’re not.”

I’m sitting on the toilet, beside the girl, whom we’ve laid out on the thin bare mattress, her hands tucked at her sides. The bed is just inside the bars, inside the actual cell part of the holding cell, along with the toilet and the sink and mirror. Cortez is on the other side of the room, the good-guy side, in the thin space between the bars and the door leading out to the hallway. That’s the only place I could find a ceiling hook for the saline bag, so that’s where it’s hung: on the good-guy side of the room, the sterile fluid dripping out of the bag, looping down through its tubing, through the bars and into the girl’s arm. When we left Police House, the Night Bird assembled a first-aid kit for me: reams of gauze and boxes of aspirin and bottles of hydrogen peroxide, plus two liters of saline in two one-liter bags and an IV start kit. When I told her I had no idea how to administer it, she scoffed and said just follow the instructions on the kit. She said it practically administers itself.

Cortez follows my gaze up to the bag of fluid. “Doesn’t look like it’s coming out, does it?”

“Well, it’s dripping at the top, see?”

“Did you do it right?”

“I don’t know. But it’s dripping.”

“What happens if you did it wrong?”

I don’t respond, but the answer is that she won’t get fluid and she’ll die. I check the Casio and it’s 4:45 in the afternoon. The watch was given to me, along with a rushed hug, by Trish McConnell’s daughter Kelli. “Mom is mad at you,” she said, and I said, “I know,” and she said, “I am, too,” but nevertheless she snuck the watch into my pocket, and I’ve been wearing it. When you press the side button it glows a pleasant blue-green. I love the watch.

This girl does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. I checked—swiftly and gingerly and with the minimum possible physical contact, murmuring apologies, but I checked. Neither does she have abrasions at the wrists or elbows that would be consistent with having been bound. Just the throat, plus the contusions and lacerations to the face, along with other signs of violent struggle: bruises on her knuckles and shins, two torn fingernails. I collected tissue samples from under her nails with a tweezer and placed them carefully in one of the sandwich bags. Detective Palace’s Miniature Roving Evidence Locker. I cleaned and dressed the wound to her throat, applying Neosporin in a thin glaze along the wide obscene mouth of the cut. I ended up using too much gauze, extending the bandaging on either side well beyond the edges of the wound, reaching around to the back of her neck. It looks like her head has been cut off and reattached. The girl’s hair is perfectly black, falling away in two matted curtains from her face.

I stand up from the toilet, turn away for a minute, waver on my feet. I’m starving. Exhausted. In my hand is the sleeping girl’s bracelet. It was in her shirt-front pocket, not on her wrist. Delicate fake gold, the sort of cheap token you get at a mall chain store, the kind of thing boys buy for girls in high school. There are charms dangling from it: a music note, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny silver cluster of flowers, delicate and lovely.

“Irises?” I murmur to myself.

“Lilies,” says Cortez.

“You think?” I feel the small weight of the chain in my palm. “Maybe they’re roses.”

“Lilies,” he says again and yawns.

I study the girl’s blank face and decide that her name is Lily. That’s why she has the bracelet. I need for her to have a name, for right now.

“My name is Henry Palace,” I whisper to Lily, who can’t hear. Cortez gazes at me with amusement. I ignore him. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s unconscious. I’m not sure what else to do. I have a weird sudden need to lie down on that mattress myself; a weird wish that it was me instead of her. I watch her breathing: shallow breath in, shallow breath out. I hold the bracelet in my palm, dull in the dirty gold light of the small gray cell.

Cortez pushes off from the wall and leans against the bars and starts talking, absently, casually.