World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(12)

“My mother was in a coma once. State hospital. Just two days. They brought her lunch and dinner, even though she was eating through a tube. Oversight, I guess. Or some dumb rule. Me and my brother ate it. It was good, too, compared to the food she usually provided for us.”

He laughs. I give him a half smile. I am never quite sure, when Cortez rolls out one of his long, involved stories, how true it is, how embellished, how much fabricated from whole cloth. The first time I met Cortez he was holed up in an ersatz warehouse on Garvins Falls Road, sitting on a pile of loot, which was subsequently taken from him by his erstwhile romantic and business partner, Ellen. He has told me three versions of that story, all with substantively different details: she caught him unawares and chased him out with a hatchet; she tricked him in a bargain; she had another lover, who showed up with some friends and cleaned the place out.

He’s wandered back into the cell now and he stands beside the small toilet, examining his wide, uneven face in the mirror. I ask him how his mother ended up in the coma.

“Oh.” He cracks his knuckles. “You know. I cut school one afternoon to go home and smoke some weed, and I found her and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend was choking her. His name was Kevin. He had been a marine. He was choking her with two hands, like this.” Cortez turns from the mirror and mimes the gesture, knuckles knitted together around an imaginary neck, eyes bulging.

“That’s awful.”

“He was a bad man, Kevin.”

“So she was choked, and lost consciousness?”

He makes a vague gesture. “She was on crack also. They both were.”

“Oh.” My eyes flicker back to the sleeping girl. “What about her? I’m presuming an OD.”

“Bite your tongue.” Cortez presses his hand to his chest, mock horrified. “She’s not that kind of girl. Someone slashed her. She bled out. She—I don’t know. Her organs shut down.”

“No.” I’ve been turning this over, trying to remember the medicine of it. Not my specialty. “If a person bleeds enough to lose consciousness then they keep bleeding until they die, unless someone is present to staunch the wound.”

Cortez frowns. “You sure?”

“Yes. No.” I am trying to remember. “I don’t know.”

I shake my head in self-disgust. Why don’t I know? In five years, I might get to be good at this, at being a policeman. Ten years, maybe.

Cortez turns back to the mirror. I squeeze my knuckles into my eyes, trying to resurrect lessons from basic first-responder trainings. Academy courses, professional readiness seminars. The throat is a narrow place clustered with vital structures—meaning that, whatever else has befallen this girl, she is in one respect extremely lucky: whoever sawed into her throat stopped shy of transecting the carotid artery, stopped shy of the jugular vein, the delicate piping of the trachea. A simple blood test could reveal whether some illicit substance is additionally involved here, but at this point a simple blood test is a concept from an alien universe, it’s science fiction. Mass spectrometry and immunoassays and gas-liquid chromatography, all of it belongs now to a bygone world.

And the fact is that what Cortez said actually has the ring of truth. Not that kind of girl. But neither was Peter Zell that kind of guy. Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.

I study Lily’s calm face, and then look up again at the saline bag. I think some is gone now. I think she’s beginning to rehydrate. I hope so.

“Don’t worry, Sherlock,” says Cortez. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and we’ll ask her what happened. Oh, unless it takes more than a week. If it takes more than a week, we’re f*cked.”

He laughs again and this time I give it to him, I laugh too, I roll my eyes and shake my head. Next week, we’ll all be dead. This station will be a pile of ash, and all of us inside it. Ha-ha-ha. I get it.


*

I leave Lily sleeping and Cortez smoking and tromp back through the woods to the crime scene.

If Detective Culverson were here, he would do a quiet, focused reenactment—walk it through, play all the parts. The girl was splayed out, facedown, pointing westward. Which means she was running from this direction, tripped here perhaps—fell forward this way. I pantomime her last desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.

There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.

I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. In the center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.