Cold War - Jerome Preisler [37]
Just now the hair lay matted to one side of her head, a twisted dirty tangle that pointed away from her ghost-white face. Cardha Duff’s body sprawled face-up in front of a TV, a few feet from the couch. Her left arm lay out as if in supplication. She had a bandage at the inside joint of the elbow; she’d obviously given blood the day before she died.
A final act of charity before death.
“Has forensics been called?” Gorrie asked the constable who’d been watching the door.
“On the way, sir. Sergeant Robertson took care of it straightaway.”
The ambulance people stood at the side of the room, waiting to hear what they should do. Gorrie wanted to know how the body was when they found it; they assured him they’d only moved it a little, ascertaining she was dead.
“The neighbor, she saw us,” volunteered the driver.
“Which neighbor was that, son?”
“Gray-haired woman, Mrs. Peters. 213. She thought something was amiss because she didn’t answer to the knock. Came in with us.”
Gorrie nodded. “Now tell me why you think it’s a suicide.”
“Pills on the floor, one near the radiator and another under the sink,” said the other attendant quickly. She had a stud in her nose and spoke with a Lowlands accent—Gorrie wasn’t sure which prejudiced his mind worse.
“And how d’you know that, lass?”
“I’m not your lass now, am I?” She’d flushed, though, and Gorrie waited her out. “I went to use the john and I saw it. I didn’t touch a thing. Not a thing,” she said finally.
“How long have you been on the job?” he asked her.
“A few weeks. What is it to you?”
Gorrie went to the bathroom. Though the scene was now obviously contaminated, he used a pencil to flick on the light, peered in a moment, then lowered himself to his knees and looked around. He could see a small capsule below the edge of the towel rack, near the molding and radiator. Another sat below the baseboard casing.
Cold capsules, he thought, but the lads at the lab would be able to tell. Best to leave them to be photographed for position.
If they were cold medicine, most likely they would match the bottle at the bottom of the empty waste bin—Talisniff. Wife used to give him that for the sniffles. There was another bottle of tiny pills that seemed to be for a thyroid condition, along with the usual feminine paraphernalia.
“Wait in the ambulance would you, both of you,” the inspector told the attendants. “Don’t go until I release you—myself, no one else.”
They would end up staying well past dinner, and Gorrie would feel sorry for being so peevish.
SEVEN
ABOVE MCMURDO SOUND, ANTARCTICA (77°88’ S, 166°73’ E) MARCH 12, 2002
PETE NIMEC FELT A HAND TOUCH HIS SHOULDER, AND came awake at once. In his home, always within quick reach of a weapon, he could succeed at something more than light sleep. Now he straightened up with a start that jostled his sling seat on its rail.
He blinked away scraps of a horrendous dream brought on by fatigue: Gordian dead on a concrete floor, the killer who’d butchered four of Tom Ricci’s men in the Ontario raid standing over him.
In his dream, the killer had again done his bloody work like a precision machine, but the savage pride in his eyes was all too human.
Nimec tried to imagine how Ricci had been affected by Ontario, imagine what private anguish it had left him to wrestle down in the depths of night.
He took a breath to relax and settled into the canvas webbing of his seat. Master Sergeant Barry, a loadmaster with the Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing—and more specifically, its flying component, the 139th Tactical Squadron—stood before him in the cabin of the Hercules ski bird. He was mouthing words Nimec couldn’t hear.
Nimec held up a finger to indicate