The Cold Room Read online

  ‘You trust me to come back on my own,’ he said after a minute.

  ‘Clyde, it’s just like you said. Your running days are behind you.’

  The first clouds made their appearance some four hours later. They came north from the harbor, long gray tendrils that swung back and forth like questing snakes. The clouds ushered in a gentle breeze, a breeze that became a wind as the clouds gradually took on the yellow-green color of a healing bruise. I led Clyde to the Crown Vic at that point. The air inside was stifling, but the clatter of hail on the roof forced me to keep the windows up.

  The hail was followed by a deluge, as if somebody had run a knife across the underside of a water bed. For the next ten minutes, the lightning advanced on our position, until there was virtually no gap between the flashes and the resulting explosions. Clyde was sitting alongside me, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. My own eyes were wide open. The hail and rain were pounding on the crime scene, destroying every bit of trace evidence. They pounded on the body of the victim as well, and what I wondered, as I struggled to draw oxygen from an atmosphere as thick as pudding, was whether her open gut would contain the water. Like a bath tub.

  The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the clouds receded to the north as if in fear of being left behind. Within minutes, the sun was out and the air again motionless. I exited the car, pausing for a minute to watch a thin mist rise from the hot cobblestones. Then I looked up at the bridge, my attention drawn by the silence. The helicopters were gone, the rescue workers as well, driven away by the weather no doubt. I wondered if there were any civilians still trapped in the subway cars, imagining their terror and the civil damages they would later seek. I was still pondering this question when a morgue wagon, closely followed by a city car bearing a death investigator, pulled up before the crime scene tape. The investigator rolled down the window a few inches. A short black man, he carefully scrutinized my sweat-soaked clothing, his distaste obvious.

  ‘You have a body for me, detective?’ he asked.

  ‘I have what’s left of a body after nine hours in the sun.’

  ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ he said, staring me down. I turned away without answering.

  FOUR

  We were in the master bedroom of our Manhattan apartment, Adele Bentibi, my live-in lover, and I, enjoying a meal of hummus, tabbouleh salad, stuffed grape leaves and lamb shawarma. Adele was wearing a blue T-shirt and gym shorts, while I wore only a pair of faded cargo shorts. I freely admit that Adele was quite attractive in this outfit, not to mention erotic, but it wasn’t sex that brought us to the bedroom. The air conditioner in the window to our left was the only air conditioner in an apartment that received eight hours of direct sunlight on midsummer days. Although the unit was running full out, and had been for the past week, the room was still noticeably warm at ten o’clock in the evening.

  Adele was propped up on one elbow, staring down at me. Nine months before, she’d been assaulted with an aluminium bat as she left her parked car. The blow had been meant to kill her, but had succeeded only in flattening the center of her rather prominent nose. Adele’s first instinct was to ignore the defect, no surprise as she was far too vain to admit to her own vanity. But then her breathing became impaired and she was more or less forced into an operating room. The result was a smaller, rounded nose that softened a thin face made thinner by sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin. Myself, I was indifferent to the change, but I remember catching Adele standing before the mirror in the bathroom one day, examining herself closely. Her dark eyes, when she finally acknowledged my existence, were filled with humor, her thin smile impish. Adele liked what she saw in the mirror, a guilt-free result that could only have come about through medical necessity.

  ‘Do you think,’ Adele asked as she cut through a stuffed grape leaf with the edge of her fork, ‘that Kelly will make a credible witness?’

  ‘Assuming I come up with somebody for him to ID, I think he will.’ Though Kelly had examined more than a thousand mug shots at the precinct, he’d failed to make even a tentative identification. ‘Especially if some defense lawyer is stupid enough to ask him why he didn’t report what he saw right away.’

  We were analysing the case, our discussion continuing through dinner and while we did the few dishes. I wasn’t dealing, we agreed, with a street criminal who acted on impulse, as street criminals so often do. The effort to prepare the victim for disposal had been thorough and systematic. Nevertheless, there were flies in this ointment. The head wound, for example; blunt force trauma is usually inflicted in a moment of passion. And the pink lividity was another problem. If she’d inhaled enough carbon monoxide or cyanide to alter her blood chemistry, why crack her skull?

  But the practical benefits of discussing the case with my former partner were beside the point. Nine months before, Adele had been my partner, working the case that put me on the outs with my peers. She’d taken a terrible beating, had come from an emergency ward to confront the man who’d beaten her. Detective Linus Potter had looked directly into Adele’s eyes, then surrendered peacefully, knowing that if he resisted, she would kill him.

  Now Adele toiled as an investigator for the Queens District Attorney, Kenneth Alessio, and she was bored out of her mind. Mostly, her work consisted of re-interviewing witnesses who’d been carefully prepped by the detectives who’d uncovered them in the first place. Either that or making sure those same witnesses arrived in court on time and sober.

  Though she was too proud to say so, Adele missed the streets. I understood this because, to a certain extent, I missed them as well. Literally the odd man out on a squad that was a detective short of full strength, I passed most of my working days without a partner, responding to burglary complaints, or comforting seniors who’d had their purses snatched.

  But now I had a mystery on my hands, for the first time in almost a year, and Adele had always been drawn to mysteries. If she wanted to experience this one through my eyes, I wasn’t about to deny her. As for me, I was cheered by her interest. For some weeks, I’d felt Adele drifting away from me. Not toward some third party, I didn’t fear infidelity. No, Adele had a capacity for solitude, not to mention isolation, and now she seemed to be folding into herself. Only occasionally was I able to draw her out and only for brief periods. Worse still, there didn’t seem to be any reason for her withdrawal.

  As for myself, I was in love with Adele Bentibi and my fear of losing her was compounded by the simple fact that there was nothing of Adele’s in the apartment we shared, not a stick of furniture, not a single picture on the walls, not even a knick-knack. She could be out of my life in the time it took to pack her clothes.

  ‘The taking of the victim’s organs, Corbin. You suggested three possibilities: that she was a drug mule; that her organs were harvested for sale; that she was the victim of a sadistic killer. Well, I can think of a fourth possibility.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Which is that she was pregnant and her fetus was removed to prevent a DNA test for paternity.’

  On that happy note, we retreated to our shared office in the apartment’s second bedroom. A few years before, in a moment of foolishness, I’d invested a week’s salary in a digital camera, a scanner and an ink jet printer. The camera went into permanent storage on a shelf in my closet after a photography class revealed that I was without artistic ability. But the other part of it, all those little tricks a computer can do with an image, continued to attract me. Not that I’m an expert, though I’ve spent many hundreds of hours working in Photoshop. But I’m not a hack, either.

  I began my work by scanning the best of the photos I’d taken of the victim’s face into the computer. I used a filter called Unsharp Mask, which – despite the misnomer – sharpened the Polaroid photograph considerably. Still, the image that popped up on the monitor was marred by decay, by abrasions on the chin and the nose, and by a discharge of purge fluid that stained the mouth and chin.

  Starting
with the abrasions and the purge fluid, I patiently transferred skin tone from the victim’s cheeks to the affected areas until her chin and lips were virtually unmarred. Then I transferred copies of her eye sockets, nose and the tip of her chin to an underlayer, before squeezing the original photo. The victim’s face was bloated and I wanted to narrow it without also narrowing bony prominences less subject to bloating. Returning these features to the original was a fairly simple matter.

  ‘You’re bringing her back to life, Corbin,’ Adele declared when I’d completed this phase of the job.

  I might have mentioned Lazarus at that point, but as Adele was a Sephardic Jew, I didn’t waste my breath. And there was no bringing her back to life, either. Like any murder victim, Jane Doe #4805 was beyond even simple revenge. Nevertheless, if I couldn’t restore her to life, I could make her lifelike. And that’s what I did. I made her cheeks rosy, her lips red, her eyes blue, her teeth white. I sharpened her chin, darkened her brows and restored the shadows bleached out by the Polaroid’s flash. The young woman who emerged would not have turned heads on the street. Dominated by a pronounced overbite, her chin was slightly receding, her nose long, her face small and square. A thick head of blond wavy hair had undoubtedly been her best asset, but as I styled her hair with all the attention of a Madison Avenue hairdresser, I could only guess that she’d worn it loose.

  Finally, I printed several black-and-white photos, each time sharpening the contrast. I might have printed in color, but there was no way I could be certain that the hues I’d assigned to the victim’s cheeks, lips and eyes reflected her normal coloring. Nor could I know if the evident bloating had erased any fine lines around her eyes or at the corners of her mouth. What I did know, however, by the time I finished, was that I had a likeness that would be recognized by anyone who knew her, a likeness at least as good as a police artist’s sketch. And I didn’t have to beg to get it.

  I shut down the computer, satisfied with the result. Long ago, while still in uniform, I’d set my sights on a detective’s gold shield. I was at a distinct disadvantage, which I knew at the time. Promotion to the Detective Bureau was strictly at the discretion of the bosses and your pedigree was at least as important as the job you did on the street. That was a given. But if there was nothing to be done about a system that consistently rewarded second- and third-generation cops, at least one variable was still in play. If I couldn’t out-influence my competitors, I could definitely outwork them. And that’s what I did, collaring so many bad guys in the next ten months that the Precinct union delegate finally told me to lay off.

  ‘You’re makin’ the rest of us look bad,’ he’d explained.

  Adele’s hand tightened on my shoulder at that point and I swiveled my chair in a half-circle to face her. Although we’d been working for two hours and were both drenched with sweat, I wasn’t thinking of a shower at that moment. My mood having instantly turned, I was thinking about the slippery texture of Adele’s inner thigh, how her skin would feel beneath my fingers should I slide them from her left knee into the shadow beneath the leg of her gym shorts. I knew that if I lifted her t-shirt just a few inches, I’d discover a tiny drop of salty water trapped in her navel. I wanted to taste that drop on my tongue, to let it roll down into my throat. I wanted to absorb Adele the way the skin of a submerged amphibian absorbs oxygen.

  Aroused by death? By violent death, by death undeserved? Looking back, I don’t think so. I think I somehow separated the chase from the event that set the chase in motion. But murder was, undeniably, a necessary precondition to the erotic recklessness I felt at that moment. And I knew it, even at the time. I reached out to place my hands on Adele’s hips, to draw her close, but she was one step ahead of me, as usual. She slid away, then yanked off her T-shirt, smiling that naughty, little-girl smile reserved for me alone. Adele’s breasts are small and hard, her nipples like thimbles. That my eyes were drawn to them came as no surprise to either of us.

  ‘Corbin,’ she asked, ‘what do you think would happen if I stood in front of the air conditioner for a moment or two?’

  I don’t remember what I answered, or what I imagined, the end result being at least as grand as any fantasy I could muster. Her nipples became as hard as bullets, her breasts pimpled with little goose bumps that smoothed beneath my tongue. Prior to Adele, my adult relationships had been limited to a series of impulsive affairs that cooled as fast as they began. The pattern was so consistent that I’d pretty much resigned myself to a hit-and-run sex life. Meanwhile, after nine months with Adele, I was as infatuated as ever.

  We made love in a frenzy, in a blur of manipulations. Adele is a very fit woman, but I’m also very fit and much larger. Toward the end, when I pinned her wrists to the bed, her legs circled my hips and tightened, commanding me forward, locking me into an arc of no more than a few inches. She was looking directly into my eyes then, her breath coming in short heaves, her mouth curled into a defiant grimace. When I bent forward to cover that mouth with my own, a shudder ran through her body, from the base of her spine up into her skull, and her eyes fluttered momentarily before closing. A moment later, I exploded inside her.

  Pillow talk. After the showers and the changing of the sheets, as we lay side by side watching NY1, the cable news station, Adele laid her hand on my thigh and cleared her throat. They were doing the subway derailment on the little screen: the eight people dead, the ninety-seven injured, the EDP, the plain-clothes cop whose every move was now being judged by a media as anxious as its audience to cast blame. Predictably, the job was acting with caution. No details would be forthcoming until after a preliminary investigation was completed sometime within the next few days.

  ‘Corbin,’ Adele said, ‘the perp in the case I’ve been working decided to plead out today. It came as a big surprise.’

  Something in her voice, a slight quaver, a hesitation, raised the hair on the back of my neck. ‘And?’

  ‘Well, I have nearly a week coming.’

  ‘Compensation for overtime?’

  ‘Exactly. And what I thought I’d do was visit Jovianna. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.’

  I recoiled, literally, my head jerking back. Jovianna Littman was Adele’s sister, an unbearably competitive woman who used her several advanced degrees to lord it over her cop sibling. Ordinarily, Adele avoided Jovianna, who lived with her family in a gated community outside Baltimore, showing up only on the Jewish holy days of Passover and Yom Kippur. And then only for the sake of her parents, who lived nearby and whom she also disliked.

  ‘How will you get there?’ I knew the question was inane before the words were out of my mouth.

  ‘I decided to go by Amtrak, so I won’t have to put up with the security delays at the airport. The ride’s only six hours.’ She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Jovianna called me this evening and we just got to talking. My mother hasn’t been feeling well, which I think I told you, and I haven’t seen them since April. Plus, I know how you get when you catch a case like this. A couple of days from now, you’ll barely remember my name.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘Maybe in a few days. If I can stand Jovianna even for that long. By the end of the week for sure.’

  There was nothing else to say, not unless I challenged Adele’s honesty. I wasn’t prepared to do that, although much of what she said rang false to my interrogator’s ear. So I told her to have a good time and got a hug before she turned out the light.

  For the next fifteen minutes, until she fell asleep, I laid quietly beside her. Then I rolled out of bed and went into the living room. Of necessity, Adele and I lived separate lives. She worked normal business hours, while I toiled from four until midnight. I wouldn’t have been ready for sleep, even on a normal day, but now my brain was spinning.

  I parked myself before the TV and tried to watch a movie, Ocean’s Eleven, but I couldn’t follow the convoluted plot. Somehow, I found my thoughts turning, not to Adele, but to the crime scene, to the flies and the body,
the heat and the rain, to Clyde Kelly’s sad eyes and troubled conscience. Adele was running off to Maryland and there was nothing I could do about it. My Jane Doe was another matter. She was my responsibility. Only I could speak for her.

  Eventually, I took those thoughts back to my computer and reworked her likeness. I rotated her head back and forth, tilted her chin up, played with her expression. I imagined her happy and sad, fearful and angry. What would she do with her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her brow, her chin? Finally, after printing what amounted to a model’s portfolio, I settled on a three-quarters shot of her right profile, adjusting her eyes until she was looking at me with a sideways glance at once timid and sly. I had no reason to believe that the finished product would be any more effective than the first photo I printed. I really didn’t care.

  FIVE

  Idon’t like autopsies and I don’t ordinarily attend them. I’m not an overly squeamish man, so neither the sounds, the plops, crunches and squishes, or the incredibly foul odor, bother me all that much. It’s more a question of loss. You’d think that when an individual is inflicted with an injury sufficient to end her life, there’d be nothing more to take from her. But you’d be dead wrong. At autopsy, murder victims are reduced to meat on a table, to the bare mechanics. The various organs – the ones sill left, anyway – are examined, measured and weighed on a scale that might be found in any butcher shop. The stomach is squeezed of its contents, like icing from a pastry bag. The scalp is peeled down and left to hang over the face. The ribs are cut away with shears that might be used to prune the dead branches of trees.

  There is no dignity for the victim in any of this. There is only a further reduction, a second stripping away. The Buddhists say that the spirit lingers for a time after death, to watch over the body, to observe the rituals of mourning. As a rule, I’m not one to question another’s beliefs, but as I listened to the whine of a Stryker saw cutting away the top of my victim’s skull, I found myself hoping the Buddhists were wrong, that her spirit wasn’t hovering above that cold metal table, whispering ‘help me, help me, help me’.