Читать книгу The 3rd Woman - Jonathan Freedland - Страница 12

Back in her apartment, she all but had to push Jeff out of the door. He had been waiting for her, sitting in his parked car, for God knows how long. He wanted to see how she was doing, he said, make sure she was OK. She allowed him to come up, accepted his offer of coffee, bought not made, and allowed him to place a portion of youtiao on the table, the sticks of fried bread which he knew she liked. But she would not let him comfort her any longer. She told him she needed to rest. He raised a sceptical eyebrow at that, which she ignored. She hoped he would believe that grief would succeed where meditation, Temazepam and the latest supposedly cure-all import from Shanghai, the saliva of a swallow, had all failed.

Once the door was closed, she cleared the desk, which meant lifting the piles of transcripts and documents about LA’s secret warren of sweatshops off the table and putting them under it, where they could not distract her. She paused as she remembered Jane Goldstein’s parting request for a follow-up story. Then she took a sip of coffee and powered up her trusted Lenovo laptop.

There, lodged in the corner of the screen, was the outline of her Day Two piece, drafted during the long stretch of sleepless nights when she worked at the sweatshop. Of course it was insane for her to think of her job now. Her inner Quincy was adamant: Don’t tell me you’re going to work. Easy coming from Quincy, who identified herself as an ‘SAHM’ on that hideously smug mothers’ website: Stay at Home Mom. Besides, this story was almost written. It made no sense to leave it sitting here on the machine. All it required was a quick read-through. If she sent it over now, that would buy her time with Howard and Jane: she could then spend the next day or two undisturbed, getting on with what really mattered. She’d give it half an hour, no more.

Forty-five minutes later the piece was done. Not as polished as she would have liked; the newsdesk would have to check some of the numbers. But it would do. She pressed ‘Send’ and hoped no one would look too closely at the time-stamp on the email or work out when, exactly, and under what circumstances she had written it. She sought to suppress the rebuke that was rising within her and whose target was herself.

Enough of this, she told herself. This navel-gazing would do Abigail no good. She had to focus on what mattered. The first thing she looked up was ‘heroin’. She read rapidly through the medical and science sites, about the physiology of an overdose, the chemical and neurological reactions. She didn’t know precisely what she was looking for – just that she needed confirmation of her iron certainty that, if Abigail did have heroin in her bloodstream, she had played no part in putting it there.

Every word she read triggered a memory of her once-beautiful sister reduced to a body on a slab, the pale skin drained of all life, her lips edged with frozen blue. She had read enough to know that a heroin overdose brought no pain, just a kind of instant, weightless bliss, but that did not stop her imagining the fear that must have gripped her hopeful younger sister as she understood that she was entering her final moments.

But had Abigail understood that? Nothing that suggested a struggle. Maddy recalled the words and, above all, the expression on the detective’s face as she had said them. How dared she imply that Abigail had been some kind of willing participant in her own death? Of course it was murder, of course it was. Madison just had to get the police to realize it. And soon: she had covered enough homicide cases to know that speed was critical. They always talked about that ‘golden hour’, the period immediately after a homicide has been discovered when detectives are able to gather the most, and the best, forensic evidence from a crime scene. Maddy feared that time had been and gone. That while they played around with their absurd sex-game theory, valuable evidence might be vanishing.

But she could not quite shake off Quincy’s words. You don’t always know everything. Quincy had insisted that Abigail did not do anything so ‘urban’ as drugs, but that did not exclude the possibility that she was daring in other ways. Did Abigail have a dark side hidden only from her, but known to the others? Maddy had always imagined it was only she who had sexual secrets, who had made countless bad choices. She had always assumed that Abigail was as wholesome as Quincy was straitlaced. But maybe she was wrong. And how to explain the high-end clothing she had seen in the closet, each item far beyond the reach of an elementary school teacher’s budget?

Her phone vibrated. She glanced down: Detective Jeff Howe again. High probability that he was merely ‘checking in’ – his phrase – making sure she was OK, even though next to no time had passed since he had last been here. But there was a chance he was calling for the reason she had asked: to convey information. She pressed the green button.

‘Hi Madison. You OK?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, hoping her terseness sounded sad rather than impatient, even though the latter was the truth.

‘I’ve seen the coroner’s report.’

‘Right. Can you—’

‘Not the whole thing. Only a summary, by the looks of things. But I’ve got the concluding section.’

‘And?’

‘There were signs of pressure on the neck, suggestive of a chokehold. And indications that she was held, with some force, by her head, around the temples. Probably from behind.’

The thought of it, the picture of it that materialized instantly, made her unsteady. A kind of queasiness rose through her, as if she were dizzy. To visualize with great clarity her sister grabbed and held by a stranger, the fear that she knew would have consumed Abigail at that moment, the word chokehold – all of it made Madison nauseous. The sensation was physical.

But she forced the sickness away, as if she were pushing bile back down her throat. She would force herself to think, not to feel, to process what she had just heard the way she imagined Barbara Miller and Howe’s fellow cops would: as information. As data: nothing more, nothing less. Judged like that, as the detectives would judge it, she told herself these latest findings were interesting and useful, but hardly destructive of the police’s rough sex hypothesis. That Abigail had been nearly strangled did not mean she had been nearly strangled by a stranger. If anything, this evidence could be held to strengthen the LAPD’s working theory of the case, confirming that the rough sex was really rough. Madison said nothing of this. Only, ‘What else?’

‘No needle retrieved from the scene.’

‘Are there pictures?’

‘None I’ve seen.’

‘Jeff, don’t spare me because you think I can’t handle it. I can—’

‘I’m not sparing you. I told you, I haven’t seen the complete report.’

‘All right, I’m sorry. Please. Go on.’

‘No needle. And just one needle mark. No others.’

‘Which confirms Abigail was no junkie,’ Madison said, irritated by the betraying quaver of her voice.

‘Actually,’ Jeff replied, ‘there’s a note on that. Saying needle marks can often close up within weeks.’

‘For God’s sake, Jeff, Abigail was not a drug user.’

‘I didn’t write this report, Madison. I’m just the jerk risking his job to tell you what it says.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ She swallowed, girding herself for the next and obvious question. ‘Jeff, I have to ask.’

‘Yes?’ he said, though he knew.

She closed her eyes, bracing herself for what she would have to say as much as for what she might have to hear. She sought to smother her inquiry in the language of forensics, as if that might take the edge off. ‘Was there any sign of sexual contact? Any … exchange of bodily fluids? Anything like that?’ Her voice petered out.

The policeman answered quickly. ‘No sign at all, Madison. None.’

Madison thanked Jeff again – aware of the obligation that was building between them – and hung up. Only then did she let out a long, deep exhalation, one she had not wanted him to hear. Thank God for that. For that small mercy at least, thank God. Whatever hell Abigail had endured, she had not been raped. In that instant when Jeff first told her Abigail had been found dead, that had been Madison’s starting assumption.

But that only made the horror more baffling. At least a sex crime had an obvious, if grotesque, motive. But how was she to make sense of Abigail’s death now? Perhaps the LAPD would cling to its sex-game theory all the same, but it struck Madison as a strange kind of sex that involved no contact. No, she was certain. This was no accident. It was murder. But the question remained, sharper now than ever: why would anyone want to kill her sister?