Читать книгу Victim Impact - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 8

He was one of the last to board the westbound Lakeshore GO Train during its six-minute stop at Toronto’s Union Station. Fortunately, there were no crowds to fight. The Blue Jays baseball team were looking for some payback against the Red Sox in Boston that evening, while the Canadian National Exhibition had a station of its own.

On his way upstairs to the top level of the railcar, Ted took in the back of a lone woman in one of the aisle seats on the mezzanine or landing. These seating areas, one at either end of a car, could accommodate fifteen or seventeen passengers each. In a sparsely populated train, they could be a good place to be alone. Ted paused at first because there was something familiar about the woman’s pale grey suit jacket and blond-streaked brown hair. He stepped towards her when he saw her shoulders shake and heard from her a pair of gasping sobs.

“It’s Ted Boudreau, Ms. Cesario. Is there anything I can do?”

She looked up at the feel of his hand on her shoulder. Her dark eyes were brimming over, without making her eyeliner run. Ted later thought it must have been tattooed on. Her mouth was open and remarkably square, like a tragedy theatre mask. She nodded slightly and gestured to the seat beside her. Before he sat, Ted cleared from it the City Hall papers she had spread there. Meanwhile, Rose Cesario closed up the laptop she had been working on and drew an old-fashioned, lacy cloth handkerchief from her sleeve. A whiff of violet toilet water was released. Exposure of a side of her so at odds with her battleaxe image left Ted wanting to offer sympathy and not knowing what to say.

“Look, Professor Boudreau,” she said, hoarse, but recovering her poise. “I wouldn’t want you to think it was the panel discussion that upset me.” She paused to clear her throat. “I mean, it was, but only indirectly. I’ve had plenty of experience with the rough and tumble of debate—at the municipal level—and, believe me, I’m looking forward to plenty more in Ottawa if I’m elected to the House of Commons.”

“I understand.”

“It was that boy, Tom.”

“Yes?” Ted too had found the boy unsettling, though not to this degree.

“I know him,” Rose went on. “I used to be an emergency room nurse. His mother brought him in twice with a broken arm. Said he got them playing football. Did he look like a football player to you?”

“Not really,” said Ted, reflecting that boys often try sports they are physically unsuited for.

“No one investigated. Then one day, it was Tom’s younger sister who was brought in—by the father this time. And believe me, he is a bruiser. That child had multiple traumas, including a severe skull fracture. All supposedly caused by a bicycle accident. She just wouldn’t wear her helmet, dad said. We couldn’t save her.”

Neither passenger spoke. The only sound was the metal wheels clicking over the track. Black windows reflected the railcar’s relentlessly cheery fluorescent lights back inside.

“Were police notified?” Ted asked at last.

“The father served four years for manslaughter. Tom testified about the beatings both kids had received, but the assault charges added nothing to the sentence. The mother, Tom, and there was an even younger child—they all had to go into hiding when the father came out.”

“That’s rough,” said Ted. Now wasn’t the time to ask what counselling the father had received as part of his sentence and what assessments had been done of his likelihood to reoffend, even though these were precisely the questions Ted’s training had ensured would be top of his mind.

“Very rough,” Rose Cesario agreed. “Seeing Tom tonight in a public gathering made me wonder if he was safe even now. His father promised to get even with him for testifying. Also . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, seeing Tom awakened my feelings of guilt and regret that I didn’t blow the whistle before a young life was lost.”

Ted nodded. He realized he’d been wrong to think of Rose as seizing on the crime issue purely for political gain. But then she rather spoiled the effect by climbing back on her soapbox.

“And then what Tom said . . . It’s so true! You have no right to decide how much punishment is enough until you can really put yourself in the victim’s place. Who has the right to indulge their Christian feelings of forgiveness by going easy on the killer of nine-year-old Eva? Who should be allowed to put absolving words in the mouth of the dead?”

The train came to a stop now at Exhibition Station, and the car filled up with families and their stuffed-animal trophies from the Midway. On this last weekend of the fair, nearly everyone seemed to be a winner. The interruption gave needed time for the rhetorical temperature to drop. When the journey resumed, Ted made this remark:

“I wonder, Ms. Cesario, whether the living have any more right to punish in the name of the dead than to forgive.”

“Thank you for listening,” Rose Cesario said in a businesslike voice, taking her papers from Ted and stowing them in a pocket of her computer case. “I know my way is not the current academic way of thinking about crime. I don’t despair of bringing you around, but it will take something more than words. In panel discussions or in railcars.”

At Long Branch, the politician got out, and Ted was left to glance over his own papers. He didn’t take the time to reflect on what she meant by “something more”.

His Toyota was one of the last dozen cars in the south lot. He drove straight for the exit, diagonally over all the solid white lines. Five minutes more brought him home. He wasn’t exactly bursting with energy, but not tired either. A little lazy. The work of the evening was over, and it had gone well enough.

He left his car in the driveway rather than taking time to open the garage. A freshening wind was tossing Karin’s rose bushes around, but there was no rain in the forecast. He further rationalized that the beat-up Corolla out front made the house look occupied. The triangular Alarm Protection Service decal in the sidelight window struck him just as forcefully as it always did when he came in by the front door after dark. The porch light, which turned on automatically at dusk, fell directly on the sign and reminded Ted that he had yet to have the alarm system reactivated and an account set up in his name. Each time, he made a resolution to rectify the situation: it had been more than two years now since the previous owners’ subscription had lapsed with the sale of the house. Karin’s cello alone was worth sixteen thousand dollars. But in the light of day, he never seemed to remember. When asked by outsiders about APS, he always pretended to be a satisfied customer, and wondered if the pretense plus the spotlit sign might not offer as much protection at no cost.

Tonight, though, he actually scribbled a memo to himself on the palm of his left hand. A baby was coming. There was even more to protect.

He unlocked the front door and entered briskly, as if he had a system to disarm by punching in a number code within the time permitted. The house was warmer than the night outside, though not quite as stuffy as Ted had expected. Perhaps Karin had left the central air on low. The first summer after moving in, they’d conserved energy by turning up the thermostat and just opening upstairs windows in summer. As their store of treasure grew, however, they had started closing and locking everything whenever they left the house.

His mouth still dry from the Riesling, Ted went to the kitchen for a club soda. The light on the answering machine was flashing. Three messages. The first was from a carpet cleaning company, the second a resort on Georgian Bay. The third was puzzling.

“Hi, Karin. It’s Daddy-o. Got your message from 400 and Finch and reckon you should be here pretty soon. If not, you’re going to miss that midnight swim. I’ve called your cell and there’s no answer, so I’m thinking you and it aren’t in the same place. Like maybe it’s in the car and you’re back in the house. Ted’s phone is turned off, so he’s no help. Clue me in if you’re staying down overnight, and I’ll stop listening to the radio station with that jolly joe that reports the traffic pileups.” The time stamp was 11:15 p.m., just before Ted had got in.

He put down his drink and listened to the empty house. The reference to a midnight swim suggested Quirk had told her father she’d be arriving late. She usually answered her phone, even when driving, but she could have left it in the car while she stopped to grab a tea. Markus’s voice contained the hint of a smile that seemed inseparable from his soft Scandinavian accent. He wasn’t overly anxious yet. Still, the combination of circumstances was unusual enough that Ted couldn’t blame him for wondering.

Ted crossed a vestibule cum basement stair landing between the kitchen and the garage. When he opened the door to the garage, there was Karin’s blue Honda Insight. So, after starting for the cottage, she had indeed come back. On the floor, in front of the passenger seat, lay her knapsack and in the back of the car her cello, ready to go. Ted thought first of illness. He raced back through the kitchen into the front hall and took the stairs two at a time up to their bedroom. Empty. Bed apparently unused since he had made it this morning. When Karin made the bed, she spread the duvet over the bottom sheet, while Ted left it folded at the foot, as it was now. The door to the ensuite bathroom stood open.

“Karin? Karin!”

He looked inside and saw nothing but an expanse of tiles, with a few water drops on the floor of the shower stall. No longer afraid of waking her, he blundered about the second floor, his senses barely registering, seeing nothing but Karin’s absence, hearing nothing but his own voice calling her name.

Ted stopped to think in the upper hall, hands on the rail as he stared down the curving stairs to the front hall. How to explain this? Karin had for some reason aborted her trip without telling Markus. Maybe the battery in her cell had run down and, rather than get off the highway and find a public phone, she’d come straight home. When she’d pulled into the driveway, she’d happened to see one of the neighbours. And, after an exchanged word or two, accepted an invitation to go over there for a drink. “I’ll just pop the car in the garage first,” she would have said. Which neighbour? Ted knew a name or two. Karin would know more; she always did. He’d look for her address book. But wait. She would have called Markus first, wouldn’t she, if it were just a matter of a friendly nightcap? She’d have unloaded her cello. Maybe the neighbour had noticed she was unwell, rushed her to the emerg. This would be bad, but not as bad as if Quirk were still lying untended somewhere in the house.

That’s as far as Ted got when he noticed the fresh wad of chewing gum on the dark blue stair runner. He knew immediately what this was from his research. It was a tag, a territorial marker that said, “This is no longer your space; it’s mine.”

Ted charged down the stairs and from room to room, flicking on lights as he ran. Living room, nothing. Dining room, nothing. Family room, the same. In his study, there was a hole where his new computer had been and his disk library had been ransacked. Instantly he feared that the disk the intruder had wanted was the one in his briefcase labelled Family Photos, the one that contained the dirt on the Dark Arrows. No Karin here, though, so he didn’t stop. He was hoping now that, when she came in from the garage, she had heard that there was someone in the house and had got out again before being found. She could have run next door or to Meryl’s twenty-four hour gas bar and convenience store two streets over from the end of the crescent. Ted just had to check the basement first.

He returned to the landing from which another door led into the garage, and a third to outside. The fourth side of this cubicle had no door but opened directly to the head of the steep, gerry-built basement stairs Karin hated. When Ted flicked on the basement light, it showed her lying at the foot of them.

On her back on the cement basement floor, feet towards the bottom step, dressed for the cottage, eyes open, and deathly still.

He picked up a splinter from the railing in his haste to get down to her. Her skin was cool rather than cold, but he couldn’t find a pulse. He ripped his cellphone from its pouch on his waist. Never had it taken longer to boot up.

When the young male 911 operator asked what service Ted wanted, he said ambulance and police. His voice rasped. His throat felt tight and dry.

“Is there a medical emergency?”

“Uh-huh,” Ted croaked. “Yes.” He started to give his address.

“One moment, sir. I’m going to start you off with the ambulance.”

Ambulance. The word carried hope. Ted tried to be patient, take things in order. It was going to be all right. It had to be. He bent closer to Karin.

“Quirk, you’re going to be all right,” he stammered.

While the 911 call was being directed, his gaze fixed on her hair. The red strands on the top of her head were pulled up, straight out from the scalp. He reached out to smooth them, but pulled his hand back. Crime scene, he thought. Don’t touch.

He swallowed hard, managed to moisten his tongue enough to speak.

“I have a woman here on the floor with no pulse,” he blurted out as soon as he sensed someone on the other end of the line.

“Is she breathing?” The call taker’s voice was female. It sounded as if she’d asked this question a thousand times before.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you see her chest rising?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Can you put your face down by her mouth and feel if there’s any breath coming out?”

Ted put his left ear to Quirk’s dear lips. Nothing. Was he just too numbed by shock to feel the puffs of air? Yes. No. He believed both at once.

“Sir? Sir? Are you there? Do you feel any breath?”

“None. Can you please send an ambulance? 19 Robin Hood Crescent.”

“Is there anyone there with you?”

“You mean—”

“Besides the woman on the floor.”

“No, no one else.”

The words echoed in the still house. Ted had too much voice now. He was a hair’s breadth from saying one or more things he’d be sorry for.

He stared at the freckles on Karin’s thin, straight nose. He couldn’t admit the possibility that it was already too late. He had to look away—anywhere—at the studs of the unfinished basement wall opposite. He noted distractedly that the window in the upper part of that wall was broken. It sounded as if the operator was following a script, not trying to be an insensitive jerk. It was hard, though, and slow. Every second felt like five.

“What happened to her?”

“I think she’s been assaulted,” said Ted. “There’s been a break-in.”

“Assaulted with a weapon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see a weapon?”

“No. Send the paramedics, please.”

“How many assailants were there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are any of them still in the house?”

“No.” Ted didn’t know this for sure, but was afraid no paramedics would come into a house where they ran a risk of attack. The word assaulted—which Ted had believed potent to speed help to Karin—was instead inducing caution.

“How many assailants did you see?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“What makes you think she was attacked?”

“Stuff has been stolen. She—I think she may have interrupted a burglary in progress.”

“Does she have any injuries?”

“I can’t see, but I’ve already told you I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“So you can’t—”

“Look, I need an ambulance here for my wife. And she’s carrying a child.”

Until this instant, Ted would never have called an embryo a child. And if Karin hadn’t been pregnant? He’d have been no less desperate to save her. At the same time, he felt he had to throw anything he could at this disembodied functionary, anything to raise the stakes enough above the routine to engage her energies.

The operator said the ambulance was on its way. Ted dashed upstairs to unlock the front door as she requested, then returned to Karin.

“Stay on the line now while I transfer you to the police.”

He had to answer all the same questions again. Mercifully, a kind of automatic pilot kicked in. Worse by far was seeing Karin lying there on the floor and believing that, if he took her in his arms as nature prompted, he might be injuring her spinal cord. A cocoon—so it seemed to him—protected him from thoughts that it might no longer matter. He touched the back of his fingers to Karin’s cheek as gently as he could. He could do so little. The paramedics would between them be able to lift her without twisting her neck, to immobilize her on a stretcher, and to get her safely to hospital.

And then—but then what would become of the evidence? Maybe there was something he could do for her after all. He used his cellphone to take pictures of the way she was lying in case the police photographers didn’t show up in time. He zeroed in particularly on the way her hair stood straight out, not tousled as it would have been if she had fallen. It was as if someone had grabbed her by the hair.

Uniformed officers of the Peel Regional Police arrived at the same time as the ambulance. Or, though Ted didn’t like to think so, perhaps the ambulance had been parked and waiting for the police cruisers. The ambulance service would have a duty to protect their personnel, the personnel a right to safe working conditions.

The paramedics found that Karin had sustained blunt trauma to the back of her head. They pronounced her vital signs absent. Ted told them Karin was two weeks pregnant. They said they’d pass that information on to the doctors at Credit Valley Hospital, which was where they now had to take her. Ted wanted to go with her. The paramedics discouraged this impulse and so, more emphatically, did the police. Someone from the hospital would be in touch later. Ted made sure the paramedics had his cellphone number.

“Her name is Karin Gustafson,” he said. He had to keep spelling it out. “No, mine is Boudreau.”

Karin’s sassy little summer purse lay on the basement floor a metre or so from where he’d found her. He handed her health insurance card to the paramedics and her driver’s licence to the police to copy from.

Meanwhile, police constables called in police sergeants, who gave orders to establish a perimeter with yellow tape and to secure the crime scene. The entire house and yard, in effect. Was there a neighbour’s house Ted could go to? The only neighbours Ted knew weren’t answering their phones, so he was asked to wait in the back of one of the cruisers.

He hunched forward on the bench seat, hugging himself for warmth. Alone with his sensations for the first time since placing the 911 call, he found he was cold in his short-sleeved shirt, actually shivering—although nothing he could see, nothing in the way officers and onlookers were standing around on either side of the yellow tape, suggested that the temperature had dropped. Ted’s slacks beneath his thighs felt clammy with sweat, none of it absorbed by the synthetic leather upholstery. The back seats of police cruisers, he reflected, had to be moisture-proof, easy to wipe clean.

He wished he had not asked for the police. They were only doing their job, but they were keeping him from Karin, separating what ought to be together. Ought to be, even if in fact Karin were dead.

There, he’d admitted it. That proved he wasn’t in denial, didn’t it? And yet he couldn’t imagine that tonight’s facts would still be true tomorrow and all the tomorrows for the rest of his life. He didn’t picture the two of them back at the Bouquet Bistro next Thursday or Friday evening, preparing for a night of love. But he wasn’t yet able to picture a future weekend when that wasn’t going to happen.

While waiting in the back of the police car, Ted listened to Markus’s message on his cellphone: “My little girl hasn’t shown up. Do you know what’s going on? It’s after eleven, by the way.” Markus had to be called. Ted watched his fingers select COTTAGE on his phone’s speed-dial menu. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t plan how to say it. My little girl. The news would hit Karin’s father hard, but he’d have to take it the way it came out.

Markus picked up on the first ring. “Yes, Ted.”

Ted summarized flatly how he’d found Karin and what the paramedics had said before taking her away.

“Is she going to pull through?”

“It doesn’t look good.”

Markus cursed, at length. He used the pronoun it, not you. Still . . . Ted picked up the implication that he himself was in some way at fault, as he believed he was, although Markus didn’t know the real reason, was just expressing a father’s distress.

Ted let him finish.

“Which hospital?” said Markus, regaining control. His breathing, deep and measured, could be heard now over the phone. He wasn’t going to let himself fall apart while he was alone in Muskoka and his only child was in lying in an ER two hundred klicks away.

Ted felt neither in control nor falling apart—more like an automaton.

“Credit Valley,” he said.

Markus got Ted to give him the nearest intersection and told Ted to call his cell if he heard anything in the next couple of hours.

“I suggest you wait till morning to drive down,” said Ted.

“I’ll come now,” said Markus and hung up.

Plainclothes investigators were called in from the local police division. Thinking he was at last in the presence of someone with real authority, Ted made the mistake of calling them detectives. The investigators set him straight. Their inferior rank didn’t prevent their asking questions. He tried to show them the photos he’d taken with his cellphone, but rather than look at these amateur offerings, they grilled Ted on how with his wife grievously injured, he could have been cool enough to take pictures more properly left to Forensic Identification Services. He pointed out that Karin had been taken to hospital before any FIS personnel arrived. He still could see no one with a camera. The investigators showed surprise at his use of a short form like FIS. He told them he was a criminologist. They received the news warily, as if they thought it much more likely he was a ghoul.

These non-detectives proceeded to ask Ted a lot of questions about his and Karin’s movements and about what signs he had found that the house had been broken into and burglarized, questions that had already been asked by the uniformed officers and were to be repeated by the detectives when they arrived.

By this time, someone had brought Ted a cup of hot coffee, and he was feeling less chilled. He didn’t want to meet more functionaries. He just wanted to be left alone. It seemed the best way to be with Karin if he couldn’t be at her bedside. Dearest Quirk . . .

The detectives introduced themselves as James Nelson and Tracy Rodriguez from the Major Crime Unit. They wore dress slacks, golf shirts and fanny packs. The man was tall and black, the woman well-muscled with dark, rippling hair. Both sporty—basketball and track respectively would be good fits—but not jockish. They’d got Karin’s and Ted’s names from the patrol officers, so Ted didn’t have to spell them out again.

Ted changed his mind about being alone. These were the people, he thought, to ask if he could go to the hospital now.

“We just need to ask you some questions first,” said Nelson, busy at the computer terminal in the front seat.

“It shouldn’t take all that long,” said Rodriguez.

After an initial interrogation in the close confines of the police cruiser, Nelson suggested they adjourn to an interview room at the divisional station.

Ted refused. He was going to Karin. While the detectives were bargaining with him for more time, his cellphone rang. A Dr. Hassan at the Credit Valley Hospital already had doom in his voice while identifying himself and confirming that he had Mr. Boudreau. Still, Ted waited until the words had actually been spoken. Karin was dead.

“I’ll be right over,” Ted blurted out, as if his prompt arrival would make possible some transplant of vitality from his body to Karin’s.

The detectives exchanged glances. Ted was certain they had already heard, but not told him.

“I’ll have your wife laid out in a room then,” said the doctor, “instead of being taken to the morgue right away.”

“Which—?” The simple decency of this provision undid Ted. No more words would come.

“Just ask at the information desk, Mr. Boudreau. Have me paged if I can be of any further help.” Dr. Hassan now plainly wanted to get on to his next patient, with luck a live one.

Ted stammered a thank you and ended the call. The cruiser’s back seat had no inside door handle.

“Let me out of here,” he said. “I have to call my father-in-law. I’m meeting him at the hospital.”

“I got it.” Nelson sprang out of the front seat and opened the door.

“We’ll have someone drive you over,” said Rodriguez, on her feet now too and beckoning the nearest uniformed officer.

“No, thanks. I’m good to drive.”

“We really don’t think that’s a good idea, sir. We’re sending a constable anyway. It’s no trouble.”

“Am I under arrest?” Ted asked.

Nelson raised his open hands. “No, sir! Which car were you planning to take?”

Ted glanced at the Corolla in his driveway, inside the perimeter of yellow tape.

“That vehicle is part of the scene. It can’t be driven anywhere until it’s been processed.”

Before Nelson finished speaking, Ted had spotted an empty taxi among the onlookers’ cars and was making for it. The driver, wearing a white beard and purple turban, caught his eye and nodded.

The two detectives kept pace at Ted’s side.

“We understand Ms. Gustafson’s father has a local residence,” said Rodriguez. “Would you be able to spend a few days with him?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it.” Ted gave the hospital name to the driver, who slid behind his wheel.

Nelson leaned casually against the middle of the passenger side of the cab. With him there, neither front nor rear door would open.

“Could we have your father-in-law’s name and city phone number?” Rodriguez asked.

“Markus—with a K—”

Ted got no further before Nelson interrupted.

“Not Markus Gustafson, the anger manager?”

“You know him?”

“I was at a workshop he did last spring.” Nelson was smiling at the memory, but quickly recovered his sense of decorum. Moving away from the taxi, he took down Markus’s contact information in his notebook as well as Ted’s cell number. “We’ll get your witness statement on tape tomorrow. We’d just ask you not to say anything to the media before that. Sorry for your loss, Mr. Boudreau. We’ll be in touch.”

Slumped against the back seat, cellphone in his hand, Ted barely heard the cabbie’s questions as to what had happened that night at his house, questions to which he did not respond. He was trying to feel Karin’s arms wrap around him the way they had this morning, yesterday morning. She: No need to tell you not to wait up. He: Wake me. He begged Karin to deliver him from the nightmare of her death—but woke instead to the need to share the nightmare with Markus.

When Markus answered his cell, Ted asked where he was.

“The 400, south of Barrie. What is it?”

“Pull off and call me back.”

Ted’s ringtone sounded the instant he ended the call. Markus wasn’t pulling off.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“A doctor phoned to say Karin’s dead.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Ted didn’t argue. Lucky Markus if what he said were true. Ted’s own beliefs were cloudier, vacillating and inconsistent, painfully confused, yet profoundly despairing.

“What kind of doctor is that?” Markus barked.

No answer was going to help him. Still, Ted felt that sooner or later he had to say something. “An ER doctor. He sounded kind.”

“Kind? Christ, Ted!”

“My taxi’s just pulling into the hospital. I’ll see you when you get here.”

At the hospital, Ted was directed to a private room, where Karin was laid out on a bed. A uniformed policeman, who had been sitting by the window, rose when Ted came in. The constable asked that Ted not touch the white bandage encircling Karin’s head, then went out to wait in the corridor.

Alone with Karin’s body in that clinical room, Ted seemed to forget for a moment how to breathe. He put a hand out to the door frame to steady himself, then let himself slide to a sitting position on the floor. What were you supposed to do to keep from fainting? Sit with your knees up, your head down between them, he distantly recalled. He did that and didn’t faint.

There was an armchair by the head of the bed. Ted climbed into it. After the chair got feeling safe, he tried looking again at Karin. His darling. He leaned over and kissed her cold lips. He sat by her side holding her hand in his until he had warmed it with his own. He was just starting to think he was going to keep himself together when sorrow hit him like a wave, and he bent double under its weight. A sense of loss and waste overwhelmed him. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Ted had imagined his final parting with Karin when they were both in their nineties. Whichever one of them wasted away first, it would have been too soon.

But this—death untimely and unnatural. The killing of a woman of thirty-two, still at the height of her loveliness. Karin had so much promise unfulfilled—as artist, mother, lover. Now she lay cold with a cold embryo inside her. Because of a crime committed in her own house, where she had most right to expect shelter.

Ted let go Karin’s hand and staggered blindly towards the door. Somewhere down the night-lit halls he found a washroom where he splashed handful after handful of cold water on his face. What was he to do? Ted had generally thought of himself as navigating life’s waters on an even keel, cool and contained. Others spoke of him this way. He simply didn’t recognize the foundering, leaky barque he’d become. Coping mechanisms would have to be invented from scratch. Short hours ago, he’d have considered his present condition shameful. Now, though, he was too panicked to feel shame. He didn’t dare look in the mirror.

At length, he took himself out into the summer night to find a patch of grass where he could sit and let his eyes dry under the stars. He tried to focus on what had to be done. Discouragingly, however, all he could think was that he had to break the news to his own father and mother, who had four children and no grandchildren. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

Ted was back in the room on a stool by the window when his father-in-law arrived. It was going on two thirty a.m. A nurse had looked in at some point and turned the lights down. Ted let his eyes close. He opened them to see Markus in the doorway, his beard standing out in blond spikes while his eyes remained in the shadow of his jutting forehead. He wore blue jeans and a denim vest over an olive T. He’d once earned his bread as a performing musician and taking command of a stage still seemed second nature to him. He walked straight to the bed without acknowledging Ted.

“What the hell!” Markus clapped a hand over the lower half of his face. Presently Ted heard him draw air in loudly through his nose.

“Shall I leave you alone with her, Markus?”

“How did it happen?”

“Have a seat.” Ted indicated the armchair.

Markus said he’d stand, and the two men stood, on opposite sides of Karin.

“The message you got tells us she started for the cottage,” said Ted. “But she must have come back for something. I don’t know what. When she entered the house from the garage, a burglary was in progress. It looks as if, instead of running away, the intruder went to confront her. Some kind of struggle must have occurred in the back vestibule, the upshot being that she either fell down or was pushed down the cellar stairs.” Ted didn’t show Markus his photos or share his thoughts about Karin’s hair.

“They catch the guy?”

“Not yet.”

“Shit.” Markus sniffed again loudly and wiped his nose. “Did you ever hear of my girl hurting anyone? Because I didn’t, not ever—not once. Did you?”

“Markus—she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The older man scowled. He plainly wanted the universe to make more sense than that.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “You’d better give me a few minutes with her, Ted. Thanks.”