Читать книгу Undertow - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 7

Echoes

Leith had seen what he had to see in the house on Mahon, and as the place filled with Ident members buckling down for an in-depth search, he thought he would leave, make himself useful back at the office. He was heading down the stairs toward the front door when he heard a commotion, a kind of collective gasp, then a murmuring of excited voices.

It was so unlike any other commotion he had heard at crime scenes over the years that he returned at a jog to the top of the stairs and followed the sound to the kitchen. Here he saw half a dozen white-clad Idents clustered about the lower corner cabinet next to the kitchen sink. All were peering into the darkness, and one was speaking gently to it.

Dog or cat, Leith thought.

“What’s up?” he asked the member closest to him.

“There’s a child in there,” she said. “A boy, we’re thinking. He’s crouched way at the back. He won’t come out.”

A child, Leith thought. Alive. He added a mental wow. “Is he hurt? Is he stuck?”

Nobody thought the kid was hurt or stuck, but nobody knew for sure.

Leith told the group, “Everybody clear out. Except you,” he told the female member, because women were nicer, and kids knew it. “What’s your name?” he asked, as the others left the room.

“Constable Kim Tam, sir.”

“Try to coax him out, okay? I’ll wait over here.”

He stood in the corner of the room and watched Tam crouch down by the open cabinet doors. She leaned over so her head almost touched the floor, and cooed in at the boy. Must be a terrifically small human to fit in there, on the lower shelf, far back among pots and pans, Leith marvelled.

“It’s all good now,” Tam was saying, in a warm, smiley voice. “The bad man is gone,” she said, and Leith sighed. He’d have a talk with her later about planting false memories. But too late now; the bad man had come and gone. She nodded encouragement into the shadows. “We’re going to take care of you now, okay? You must be so cold! I have a blanket here, and we’ll get you a nice cup of cocoa, how about that?”

Finally there was movement and a shifting of cookware. A little face appeared, caught sight of Leith, who was working hard to look like safe harbour, and ducked back inside. Tam turned and glared at Leith, letting him know safe harbour was the last thing he looked like. He stepped further away, and she went about undoing the damage.

At last she had the little survivor gathered in her arms, hugging him tight. There were tears in her eyes as she stood and turned to Leith, and a flash of outrage, asking what kind of monster could tear this little darling’s world apart like this.

Any decent person would feel that outrage. Children left parentless, parents left childless, families shredded. Leith knew the outrage most viscerally. In his line of work, anger was a valuable but delicate resource, possibly not renewable, not to be overused. He had learned the lesson maybe too late, because his anger these days felt like a worn tire, dulled by age and subject to bursting. As hers would, too, in time, if she didn’t watch out.

“What’s your name, little guy?” Tam was asking the child. He was somewhere between three and four years old. He wore flannel pyjamas that smelled of stale pee. He wouldn’t talk. Nor did he cry or fuss; he just huddled in Tam’s arms. Whatever he’d seen in this place last night had shocked him numb.

“Maybe he doesn’t speak English,” Leith suggested.

Tam said, “I’m sure he speaks perfect English.”

Leith wasn’t sure how she could know, but trusted she was right. He got on the phone, calling Paley to send in a female GIS member to help get the kid to the hospital. The one who showed up a few minutes later was a bit of a disappointment, not the kind of female he had in mind. He had worked with her before in a passing way. JD Temple was tall, about thirty years old, with short brown hair. Her face was marred by a birth defect, a cleft lip that had never been properly repaired. She had a skinny build, fierce dark eyes, and an air of macho impatience. Leith would have preferred the soft femininity of Kim Tam, but Tam was Ident, and her job was here at the scene, combing and picking up lint with her team like an OCD housemaid.

Problem? JD’s stare asked him as she plucked the reluctant child from a reluctant Tam, reading the doubt on Leith’s face and resenting it.

Yes, there was a problem, because right now this little survivor was Leith’s best clue, and he wanted that clue to be as comfortable as possible. He wasn’t sure JD was capable of giving that kind of comfort. “Great,” he said. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Sigmund Blatt’s stats said he lived on the fourth floor of a low-rise down near the industrial zone. Nobody at his unit number buzzed the door open, so Torr got the manager to open up. Torr asked the manager what he knew of Blatt, and the manager, a hard-eyed Asian — Vietnamese, Dion believed — only shrugged, signing that he wasn’t up on his English. He was, however, able to explain that the elevator was out of order.

“See the way he looked at me?” Torr said as he and Dion climbed the stairs to four. “Looked at me like I’m the invasive species. Blatt won’t be home, I guarantee you. We’re doing ten miles of stairs for nothing. Fuck you.”

The fuck you wasn’t up to Torr’s usual standard. Maybe it was the exertion of the climb. They arrived, damp and winded, at the door of apartment 416. Dion was out of shape from lack of exercise, and Torr was a body builder, not a mountaineer. Torr flapped his elbows to air the sweat, then knocked on the door, two loud thumps, predicting again that nobody would answer. Nobody did.

“It was worth a try,” Dion said, as he and Torr exchanged angry looks. He got on his phone and called the number from his notebook. Again, nobody picked up. Was Sigmund Blatt missing along with Lance Liu? He let it ring, and heard a cellphone tweedling, a distant, eerie, echoey sound, as if from outer space. Torr walked down the hall and pushed open the fire door, looked down the stairwell, and held up a hand for silence. The tweedling was coming from below, rising slowly.

Dion disconnected, and the tweedling stopped. They waited on the landing, and a minute later, a man appeared, plodding up the stairs. He was burly and red-faced, with bristling blond hair. When he noticed their presence he didn’t flinch, but kept climbing until he stood facing them on the landing. He wore jeans, a well-worn black leather jacket, and heavy-duty workman’s boots. Torr said, “Sigmund Blatt?”

“That’s me.”

Torr showed his ID and said, “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“Didn’t recognize the number.”

“Not a great business model, is it?”

“It’s my personal cell. My partner does sales. What’s the problem?”

Like the building manager, Blatt latched suspicious eyes on Torr and ignored Dion.

“Your partner is the problem,” Torr answered. “Lance Liu. Where is he?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself. Trying to get a hold of him. No answer. No answer at his home, either. Weird.”

Torr gave Blatt a heavy stare, maybe challenging him to figure it out, that something was terribly wrong; why else would two cops be standing here wanting to talk? The staring contest grew edgy, till Blatt brushed past them, out of the stairwell, and into the corridor. The two cops trailed after him. He stopped at 416 and fished for keys. “Guess you better come in,” he said.

Dion followed Torr into the apartment. The place was messy and musty. Over by the window a big white bird, some kind of parrot, muttered and squawked from a cage. Unlike the apartment, the cage appeared to be clean and well tended. Sigmund Blatt flung clothes and shopping bags off a sofa set and indicated they should sit, if they cared to, but nobody was in the mood.

Dion watched Torr arranging his face to break the news, a professional blend of sympathy and suspicion. “Mr. Blatt,” Torr said. “I’m sorry, but we’re here because Mr. Liu’s wife and daughter were found dead in their home this morning. You know Cheryl Liu, do you?”

Blatt had taken a step backward. His mouth dropped open. His eyes narrowed, then widened. “Oh no,” he said, and to Dion the surprise seemed genuine. So did the shock, and then the slow surge of grief. This man knew the family well. He had maybe been there through weddings, births, Christmases, barbecues. They were dear to him.

“Cheryl?” Blatt said, hands to his face. “Rosie? Dead? No. Joey?”

Dion knew who Cheryl was and could assume who Rosie was, but the third was a mystery. Torr seemed to still be mentally counting off bodies, so he asked, “Who’s Joey?”

“Their kid, the boy.” Blatt’s hands left his face, a face that was visibly paling. Dion watched for more subtle clues, maybe a telltale flash of fear, the sickness of guilt. Back when he’d been a keener, before the crash, he had been the detachment’s go-to interrogator. Looking at Blatt now, he knew he was seeing something below the surface, a mystery emotion buried in shock and grief. He tried to put a name to it and couldn’t. Just couldn’t get a grip on the right words.

Blatt was back to answering Torr’s questions. The sense of a clue almost within reach was gone, and Dion found himself looking at the parrot — if that’s what it was — instead of the suspect. He noticed the white bird with its punk hairdo was bobbing its head to the conversation, trying to get a word in. A bit of a power struggle was being waged now between Torr and Blatt, with Torr fielding questions instead of asking his own. Dion lost the thread of their dialogue, and without the thread there was no fabric.

He focussed on Blatt again when Blatt swore on his grandmother’s grave that he didn’t know where Lance was. “All right, sir,” Torr said, and finally Blatt was free to sink onto his sofa and bury his face in his arms.

Only on the stairs did it come to Dion, the perfect description for Blatt’s reaction. Misplaced confusion. He stopped to capture the words in his notebook. Torr kept stomping down, griping as he went. The stairwell was a vertical tower of concrete and iron, and every sound within it rang bell-like. Even Torr’s griping had a musical resonance as it floated back. Dion stood with notebook open, startled off task by déjà vu. A different stairwell, but the same effect. Voices and boot thuds echoing up and down. The boom of Looch’s laughter.

Out of sight now, Torr bellowed up, “Hey, what’s up?”

It was a good question, and it brought Dion back to where he was, on somebody’s stairwell, notebook open in his hands. He looked at what he’d scribbled there — confusion — and couldn’t for the life of him think why.