Robert Knightly: The cold room

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.