David Jackson - Marked

Doyle looks around him. ‘Where’s Tom Thumb? I didn’t step on him, did I?’

Kravitz smiles. ‘You mean Detective Folger? We had a parting of the ways. We didn’t see eye to eye.’

‘More like eye to crotch, huh? You get sick of him poking his nose in your business?’

Still Kravitz smiles, and Doyle feels he’s doing so in apology for what has gone before. He decides he should stop being so hard on the guy. At least for now.

Kravitz gestures to the man standing next to him. ‘Meet my new partner. This is Detective Fenster.’

Fenster nods, but doesn’t proffer his hand. He seems to be studying Doyle intently. Probably wondering why Doyle is smiling.

The reason Doyle is smiling is not because of anything pertaining to Fenster’s physical appearance. Whereas the man’s predecessor was massively challenged in a vertical sense, and played an important part in amusing his fellow officers by merely standing next to his cloud-scraping partner, Fenster’s own build is unremarkable. In fact, aside from a slight reddish tinge to his hair that only the cruelest of jokesters would refer to as a disability, his looks present negligible entertainment value. No, Doyle is smiling because he knows that Kravitz is often given the nickname Lurch, after the ugly tall butler in The Addams Family . And because Doyle remembers that in that family was also an ugly bald guy called. .

‘Fester?’

So much for not giving the Homicide boys a hard time. Hey, how many opportunities get handed to you on a plate like this?

‘Fenster,’ says Kravitz sternly, obviously already acutely sensitive to the likelihood of this comparison.

‘Not Fester?’

‘No.’

‘Ah.’

Fenster continues to stare at Doyle. ‘Have we met before? You look awful familiar.’

Before Doyle can answer, Kravitz chips in again: ‘You’ve probably seen him over breakfast.’

‘Huh?’ says Fenster.

‘In your newspaper. Or on TV. This here is the famous Detective Callum Doyle of the Eighth Precinct. The Eighth Wonder, as I like to think of him. You remember that serial killer we had a few months back? Only nobody knew we even had a serial killer?’

‘Oh,’ says Fenster. ‘Yeah. Doyle. I remember that one.’

‘Of course you do. Doyle solved it all by himself. He was the only cop in the whole city who realized the murders were connected. It was uncanny. I still haven’t figured out how he did it.’

Doyle remains silent. It’s clear to everyone listening that Kravitz is suggesting that Doyle must have been privy to more information than he ever revealed at the time. And the reason Doyle fails to respond is because he accepts the accusation is true. He knew a lot more. And he still feels the pain every time he thinks back to that case. The guilt over deaths that should never have happened. Deaths he might have been able to prevent if only he’d acted differently. He has tried telling himself that he shouldn’t dwell on thoughts involving ‘should’ or ‘ought’. But still it hurts.

He says, ‘You’re right. It was a little weird. I guess I was just thinking outside the box. I mean, I’m just one cop in one small precinct. It’s not like I got a wider picture of things. Not like, say, the boys in Homicide. .’

Doyle’s targets glance at each other, and then Kravitz says to his partner, ‘You should know that Doyle here is not a man to be crossed. He’s upset a lot of cops in the past, not least my previous partner, with whom he had a little altercation.’

‘Is that so?’ says Fenster, and again he stares at Doyle.

Kravitz continues, ‘But then Doyle knows what it’s like to lose a partner. Ain’t that right, Detective?’

Same old same old, thinks Doyle. It always gets dredged up. I miss my partners more than anyone, yet still some people insist on trying to taint me with their deaths. How much longer am I going to be haunted by it?

For a few seconds the three men stand in strained silence. Then Kravitz says, ‘Speaking of partners, you wanna complete the introductions?’

Doyle suddenly remembers that LeBlanc is standing behind him.

‘Uh, this is Tommy LeBlanc. He’s gonna be working this with me.’

‘Pleasure, Detective,’ says LeBlanc, moving in front of Doyle and thrusting his hand out. Doyle rolls his eyes, while Fenster regards the younger man with disdain until he sheepishly drops his outstretched arm.

‘You been on a homicide before?’ asks Fenster.

LeBlanc shrugs. ‘A couple. Nothing like this, though.’

It’s only then that the four men turn their collective gaze on the reason they are all here. The head is that of a blond girl. No more than twenty, and probably pretty too. Once. Devoid of blood, of life, of spirit, her wavy hair matted with food, her white skin blotted by injuries — it’s difficult to imagine how she appeared in life. Impossible to imagine how she ended up like this.

‘You think she’s dead?’ asks Kravitz.

‘Hard to say,’ answers Fenster, ‘us not being medical experts. I’d hate to make such a pronouncement and then be proved wrong when the ME gets here. What idiots we’d look then.’ He glances up at his partner. ‘You know about chickens, right?’

‘Chickens?’

‘Sure. Those bastards can live for some time even without a head. There was this one chicken, lived for months that way. Its owner would put food into its gullet with an eye-dropper.’

‘Really? Where’d you learn about such a thing?’

‘Ripleys. You know? The Believe-It-Or-Not people? ’Course, what we got here ain’t exactly the same. We got the head, and I don’t think the chicken’s head stayed alive.’

‘Maybe not. Although we humans are more highly evolved than poultry. I’ve yet to see a chicken program a computer or drive a racing car. Hell, those fat feathery fucks can’t even fly for shit. Who knows how long we could live without heads if we put our minds to it?’

‘We certainly are the master race, all right,’ says Fenster as he puts his finger up his nose.

Doyle is grateful when the door opens again and another figure breezes in. The man is Chinese, but he’s not here for a meal. He wears spectacles with lenses so thick they magnify his eyes to cartoon proportions. He is wearing an overcoat that looks several sizes too big, and he is carrying a large black bag.

Fenster nudges his partner in the ribs. Doyle recalls that the much tinier Folger used to do similar nudging, only it was much more painful.

‘Watch this,’ says Fenster.

He steps out in front of the Chinese man. ‘Hold on there, fella! Who let you in? This is a crime scene. The restaurant is closed. No more food. Savvy? You speakee English?’

Unfazed, the man blinks his saucer-sized eyes at the detective. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he says in perfect English, which gets a bigger laugh than Fenster’s own attempt at humor. ‘You’re an idiot if you believe your prejudicial — dare I say racist — comments were funny, which they weren’t, and you’re an idiot for calling this a crime scene, which it ain’t. Now get outta my way.’

Realizing that his stunt has backfired, a sheepish Fenster steps aside to admit the man, who marches straight past the four detectives and up to the focus of all the activity here. He stops, shakes his head and makes tutting noises.

‘What a waste,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ says Doyle. ‘She looks so young.’

‘I’m talking about the food. This is so symptomatic of what’s wrong with society today, the amount of food we throw away. But yes, the girl too.’

That the girl seems almost an afterthought to this man says a lot about him. It is not that he is incapable of sympathy or sorrow. It is just that death in all its various guises is nothing new to him. He sees it regularly. He lives with it. He has become hardened to it, not out of choice but out of necessity. Norman Chin, MD, has lost count of the number of corpses he has examined over the years, many of them mutilated, decomposing or maggot-ridden. As one of the city’s Medical Examiners he views this as just another job, and the cops here understand that.