Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“A cover-up devised in a panic—”

“Look, Nick,” Eddie said. “I don’t swim in your toilet, you don’t pee in my pool, understand?”

“Huh?”

“I don’t tell you how to run Stratton. You don’t tell me about crime and cops and all that shit. This is my area of expertise.”

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Nick said. “I’m telling you what I’m going to do.”

“Any decision you make involves me too,” Eddie said. “And I vote no. Which means you don’t do a damned thing. What’s done can’t be undone. It’s just too fucking late.”

They pulled up in front of a modest house on West Sixteenth in Steepletown, Audrey feeling that jellyfish wriggling in her belly, the thing she always felt when she first met a survivor of a homicide. The spill of raw grief, disbelief, fathomless pain — she could hardly stand it. You had to distance yourself from all that, or you’d go crazy, Noyce had warned her early on. We all do. What looks to the outside world like cynicism, hardness, that’s what it is. Protective insulation. You’ll learn it.

She never did.

The investigative work, even the routine stuff that phone-it-in types like Roy Bugbee had no patience for, she enjoyed. Not this. Not feeling the hot spray of another human being’s agony up close and being unable, fundamentally, to do anything about it. I’ll find your dad’s murderer, I’ll track down the kids who killed your daughter, I’ll uncover the guy who popped your father in the 7-Eleven — that was the most she could promise, and it helped, but it didn’t heal.

So a missing persons report had been called in to the police by a woman whose father had never come home Friday night. The physical description — age, height, weight, clothing — matched the murder victim found in the Dumpster on Hastings. Audrey knew this was it. The Family Services Division had called the daughter, which was the protocol, to say in their most diplomatic, tender way — they were good at this — that a body had been found, and there was a chance, just a chance, that it was her father, would she be so kind as to come down to the police morgue at Boswell Medical Center and help them identify a body, rule it out?

The aluminum screen door slammed, the woman coming toward them, even before Audrey was out of the Crown Vic. She was a small woman, even tiny, and from twenty feet she looked like a little girl. She wore a white T-shirt, faded and paint-splotched jeans, a ragged jeans jacket. Her brown hair was cut in a spiky sort of hairdo that Audrey associated with punk rockers and artists. Her hands flopped from side to side as she walked, making her look a little like some neglected rag doll.

“You must be from the police,” she said. Her brown eyes were large and moist. Up close she was actually quite beautiful and even more fragile. She looked to be in her mid-to late twenties. She had that glazed look of disbelief that Audrey had seen dozens of times in the faces of victims’ families. Her voice was deeper than Audrey had expected, its timbre oddly soothing.

“I’m Audrey Rhimes.” She extended a hand, beamed a look of compassion. “That’s my partner, Roy Bugbee.”

Roy, standing beside the open driver’s side door, did not come around to shake the daughter’s hand, probably figuring that it would be overkill. He gave a quick wave, a tight smile. Move your butt over here, Audrey thought. The man had no manners, no compassion. He didn’t even have the ability to fake it.

“Cassie Stadler.” Her palm was warm and damp, and her eye makeup was smudged. She got into the backseat of the cruiser. Bugbee drove.

The object here was to low-key it, to reduce the woman’s anxiety if at all possible. She’s being driven over to the city morgue to identify a body that might be her father’s, for God’s sake; probably nothing could diminish her anxiety. Cassie Stadler probably knew just as surely as Audrey knew. But Audrey kept speaking, turning around to face the passenger, who sat in the middle of the back seat, staring glassily ahead.

“Tell me about your father,” she said. “Does he tend to go out at night?” She hoped the present tense would just slip in there unobserved, silently reassuring.

“No, not really,” Cassie Stadler said, and fell silent.

“Does he get disoriented from time to time?”

She blinked. “What? I’m sorry. Disoriented? Yes, I guess he does, sometimes. His... his condition.”

Audrey waited for more. But Bugbee, heedless, broke in, his voice booming. “Did your father go down to the Hastings Street area often, to your knowledge?”

A series of expressions flashed in this lovely woman’s dark eyes, a slide show: puzzlement, hurt, annoyance, sorrow. Audrey, embarrassed, averted her gaze and turned back around in her seat, facing forward.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” was all the daughter finally said. “My daddy.”

They pulled into the hospital parking garage in silence. Audrey had never done one of these before. Identifying a body in the morgue — it was not at all common, thank God, no matter what you saw on TV. There were no sliding drawers at the morgue either, none of those hokey gothic touches. But death was gruesome, unavoidably so.

The body lay on a steel gurney covered with a green surgical sheet, the room sterile and air-conditioned to a chill and smelling of formalin. Jordan Metzler, polite if distant, pulled back the green cloth as matter-of-factly as if he were turning down a bed, exposing the head and neck.

Beneath that spiky mane, Cassie Stadler’s perfect little doll face crumpled, and no one had to say anything.

Audrey found an empty room in the hospital basement where the three of them could talk. It was an employees’ lounge: a collection of chairs upholstered in different institutional fabrics, a short couch, a coffee machine that looked as if no one ever used it, a TV. She and Bugbee moved chairs into a cluster. A couple of open soda cans were clustered on an end table. She found an almost-empty box of Kleenex. Cassie Stadler’s narrow shoulders bobbed; she sobbed silently, with all her body. Bugbee, who’d obviously learned how to distance, sat impatiently with a clipboard on his lap. Audrey couldn’t take it anymore, put her arms around the woman, murmuring, “Oh, it’s so hard, I know it.”

Cassie took in great gulps of air, her head bent. Eventually she looked up, saw the Kleenex box and pulled out a few tissues, blew her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think...”

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart,” Audrey said. “What a terrible time for you.”

Cassie took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. “Okay if I smoke?”

Audrey nodded, gave Bugbee a sidelong glance. Smoking wasn’t allowed in here, but she wasn’t going to make a point of it, not with this poor woman at this time, and fortunately neither was Bugbee, who nodded as well.

Cassie took out a cheap plastic lighter and lit up, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He was shot in — in the mouth?”

A funeral home would have done some reconstruction, skillfully applied makeup. The face would have looked artificial in that way that all dead bodies look at funeral homes, but at least she’d have been spared the brutal sight.

“That’s right,” Bugbee said. He didn’t elaborate, didn’t say twice, didn’t say Stadler had also been shot in the chest. He was following standard procedure, which was to give out as little information as possible, in case a withheld detail could help them, down the line, confirm the killer.

“God!” she erupted. “Why? Who’d do that to my daddy?” She took another puff, took an empty Coke can off the end table and tapped out the ash into its small opening.