And after I’d bought him a pint, too. The ungrateful little bollix. “Detective Kennedy needs to take himself a tad less seriously,” I said. “I don’t have to be on his little team to be interested. It’s an interesting case. And… well, I’d rather this didn’t get around, but if the victim’s who we think it is, I grew up with her.”
That put a sparkle in Cooper’s beady little eye, just like I’d known it would. “Indeed?”
I looked down and played reluctant, to tickle his curiosity. “Actually,” I said, examining my thumbnail, “for a while, when we were teenagers, I went out with her.”
That hooked him: his eyebrows hit his hairline, and the sparkle got brighter. If he hadn’t so obviously found himself the perfect job, I’d have been worried about what this guy got up to in his spare time. “So,” I said, “you can see how I’d really like to know what happened to her-that’s if you’re not too busy to talk me through it. What Kennedy doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.”
Long corridors, elegant stairwells, not-bad old watercolors on the walls-someone had draped fake-pine-needle garlands between them, for that discreet balance of festive and somber. Even the actual morgue, a long room with ceiling moldings and high windows, would be beautiful if it weren’t for the little details: the thick chilly air, the smell, the stark tiles on the floor, the rows of steel drawers lining one wall. A plaque between drawers said, in neat engraved letters, FEET FIRST. NAME TAG ON HEAD.
Cooper pursed his lips thoughtfully at the drawers and ran a finger along the line, one eye half closed. “Our new Jane Doe,” he said. “Ah, yes,” and he stepped forward and pulled a drawer open in one long flourish.
There’s a switch you learn to flick, very early on in Undercover. It gets easier, maybe too easy, with time: one click, somewhere in a corner of your mind, and the whole scene unfolds at a distance on a pretty little screen, in living color, while you watch and plan your strategies and give the characters a nudge now and then, alert and absorbed and safe as a general. The ones who don’t find the switch fast wind up in new squads, or in the ground. I flicked that switch and looked.
The bones were arranged perfectly, on their slab of metal; almost artistically, like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. Cooper and his crew had cleaned them up somehow, but they were still brownish and greasy-looking, except for the two neat rows of teeth, Colgate white. The thing looked a million times too small and fragile to be Rosie. For a split second, a part of me even hoped.
Somewhere out on the street a bunch of girls were laughing, high helpless shrieks, faint through the thick glass. The room felt too bright; Cooper was just an inch too close, watching me just a hair too intently. He said, “The remains are those of a young adult white female, between five feet six inches and five feet nine inches tall, of medium to strong build. The development of the wisdom teeth and the incomplete fusion of the epiphyses place her age between eighteen and twenty-two.”
He stopped there. He waited till he made me ask, “Can you tell for sure if it’s Rose Daly?”
“No dental X-rays are available, but records show that Rose Daly had one filling, in a rear right lower molar. The decedent also has one filling, in the same tooth.”
He took the jawbone between his thumb and finger, levered it downwards and pointed into the mouth.
I said, “So do other people.”
Cooper shrugged. “Improbable coincidences do, as we know, happen. Fortunately, we are not purely dependent on the filling for identification.” He flicked through a neat stack of files on a long table and pulled out two transparencies, which he slapped up on a light board, one on top of the other. “There,” he said, and switched the light on.
And there was Rosie, illuminated and laughing against red brick and gray sky, with her chin up and her hair lifting in the wind. For a second she was all I could see. Then I saw the tiny white Xs dotting her face, and then I saw the empty skull staring out from behind it.
“As you can see from the points I have marked,” Cooper said, “the anatomical landmarks of the found skull-the size, angles and spacing of the eye sockets, nose, teeth, jaw, and so on-correspond precisely with Rose Daly’s features. While this does not constitute conclusive identification, it does constitute a reasonable degree of certainty, particularly when combined with the filling and with the circumstances. I have informed Detective Kennedy that he is at liberty to notify the family: I would have no difficulty in stating under oath that I believe this to be Rose Daly.”
I asked, “How did she die?”
“What you see, Detective Mackey,” Cooper said, sweeping an arm at the bones, “is what I have. In skeletonized remains, the cause of death can rarely be determined with certainty. She was clearly assaulted, but I have no way of positively eliminating, for example, the possibility that she suffered a fatal heart attack during the course of the assault.”
I said, “Detective Kennedy mentioned something about skull fractures.”
Cooper gave me a high-level snotty glare. “Unless I am gravely mistaken,” he said, “Detective Kennedy is not a qualified pathologist.”
I managed to grin at him. “He’s not a qualified bore, either, but he does the job just fine.”
The corner of Cooper’s mouth twitched. “Indeed,” he said. “Detective Kennedy is, albeit accidentally, correct that the skull has been fractured.”
He reached out one finger and rolled Rosie’s skull to the side. “There,” he said.
The thin white glove made his hand look wet and dead, sloughing away in layers. The back of Rosie’s head looked like a windscreen that had been bashed, more than once, with a golf club: it was thick with crazy spiderwebs of cracks radiating out in all directions, crisscrossing and ricocheting. Most of her hair had come away, it had been dumped beside her in a matted heap, but a few thin strands were still curling from the wrecked bone.
“If you look closely,” Cooper said, stroking the cracks delicately with a fingertip, “you will observe that the edges of the fractures are splintered, rather than snapped cleanly. This implies that, at the time of the injuries, the bone was flexible and moist, not dry and brittle. In other words, the fractures are not a post-mortem artifact; they were inflicted at or around the time of death. They were caused by several forceful blows-I would estimate at least three-from a flat surface, four inches wide or more, with no sharp edges or corners.”
I beat the urge to swallow; he would see it if I did. “Well,” I said. “I’m no pathologist either, but that looks to me like it could kill someone.”
“Ah,” Cooper said, smirking. “It could, but in this case, we cannot state with certainty that it did. Look here.”
He groped around at Rosie’s throat and fished out two fragile slips of bone. “This,” he said, fitting them neatly together into a horseshoe, “is the hyoid bone. It lies at the top of the throat, just beneath the jaw, supporting the tongue and protecting the airway. As you see, one of the greater horns has been completely severed. A fractured hyoid bone is associated, so near exclusively as to be diagnostic, with either motor vehicle accidents or manual strangulation.”
I said, “So, unless she was hit by an invisible car that somehow drove into a basement, someone choked the living shite out of her.”
“This,” Cooper informed me, waving Rosie’s hyoid bone in my direction, “is in many ways the most fascinating aspect of the case. As we noted previously, it appears that our victim was aged nineteen. In adolescents, it is rare to find the hyoid broken, due to the flexibility of the bone-and yet this fracture, like the others, is clearly perimortem. The only possible explanation is that she was strangled with extreme force, by an assailant with some physical strength.”