“Him,” he said, nodding in the direction of a gaunt young man Morgan had never seen before.
Spivak’s last partner was killed in a car accident; a woman, a rookie, a high-speed chase. A lot of bad publicity, no liability. She was driving.
“He looks like a funeral director,” said Morgan.
“He’s in the right place,” said Ellen Ravenscroft. “I think he’s kind of distinguished.”
“Maybe where you come from,” said Spivak with a sneer.
Spivak is the perpetual immigrant, thought Morgan. Born in Toronto, grew up speaking English, his parents spoke none. By identifying others as outsiders he proclaims his own credentials as a native son.
“Yorkshire,” she said, paused, and added, “love.” Her tone made the word seem its opposite. “Now to business,” she continued. “We have a killer who was taking no chances. This fellow has been shot through the head, gutted, and for all we know asphyxiated and poisoned as well.”
“Check it all out,” said Spivak cheerfully, ingesting a massive wheeze.
“What do you make of this?” his funereal partner called from the bathroom doorway. Spivak and Morgan walked over to him while Ravenscroft rejoined the pathology team by the bed.
Morgan was startled when he entered the bathroom. The walls were smeared with swathes of blood that appeared to have been applied with deliberation, to deliver an indecipherable message.
“My goodness,” he said.
Morgan’s habitual avoidance of obscenity and profanity was known through the department and sometimes ridiculed, but never to his face.
“My goodness!” Spivak repeated.
Morgan looked at him. Spivak’s eyes flicked downwards in a brief acknowledgement of something unspoken between them. He was a crude man and hard as nails, but Morgan was alpha, something to do with quietude, with his intelligence. Men like Spivak invested stillness with menace and were grudgingly deferential.
“What’s it saying to us, Morgan?” asked Spivak.
Morgan reached over and flicked off the overhead light. The room fell silent. He turned on the heater-light and the low rumble of the fan spread around them in the red gloom, the blood scrawlings on the wall disappearing, merging with the shadows. He turned on the overhead and the bloody scrawl returned.
“She wouldn’t have seen it,” he said.
“Unless she did it herself.”
Morgan glared at the burly, unkempt man — Morgan was unkempt, Spivak was scruffy.
“It’s her bed, her boyfriend, her gun. She’s on suspension.”
“What?”
“It’s automatic. And Rufalo says you’re out of it, too. This is Igor, he’s a mortician from Jamaica.”
“Don’t you be saying to he such a terrible thing, I never been to Jamaica, man,” Spivak’s new partner said in an exaggerated West Indian dialect. Then he turned to address Morgan. “Eeyore, not Igor,” he said, and shook hands, speaking with a crisp Toronto inflection. “We’re working on racial sensitivity,” he continued. “So far, Spivak can’t make the entry requirements for the program. I have heard a lot about you and your partner, mostly good things. My mother didn’t realize Eeyore was an ass. Nice to meet you.”
He seemed a nice enough kid. Morgan walked back into the living room, where Miranda was sitting on the sofa, small and alone amidst the commotion.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“Did you see the stuff scrawled on the bathroom walls?”
She looked at him quizzically, cocking her head like a wounded animal.
“Hieroglyphs of some sort. Written in blood.”
“Philip’s ...” she murmured, her voice trailing off.
A woman from the CSI unit kneeled in front of them.
“Detective Quin, I’m going to need some bits and pieces.”
Miranda held out her hands one at a time, and the woman pared residual matter from under her nails into a small plastic envelope.
“Did you wash?” she asked.
“Yeah, I had a shower. I flushed the toilet.” Miranda seemed almost embarrassed.
“That’s okay. I need to check what I can.”
“There’ll be powder under my nails,” said Miranda. “I was on the range yesterday.”
“With the murder weapon?”
“Pardon?”
“The murder weapon,” the woman repeated, nodding in the direction of the bedroom.
“I guess so. I don’t know.” It seemed inconceivable he could have been killed with her own gun. And inevitable that he was.
“And we’re going to need a vaginal scraping.”
“He was my lover, for God’s sake.”
“Did you have sex last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll need to find out.”
“Yeah, okay. Where?”
“As soon as we can. We’ll take you over to Women’s.”
Morgan felt for her, but it was standard procedure.
“Can you do it here?” Miranda asked.
“I can’t, but the M.E. could.”
“A coroner’s pelvic — see if she’s up for it.”
The woman went to find Ravenscroft. Morgan leaned over the sofa from behind, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“We’ll have to go down to Headquarters,” he said. “Spivak and Eeyore, they’ll want to talk.”
“How long?”
“What? Downtown —”
“No. How long’s he been dead?” she asked.
“Five or six hours.”
“Is it bad?”
“He’s dead.”
“Gruesome?”
“Yeah, very.”
“Disembowelled?”
