“No such luck on the prints, Mike. As usual, the wheels of death processing grind slowly.”
“So what’s your take on Mr. Doe?”
“Where do I begin?” she said. “Did you see the amazing shape of this guy?”
“He did seem pretty trim. Worked out some, did he?”
“He looks like an Olympian. Jacked, as the kids say, with a body fat percentage in the single digits.”
I shook my head. This case just kept getting weirder.
“Anything else? Cause of death was the fall, right?”
“Yep. Massive bruising and impact contusions on the skin and muscle, especially to the head and upper chest. The bones in his face were completely pulverized.”
“Anything in his bloodstream that would have made a healthy person like him suddenly want to throw himself off a roof? Like flakka or something? Crystal meth? We have some indication that he might have thrown up prior to the fall.”
“No, nothing,” she said, surprised. “A little alcohol in his blood was all. You think he threw up? I don’t know about that. He had food in his stomach.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep,” Dr. Linder said. “Food and this.”
She lifted a plastic evidence bag on her desk beside the autopsy report. There were two items inside of it. One of them was yellowish and thin and looked like a deflated balloon. The other item looked like a thin slip of paper.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “How was this in the guy’s stomach? A piece of paper in a condom?”
“With numbers written on it,” the doctor said. “They seem random. I counted them twice. There are twenty-four of them altogether.”
“That’s just—”
“Yep,” Dr. Linder said.
“Like the way people sometimes smuggle drugs,” I mumbled, turning the bag over in my hand.
“The same exact way,” Dr. Linder said. “Have you ever seen something like this, Mike? Because this is a first for me.”
Chapter 8
“So tell me, Una. Mary Catherine was a nut when you guys were teens back in Tipperary, wasn’t she? Remember, I’m a cop, so don’t try to lie. I’m highly trained in the art of truth detection.”
“How did you know, Mike?” said Una, a very funny, heavyset forty-something with long black hair. “Oh, Mike, she was just mad, so she was. Closing down discos, out-drinking full rugby teams, all the lads chasing her. She was a sheer panic of a woman, a true holy terror in high heels.”
“I knew it,” I said and smiled at Mary, blue-eyed and blushing beside me in the van.
I was driving down Broadway in Midtown, on chauffeur duty for Mary and Una, her cousin visiting from Ireland. They were going to see the new musical School of Rock at the Winter Garden Theatre, then to drinks and a late dinner at my good buddy Emmett O’Lunney’s joint across the street. I’d already called ahead and told Emmett to pull out all the stops, the full red carpet treatment. Not so much for Una, but for Mary, our house martyr. The kids had insisted that she enjoy herself without us in her hair for once, on a much-deserved girls’ night out.
I stole a glance at Mary again. So heart-swellingly pretty, done up in makeup and a little black dress. I remembered a line from an old drunk cop at a retirement party I’d taken her to over the holidays.
“Your wife, Mike,” the former emergency services cop said, with a drunkenly wistful and old-fashioned earnestness, “your wife is an Irish beauty.”
I’ll say, I thought, as I watched Mary blush even more under my gaze. Though, technically, she wasn’t my wife.
And why not, Bennett? You complete idiot! came my interior Catholic. Funny how he always sounded sort of like Grandfather Seamus.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Mary whispered, squeezing my hand as Una took a call on her cell behind us. “As if I don’t know.”
“You want to know what I’m thinking about right now? You really want to know?” I whispered back.