False Mermaid (10 page)

“As long as we’re offering true confessions,” he said, “I’m booked on a flight to America first thing tomorrow morning. “

Roz looked up at him. “Who or what’s in America?”

“Someone I don’t want to lose.”

She squeezed his arm, and shook her head in sympathy. “We are a pair, aren’t we? You know I’ll do everything I can to help.”

“Start of term is only a few weeks away, Roz. Nobody expects you to
stay on here. I might be able to request some emergency leave. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

He stood and walked to the end of the corridor, where he could see the nurses still hovering over his father and hear the quiet murmurs, the squeaking of their shoes on the polished tile floor. One of his father’s bare feet poked out from under the blanket, and Cormac felt an unfamiliar surge of protective instinct. One of the nurses finally noticed as well, and tucked the blanket more securely around the old man.

Part of him couldn’t consider abandoning his father now, despite anything that had happened in the past. The man had left whatever life he’d made for himself in Chile to return home and care for his wife in her last days. Éilis—Cormac’s mother—was still his wife. And still loved him, all those years later. Maybe that should count for something.

The fantasy he’d had of landing once again on Nora’s doorstep was rapidly evaporating, and he could feel her slipping further away from him. Why had he not gone with her? Fear of crowding her, perhaps. But if she was going to reject him eventually, wasn’t it best to give her a clear opportunity? She must know how he felt, that he’d never felt the same about anyone else. But their lives were not yet intertwined, and maybe they never would be. He’d always been so separate, unto himself. Could he change—was it possible, at this late date?

He looked in at his father, and decided it was no mystery why the ancient gods had been so often imagined as moody, capricious parents. Something buried deep within the life-giving force bestowed a kind of extraordinary, mythic stature. How strange it was to see the person he had once imagined as a divine being, a colossus, reduced to mere mortal once again. Cormac turned away from that unsettling sight and stared down at the pale, bitter tea in his cup, now gone cold.

It was delightful and refreshing to see them disporting themselves in their native element. And their eyes! Such eyes! they were simply the loveliest I ever saw in any creature—large, dark, liquid, and lustrous, with a wistful, pleading, melancholy expression that went far to justify the local legend which represents them as a certain class of fallen spirits in metempsychosis, enduring a mitigated punishment for their sins. The seal has a way of looking right into your eyes, as though asking for sympathy and kind treatment. It makes one feel pitiful towards them, and I wonder exceedingly how the sailors who prosecute “seal-fishing” in the polar regions can have the heart to knock them on the head with a bludgeon.

—The Home of a Naturalist,
by the Reverend Biot Edmondston and his sister, Jessie M. E. Saxby, 1890

The light was all that Nora could register, because her whole body was on fire. Strong hands held her wrists while soft, slow kisses found her most sensitive places. When her phantom lover raised his head, the face belonged not to Cormac but to Frank Cordova. Caught in his grip, she watched his lips move in slow motion:
Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you
. When she tried to pull away, the face altered again, and this time the eyes looking into hers belonged to Peter Hallett. She struggled harder. How could this be happening? It wasn’t real. She jerked awake and threw off the tangled sheets, shot through with cold fear and disoriented by the half light in the unfamiliar room. Heart still racing, she checked the locks on the doors and windows. Everything was secure; it was just a terrible dream. She didn’t dare try to sleep again.

When the doorbell buzzed at a quarter-past eight, she had been awake and dressed and going through the case files for nearly two hours. She tried to look out and see who was downstairs, without success. Who besides Frank Cordova even knew she was here? After the bell sounded a second time, she ventured down the narrow stairs and peered through the peephole to see Frank standing outside, freshly showered and shaved, looking not much the worse for wear after last night.

“I figured with the jet lag, you wouldn’t be able to sleep in,” he said, when she opened the door. “I’m really sorry about last night.” He was staring down at the threshold between them. “I shouldn’t drink. I was way out of line. Sorry.”

“I was nervous about seeing you, too.” The memory of his looming countenance in the dream this morning made her flush, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“So we’re okay?”

“Yeah, we’re okay. You want to come in?”

Relief broke over his face. “Yeah, sure.” He followed her upstairs into the small kitchen.

“Are you hungry? I don’t have much—”

He waved a hand, looking a little queasy at the prospect of solid food. “No—just coffee, if it’s handy.” He took a seat at the table, looking uncomfortable. He wasn’t tall, barely six feet, but he had the sort of masculine bulk that made the kitchen furniture seem almost child-sized. Nora kept the door to the sitting room closed. For some reason, she didn’t want him to see her makeshift incident room with files still spread across the floor.

She poured two cups of coffee, while he cast an appraising glance.

“Seems like Ireland agrees with you.”

Nora felt the blood rising to her face again, and this time, Frank seemed to take note.

“It was good to get some distance,” she said. “From everything. I think going away was the only thing that saved my sanity. You remember what it was like.”

The downcast look said he remembered all of it—the late nights, the media circus, the grueling emotional roller coaster of leads that evaporated almost as quickly as they appeared. And the frustration and despair that had driven them together for one reckless night. It had been a mistake. But clearly she’d been wrong in thinking he perceived it that way as well.

“How have things been with you, Frank?”

Cordova shifted in his seat and looked away, and she could almost hear the sound of a door creaking shut. Not going to happen. Not in broad daylight, and certainly not when he was sober. He gave her a weary smile. “The usual. Not enough hours in a day. That’s what they’ll carve on my tombstone.”

“Frank, last night—”

“Last night was not exactly the usual, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His left thumb absently traced the groove around the rim of his mug. “I suppose you know about Miranda Staunton. You think her brother fixed her up with Hallett?”

Nora heard a note of antipathy in Frank’s voice that said he hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the way Marc Staunton had treated her. The way Marc had taken Peter Hallett’s word over hers. The way he’d walked out when she wouldn’t desist in unmasking his old friend. It was a little unsettling to admit how good Frank’s lingering resentment made her feel. She took a sip of coffee, but found its taste bitter on her tongue. “To tell you the truth, just hearing that Peter planned to marry again convinced
me to come back. I didn’t find out that Miranda was the bride-to-be until last night. I can’t let go of this crazy idea that we might be able to stop him.”

“I hope it’s not crazy—I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Here’s something you might not know. He’s leaving the country on Saturday—taking Miranda to Ireland, the same place he took Tríona on their honeymoon. That was something I only discovered last night as well.” She watched the news work its way across Cordova’s features.

“So we have what—four days—to crack a case that’s hung us out to dry for five years? Even if we had something, it takes time to build a case.” Nora realized that he was probably swamped at work, and couldn’t just drop everything for a cold case, even this one. They sat in awkward silence for a moment. “Four days. I thought we’d have a little more time.”

“Frank, you said something last night, about another girl at Hidden Falls—”

His eyes narrowed. “What did I say?”

“That Peter didn’t know you’d found her. You said you weren’t sure it was anything to do with Tríona.”

Cordova took a deep breath. “A Jane Doe turned up down at the river three days ago. A fisherman came across the body, in a patch of swampland down at Hidden Falls—you know yourself, sometimes it’s just a feeling.”

Nora felt the beginning of a vibration, as if someone had touched a tuning fork to her solar plexus. “Where was this patch of swamp exactly?”

“Up under the bluffs north of the falls.”

Nora knew the place—one of a dozen sites the police had searched along the river five years ago, looking for evidence to pinpoint a primary crime scene, the place where Tríona had been attacked. There was nothing to say that this was the same wooded area—nothing, that is, except another body. Cordova’s eyes met hers, and the same frisson passed through her again.

“How long had she been there?”

“Hard to say exactly. The ME said he’s never seen anything like it. Half the body was reduced to bone, but the side buried deeper in the swamp was—”

“What?”

“Mummified, I guess—I don’t know what else to call it. The doc said
it was probably something to do with the wet ground. He was guessing she’d been there three or four years, maybe longer.”

“And the cause of death?” Somehow she knew what Frank was going to say even before he opened his mouth.

“Somebody smashed her face in. I’m stopping over to pick up the final autopsy report this morning—”

“Take me with you.”

“What?”

“I need to see her, Frank. If the ME has a problem with me being there, you can say I’m a specialist on preserved human remains.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that true?”

“It’s part of what I’ve been doing in Ireland, studying Iron Age remains recovered from peat bogs.”

Cordova smiled faintly and shook his head, as though it was difficult to process this new information. He stood and gestured for her to lead the way. “Okay, Dr. Gavin, let’s go.”

The Ramsey County medical examiner worked out of a low, nondescript building adjacent to the regional medical center in downtown Saint Paul. Nora hadn’t been to the building since she’d identified Tríona’s body. She tried to steel herself as Cordova parked in the small lot in front of the building.

Buck Callaway, the former ME, had been a colleague at the university, and a good friend who’d seen her through some rough times. They had kept in touch. Since his retirement, Buck and his wife had set off traveling the world. Nora was never surprised to receive their postcards from far-flung locales—the Peruvian Andes, Greenland, or the steppes of Mongolia. Buck’s travel had a serious purpose; in his retirement, he was compiling an epidemiological library of the ancient world. It was Buck Callaway who’d first urged her to take up the study of ancient bog remains in Ireland. She had yet to meet his replacement.

“What’s the new guy like?” she asked Frank.

“Solomon’s good,” Cordova said. “Very enthusiastic. Although that pretty much goes without saying for you pathology types.”

They signed in at reception, and Cordova led the way down the hall and through the wide double doors leading into the autopsy room. Not much had changed since she’d last been here; the place still had the look of a combination laboratory and operating room, albeit with some rather unorthodox surgical instruments. Three of the five stainless-steel tables were occupied. At the first two, the mortuary technicians were washing a pair of pale corpses, preparing them for the next step. On the last table was an articulated skeleton belonging to the county’s latest Jane Doe.

Nora’s first thought was that she might be back in Dublin, looking at one of the National Museum’s ancient specimens. The skull had been reduced to bone, along with one side of the body, just as Frank had described. Moving closer, she saw that the right side was mostly intact, from the shoulder down to the slightly darkened toenails and the sole of
the foot. Taken as a whole, the image was grisly and surreal: a grinning, gap-toothed skeleton half veiled in tattered flesh.