THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (3 page)

Wonderful
, Tay thought to himself,
just wonderful.
Where’s my damn coffee?

He glanced down the promenade in the direction of Robertson Quay, but Kang was nowhere in sight.

As subtly as he could, Tay took a couple of deep breaths as a precaution against nausea and nodded to the patrolman. The man pulled open the flap and Tay walked inside.

“GOOD AFTERNOON, INSPECTOR. I had no idea I was going to see you today or I would have worn something a little more fetching.”

Dr. Susan Hoi was a pathologist at the Centre for Forensic Medicine and Tay had first met her a couple of years back when he was trying to identify the body of a western woman murdered in a room at the Singapore Marriott. It had never occurred to Tay he would see Dr. Hoi today either. If it had, he would probably have broken into a trot in the opposite direction. Their last encounter had been a source of acute embarrassment for him and he had been doing his best ever since to avoid having another one.

Dr. Hoi began making her personal interest in Tay unmistakable almost as soon as they met. She even went so far as to tell him she had off-the-record information to pass along to him from the autopsy of the woman found at the Marriott and asked him to meet her for a drink at Harry’s Bar in Boat Quay. When he got there, she confessed she didn’t have any information at all. She had only said she did, she admitted, to get Tay meet her at Harry’s Bar.

Tay had been avoiding the woman ever since, but now in spite of his very best efforts here he was alone with her inside a little blue tent. At least they were alone if you didn’t count the dead body at their feet. Turning and fleeing wasn’t really a practical response to those circumstances no matter how unhappy Tay might be about them, although he did give the possibility one brief moment of consideration. So Tay stayed where he was. Sometimes life just screwed with you and there was nothing you could do about it.

“I’ve never seen you out in the field before,” Tay said, looking for safe ground.

“They’re starting to send me out quite a lot. Do you think it’s a promotion?”

Tay wasn’t sure so he merely bobbed his head and tried to appear as if he were considering the question thoughtfully.

Susan Hoi was a looker, no doubt about that, and a stylish one. The first time Tay met her was on a day she was cutting up dead bodies and she was wearing a little black dress and pearls. Her hair was black with highlights that appeared almost red, and she kept it cut short and shaped tightly to her head, which gave her an air of professional crispness Tay had to admit he rather liked. Eye color was something Tay seldom remembered, but the celadon green of Dr. Hoi’s eyes was impossible to forget. He could recall the first time they had met how her eyes seemed to gleam as if they were illuminated from within.

Tay just wished she hadn’t been so forward. It had made him jumpy as hell and he had reflexively taken off in the opposite direction. Then again, he knew he usually found a reason to take off in the opposite direction whenever he met a woman who showed interest in him, didn’t he? He supposed that explained why, at fifty, he still lived alone. Sometimes he asked himself if he was going to live alone for the rest of his life, but he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it anymore. He was pretty sure he knew what the answer to that question was.

This afternoon Susan Hoi wore a tight pair of low-slung jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled above her elbows. Tay thought her face looked drawn and tired, and at a glance she appeared older than her thirty-five or so years. For once Tay’s brain worked faster than his mouth and he very sensibly kept that thought to himself.

Tay made a throat-clearing noise to underscore that the personal part of the conversation was over, brief as it might have been, and the time had come to get on with business.

“So what have we got here?” he asked.

For the first time he glanced down at the corpse and he instinctively recoiled.

It was the body of a man dressed in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt, but below the bottom of his shorts most of the man’s left leg and part of his right leg were gone. Shreds of flesh hung from each stump like clumps of dangling vines. The corpse’s arms were intact, but the fingers were shredded away to the bone. His chest was dented and misshapen and his face had been cut off. The man’s shoulders were broad and well developed and Tay could tell he appeared to be in pretty good shape. Apart from being dead and having his legs ripped off, of course.

“Yes,” Dr. Hoi said when she saw Tay’s reaction. “He’s a real mess. It looks like a boat propeller tore him up. And of course the crabs have gotten to him.”

Tay involuntarily glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the river.

“Don’t worry, Inspector,” Dr. Hoi laughed. “Nothing you eat in Singapore came out of
that
water.”

Tay’s nodded slowly.

“You look a little green, Sam.”

Tay took a deep breath and nodded again. He kept his eyes well away from the corpse laid out on the plastic sheeting at their feet.

“Maybe we should talk outside,” Dr. Hoi suggested.

Tay didn’t even bother to nod. He just turned and pushed out through the flap of the tent.

They stood together at the concrete wall that ran along the river. Tay leaned on his forearms against the top of the wall and contemplated the dirty brown water creeping past. It looked sticky, and it flowed like maple syrup.

Susan Hoi reached into a back pocket of her jeans and produced a crumpled pack of Marlboros with a book of matches tucked inside the cellophane wrapper. She shook out a cigarette and offered it to Tay. He could have thrown his arms around her and hugged her, but he had the presence of mind to know that was probably a terrible idea. So he just accepted the cigarette with a small nod.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

Dr. Hoi shook a cigarette out for herself and struck a match, touching it first to Tay’s cigarette and then to her own.

“That’s exactly what you said the last time you saw me with a pack of cigarettes, Sam. You do remember
something
about me, don’t you?”

This can go nowhere good,
Tay thought, so he drew on his cigarette and said nothing.

“How much do you smoke, Sam?”

“I don’t know. A few a day. Maybe half a pack.”

“Nonsense. I’ll bet you’re a pack a day man. Sometimes probably two.”

Tay raised and lowed his shoulders in a small shrug.

“Has anyone ever told you that smoking is a symptom of a self-destructive personality, Sam? Do you have a self-destructive personality? Is that who you really are?”

“Thanks for the cigarette,” Tay said, ignoring Dr. Hoi’s personal question. “You have officially saved my life. Now all I need is coffee and the world will be right again.”

“Right behind you, sir,” Sergeant Kang responded exactly on cue.

Tay turned to find Kang holding two large Starbucks cups.

“What is that?”

“It’s coffee, sir. I found a Starbucks down in Shell House.”

“You know I don’t like Starbucks.”

“Drink it, sir,” Kang said, holding out one of the cups. “You can pretend Starbucks isn’t American.”

Tay hesitated, and then he abruptly reached out and took both cups from Kang.

“Sir, one of those was for—”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Dr. Hoi and I are very appreciative.”

Tay turned his back on Kang and handed one of the Starbucks cups to Dr. Hoi. Then he took her by the elbow and tugged her along the promenade until they were more or less alone again. He popped the top off his coffee, laid it on the wall, and drank deeply.

Dr. Hoi laughed. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m the inspector and he’s the sergeant. That’s how it works.”

“Jesus, Sam, I’m glad
I
don’t work for you.”

Tay shrugged. He drew on his cigarette and drank more coffee. He could feel the caffeine and the nicotine building up nicely in his bloodstream. In another minute or two he would be back to normal.

“Okay,” Tay said, trying to assume his most professional tone of voice, “tell me what you’ve found so far.”

“A badly mangled body without a face and not a lot more.”

“Any guess yet as to how long it’s been in the river?”

“A while. Three days? Maybe longer.”

Tay waved a hand at the river. “You’re telling me a body floated around out there for at least three days and nobody noticed it?”

“Shit happens,” Dr. Hoi shrugged. “Life goes on. Nobody cares.”

“Jesus,” Tay muttered, “aren’t you cheerful today?”

“It’s the wrong time of the month. You want cheerful? Call me next week.”

Tay cleared his throat and looked away. He admired honesty in a woman, he really did, but only to a point. This was past that point.

“Anything about the body that would help us with an ID?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the river. “Tattoos? Birthmarks?”

“Nothing.”

“I suppose an ID card would be out of the question.”

“If he had a wallet, it’s in the river now.”

Tay peered at the dark water and shook his head. “We can forget about finding it down there.”

“And since we can’t get any prints for you, doing an identification isn’t going to be easy.”

“What do you mean you can’t—”

Suddenly Tay remembered and he stopped talking. You needed fingers to get fingerprints, and the corpse’s fingers had been eaten away by crabs. He sucked up some more nicotine and took another hit on his coffee. It helped. A little.

“Anything on the cause of death?” Tay asked.

“It’s early days.”

Tay gestured at the river. “Do you at least know if he was dead before he went in, or did all the shit in that water poison him?”

“He was probably dead before he went in.”

Tay nodded.

“I’m reasonably certain the gunshot wound in the back of his head would have been fatal.”

Tay was just taking a puff on his Marlboro and he choked on the smoke.

“Gunshot wound?” he coughed.

“Nine millimeter, I think. I can’t be certain until I get him back to Block Nine and open him up, but I don’t think there’s much doubt about it.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You said that the last time I brought you a gunshot wound,” Dr. Hoi smiled. “I feel like we just keep having the same conversations over and over again, Sam.”

Tay and Dr. Hoi had a case together once before that involved a gunshot wound. At first, Tay hadn’t believed her then either because firearms were rarely used in homicides in Singapore. He had seen hundreds of stabbings and beatings, but in his entire career he had seen less than two dozen gunshot deaths. Guns simply were not part of the culture in Singapore.

“I didn’t expect that,” Tay said.

“Neither did I. Somebody shot and dumped in the Singapore River? That’s one for the books.”

Tay’s eyes drifted away to the young patrolman who had recognized him when he arrived. The boy looked so young and eager, and Tay couldn’t help but wonder how many misshapen lumps of flesh he would have to encounter before all the freshness was gone from his eyes. With his thumb and forefinger, Tay flicked his cigarette butt into the river.

“Shame on you, Inspector Tay,” Dr. Hoi said. “That’s exactly why the river is so dirty.”

“With all the crap that’s already in there, one more cigarette isn’t going to make any difference.”

“I expected you to be a big supporter of improving Singapore’s environment, Sam, knowing your strong social consciousness.”

Tay sneaked a look at Dr. Hoi’s face. Surely she was joking, but he couldn’t tell for sure so he said nothing.

Dr. Hoi dumped her own cigarette butt into what was left of her coffee and Tay listened to it sizzle as it hit the liquid. He stared at the surface of the river, struggling to wipe from his mind the image of that mangled lump of flesh inside the blue plastic tent not twenty feet away.

THEY CLEARED THE crime scene quickly since it wasn’t really a crime scene. Nothing had really happened there. Somebody dragged the man’s body out of the river by the Alkaff Bridge, but he hadn’t been killed there. It seemed unlikely the body even went into the river there. Almost certainly it had drifted for a distance before it became wedged underneath the bridge, but they had no idea yet how far.

The location to which they had been called was only a place where a lump of flesh almost unrecognizable as a human being lay on a patch of straggly grass underneath a blue plastic tent. Tay hated looking at it like that, but that was simply the way it was.

When they got back in the car, Kang took Mohamed Sultan Road out to River Valley Road

“Where to, sir?” he asked as they pulled up to the corner.

The hard white light of Singapore was beginning its daily metamorphosis into the gentle twilight that was Tay’s favorite time of day to sit in his garden and smoke a Marlboro or two. His desk was reasonably clear, and what could he do about the body in the river with whatever was left of today anyway? Until they knew who their corpse was, or at least who their corpse used to be, he couldn’t do much of anything. Would the autopsy turn up something to help with the identification? It seemed doubtful, at least not without a major stroke of luck. Tay pictured the corpse’s fingertips gnawed away by crabs and shuddered slightly. Without fingerprints, it was going to be a struggle, and he doubted Dr. Hoi would produce an autopsy report for a day or two anyway.

The more he thought about it, the more obvious the answer to Kang’s question became. Shuffling papers back at the Cantonment Complex would be even more pointless today than it usually was. And it was almost always completely pointless.

“Drop me at home, Robbie. Then go home yourself. I don’t see what else we can do today.”

Kang nodded and turned left.

They drove in silence for a while, but then Kang shot a glance at Tay and cleared his throat.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about, sir. It’s…uh, personal.”

Tay shifted his eyes toward Kang. This didn’t sound like anything he wanted to hear. It really didn’t.