Pariah Read Free

needed to pee.’
    ‘So you stepped into the lot. You really have to go all the way to the back wall to do that?’
    It’s one of the few fragments of information Doyle was given before he arrived. Two DOAs found in the far corner of a vacant lot. One his partner, the other a woman who was not his wife.
All the ingredients for one of the shittiest days imaginable.
    ‘No, no. I just went about halfway down. But when I was doing my thing, you know, I saw this light.’
    ‘A light?’
    ‘Yeah. A little light. And I wondered what it was. So I went down there to take a look. And that’s when I found them.’
    ‘And the light was . . . ?’
    ‘A flashlight, in the guy’s hand. It was really dim, like the battery was dying, you know? But it was just enough so I could see them. There was a lot of blood, but it didn’t
look like blood, because it was so black, you know? And the girl’s face, it was wrecked, man. I thought she was wearing a mask at first. And you know what the really freaky thing
was?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Literally while I was standing there, the flashlight went out. Slowly dimmed, and then just went out, totally. Man, was I spooked. It was like . . .’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Like . . . his soul just left him. I know it sounds crazy. He already looked stone-cold dead when I found him. But that’s how it felt at the time. Like his life was draining out of
him while I watched.’
    An image enters Doyle’s brain. A memory. Of standing over a body drenched in blood. He is aware of the life force leaking away, and is powerless to prevent it. He is crying in frustration
. . .
    Doyle shivers, and blames the cold. He asks the student a few more questions, thanks him, and returns to the crime scene. Slipping wordlessly between his colleagues, he enters the lot. It is
brightly lit by banks of floodlights. He can hear the thrum of the generator that powers them. Members of the Crime Scene Unit are scouring the weed-pocked ground and sifting through garbage. Doyle
gets as close as he can without disturbing them. Close enough to get a good look at the bodies.
    The woman is young. Perhaps not yet twenty. To the uninitiated she might appear older, but her line of work adds years in that way. She is wearing a faux-fur jacket that ends at the waist and a
skirt that extends not much farther. The signs of a severe assault are not hidden behind her face mask of caked blood. Her features are contorted and misshapen, her nose looking like a squashed
strawberry. Her mouth is open and the tip of her tongue is wedged in the gap where one of her teeth has been smashed out.
    He has seen this woman before. Well, not her exactly, but quite a few like her. She’s another corpse, another DOA. As yet she doesn’t even have a name. She’s paperwork,
she’s tracking down friends and family and acquaintances, she’s interrogating suspects. She’s his job. She’s what puts bread and butter on his table.
    At least, that’s what he’s learned to tell himself at scenes like this. It’s a defense mechanism that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the sheer waste of it all still gets
to him. Sometimes he cares a little too much for his own good.
    And then there’s Joe, and for him Doyle cannot make even the pretense of detachment. That crumpled lifeless mass lying there in a puddle of its own blood is the body of a man who, just
yesterday, was telling Doyle a joke about a blind beggar and a nudist. This was minutes after they had worked in perfect harmony in the interview room to get a confession from a suspected rapist.
Which in turn was not long after they had spent over three hours freezing their asses off doing surveillance from a rooftop coated in pigeon shit.
    There are strong ties here that Doyle cannot and does not choose to deny. They make him wonder whether he made the right decision in requesting this case: he knows that the end of
Parlatti’s journey is the start of a new one for himself, and that it’s going to