The Dead Room Read Free Page A

undid the rubber band holding her hair together and caught her reflection in the mirror. Her gaze shifted to a thin but hard white scar peeking out from the greasepaint above her fake cheekbone. The implant had replaced the bone shattered by Traveler’s axe.
    Darby wet the towel and began to scrub the greasepaint from her face. Coop stared at her. Their eyes locked in the mirror.
    ‘Nice six pack,’ he said.
    Darby looked at the sink, felt her throat close up. Not from the compliment but from this awkward feeling she’d been experiencing lately – the way Coop’s voice hung inside her chest at the end of the day. Sometimes she caught herself thinking about him when she was alone in her condo. Coop was the closest thing she had to family – the only thing, really, since her mother had died. Darby wondered if this newfound feeling she had for him had something to do with the fact he was being headhunted for a new job. Coop had been approached by a London forensics company that was making new technological advances with fingerprints – his area of expertise.
    ‘What’s the latest from London?’ she asked.
    ‘They increased their offer.’
    ‘Are you going to accept?’
    ‘Say it.’
    ‘Say what?’
    ‘Say you’ll miss me.’
    ‘Everyone will miss you.’
    ‘You especially, though. I’ll leave and you’ll lock yourself inside that fancy Beacon Hill condo of yours and listen to John Mayer while drowning your sorrows in Irish whiskey.’
    ‘Don’t every say that again.’
    ‘That you’re going to miss me?’
    ‘No, that I listen to John Mayer.’ Darby grabbed a clean towel from her locker. ‘I need to take a quick shower. Give me five minutes.’
    ‘Take your time, Dirty Harry.’

4
    Darby wanted to get a handle on the crime scene before she reached Belham. She called Artie Pine half a dozen times while driving out of Boston and each time she got his voicemail. On the last call she left a message.
    WBZ, Boston’s twenty-four-hour all-news radio station, had the ‘breaking story’. The twenty-second prerecorded audio spot, courtesy of an on-scene reporter, offered up only vague details: ‘A Belham woman and her son were victims in what police are calling a botched home invasion. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and the son is listed in critical condition at a Boston hospital. Belham police won’t release the names of the victims, but a source close to the investigation called it “grisly and horrific, the worst I’ve ever seen”.’
    The story ended and switched to the local weather report. More rain and more oppressive humidity. People were running their air-conditioners day and night, putting a drain on the state’s electric grid. A spokesman told people to expect more blackouts.
    Half an hour later Darby pulled the crime scene vehicle, a navy-blue Ford Explorer, on to Marshall Street. Residents crowded the pavements around the cul-de-sac, flashing blue and white lights flickering on their faces as they stared across the roofs of three cruisers parked at the end of a driveway leading up to a massive white Colonial home with a wraparound farmer’s porch and an attached three-car garage. Only the middle door was open.
    An antique-style lantern light was mounted on each side of the home’s front door. The same lights had been installed on the garage. A wooden fence at least seven feet high separated the driveway and a basketball court from the backyard.
    The driveway had been taped off. Darby parked against the kerb, got out and lifted her kit out of the back. All the shades had been drawn on windows facing the street.
    Coop moved across the trimmed front lawn, lugging his kit. Michael Banville from the Photography Unit, a big bear of a man who had a permanent case of five o’clock shadow, stood on the porch near the front door, dressed head to toe in a heavy-duty white Tyvek coverall.
    Darby turned on her flashlight and made her way to the edge of the lawn to examine the driveway.