the boy the home he deserved and provide the love and care he needed. And then he himself would feel healed and whole as well.
And if not …
Time had a way of dulling sensations. He found it much easier now to think about what he had done to Neil Spencer. The shivers he’d experienced afterward had long since faded, and he could handle the memories more dispassionately now—in fact, there was almost pleasure in doing so. Because that boy had deserved it, hadn’t he? And if there had been moments of tranquility and happiness in the two months beforehand, when everything had seemed good, there had also been a sense of calm and rightness in the aftermath of that final day that had been comforting in its own way too.
But no.
It wouldn’t come to that.
Tom Kennedy stood up and made his way to the door. The man stared down at his phone, idly tapping the screen as Kennedy passed him.
The man sat for a few seconds more, thinking about the other things he’d heard. Who was Norman Collins? The name was completely unfamiliar to him. One of the others, he supposed, but he had no idea why this Collins had been arrested now. It suited him well enough, though. The police would be distracted. Kennedy might be less on edge. Which meant that he just needed to pick his moment, and everything would be well.
He stood up.
The greater the noise, the easier it was to slip silently in without being noticed.
Thirty-eight
I’ve been looking for you for so long.
Pete got out of the car and made his way into the hospital, then took the elevator down to the basement, where the city’s pathology unit was based. One wall of the elevator was mirrored, though, and he looked fine. Calm, even. The pieces within might be broken, but from the outside he was like a carefully wrapped present that would only rattle if you shook it.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling this apprehensive.
He’d been searching for Tony Smith for twenty years. On some level, he wondered if the boy’s absence had even sustained him—if it had given him a sense of purpose and a reason to continue, albeit one that had always been kept occluded in the background of his thoughts. Regardless, however much he had tried not to think about it, the case had never been closed for him.
So he had to be present when it was.
He hated the autopsy suites in here, and always had. The smell of antiseptic never quite masked the underlying stench, and the harsh light and polished metallic surfaces only served to emphasize the mottled bodies on display. Death was tangible here—laid out and made prosaic. These rooms were about weights and angles, and clipboards scribbled with spare details of chemistry and biology, all of it so cold and clinical. Every time he visited, he realized that the most important parts of a human life—the emotions; the character; the experiences—were conspicuous by their absence.
The pathologist, Chris Dale, walked Pete over to a gurney at the far side of the suite. As he followed the man, Pete felt light and faint, and had to fight the urge to turn around.
“Here’s our boy.”
Dale spoke quietly. He was famed throughout the department for his brusque and dismissive manner when it came to dealing with the police, saving his respect for those he always referred to as his patients. Our boy. The way Dale said it made it clear that the remains were now under his protection. That the indignities they’d been subjected to were over, and that they would be looked after now.
Our boy, Pete thought.
The bones were laid out in the shape of a small child, but age had separated many of them, and not a scrap of flesh remained. Pete had seen a number of skeletons over the years. In some ways, they were easier to look at than more recently deceased victims, who looked like human beings but, in their eerie stillness, somehow not. A skeleton was so far removed from everyday experience that it could be viewed more dispassionately. And yet the reality always hit home. The fact that people die, and after a short amount of time only objects remain, the bones little more than a scattering of possessions abandoned where they fall.
“We’ve yet to do a full postmortem,” Dale said. “That’s scheduled for later. What I can tell you in the meantime is that these are the remains of a male child who was