Skin Deep by Gary Braver Page B

stockings.”
    Neil smiled and nodded. “Yeah.”
    â€œHey, man, we’re partners. We’re working this together, okay? There’s no one-upsmanship bullshit.”
    Neil nodded. “Maybe you called it.”
    â€œAnd maybe not. We’ve got lab stuff still to come. We’ve got an investigation to mount.”
    â€œYeah.”
    Steve felt himself relax a little in whatever reconciliation had been established. But he wasn’t sure if Neil was sitting on something else.
    â€œYou seem to have all the answers is all.”
    They had been partners for less than six months, so Steve was still getting to knowing Neil, who had been rehired from Gloucester on the North Shore. He had said that low pay, boring assignments, and minimal overtime made him leave. So he took the civil service tests, scored high, got hired, did time on the streets, and was eventually promoted to homicide. But the real reason for the move was his wife’s death three years ago.
    Neil wanted to be out of Gloucester and all reminders of his loss. Also, he wanted a fresh start for his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lily, who had behavioral problems. So part of Neil’s emotional makeup was family baggage. That and a fierce competitiveness which sometimes surfaced as pit bull finesse.
    Neil pulled the stirrer out of his mouth and tossed it out the window. Unconsciously, he began to finger the crucifix chain around his neck. It was another one of his tics. For several minutes, neither of them said anything as they proceeded toward headquarters, Neil looking as if he had put behind them any resentment that Ottoman had corroborated Steve’s murder theory. But Steve was not convinced. Neil was a quiet brooder.
    â€œI don’t care how good a pathologist he is,” he finally said. “He gives me the fucking creeps is all. I mean, how many guys say, ‘Let’s talk strangulation,’ and grin like that?”
    â€œYou’d be creepy too if you spent your days cutting up cadavers.”
    â€œYeah, but I think he gets off on it. I mean, when he was a little kid instead of a fireman or baseball player, did he say he wanted to be a coroner?”
    Steve laughed. “He probably made that decision in medical school.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m saying. He’s got a whole list of medical options—psychiatry, neurology, cardiology, gynecology, pediatrics, whatever. So, what kind of person decides he’s going to make cadavers his specialty?”
    â€œI don’t think he sees dead people the way most people do. They’re more like scientific problems to be solved. And what about us opting for homicide?”
    Neil shrugged. “Maybe we’re a little weird, too. Not like we’ve got lots of cool options—traffic, public safety, cyber crime, domestic violence, harbor patrol. Administration. I think I’d die an early death if I had a desk job.”
    â€œYeah, me, too.” Only on movie or TV screens was homicide cool—cops rolling into crime scenes in shiny black Hummers, wearing Armani suits, spouting hot-shit platitudes, finding conclusive DNA evidence, getting the bad guy IDed the next day. The real thing is not like that. Nor is the crime sanitized. In Steve’s experience it was a daily confrontation with human depravity: bodies found in a basement, their brains exploded for a fistful of dollars; young kids dead in a playground over sneakers; a wife and child bludgeoned in a moment of madness because of mounting bills; a pregnant woman murdered, her fetus cut out of her. Or shooting dead some kid zonked out on OxyContin and coming at you with a gun. All in a day’s work.
    But one never quite gets used to it. You cope for a while, maybe seek counseling for the stress and horror. But eventually it comes back up like a clogged toilet. That’s when you go for the unhealthy solutions—cigarettes, booze, drugs—whatever it takes to anesthetize