The Cold Room by Robert Knightly

expectations. ‘I don’t know, boss. I got a bad feeling here.’
    â€˜C’mon, guy, don’t be so pessimistic.’ Millard spread his arms and smiled encouragingly. ‘What about the witness?’
    â€˜The witness describes a middle-aged white male with squinty eyes and a van that might be any year, make, model and color. Unless I get lucky and identify the vic, I got no way to find either.’ I paused for a moment as Millard nodded agreement. I’d returned to the precinct after the body was removed, with Clyde Kelly in tow, then created a case file while Kelly turned the pages of a mug book. The file was now on Millard’s desk. Apparently, he’d taken the time to read it.
    â€˜What do you make of the way she was disemboweled?’ he asked. ‘What’s that about?’
    â€˜I don’t know? Jack the Ripper?’ I shrugged off the idea, then drove the message home again. ‘Until she’s identified, it’s all a guess.’
    Millard began to fiddle with the case file. He opened the cover, sifted through the Complaint Report and my investigator’s DD5s, then closed the file before rotating it 180 degrees. Finally, he said, ‘You got a photo?’
    I showed him the same photo I’d shown Bobby Bandelone. He passed it back to me after a quick glance. Again, I shrugged and smiled. ‘CSU couldn’t free up a team, what with the derailment. I did the best I could.’
    â€˜It ain’t the photo, Harry, it’s the victim.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Ya know, in a way, the derailment was a lucky break. The reporters would’ve jumped all over this on a slow news day. How long until we hear about the prints?’
    I glanced past Millard’s shoulder, through the dirty window behind him. I was looking west, over a furniture warehouse and across Union Avenue toward Manhattan. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving in its wake a strip of yellow that brought the upper stories of the Empire State Building into sharp relief.
    â€˜We’ll get fingerprint results the day after tomorrow,’ I continued. ‘If she was a prostitute or a drug mule, most likely she has a record.’
    Millard nodded judiciously, then laid the palm of his right hand over his chest. ‘So, whatta ya wanna do here?’
    I leaned back in the chair and crossed my legs. ‘Well, boss, showing this photo to the hookers up on Broadway, it’s gonna get us exactly nowhere. So I think I should concentrate on missing females who fit the victim’s general description, eliminate them one by one. That way, you won’t be second-guessed somewhere down the line.’
    Millard smiled. ‘In case she turns out to be somebody?’
    I returned his smile, finally looking up to meet his eyes. ‘Exactly,’ I said.
    I went home that night to an empty apartment for the first time in many months. There was a message on the answering machine from Adele. She’d arrived safely, was very tired and expected to retire soon. I should call her the following evening at my convenience. At the end, she paused for a moment before saying, ‘Bye-bye.’ Not, ‘Love ya, honey.’ Not, ‘Miss you already. Bye-bye.’ And what I wondered, as I heated a can of soup in the microwave, was whether last night’s romp had really been a bye-bye fuck. So long, baby, it was fun while it lasted.
    I ate standing up by the kitchen window, the cooling soup on the counter before me. Outside, in the landscaped plaza at the center of Rensselaer Village, the leaves on the plane trees lay motionless, as though exhausted. I could smell the dead air on the other side of the screen, redolent of the garbage bags piled in front of the building for collection tomorrow morning. Summer in New York, a condition from which residents have fled for three hundred years. I dumped the dishes in the sink, grabbed a