Inherit the Dead

question to the latter.
    “Come on, Henry. You know something doesn’t feel right about this one.”
    The detective shrugged, his expression both weary and frustrated. “What? The woman was terminally ill, distraught. She took some pills and threw herself off the balcony. What’s not to feel right?”
    Perry shook his head. “I told her I was close to finding Angel. If you hire a PI to find your estranged daughter, and you know he’s getting close, is that the time you pick to kill yourself?”
    “You and I both know suicides always leave a lot of questions behind,” Watson said. “If she was in pain, hell . . . maybe it just got to be too much for her.”
    “Maybe,” Perry said with no conviction.
    Watson let out his biggest sigh yet, and that was saying something. He clicked off the little digital recorder. “That’s it. For now.”
    As Perry rose and walked out of the interview room, he couldn’t help but feel that he was missing something important. And so was Watson.
    Suicides were unpredictable, all right. But mothers, where the welfare of their children were concerned, were among the most predictable creatures on the planet. And he could not see Julia slipping over that ledge when possible reconciliation with her daughter was so nearly at hand.

19
MARK BILLINGHAM
    C offee and doughnuts . . .
    Police stations smelled of coffee and doughnuts, that’s the way Perry remembered it anyway . . . whenever he found himself sitting up late with a drink in his hand and thinking about these big, ugly buildings he’d once spent so long in. The dingy corners and the crowded hallways and the squad rooms that had made his blood pump just a little bit faster as he walked into them every day, until six years ago when everything . . . changed.
    That’s the way he dreamed it.
    Rose-tinted spectacles. Didn’t sound right when you were talking about the way a place smelled, but it was the best he could come up with sitting there now and breathing it in.
    “Somebody taking care of you, buddy?” A young cop—one whom Perry didn’t know, and who didn’t know him. He was glad.
    “I’m good, thanks.”
    Piss and puke was more like it, and something else that was hard to put into words but that all cops recognized the moment they caught a whiff of it.
    Police stations smelled of fear.
    Perry sat on the edge of a scarred, wooden bench on the secondfloor of the 19th Precinct Station House. Twenty feet to his left was the small, brown door to an interview room, which he had glanced at every twenty seconds or so since he had been asked to leave and the Lokis had been ushered back into for a second round of questioning.
    “You sure?”
    Perry looked up again at the uniformed cop standing over him. The man had a shaved head and a face like a forgotten potato in the bottom of the refrigerator. “Yeah, like I said.” He sniffed and leaned back. “Just waiting on somebody.”
    The cop sucked his teeth and straightened his belt, and as soon as he had turned away, Perry stole another glance at the door to his left. He rolled his head around on his neck. He let out a long, slow breath and dropped his gaze to the patch of scuffed gray marble beneath his feet.
    “Yeah, well, that’s bullshit!”
    “Try telling someone who cares.”
    “I know my rights.”
    “Good for you . . . ”
    He might have been wrong about the smell of the place, but it was every bit as noisy as he remembered. While the argument echoed up from the floor below, a radio was playing somewhere and raucous laughter drifted toward him from a room at the other end of the hallway. There were high ceilings in here. There was plenty of air. Sound carried in a place like this, and you could hear a whispered plea or a muttered curse from fifty yards away.
    He remembered a cop saying once, “Don’t even think out loud in here.”
    Once or twice in the last few minutes he had thought he’d heard voices coming from the interview room. Not raised voices, just the gentle to and fro of a conversation, but even so he had struggled to resist marching across and pressing an ear to that small, brown door. Struggled, until he’d drawn the attention of the potato-faced sergeantand thought better of it. He looked up now, and the cop was still watching him, making a bad job of pretending he wasn’t and looking away just a second too late. For a moment or two, Perry wondered if the cop did know who he was.
    He looked at the door again.
    Cigarettes, too, back in the