The Dead Room by Chris Mooney Read Free Book Online

arrived,’ she said.
    ‘I know. Randy called to let me know he was here.’
    ‘I’ll go speak to them.’
    ‘I’ll do it. You need to go to St Joseph’s Hospital in Belham. I just got off the phone with operations. A Belham patrolman called looking for you. The kid says he wants to speak to a Belham cop named Thomas McCormick. Isn’t that –’
    ‘Yes,’ Darby said, blood beating in her eardrums. ‘That’s my father.’

9
    Darby stood with Pine and a Belham patrolman around the corner from the nurses’ station, next to a trolley holding discarded cafeteria trays. The odours of sour milk and steamed vegetables were a welcome relief from Pine’s cigar stench.
    The patrolman’s name was Richard Rodman. His thick grey hair, carefully combed and parted, did not match his youthful face. Darby thought he looked like a budding politician stuffed inside a cop’s blue uniform. He held a white-paper mailer spotted with blood from the teenager’s bloody T-shirt. The emergency room physician had cut the shirt off the teenager and then had the good sense to transfer it to a paper bag. Plastic bags broke down DNA. Not all doctors knew this.
    ‘I was sitting on a chair outside his room when he opened the door and asked if I knew a Belham cop named Thomas McCormick,’ Rodman said. ‘I said no, I didn’t, and the kid said everyone called McCormick Big Red. Kid said he needed to talk to McCormick but wouldn’t tell me why.’
    Rodman looked at Darby. ‘I remembered seeing you on TV last year when you caught that whack-job, what’s his name, the guy who shot women in the head, put Virgin Mary statues in their pockets and dumped them in the river.’
    ‘Walter Smith,’ Darby said.
    Rodman snapped his fingers. ‘That’s the guy. What happened to him?’
    ‘He’s in a mental institution. He’ll be spending the rest of his life there.’
    ‘God bless us all. The news story I saw did this profile on you and I remembered something about you growing up in Belham and your old man being a cop. So I went to the nurses’ station, used a computer to do a Google search, then called operations and here we are.’
    ‘Did you tell the boy that Thomas McCormick is dead?’
    ‘No. I figured it might be better if you tell him. You know, use that as your way in.’
    ‘Has anyone come to see him?’
    Rodman shook his head. ‘No phone calls either.’
    ‘I think it’s better if I see him alone.’
    ‘I’m fine with that. The less, the better, I say. The kid’s really shook up.’
    Darby turned to Pine.
    ‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Pine said.
    Darby pushed herself off the wall and grabbed the small digital tape recorder from her back pocket. ‘Where is he?’
    ‘Straight down the hall,’ Rodman said.
    Darby opened the door. The teenager had turned off the lights in his room. In the dim light coming from the window next to his bed, she could see that someone had worked him over good. The left side of his face was swollen, the eye nearly shut.
    He sat up in bed, a blanket covering his legs. His bandaged arm, perched in a sling, rested against his bare chest, tanned from the sun. Tall and lean, he had barely any muscle tone.
    ‘Hello, John. My name is Darby McCormick. I understand you wanted to see my father.’
    ‘Where is he?’
    His voice was raw. And young.
    ‘May I come in?’
    He considered the question for a moment. His blond hair was cut short, his forehead damp with sweat. All-American good-looks. The ER doctor had used butterfly sutures on the split skin.
    Finally, he nodded.
    She shut the door and sat on the end of the bed. The skin along his wrists and eyes was red. Patches of missing hair above the ears. She could see that he had been crying.
    ‘Where’s your father?’ he asked again.
    ‘He’s dead.’
    The boy swallowed. His eyes went wide, as if a door had just been slammed shut in his face.
    ‘What happened to him?’
    ‘My father was a patrolman and pulled over a car,’ Darby said. ‘The