A Pitying of Doves by Steve Burrows Page A

felt about as isolated and alone as she had ever felt in this department.
    â€œSo where’s DCI Twitcher, then?” asked Holland, sipping his tea. “Morning briefings beneath him now, are they?”
    Maik was standing at the front of the room holding a sheet of paper, ready to begin the meeting whenever the DCI arrived. He checked a chunky wristwatch. “The briefing is not due to start for another couple of minutes. Detective Chief Inspector Jejeune, as he is to you, will be here. Anybody hear how his interview with Carrie Pritchard went? Did he get anything interesting?”
    â€œPossibly more than he bargained for,” said Salter archly, “if the rumours about her are true.”
    â€œCarrie Pritchard? The woman who does those bird carvings?” asked Holland, stirring with interest. “Perhaps I should interview her next time. We seem to have this connection, older women and me. The last one I was with kept saying how much more stimulating my company was compared to the crowd she usually hung around with.”
    â€œReally?” said Salter. “What was her name, Jane Goodall?”
    Maik looked like he was already about to put an end to any further discussions about Tony Holland’s cross-generational conquests when the entrance of Jejeune and DCS Shepherd abruptly did it for him. He recognized Shepherd’s presence here as evidence of her agitation; a sign that she couldn’t leave them alone to get on with things. As was the fact that she had gone to the trouble of getting advance copies of the medical examiner’s report.
    â€œThe ME found something interesting, I see,” she said, nodding at the sheet in Maik’s hand. “A puncture wound in Santos’s neck?”
    â€œFrom a large-bore syringe, they think,” said Maik. “The wound was hidden by the collar of his sweater, which is why the officers on the scene missed it.”
    Shepherd made a face that suggested that this did not in any way mean she would be exonerating them for this oversight. “Embolism to the brain,” she said, “a nasty way to go.”
    Both she and Maik waited for some sort of response from Jejeune, who was standing beside them reading the ME’s report for himself. But he apparently had nothing to say. He really could seem maddeningly disconnected from events at times.
    â€œAnything on the fingernail yet?” A tiny fragment of fingernail had been found in the fabric of Phoebe Hunter’s baby-blue top, torn away as her killer shoved her back onto the branch.
    Salter fielded the inquiry. “No matches in our DNA database. But uniforms might have a lead on wild Maggie. They’re off down to Yarmouth to check it out now. As soon as they bring her in, we’ll have her typed and see if it’s hers.”
    Shepherd nodded and turned to Jejeune. “Speaking of DNA testing, I’ve had Procurement bending my ear about frivolous requests. Priority codes are there for a purpose, Domenic, and bird feathers rank somewhat lower than human tissue on that scale. I understand they have farmed the work out to a local lab.”
    â€œBut it could be a long time before we hear anything from an outside lab,” objected Jejeune. “DNA sequencing involves a lot of steps. There’s extraction, purification, staining, separation, sequencing. They all take time, and in between, an independent lab might put the samples aside to take on other work.”
    Somebody’s been doing their homework, thought Maik. Despite his constantly rising opinion of the inspector, he realized not even Jejeune would be likely to carry this kind of information around in his head. He wondered why he would have found it necessary to look into the process of DNA testing so deeply, when, really, it was only the results that they were interested in. But regardless of the reason, it was exactly the wrong time to be delivering a lecture like this to Shepherd, and it was