Incubi

Chapter 10

“It’s not metal,” Jan Beck said the instant Jack Cordesman walked into her lab, which occupied half the basement of the county’s HQ. Myriad junk filled the workup section, shelves of glassware and chemicals, rows of fuming cabinets, comparison microscopes, and squat machines. Jan Beck looked tiny amid all this, for she was tiny herself. She looked desperately thin in her lab coat. Her hair was flat ashen brown and frizzy, and she wore huge spectacles. In her hand she tapped a fat camel’s-hair brush.

“You want a Coke, sir?”

“Sure. And what’s not metal?”

She opened a refrigerator and got two sodas. Jack had time to glimpse a clear-plastic evidence bag containing one human foot. Then the fridge door sucked shut. “I worked up the n/a/a-scrape,” she said, handing him a bottle. “The weapon that opened Shanna Barrington is not composed of metal.”

“An airplane knife or something? One of these polycarb jobs?”

Jan Beck shook her frizzled head. “Plastic composites would be easier to ID. It’s some kind of stone, I think. Our spec-indexes don’t provide reference for stone-cutting objects, so it’ll take me a while to ID.”

He guessed she was about forty. She’d worked for the state police for years, and had come to the county for more money and because “county gets better homicides,” she’d told him once. Jack often wondered exactly what constituted a “better” homicide.

“Stone,” he said after her.

“Something brittle. It shredded well against the ribs and sternum. Some of the particulate residue I could actually gander fucking bare-eyed.”

Jack loved this woman’s sense of terminology.

“—but it’s also something that takes a mean edge. Flint, maybe, or obsidian. Some of the initial incisions could’ve passed for scalpelwork.”

A stone knife, Jack contemplated. He’d have to inform Faye Rowland as soon as possible. The instruments of the ritual could lead to the ritual itself.

“And your killer’s blood is B neg,” Jan Beck said.

This was a bombshell. “How the hell…? Her fingernails were clean. And you said this semen didn’t type.”

“They were, and it didn’t. Salined random bloodstains and malachited them. Shanna Barrington’s type was A pos. One of the malachite samples gave a different hue, so I factored it. All that shit the killer left on the walls, the triangle and the symbols, was done in the victim’s blood. All except one.”

“Aorista?” Jack speculated.

“Good guess, sir. That word was written in B neg. What’s it mean, by the way?”

“A process that doesn’t end,” Jack muttered

“That’s a kick from your end.” Jan Beck’s cynical grin looked vulpine. It was her way of saying, You’ve got a real winner here, sir. A killer whose buzzword indicated an unending process was the same as saying I will not stop. But Jack was thinking about the blood. The fucker cut himself, he thought. Why?

“We’ve got a hair problem too,” Jan Beck went on. She led Jack to a labtop piled high with red hardcover field texts. Morphological Differentiation of Human Hair, one title read. And another: Microchemical Cortex Analysis. Several large CRP slide frames hung from a glowing lightboard. Jack saw that they contained long kinky hairs.

“Can I ask you a personal question, sir?”

“Sure,” Jack said.

“Have you ever seen fit to measure your pubic hair?”

Jack stared. “Well…no, I haven’t, Jan.”

“I didn’t think so. We in the trade call it ‘crotch-hair morpholistics.’ Can you guess the average length of a dick hair?”

“To tell you the truth, Jan, the average length of dick hairs is not something I’ve given a whole lot of thought.”

“It’s four inches. Some get as long as seven before they fall out. Most people probably don’t think they get that long.”

“I’m astounded by this new knowledge.”

She pointed her fingerprint brush to the slide frames. “Those are eleven inches long.”

Jack’s face pinched up. “Those are pubic hairs?”

“Yes, sir. It’s easy to tell auxiliary body hairs from one another. Standard microscopic inspection of the sheath wall and medulla verifies that these are pubes. Only problem is they’re about twice as long as average.”

Jack’s gaze held fast to the kinky hairs in the frame.

“Here’s another thing most people don’t realize.” Jan Beck seemed to gauge his dismay. “Female pubic hair is thicker than male. But your killer’s pubes are the thickest I’ve ever see.”

“You’re not going to tell me the killer’s a woman, are you?”

Jan Beck laughed beneath her breath. A silly question deserved a silly answer. “Not unless you know any women who can blow eighty to a hundred milliliters of sperm. You know any women like that, sir? You know any women with penises bigger than rolling pins?”

Jack nodded his stupidity. “Go on.”

“This guy’s core diameter is four hundred microns plus. Average is one fifty. It’s just really odd, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. He wanted a drink. Bad. “Maybe it’s a growth-hormone disorder or something.”

“Good point. But there’s one more thing. The field boys brought in several other hairs located high on the spread outline. They were straight and black. And they weren’t ancillaries.”

“Head hairs, in other words.”

“Correct. Thing is, head hairs and ancillaries from the same person are always microscopically matching through fusiformal comparison and thermal analysis of the scale count.”

“You’re losing me, Jan. I’m a stupid flatfoot, remember?”

“The pubes and the head hairs did not come from the same person. The black hairs had a different pigment lineament, and they were cut. They lacked root-cell sheaths. And let me ask you this. Do you know what dihydrotestosterone is?”

Jack thumbed his brow. “No, Jan, I don’t.”

“It’s a hormone secretion from the human scalp. This substance is microscopically ever present on the shaft cuticle of any human head hair. But these black hairs didn’t have it.”

Jack was getting tired of this. “Let me put it this way, Jan. What the fuck are you fucking talking about, for fuck’s sake?”

“The killer wore a wig.”

Jack sat down on a lab stool, though he dearly wished it were a barstool. He needed a drink. Even more, and quite suddenly, he needed normality. The memory hung before him in color: Shanna Barrington butchered on the blood-drenched bed, her flesh opened up like a book. Jack wanted his world back — no, he wanted a different world, a world where people loved, not butchered, each other. Was that too much to ask for? Suddenly he felt so sick he wanted to bend over and vomit right there on Jan Beck’s shiny linoleum lab floor. It would all come up, not just his breakfast, but everything, his broken dreams and short-changed love, his spirit and his psyche. His heart.

“Are you okay, sir?”

Then he saw Longford, which was as bad. There’d been so many videotapes…Jack would never stop seeing the faces. It was evil. That was the only explanation. You could blame environment and upbringing and personality disorders only for so long. There came a point when it simply didn’t wash. Grown men, with wives and children of their own, hugely successful businesses. Having sex with abducted kids, he thought. What is wrong with the world?

“Captain Cordesman, are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Eventually the moment, with all its blackness, lifted.

Jan Beck was looking at him funny.

“What about the impressions?” he asked.

“You sure you’re okay, sir?”

Jack felt his temper shudder, a bad spirit devouring his heart, his mind. Get your act together, he pleaded to himself. “I was just having a bad moment, Jan. But I’m okay.”

The pause checked. Now Jan Beck looked uncharacteristically solemn. “There isn’t much more. We can talk about it later if you want.” A longer pause. “I kind of heard through the grapevine—”

“You heard that my girlfriend dumped me and I’m a drunk and I’ve been cracking up ever since the Longford case, right?”

“Well…”

She was too polite to answer. Jack knew he was slipping, but why? Why now? Even after Longford he hadn’t slipped this bad. He felt impotent. He remembered the graffitto he’d read last night: “Loss of love equals loss of self.” Was Veronica the catalyst?

“Tell me about the impressions, Jan.”

“The techs didn’t bother pouring any. That whole ring of high rises sits real close to the bay, and there’s a bad water table. The ground back there gets real mucky when it rains. We were able to establish a walking pattern, though. Forceful gait, long strides. The footspreads indicate someone who’s tall, and he’s probably heavy too, a big guy. What was left of the impressions was pretty deep. And we know he didn’t rappel down the back. I found his prints on the terrace rails below Barrington’s flat.”

“So he climbed down with his bare hands?” Jack asked.

Jan Beck nodded. “Terrace to terrace, to the ground. Maybe the guy’s ex-military or something.”

What have I got? Jack asked himself. I’ve got a sex killer with eleven-inch pubic hairs and a dick bigger than a camshaft. Does he use a regular knife? No, he uses a stone knife. Does he kill girls to get his rocks off? No, he kills them as part of a ritual. He leaves his prints all over the place because he knows they’re not on file. He even cuts himself. He leaves enough semen in the victim to indicate repeated intercourse but we know he wasn’t in the apartment more than a few minutes. Last but not least, he wears a wig and he has the physical ability to climb down five floors with his bare hands. Do I have a typical killer? No, lucky me. I have an absolutely extraordinary one.

“Last night you said you found some herb extract in her blood.”

“I ran the chain through the NADDIS landline-link. Whatever it is it’s not in their index,” Jan Beck said.

NADDIS was an interservice narcotic catalog that the DEA provided for outside agencies. The molecular constituents of an unknown substance were transcribed digitally and coded into their data-storage system via telephone. NADDIS kept thousands of mole chains on file. “If it’s not in their file, how long will it take you to ID?” Jack asked.

“Who knows?” Jan Beck said. She set her Coke down on the lid of an Abbott Industries Vision Series blood analyzer. “I was sure it wasn’t CDS, and it’s not pharmaceutical either. Now I won’t have to waste time finding out what it isn’t. I’ll let you know.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it, sir.”

Jack stood up, looked absently about the lab. He could not identify the impulse which came to him then. For years the job had stripped him of his feelings. Now those feelings were coming back like a flock of mad birds. Perhaps he needed to immerse himself now—drench himself in feelings. Perhaps he needed more.

“Where’s the body?” he asked.

“Still in storage. Unfortunately there’s no next of kin to release it to. It’s kind of sad.”

Kind of sad, his mind repeated. “What’ll happen to it?”

“The state takes them after sixty days.”

Jack nodded, attempted to distract himself. “I need to see it.”

Jan Beck’s eyes thinned behind huge glasses. “The corpse?”

“That’s right. The corpse.”

“There’s nothing to see, sir. She’s sewn up and bagged. She’s—”

Jack held up a hand to silence her objection. She thinks I’m a nut, he realized. “Just show me the corpse, Jan.”

Her expression constricted. She took him down the hall. TSD had its own autopsy facilities: the corpora delicti of the more excruciating homicides were brought here rather than the county hospital, to speed up evidence procurement. Jack had been here many times. They called it the Body Shop.

The shiny black door was labeled merely “Storage.” There were no slide-out drawers or such, just metal tables which hosted bulky black plastic bags. A stringent odor filled the cool room, a combination of formalin and iodine wash.

One of the bags was tiny: a baby, Jack realized. Another table contained several smaller bags. Pieces. Jan Beck approached the center table. There was no expected zipper but big metal snaps instead. The bag shimmered in fluorescent light.

Jack needed to see; that’s why he was here. He needed a sense of reaction to smash him in the face. Jan Beck unsnapped the bag, then opened the inner clear-plastic shroud.

Then she stepped away.

Silence seemed to rage in Jack’s ears — the silence of chasms, or of the highest places of the earth. He wasn’t looking nearly as much as he was being shown. But whose show was it? God’s? Fate’s? This is what the world does to people, whispered a voice that was not his own. This is what we do when we’re bored.

Shanna Barrington’s head had been shaved; metal staples — not stitches — reseated the skullcap. She looked like a bad mannequin. The notorious Y-incision — pathology’s universal signature — ran from clavicles to pubis, the black seam held together by big black stitches. Her organs had been weighed, histologized, and replaced. Jack thought of a grocery store turkey restuffed with its own innards.

Yes, this was what the world did to you sometimes — for kicks. The world didn’t care. Stone-still, he stared at the corpse. What a cosmic rip-off. The corpse’s white skin almost glowed. If this was what the world gave you for being innocent, then the world ate shit. Suddenly Shanna Barrington became Jack’s sibling, a sister of conception. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know her. He knew her by what she represented. Here was her reward for daring to dream: cold storage in a Parke-Davis cadaver bag. All she ever wanted was to be loved, and this was what the world had given her instead. Good and evil weren’t opposites — they were the same, they were twins. Horror was as much a monarch as God.

You are my sister now, he thought in a fever of blood to his head. He didn’t know what he wanted to do more: laugh or cry.

He grinned through gritted teeth. What he stood in now — a human meat locker — formed the answer to all his life’s questions at once. The answer was this: There are no answers to anything. Jan Beck appraised him from aside, the funkiest of looks, as Jack continued to appraise the corpse. The blue nipples had once been pink with desire. The blue lips had once kissed in a quest for love. Somewhere beneath the black-stitched seam was a heart that had once beat with dreams.

I will avenge you, Shanna Barrington. When I catch the motherfucker who did this to you, I’m gonna bury him with my bare hands and piss on his grave. I’m gonna feed him piece by piece back to the evil shit-stinking world that made him.

He stepped closer, through the vertigo of a thousand cruel truths. With the tip of his finger he touched the cadaver’s hand. Oh yeah, he promised her. I’m gonna make him pay.