Robert Bennett - The Company Man

“What?” Gibson said.

“That’s not very respectful,” Garvey said.

“It would be even more disrespectful to not examine them. Are we not here to investigate, Detective? We need more workers. More room. An actual doctor’s surgery. But we make do with what we can. Right?”

Garvey sighed and looked at the shrunken, gaunt remains of the prostitute, flecks of makeup still clinging to her drying face. “Right.”

“I don’t see why I even look,” Gibson said, shaking his head. “It’s the same damn thing.”

“Which is?”

“Stabbings. Stabbed all to shit. But from the look of it, it was all done with the same weapons. These ones, in fact.” Gibson picked up a small cloth sack and dumped it out on the table. Inside were two blades with no handles, each about four inches long. One side of each was dull and the other sharp. The sharp sides had several small pieces missing and the tip of one was gone.

“Found these in Mrs. Sanna,” Gibson told him. “Occupation barmaid, it seems. I suppose whoever killed all these folks got to her last. Must have snapped off in her. They were way the hell up in her back. The tip of that little bit was in Mr. Evie. In his neck.”

Garvey picked the pieces up, handled them. Then he placed them back on the table and picked up his report and flipped through it.

“What?” said Gibson.

“There was a pair of scissor handles in the trolley,” said Garvey.

“Oh. Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. I’m guessing they were there for… Hell. Who knows. I think I saw a ball of yarn in there, maybe someone was knitting on the train. I don’t think the scissors were brought there by the murderer, though.”

Gibson took what was left of Mrs. Sanna and wheeled her back into her dark little cupboard. “Scissors are usually not the weapon of choice for the prepared assassin, no.”

“Ignoring all the things I can’t explain, this feels like a crime of passion,” said Garvey thoughtfully. “Whoever went in there was irrational as hell. Just grabbing things and going nuts. Busted in with a garbage can and started killing people with a weapon found on the scene.”

“But how could they have done that on a moving trolley?” said Gibson.

Garvey turned the blades over on his palms. He felt the notches in them and wondered whose bones the splinters had found a home in. He thought about who had held them before and what they had done and tried not to imagine the possibility that someone had assaulted and murdered an entire carful of people single-handedly, and in only a handful of minutes to boot.

“I don’t know,” said Garvey. He put the scissors down. Then he wiped his hands and thanked Gibson and left.

Christmas in Evesden came and went, though it was more somber than ever before. The Christmas Eve Parade was paltry in comparison to the previous ones, and only a handful of people turned out to watch it trundle along Michigan Avenue. The St. Nick they’d hired to ride the sleigh waved halfheartedly at the few children present, who were skinny things with sunken eyes. They solemnly watched him go by and did not wave back. When the parade finally came to a halt at St. Michael’s it was said St. Nick climbed down from his ride, drank deeply from a bottle he’d hidden in his red coat, cursed the parade and everyone in it, and stormed off.

Neither Samantha nor Garvey celebrated in any significant way. Samantha tried to attend Midnight Mass at the church down her street, which she felt slightly guilty about since she was in no way Catholic, but it turned into a moot point when she spent too much time at the office on Christmas eve and couldn’t bear to enter the church late. Garvey made one of his rare jaunts to see his family out in the country, and he spent his brief holiday awkwardly dancing around his ex-wife, who made it clear that his presence wasn’t necessary, and his two young girls, both of whom he barely saw these days. He felt very much like an intruder in their home, as he had in the waning days of his marriage when his work had begun eating up every hour; their holiday was their own, separate from him, and he was only an observer. On Christmas day he sat on his ex-wife’s porch and watched the sun set on the chilly countryside, and he thought about the bodies waiting for him back in the city, and what would happen to his career if they went unfiled, and also, very briefly, about the pretty girl Hayes had brought to the trolley station.

Hayes did not realize it was Christmas until after the day had passed, though he did vaguely wonder what all the candles were about.

Then just before New Year’s McNaughton and Evesden received yet another blow, just when they needed it least. It did not fall in the city, however, but far up the coastline, just off the shores of the Alaskan town of Ketchikan. It came on a dark but clear night, with the stars very visible early on in the evening, but soon a few residents of the town noticed something different about one of them.

One of the stars was red, it seemed. And it also seemed to be growing.

As word spread, people were drawn out of their homes to gather and watch as the red star grew until it flared bright and arced across the night sky, never losing its deep red hue. It sailed down to the sea, and though some ooh ed and aah ed, many were disturbed by its sanguine color. It seemed a baleful sight to them, but they could not say why. One local, a photography enthusiast, managed to capture a magnificent shot of the star’s descent, and when the photo was developed it seemed to show that the star was splitting the sky in half.

Some reckoned that the falling star had landed not far off the coast, and a handful of fishermen decided to take their boats to investigate. It was not hard to find the place that it’d hit, as a thick column of steam was still rising less than a half-hour afterward, but to their surprise the fishermen found that the star had not sunk, as had been expected, but was floating. It was obviously still incredibly hot, as water boiled and steamed around it, and they had to wait some time before they could approach it.

When they did it soon became apparent that it was not a star at all, but some sort of vessel. It resembled a fat, silver-white tack, and though it had melted in several places they could still see where three engines were attached to its back. It also seemed somewhat incomplete, as though it had disassembled itself as it fell. As the fishermen marveled at this strange thing floating in the waves, another ship began to approach on the horizon, this one no fishing craft but a much larger cruiser of some sort. It began signaling to them to leave the site and return home, but before they paid any attention to it the thing in the water turned over to reveal an insignia on the side-a thick, imperial M.

By the time the cruiser had pulled up to confiscate the device, several fishermen had already returned to the city to report what they’d seen.

When the photograph hit the papers and word got out that this craft was man-made, and somehow made by McNaughton, the country was swept up in surprise and outrage. What was it, they demanded. Where had it come from, and why had it fallen? Was it an accident? Was there someone in it? And why had the government not been notified? McNaughton’s delay in addressing the press cost it dearly, and when it finally did answer it did not satisfy much. It was, the company said, a new airship of a sort, but this one was meant to sail higher than any other, and then boost itself up and pierce the outer limits of the atmosphere. McNaughton had launched the unmanned prototype from a station in the north of Alaska, and had not intended for it to fall so far south, or indeed to fall at all. According to their research, said the engineers, sounding more nervous with every minute, if it went high enough then it would simply float, and never come back down. Obviously, they had miscalculated somewhere.