Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“I’m not,” said Raf. “What about the girl?”

“That’s all you want on this one?”

“It’s enough.”

It was too. Tourists butchered by tourist . The dead man was a foreigner. If necessary, he could be made into a tourist. That gave him something to give the newsfeeds. And the earlier deaths could also be put down to this man. Raf was still writing headlines in his head when Kamila walked over to another trolley and pulled back the sheet, exposing the face and shoulders of a blonde teenager.

She treated this corpse with more respect. Maybe because the victim was female or this was a victim, not a killer. Perhaps just because the body was more obviously human. A jigsaw of a human, true enough, with some pieces missing, but still more obviously like her, even when dead.

The dead girl looked unnaturally thin beneath the cloth, and then Raf realized why. Both her large and small intestines were already in a surgical chill bucket beneath the trolley. The bucket tagged and numbered. The more Raf looked at the corpse the more it reminded Raf of himself. He could swear there’d been one time he was across the other side of an operating theatre looking at his body as it lay on a table, figures in white coats standing around it.

“She’s American,” said Raf. “Nineteen, a politics major, doing well at university. Originally from Kansas City. Her father works for Hallmark . . .” Raf caught the pathologist’s look and held it. “I was talking to the poor bastard half an hour ago.”

And saying nothing of any consequence, obviously enough, the meeting brief and painful. A jowly middle-aged man, still jet-lagged and pale with shock, accompanied by a vodka-sodden woman whose anger was barely in check. First they learn their kid is missing, then—once they arrive where she’s meant to be—no one in authority will even take their calls. And then twenty-four hours later, just as they’re ready to flip, Iskandryia’s chief muckety-muck turns up at their hotel, accompanied by three armed guards.

In the end, Raf had apologized to the Haugers and left, trailing his guards behind him. And the parting glare from the dead girl’s mother made it obvious she held him personally responsible for every injury inflicted on her child.

Only manners and being in a foreign city made Mrs. Hauger swallow her words. On his way out of the hotel, Raf had met Senator Liz coming in. From the look on her face she also held Raf accountable.

All he’d learnt from his uncomfortable encounter with the Haugers was that their daughter Dawn didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs and wasn’t interested in boys . . .

Pulling the modesty cloth back to her hips, Raf looked down at what was left of their daughter. She’d been beautiful in an ordinary sort of way and she was someone’s child. And those someones were trying to hold their life together in a Hyatt hotel room, in a city so alien it might as well have been on another planet.

He tried to see Dawn as her parents would remember her, if they got lucky. Not as this emptiness with its faint tinge of decay, but as she’d been: blonde, pretty, with high cheeks and eyes of speedwell blue.

“Talk me through the injuries,” said Raf, folding the modesty cloth into a strip and positioning it carefully. His attempt not to offend Kamila more than circumstances required. “How much preliminary work have you done?”

“None,” the pathologist said flatly, “apart from X-rays. Those were your orders, apparently . . . Hold everything until you were here in person.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry . . .”

Not the response Kamila had been expecting but then, in part, that was Raf’s intention. The fox had a tag from Machiavelli covering emotional sleight of hand, but unfortunately the fox was missing, assumed dead.

“Well,” said Kamila, more embarrassed than mollified, “you’re here now.”

“True enough,” Raf said and wondered why he shivered. Then he remembered that he’d thought a lot about such places when he was a child, around the time he got his second kidney replacement.

Speed had been essential according to his doctor. And it had been this time constraint that made the clinic go through an organ broker. Searching for a matching kidney from someone dying or freshly dead. Of course, going this route was cheaper than growing a new one, but they’d assured his mother that wasn’t an issue.

Raf had given up trying to remember which bits of him were retreads. Although, occasionally, he’d catch a slight seam of scar where he didn’t expect to see one. Across his ribs or down one arm, and think, what’s that?

Shadow memories.

“You all right?”

Raf glanced up to find Kamila staring at him, eyes anxious.

“I’m Iskandryia’s new can carrier,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t,” said Kamila. “I’m not that stupid.” Reaching into her pocket, she produced a floating camera, which she tossed into the air, waiting while it ran self-diagnostics.

“Friday, 22nd October, 2:38P .M.,” she announced once a diode lit green. “I am Kamila bint-Abdullah, city pathologist, second grade.” Kamila’s tone made clear what she thought about that. “Also present at the autopsy is His Excellency, Ashraf . . .” She cleared her throat. “Delete that . . . is His Excellency, the Governor of El Iskandryia.

“This is case number 49–3957, Jane Doe . . .” Kamila’s smile was almost apologetic and Raf realized she’d need a formal identification before the corpse earned itself a name. “The body is that of an apparently healthy, well-nourished female, Caucasian, late teens/early twenties. The body is sixty-four inches long and in total, but minus lungs and heart, weighs . . .”

Taking a readout from the autopsy table and the bucket that held the girl’s intestines, Kamila added the two figures together in her head. “. . . 115 pounds. Blonde hair, blue eyes . . . The skin is of normal texture. There are no scars, moles, subdermal chips or tattoos.

“Preliminary X-rays and scans reveal no bone fragments, fractures, bullet tracks, knife wounds, needles or objects embedded beyond point of entry. No foreign objects in throat, anus or vagina.”

Kamila lifted Dawn Hauger’s right hand and examined each finger. “Nails painted, neatly filed and unbroken, no indication of embedded foreign material. No defensive cuts to palm, dorsal side of arm, no damage to webbing between fingers . . .

“Which should suggest suicide,” Kamila tossed the comment over her shoulder. “At least it should according to the textbooks.” Her voice was darkly ironic, animosity briefly forgotten. She was good at the job, Raf realized. Her manner professional and assured.

“Initials H.Q. inscribed on inside of left wrist,” Kamila announced, finishing up the other hand.

A quick sweep with a UV rod produced no significant areas of flare, though Kamila still took swabs from one corner of the dead girl’s mouth, her nasal area and just outside the vagina. She also swept the pubic area for foreign body hair, despite the fact this had already been done once at the crime scene.

Using a plastic ruler, Kamila began to measure the wounds, her voice emotionless. The longest cut ran from throat to pubis, the second longest traversed the ribs, just below heavy breasts. Together the gashes formed a cross potent. And it was a cross potent rather than a mere cross, because once again wounds showed short lines cut at either end of each slash. The top one conveniently opened the girl’s throat and the bottom one bisected her pudenda, the other two scored down both sides of her ribs. Though the terms Kamila used to describe their position were cephalic,caudal and lateral .

“This is too neat,” Kamila said. “Much too neat . . .” The pause that followed was to let Raf ask a question.