Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

She found Dr. Nasiri in one of the autopsy rooms, working over a skinhead with an impressive sector of his skull cracked apart like a clay flowerpot.

“Hello there,” Nasiri shouted over the whine of her Stryker saw. “Put on a mask and booties, will you?”

Pete did as she asked. “I’d hoped to get another look at Mr. Carver,” she shouted back. “And possibly some closeups of his wound patterns.”

“Sure. I’ll get you copies when I’m done here,” Nasiri said. She put the saw aside and lifted out a section of the skinhead’s ribcage, the way Pete would lift the top off a plastic tub. The Y-incision and the thin line of the saw blade bisected his blurry hand-done tattoos and a ragged white scar over his left nipple.

Pete had gotten past the reflexive throat clench sometime during her probationary year at the Met, but she didn’t return Nasiri’s smile as she set the ribcage aside in a metal tray and worked to remove and measure the internal organs, slapping them onto the scale with the acumen of a butcher.

“Know what did this naughty boy in?” she said in a bright tone, as if she were a professor asking question.

“Zombies?” Pete offered, pointing to the hole in the man’s head.

“Stupidity,” said Nasiri. “Tried to rob an off-license and the owner slammed him in the skull with a cricket bat when the guy called him, quote, a curry-stink Paki bastard and then foolishly turned his back. Apparently his favorite vodka was on the high shelf.”

Pete moved a step away from the steel table. “Tick a box for Darwin, then.” Her head was beginning to throb as Lawrence’s hospitality wore off, and the smells and sights of the mortuary weren’t mixing in a way she’d call pleasant, or even tolerable.

“Stupidity is the leading cause of death in the United Kingdom,” Nasiri said. Her hands kept moving, weighing the man’s heart even as she stared at Pete across his chest cavity. “But not for your Gerard Carver, is it?”

“You’re asking me?” Pete said. Her mask pressed against her mouth, a sterile papery kiss, and the air conditioning in the mortuary had made her mouth dry.

“Aren’t you the one with the spooky psychic powers?” Nasiri said, her cheeks twitching. “Aren’t they why Heath has you coming in here on the sly, telling me to slip you autopsy files, and getting evidence from you in turn he couldn’t possibly use in a court trial? He believes in your uncanny visions from the other side?”

Pete pulled her mask off, the itchy paper all at once suffocating. Nasiri was taking the piss, and she knew better than to argue with a skeptic. She’d been one for too long to think there was any merit to it.

“I’m not psychic,” she said, crumpling up the mask and tossing it at the bin. She missed.

“At least you can admit it to me,” Nasiri said. “I mean, bored housewives saying bodies will be found near water, I at least understand. They’re attention seekers. You I don’t get at all.”

“I’m not telling Ollie I can wave my hands and make a killer appear,” Pete said. “I’m not a fake and Ollie’s not an idiot. Not like this is the Yorkshire police and Peter Sutcliffe. It’s one man, and I really can help Ollie close his case. Wondering whether you think I’m full of shit or not isn’t going to keep me up nights.”

“You used to be a DI,” Nasiri said. She packed the organs back into the skinhead’s chest, plopped the ribcage back into place, and covered the table with a paper sheet. “You used to be a good DI. And yet you chucked it to chase spirits. If you’re not psychic, you must believe there’s something else out there. Or else you’re a complete nutter and hide it very well.”

Pete removed her paper booties and threw them into the bin at the same time Nasiri pitched her gloves and paper scrubs. “Are we going to have the conversation about how you’re a woman of science and you’ll expose me? Because I tell you, I don’t fancy it.”

Nasiri stuck her forearms under the pedal sink and coated them in soap, scrubbing vigorously. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, Pete. I’ve never seen anything like what was done to Gerard Carver. I’m willing to buy you might have insight, if not the power to pull a unicorn out of your arse. You don’t drag Ollie into the mumbo-jumbo and I won’t grill you too much about what exactly it is you’re into when you’re not being a good fairy for the Met.”

Pete wasn’t used to having someone else look out for Ollie, and she wasn’t sure she liked it very much. “I’m just trying to make sure Ollie knows what he’s dealing with,” she said.

“Then we won’t have a problem,” Nasiri said. “I’m not a nonbeliever, Pete, all cold dead flesh and electron microscopes, but I’m not big on blind faith.”

“Finally something we agree on,” Pete muttered. Nasiri went a short way down the corridor to a set of offices, leading Pete to the one with her nameplate.

“It’s too bad we didn’t work together. I think that would’ve gone well.” She unlocked her office from her keyring. “I’ll just get you those photos.”

Nasiri disappeared into her office, and Pete leaned against the wall, wondering if anyone would noticed if she smoked. As if her tête-à-tête with McCorkle hadn’t driven the stake in far enough, Nasiri had made sure. This wasn’t her world any more. The Met thought she’d gone over to the side of kooks and crime scene ghouls, and Pete couldn’t even explain herself without sounding like exactly that. What would she even tell the rational and the plodding of London’s finest? Magic is real and your nightmares have teeth ? That was a fast trip to a psychiatric ward if she ever heard one.

Pete stuck a Parliament in her mouth and tongued the filter, but didn’t light it. Overhead, the fluorescent tubes buzzed, an insect heartbeat, flickering off and on, creating a shadow pulse. What the Hell was taking Nasiri so long?

Far away a door banged open and shut, and gurney wheels clattered on tiles. Pete felt the small part of her mind that sensed the tides, the flow and flux of the Black, unfold and send trembling fingers forth.

The hall lights snapped on, off, on, and Pete watched through the open door of the autopsy bay as they gave the skinhead’s lumpy form under his sheet dimension and life.

Snap again, and when Pete’s eyes adjusted to the light a shadow stood in the door of the autopsy room, no shape really, just a thin slice of darkness the size of a man, whose presence sent needles of ice through Pete’s mind. The thing peered at her from a tear in the Black, a bleeding intersection of the daylight world and what lay beneath.

She didn’t stay frozen, like she had when the owl fixed its gaze on her. Pete snatched her pepper spray from her bag and aimed a concussive stream of it at the figure. “Come on then!” she shouted.

The hall lights snapped. The pepper spray spattered across the tile floor. The doorway was empty.

Nothing waited for her, just on the other side of the Black. The lights stabilized, and the mortuary hallway remained bland and sterile as ever. Pete felt her heart drumming at a thousand RPMs, and her blood was rushing so loudly in her ears it came in like a radio station. She didn’t hear Nasiri until the doctor tapped her arm.

“Everything all right?” Nasiri extended a plain brown envelope, inter-office mail for the Wapping police station. “You look a bit startled.”

Pete shoved the pepper spray into her back pocket and took the envelope in one smooth montion. The last thing she needed was Nasiri thinking she saw things. Her opinion, and that of the entire CID, was already low enough. “Just thought I heard someone back there in the autopsy.”

“The bodies don’t generally get up and walk about on their own,” Nasiri said. “Though if they do, you’ll be my first call.”