Edward Lee - Incubi

“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 .