Jim Butcher: Death Masks

When we came in, he held up a hand toward us, and finished his scribbling with a flourish, before hopping up with a broad smile. "Karrin!" he said. "Wow, you're looking nice tonight. What's the occasion?"

"Municipal brass are tromping around," Murphy said. "So we're all supposed to wear our Sunday clothes and smile a lot."

"Bastards," the little guy said cheerfully. He shot me a glance. "You aren't supposed to be spending money on psychic consultants, either, I bet. You must be Harry Dresden."

"That's what it says on my underwear," I agreed.

He grinned. "Great coat, love it."

"Harry," Murphy said, "this is Waldo Butters. Assistant medical examiner."

Butters shook my hand, then turned to walk to the autopsy table. He snapped on some rubber gloves and a surgical mask. "Pleased to meet you, Mister Dresden," he said over his shoulder. "Seems like every time you're working with SI my job gets really interesting."

Murphy chucked me on the arm with one fist, and followed Butters. I followed her.

"Masks on that tray to your left. Stay a couple of feet back from the table, and for God's sake, don't throw up on my floor." We put on masks and Butters threw back the sheet.

I'd seen corpses before. Hell's bells, I'd created some. I'd seen what was left of people who had been burned alive, savaged to death by animals, and who had died when their hearts exploded out of their chests, courtesy of black magic.

But I hadn't ever seen anything quite like this. I shoved the thought to the back of my head, and tried to focus purely upon taking in details. It wouldn't do to think too much, looking at this. Thinking too much would lead me to messing up Butters's floor.

The victim had been a man, maybe a little over six feet tall, thin build. His chest looked like twenty pounds of raw hamburger. Fine grid marks stretched vertically from his collarbones to his belly, and horizontally across the width of his body. The cuts were spaced maybe a sixteenth of an inch apart, and the grid pattern slashed into the flesh looked nearly flawless. The cuts were deep ones, and I had the unsettling impression that I could have brushed my hand across the surface of that ruined body and sent chunks of flesh pattering to the floor. The Y-incision of the autopsy had been closed, at least. Its lines marred the precision of the grid of incisions.

The next thing I noticed were the corpse's arms. Or rather, the missing bits of them. His left arm had been hacked off two or three inches above the wrist. The flesh around it gaped, and a shard of black-crusted bone poked out from it. His right arm had been severed just beneath the elbow, with similar hideous results.

My belly twitched and I felt myself taking one of those prevomit breaths. I closed my eyes for a second and forced the impending reaction down. Don't think, Harry. Look. See what there is to see. That isn't a man anymore. It's just a shell. Throwing up won't bring him back.

I opened my eyes again, tore my gaze from his mutilated chest and hands, and forced myself to study the corpse's features.

I couldn't.

His head had been hacked off, too.

I stared at the ragged stump of his neck. The head just wasn't there. Even though that's where heads go. Ditto his hands. A man should have a head. Should have hands. They shouldn't simply be gone.

The impression it left on me was unsettling-simply and profoundly wrong. Inside me, some little voice started screaming and running away. I stared down at the corpse, my stomach threatening insurrection again. I stared at his missing head, but aloud all I said was, "Gee. Wonder what killed him."

"What didn't kill him," Butters said. "I can tell you this much. It wasn't blood loss."

I frowned at Butters. "What do you mean?"

Butters lifted one of the corpse's arms and pointed down at dark mottling in the dead grey flesh, just where the corpse's back met the table. "See that?" he asked. "Lividity. If this guy had bled out, from his wrists or his neck either one, I don't think there'd be enough blood left in the body to show this much. His heart would have just kept on pumping it out of his body until he died."

I grunted. "If not one of the wounds, then what was it?"

"My guess?" Butters said. "Plague."

I blinked and looked at him.

"Plague," he said again. "Or more accurately plagues. His insides looked like models for a textbook on infection. Not all the tests have come back yet, but so far every one I've done has returned positive. Everything from bubonic plague to strep throat. And there are symptoms I've found in him that don't match any disease I've ever heard of."

"You're telling me he died of disease?" I asked.

"Diseases. Plural. And get this. I think one of them was smallpox."

"I thought smallpox was extinct," Murphy said.

"Pretty much. They have some in vaults, probably some in some bioweapon research facilities, but that's it."

I stared at Butters for a second. "And we're standing here next to his plague-ridden body why?"

"Relax," Butters said. "The really nasty stuff wasn't airborne. I disinfected the corpse pretty well. Wear your mask and don't touch it, you should be fine."

"What about the smallpox?" I said.

Butters's voice turned wry. "You're vaccinated."

"This is dangerous, though, isn't it? Having the body out like this?"

"Yeah," Butters said, his voice frank. "But County is full, and the only thing that's going to happen if I report an occurrence of free-range smallpox is another evaluation."

Murphy shot me a warning look and stepped a very little bit between me and Butters. "You got a time of death?"

Butters shrugged. "Maybe forty-eight hours ago, tops. All of those diseases seemed to sprout up at exactly the same time. I make cause of death as either shock or a massive failure and necrosis of several major organs, plus tissue damage from an outrageously high fever. It's anyone's guess as to which one gets the blue ribbon. Lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, spleen-"

"We get the point," Murphy said.

"Let me finish. It's like every disease the guy had ever had contact with all got together and planned when to hit him. It just isn't possible. He probably had more germs in him than blood cells."

I frowned. "And then someone Ginsued him after he died?"

Butters nodded. "Partly. Though the cuts on his chest weren't postmortem. They had filled with blood. Tortured before he died, maybe."

"Ugh," I said. "Why?"

Murphy regarded the corpse without any emotion showing in her cool blue eyes. "Whoever cut him up must have taken the arms and hands to make it hard to identify him after he died. That's the only logical reason I can think of."

"Same here," said Butters.

I frowned down at the table. "Why prevent identification of the corpse if it had died of disease?" Butters began to lower the arm slowly and I saw something as he did. "Wait, hold it."

He looked up at me. I pressed closer to the table and had Butters lift the arm again. I had almost missed it against the rotted tone of the dead man's flesh-a tattoo, maybe an inch square, located on the inside of the corpse's biceps. It wasn't fancy. Faded green ink in the shape of a symbolic open eye, not too different from the CBS network logo.

"See there?" I asked. Murphy and Butters peered at the tattoo.

"Do you recognize it, Harry?" Murphy asked.

I shook my head. "Almost looks old Egyptian, but with fewer lines. Hey, Butters, do you have a piece of paper?"

"Better," Butters said. He got an old instant camera off the bottom tray of one of the medical carts, and snapped several shots of the tattoo. He passed one of them over to Murphy, who waved it around a little while the image developed. I got another.

"Okay," I said, thinking out loud. "Guy dies of a zillion diseases he somehow contracted all at once. How long do you think it took?"