Scott Sigler - Nocturnal - A Novel

Bryan turned and started walking.

Robin and Spoiled Milk

Robin Hudson finished tucking her hair into a hairnet as she stood in the prep area, watching the van back into the loading bay. The back of the van opened. Robin was surprised to see Sammy Berzon and Jimmy Hung get out. They removed a cart loaded with a white body bag.

As crime-scene investigators, Sammy and Jimmy usually didn’t help bring a body back to the morgue — that was normally done by Robin’s co-workers in the ME’s office.

Robin smoothed out her disposable gown and hung a digital camera around her neck. She slid her face-shield rig onto her head, but left the clear plastic flipped up.

The men rolled the cart into the prep area.

“Fancy meeting you two here,” Robin said.

“Hello, pretty lady,” Sammy said. “Do you mind if we help with this one? We got a hundo riding on what did the killing. I say rottweiler or big dog, Jimmy is betting a more exotic animal.”

“Tiger,” Jimmy said. “Definitely a tiger.”

Robin nodded. “Sure, you can assist. Whatever floats your boat.”

“Awesome,” Sammy said. “I’ll load the crime-scene photos into the system as soon as we help prep the body.” He held up a clear plastic bag containing a blanket. “This was covering the vic.” He set the bag on the end of the cart.

Robin leaned down to look. Inside the bag, she saw that the blanket was covered with short, brownish hairs. No wonder Jimmy thought it was a rottweiler.

She picked up the bag. “I’m pretty good at identifying dog breeds from fur. I’ll take a closer look after we finish with the subject. You guys get ready while I handle the x-rays.”

Robin shot x-rays while the corpse was still in the body bag. The digitized images immediately showed major damage: missing arm, jaw dislocated and fractured in at least two places, missing teeth, shattered right orbit. Bright white bits glowed from within the soft, multihued gray representation of his lungs — the boy had aspirated some of the teeth.

She finished the x-rays and rolled the cart into the prep area. Sammy and Jimmy were waiting. They had donned their own protective personal equipment: gowns, face shields and fresh gloves.

“You boys bring me the nicest presents,” she said. “Just what I needed to pep up my afternoon.”

Sammy smiled. “That’s what we do. Great case for your first day as the boss-lady, huh?”

“I’m not the boss-lady , guys. It’s only temporary.”

Jimmy shrugged his little shoulders. “We’ll see. I love Metz, but a heart attack at his age? Hard to come back from.”

“He’ll be back,” Robin said. She wanted the top job, absolutely, but she knew she wasn’t ready for it yet. Just another year or two with Metz, maybe, then she would be.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get this party started.”

They unzipped the body bag. Instantly, she smelled urine. Strong, and somehow unique — the same smell as when Metz brought in Maloney .

“He’s a ripe one,” she said. “Must have had a full bladder when he died.”

Sammy shook his head. “Guess again. The perps pissed on him. Or the rottweiler did.”

“Tiger,” Jimmy said.

When a body died, the muscles in the bowel and bladder relaxed, often resulting in a corpse releasing feces and urine. That was why she hadn’t thought twice about Maloney’s body smelling as it had when Metz brought it in. But this scent was so unique — aside from this corpse and Maloney, she’d never smelled anything quite like it. Was it possible Maloney’s killer had urinated on him as well?

“This could help us,” she said. “If it was the animal’s handler that urinated on him, we might be able to get something out of that.”

Sammy reached into the body bag and pulled out a bloody, dead hand. They ran fingerprints, then weighed and measured the corpse.

“We have a preliminary ID from a driver’s license,” Sammy said. “Oscar Woody, age sixteen. We’ll get confirmation quick, he’s got a record and his prints are in the system.”

“Already?” She found it endlessly sad that kids went bad so early in their lives. Had it always been that way? Probably. It just seemed more drastic now — as she got older, teenagers seemed progressively younger and younger.

Jimmy cut away the victim’s clothes and started placing them in bags.

“We got what we think are saliva samples,” he said. “All over the shoulder area. Probably from the tiger.”

“Rottweiler,” Sammy said. “Robin, thanks for letting us help. If you want to prep your table, we’ll bring him in to you.”

Robin nodded. “I’ll go do that.”

She walked out of the prep area and into the long, rectangular, wood-paneled autopsy room. Five white porcelain exam tables lined the room’s length, the tables’ long sides paralleling the room’s short sides. At the moment, the tables sat empty. Robin had seen many days when all five tables were in simultaneous operation, with even more bodies backed up in the big walk-in refrigerated transit locker.

Most morgues used stainless-steel tables. The Hall of Justice, to which the morgue was attached, had been built in 1958. This examination room — original white porcelain autopsy tables and all — hadn’t changed much in the last fifty-odd years. Metz often told her that other than the ashtrays being removed from the walls, it basically looked the same as it had on his first day of work four decades earlier.

Sammy and Jimmy rolled the metal cart into the room. They slid the body onto the first porcelain table. As seasoned as she was, Robin couldn’t help but wince at the carnage.

When the arm came off, the outer third of his clavicle had been sheared away. The stumpy bone stuck out of the ravaged pectoral. Blood on the clavicle’s jagged end was already a dry brown. She saw scrapes on the broken bone; gouges from teeth, probably. No teeth marks on the face, though — that damage had been done by blunt-force trauma: fists, elbows, feet and knees, most likely.

Severe lacerations covered his abdomen. Severed pieces of intestine dangled out like bloody gray-brown sausages speckled with yellow globs of fat. She realized that the intestines had been pulled out, torn up, then crammed back in. That was the work of a person — animals didn’t stuff your guts back in for you.

“Any evidence that could lead to the perps?”

“Tons,” Jimmy said. “Sick bastards used the vic’s blood to write long live the king on a brick wall, and make some weird occult drawings. It’s all in the photos for you.”

“Good,” Robin said. “So, where’s the arm?”

Sammy shrugged. “We couldn’t find it.”

Jimmy checked his watch. “Well, that does it for me today. I’m heading home. Robin, if you have any questions, call me, but I’m sure Bryan and Pookie can answer anything.”

The sound of his name stopped her cold. “This is Bryan’s case?”

“He and Pookie were first on the scene,” Jimmy said. “I’m out. Later.”

Robin threw the departing Jimmy a half-wave. She pushed away any thoughts of Bryan Clauser and focused on her job. She did a slow walk around the white table. Oscar had been a big kid. Five-ten, would have been about a hundred and eighty pounds if the arm had been attached. Hopefully the arm was discarded somewhere and would soon turn up. If the perp still had it, that probably meant he was keeping it as a trophy. A trophy-taker could mean a serial killer. Or, perhaps even more messed up, the arm had been an atta-boy treat for the attacking animal.

“Soft-tissue damage looks like it extends to the back,” Robin said. “Let me look at the scapula. Sammy, can you flip him over?”