Dead Mann Walking

11

Fort Hammer’s police station was an old building in a city full of them. It’d been renovated a few times, when the economy was good. Built in the 1920s, it had an art deco look, the craze that swept the nation when archaeologists found Tut’s tomb. Everything looked like ancient Egypt for a while—worshipers of the dead. In the 1980s they added a new wing devoted to holding cells, designed to match.

To me, it was different things: office, library, dungeon. When my photographic memory went, it took a lot of the picture albums with it. I could no longer recognize the exact spot on the wall where I’d rammed a perp’s head into the fine stonework, or exactly where I’d leaned back for a smoke while the rest of the department was laughing over a job well-done or hooting over some woman’s rack. I got tingles, though, feelings like I should remember.

I did know where the rear entrance was, and I was smart enough to head there fast. If any of my former coworkers saw me, I didn’t doubt I’d be buried so deep I could crawl down into China. Funny. Boyle wouldn’t even get that burial. Then again, Booth wouldn’t bother to D-cap me first.

The morgue was in the basement, open until three—I didn’t even have to worry about running into the coroner, Anthony Philbrick. A round guy with a vague goatee, he had a pretty good sense of humor. He was one of the few I used to clown around with. Not someone I wanted to see, and not because I didn’t like him. While I was in jail, I heard that ever since he saw Lenore’s body, he hadn’t cracked a grin.

The after-hours guy was a chak. I could picture him easily, but I was damned if I could remember his name. Half his abdomen was gone, but that was always covered by his clothes, so you wouldn’t notice unless he bent in a weird way. His face was intact except for a missing chunk of his chin. Nothing unusual. Maybe I remembered because he didn’t wear the typical chak deadpan. There was a slight look of shock haunting his face, as if all his worldly concerns had been blown away all at once, and part of him was still going, “Oh.”

Not surprising. He got the job because he was a vet. He did four tours before an IED caught him, got brought back in the early days, when people thought ripping was a good idea. His folks did it. Unlike a lot of others who tried it and ran, they stuck by him. Even Booth didn’t dare stop that hire. And I couldn’t remember his name.

I knelt by the basement window. There he was, running a hose on the tiled floor, steering some gunk or other toward one of the drains. I’d been hoping to play on his sympathy as a fellow chak, but that wouldn’t go over big if I didn’t even know what to call him. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe it would come to me.

I rapped on the window, half expecting him not to remember me, half hoping he wouldn’t. But when he saw me he waved. Not knowing if that was a good thing or a bad thing, I motioned with my hands for him to open the door.

A few seconds later, his ghostly face greeted me.

“Mann,” he said. Given his natural look, I didn’t know whether he was surprised to see me or not.

“Hey,” I answered.

He studied my face, avoided eye contact. “You been on leave, Detective? Haven’t seen you around here in a while.”

Wow. Not only did he not realize I was dead, but either he didn’t remember or no one told him I’d been arrested for killing my wife. I wasn’t about to tell him.

“Something like that,” I said. “Listen . . . can you help me out? Any bodies come in last night or today? Big guy named Turgeon?”

“You mean liveblood?”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head. “Got a John Doe, but that’s it.”

“Can I see him?”

He shrugged and pointed. There were three silver tables along one of the tiled walls. One had a sheet over it. The tiles were the ugliest damn yellow I’d ever seen in my life. Reflected the fluorescents and made everything look sickly.

I stepped up and pulled the sheet back. It definitely wasn’t Turgeon.

“I think you meant Jane Doe.”

“Right,” he said. “Jane. I should change the tag.”

He spun, put the mop down, and started looking for a marker. I took another look at the body. “Looks like a car accident, if anyone wants to know. Hit and run.”

“Uh-huh.”

I covered Jane up with the sheet and looked around. “That’s it?”

“Yep. Quiet week.”

The rest of the tables were empty. The log only had one entry. Then I noticed a couple of plastic bins under the dissecting table.

“What’re those?”

“Chakz,” he said absently. “From the desert.”

“From the . . .” I pulled one out. There was a label on top: Wilson.

“Colin Wilson, like on the television?” I felt a wave of déjà vu as I said the name, like I’d been here before and didn’t like it the first time.

“I guess.”

“The other one. Frank Boyle?”

“Maybe. Sounds familiar.”

I pulled the second bin out just to make sure. Yeah, it was Frank. A little shudder ran through me, my body warning me to watch it with the emotional reactions.

“Mind if I take a look?”

He stopped looking for the marker to eyeball me. “Why? What’s a liveblood care?”

“I . . . I’m curious.”

“Go ahead.”

I opened the lid. Frank Boyle’s arms were stacked on top, the legs below that, the torso on the bottom. I checked his pockets, but they were already emptied.

Out of a sick curiosity, I looked at Colin Wilson, too. Not what I expected, though, really, how could I expect anything? His clothes weren’t as neat. He had a tattoo on his right arm, which was beefier than I’d pictured it being.

I looked from one to the other. Pieces of a man I barely knew, pieces of another I didn’t know at all, but both of them haunted me.

I hadn’t noticed, but the vet had walked up beside me.

“Notice anything?” he said.

I snapped my head around. “No. Why? Do you?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. I told Mr. Philbrick about it, but it’s just a couple of chakz, right?”

“What did you notice?”

“You’re the detective; can’t you see?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

Kind of like a mechanic showing me something obviously wrong with my car, he knelt beside me and rummaged through the parts until he had both torsos standing in their bins side by side. He nodded at the necks.

“There.”

I stared. I’d figured they’d used a hacksaw or something, but the cuts were both razor clean. “So they used choppers.”

“Yeah, but what else?”

I looked again and shrugged. “You going to tell me?”

“Spring assist makes it too easy. Street gangs started using them on one another, so choppers were made illegal, right?”

“Right, but so’re a lot of guns.”

“Guns are different. I’ll show you.” He stood up, opened a tall closet, and withdrew a set of choppers. Unhinging the blades, he stepped toward me.

When he got a little too close, an image of Colin Wilson’s head flashed in front of me, and I fell backward to get out of the way.

“Easy!” I said.

“Sorry,” he answered. He knelt by me and pointed to the edge of the blade. “I just wanted to show you this. See? They make all the blades a little different, like a signature, so they can track them if they’re ever used on livebloods.”

His gray finger graced a part of the blade. At first I thought it was jagged, but then I realized it was a pattern. “I get the idea.”

He put the blade away, then pointed at the necks again. “Those chakz were D-capped by the same set of choppers.”

What the hell?

I stared at the marks on the necks long enough to realize he knew what he was talking about. The cuts were smooth except for some very small notches grouped right next to one another, two half-circles, a triangle, a square, and another half-circle. Same on each.

Whoever killed Frank Boyle also killed Colin Wilson, or at least had access to the same clippers. What did that mean? Maybe nothing. Ashby described two goons. If they were for rent, like rat catchers bumping off pesky chakz so you don’t have to, they wouldn’t think twice about leaving the same calling card. Someone else might have hired them to get rid of Colin Wilson, maybe because he was hanging out on their lawn. The Boyles hired them of get rid of their inheritance problems. The rat catchers might not even have known how much money was involved.

That fit, except for one detail: the heads. Both were missing. Why? That electric syrup hit me again, flashes of disembodied heads chatting in the desert while the coyotes gnawed at them. Hard enough to keep my obsessions and the world separate; now it felt like they were crashing into each other. I groaned and twitched my own head, trying to clear it.

The vet looked at me but didn’t say anything.

Proof they’d done the job? Here’s the head; where’s my cash? Maybe in the Middle Ages. A photo or fingerprints could do that just as easily, without the gore or the bother. I couldn’t see Cara Boyle going for a deal that involved eyeballing her brother’s body parts unless she really hated him for some reason—and nothing Frank said about them suggested that kind of rift. If anything, he seemed confused and a little hurt that they’d been left out of the will. It didn’t make any sense, but in a way that made you wonder if making sense was worth it.

“Funny, huh?” the vet said; then he started packing the pieces back into the plastic bins.

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled out a twenty and stuffed it in his pocket. “For your trouble.”

He pulled it out and handed it back. “This is my job, Detective. I’m supposed to help you guys. Glad to do it when I can. Not like I’m ever going to be a cop myself, right?”

“Yeah, but neither am . . .” I hesitated. “Look, buddy, I’m sorry, but for the life of me I can’t remember your name.”

“Really?” He scrunched his face and looked around. “Tommy. I think it’s Tommy.”