Nocturnal

Parlar, J. —?

Robin Hudson had awoken that morning after a whopping three hours of sleep, walked Emma next door for a play-day with Big Max and his pit bull, Billy, grabbed a large coffee from Royal Ground (no sugar, a single girl has to watch her waist), pounded it like a sorority girl in a drinking contest, then rode her motorcycle into work.

When she arrived, work was waiting for her in the form of a list of five names up on the green chalkboard. Four NCs, and one question mark for Parlar, J.

She walked to the body locker, opened the door and pulled out the sliding tray that held Parlar’s body. A question mark didn’t seem necessary — not much of a chance this was due to natural causes: broken bones and contusions; multiple lacerations on his abdomen; and about 20 percent of the body had been burned, from the abdomen up to the chest and face.

The worst of the burns were on his face and hands, where there had been no clothes to protect him from the heat. Blisters covered his palms and the underside of his fingers — he’d had his hands up in a defensive position when the flames hit. An explosion or fireball of some sort, obviously. His hair was more burned off on the left side of his head than the right — he’d instinctively turned away when it happened.

Robin read the crime-scene investigator’s preliminary report. Bryan and Pookie had been first on the scene again? They’d found a murdered teenage boy for the second morning in a row. Weird. The report said that Parlar, J., had not only been stabbed three times and badly burned, he’d also suffered a four-story fall onto a van.

“Sorry, Jay,” she said to the corpse. “Rough way to go.”

Robin thought back to Pookie’s call last night, asking if Bryan was capable of real violence.

She looked at the body.

What, exactly, was Pookie asking? If Bryan could do something like this?

No. That was impossible. Clearly, Pookie was talking about something else altogether.

Robin pushed the tray back in, shut the door, then walked to her computer. The karyotype results from Oscar Woody’s killer were waiting for her.

The spectral karyotype showed four rows of fuzzy, paired lines, each set a different neon color. The image represented the twenty-three paired chromosomes of the human genome. The last pair, the one that determined sex, was usually an XX for female or an XY for male.

Oscar Woody’s killer had an X, all right, but its partner chromosome didn’t look like an X or a Y.

“What the hell?”

She had never seen anything like it. It didn’t make any sense. Was it a bad test? No, the rest of the karyotype looked perfectly normal.

It wasn’t Klinefelter’s syndrome; this was something else altogether.

The information would help Rich Verde and Bobby Pigeon’s investigation. But Verde had basically told her not to run the test, and Chief Zou also didn’t seem that interested in getting to the truth.

Maybe Rich wasn’t interested, but she knew someone who would be.

Robin pulled out her cell phone and dialed.