Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he says, but she can see he does. He’s so earnest. He’s got really long eyelashes, which make his eyes look bigger, and a small chin, like a black manga Toby McGuire. She tries to imagine her mom like this, full of eager faith. Give him a few years of department bureaucracy and see if it doesn’t wear him out and break up his relationship.

  ‘Sucks to be junior rank,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll be right here if you need me,’ he reassures her. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

  She hovers in the doorway. She can’t face going upstairs and being alone with her non-responding phone and thoughts of the thing. ‘Hey, do you want to watch some TV?’

  ‘Now?’ He looks at his watch. She likes that he has one. He checks himself. ‘If you want to, sure.’

  She can’t stand the flit of pity that crosses his eyes. ‘Probably only infomercials anyway.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah, my mom canceled our cable.’

  ‘If it’s bothering you— I mean, you could sleep here and I could sit in the kitchen. Do paperwork.’

  ‘Do you have your paperwork here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ she says and clumps upstairs. She tries not to see the deer-boy in the darkness. But it turns out there are worse things to see.

  It takes no time to find the video. It comes up in the first few results. Not on YouTube, because it doesn’t meet the community standards, but there are other sites. For every takedown, for every violation of service, there are mirrors and sub-threads with links where you can stream it or download it to watch in the comfort of your home. It’s right there under ‘honk_honkboobsUNCUT.mp4’. They used to put people in stocks to shame them in public. Now you just need a wifi connection. On the Internet, humiliation lives forever.

  Cas is beautiful, shiny California blonde. Wearing bubblegum-pink lipstick and a tank top with a skull picked out in shiny pink studs and a denim mini-skirt. She is drooping, her arm around the neck of a teenage boy Layla doesn’t recognize. Fuck. She can’t look. She can’t.

  ‘Oh my God, she’s soooooo drunk.’

  ‘Help me.’

  ‘Dude, she’s passed out.’

  ‘Get her over the couch.’

  ‘She’s heavy.’

  ‘That’s why I need you to help me.’

  ‘Lose some weight, lard-ass.’ The sharp sound of a slap.

  ‘Wait, wait. I want to get a picture of this.’

  ‘Pull up her top.’

  ‘Dumb slut.’

  ‘Learn to handle your liquor, girlie!’

  Another slap.

  A boy doing a falsetto voice: ‘Oh, spank me, Daddy. Harder! Harder.’

  ‘Help me prop her up.’

  ‘Oof.’

  ‘Okay, that’s good.’

  ‘Take off her top.’

  ‘And her bra.’

  ‘How does this thing unclip? Wait, I got it.’

  ‘Hoooooly shiiiiiit.’

  A wolf whistle.

  Laughter.

  ‘Take a photo. Me and Isabella’s bazoombas. We’re in love.’

  ‘I want to get in there. Take a picture of me!’

  ‘Get out of the way, douchebags. Hey, Trent. Hey, get a picture of this. Honk-honk! Boobs!’

  ‘Oh my God. Dude, that’s hilarious. Do it again.’

  ‘Oh man, what a dumb fucking bitch.’

  ‘Honk-honk! Honk-honk!’

  Layla shuts down the player. There are still eight minutes of video left. She doesn’t need to see the rest. She sits very still in front of her screen. Then she shuts herself in the bathroom and kneels in front of the toilet. She spits and spits, but nothing comes up. She’d be a terrible bulimic. She turns her head and rests her cheek on the cold porcelain, wrapping her arms around the bowl. She closes her eyes and the footage starts replaying in her head. No. She forces her mind away. Something harmless. She narrates the play to herself, runs through the whole thing, everyone’s lines, not just hers, and the songs, again and again, until the words all run together.

  Her mom finds her like that, asleep on the bathroom floor. ‘Come on, bean. You can’t stay here.’ She lifts her up and Layla clings to her neck. Gabi helps her into bed, still wearing her skirt and ripped tights and the stupid sequin top, and pulls the covers up around her shoulders. ‘You did good,’ her mom says, and kisses her on the forehead. ‘I’ll make a plan for Aunt Cheryl to come pick you up in the morning. I’m going to have to go back to the scene.’

  ‘Mom!’ Layla calls her back. Her mother pauses in the doorway, the light haloed behind her head. But everything is scrambled up, and she feels sick and sad and she doesn’t know how to say any of the things she needs to.

  ‘Nothing. Never mind.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ her mom says.

  Me too, Layla thinks, and falls away into a fractured sleep.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16

  The Shit Show

  The crime scene has become a grand spectacle ever since the sun came up, and it’s getting worse by the hour. On the other side of the police tape, crowds have gathered, pulling up chairs and beers in brown paper bags, hoping to see something horrible. Gabi has commandeered a kitchen in a neighboring house for processing interviews and identifying possible witnesses, sending the most likely on down to the station. It would be nice if their man was among them, but so far they have nothing but rumor and speculation and some of the artists are screaming from the sidelines about how they’re gonna sue and you think this city’s bankrupt now, you wait till my lawyer is done with you! Apparently the sanctity of creative expression trumps life.

  Jessica diMenna wants Gabi and Boyd to drop everything and get down to the mayor’s office to discuss strategy, and that’s a fair point, what with the media clamoring round the edges, trying to get shots, cameramen climbing trees, a press helicopter hanging low overhead, adding to the racket, and someone’s even got a drone. Local and national out in force; hell, someone said Al Jazeera was here, somebody else heard that as al-Qaeda, and then they had to shut everything down for an hour to control the panic: no terrorists, no bomb threats. Only a sick serial killer who may or may not have hidden more body parts in other places. It’s sensational enough on its own.

  She’s managed two hours' sleep in the last twenty-eight hours, when she raced home to check on Layla, and now she has to sit with the goddamn curator, Patrick Thorpe, who hasn’t got any sleep either and is becoming increasingly hysterical, although that might also be from his hangover. Eventually, they send him to dry out down at the station, a very grumpy officer accompanying him, and continue the interview with the other curator, a woman called Darcy D’Angelo, who is ruthlessly co-operative, especially when it comes to dismantling the art for forensic testing. Gabi gets the uneasy feeling she likes watching things get taken apart.

  They have to bag everything. She’s sent the blogger’s phone for processing. Ovella Washington is taking statements, downloading phone footage from people willing to share their videos without a warrant, taking names for those who aren’t, plugging each phone into a laptop they’ve got for this purpose, but the card reader is playing up and they have to get a technician in to sort it out and everyone is impatient.

  Some idiot decided it would be a good idea to let Daveyton’s parents know, and they’ve come down to see for themselves, even though the body was moved hours ago. The press descend on the Lafontes – their first public appearance – like starving pigeons on a crust of bread, jostling for space, screaming questions. Mrs. Lafonte flinches with each camera flash. They cling to each other, terrified, while Boyd tries to cover them with his jacket and hustle them through the hordes.

  ‘I’m so sorry, your son isn’t here,’ Gabi tells them. ‘I don’t know why they told you to come down.’

  ‘I asked them to,’ Jessica diMenna says, leaning in the door, dressed for television. ‘Thank you for being here. We’ve got a media caravan where you can sit quietly and pr
epare. If you could just say a few words about how relieved you are that the DPD has found the rest of Daveyton, it would be such a gesture of faith and solidarity in these men and women who are working so hard to bring his killer to justice.’

  ‘But where is he?’ Mrs. Lafonte asks, confused. ‘Where’s our boy?’ She’s shrunk into herself since Gabi saw her last.

  Mr. Lafonte is the opposite. The news has energized him, focused grief into rage. ‘The way they’re talking about it on the news, Miss Mayoral-la-di-da, I get the idea these men and women haven’t done shit. I heard Davey was propped up on display, like a lynching.’

  ‘This wasn’t a lynching,’ Gabi is quick to tell them. God, that’s the last thing they need. ‘We don’t believe this is race-related. There was another victim on Friday. A white woman from Indian Village.’

  ‘Another murder?’ He’s furious. ‘And where is this killer you’re bringing to justice? Is he here? I don’t see nobody in handcuffs. He’s still out there, probably doing this to someone else’s little boy right now. Or some other nice white lady. And you want me to go on TV? Talk to the press? Oh, I can do that. I’m ready to do that right now.’

  Jessica is back-pedaling furiously. ‘Please, Mr. Lafonte, I think Detective Versado’s right. This is a terrible shock. You should be with your boy.’

  ‘Miss, let me tell you straight, there is nothing on God’s green earth that is going to shock me again. I am disappointed that you cannot do your job, but shocked? No.’

  ‘I’ll drive you down to the morgue,’ Gabi says, even though she is so tired she can barely see straight. She just prays that Dr Mackay, pulling overtime, has the body – or its constituent parts – presentable by now. ‘Bob, can you get someone to supervise dismantling the collection? Not you. I need you and Sparkles to start following up on those artists’ names. I’ll catch up with you later.’

  ‘No problemo,’ he says, even though he’s as tired as she is.

  ‘There’s a spreadsheet of participating artists – start with a criminal record search, work your way down, cross-reference with the officers who have been taking statements, if any of the names jump out. Some of them work under pseudonyms, so you’re going to have to establish their real names first.’

  ‘I know, Gabi.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘We’ll look them up in the car, get on the door-to-door soon as we can. You take care of your people.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She ushers Mr. and Mrs. Lafonte out the door, hissing at the mayor’s aide as she passes: ‘No more fucking surprises, okay?’

  Shaggy Dog

  Jonno finds that overnight celebrity suits him, even if it’s Detroit-style. The brunch party at some musician’s house in Hubbard Farms is an excuse to catch up on the scandal – did you hear it was made out of part of Daveyton’s body? – and most of the cool culturati hanging out have been up all night, half of them crowded into the cosy kitchen, making French toast, the others smoking weed and idly shooting hoops in the tangled garden. A kid with sideburns decides they have to make it more challenging and try to score from a moving skateboard. But that’s only the warm-up act, because there’s no doubt that Jonno is the main attraction. They’re impressed in a not-impressed way, which means very. It’s the magic words ‘exclusive footage’.

  He and Jen stayed up all night editing it together. Well, she did – he massaged her shoulders and brought her appropriate snacks, and finally passed out and woke up at seven to find her finishing it off. It’s a rough-cut, a placeholder, but Jen says they need to move with the times and put it up immediately before someone else beats them to the post.

  Tight communities mean that word gets around. Now all he needs is for the major websites and, better yet, the TV stations to pick up on it. He keeps his phone handy, in case, but he knows he’s competing with the professionals. What he needs is a scoop.

  Jonno has never had a particular interest in serial killers. But he’s a fast learner and a good researcher, courtesy of a million listicles: ‘10 Signs You Might Be A Psycho’.

  Number one: Narcissism.

  Oh, it’s good to get close to danger. To flirt around the edges. The fascination of the terrible, just terrible things people do to each other. He’s an ambassador from the land of monsters, and they all want to hear all about it. He plays it up, practicing lines for his piece.

  Not that he has much to go on. But who needs facts when you can go with wild speculation? And there’s no shortage of that. Everyone he talks to has a theory, all playing armchair detectives.

  It’s a gang revenge killing – all these years later, it turns out that they were targeting Daveyton all along for snitching on a drug boss he was running for.

  It’s the ex-mayor trying to destabilize the current administration from inside prison.

  It’s the result of a terrible military experiment on Zug Island.

  Mutations.

  It’s Nain Rouge.

  ‘Who?’ he asks.

  ‘The red dwarf,’ Jen explains. ‘Some cities get Olympic mascots. Detroit has a bad-luck bogeyman with his own annual parade.’

  He gets as many of them as he can on camera.

  Of course the most popular is the most obvious: a serial killer targeting kids. But then a jewelry designer who must be wearing half her collection in her face chirps up with something interesting: ‘But what about the woman in the oven?’

  ‘I caught a headline,’ Jonno says, fishing. He pulls up the article on his phone, but it’s tellingly curt, especially for a white middle-class femicide.

  Woman’s Remains Found In Kiln

  The body of Betty Spinks, manager at the historic Miskwabic tile factory, was recovered from the pottery’s kiln. Police suspect that it was a robbery gone wrong and the killer tried to cover his tracks by incinerating the body. The DPD have asked that anyone with information please call the official police tip-line.

  ‘I hear they found her head spinning on the wheel. And she was covered in satanic symbols made out of clay.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I heard it from a friend of a friend. Someone who works there. Robin Mitchell.’

  Jen touches his arm. ‘You remember, the guy from the dinner party.’

  ‘There were a lot of people at that dinner party,’ Jonno says. ‘Can you get me in touch with him?’

  ‘Sure.’ The jewelry designer is avid, delighted to be caught up in it all. ‘Let me just text Allie and see if I can get his number.’

  In the meantime, the promo girl offers him a free pair of shades. He takes great delight in turning her down.

  An hour later, he and Jen have tracked Robin down and convinced him to come out to the parking lot of Miskwabic Pottery, or, as Jonno likes to think of it, ‘the scene of another monstrous crime!’ He does vaguely recall him – good thing the arts scene is so cosy, one of the advantages of a downsizing city.

  They position him in front of the building, the yellow police tape across the door clearly visible. Robin keeps glancing over his shoulder, uncomfortable. ‘The police told me not to talk about it. They were very specific.’

  ‘You’ve got a responsibility to the people of Detroit,’ Jonno says. ‘The pigs are trying to cover this up. There’s some madman killer out there and they don’t want people to know.’

  ‘Yeah, but they said it would mess up the investigation.’

  ‘So don’t talk about the case. Talk about your experience.’

  ‘Do you have to use my face?’

  ‘We can pixelate it out and distort your voice if you want,’ Jonno promises.

  The video goes up that afternoon, un-pixelated. ‘A serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Woody Allen,’ is how Jonno describes the murderer. That’s the pull quote that gets used in all the media, that gets him calls from news outfits across the country – and that evening, one from a TV executive in New York. She has a major true-crime show, she says. A major show on a major network. Murder48.’

  He says h
e’s heard of it, by which he means Jesus fucking Christ.

  They like his style. His insouciance. They want an exclusive documentary, following the action as it unfolds. Does he know the investigating officer? Can he get access? Will the police co-operate, does he think?

  When he stalls, she cuts in. It doesn’t matter if they don’t. There are ways around it. But she needs to know what footage he has access to. Can he send over everything he has? She’ll give him access to their upload site. They need to know they’ll have enough material before they can pitch it to their commissioning board. If he can deliver ‘something hot’, she’ll get a producer and a camera crew out to him pronto.

  ‘What about the contract?’ he manages to get in.

  ‘I’ll email you one right away. Sign it and send it straight back.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I get an entertainment lawyer to look at it?’

  ‘It’s a standard contract, giving us exclusive rights.’

  Cate. Cate will know someone.

  Any excuse, huh, boychick? And where are you going to get this extra material?

  He’ll figure it out. He always does.

  He doesn’t call Cate. He’d rather she switched on the television and saw him.

  The contract arrives in his email inbox, and he signs the shit out of it.

  Viral Like Ebola

  ‘Hey, TK, there’s someone who wants to see you. I’ve locked up already, but he ain’t taking no for an answer,’ Big Dennis says, poking his head into the computer room – a tiny office with two beat-up desktops that Reverend Alan believes were donated by a kind benefactor. They were, sorta. Reclaimed from an insolvent drugstore where TK happened to be the first salvager to crowbar the door open. The PCs are doing much more good here than they were there. No harm, no foul.

  ‘Tell him to come back tomorrow. Church is closed. We got special permission to stay late and watch my man Ramón’s screen debut.’