by Nick Keller
Heller slammed the drawer with a loud bang and spun toward them. “You want to know what you can do? Stop trying to be a fucking hero, both of you. For Christ sakes Helms, you haven’t even been here a day—a fucking hour, and you’re already taking bullets? Whose stupidity was that?”
“Mine, sir,” Mark volunteered.
“No, it was mine,” Helms said.
“Look, I don’t give a good goddamn whose it was. The psyche department’s all over this. That’s time on the couch for you. I should discharge you for the day,” he said, looking at Nia who shifted her eyes down. Then to Mark he shouted, “And you, too, Sergeant, just to think about it.” Heller calmed himself, leaned both hands on the desk taking a moment. “Look, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but it isn’t a game out there. It’s dangerous. Cops die. I don’t know what happened. All I know is somebody fucked up. I need the two of you to identify where you went wrong, and fix it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I got something.” He drew a manila folder out of his desk drawer and handed it over to Mark who flipped it open. There was loose-leaf paper with familiar letterhead.
Mark looked up. “Coroner’s office?”
“Yeah. Found a body this morning, dumped off the East Twenty-sixth Street bridge.”
“The river,” Nia said.
“That’s right. No closed circuit, no eyes. But it was careless. Someone was either in a hurry or they wanted the body to be found.” He paused obviously emotional, and said, “A young woman.”
Mark closed the manila folder and said, “We’re on it. But, uh, why this one, Captain?”
Heller scratched his face. “There are peculiarities. I want you two to work on it. Get with the County Coroner’s office. Olday’s there. He’ll fill you in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
They turned to leave but Heller called, “Nia.” She turned back. “Did you say cowboy?”
Nia gave Mark an incredulous look. He must have put it in his report. Now the whole department would know. “Yes, sir.”
“It’s a nice line. But,” he put a finger up and said, “no hero stuff.”
“I understand, sir.” They turned to leave.
Heller said, “Mark.” They turned back again. Heller said to Nia, “Give us a minute.”
She nodded, left.
“Shut the door.” Mark did so and stepped toward the desk. Heller continued, “So what happened out there?”
What happened? Nia showed her impetuous side, almost got herself killed, then she beat the hell out of a much larger man. Mark wasn’t sure which part of the story Heller would like, and which he would condemn. He said, “Nothing that’ll happen again, I promise.”
“Okay,” Heller said. “How is she?”
“Capable. No nonsense. I think she eats rusty nails for breakfast, but that’s what we want, right?”
“Yeah. They all come in with a complex. You trust her?”
Mark gave him an assuring grin. “I trust her.” He flicked the manila folder in his hands and said, “We’ll knock this one out, go from there.” He turned to leave but Heller stopped him again.
“Mark.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t fuck her.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“We’re partners.”
“That’s right, so don’t fuck her.”
Mark pulled a big breath hiding his insult. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Uh-huh. And now you’ve been preempted. Now go solve this one.”
Mark gave him a nod and left shutting the office door behind him. He met up with Nia. “Anything I should be aware of?” she asked.
“He’s on your side, that’s for sure. Let’s go.”
8
The Big Exit
William was given his exit documents and processed out of the Napa State Institute. They issued him a charge card with access to five hundred dollars for his return to normalcy as well as a brand-new family visit ID badge, which would allow him to communicate with his death row dad via telephone. His last fam-vis code had been deleted upon his admittance to the institute. He accepted this with a bitter scoff.
Once he left here, he never intended to look back. Not for a second. He’d been here six months, thanks to Dr. Oaks. High security. Top shelf psychos. Maybe he belonged.
Dahmer had spent time here. James Holmes was a resident. Other killers were stacked a dozen deep at this facility, all subject to the rigorous throes of psychiatric disciplines trying to fix them, cure them of their illness. And now William Erter had joined their fraternity, unwittingly. It made him sick to his gut. There was no cure for what these people had. The truth would never be found here. The question ‘why’ only led to the next question ‘why’ and so on. Man simply wasn’t meant to understand. Why did Anthony Morley eat his gay lover? Why did Gary Ridgway have a deadly fetish for sex workers? Why did the Menendez brothers fill mommy and daddy with buckshot?
Every answer was only a label. Neurosis. Psychosis. Antisocial patterns. Schizophrenia. Paranoia. Delusional behavior. All titles. William had discovered the bitterness of truth. They’d shown it to him. The Napa Institute had taught him one thing: We’re all capable of the same thing. But the question still remained. Why.
And he’d never tell them. No fucking way.
Sitting in the exit lobby with the free world beckoning just beyond a double set of security doors, Dr. Oaks paid him one final visit. When she entered, he didn’t bother getting up from the plastic bench. She stood before him in silence. He had nothing to say to her.
She broke the silence. “William, I want to say something. Nothing happens merely by circumstance. I know you didn’t intend to hurt me, but causality is a much bigger thing than we are.”
“Are you saying that my presence alone creates the inevitability that the people around me will be hurt?” The words no sooner slipped from his mouth than his mind flashed to his old friend, Bernie Dobbs. He’d destroyed him.
“Your presence, no. Your nature, yes,” Dr. Oaks said. “Though I would say it starts with your father. It starts with being Oscar Erter’s son. You’re not going to be able to escape that until you face it.”
William got to his feet, angrily, making Oaks step away. “I have faced it. I face it every day.”
“No you don’t. You run from it. You hide,” she said, matching his anger. She cooled and said, “What did you do, William, when you were alone with them?”
Those portraits of the dead.
William faded back a step staring down at her. He finally said in a keeled, even voice, “Why are you so afraid to ask me what you really want to know?”
After a pause, she whispered, “Are you a killer, like your father?”
He gave her a miserable look. “If I said no, would you believe me?”
“I don’t think you even believe that.”
He broke away from her stare and paced to the wall, thinking. Turning back he changed the subject. “We’ve talked and talked about my relationship with my dad. We’ve processed and analyzed my childhood. But what about you, Doctor Oaks? Tell me about your dad. Tell me about Donald Oaks before he passed away. His picture hung on your office wall back in Los Angeles. It hung there for years. It probably hangs there now, awaiting your return, doesn’t it?”
William paced, stopped, looked at her. “I read his material, his books. Even read his Master’s thesis. He was the consummate psychologist, someone who added to the field. I know his work, but I don’t know him. So, tell me—who was Donald Oaks?”
She gave him a flat grin, her eyes never changing. “Okay, William. I’ll placate you. My father was the reason I pursued the path I chose. My father guided me. Gave me direction.” Her eyes cut him as she said, “We have that in common, don’t we?”
Maybe she was closer to the truth than she knew. It made him smile inwardly, thinking to himself—What man doesn’t pus
h their sons and daughters in a given direction, advertantly or otherwise?
Dr. Oaks continued, “Or are you now going to suggest that just because my father guided me does not mean that your father guided you?”
“No, I agree with you. In fact, you’re right. We do have something in common, Doctor Oaks.”
She tilted her head. “What’s that?”
He paced slowly back toward her, looking into her, and said, “We both adorn our walls with pictures of the dead.”
Her glare softened in subtle ways. His words bruised. She looked up at the security camera and nodded. There was a metallic thud and the security doors unlocked. William turned from her and strolled toward a big, bitter world.
9
Autopsy
County Coroner Olday met them almost immediately as they were buzzed into the coroner facility. He was holding a Styrofoam cup full of lukewarm coffee and sipping from it while chewing gum like a maniac.
“Hey, Detectives,” he said. Without breaking pace he turned, leading them down the hall. “Body’s this way, a real Frankenstein.”
Mark and Nia switched a look. They followed.
Olday went on, “Came in last night. Real weird. Never seen anything like it. I mean, murder—we get that all the time. Even multiple murders—get that too, you know, from time to time, like when some knee-jerker goes off half-cocked and starts shooting a place up or whatever. But multiple causes of death from one victim? Nah—weird. Had this one guy come in, ‘bout three years ago, with a chicken bone caught in his throat, esophageal asphyxiation, cut and dry, right? Nope, he also had a gunshot wound to the chest, a .38. Two causes of death. One guy. Turns out, this dude was playing with his gun with a bucket of KFC on his lap, starts choking, panics and boom, does himself in by accident. Wasn’t murder. Stupid maybe, just not murder. But this chick from last night, man this is just weird.”
“Multiple causes of death,” Mark murmured.
Nia asked, “Is that what you mean by Frankenstein?”
Olday chuckled, “Among other things. Let me show you.” He swung into the autopsy room where the body was laid out on a stainless steel gurney under stark surgeon’s light. Nia and Mark stopped abruptly.
Jane Doe lay motionless staring up at the ceiling. Her skin was perfectly colorless, nearly translucent, and she’d been opened from pelvis to clavicle. Two beautifully sculpted breasts rested to either side of the opening, their perfection utterly offensive under the circumstances. They were high-dollar boobs, now a bloodless color. It made Mark cringe.
The victim’s eyes were blue and stark against the wash of light, and her skin was bone white. Mark approached the body as if it were the edge of a cliff. He noticed her wrists were abraded and bruised, worn skinless. Ligature marks. “Jesus,” he muttered.
“Do we have a name?” Nia asked.
“Meet Angela Newman, twenty-nine year old Caucasian female, Five foot, seven inches. Hundred and nineteen pounds.”
“Next of kin?” Mark asked.
“Notified,” Olday said, and continued. “No wedding band, no sign of previous childbirth, no distinguishing marks except a lower back tattoo of a flaming butterfly, and, well,” he motioned toward the breasts. “Definite augmentation. And this,” he brushed a gloved finger across her eyes and cheeks, then the lips.
“Plastic?” Mark asked.
“Oh yeah,” Olday said. “This one’s had multiple procedures. Body alone is worth many thousands of smackers.”
“Expensive tastes,” Nia added.
Olday flipped through an aluminum clipboard. “We put the time of death between ten and midnight.”
Mark checked his watch. Barely fifteen hours ago.
Olday positioned himself at the head of the gurney looking down. “This is where it gets exciting. Once I gave the body …”
Nia flashed him a look, and said, “Exciting?”
It made Olday smile. He said, “I’m a coroner. This is a dead body. That’s exciting.”
Nia pinched her lips together and invited him to continue.
“Okay, so once I gave the body a surface inspection I found a few peccadillos, like this here.” He raised the chin with two fingers revealing a long contusion along the throat grown bloodless and dull looking.
“Strangulation,” Mark said.
“Yup. Not rope or fabric, though.”
“What then?”
“Looks like some sort of collar, maybe leather or plastic. Like a dog leash or a belt.”
“You sure this wasn’t just kinky?” Nia asked.
“Well—maybe. I’ve seen sadomasochism deaths worse than this that were logged as accidental, but given the circumstances, yeah, I’d say foul play. However, internally, we didn’t find any damage inside the throat—no bruising or bleeding, no trauma.”
“Someone tightened the noose slowly, took their time,” Mark said.
“Yeah, if that’s even what killed her.”
“What do you mean?”
“This.” He pointed out the ligature marks around the wrists. There were more at the feet. “These aren’t consistent with a party night. Too deep.”
“Someone held her, kept her. She struggled.”
“Yeah, and this.” He lifted her right arm and pivoted it upward revealing a tiny puncture wound at the fold of the elbow, not much more than an ant bite.
“Needle mark?” Nia asked.
“Yep,” he said.
“Overdose?”
“Would you believe no?”
“And she was no addict. No tracks,” Mark said, perplexed.
“Nah.” Olday parted the lips from the teeth with a finger revealing perfect pearly whites. “I’ve seen lots of addicts come through the morgue. None of them have teeth like this. Especially the meth heads. Man, they get this meth mouth—makes the teeth look black. Had this one come in once couple years ago, had one tooth. One single tooth in its head. Real pretty, too. All the others looked like raisins, weird little raisins. And the mouth—” he made a disgusted display like something stunk and said, “whew.”
Mark gave a frown. “Uh-huh.”
Nia suggested, “This was no party.”
“That’s right. The ligatures suggest someone was administering something. Maybe through an intravenous needle.”
“IV” Mark said, disgusted. “So why the strangulation?”
“Good question.”
Nia said, “It doesn’t add up.”
“Yep—I’m a monkey’s uncle on this one,” Olday said. “And guess what.” They looked at him. “There’s even more.”
Olday led them around the corner to a freezer vault. Yanking the door open a cloud of vapor furled out around their feet, and a blast of chilly air swallowed them. Inside the vault was a series of steel shelves housing a row of buckets. Mark eyed the buckets knowing precisely what was inside. Body parts. Internal organs.
Olday reached up and yanked down a bucket tagged “A. Newman” making Mark lean back, ominously. He and Nia turned and followed Olday back out into the morgue area where Olday heaved the bucket onto a bench. Whatever it was, it was heavy.
“Had this one guy come in couple years ago, total coronary,” Olday said with an offensively benign sincerity, like he was telling a story at a dinner party over entrées, “his heart had grown as big as an elephant’s, no kidding.” He peeled back the lid on the bucket, reached in rummaging through a few pounds of organs, and yanked out something as large as a grapefruit. “Damndest thing I ever saw.” He dropped it down on the steel shelf. It was a heart—a human heart—severed at each major artery. “But this one—check this out.”
Mark and Nia shared a wary look, almost nervous.
Poking at it with a surgeon’s tool, Olday said, “If you look closely you can see stress marks, here, and here. See?” He pointed out tiny striations in the muscle, as though the cellular composition had begun pulling itself apart on a microscopic level and scarring the very heart muscle. The tiny marks webbed throughout the ventricular
chambers. “Look closely,” Olday said.
“I’m fine,” Mark said. “Why don’t you just tell me the point?”
Olday gave him a hurt look, then shrugged. “These are stress marks. This heart, belonging of course to our victim, was irregularly fatigued. It was damaged, in fact. Had she not died when she did, she wouldn’t have lasted long. Not without medical attention. In fact, we might just be looking at her cause of death.”
“Heart failure?”
“That’s right.”
“Due to what exactly?”
“Whatever could stress a heart muscle this catastrophically.”
Nia said, “Could it have been hereditary?”
Olday plopped the heart back into the bucket nonchalantly. “It’s doubtful.
Think about it. She was bound, gagged, drugged … and then died of a hereditary heart condition? I don’t think so.”
“Any theories?” Nia asked.
Olday took a breath nodding. After a thoughtful pause he said, “Two things. My first thought, electrocution.”
Mark laughed miserably and started pacing. “Strangulation. Possible overdose. And now electrocution? Is that a third cause of death, Doc?”
“Yep. Or,” he gave them a nervous chuckle, “repeated resuscitation.”
“Jesus,” Nia whispered.
“Christ,” Mark said.
“Yeah—and guess what. There’s even more.”
They strode into the lab where a female mortuary technician sat at a desk, facedown over a microscope. She looked up as they entered and gave Olday a familiar look. “Trish,” Olday said.
“Doctor,” she returned.
“This is Examiner Dilfer,” Olday said in introduction. “Detectives Neiman and Helms. They’re investigating our girl.” She shook Mark’s hand, nodded to Nia.
“Okay, well I guess you’re curious about our newest member to Hotel Paradisio,” she asked, wiping her hands along her thighs.
“What do you have?” Mark said.
“I’ll show you.” She walked over to a computer monitor sitting next to her microscope. “When she came in this morning, it seemed pretty straightforward, so I conducted the standard toxicology screens—blood, urine, vitreous humor, that kind of thing. Came across some fantastical readings. Very high. Like here.” She pointed to a bar chart on the screen that displayed human blood levels in micromeasurements—Albumins, Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, along with T cells, white and red cells, platelets, basically every component of human blood. “Everything’s normal, except this. Her Glycoproteins.”