Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  Stanley poured milk into an enameled metal cup. “What is this, Corrigan? You got a hole that needs a pigeon?”

  “I like to categorize people, I guess. Define them. You could say it was a cop-ly thing to do. But, as an American, you might prefer to look at it as individuation.”

  “You tried astrology?”

  “The girlfriend looks after the eldritch side of things.”

  “Iris’ mother?”

  Corrigan said nothing.

  “Damn,” said Stanley after a while. “I haven’t come across that word since I read H.P. Lovecraft.”

  “That was his favorite word, I believe,” mused Corrigan, without missing a beat. “Lovecraft used ‘eldritch’ like Kerouac used ‘sad.’”

  “That’s a lot of authors for one cop.”

  “Only two.”

  “You consider astrology eldritch?”

  “No,” said Corrigan mildly. “I consider it bullshit.”

  Stanley pushed open the window sash next to the door and sat gingerly on the sill. If he’d suspected he’d torn open his incision before, his thoughts were definite on the subject now. It stung, and it was damp. He pointed north. “You know there’s an alley named after Kerouac, right over there?”

  “I know,” said Corrigan. “It used to be called Adler Place. Specs’ bar is still there, though.”

  Stanley nodded his head in the dark.

  The Love Boat was parked at Pier 19, all lit up. After a few moments of watching it Stanley said, “You think Lovecraft will ever get a street named after him?”

  “Sure,” said Corrigan. “Later. In the space station nostalgically named after San Francisco.”

  Stanley frowned thoughtfully. “We’re nearly the same age. You and I…?”

  This personal question, too, Corrigan avoided answering. But, Stanley realized, Corrigan was only three or four years older than he was.

  Two minutes of silence passed, during which an entire floor of lights suddenly became extinguished in the TransAmerica Pyramid, and steam began to percolate through the works of the espresso-maker.

  Corrigan heaved a sigh. “Take a look in that envelope, will you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I’m afraid there’s an excellent reason.”

  “Let’s have coffee first.”

  “Suit yourself. I was just thinking the other day about how I was getting too much sleep lately.”

  The espresso-maker’s sound announced that all its water had boiled away. Stanley pulled the machine from the flame and replaced it with the tin of milk. Soon enough, he had two steaming mugs of cafe au lait.

  “Sugar?”

  “Nah.”

  He handed a cup out the window to Corrigan, then showed him a fifth of Bushmills. “Nudge?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Sweater?”

  “What is this,” Corrigan growled, “a goddamn camp-out? Take a look at the motherfucking pictures, why don’t you?”

  Stanley nudged his own coffee, tasted it, then set his cup on the counter. “What I like best,” he muttered, more or less to himself, staring at the envelope, “is a nice Irish coffee with the midnight mail.”

  Somewhere a garbage truck hydraulically yawned, upended a dumpster over itself, and redeposited it on a sidewalk with a crash.

  Stanley snapped on the light over the sink.

  The envelope was plain manila, 9 by 12 inches, with a button-and-thread fastener. Stanley hadn’t seen such an envelope in a long time. He studied it. The string looked like waxed dental floss except, like the two buttons, it was the color of dried blood. Other than its model number and size, printed along the sealed seam opposite its flap, the envelope was unmarked.

  “Aside from the fact that I associate it with you,” said Stanley, still not touching the envelope, “What’s bothering me about this?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Corrigan. He sipped his own coffee. “Unless you already have an idea what’s inside it.”

  Stanley frowned. “How the hell would I know that?”

  “Beats me,” Corrigan admitted, blandly ingenuous. “Foresight would imply you had brains. But,” he added, “your interest in hookers — let alone what that envelope contains — proves you in short supply.”

  “Fuck you, cop.”

  “Ahearn,” said Corrigan tiredly, dropping his eyes off the bridge and staring at the gravel at his feet, “thanks for the cup of coffee. Now, I don’t want to be rude. It’s not in my nature to be rude. But as soon as you get over your cozy clairvoyant qualms and have a look inside that envelope there, we’re going to have a chat for real. You know it, I know it. I’m being nice about it, and you’re not. You apparently have all night, but I don’t. So quit stalling, get it over with, and let’s talk. Because starting right now, if you don’t take a look at that envelope, like, immediately, I’m going to drag you by your ears down to my office on Bryant Street, and nail them to a desk. Then for sure we’ll find out who’s got all night. Now, how’s the audio? Is this clear?”

  “Keep your shirt on.”

  “I’m done with that: hop to it.”

  Stanley unwound the thread and opened the envelope.

  Pictures, all right. Like Corrigan said.

  Colored pictures.

  The first one was of a purple sleeping bag.

  It could have been the one he himself had been found in, six weeks ago.

  Something was inside it. Something that tapered from one end, possibly the feet, a yard up to what might have been hips, to shoulders, abruptly to what could easily have been a head.

  There was a hand showing at the seam. Its fingers curled around the edge of the nylon, like… a sleeping child’s might curl around the edge of its quilted comforter. This disconcerted Stanley. Had he not seen just such a hand in just such a pose not two hours ago? He looked up momentarily, but resisted a glance over his shoulder. Had Corrigan found Ted? Already?

  Get a grip, he told himself: that’s impossible. Green Eyes isn’t done with Ted yet. The sleeping bag comes later.

  Stanley lingered over the first photo. What struck him about the shot was that the hand seemed outsized, adult, too large for the apparent mass of the body inside the sleeping bag, which could have been that of a child. The apparent mass seemed… diminished.

  A fringed, green blur across the top of the photo was probably a tree limb.

  So. A sleeping bag in a sylvan setting.

  A park, maybe.

  He set the first photograph aside.

  The second picture was… disconcerting.

  The setting had changed. Now the subject was brightly lit, with no shadows or blurred details.

  The subject was a human head.

  Face up, the head stared straight at the camera. But the stare was sightless.

  The head had no eyes.

  The lids were there, but there were no eyes behind them. The lids were sunken, like two little graves.

  The head lay against a stainless steel table.

  Obviously, the head belonged to a dead man.

  A man whose eyes had been removed.

  For better or worse, the head seemed to be still attached to a body. A sheet was pulled up beneath the chin.

  Beside the head, parallel to its vertical axis, lay a child’s one-foot ruler.

  Stanley hesitated over this photograph for a long time.

  To be sure, it was fascinating.

  Certainly there was additional detail to be had from a prolonged study of the image. But Stanley hesitated because something about it disturbed him.

  Stanley also hesitated over the second photograph because he had a distinct foreboding.

  Caught between these two sensations, Stanley was pretty sure he didn’t want to see the third photograph—let alone the fistful of others that would follow it.

  So stalled, Stanley’s mind ground almost to a halt. Yet his hands, operating external to his will, inevitably dealt him the third photograph.

  A torso, hips
to neck, naked and the color of lead.

  And the ruler, again. It was yellow.

  Mute and shocked, Stanley mechanically shuffled the second picture back over the third, checking.

  It certainly looked like the same ruler.

  He set the second photograph aside, face up.

  Though the skin looked like that of a young person, and though it was male, the torso was pale and shrunken. The breasts looked shallow, emaciated.

  But those details struck Stanley only later. His immediate perception was of the large, coarse sutures that transected the gaunt trunk like the legs of a pair of flattened millipedes. Their black so coarse as to render almost invisible the sparse clumps of fine body hair, the gleaming threads contrasted with the blanched skin as impersonally as the ebony mensurations embossed along its bevel contrasted with the ruler’s yellow plastic. The livid, orthogonal incisions formed two meandering puckers, their bilious discoloration flowed along the pallor of the flesh into which they had been gouged. These, like nave and transept wickedly inverted, dissected the torso vertically, from groin to throat, and horizontally, along a line grazing just below the twelfth rib.

  “That’s called a radical cruciate abdominal incision,” Corrigan said over Stanley’s shoulder.

  He hadn’t heard Corrigan come inside. Emanating from the shadows Corrigan’s voice blasted Stanley’s concentration as thoroughly as that voluminous sneaker wave had blasted little Tseng’s rock at Land’s End. Stanley jumped as if snatched by the scruff of his neck, straight up. The pictures tumbled to the countertop as he whirled with a balled fist and a torque at his incision and yelled “Goddamn fucking sneak-ass gumshoe cop!”

  “Tsk,” clucked Corrigan, ignoring the fist and regarding Stanley, as if from afar. “Are we nervous about something?”

  “I was fine until you showed up,” Stanley snapped. Too loudly.

  Corrigan allowed the faint trace of a sour smile to be replaced by a not-so-faint contempt. “And that poor son of a bitch in these pictures was fine until you showed up, Ahearn.” He pointed at the photos on the counter. “Radical enough to be called butchery, that incision. Usually, it’s practiced exclusively on cadaver donors.”

  Stanley blinked. “What?”

  Corrigan moved his face until it was a foot from Stanley’s, and curled his lips in disgust. “There wasn’t enough left inside that kid to feed a dog with.”

  “What,” Stanley muttered feebly, “are you talking about?”

  Corrigan bored in. “He was alive, when they gutted him. He had to be.”

  “He had to be what?”

  “Alive! So they could harvest his vital organs!” Corrigan shouted. “What do you think they took?”

  Stanley was confused.

  “They again?” he croaked.

  “Both eyes, both kidneys, his liver, the heart, and both lungs. Get it? The works! Everything they can sell! Look at him!”

  Corrigan swept up the photographs from the counter and shook them in Stanley’s face. “There’s nothing left of the poor bastard,” Corrigan shouted. Abruptly, recognizing the expression on Stanley’s face, Corrigan’s own face changed into an incredulous, almost cruel leer, accentuated by the bad light.

  “You didn’t recognize him,” Corrigan realized. “You don’t know him.”

  “Know who?”

  “You think so?” Corrigan continued, not listening. “You think you don’t know him?” He answered his own question. “You just didn’t recognize him. Here. Have another look!”

  Corrigan dealt the photographs one after another, in rows, like cards in a game of solitaire. There were at least twenty of them; twenty autopsy photographs of a disassembled corpse, of exposed vertebrae, of an empty ribcage hastily laid open by power-sawing the ribs, of abruptly terminated arteries, of a yawning, eviscerated abdominal cavity.

  “You see.” Corrigan’s face was contorted by horror and disgust nearly matching Stanley’s own. But, unlike Stanley’s, Corrigan’s expression was steeled with disdain. “Now take another look at this one.”

  Corrigan plucked up the second photo Stanley had looked at, that of the victim’s eyeless head, shook it in front of Stanley’s face, and threw it back down on the counter.

  Stanley glanced at it, then looked away.

  “I saw that one already.”

  “But you didn’t recognize him,” Corrigan said. “Look again.”

  “Rec…?” He looked at Corrigan.

  Corrigan looked at Stanley. At that moment, Corrigan’s face could only be described as carnivorous.

  Stanley forced himself to find salients in the picture aside from the eyes. The lips were well-defined, but appeared soft. The nose was almost cute. They might almost have been the features of a girl. But, still, his mind wouldn’t place them.

  “The name was MacIntosh,” said Corrigan at last. “Giles MacIntosh.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A FIRE ENGINE EMITTED A PRELIMINARY WAIL AS IT LEFT THE STATION house on Stockton Street, two blocks away.

  “That’s number ten,” Corrigan said, pointing to the eyeless head of Giles MacIntosh. “But it’s not meant as a statistic for the newspaper.” He shuffled the photos and chose one. “Have a look.” The ghastly photo displayed the trunk reopened, its sutures unzipped. Corrigan took a pen from his pocket and touched its tip to a small object resting inside the eviscerated cavity.

  “See that?”

  Stanley’s esophagus was surging with bilge. “No. What is it?”

  Corrigan chose another shot, a close-up.

  “Recognize it?”

  “It’s a flower.”

  “What kind of flower, Ahearn?”

  “How should I know?”

  Corrigan just perceptibly smiled. “You’d think a guy with your experience would know a purple aster when he saw one.”

  He actually hadn’t recognized it. Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to. For a guy Corrigan hadn’t yet laid a glove on, Stanley was feeling pretty worked over.

  “But why?” he managed to ask.

  “It’s meant as a warning.”

  “To who?”

  Corrigan’s eyes showed the certainty of death. “To you, of course.”

  Stanley stared at the photo of Giles’ eyeless face. First Ted, now Giles. Come to think on it, the proper order must be the other way around — first Giles, then Ted. He felt sick. Should he tell Corrigan about Ted, soon to become number eleven? Maybe Corrigan knew about Ted already? If not, maybe there was still time to… Abruptly he dissembled: “A warning to me? Why me?”

  “Come off it, Ahearn. You telling me you didn’t know this guy MacIntosh? Really? If you think these pirates are playing mumblety-peg for bottle caps, take another look at this kid’s eyes. Maybe, really, you don’t get it. Did your back heal so fast? There’re plenty more photos. Here’s a good close-up. Have a look.”

  “No, I —.”

  Corrigan gathered Stanley’s shirtfront into a bunch, twisted it until their faces came together, and said quietly, “Look at them, you spineless fuck.”

  Stanley stared at Corrigan in disbelief. Weren’t there laws about police officers getting physical with crime victims?

  Corrigan released Stanley just as suddenly as he’d grabbed him.

  Stanley smoothed his shirt while Corrigan, breathing like an asthmatic, carefully redistributed the photos over the counter. It was a gruesome collage.

  “The short version is this,” Corrigan said, adjusting the photos so that few overlapped. “Sometime Tuesday night your friends picked up MacIntosh and took him for a ride.”

  “My friends?”

  “His, too. It’s almost certain he knew who they were. His apartment showed no signs of forced entry or a struggle. No signs of chloral hydrate in what’s left of his system, either. There was an appointment time penciled in on his calendar. Just a time. No name.” Corrigan jerked his head toward the room behind them, not looking at it. “His crib was in much better shape than yours. He was expecting t
o be home in time to cook supper for his mother. When he didn’t show, she called us.”

  The word guiro suddenly popped into Stanley’s head.

  “A homeless guy found him in the park.”

  Rebozo. Guiro and rebozo.

  “Another guy is missing too, one of MacIntosh’s buddies. A colleague from the Center for Sexually Transmitted Diseases, where they both worked. Kid was the systems manager.”

  Stanley pulled himself away from his sentimental reflections. “A contract guy? Worked mostly nights?”

  Corrigan fixed Stanley with a look, and there passed between them the silent awareness that there was no longer any reason for Stanley to maintain some lame fiction about his connection to Giles MacIntosh.

  “Name of Tommy?” Stanley added, his voice barely audible.

  Corrigan touched various of the photos. “Tommy Quinn. Nice kid, they say. Bright. About twenty, light build, tall, thin, sandy hair, brown eyes, talks with a slight stutter. Been making it as a contract programmer since he was sixteen. You seen him?”

  “No. MacIntosh mentioned him to me, but I never met him.”

  “And so now I get to ask how you knew MacIntosh.”

  Stanley told him everything he knew about the clinic — almost everything.

  Corrigan shook his head disgustedly. “We go over that place with a fine-toothed comb, and you’re telling me you just walk in there and finger the one guy who can open up this case like a can of okra?”

  “I don’t know from computers, Corrigan, but this kid MacIntosh does — did. He found it by accident. He knew about it when you were there, but he hadn’t made the connection. That, and you didn’t actually talk to him. He thought the glitch was some game or scam his hacker buddy Tommy was up to.”