The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  The supervisor shrugged. “Eight, ten minutes?”

  Oscar looked at Neve. Ample time for anyone dumping a body to make himself scarce.

  “And he was with you in the control room when the warning light went on?”

  “Just him and me.”

  Oscar reluctantly stubbed out the last of his cigarette and indicated the motionless auger. “That thing isolated?”

  The supervisor nodded.

  “I’m going out.” Oscar pulled on a pair of latex gloves, put his flashlight between his teeth, and crawled hand over hand across the narrow concrete edge of the outlet tank.

  “How did someone get in here?” Neve shouted. “Why didn’t your security stop them?”

  The supervisor barked a laugh. “Love, my operating budget doesn’t stretch to running security lights, let alone security guards.”

  “Cameras?”

  “Don’t have ’em. Who wants to look at crap pumping around?”

  Oscar reached the body and held tight to the slick concrete with one hand while he switched on his flashlight. He guessed the girl was in her early teens. Her wet hair was brown. The auger had opened her like a dull but brutally swung butcher’s cleaver, down to bone and in some places clean through. He gently touched the skin—cold. He gingerly lifted an arm; it moved with a little stiffness, dragging up at the torso. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in.

  He ran the flashlight beam down the ruined body and stopped at the girl’s belly.

  Just above the smear of wet pubic hair, cuts had been carved into her slightly flabby flesh. Even in the shaky flashlight under steady rain, it was clear that the marking had nothing to do with the rude, machete-deep slashes the auger had inflicted. Oscar’s heart thudded. Looking at the pattern was like glimpsing a snake or the sheer fall of a cliff; a deep, fundamental fear sewn into his blood warned, This is dangerous. The overall shape—about the size of a man’s open hand—was made up of an intricate pattern of dozens of interlinked curls and lines. At the center of them was an elaborate cross, and imposed over it was a seven-pointed star.

  Oscar pulled on his hat as he watched the two men from the funeral home extract the girl from the blades of the auger. The undertakers wore plastic overalls over their suits; they looked tired. As they lifted the torso out of the pit, the upper intestine and slick organs began to slump out. The men argued quietly, then tied a garbage bag around the open cavity.

  Oscar saw how wan Neve was and sent her to scour the plant grounds for a pile of girl’s clothing they both knew she wouldn’t find. He’d telephoned Scenes of Crime, but there had been a triple fatality at a food cannery, so no staff was available to photograph and forensically assess the corpse in situ. Oscar returned to his car, to get his digital camera, then climbed back to the body only to discover that the battery—which had been fully charged that morning—was flat. He cursed and took pictures with the camera in his phone, a tiny thing better suited to capturing birthday cakes and beach cricket than murder victims. He wished that he’d bribed the supervisor out of his entire packet of smokes.

  The undertakers laid the body on a small blue tarpaulin, and rain snapped on the plastic like tiny firecrackers. The dead girl stared up into the rain through the eye that had not been ripped away by the auger.

  “Have you got a thermometer?” Oscar asked.

  “For her?”

  Oscar nodded. “A mercury one. A glass one.”

  One of the men went to the hearse and returned with a long rectal thermometer. Oscar wondered where to put it—the girl’s lower torso had been badly chopped by the auger blade. He forced the thermometer down her split throat and felt unpleasant resistance as he reached the upper esophageal sphincter. He pushed harder, sticking the glass rod as deeply down her throat as he could reach. It came back just over 84 degrees. About two and a half hours had passed since the supervisor phoned the police. How long had the girl been dead before that? Another three hours? Four? It was hard to say—the combination of cold rain and evisceration was rapidly cooling the body. Oscar stood and wondered if he should wash and keep the latex gloves. He decided that was too parsimonious even for him.

  Neve returned and shook her head once in reply to Oscar’s unspoken question. A bit of color had returned to her cheeks. Oscar nodded to the undertakers that they could now take the body to the morgue. As they unfolded a cadaver bag from their kit, his eyes were drawn to the girl’s body. Naked and broken, she looked utterly defenseless, exposed inside and out. So young. The awful marking on her belly glared like a brand. The cause of death wasn’t clear, but the girl didn’t carve her own belly and throw herself into spinning metal and stinking sewage. Someone had thrown her—dead or alive—into the auger. As the undertakers lifted the small body gently into the bag and zipped it shut, the nausea that had been squeezing Oscar’s stomach was gone. The deep weariness that seemed to have been his constant companion for years had also vanished. In their place was something volatile and bitter. He was angry.

  “Did you phone Homicide?” she asked. “We shouldn’t release her till they come.”

  “I’m not calling Homicide. We’re keeping this one.”

  He felt Neve’s stare like a cold wind on the side of his face.

  “You want to keep her,” she said quietly.

  “It’s murder.”

  The undertakers lifted the cadaver bag onto a stretcher and began to carry it up the steel stairs. Oscar followed, and Neve trailed after.

  “Exactly,” she said. “It’s murder. But it isn’t a Clause Seventeen.”

  “You saw that thing carved on her?”

  “Listen.” She had to jog to keep up with him. “She’s got nothing. No clothes, no ID, no face. No suspects. A case like this needs feet on the ground. Haig has thirty people. We’re two. Giving her to Homicide is the best chance she’s got. It’s a case that needs their—”

  “Brains?” The irritation inside him grew hotter.

  “Resources. A case like this will take a month, and we don’t have a month. They’re going to shut us down! Oscar! We need to spend the next few weeks getting every conviction we can. We need to—”

  “Bump up our stats?” Oscar asked.

  He realized that Neve had stopped following. He turned and faced her, and she flinched.

  “You know we do,” she said. “I do. I need my job.”

  Oscar chewed his lip. Neve was right: this case would be a time pit. But that didn’t seem to matter to him.

  “Or is this just a pissing contest between you and Haig?” she said. “Because I know who’s winning.”

  He glared at her. “You know what Haig will do? He’ll glance in Missing Persons, and if there isn’t an instant match she’ll go on the back burner as a runaway Jane Doe, too hard to solve.”

  Neve’s lips tightened. Oscar could see she was holding herself tight as a fist, fighting to keep her voice steady. “He’d have a point. There are ten murders a week here in the city. It’s terrible, but this girl is just one more. Let’s fight the fights we can win. Please, Oscar, be reasonable. Let Haig have her. If I bum out with you I’m back to Generals, and you know what the pay’s like there. No one gets by without—”

  She bit her lip, but he knew what she was about to say. Taking bribes.

  Oscar watched the undertakers gently lift the stretcher over the last rail and out toward the parking lot. The rain grew heavier. He looked inside himself for a gracious retreat, for polite agreement; all he found was anger. A girl had been stripped, mutilated, and thrown away like so much garbage. He wanted to find who did it.

  “We’re keeping her,” he said.

  His footsteps clattered as he went down the stairs.

  He drove, quietly blessing the rain. The weepy dawn sky dropped a cold pall over the neglect and destruction, hiding the overgrown parks and unchecked weeds, damping down the reek of uncollected rubbish dumped on unswept footpaths, filling sore-like potholes with water. The sky looked almost solid: oystershell to the west, slate to
the east, cobweb curtains of rain ahead—gray on gray on gray. The city had once been quite beautiful, but three years had made such a difference.

  Three long years. A long time to hold a grudge, Oscar had to admit. After hitting the girl on Gray Wednesday, Oscar took a week’s personal leave. By the time he was back and Jon was out of the hospital, the investigation of Geoffrey Haig had formally ended. Haig had no doubt learned about the bug, and knew that Oscar had been inside his home. Oscar knew Haig hated him to the marrow.

  “Left,” Neve said, jolting Oscar back to the present.

  She had a street directory open on her lap but was staring out the passenger-side window. He could feel her ire bouncing against his own, like the same poles of two magnets repelling each other. Rain fell harder, drumming on the roof like an endless exhalation. Ahead, he caught glimpses of the city, glass towers all but shrouded by the downpour. The drabness they passed was briefly relieved by a blue banner across a half-finished building: THATCH CONSTRUCTION. People were building again. Maybe there was hope.

  Neve indicated a side street.

  “Here. This one.”

  Oscar turned the wheel.

  Lucas Purden lay on a mattress in a squat house, desperately waving pot smoke that didn’t exist out of the air. He had clearly forgotten what drug he’d taken but knew he’d taken something, and—seeing badges—had enough capacity to know he’d better hide the fact. Purden was twenty or twenty-one. His eyes were a dull brown, and the earrings in both lobes were a dull and dirty silver. His skin was greasy. His blond hair, stained jeans, and green collared work shirt all bore an oily grime that said they hadn’t been washed in weeks. And, Oscar noticed, he smelled. But then so did the whole squat. Luke was the only person in it; the other residents had cleared out the moment a police car—even a weary, unmarked sedan like Oscar’s—turned into their street. They hadn’t bothered to alert Luke.

  Despite his theatrical flapping, Luke had forgotten that his fly was unzipped; Oscar and Neve had interrupted what was clearly enjoyable leisure time. Neve looked away from the metronome waving of his erection and knelt beside him, just out of arm’s reach. She sent an unhappy glance at Oscar. He ignored it and nodded—go ahead. She sighed and turned to the grubby boy.

  “Lucas Purden?” she asked.

  “Guh,” Purden replied. Oscar could see the boy’s eyes were glazed, his pupils almost as large as small coins.

  “We’re here to ask you about the girl. You found a girl last night, Lucas, in the number-one auger pipe at your work.”

  “No.” Purden nodded. “Yeah?” He shook his head. “Guh.”

  Neve looked at Oscar. He made a circular gesture with his finger—keep going—and began to look around. Aside from the mattress, there was a line of old school lockers against one wall, and a stereo chained to a sink pipe.

  “How did you find her?” Neve asked.

  Purden licked his lips and tried to look composed.

  “Light. Light the pipe. Not light the pipe.” He began to giggle and tried hard to stop it. “Light on the pipe. Red warning light. On the pipe. Flipped.”

  “What flipped?”

  “We flipped!” Purden giggled more, nodding. “Flipped a coin. To go out. Me and Mister Bruce.”

  “Your supervisor?”

  While Neve quizzed the young man about whether he saw anyone on his trip to or from the jammed auger, Oscar inspected the locker’s door. On it was written, “Lukes. Dont touch. Privat!” The style was childish, and the letters’ component lines and curves were shaky. Oscar looked at the boy—his hands vibrated in a slight but uncontrollable palsy. Purden hadn’t made the fine scalpel cuts they’d seen on the dead girl’s abdomen. Interestingly, though, there was a circular bandage stuck on the boy’s neck.

  “Luke, give me your locker key,” Oscar said.

  “Locker?”

  Oscar tapped the locker, and Purden’s eyebrows rose in surprise, as if he’d never noticed the six-foot metal cabinet next to his mattress.

  “Five seconds, Lucas. Then you’re under arrest. Four.”

  It took three of those four seconds for the message to sink into Purden’s brain, then he fumbled quickly in his pockets. His penis flailed as he hunted for his keys. Neve picked a spot on the far wall to stare at while the ruddy member waved like a drowning man’s arm.

  “Here, here.”

  The boy passed the keys to Neve, who took them in a delicate pinch and passed them to Oscar. The locker door groaned. Inside was a damp pile of pornographic magazines with heavily worn corners, three empty bottles of roll-on deodorant, a small Vegemite jar containing only a dusting of cannabis, a glass pipe with a blackened bowl giving off the sweet chemical snap of Delete. Oscar pushed them aside and looked inside a shoebox. It held mostly junk retrieved from the bottom of the plant’s filter box: a cheap silver earring, a broken watch, a foreign coin, a medal from a school’s running race … but one thing caught his eye. A packet of Fentanyl patches. Fentanyl was a powerful painkiller—it was used in lollipops issued to combat soldiers. Quality analgesics like Fentanyl were as rare as truffles and almost as expensive, far beyond the economic reach of a slow-witted boy who worked in a sewage plant. Oscar opened the packet. Inside were a dozen sealed medicated patches just like the one on Purden’s neck. A small fortune’s worth.

  He showed the pack to Lucas. “Where from?”

  Purden’s euphoria had dulled, and his eyes slid like marbles in oil. “Mine.” His voice was groggy.

  “How did you afford them?”

  Purden licked his dry lips and smiled.

  Oscar knelt beside Neve and loosened Purden’s collar. Another two patches were stuck on the skin of his upper chest.

  “Mine,” Purden repeated, on the edge of sleep. “Come on.”

  Purden’s half-open eyes glazed, and a snore rattled through his nostrils. His penis held bravely high.

  “We’ve lost him,” Neve said, and stood. “Maybe he found some jewelry that was actually worth something and went to town on it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Take him in to the watch?” Neve asked.

  Oscar shook his head. “He’ll be raped.” It was the simple truth. The watchhouse was understaffed and overcrowded. Oscar pulled out his business card and dropped it on the snoring boy’s chest.

  His car started on the third try.

  “I can fill in the report,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Her tone was curt.

  “Home?”

  “Church.”

  “Really? You don’t want a shower first?”

  She looked at him.

  “You smell a bit,” he explained. “We both do.”

  “It’s Saturday.” Her words were edged with ice chips. “It’s a working bee.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll need directions.”

  Hunched pedestrians scuttled like beetles over the wet roads, heads down. Oscar felt a little embarrassed that he’d been working with Neve for more than a year and he had no idea where she worshipped. But then he had no idea where anyone worshipped anymore; the faithful had become a rare and reclusive species. In the weeks and months immediately after Gray Wednesday, houses of worship enjoyed an enormous influx of congregants petitioning their brand of God to remove the blight of the ghosts. But when they discovered that prayer did nothing to shift their personal dead—who were, it seemed, immutable evidence of a joyless afterlife—congregations plummeted. Churches, temples, and mosques steadily emptied. It wasn’t the same everywhere: in North America, Canada’s Mennonites swelled in number and bulged down into the United States, rubbing heatedly against Mormonism, which had shifted and adapted and spread up to Pennsylvania and down to Tijuana; in Africa, a resurgence of animism stretched from Senegal to Mozambique; Norway had all but closed its borders, and whispers from Sweden reported mass sacrifices to Odin. But most of Europe had turned its back on gods old and new, and languished in economic depression.

  Neve directed him over the river into a section o
f town that had gone through a strange circle of life. Before the Second World War, this area had suffered a reputation for ruffianism and black marketeering; then it became a rich larder of multiculturalism with the influx of postwar migrants; then a third shift to gentrified exclusivity; finally, after Gray Wednesday, it underwent a swift devolution to its original state. A hundred times in the past year Oscar had tried to persuade Neve to move to a safer suburb; a hundred times she had refused. He understood now that she refused to abandon it. She held hope that, one day, her suburb could be resurrected.

  He slowed at the huge white Catholic church on the hill. Its grounds were a battlefield of broken bottles and garbage; its stained-glass windows were long gone, replaced with scorched and bullet-pocked boards and tin. “Not this one,” she said. “We’ve lost this one.”

  She directed him through narrower streets to stop outside a tall brick fence. The brickwork was recent, and on its top course upturned broken bottles were set in mortar to deter fence-climbers. A stout, plain gate sat in a neat architrave.

  Neve didn’t get out. She remained silent and still for such a long moment that Oscar wondered if she was waiting for him to say something.

  “Look,” he began, “let’s just get the autopsy—”

  “You can come in,” she said primly. She looked up at him. A frown rode her forehead, and her mouth was a pink knot. “If you want.”

  He stared at her. “In?”

  Pink flushes appeared on her cheeks. “It’s just a working bee. No prayer. You don’t have to pray or anything.”

  He tried to think what this all meant. “Um …”

  Neve looked away, embarrassed, and fumbled for the door latch. “Never mind.”

  He watched her go to the gate and knock, not a typical rap-rap-rap but a coded staccato tapping. A moment later, the heavy gate swung open, revealing men and women in jeans and work shirts in front of a tiny, old wooden church with scaffolding around its small spire. A young man broke into a smile when he saw Neve and kissed her chastely on the cheek. Oscar felt jealous little wings flap inside him. Stupid. Of course she’d have men interested in her. But what arrested Oscar was Neve’s expression. She was smiling. He wondered if he’d ever seen her do that; it was as surprising as stumbling across a previously undiscovered portal that opened to a new and fascinating world. But then Neve seemed to remember something. She turned to glance back at Oscar, and her smile fell away to a more thoughtful, troubled look. The gate swung shut, severing the stare and returning Oscar to the filthy gloom of the street.