Tank takes a look around the big office, leering like he's getting a blank check for special favors. His fellow cops cheer and whistle and roar with laughter, even the three women standing around. It's not so much a sexist thing. These people have no love for super-humans, and they hate "foxes" like me even more. They figure we're obstructing justice and covering for our own kind.
Which doesn't seem like such a stretch to me after today, I gotta be honest.
"So what's this favor you need from me?" Tank narrows his eyes and strokes his waxy mustache. "What's important enough to make you waltz in here--after the shitty way you treat me 99.99 percent of the time--and ask for my help?" He looks around at his buddies and shakes his head at how brazen and stupid I am.
I shake my head right back at him. "I can't tell you here. Not in front of everybody."
"So you two want to get me alone?" The douche smirks like a twelve-year-old smart-mouthing his teacher in front of the class. "Just the three of us in a room together?" His tone oozes innuendo, and the crowd responds with a round of whistles, howls, and laughter.
Hericane takes a step forward, and I throw out my arm to hold her back. I warned her how it would be with Tank, but I guess she's had her fill.
Too bad. If either of us effs up even the slightest bit, the douche will shut us down and cuff us. He'd be within his rights, and he knows it.
"You've got some big balls, you know that?" He paces in front of us, glaring like a drill sergeant. "Walkin' into my house after treatin' me like your bitch for how many years, expecting me to kiss your ass!" He stops in front of me and shoves his face up to mine so our noses are a hair's breadth from touching. "Well guess who's the bitch now?" He makes sure he says it loud enough for everyone in the office to hear.
And they do. They go wild with laughter and cheering.
But while they're doing that, I grab the collar of his sports coat and yank him toward me. Then I whisper in his ear, just loud enough for him to hear me over the ruckus.
"How would you like to be the cop who takes down the Protectorate?" That's what I tell him. "Because that's the war we're fucking fighting right now. And if you help us, you get the glory."
I let him go then, and he bobs back from me. His eyes lock with mine, and I watch his expression change from surprise to disbelief. He's wondering if he heard right; he's wondering if I'm serious. Because I just told him I'm going to give him his dream come true.
I nod without the slightest flicker of hesitation.
At which point his expression changes to a grin.
"All right then." He raises his eyebrows. "Let's go somewhere a little more--private--" The crowd hoots and howls again. "--and see what you ladies have to offer." Again with the whistles and catcalls.
So he leads us out of there, strutting like king of the pimp daddies, and we follow, two super-humans--one the mightiest woman in the world--giving control to a mere mortal douche. As if we have any choice. As if we have anyone else to turn to in this desperate hour.
Which probably makes this the sweetest moment of his life, I'll just bet.
*****
The douche never stops posturing, so it takes a while to tell him the story. But he's interested, I can see it in his eyes. He's drooling like Pavlov's dog.
He'll give us what we want. Later, if we live through this, it will suck to be us, because he'll milk it for all it's worth...but here and now, he'll take us where we want to go.
The morgue, in other words.
"So I was right all along about the Protectorate. And you were wrong." That's what he says as he leads us downstairs. "I love it."
"Congratulations." I'm staying close to Hericane, keeping my eyes peeled. I know how I'd react to what we're about to see.
She just walks along with a blank expression on her face, unreadable. If there's any turbulence going on inside, she doesn't show it.
"I always knew those so-called heroes were dirty pieces of shit," says Tank when we get to the bottom and start down a dark hallway.
I know we're at his mercy, but enough's enough. "You do realize one of us is a hero, right?"
Tank stops and looks back at Hericane like he forgot she was there. "Well, present company excluded, of course."
I get up in his face and lock eyes with him. His breath smells like putrid bacon. "And you do remember what it is we're about do, right?" I push a little closer; I need him to get the message. "Maybe you could show a little sensitivity for once in your life?"
His eyes drift, and I start to think I'm gonna have to paint him a picture. Then he focuses back in on me with a tough glare, and I think he doesn't have any sensitivity to begin with.
But he surprises me. "Sorry." He leans around me and looks at Hericane with an actual sincere expression on his greasy face. "Sorry." Then he whips around and marches off down the hallway. "This way, please."
I shrug at Hericane and follow him. An apology from the douche. Will wonders never cease?
He stops at a door midway down the hall and pushes it open. Surprise again, he actually holds it for us as we walk through.
"Charlie?" He wanders off across the room and disappears through a doorway.
Leaving us to look around.
I've been here many times in my career, but this time is different. Everything is very familiar to me--the silver tables draped with sheets, the trays of equipment, the power tools. The wall of cold storage drawers, each big enough to hold a lifeless human body.
But the feeling is all wrong--darkly personal instead of all business. Painful instead of clinical.
It reminds me of the one time, seven years ago, when I was down here for Jimmy and the boys. The one time they had to drag me kicking and screaming out the door, knocking shit over right and left.
Here we are again. Only she's taking it a lot better than I did.
At least on the outside.
Still, something needs to be said before this goes any further. "Hey." I turn and meet her gaze. "If you need to step out, you step out, all right?"
Hericane frowns and shakes her head. "I'm okay."
"Be that as it may, you got nothing to prove here." I raise my eyebrows. "Nothing to prove to anyone. You understand?"
She looks past me at the middle table, where vague outlines of parts and pieces are visible under the draped white sheet. She blinks once, then twice, then nods. "Sure."
"This will suck. I don't care who you are, this will suck." Reaching out, I give her invulnerable arm a squeeze. Feels just like any other arm to me. "But you got a friend right here. Okay?"
Hericane nods, eyes locked on the middle table.
I give her arm a shake. "Okay?"
Her eyes dart away from the table and back to me. "Okay."
"Okay, ladies." Just then, Tank strolls back in, clapping his hands together. "Let's get this show on the road."
The coroner walks in behind him--an old guy named Charlie Abernathy. Sweetest guy you could ask for, been with the department since Eve ate the apple. More grandkids than there are ants in an anthill.
"Hello, Bonnie." He looks up from his stooped shuffle, peering over his Coke bottle glasses. "So very good to see you, dear."
"You, too, Charlie." Guy oughtta make me cringe, he autopsied Jimmy and the kids...but instead he makes me smile every time. What's he doing working with trash like Tank?
"Lieutenant Driscoll has filled me in." Charlie shuffles to the middle table and stops, looking at Hericane. "He says you're the victim's next of kin?"
Hericane bites her lip and nods. "Mm-hm."
Charlie touches a corner of the sheet on the table and clears his throat. "I guess you know she was pretty well obliterated. Her remains were dispersed throughout the apartment." He clears his throat again. "We, uh...we gathered her up as best we could. I doubt you'll see much that you recognize."
Hericane nods. Her eyes are locked on that sheet.
"But maybe that's a blessing, in a way." Charlie manages the faintest smile, and then it's gon
e. He pulls up the corner of the sheet and keeps going, peeling it away as he shuffles from one end of the table to the other.
"Ready?" I ask Hericane.
She nods.
"Let's get this over with." I walk over to the table as Charlie flicks on the bright lights above it.
He wasn't kidding about not recognizing much. Instead of a body, there's a pile of bloody bits oozing over the length of a black plastic trough. It looks like what you'd get if you put a person through a wood chipper.
Don't know how much of a blessing it is, though.
As Hericane draws up beside me, she covers her nose and mouth against the stench, which is atrocious. Her eyes glisten with tears as she stares down at the mess in the trough--all that's left of someone she adored.
And then the mightiest woman on Earth turns away. She turns her back on the sight and sobs.
I see the douche open his mouth to say something, and I shoot him a warning glare. Don't you dare. Ninety-nine percent of what comes out of your mouth is poison, so don't you dare.
Let's stick with the business at hand. Give her time to come around.
"Have you found anything?" I ask Charlie. "Any relevant trace evidence?"
Charlie shakes his head. "Honestly, I'm not sure where to start. We've got nothing bigger than a fingertip to work with." He hesitates and looks at Hericane, then continues. "No fingernails, though, mind you. Even her dental fillings were torn out."
"Overkill," says Tank. "Big time. Payback's a bitch."
"I don't know." I crook a finger against my lips as I gaze into the mess in the trough. "I've been thinking about that. Maybe they were looking for something."
Tank screws up his face in a scowl so deep, it pulls his right eye shut. "Something inside her?"
"Why else would they tear her to pieces like this?" I say. "To send a message? Then where's the message?" I shake my head. "To make sure she's gone for good?" I shake my head again. "She wasn't invulnerable. A bullet to the brain would've accomplished the same thing."
Tank unscrews his scowl and shrugs. "Say you're right, and the killer was looking for something. It doesn't matter. We'll never know what it was."
"Does it look like they found it?" I gesture at the trough. "Maybe it's still in there."
"If so," says Charlie, "how will we ever find it?"
Suddenly, Hericane stops sobbing and turns to face the table. "I'll bet the killer didn't have 21 senses." Her voice is steady and cold, her face tear-stained but stony. "Unlike me."
I give her my best "are you sure you're ready for this?" look, and she doesn't flinch. Heroine that she is, she's pulled herself together to deal with the crisis at hand.
No matter how awful it will be.
"Excuse me," she says to Charlie. "Can you give me some kind of--instrument--to, uh..." She moves her hand back and forth over the trough.
Charlie shuffles over to a tray of tools on a nearby metal counter. He fishes around for a moment, clattering things together, and comes back with a clawed, silver utensil. He hands it over without comment.
"Thank you." Hericane looks at me like she wants me to move, so I do. She steps in to take my place alongside the trough.
Then she hesitates. Looks up at the ceiling and takes a deep breath. Like she's bracing herself.
My hand twitches. Maybe she's not ready for this after all. I start to reach for her, to keep her from doing this thing no one should ever have to do.
But before I can make contact, she leans down over the remains and begins her work.
In the field of blazing bright light cast down from above by Charlie's lamps, she gazes at the contents of the trough. Wrinkles her nose once, and then never again.
Gently, she dips in the clawed instrument and stirs the mess, moving it around. I watch over her shoulder as she turns over the lumps, training her 21 senses on them at what has got to be maximum intensity.
She rakes the tool through the bloody mush for a long time with no sign of finding anything or even coming close. She doesn't linger over a particular bit or lift anything up out of the ooze. She just keeps looking, aiming her 21 senses invisibly at the gruesome slop that used to be her lover.
After a while, it seems like nothing will ever come of this. Charlie pulls up a wheeled stool and takes a load off. The douche paces the floor, scratching his head. Even I begin to lose hope.
But not Hericane. She just keeps patiently combing the instrument through the remains, silently searching for some kind of revelation.
Would I have been able to do this, I wonder? If it was Jimmy or one of the boys in that trough? Could I have done what she's doing for even a single moment, let alone an hour?
No fucking way. I would've snapped at the first glimpse of that mess. But not Hericane.
My admiration for her grows with each passing second.
After a while longer, Tank stops pacing. "I gotta hit the head. Be right back."
He's halfway out the door when Hericane finally stops raking. "Hold on."
Tank returns to the table. Charlie gets up off his stool. And all of us lean closer to the mush, straining to see what's gotten her attention.
"Okay." Carefully, she steers a stubby object, a half-inch long, to the edge of the trough. "Forceps, please."
Charlie shuffles to a nearby tray and hurries back with a fresh instrument. He gives it to her handle-first.
"Thanks." Hericane slips her thumb and forefinger through the looped handles and cranks them apart, scissoring the hinged forceps open. Then she lowers the instrument to the trough and clamps the ridged jaws around the object she has found.
As she lifts it out, Charlie brings over a small metal basin without being asked and holds it under the forceps. Hericane opens the jaws, and the stubby object drops into the basin.
"What the hell is it?" says Tank.
Hericane raises the basin under the bright lights. Charlie hands her a pair of tweezers--again without being asked--and she uses them to prod at what she's found. "The tip of a left pinky finger."
"Without the nail," says Tank, stating the obvious.
"Which I think was what the killer was looking for." Hericane turns over the fingertip and pokes the tweezers at the area once covered by the missing nail. "Mardi Gras must have had a microchip planted under there. Which tells me that whatever she was investigating, it was pretty huge."
"Like a cover-up by the Protectorate, maybe?" says Tank.
I notice Charlie perk up a little when he hears that one. Apparently, Tank didn't fill him in on all the details before our private autopsy.
"So the killer got the chip." I start to lose hope again. "So we're back to square one."
Hericane shakes her head and pokes the fingertip again. "The chip left an imprint on the nail bed. An imprint I can read with my twelfth and sixteenth senses." She squints as she gazes at the fingertip. "Can somebody point me to a computer? There's a bunch of code we need to transcribe."
*****
Tank gets us an IT guy with a smokin' laptop, and we put him to work. Hericane reads off endless streams of numbers, and Gary the IT guy types them into his machine as fast as he can. Hericane could do it faster, of course, but her hyper-speed typing would melt the keyboard.
"This is ASCII code," says Gary. "It converts to simple text."
I stare at the laptop screen and shake my head. "I didn't know Mardi Gras was such a computer whiz."
"She had help," says Gary. "The one and only King Crypto. Dude signed his work." He taps the screen and smiles.
"An old boyfriend of hers." Hericane frowns. "I didn't know they were still in touch." Her voice trails off.
There's a moment of awkward silence. Hericane stares at the fingertip in the basin. Gary watches the screen, keeping his hands poised over the keyboard. The douche, who's sitting with his feet up on a stool, snores.
Then, Hericane shakes her head, clears her throat, and keeps reading code from the nail bed of her dead lover's pinky finger.
And Gary
keeps typing like a maniac.
*****
When Hericane finishes reading code, we head for a conference room upstairs. Only Charlie stays behind; I give him a quick hug on the way out.
Once we get resettled, Gary converts the ASCII code to text on his laptop. There's a projector on the big conference room table, and he uses it to display the results on the wall.
What we see is not a revelation at first. Just a jumble of names, places, and dates.
But holy shit. Does it become a revelation.
Tank brings in another laptop, shrugs off his sports coat, and rolls up his sleeves. Then he goes to work, searching police databases for anything related to what's up on the wall.
And a picture begins to form.
Each name identifies a missing person or a victim of an unsolved murder. Each date corresponds with a victim's death or disappearance. Each place represents a location in or near Isosceles City.
There are so many of them--name after name after name. Men, women, children, all ages, all races, all social strata. Some date back ten years or more. Others are as recent as last week. Some are known to me from coverage in the media; others, I've never heard of.
And all of them have one thing in common, one thing that jumps out at me so far. "No superhumans." If any superhumans were on that list, I would recognize them at least. Though I guess I should qualify that. "No known superhumans."
"Fifty-seven names." Gary whistles and flops back in his chair. "That's a long list."
"Jody Lynne McIntyre. Son of a bitch." Tank scrolls through a record on his laptop screen. "What a little cutie. My first case when I made detective five years ago." He stops scrolling and looks at me. "All we ever found was her head."
I never thought it would happen, but my heart goes out to him.
Gary puts all the information in a table, along with photos of the victims. When I see them on the wall like that, all those people, I burn with pity and rage.
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