BiteMarks

by Drew Cross

  “After you then, son.” The older officer gestures towards the rusted metal rungs leading upwards with a sweep of his arm that is fast enough to hide the slight shaking of his hand. He watches the younger man as he enthusiastically bounds up to the door and knocks, then radios in for an ambulance and a scientific support van. He finds himself mesmerized for long moments by the particles of rust and faded wrought iron paint that fall like black snow from the staircase, dislodged by heavy footfalls. He has no desire to see what waits inside the flat but since the lad is still banging on the door and shouting through the letterbox, he mounts the stairs, heartsick with leaden unwilling legs.

  “I'm not getting a response from inside, Gary.”

  The younger man takes a quick glance up at his tutor constable, unused to using his Christian name, the word feeling clumsy and unnatural in his mouth.

  “Well then in we go. You remember your section seventeen powers of entry?”

  “Yes.”

  Gary holds up a hand before his pupil can start rattling off the lengthy legalities verbatim. Training school drills in the words, but only experience gives them any meaning he'd already said more than once.

  “Just open the door, James, somebody's badly hurt or may be dead in there.”

  James tries the handle first, not a completely lost cause then, Gary observes. He'd had others who tried to knock down doors that were completely unlocked before, and one who'd dislocated his shoulder charging a metal safety door.

  James gives the door a firm shoulder but it stays rigidly in place, and the more experienced man waves him aside. He moves into position and steadies himself, then drives the hard sole of his boot against the wood just below the lock, splintering the timber at a weak point and forcing the door open.

  “That's considered polite in these parts, it stayed on its hinges.”

  The weak joke does little to relieve the tension.

  Unable to contain himself any longer, James rushes in, pushing the first of three doors open.

  “Hello, are you okay?”

  There is no reply from the empty lounge.

  “Try the bedroom. It'll be the door on the right at the end.” He doesn't complete the thought – the one with the blood spattered window.

  Maybe the lad has less sense than he'd been credited with a moment earlier after all, or maybe the ability to think through your actions, to observe yourself from distances with something like detachment, comes with advancing age. Gary, not usually a man prone to introspection, has the sudden strange thought that this detachment might signify his soul pulling gradually away from his mortal body and reaching out for the next life.

  Perhaps the growing certainty of your own death is what makes you begin to be afraid again in the face of human carnage as your police career advances towards its end.

  The younger officer runs back past him in the narrow hallway, barging him aside with a well-muscled shoulder; hands clasped tightly over his mouth. Gary absorbs the blow, sags against the wall for momentary support and then heads for the bedroom. Somewhere behind him is the heavy wet sound of vomit falling from height onto foliage.

  Blood in quantity has a characteristic smell. It is metallic and cloying, lingering on the palate, splintering sharpness in the back of the throat, with a tendency to return later on to remind you of that fragrance. 'Beat' Officer Gary Hankinson has seen a lot of blood spilled in twenty five years of service, glassings, stabbings and horrific suicides where they'd slit their own wrists and throat and then run around the house in a panicked moment of clarity before collapsing. He can't remember seeing this much in one place before though.

  The scene is morbidly fascinating, a blood spatter analyst's wet dream; arcing sprays across the walls and high ceiling in dry red-brown bands and thick black gelatinous blobs all over the bare wooden floor. There is a neat bloody hand print on the bedside table like a signature, all my own work it seems to say. The woman's throat is torn wide open, most of the cords ripped through to leave a dark yawning chasm, and she lays in a deep red swamp, naked and smeared in scarlet fluid with sightless eyes.

  Gary finally turns away and gags once, composing himself and swallowing back the sour acid tang before walking back out into the daylight. James is still hanging over the rusted railings, spitting the taste of the room from his mouth and wiping his streaming eyes with a wrinkled sleeve.

  “I took the liberty of calling it in for SOCO before we went in, on account of the blood in the window.”

  James looks back at him stupidly, before replying in a ragged voice “I've never seen anything like that before … you won't tell people that I was sick will you?”

  “I think maybe their noses will tell them first, but no I won't. Welcome to the real world in all its glory, son.”

  Three more years until retirement and the bottle. The Scenes Of Crime Officers, SOCO, are now formally referred to as Crime Scene Investigators, CSI. Rumor has it that baseball caps and hooded jackets will be finding their way into the CSI uniform soon. Since a good number of the department are approaching their more senior years and sporting a little gray on top, there's been both animated humorous discussion and open hostility towards the news. Some are saying that they should welcome the chance to cover up thinning silver hair, but the general consensus is that baseball caps and hoodies are for the kids committing offenses not for those employed to catch them. Maybe that's a problem, maybe that's the problem.

  David Barrow, the senior CSI in charge of Central Divisions major inquiries, slips into an extra large 'smurf' suit – one of the white hooded all in ones worn over the clothes when processing a scene to avoid contamination.

  'Big Dave' is a giant of a man, with a giant reputation to match his stature. Six feet seven inches tall and three hundred and twenty pounds in weight. He is possessive of an intelligence of expression that advertises his nimble mind and fast tongue. Woe betide anybody who compromises one of his crime scenes.

  “So once you'd finished trampling your size nines all over my evidence and throwing up all over the place, what else did you do?” Dave addresses the rookie probationer first, expression serious but mischief sparkling in his eyes like stars on calm lakes.

  “How did you .... ?”

  “How did I know that you'd been sick? Easy, you look like a soft lad, the sort who might blow chunks at the sight of a bit of blood. And besides plants don't usually excrete their own bile.” He turns to the woman coming down the hallway. “Sharon, could you arrange to take some prints and hair from officer sick-bag for elimination purposes?”

  Watching the giant man squeezing in through the doorway chuckling softly to himself, James dully realizes that the big man was only joking.

  The processing of a bad scene is unceremonious, interspersed with coffin humor from the Forensic Examiners, Pathologist, Undertakers and Detectives who see these atrocities more often than anybody should have to. The uninitiated often confuse the jokes at a crime scene with callousness and a general lack of respect for the victim. They couldn't be more wrong, though. Nobody cares more about the dead and abused than the 'smurfs' and 'kidders' – terms of endearment for the CSI and CID, Criminal Investigation Department, respectively. These are the people who put aside their own emotions, ignoring the need to eat and sleep in order to catch the creatures that maim and kill other peoples loved ones. They pay for their devotion with years lost from the ends of their lives, taking the ones who get away with them to their deathbeds as if they're somehow to blame. Photographs of the body in situ first.

  “Hold that pose, darling. Right got it, lovely, lovely.”

  The Pathologist arriving to certify death, since only a qualified Doctor is legally permitted to declare a person dead, no matter what the condition of the corpse.

  “Any initial thoughts?”

  “Cut herself shaving perhaps, Dave.”

  Two old friends sharing familiarities in a room inscribed with all of the pain of life and death. Lifting the body, head, hands and feet bagged to
preserve trace evidence.

  “Might suggest this one to the wife.”

  “What?”

  “The blood loss diet, guaranteed to take pounds off in seconds.”

  Laughter necessary here, feeling good albeit slightly too loud, the relief required when you spend your days amongst the mutilated and your nights hoping that they don't decide to revisit you.

  Outside the old cop and his young pupil are long gone, on to the next incident now, law enforcement makes no allowances for its servants and their feelings. Over the coming hours and days, Gary will deflect the younger man's attention away from the realities of what he has been so eager to witness for himself. The younger man will in turn begin to forget what he has seen, although he will recount the details in Technicolor for friends and family alike, spouting bravado that does not stand up to close scrutiny since that is what is expected of him. On the occasions when the bluster intrudes upon his effectiveness, Gary will quietly and subtly rebuke the behavior; but will forgive the lapses as they were forgiven of him two and a half decades earlier.

  * * *

  Every second kid you meet in this fucked up world is pierced and tattooed, scars marring the wrists like pink bracelets, and sleeves rolled back to show off the slashes like trophies of parental failure and defiance combined.

  Some might be proud to be bitter and twisted, but not me. I remember being that boy, nine years old and bleeding by my own hand, wishing that I'd never been born. I believed that I was the only person who had ever cut themselves in this way, and I kept the wounds secret, ashamed to be in existence and afraid of what they signified. I felt like the loneliest boy in the world.

  Over time my feelings changed as I returned to the pain again and again, each new agony allowing me to feel alive and renewed.

  Each time the exquisite release swept through me like a tidal wave; the running blood reminded me that I was still human, that in the creeping absence of other feelings and the fog of numbness, I could still feel something even if it was only pain. That's the part that most people don't seem to understand, that you learn to enjoy the sensation of your skin parting beneath the blade, that if you try to stop you begin to feel the itch of need building up and quietly insistently demanding release.

  It took a while, but I finally realized that I wasn't cutting because I wished I was dead any more. I was cutting to remind myself that I was still alive.

  When we first met him, Will's everyday attire had been composed more of holes than of actual material, and a plethora of bruises running an impressive array of shades from palest yellow to deepest black, ran in columns along his limbs and torso. Will had blamed his father when asked, until the night that the police had come and dragged 'the bastard' screaming and flailing across the saturated lawns of half the neighborhood, then locked him in the caged rear of their van.

  Will's mother's jaw was broken in several places, and she was admitted for treatment of those fractures and for the bruises and puncture marks left by her husband's teeth, that adorned her face and neck. Apparently, 'the bastard' had decided that whatever her latest indiscretion had been, it warranted a special kind of cruelty. His punishment of choice had been to make his treasured wife sit silent and still whilst he disfigured her with a series of bites. Will had sat in the next room on the telephone to the police, quietly sobbing out this latest act of sadism to the kind concerned voice on the other end of the line whilst praying that he wouldn't be discovered.

  The prison sentence would prove to be relatively substantial, but his mother's stay in hospital was only fairly brief. When Will returned to school a full week later on, he was complete with a fresh new design of bruising that made him clench his teeth with each step; we realized then that we were all he really had in the world.

  Meg's never ending and never questioned supply of money had seen Will's rags replaced with suitably Gothic clothing of his own, and more recently, tentatively applied make-up was starting to creep into the equation. Will beginning to mimic my own black nail polish on the middle finger of each hand and eyeliner encircling each dark eye. We heartily approve of his ongoing transformation, and with that acceptance some of his tics have vanished over time.

  We take it in turns to drink late into the warm afternoon, gradually feeling the wearying effects of the poison entering our systems. Laying on my back I trail magnet heavy limbs through the dry feather whiskers of long grass, idly contemplating how alcohol is much like every other drug, in that it seems to pervade the entire being with apathy, leaving the user only able to muster up the enthusiasm to continue abusing its subtle toxic charms and little else besides. Little by little we succumb to the muddled sensory experiences of drunken oblivion; and as we do the conversation starts to lose its playfulness as bitter emotions start to surface.

  “My Dad, right? Yeah, my Dad's a complete fucking idiot.”

  Meg's voice is thick and wet with the drink. “He doesn't know what love is, the bastard.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  By the sounds of him, Will is not far behind her in the inebriation stakes, but at least he can still speak. My tongue, in comparison, lays marooned like a dead whale on a bed of sand inside my mouth. The mere thought of attempting speech produces a wave of nausea and exhaustion that makes me want to lay down and sleep right where I am.

  “Doesn't matter, don't want to talk 'bout it, but 's jus' way it is.”

  Meg's speech is becoming even more labored and fractured, she takes another swig from the flask before handing it on to Will.

  “S'jus the way of the adult word … world?” Will is joining her now, losing track of his own thoughts, brow furrowed in deep concentration and eyes starting to orbit and drift away.

  “Mine dun't even know whom I'm am.” I slur badly, realizing how I'm just as bad as the other two right now. My vision starts to shift a little on its axis, the whole field starting a slow revolution to the left, picking up speed as I fight the movement. I close my eyes to block out the rapidly accelerating spinning, but I can still feel everything rotating behind the closed eyelids, and the sickness is starting to take shape in the depths of my churning stomach.

  A senseless and wordless prayer is forming inside me, causing a small ironic inner sneer in the small part of me that is not yet entirely paralytic. How did I get from moderately merry to absolutely devastated and out of control in such a short space of time? Saliva is becoming more copious now, flooding my mouth as my gorge rises and falls starting a practice run for the main event.

  I hear the synchronized sounds of male and female retching close by, and open my eyes in time to see the blurred forms of Meg and Will hunched over and traveling past my face at high speed. I am the first to start feeling better as my body rapidly finishes evacuating much of what I have eaten and drunk that day. I move over towards Meg and take hold of her hair, holding it away from the pooled vomit in a loose ponytail. She stops spitting after a short while and leans in to me turning her still beautiful face up to mine.

  “He wouldn't do it if he loved me, would he?” Her expression is exposed and imploring, I'm not used to seeing her like this and the effect is jarring.

  I hold her in close trying to absorb the pain and whispering words of comfort, as I realize with a jolt where she gets her never questioned sums of money from, payments for her silence.

  * * *

  I've been knocking on the front door for ten minutes or so now, glancing up at the purple BMW outside once or twice to ensure that it genuinely isn't occupied. Finally there's movement in an upstairs window, the squeaking wood on wood sound of a sash window being lifted. An aggressive looking bare-chested man leans out of the opening.

  “What the hell do you want, white boy?”

  “Good morning to you too, I'm looking for a girl called Cristal.”

  “Tell it to somebody who gives a shit.” He leans back in and pulls the window back down forcefully.

  I start up another round of continuous knocking until I can see his silh
ouette approaching the door through the opaque glass, moving with stiff angry strides. The door swings open and crashes against the wall since he doesn't bother to halt its progress. I recognize him as one of the hangers on who was in the room last time I visited. A surly Jamaican giving away a few inches in height to me but in great shape, torso chiseled to masculine perfection.

  “Hello again, you took your time getting down here. Did I wake you?”

  “The spider man told you not to come here again unless you got a death wish, white boy.”

  “My name's Shane. Address me as white boy again and you'll be picking up you're shattered teeth with broken fingers. Is Cristal here?”

  He starts to answer the question and then registers the threat, anger moving in a fresh wave of hostility over his face. He jabs a solid finger into my chest, eyes sparking dangerously as he starts to speak. “You'd better think about who you're talking to … ”

  He doesn't get to finish the sentence, when somebody snaps your finger mid speech it tends to upset your train of thought like that.

  “Motherfucker!” He is holding his finger aloft as if it were some rare prize, gritting his teeth and grimacing against the pain.

  “Now I've got your attention are you going to answer my question?”

  “She's here.” The reply coming from a deep accented voice in the gloomy hallway behind Mr Surly. Antony Jones and Levi Bennett standing there with Cristal between them looking stupid eyed and out of it.

  “Hi there, lady. I've come to see how you're doing after your swift and premature exit from the hospital.”

  “She's fine.”

  The reply from Bennett, I ignore him and keep talking.

  “We're getting closer to catching the man who attacked you. Do you want to leave with me now and go somewhere safe?”

  Mr Surly moves across the doorway again, trying to curry favor with his employers. “She isn't going anywhere with you.”