Alien Taste

by Wen Spencer

  “Get in,” Max finally said.

  Ukiah went round to the passenger side and climbed in.

  The .45 in Max’s shoulder holster was freshly cleaned. The cigar smoldering in the ashtray was cherry-flavored. There was fresh oil on Max’s shoes from when he stopped to refuel the Hummer. These stenches did nothing to mask the reek of his fear. Ukiah hunched miserably quiet on his side of the truck, afraid to break the silence and yet hating it.

  Max wrenched the Hummer through a tight U-turn and headed across town.

  “How did you find me?” Ukiah finally asked.

  “Tracer. I was feeling paranoid so I tagged your jeans.” Max tapped his laptop sitting open beside him, its screen scrolling GPI maps matching the streets they were roaring down, still dutifully marking Ukiah’s position.

  Max was silent for a moment, then in more of a statement than a question asked, “There was someone else in the woods, wasn’t there? You went back to check them out.”

  Ukiah nodded. “How did you know?”

  “A call from the police got me out of bed about an hour ago. Someone killed the coroner on duty and snatched the woman’s body from the morgue. Apparently the FBI has gotten involved in this for some reason. They called the hospital to check on your status—and found out you were missing at the three A.M. bed check. Missing woman. Missing private detective who killed her. Police called me to see if I could shed some light on this coincidence. I activated your tracer and you’re running around Schenley Park in the frigging dark.” Max pulled off his baseball cap and swatted Ukiah with it. “What the hell were you thinking!”

  At least this was the Max that Ukiah was expecting. This was the Max he knew. “I needed to study the trail before it got ruined by another rain.”

  “You need to get your head examined! Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have let me out of the hospital.”

  “Damn right!” Max snapped. “This isn’t our normal case of find the kid snatched by his loser father or a stupid messed-up runaway. Something big and ugly is going on here, Ukiah. I ran a check on the girl—Dr. Janet Haze had a top-secret clearance. They don’t give those to whacked-out drug users. Even if they did, we’re talking cum laude from MIT. You don’t make grades like that while messing with drugs. I watched the recording, and she’s tripping deadly on something and acting pretty surprised about the matter.”

  The light ahead changed to red, and Max slammed the Hummer to a stop. He turned to glare at Ukiah. “Someone slipped her something really nasty. Someone snatched her body, all her body parts and even her blood samples. The night-duty coroner happened to be in the way, and from what I gather, someone messed him up good before killing him. And what are you doing? You’re chasing after that damn someone without a gun or backup or even one fucking person who knows that you’re not safe in the hospital!”

  “Sorry, Max.”

  “Sorry won’t cut it because it won’t cut it with your moms when you get yourself killed. Sorry, Jo. Sorry, Lara. I dragged your child out into the big bad world and got him killed. That will go over just great.”

  Ukiah hated it when Max treated him like a kid. He hated it more than anyone else treating him like a kid—maybe because Max had been the first to treat him like an adult. Somehow Ukiah never saw one of these “that was amazingly stupid” speeches coming. Things would be going fine and then suddenly he’d be jerked back to the wrong side of the kid/adult line.

  “I promise I won’t do it again,” he said, meaning it. “If I feel the need to chase after someone, I’ll carry my gun and I’ll make sure I have backup.”

  “That’s what I want to hear,” Max grumbled, geared down to first, and started out as the light changed. “The police said, when I found you, I was to bring you down to the coroner’s office.”

  “Why?”

  “Actually, they said there or the police station, and the station seemed too close to being arrested, so I opted for the coroner’s.”

  A McDonald’s was coming up on the corner. At the sight of the sign, Ukiah’s stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. “Can we pull through the drive through and grab something to eat first?”

  Max didn’t answer, but veered hard into the McDonald’s parking lot. Three minutes later, they pulled out, with Max eyeing the pile of food on Ukiah’s side of the Hummer. “Hope you don’t regret that when we get to the coroner’s.”

  There was mass confusion at the morgue. Max announced their arrival to the first uniform they saw, but the man shrugged and directed them inward. “From the sounds of it, the FBI wants you.”

  Even if the path to the killing hadn’t been clear, Ukiah could have found it by following the smell. The last door opened to an autopsy room in complete disarray and splattered with blood. The body of a middle-aged black man was huddled in the far corner, his lab coat soaked red by his blood. The damage reminded Ukiah of a wolf pack kill: the gut ripped open, the intestines pulled out, the blood-gorged heart and liver eaten first. Parts of his face were eaten down to expose white bone.

  Max cursed softly, an obscene chant that often called on his God, who apparently didn’t mind having his name taken in vain.

  “You two the private detectives I wanted to see?”

  It was a voice like Mom Jo used on the wolves, a strong steel voice that demanded an answer. They turned to face the young woman bearing down on them. Compactly built, she came only up to Ukiah’s chest. She projected strength without the little yap-dog frenzy that Ukiah found in a lot of small people. She wore a torn heavy metal T-shirt and worn jeans that fit her snugly. Most of her hair was short and glossy black. One of her forelocks, however, was twice as long as the rest and dyed a vibrant purple, and hung down over her gray eyes. She turned to one of the forensic people to indicate that they could go, and flashed Ukiah a look at her .357 pistol in a kidney holster. She turned back to the private detectives again, flipping the violet hair out her eyes. She was in her mid-twenties, but had the air of someone in complete authority.

  Max eyed her blue jeans, T-shirt, and dyed hair. “I didn’t hear that the agency had gone casual on the dress code.”

  “I was working undercover,” she stated in a feminine version of “just the facts” impassiveness. She took out her FBI ID and flashed it at them. “Special Agent Indigo Zheng, Pittsburgh field office.”

  “Maxwell Bennett, Bennett Detective Agency.” Max had his hands in his jeans pockets and didn’t bother to take them out to shake—a sure sign he was in a bad mood. “This is my partner.”

  Max paused for a beat to let Ukiah introduce himself. Max insisted on Ukiah giving his own name; “establishing a strong presence,” he called it. They practiced it until it was smooth, but Ukiah would rather let Max do the talking.

  “Ukiah Oregon.” Ukiah shook hands like he was taught and left Max to deal with the agent. In the name of learning, Max had once gotten Ukiah into an autopsy, so he was faintly familiar with the layout of the room and the procedures that the coroner would have followed.

  The first step would have been to draw blood samples. Ukiah found the vials labeled JANET HAZE scattered across the appropriate table. They had been dusted for fingerprints and left, so he felt free to pick one up.

  Tiny sharp teeth had gnawed through the rubber top. Four hairs lay almost invisible inside. He tapped them onto his hand. They were—mink fur? No, something close to a mink, some animal related to it. The teeth marks matched that of a mink cousin. The strong musk odor coming from inside the vial also confirmed that it wasn’t a mink, but something close. He eyed the small glass cylinder with its gnawed-open top. Mink and weasels were common in Oregon’s Umatilla National Park where he ran with the wolves, but at a morgue in downtown Pittsburgh?

  The second step would have been to remove the vital organs. He found the neatly labeled, semirigid bags, but they too had been gnawed open. This time it was apparent, at least to him, that the damage had been done from
the inside out. In the organ bags were more minklike hairs. He noticed this time the lack of blood. There was no residue, no blood cells, no organ cells—only the stray hair. He studied the labels. Janet Haze, heart, weight 3.4 pounds, extreme damage from advanced viral infection noted.

  She had been sick? He checked his memory and found only black holes. He sighed and examined the vials for blood traces. They had the same lack of residue, yet the labels stated that blood had been placed inside. He doubted that it was a case of labeling the vials and bags prior to use. The dead coroner would have been under pressure to do it by the book. He theorized that the mink cousin had licked the bags clean, but there wasn’t any sign of saliva.

  So someone had dumped the bags of their contents, washed them well, and then sealed animals inside. Yeah, like that made sense!

  Mystified, he studied the room. The first true sign of blood was two feet in front of the vital organ table. It belonged to the coroner—he assumed, then caught himself. It didn’t belong to Dr. Janet Haze. The subject had been male, black, and mature, so maybe it did belong to the coroner. There were faint traces of drugs in the blood, ones he recognized from experience to be heart medication.

  More blood of the same type splattered the floor in increasing amounts, leading to the coroner’s body.

  The coroner had died slumped against a wall, knocking a ventilation grate askew with his last struggles. His feet almost touched the table where Dr. Janet Haze would have lain, cut open and gutted. In metal trays were the dissection tools: large knives, bone saws, and one small circular saw to cut open the skull. In a steel bowl were two twisted lumps of .45-caliber bullets.

  He found countless little footprints in the pool of congealing blood, trampling over each other until they had become a blur. Here and there, though, he could pick out individual prints. He used his pinkie to measure the prints. Five. Six. Maybe seven individual animals. Over and around the body they had gone, tearing and eating. But where had they gone? They had to have gone somewhere. He felt the hair on the back of his neck lift slightly; the whole situation was creepy. He ran a hand across the apparently clean section of the floor, hoping to hit a blood trail too faint to see.

  Agent Zheng walked over and placed a foot in front of his searching hand. “Is this some version of good cop, bad cop? Talkative PI, silent PI?”

  He leaned back on his haunches to look up at her. The foot had been a firm “stop it,” but there was no anger in her face or body. “I don’t talk much.”

  They regarded each other. She had a strong face, sharp lines, and hard angles, tightly composed to neutrality. Only her large eyes were slightly readable, and they seemed narrowed in vague suspicion. What had she and Max been talking about? Ukiah reviewed their conversation and found that someone had also broken into police evidence and stolen everything held there. Their recording from his head camera was the only shred of evidence left on the case, and she was concerned whether it was safe from theft too.

  “I was told,” she said, “that you left your hospital bed sometime after two A.M. Since I was already here at the morgue at 2:15, it’s doubtful you had anything to do with this murder.”

  “I can’t believe you’re considering my partner as a suspect!” Max snarled behind Ukiah. “We were called in by the police without a clue as to what was going on. Mr. Oregon was almost killed by your top-secret scientist, and was confirmed in the hospital when this murder happened. How dare you try to stick the blame on him?”

  “The facts remain,” Agent Zheng replied quietly, “he killed Dr. Janet Haze and he left the hospital in the middle of the night.”

  “He’s got seventeen stitches in his left arm and five in his neck! The shooting was self-defense. And what if he did leave? There’s no law that says you have to stay in the hospital once checked in.”

  Agent Zheng ignored him. “Mr. Oregon, will you please explain to me yourself why you left the hospital?”

  He considered what to tell her. At least part of the truth seemed safe enough. “There was a man and a woman in Schenley Park. The man was at the crime scene before my backup arrived—they stepped onto his footprints, not vice versa. He didn’t actually come close enough to touch either one of us, but he did walk around our bodies. Then he moved off and was joined by the woman. They wore leather jackets and boots common to bikers. They ran to the edge of the park where they had two motorcycles, Japanese high-performance machines, the man’s a nine hundred and the woman’s a six hundred.”

  One of her eyebrows lifted. With someone else, the gesture would have been unremarkable. In her, it was a shout of surprise. “How do you know this?”

  He hated lying, but he’d learned there were limits to what people believed. “When I came to, he was there, but I was too faint from blood loss to tell anyone. When I felt better, I went back to track him.”

  “Your head camera will confirm or deny this.” Was it a warning or a question?

  “I don’t know if he’ll show up on the recording,” Ukiah said. “It was dark and raining, but I could sense him moving around. You can hear a black dog walking in the woods at night, but you can rarely film him.”

  “I see.” She showed no hint of believing or disbelieving him. “And were you able to track him?”

  “Not far. Their wheels were muddy, thus leaving tracks, but the mud eventually gave out and I lost them.”

  “Any other questions?” Max interrupted, motioning to Ukiah to get up. “Come out to our truck, and I’ll make you a copy of the disc now. Then, if you don’t mind, Mr. Oregon has had a rough twenty-four hours, and I should take him home.”

  She considered them, first Max and then Ukiah, with her somber gaze. “No more questions for now.”

  Coroner personnel were waiting at the door as they exited. Agent Zheng indicated that she was done and they could remove the body. Max led the way back through the morgue.

  Ukiah found himself in step with Agent Zheng despite his longer legs. He wondered if she believed him, if she was suspicious of him still. What did she feel? Why did he care? Why, for that matter, was she even involved in the case? “Agent Zheng, I don’t understand why the FBI is involved. This is a straight murder case to be handled by the local police, isn’t it?”

  “Not completely.” Agent Zheng gave him another measured, unreadable look. “Doctor Haze worked for a company with several ongoing top secret projects. A month ago, her immediate superior was killed and Doctor Haze took over his position. We think his death was accidental, but there were some suspicious details and the case is still open. We had our net filters scanning all law databases for anyone connected to the company, and it alerted us when the police filed their initial reports.”

  “What I don’t understand, why was a doctor living with three college students?” Max asked.

  “Janet Haze only recently received her doctorate,” Agent Zheng said. “She had been roommates with the other three for the last four years.”

  They emerged from the dim building into the parking lot. The cement was still damp from the night rain. It glistened in the bright morning sun. The police cars were gone and the Hummer squatted alone, waiting unmolested for their return.

  “A Hummer?” Agent Zheng studied the truck. “How does a small-time detective agency afford one?”

  “Good fortune in a previous life,” Max grumbled, remotely unlocking the truck. Opening the driver’s door, he leaned in and slotted a blank optical disk into the computer.

  “Previous life?” Agent Zheng opened the passenger door before Ukiah reached it, leaning in to eye the Hummer’s interior. She waited for an answer, but Max rarely talked about his life before becoming a private detective. “You have it loaded for bear.”

  “I like it that way.” Max ejected the copied disc and held it out to her. “I made a copy of the disc yesterday and gave it to the police, but I guess that’s gone. What’s here in my truck is a copy too—the original is in a secure place. Myself, Mr. Oregon, and the agency’s lawyer know how to access
the original.” Which meant it was in the floor safe at the office. “Now, can you let Mr. Oregon in so I can take him home?”

  She stepped back, turning to let Ukiah into the Hummer. She gazed up at him, and he thought he saw a sudden wistfulness in her gray eyes. She held out her hand. “Mr. Oregon.”

  He took her hand and they shook firmly. “Agent Zheng.”

  He got in and shut the door, fastening his seat belt out of habit. Max started up the Hummer and they pulled out of the parking lot, leaving Agent Zheng standing alone.

  It was a long drive from the morgue back to Ukiah’s moms’ place. Usually Ukiah liked the trip; it let him unclutter his mind of useless junk before rejoining his family. The day before, however, still contained choppy flashes of memory. He could tease nothing new from the time after he woke wounded in the park. There remained only the morgue with its grisly puzzle, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it.

  Max stayed quiet until they hit I-279 north, running up out of the city. Then he glanced over at Ukiah. “You okay?”

  “That was really, really scary, Max.”

  “What, special Agent Zheng?” Max snorted. “Don’t let her get to you.”

  Ukiah shook his head, running his hand repeatedly down the back of his neck in an effort to get the hair to lie down again. “The stuff in the morgue. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It looked pretty gory. So what did you find?”

  Ukiah shrugged, having no idea where to start. “Janet Haze was really sick when she died. All her organs had extensive damage to them due to viral infection. Or at least that’s what the coroner noted on the organ bags.”

  “Oh Jesus, I wonder if she was working on a germ-warfare project. Maybe we should get you checked out. If she was exposed to something nasty, you could have been too.”

  Ukiah pondered his own body. “I don’t feel sick. Hungry again. And I could use a nap, but I’m not sick.” A memory came to the surface—her room filled with K’NEX toys and books on robots. “Anyhow, she worked in robotics, not biology.”