Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  “Pretty…ugly…”

  The air turned colder as his gaze found the lighted desk. It wasn’t just blood he’d smelled. Blood’s always at a scene, in coagulated pools scabbed at the limit of their flow, the dazzling dark ruby and plum of blood, in shadowy nimbus haloing a head, sopping clothes, looking to soak before drying up. But no experience had prepared him for this sensory abundance, the whole spectrum of a big body’s interior on shameless display: the iridescent pinks and purples of spongy flesh, the plentiful yellow fat like custard, jellied things, the suffusing rank tang infused with the smell of human waste.

  He forced his gaze away from the desk and looked up to where the black MYCROFT bots like regimented spiders were finishing a tight fibre grid a foot below the ceiling. A burst of electromagnetism from the sun, as had happened two years before in the Lobos’ warehouse, and the bots would crash the once uncontaminated, supposedly secure site. Then where would forensics be?

  Kevin smiled, half-expecting to see a shuttle bisecting the warp and weft of the photonic array.

  He shivered, but didn’t know whether it was from the increased chill or a gut aftershock. He needed to get his bearings.

  He took in the oddity of the spiral iron staircase twirling from floor to ceiling in the corner back of the desk, like half a double helix into the dome. So that was the access to DeLint’s Button. Could he risk asking Frank to decommission the two SWISS guards that hovered atop the stairs at a trap door in the ceiling? Two? Talk of backup! The SWISS weren’t infallible in their assessments. He’d once caught only their shoot-to-dissuade laser in his right knee and been sidelined for a month. Still hurt like hell when it rained, only then luckily.

  He looked down. The floor around the desk was like an explosion at an illegal organ-bank operation, an explosion followed by — sniff-sniff — yes, a fire.

  Then greedily taking in what was left of DeLint, it was something else again, his mind factioning… Little girl Kelly offering the messed baby Bill to him, held by the armpits, his diaper full and manacling his ankles, shit everywhere, Cyn out with friends on a rare break, but bad timing, he was too busy for this. Chronologically impossible, Bill’s the older… Then Cyn chopping onions with a big knife and really crying because it’s right after the vasectomy he’d not discussed with her (he couldn’t afford more distraction)…then dicing beets…working DeLint over…with a machete. Madness. Perfect. Someone sure had. That head had been cleanly severed. Reports saidthat the new Tonton Macoutes were at the machetes again in Haiti. DeLint had spent time there. Two of the Widower’s victims were connected to DeLint in Haiti (Santo Domingo was a beard). DeLint maybe another beard, the killer’s, the Widower’s. The remaining body still sitting in the chair had been deeply sliced and diced so that the torso was almost unrecognizable as human, intestines worming like fat umbilici.

  To control his revulsion Kevin twisted a joke that was familiar in the capital, saying it loudly over his shoulder to Frank:

  “Trouble with Eugene DeLint, he’s everywhere!”

  “That’s Huge-Gene all over,” said Frank from closer than Kevin had expected.

  “That’s good, Frank, Huge-Gene, where’d you get that?”

  Frank was silent.

  “Earlier today Kelly called him Eu-genius. You two working as a comedy team now or what?”

  “Kevin, my breakfast was almost everywhere when I first saw this. After the last Lobos–Rock Machine war, I’d thought no one could top those boys when it came to butchery! Remember the dead four-foot beardo propped against his bike — we thought it was a midget biker! Then we found his thighs in the saddlebags.”

  Kevin indicated with his chin: “What’s with the spiral stairway to heaven?”

  Frank had come alongside. “Ask no more, Kevin, I remind you. Strictly off-limits. Hell to pay.”

  “We’ll talk about that. For now —”

  “Oh no we won’t. You won’t, for now or ever again.”

  They were uneasy in the mess, which was exceptional for them.

  Macro Media was so free projecting graphic violence in UD (über-definition) into the nation’s family rooms (most in 3D, with some experimental holos) that law-abiding citizens believed they really knew something of the criminal desecration to which a body can be subjected: from re-creations of parboiled flesh for the delectation of suburban cannibals; to shots of frosty-eyed freezer-preserved heads for the contemplation of some hamlet’s unsleeping beast; to illustrated tales of children kept alive for days while being hanged intermittently on hooks, variously burned and violated — with hair dryers, curling irons, barbecue starters — the more banal the settings and instruments of torture, the higher the ratings. Whatever familiar tool could be made strange by a psychotically resourceful neighbour, whatever insult to hopeful human love issues from a black brain — all of it got beamed into homes courtesy of Macro Media and Macrodocs for display on wall-size monitors.

  Having grown accustomed to such lifelike visuals, viewers had reason to believe they’d seen it all. And they had, though they also hadn’t. Seeing may be believing, but mistakenly so. Seeing was only part of experiencing. For the viewing masses didn’t know what big-time blood and guts smelled like and felt like underfoot, the fetid stickiness of it everywhere, that suction that wants you more deeply involved in the crime, even implicated. The bittersweet complicity of one’s own summoned blood and vomit.

  When Kevin turned his head this way and that, the smell of warm life gone cold and sour varied in intensity. Or he imagined a variance. Good, that imagining.

  Look, there, the floor on the far side of the desk: a struggle had taken place at the foot of the spiral stairs. DeLint had fought with his killer…who then got carried away with the job, obviously. So the killer was emotionally involved.

  Messages in blood, bloody words whose patterns were being decoded by MYCROFT even as he stood there, analyzed for displacement, for density, even for olfactory properties at the molecular level. MYCROFT would soon tell them how tall, what weight, and what route the perp had traced and retraced; speculate reliably on sex and age; on what make of shoes were worn, maybe even when and where they were purchased. With the aid of its REIMAGINE program, MYCROFT could see through mess to pattern, to conclusion: AN ALTERCATION OCCURRED BETWEEN TWO MEN. One of the participants was this much taller and heavier than the other; such a pelvis strides so, distributes weight so, slides to this extent before regaining balance: therefore two males of these probable ages. Etc. Etc. Etc. MYCROFT might speculate on the perp’s physical condition, but only Kevin Beldon knew from criminally sick. Only Kevin could wonder at that stride pattern in the floor’s blood, imagine the slipping and sliding and grappling right up to the base of those spiral stairs, where — yes — a serious altercation had occurred…

  Although he gave the desk a wide berth, still the hard soles of his brown oxfords were sucked at. Pieces of flesh — rose and white, lots of fat, with lashings of blue — were scattered about like something spat out by a demon. Even a far windowpane was smeared like the first swipe of a windshield wiper on smashed tomato.

  Somebody sure had lost it. But why go to the spiral stair? Who was waiting there? Was he going up or coming down? What had he said that upset the killer?

  Approaching the desk again, he was reminded of the burnt smell, an odour of wet cigar ash. He wanted a smoke. He kept his eyes on the floor, and as he shuffled nearer the desk, leaving a ski trail in the mess, he noted that some of the carnage looked singed black at crisped edges.

  Finally he gazed at the intact head in the big black wok, its milky eyes staring straight up — yes, as if to penetrate the Dome. He tasted the rotten air and looked again at the desk. The hand of Eugene DeLint’s detached left forearm still held a pen on the sopping writing paper. On the chair a shelf of intestines half a foot high, like varicoloured sea anemones. Kevin’s hand came up, reaching for nothing.

  �
�Don’t touch, Kev!… Uh, MYCROFT’s not finished with the body yet.”

  Kevin Beldon needed no such order: he never touched the body. He’d done so only once, at a pharmacy robbery gone badly wrong. He’d cupped the cheek of a dying salesgirl, whose eyes stared vacantly as they clouded over and her white top blushed deeply. She’d had the finest auburn eyebrows and lashes. She’d taken the stabbing for some mild drugs, a big bag of all-dressed chips, and a packet of cheap condoms. The bout of insomnia had lasted a month. He couldn’t sleep with Cynthia. On his study’s leather couch in waking dreams he was touching her, the salesgirl, Cyn, everywhere; she was made of heavy deep-sea sponge, sopping blood, she couldn’t be dragged away, it was a police college test for firefighting and he was failing…flailing as he came awake, his senses drenched in salt, the smell of the store’s vitamins and nauseating perfumes sickening him till he retched nothing. He would have killed the first person he met. Until he came fully awake.

  That had been some twenty years before, during his first stint as detective inspector Homicide, only months over from staff sergeant Missing Persons. He’d been chewed out at the next day’s collective briefing for contaminating the scene (touching a body). Two weeks later, he tailed too openly and fouled up an operation against the Lobos. He was demoted to sergeant and partnered in a cruiser with the only Asian on the force at the time, Fourth-Class Constable Frank Thu (the only one who would have him, Kevin had suspected), who’d graduated from the Aylmer police college the same year as himself.

  Frank had snorted by way of welcome back to the squad car: “Rookie thinks scene’s a vid game.”

  Kevin, uncomfortably trying to get comfortable in the shotgun seat: “Fuck off, Frank.”

  And they were partners.

  They became friends, then close friends. Eventually in the times they spent together — which soon included their families socializing — Frank complained of racism, and Kevin saw no reason to contradict.

  But not long after their partnering they’d been on surveillance, and Kevin advised: “Interrogate the father and mother together, Frank, not separately by the book. Lie that the father’s mother has accused the wife.”

  Frank knew of Kevin’s uncanny successes in Missing Persons, which others begrudged and dismissed. He paused with the Styrofoam coffee cup at his mouth and stared across the steering wheel. “So the father and mother are the torturers and murderers of their own five-year-old daughter? That’s why they couldn’t stop crying on Macro and begging the abductors to release her? Just out of curiosity, what makes you say so, Sherlock?”

  Kevin flipped open the leather notepad Cynthia had given him when he’d been promoted to detective inspector. “The mother has no friends, no one has visited or called, neither relatives nor neighbours, and the mother in such a business always has more visitors than she wants. The father’s only so-called friend described him as a pussy with everyone but his wife, whom he bullies and abuses. Our prime suspect, the neighbour with the porn collection and women’s clothing, whom our father not-so-subtly fingered, is being secretive only about the special parties he attends, which his wife already knows about, you could see it between them. The mother of our dead child hates her husband and hates her mother-in-law for what she did to him, and now has done to her too.”

  Frank had acted nonchalant, but still hadn’t sipped his coffee. “And just how do you come to know all that, former Detective Inspector Beldon?”

  “You saw and heard same as me, Frank. Wanna make Ottawa’s first and fastest Asian-Canadian detective inspector ever? Try it as I say, if only to piss off Sergeant Otto Parizeau. Go over his head.”

  “Big Ot?” Frank smiled. “Avec plaisir.” Then finished his coffee in silence.

  He suggested and explained the interrogation strategy to the stumped lead inspector on the infanticide investigation. When the parents were brought together after lengthy separated sessions and subtly egged on, a fight erupted between them and the mother soon told where to find material proof that the father was the murderer.

  Frank was promoted at the next opportunity and, with Frank’s support, Kevin was eventually back in Homicide as detective inspector.

  Frank had then moved rapidly through the ranks, though he’d stalled for ten years at superintendent. It was again racism had made his appointment to deputy chief long overdue. Frank had never complained publicly. Kevin had, which was the one time he’d found the union useful. Still, no one was more surprised than Kevin when, with what would pass for administrative alacrity, Frank was appointed chief of police.

  As he’d moved up the ladder, Frank had requested Kevin on the most important cases. Despite Kevin’s success at crediting his superior with solving the crimes, he’d acquired a continent-wide reputation among law-enforcement cognoscenti. The article in Criminel about his so-called factioning had made his investigative work more difficult. So on high-profile cases he worked through others, hanging around the scene perimeter and relaying his instructions to whatever front man Frank had read the riot act to.

  But that continuing distance from scenes eventually dulled even Kevin Beldon’s wits. Mistakes mounted. Then his high-profile failure on the Widower had crippled him: the conflict of Kelly’s seeking the search warrant, the flimsy evidence, Judge Mender’s dressing down, the appearance of Kevin’s having personalized official business, his wife’s suicide. With no resistance marshalled by union shop steward Otto Parizeau, administration had forced a medical leave. Frank shouldn’t have bothered fighting it. Kevin had felt finished. Till this morning.

  He withdrew his hand from the aura of DeLint’s mangled torso. He sniffed twice and spoke just above a whisper: “What do we, or mighty MYCROFT, make of the burnt smell?”

  “No certainty, old partner. Some acid compound MYCROFT has only partially identified so far, and like I said, probably a sedative too. By the way, Beldon, just so you know: officially it’s still the chief’s case, mine. You’re consulting.”

  Kevin pinched his mouth. “He must’ve been eating those pistachio nuts by the fistful. There’s your delivery method for the acidic sedative…Chief. But why acid? The sedative first to set him up. But obviously acid’s not what killed him. That head’s a helluva clean cut. The rest,” he gestured around, “was overkill. So emotional, a personal relationship.”

  Frank stepped up beside him. “What could have led to this?”

  Kevin smiled. “The mystery, old chum: not what but who-dunit?”

  “Funny.” But Frank was not amused. “You’re saying someone laced the nuts with drugs as a prelude to this, to make him suffer?”

  “Has MYCROFT made the murder weapon a machete?”

  “What? Don’t fuck with me, Beldon.”

  “Short of a guillotine, only a very big and razor-sharp knife wielded by an expert could have decapitated DeLint this neatly. He was sedated, more asleep than awake at the end; something, someone, not the actual killer, who’d have stood behind him, got DeLint to lift his head for the machete cut. Machete killings are big in Haiti again. DeLint had a Haiti connection.”

  “Haiti? But if you’re right, then it’s international, and we’ll have to notify UNSecure.”

  “Don’t. It’s local, Frank. Very local, an inside job.”

  “Give, Beldon.”

  “You noticed Omphalos security on the way up? Some of those boys and girls used to be part of our own elite Primoguard squad deployed exclusively for events on Parliament Hill. It would be all anyone’s life was worth just to knock twice at the front door of Omphalos — don’t I know it — forget making it all the way up here.”

  “An inside job.”

  “Deeply inside, very high up. Try that scenario on mighty MYCROFT.”

  “You just wait, smart guy, and see what MYCROFT tells us about his nuts.”

  “More than my curiosity is aroused, Frank.”

  Frank laughed. “Don’t make me
puke, Beldon! Can we go back now, you heard Big Ot? It’s one fucking grievance after another with that asshole. He’s had a grudge against me and you ever since the day I pulled him off the Wid — … Well…”

  Frank turned away from the mess, and from old habit they retraced their trail in single file.

  From the front Frank said, “Am I safe with you so close behind me, Beldon? You never did explain how you knew so much about gay orgies way back when.”

  Kevin said, “Frankly, dear Frank, your ass ain’t what it used to be.”

  “So, you once admired it? I’m touched, if not literally, and that’s an order.”

  “Oh please, don’t wiggle, my vomit reflex still has a threshold.”

  At the door Kevin pinched Frank’s jacket to hold him back, and was all business: “But emotional killing or not, why such an elaborate getup just to off one man? Given that Omphalos security was easily breached by the killer, whoever pulled this off could have walked in here any early morning, choked DeLint, and caught the next plane to Pyongyang.”

  “So it’s personal…and some sort of ritualistic killing.”

  Kevin looked at Frank with the slight surprise of renewed respect. “Good. Keep talking, partner. I repeat: why go to all this trouble? Look at me, Frank.”

  On the threshold between bright hallway and dim office, Frank had no trouble meeting Kevin’s gaze and letting himself be held by it. It was an old routine of theirs that helped Frank voice what he already knew but couldn’t lay his tongue to.

  Kevin selectively used the technique only with cooperative witnesses. He’d learned it not at the Aylmer police college, and not later in his criminology courses at the University of Ottawa. He’d learned it from watching his Mammy talk with troubled friends and neighbours. Listen, lean forward, touch lightly, encourage with a squeezed forearm, respond empathetically, imaginatively, helpfully. She was better than a therapist, and free. Troubled acquaintances left Mammy’s table much lightened and believing they’d done it themselves, or not knowing what had happened, or, if perceptive, knowing they’d met a very special soul. In time Kevin had recognized her method as charity, even love, which she could express for just about anyone, including his father, which he never could.