The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  That morning she filled her thermos with the remaining coffee in the station’s pot, then got in her car, waving to the cars driving past her on the off chance they waved back. She’d almost made it to the gas station to buy her paper when the radio crackled, the dispatcher calling, “County to Thirty-Four-Four.”

  She picked up the microphone. “Four, go ahead.”

  “Meet your complainant at Club Transmission, eight hundred block of Cardinal Way for a parking violation.”

  “En route,” she said, hanging the mic. She pulled into the gas station lot and turned her car around, heading the opposite way.

  * * *

  Mr. Darren was a large man whose bright red suspenders always accented whatever shirts he wore. White, short-sleeved button-down shirt with a tie? Red suspenders. Tattered blue T-shirt with a pocket over the left breast? Same suspenders. He was prone to make frequent complaints to police regarding the properties he owned all over town, and in all the times Carrie had dealt with him, she’d never seen him without them. As she pulled into the gravel parking lot of Club Transmission, Darren thumbed his suspenders as he waited for her by the front door.

  She drove her patrol car up alongside the entrance and said, “Morning, Mr. Darren.”

  “Hiya, Carrie. Can you get that van out of here for me? I want it towed.”

  Carrie turned to see the van parked at the far end of the lot, backed into one of the spaces in the last row. “Unfortunately, this is private property,” she said. “If you want it towed, you’ll have to call them yourself.”

  “And pay for it myself.” He scowled.

  “Yeah, at least until the owner comes to pick it up. How long’s it been here?”

  Darren squinted at the van. “We were closed yesterday, so at least since Friday. I figured somebody got lucky and went home with his new friend, if you catch my meaning. I was hoping they’d come get it out of here by now.”

  Carrie tapped the steering wheel with her thumbs, rolling the situation around in her mind. Any other time, she’d have said good-bye and driven off, but Mr. Darren was a well-known businessman with good connections throughout the township. There were certain people whom it paid to go the extra mile for, and he was one of them. Besides, she liked that he never asked. He just stood there, thumbing his suspenders, waiting.

  “Tell you what. I’ll go run the tag and see if I can find the owner.”

  He patted the side of her car and said, “Thank you so much, young lady. I will be sure to let Chief Waylon know you helped me out.”

  “That works,” she said, dropping the car into drive. She cruised across the lot toward the van and got out, looking it over as she circled. She saw a black speck on the passenger window, and then another, and they were moving.

  Flies?

  The van seemed to buzz from within, as if its speakers were thrumming with static feedback. As she rounded the van’s rear corner, she saw deep crimson droplets on the grass. The droplets grew bigger as she approached the rear doors, forming a dried puddle beneath the bumper.

  It’s paint, she told herself, then stopped and looked at it again. Red dye? Leftover Jell-O shots the bartender dumped in the grass. Has to be.

  She bent down and peered closer, deciding it could possibly be blood, maybe from a deer. She looked out at the highway, thinking how the van might have come around the corner, struck a deer, and pulled into the lot. The driver, probably too freaked out to drive after that, had called for a ride. There were deer carcasses littered up and down the highway. It happened all the time.

  She reached for the van’s back door and wrapped her fingers around the metal handle, giving it a quick twist and pulling, telling herself it was nothing even as the black cloud of flies burst in her face, sending her leaping backward, swatting.

  The stink of rotting meat and offal filled her nose and mouth. Her eyes burned from bleach fumes and methane gas, but she forced herself to look. Even as her mind struggled to calibrate the immensity of horror spread out before her, she forced herself, with burning eyes, with clenched teeth, to look. And it could never be unseen.

  * * *

  “You seriously touched the handle with your bare hand?” Harv Bender asked for the third time. “A key piece of evidence at the scene of a homicide, with your bare hand? Please tell me you’re joking.”

  Carrie stood at the center of the crucible while activity swirled all around her. Paramedics stood off to the side, leaning against their ambulance, not speaking. They’d come running after she reported finding a body, racing down the highway with lights and siren. Their tires squealed as they rounded the corner into the parking lot. They parked and jumped out, carrying their medical bags and oxygen tank and defibrillator. She watched them hurry past her. They stopped at the van’s open doors, staring in mute horror at the contents inside.

  Someone had strung yellow caution tape around the van at Harv’s direction, and he was talking on the phone with the on-call district attorney, loud enough for everyone to hear. “We haven’t touched a thing. Well, except for the back door. The cop who took the call fingerbanged the back door all up before we could process it.” His eyes flicked toward her, and he turned away, saying, “I have no idea why. I’ll make it work, though. Somehow.”

  A dark Crown Victoria turned into the parking lot, and Carrie’s heart sank. She could barely look up as Bill Waylon parked behind the long line of police cars and walked toward her. Carrie leaned back on her police car, knowing what had to be done.

  “What do we got?” Waylon said.

  She turned to him and said, “I screwed up, Chief.”

  His face shifted in surprise. “How?”

  “I touched the back door,” she said, flapping her arms in frustration. “I screwed up the crime scene. My first homicide, and I screwed up the crime scene.”

  He looked at her, and then at the van. “This came out as an abandoned car, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you see inside it when you got here?”

  “No. But I could see something red on the pavement. I should have known better. I just wasn’t—”

  “What?” he said. “Expecting to find a body in the back?”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s a wise old expression that goes, Experience is something you get five seconds after you need it. We’ll work it out. Grab your camera. Let’s get to work. Did you get a positive ID on the decedent yet?”

  Carrie glanced nervously over her shoulder. “I told them I didn’t touch anything else.”

  “I don’t care what you told them. I’m asking.”

  She leaned close to him. “There was a wallet with a driver’s license inside it. It came back to the owner. The tattoos on the dead guy’s arms match the ones in his mugshots.”

  “You couldn’t just tell from his face?”

  When she didn’t respond, Waylon walked around the van and peered inside the rear, looking over the open doors and blood smeared across the back bumper. He saw where blood splotches had dried on the pavement and trickled down into the grass, trampled by dozens of boots from all the cops who wanted to get a look. Word had spread about the body, and cops from five surrounding jurisdictions were doing nothing but standing around. Waylon snapped his fingers at two of them and said, “You and you, expand this crime scene tape twenty feet in every direction. Everybody else, get back and stop stepping all over my evidence.” He reached in his pocket for his phone and tossed it to Carrie, saying, “Find Eddie Schikel’s number and call him. I want him and his crime scene wagon here ASAP. If his boss asks, I’m paying the overtime.”

  Harv Bender strolled to Waylon’s side, his voice sliding like oil when he said, “Hey, Bill.”

  Waylon looked to see the officers stringing crime scene tape around the van’s new perimeter and made sure everyone was moving back. He called out, “Double that. I want a nice clear field for the crime scene team to work in. Everybody back up!”

  “Listen, I just talked to the on-duty DA,
and he said to sit tight while he figures out if we need a search warrant,” Harv said.

  “We don’t need one.”

  Harv rolled his shoulders back, like a boxer warming up for a fight. “Yeah, why don’t we just go ahead and wait a few extra minutes on them before we call in any of your buddies from out of county. Regardless, we have our own crime scene people, and it looks bad if we go outside our own, you know what I mean?”

  Waylon turned to him. “We do not need a search warrant, because the owner of the van is dead, Harv. He has no right to privacy. That’s basic police work 101.”

  “I’m just telling you what the person with the law degree said, Bill.”

  “And I’m telling you we don’t need one,” Waylon shot back. “Now I realize your nose is buried so deep in the district attorney’s ass that when you sneeze he whistles, but let’s get one thing clear. This is my township, and I make the calls, is that clear? I think I’ll rely on my thirty-five years of doing this instead of some dipshit fresh out of law school and a deputy chief detective who never cleared a single homicide we didn’t hand him.”

  Harv backed away from Waylon, looking around to see who had been listening. “Handed me? Yeah, right,” he said. “You wish! Hey, try not to let any more of your people put their hands all over the crime scene, okay, Bill? Great job in training them, by the way.”

  Carrie came up beside her chief and handed him his phone. “Schikel says he’ll be here in forty-five minutes. He said forget the overtime. Something about a set of testicles being worth a hundred crime scenes?”

  Waylon ignored her comment. “When he gets here, have him print you. We’ll send your prints up to the lab along with whatever else we find. That way they can eliminate you and the victim.”

  “Aren’t my prints already on file?” she asked.

  “I don’t have time to wait for some state police mail clerk to dig them out of a filing cabinet. I want a one-to-one comparison done ASAP that eliminates you and searches for a suspect match.”

  Carrie told him she’d take care of it as soon as Schikel arrived and then stood with him looking at the van. “Hey, what did he mean about the set of testicles, Chief? Was he talking about Krissing? There was always talk that you and Rein castrated him when you arrested him.”

  “Jury ruled otherwise. It was just a freak accident,” Waylon said.

  “Oh, of course. I know that,” she said, not wanting to sound accusatorial. “Hell, not that anybody would have blamed you.”

  “Let’s focus on the situation at hand, okay?” he said, heading back to his car. “See if you can manage not to touch anything else, if that’s not too much trouble.”

  She watched him walk toward the cops stringing up the crime scene tape, telling them to move it back even farther, into the woods. The stink of bleach and decomposition was almost more than she could stand, but she forced herself to breathe it, refusing to show any more weakness. When the time came for someone to go into the van, she was volunteering.

  * * *

  “I would like to buy an I, please,” the Tyvek-suit clad man said from inside the van, his voice mechanical through his mask’s respirator. “I’ve got an E and an A, but has anyone seen an I that I can buy?” He chuckled, ducking down to look under the seats.

  Carrie leaned in and looked at the ceiling, trying to see through the misty shield of her mask, wishing she could wipe away the layer of fog that appeared every time she breathed. “What’s that?” she said, pointing at an object stuck in the far corner, where the sidewalls met the roof.

  Eddie Schikel turned and looked, duckwalking through a pile of intestines to reach into the rear corner of the van’s ceiling and pluck the small lump stuck there. He pried it loose from where it had dried and turned it over in his gloved hands, saying, “Hey, you found my eye!” He turned toward her and held the smashed orb up to her face. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  Carrie half grinned as she took it from him with one hand and opened the thick, red biohazard bag with the other.

  “Make note that the optic nerve is cut clean through,” Schikel said. “Looks like tool impressions on both sides of the eyeball.”

  Carrie looked down at the ruined lump of flesh in her hand, fascinated by what she was seeing. There were lined grooves in the white meat surrounding the green and black discs of the dead man’s eye, as if someone had squeezed the white flesh of a hard-boiled egg with a pair of pliers. The dangling nerves were severed in a straight line. “Did he pull the victim’s eye out with one of these tools and cut it free?” she said.

  “Yep,” Schikel said.

  “Why would he do that? To keep it like a trophy? If he wanted it so bad, why didn’t he take it with him?”

  “Maybe he thought the eyes were staring at him? Some kind of crazy schizophrenic shit, or something. I don’t know.” Schikel looked around the cabin at the gore surrounding him and said, “If I had to lay money on it, though, I’d say he wasn’t taking trophies. He was just ripping this poor bastard’s eyeballs out.”

  Carrie dropped the eyeball into the bag and sealed it, saying, “Along with everything else, apparently.”

  “Whatever he could get his hands on. I’m going to need more bags. Can you tell Bill to grab them out of my truck?”

  “Sure,” she said, stepping away from the van. She took deep breaths as she walked farther from it, able to tell the difference between clean air and the chemical horror inside the van, even through the respirator. She found Waylon standing at the edge of crime scene tape and said, “We need more red bags.”

  “What sizes?” he said.

  “Anything you can find,” she said. “I’m not sure what he’s taking and what he’s leaving for the coroner. I think he wants anything that’s been cut, or yanked out. The coroner’s getting whatever’s left.”

  He looked at her, leaning down to see her face through the mask. “You need a break, kiddo? I can have someone else suit up.”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped.

  “No, you’re not fine. You’re in there looking at a mutilated dead body on a Sunday afternoon when most girls your age are out at the mall, getting their nails done, or whatever. I’m not asking if you’re fine, I’m asking if I need to order you to take a break.”

  “I’m good, Chief. I’ve got this,” she said. “I’m working the case. This is what detectives do, right?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, backing away from her toward the crime scene van. “Most of the time we sat around staring at buildings, trying not to fall asleep. Listen, I’m pulling you out if you start to get wobbly.”

  “Would you be saying that if I were a guy?” she called out. “Instead of some silly girl that was supposed to be getting her nails done or some shit?”

  “No,” he said, considering her question. “But then, if you were a guy, I wouldn’t care if you felt okay or not, either. Kind of like reverse-reverse discrimination, I guess.”

  “Probably because you think of me as the daughter you never had.”

  “I have two daughters.”

  “But not like me,” Carrie said, smiling through her mask.

  “Well then,” he said, “maybe there is a God.”

  * * *

  The individual bags had all been set inside cardboard evidence boxes and labeled with the body parts stuffed inside them. Some, Bill Waylon could make out. R EAR, L EAR, TONGUE, TEETH, ASSORTED INTESTINES, and so on. He stopped when he saw one group of boxes, squinting at the writing on them. “Penis tip?” he said, looking at Eddie Schikel. “Just the tip?”

  “Yep,” Schikel said, wiping a towel across the back of his neck. He picked up a bottle of water, poured it over the towel, and draped it across the top of his head, relieved at how good it felt. “Stem of penis down to the circumcision scar,” he said, pointing at the first bag, then pointed at the next two and said, “Root of penis, base of penis. I’m not sure about the exact medical terms for each and every section of a guy’s cock. That was the best I could come up
with.”

  Waylon ran his fingers through his gray hair, feeling queasy. He looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone, then said, “Jesus. I’ve heard of somebody cutting off a dude’s dick before, but whacking it into pieces?”

  “Sliced it up like a cucumber, Bill. I’m traumatized. I won’t be able to go near a vegetable tray for a long time.”

  Bill turned and looked over his shoulder at Carrie. She’d stripped down to her sports bra and pulled the Tyvek suit down to her waist, trying to evaporate the layer of sweat covering her body. She was guzzling a tall bottle of water, pretending not to notice the leering looks from the cops standing behind the perimeter. “How’d the kid do?”

  “She did good,” Schikel said. “Even when she looked like she was going to puke in her mask, she stayed put.”

  “Good. I’m going to need all the help I can get on this. God knows the county isn’t worth a squirt of piss anymore.”

  They stood there, surrounded by bags and boxes containing pieces of a dead man, Schikel giving his friend time to absorb it all. He looked past the chief toward Harv Bender. Two more men in suits had arrived and were circling the perimeter like sharks following the scent of blood.

  He glanced at Bender, then said, “I’m going to have to hand this over to those idiots. I just wanted to delay it a bit and remind them of their place, is all. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Who do they have that’s good up there now?”

  “Nobody. Not anymore,” Waylon said.

  Schikel wiped his arms down with the towel. “Have you talked to him recently, Bill? Any word on where he is?”

  Waylon looked off into the distance.

  “I was thinking that maybe if you asked, he’d be willing to take a look at this for you. For old time’s sake.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Waylon said. “And I wouldn’t ask.” He looked at the boxes once more, then turned toward the county detectives and called out, “You guys going to stand around all day, or do you feel like getting some work done?”