Eight Black Offerings

by Lamb, Robert

  Three more flashes of light followed. Then the crime scene photographer kneeled even closer to the victim’s left hand.

  The dead girl’s wide, dilated stare gleamed in the momentary brilliance. As the flash played across her, her shadows changed. Quinn realized for the first time that her hair was not black, but dyed a very dark shade of red.

  The beginnings of a smile cracked the corner of his lips. There was something about redheads -- even when the hue was hidden from him. Even when it was fake, there was something deeper.

  A desperate fire.

  He pawed the half-pack of Marlboros in his coat pocket, then remembered he was knee-deep in a homicide. He could feel sleep gradually overtaking the chemicals in his system.

  A new set of footsteps clacked across the faded tiles. Quinn cocked his head to see Detective Abrams strolling casually in, a smirk streaking his black, pox-marked face.

  “More dead white girls,” Abrhamas said.

  Quinn returned the grin. “Yeah, they actually make you clear these.”

  He tried to force the smile to stay, but his eyes caught the mess of the victim’s abdomen again. As he stared into all that black congealing blood, his expression melted away.

  “Number five…” Abrams mused, his thin frame rocking back and forth on his heels, hands buried deep in his coat pockets. “Hell, maybe it’s a copycat?”

  “Nah,” Quinn mumbled.

  No one outside of CI knew all the details, and who could emulate something what, by its very nature, seemed to follow no set logic? The newspaper’s “stripped and partially mutilated” implied a sense of procedure that simply wasn't there.

  The press had whipped themselves into a frenzy over the last one. And this made five. The jackals would bloat themselves.

  Abrams carefully kneeled in front of the dead girl’s bare feet, neatly straddling the still-glistening blood gutter. He examined her heels, eyed the unpainted nails on her curled toes, then stared up into what had surely once been a nice, twenty-something ripple of a cunt.

  The camera flashed again.

  “I don’t even know what I’m looking at here…” Abrams said, humor draining from his deeply-lined face as he gazed at the disassembled puzzle of flesh and organs. “Jesus, what a mess.”

  “He did more on this one,” Quinn said.

  For several moments, Abrams just continued to stare into it, blinking occasionally, but not moving closer, not searching. The two men just drank it with their eyes.

  “I dunno…” Abrams said, rising weakly back to his feet. “Fucked, if I know…”

  Quinn glanced around at the rest of the abandoned community center locker-room: dead showerheads, empty toilets and only one drain drinking its grisly fill. He could feel the stagnant silence, thick in the air around them like a barrier to worlds outside, worlds above.

  Their perp had probably had as much time as he’d wanted.

  He imagined a hunched-over shadow at work in the dark, the corpse beneath already frozen in its bizarre pose. He could even hear the lonesome sounds in his mind -- sounds from the furthest reaches of what sometimes passed for human: the clink of surgical tools, panting, steel pealing back fat and gristle, scraping bone, forcing the break in ligament and cartilage. He could smell the surgeon’s sweat.

  A droplet slides down the bridge of his nose, trails a sliver of disarrayed hair and drips into his work.

  He broke his mind away from the possibilities, surveyed the rest of the empty room again.

  Number four had happened in an alleyway. The third in a parks department maintenance shed, the second in a condemned garage. The first one they knew of had gone down in a vacant housing unit.

  All in the middle of the night, all but one of them prostitutes.

  They couldn’t be sure about their current girl. Her body wasn’t visibly street-hardened, but it was still difficult to say one way or another. They’d yet to find any clothing or belongings stashed near the scene. The case was like the others in that respect.

  Abrams shook his head.

  “I hope the medical examiner has better luck with this one.”

  “He won’t,” Quinn interrupted, sniffling again. “They already said they were bringing in a new guy if we found another one -- some expert from Toronto, if you believe that.”

  “Expert in what?”

  Quinn stared down at the deep red wounds in her sex, and shrugged.

  ***

  Already vigorously rubbing her clit with his ring finger, he slid his index and middle finger back inside her as well. As she began to pant, her thighs gyrating to the rhythm, he leaned over her soft stomach and, closing one nostril with his free hand, inhaled the last, meager line of coke off the smeared glass nightstand.

  He recoiled, still inhaling and went knuckle deep in her. Harder. Faster. She moaned and tightened her fingers around his cock, then reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled. Her grip tightened even further as she made the final approach to orgasm.

  They collapsed back onto the unmade bed, her long, scarlet hair splaying out in sweaty tendrils all around them. She kissed him once on the mouth, a lingering drag of lips across lips, a taste of cigarettes and skin.

  A minute of heavy breathing passed. A contemplation of the stucco ceiling. The tips of her fingers brushed back and forth across his stomach.

  “Sorry…” Gwen said.

  “Not your fault,” Quinn said, still studying a water stain, ancient and formless, just above him. “It takes a bit of work to get me off.”

  “Well…” She moved her hand, traced the path of a swollen blue vein.

  “Give me a few,” he said, still breathing hard.

  Silence settled back between them. As their sweat began to cool, she returned to the familiar line of questioning. Her soft voice was still laced with seduction, even as she rushed right to the point.

  “What did he do to them?"

  “You’ll need a notepad.”

  “I’ll remember."

  He smiled. “Was all that off the record just now?”

  “Tell me,” she said, fingers still ghosting his skin.

  He thought about how best to word it, so as to give her a peak without exposing just how little they actually knew. One of their cell phones began to vibrate on the dresser across the room. Neither of them moved.

  “He ambushes them and subdues them, probably with a narcotic,” he said. “Then he strips them and severely mutilates their lower abdomen at a secondary location. We’re pretty sure he uses surgical instruments. The verdict's still out on the drug. It might be the cause of the death -- that or the blood loss. They're really banking a lot on this one. It’s fresh.”

  Her fingers slid into a fist around him.

  “Did he leave any notes?"

  “Nope.

  “Do they think he has any actual surgical background?”

  “There is no methodology to what he does,” Quinn said, sliding his hand over hers, forcing her to tighten her grip. “But I have copies of the coroner’s reports from victims three and four…”

  “Leaked to me by an anonymous source,” Gwen said, gritting her teeth and squeezing.

  “Yeah…” He closed his eyes, swam in the wavelength there. “Now let me show you how to help me come.”

  ***

  Eventually he did.

  He felt further and further away from it each time these days. The desire was always there, firm and aching. And yet release was always somewhere just beyond him, lost in a fog he couldn’t penetrate. If he let his mind wander long and far enough, drifting through just the right combinations of foreplay and pain, he could begin to sense the outer edges of climax. But it was always somewhere far away, somewhere that didn’t even feel like himself when he reached it.

  Intercourse did nothing for him anymore. It just made him numb -- and he felt the numbness growing more powerful each time, threatening to overcome his ability to keep up with those rare and distant climaxes at all.

  Gwen h
adn’t balked too much about what it took, the time or the methods. She clearly wasn't new to all of it, nor was she squeamish about inflicting a little pain on a cop.

  Plus, she knew what she was getting in return.

  Riding high in the after-haze of sex and coke, he’d driven through town restlessly for half an hour, mostly unsure where each turn was taking him, just following the curves that felt right. He didn't speed, took every light and sign just as prescribed. He gave himself up to the road.

  Another half-hour passed before he pulled into the parking lot at the old community center on Dockson Street.

  He killed the engine and stepped out into the cold silence, lighting a fresh smoke as he shut the door. Just a hint of moisture floated in the air -- not that there was any real threat of rain.

  For the longest he just stood there.

  There was no visible life in his surroundings, just the gleam of street lamps on cracked asphalt and the swollen, outer dark. Iron bars stood between shattered glass and ransacked, empty spaces. A few blocks in the distance, a pair of headlights flashed briefly, then turned away down another street.

  Formerly industrial and bordering one of the city’s worst housing projects, this little corner of the city was, as they say, a transitional neighborhood. Contested space became uncontested, became ruin and rubble.

  He stood there and waited -- for what, he couldn’t say. The air was cold, refreshing as he sucked it into his body.

  He had dropped five butts onto the crumbling blacktop before he decided to move. Lighting up a fresh one with a cupped hand, he strolled around toward the rear service entrance to the building, stepping though tall, dead grasses, careful not to twist his ankle in some hidden ditch.

  A fine moss of graffiti covered most of the building, colorful text, scrawled cartoon lettering: “QLIPHOTHS,” “ARSN,” “4-SKINN.” All nonsense, all babble. The rolling service door boasted a giant red and black swastika, backwards with dots added between each spiraling arm.

  Police tape still littered the steps leading down to the rear basement doors. There was no rush to release the scene. The chain and lock were new.

  Darkness obscured all the tracks beneath Quinn’s feet. The little ID flags that had deciphered their meaning were gone. Still, he stared down and tried to remember. He thought again of the peculiar detail he’d withheld from Gwen: the victim had walked in barefoot.

  Before or after, drugged or at gunpoint -- they had no clue on the details. But there didn’t' seem a struggle.

  He stared down at those double doors.

  Quinn felt the urge to walk down the stairs, to part the yellow tape, unlock the chains and stroll through into the dark halls beyond -- to see them as she had seen them: a path of filtered moonlight trailing into black.

  He wanted to hear the sound of his own footsteps echoing through the desertion, maybe even, in his mind, hear the footsteps of that other walking behind him.

  He could picture it clearly: the killer and victim navigating their way through the maze of empty rooms; the dark sliced now and again by a streak of high-set window light. He could feel himself reaching out to touch dusty walls. Phantom specks would dance across his vision, singling the absolute defeat of visual perception as he reached the core of the old building. Its lightless heart.

  How fast would his heart beat in that darkness? How quick his breath? Even now, standing at the top of the stairs, he felt his blood pulsing. He gripped a length of the yellow tape in his fist.

  He knew he might actually do it too -- that was the unnerving part. He'd do it just so he could feel the air around him move and swell with his own dread.

  And why?

  Because you’re numbing, right? Every day and in every way… Because the fear feels like something. Even if you have to pulp it up with your imagination. Even then, it becomes alive.

  The drugs made it difficult sometimes -- not their effects, which could bring new paranoid dimensions to corner shadows and empty sky. But the meaning they threaded through it all -- that was the curse of the drugs. When life is but an arrangement of chemical highs and lows, what is there to fear in the dark? What was there to feel?

  He was standing at the bottom of the stairs now. He felt the tagged key in his pocket.

  Strictly speaking, there were no new prints to find, no more blood, no forgotten clues or unexplored avenues of hypothesis.

  He exhaled: a slow, calming breath through gritted teeth.

  He checked his wristwatch. It was 4:30 A.M.

  He stumbled up the stairs, through the grass and back to the car.

  ***

  Gloved in latex and blood up to his elbows, Dr. Kenneth Morgan gave his professional opinion with a mixture of awe and uncertainty. He gestured with his scalpel to his ongoing study of JD5's lower extremities

  “There's a pattern here," he said, “Definitely a pattern...”

  Discounting the metal cadaver drawers in the walls, it was just the three of them: a detective, a medical examiner and an unidentified redhead's corpse. The room was all sterile light and white tiles, with just a hint of a brownish stain clinging to the cracks.

  Morgan carried an air of stylish precision about him: neat, black-rimmed frames; a smooth, flawless shave. His auburn hair was impeccably trimmed, styled and finally coerced by some manner of gel into a solid form. Both men wore white smocks over their regular attire, but Morgan’s sheen still clashed with Quinn’s blood-shot lack of polish.

  The smell wasn’t bad, not for two professionals so versed in decomposition. They both stared unflinching into the ongoing dissection of the dead woman’s abdomen.

  “I initially assumed it was just an ape of surgery," Morgan said. "Just sadistic glee channeled through a few sharp blades. There was no order to it, just a desperate, carnal desire to dive deeper into the…um…" he stammered, fished deep for the right language, “…the visceral, tactile pleasure of the act.”

  The doctor’s eyes pooled with wonder, darting back and forth amid the surgical ruin beneath him with a calculating intensity.

  “But with this…” he gestured with the bloody scalpel, “It’s a randomness that circles back around on itself, you know? It’s… well, like Wallace Stevens put it -- an abundance of order is disorder, and an abundance of chaos… well, that becomes a kind of order all its own, doesn't it?”

  Quinn sighed. Fucking poetry.

  "So what's the pattern?"

  "Can't be certain yet."

  "Oh."

  "Still processing it…"

  "Oh well…"

  “Some of this tissue really perplexes me…” Morgan continued, picking his way back into the cadaver, as if sifting through noodles with a pair of chopsticks. “I think this victim had an unusual genital arrangement to begin with -- a hermaphrodite maybe? Some other form of natural disarrangement? Maybe a post-op transsexual? It’s hard to say, given the level of surgical rearrangement here, but some of these changes simply can’t be attributed solely to scalpel work. See for yourself…”

  Quinn watched as Morgan placed his scalpel aside and slowly slid the tip of his gloved index finger into one of the sliced, curving folds of flesh in the woman’s pudendum. The blood-smeared latex tip slipped inside her and slowly traced the wound path, parting flesh on both sides in a manner that was at once grisly and vaguely sensual.

  The doctor’s finger slowed and, at last, stopped.

  “Touch that…” Morgan said.

  Quinn, whose own gloves and surgical smock were as yet unsoiled by the work at hand, replied only with a look of confusion.

  “Here…” Morgan said, gesturing with darting eyes.

  Their gloved index fingers touched as Quinn slid his into the wound.

  Then the doctor pulled free.

  The flesh was cold. Wet. Still. And in the dead folds, his finger slid across… something.

  It must have shown on his face.

  “Yeah?” Morgan asked.

  “Yeah…” Quinn said dryly, staring down into
crisscrossing wounds and incisions -- seeing past them, forming in his mind a picture of the strange shape passing under his fingertip.

  “I don’t know what that is yet,” Morgan said. “…but I know a few of things that it’s not.”

  Quinn slid his finger back and forth over the shape. He unfocused his eyes and the picture became even less distorted in his mind with each caress.

  His mind reeled back from the imagined shape of the… (organ? growth? scar tissue?)… and it was then that he realized he had not simply slid his index finger into the wound, but his middle finger as well.

  Up to the knuckles.

  He gasped and pulled his fingers out of the cadaver, a sliver of liquid flinging off his bloody glove in the process. It splattered across the victim’s pale thigh: a mix of blood and something the color of bile.

  Quinn exhaled sharply. He looked up at the doctor again.

  “What do you think?” Morgan asked.

  “It’s a possible lead,” he said weakly, snapping his gloves off, trying not to notice how shaky his hands were. “Targeting transgender victims, scoping them out at clinics, support groups -- and it’s something we might have missed with the other ones.”

  “I need to work with her some more,” Morgan said, neither accepting nor dismissing Quinn's prognosis. “This is the most unusual specimen I’ve ever examined -- to say nothing of the handiwork."

  Quinn let his gloves fall into the wastebasket and stared again at the partially dissected display. He tried to imagine what steps brought even an abnormal genital arrangement to such an end. A career’s worth of homicides rose up in his mind like foulness from a blocked drain -- something indistinct. Something ancient and formless.

  "I need to concentrate," Morgan said dismissively.

  “Order out of chaos, huh?” Quinn asked

  There was a slight tinkling sound as Morgan selected a pair of cruelly curved scissors from his instrument tray.