by Lamb, Robert
“Yes,” he said. “God willing.”
***
Dark faces stared out at them from windows and door stoops -- the blank, untrusting masks of a terminal neighborhood.
The dead black woman, sprawled half-way in the gutter, had been shot in the back of the head -- probably as she was getting out of the shooter’s car. There was something in the way her right ankle was twisted around, the foot still wedged in the gutter.
He could picture it in his mind.
She goes to exit the car. Gunshot. She falls onto the sidewalk. Foot catches, ankle twists, black mini skirt rises up over her ass.
She was maybe 20.
At some point, between gunshot and their arrival, someone had emptied her purse.
Abrams was standing just a little off to the side, caring enough to smoke a few feet away from the actual body, but disregarding any real sense of crime scene integrity. It was not like there was really that much to begin with.
“Face it, you needed a sane one like this to put things back in perspective,” Abrams said through the smoke.
Quinn paced around the body.
“Yeah, it’s like fresh air,” he said, stepping over her.
He looked down at the neat, burn-rimmed hole in the back the woman’s head. Blood, brain and bone fragments were spread across the wet cement on the other side. The idea of possibly clearing this one or just finishing his shift was already fading into the background -- and what remained was the memory of the autopsy room. He remembered Jane Doe’s assorted mutilations glimmering under an unforgiving glow -- one work rearranged into another by their unknown master.
The feeling it gave him kept seeping back up to his mind -- that edge of the unknown, that tinge of the uncomfortable sliding towards an uneasy excitement. He hadn't felt that in ages.
Perhaps not since the first time he’d--
But that was a list too long to start inventory of, wasn’t it?
What was his life, after all, but a desperate fleeing from one new sensation to another, from the empty dregs of the last drug, the last sexual exploit and into the tingling promise of something new?
And each path spiraled down into stagnation.
He stared down at the bullet hole -- dead, vacant eye in the back of the skull that it was. He imagined himself touching it, swirling it with his tongue to the taste of blood and charred bone. He tried to force the feelings in the autopsy room to rise, frothing back to the surface of his mind.
But all he saw was a wound. All he experienced was a bullet hole and a memory. The actual sensations he had felt merely lingered in the background, taunting him.
He thought again of the way the flesh parted and closed around his gloved finger, like sucking lips…
Restlessness washed though him. He took a few steps back towards the cruiser and felt in his coat pocket for the small, plastic bullet of coke, his cigarettes and a bottle of pills -- mostly just to reassure himself that they were there.
He pawed his other pocket, felt his cell phone and thought of Gwen. His thoughts turned to the bag of paraphernalia currently stowed under the driver's seat: a sampler platter of experiences synthesized into pills, powders and vials. It also held his other keys to release, the more direct instruments he'd had Gwen use on him.
He glanced back over his shoulder to make sure Abrams was still jaw jacking with the two uniforms, then walked a little further. He casually strolled into the deeper shadows beyond the nearest light -- one of those baleful city lampposts that turned all blood pools black.
As if a reflex to the cover of darkness, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the plastic bullet. Already an old, ingrained movement, he quickly twisted the tiny winder in the side of the blue shell, rotating a bump of coke from the reservoir to the hole. He raised it to his left nostril, plugged the right with a free knuckle, and inhaled. For a moment, the street shadows swam faster around him. For a fraction of a second, he touched it again.
Then he had the cell phone in his hand. He punched a few keys, waited for the tone.
“Gwen,” he said, feeling his nose start to run again. “Call me if you need more.”
Because I do…
He shut the phone and slid it back into his pocket, turning to walk back towards the others. Absentmindedly, he wiped his leaking nose against the back of his palm --blackening his skin in the nerveless light.
***
She didn’t ask any questions as they walked down the hallway. He didn’t offer any answers. A janitor watched on idly as they passed him by. He was focused mostly on his mop bucket, but paid Gwen the customary leer reserved for any cluster of x chromosomes that strolled through the city coroner’s office.
Quinn led the way, through the rear surface entrance and up through the guts of the old city building -- a path of least resistance and observance. They passed rooms deeded to obscure city positions by tiny brass name strips. Some seemed occupied; some had the unmistakable air of long abandonment. One open door provided a brief glimpse of an empty, spacious public lavatory, complete with dry, barren shower stalls. Another room contained nothing but rusting wheel chairs.
Autopsy room eight was empty when he unlocked the door, as well it should be. They reserved it for special specimens: cadavers with significance, bodies with mysteries worth prodding. A former U.S. Senator had slept here once. So too had a famous gay movie star and a civil rights advocate. Currently, it was home only to JD5.
The overhead fluorescents flickered on with the flip of a switch, bringing all the dirty white tiles into perspective with a hesitant hum. The room seemed to crawl with a false sterility. The smell of disinfectant burned the nostrils. The central slab in the undersized autopsy room was vacant.
A row of five steel drawers lined the wall. Only one had a tag. Aside from a pad of hand-scrawled notes, there was no sign of Dr. Morgan. He'd evidently left behind a notebook, scrawled with text.
Gwen followed him in, her eyes, like his, fixed on that sole, occupied drawer. He could feel their conjoined energy drawn to its contents. Absentmindedly, he let his bag drop to the floor, an assortment of clamps, needles and pills jingling for a moment before going silent.
There was only the hum, only the beating of his heart. An erection throbbed in his slacks.
“She’s fresh?” the reporter asked.
“Yes,” Quinn said.
With a sudden heft, he pulled the drawer open — all the way out onto the wheeled cart. Impatiently, he grabbed the zipper on the vaguely larval body bag.
“Shouldn’t we…” she began, but her words left her as the metal zipper pealed its way down JD5's face and neck, exposing pale breasts and cold nipples. She gasped as the bag opened further.
He pulled the zipper down all the way to her toes, then let it fall.
“My god…” she said, sickness and awe quivering in her voice.
“Some of this is Morgan’s work…”
He traced his index finger in the air above a dissection slice.
“And this…” He traced another, his finger nearly touching the flesh. "I think he did this too."
He stared into the depths of the carnage, where it all seemed to mesh and converge like a vortex, like a thousand blood-slit eyes becoming one, a yearning maw bent to receive some incomprehensible member.
“What did he do to her?”
“This.”
“Why--”
“He made her something else.”
His eyes still locked on the ravaged flesh, he moved behind the awe-struck reporter. He slid his hands around her waist and found her thin belt.
“I see…” she said, an emptiness to her voice.
He unbuckled her and slid her slacks down from around her waist. Neither of them moved their eyes away from the wounds, even as he slid Gwen's panties down her thighs. He reached up between her trembling legs, ran an index finger down her cunt, already wet with a sweetness of sweat and honey.
And, even in the excitement of the moment, his brain shut
tered with the shock of it.
I don’t know what I’m doing…
The voice cried weakly in the back of his mind.
I don’t know why I’m doing it…
He laid his left palm over the top of her left hand on the table, laced his fingers with hers. His free hand found his own belt buckle as he ground his pelvis against her. She gasped and moved with him, distantly, as if half lost to sleep.
They moved their intertwined left hands towards the still-wet pit at the center of the cadaver. Gwen gave only the slightest resistance at first, straining weakly against him, but she finally relented. Their fingers sank into the wounds, touching hidden anatomical puzzles just beneath the folds.
She moaned. With his free hand, he rubbed the head of his cock against her sex. Cold blood washed their fingertips. He felt a shiver of sensation surge though him.
He licked his lips and bent over to tongue her ear, then licked the ligaments of her neck, pulled open her blouse to tease her clavicles.
She tasted like sweat.
As he slid inside her, he bent her further onto the autopsy table. He closed his eyes and tongued, sucked, nibbled further with each thrust.
Unseen flesh became cold against his tongue. It became wet, salty and sweet. At some point, he slid out the reporter. His lips were soon sucking at impossible compositions of flesh. His tongue slid through textures he’d never dared imagine.
And next to him, he felt Gwen’s head moving too, fellating unseen wonders in the dark.
***
“—that a crime of this magnitude will not go uninvestigated, unsolved and unprosecuted so long as the city of—”
Quinn stood as far from the police commissioner’s podium as possible -- had edged his way there though the assembled detectives and police brass just before the speech began, as the TV cameras rose and the reporters readied their flashes. It was all just so much wasted motion.
“I assure you the cream of this city’s police force is working overtime to hunt—”
Commissioner Reynolds continued, punctuating key words with a forceless thump of his hoary, liver-spotted fist against the podium.
“No expense is being--”
A security guard had found the naked body of Dr. Kenneth Morgan in a downtown construction site the previous evening. His lower extremities were emasculated beyond recognition. While a diversion in gender, the handiwork had suggested only one possible practitioner.
“--an esteemed professional, one of today’s leading experts in forensic medicine, and his death, while a--”
Quinn scanned the crowd of press before them: camera lenses for faces, coiling cables, notepads, recorders and pens.
Drink it up.
Only one pair of familiar eyes stared back at him: third row, behind the hunched-over backs of journalists fervently scribbling notes in their slender pads: the scarlet-haired reporter. She stood there motionlessly, draped in a long gray raincoat. She stared back at him across the fury of communication, through tendrils of dark, wet hair.
Her gaze was unwavering, devoid of expression.
They’d not spoken since the night at the morgue, since they’d both stumbled out of autopsy room, each in their own private spells of confusion. They’d dressed and wiped the blood from their faces as best they could, washed their stained hands even as their skin soaked red though the fabric of their clothing. Each had left that night to figure it out alone, to somehow come to terms with what they’d done and what they still yearned to do.
Quinn had trembled as he'd driven home. He'd only achieved sleep with a heavy dose of Ambien.
The space between them suddenly surged with camera flashes and raised hands.
He knew exactly what she was thinking. The two of them knew what the press could only guess at: Morgan had sought the rearranger.
Morgan had committed hours of solitary study to JD5's wounds, bringing all his vaunted talents to bear on the handiwork. How much further had he gone in the seclusion of a private autopsy room?
How much further than even us?
While Quinn and the reporter had made their way to the autopsy room, the doctor had been out there in the streets, seeking the murderer out on his own.
“--no, once again, that information is being withheld until such time as--”
The frenzy all around them seemed like so much distant noise. The idea of arresting their man no longer rang with any importance. Pulitzer-winning coverage, cleared cases -- it was all meaningless against the force of their desires.
They wanted him.
They wanted to watch him from the shadows as he claimed his next victim. They wanted to study him as he changed the next lost soul into something unexplainably greater. And then they wanted to be the first to touch the body in his wake.
Gwen averted her eyes at last, broke his stare and turned to work her way through the swelling crowd to the exit. She’d barely disappeared before his cell phone began to vibrate.
“--are looking into the possibility of leaks within the department, yes. Dr. Morgan’s work on this case was strictly--”
How had Morgan done it? What had they missed? What possible path had there been to follow?
A pattern…
He stepped off the press stage at last and slung his phone open.
“Yeah?”
The reporter answered, calm and cold. “Who’s doing the autopsy?”
“Just a minute.” Quinn eased his way through the edge of the crowd. He ducked out an adjacent doorway, started down a deserted stretch of hallway. “Still there?”
“When can we see the body?”
“There’s not much I can—”
“Don’t you feel it?"
Quinn started to speak, but snapped his cell phone closed instead. It began to vibrate again in his hand almost immediately.
He looked down at little pulsing red light in the phone's black chassis. He noticed for the first time that there was still dried blood underneath his fingernails. He shut his eyes and let the memory of the autopsy room move through him like a tremor.
It was all a kind of blur now, but he remembered fragments of it -- the physical side of it, anyway: the two of them leaned over the body like feasting or praying things. Then they were facing each other, mounted atop the body. The only truly hazy part was exactly how it had felt. The sensations had bored new holes through him, new pathways of sensation, and every cell in his body called out for their refilling.
But as to exactly what it had been like to partake of the Rearranger’s work… it was like those things had been experienced someone else. He'd been little more than a puppet. He saw it played out in his mind, but only traced the faintest edges of feeling.
The numbness again.
The autopsy room reminded him of why he’d never given into the temptation of heroin, despite his dabbling in just about everything else. They say you spend the rest of your life chasing that first high, the apex slipping further from your grasp each time. It was a devil’s deal, to be sure, to actually feel something like that and have the rest of your life colored not only by the experience, but by the hopeless quest to reclaim it.
What had he become while he was in that room? What, truly, had he ever been before? He felt as if his entire life had been but a sleepwalk, a mere shadow cast by the Andrew Quinn who had looked into the Rearranger’s handiwork and dared to glimpse its hidden geometries.
He could not begin to fathom what it was about their murderer’s work that had so enthralled him initially. There had been something primal in it, something that sent whispers of possibility worming through his nervous system.
The closest memory he could compare to it was the first time he'd ever initiated oral sex, unaware at 12 that such acts were even tolerated. But he had felt vindication in every inch of his skin: This is right. This is good. At this moment, this is the only action in the universe that makes sense.
At first, he'd thought the business with the bodies was his own sick attraction -- necrophilia g
rowing like a mold on a ghoulish career. Numb to so much, why shouldn’t his lust deteriorate into a desire for the bloody sights that filled his days?
But he’d quickly confirmed that it wasn’t just any murderer’s handiwork. Photos, sights and smells at other scenes didn't cut it.
And it wasn’t just him.
The look on Abrams' face at the crime scene, Morgan’s enthusiasm for the cadaver, Gwen… They’d all been touched by it. The earlier bodies were too decomposed, rendering most of their killer’s message illegible. It was the fresh ones -- of which they’d only had two -- that still held the power to draw others in.
In his brief visit to the city, Morgan had spent an enormous amount of time alone with the body, lavishing it with his already keen interest in the grotesque. Maybe all that poetry nonsense made him even more susceptible.
Who would be working with Morgan’s corpse? Singh? Cordova? How quickly would it get its hooks into them as well? How fast was it working its way into Abrams, the crime scene photographer…?
Abrams.
He flipped open the phone and hit the first name on the contact list. After several rings, a weary, familiar voice answered.
“Yeah?” Abrams asked.
“I thought I’d get the machine -- they still talking to the press in there?”
“I guess. I cut out just after you did. Can’t think with all that bullshit all around me.”
“You saw Morgan’s body, right?”
There was a pause on the other end, a crackle of brief interference. “Yes.”
“Was it like JD5?”
“Well… how?” The stammering gave him away.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Like JD5?”
“Yeah.”
There was a long pause.
“Meet me outside,” Abrams said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
***
“I must be losing my mind,” Abrams said, opening the door to the tiny studio apartment. “I should have come straight to you -- should have reported it to someone, but I kept telling myself I needed time to think it over, to look through everything she had here.”
Quinn followed him into a cramped kitchenette littered with newspaper clippings and grainy, black and white photos. They covered the walls, taped and tacked, overlapping like the scales of some papier-mâché dragon. They cascaded over a framed Dali print, drowned most of a small collection of framed photos. In one family portrait, a younger JD5, frizzy haired and alive, posed with others around a stack of canoes.