by Hayton, Lee
His voice grew muffled, as though he'd pressed his lips up close to the mic. “We've discovered a new murder victim today. A member of the public called it in, this morning.”
“So?”
There was a long pause, and Victoria’s heartbeat slowed down. Each thump sounded loud and clear in her eardrums. Anxiety writhed in her stomach.
“I talked it over with the Captain, and he thinks it's better if you come in and see for yourself.”
Victoria frowned. Even the mention of her old Captain set her teeth on edge. “I'm not employed by the department any longer, Stanton. What's this about?”
“He said you could come in as a consultant. Keep a record of your hours, and he'll put you on the payroll.”
“Stanton!” Victoria’s frustration bubbled over. “What is it?”
“The body. It was a young girl, white, teenager.” He stopped, and for a moment Victoria thought that was the end of it. She almost released the breath she was holding. Then his voice came back. “She was strangled, draped in a dirty blanket and propped in a doorway.”
Victoria closed her eyes, and a kaleidoscope of memories circled through her mind's eye. Each image more unpleasant than the last. “Stanton,' she said, her voice almost pleading. “You know it can't be—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “But you need to come in all the same. We need to know where this one is different, and you worked the case more than the rest of us combined.” He exhaled, a teakettle whistle telling her he'd soon be reaching for his inhaler. “We need you to tell us why it's not the Birdman.”
“Because he's dead, Stanton,” she said. Her voice was sharp with anger. Sharper than she meant it to be but she no longer cared.
Her eyes flicked open and still the images spun in front of her. Star. Abby. Courtney. Mai.
“You don't need me because he's dead.”
Victoria tried to breathe deeply and struggled. That damn wheeze of Stanton’s fooled her head into thinking oxygen was a rare commodity. “If you want to know more, then read the case file. It's all in there.”
Brittany. Laney. Keesha.
“Collins, we've got the lawyers crawling all over because of the lawsuit already. They'll bring this up at your deposition. It'll help you, as much as it'll help us.”
“Why do you need to tell them anything?” she yelled back, furious. “It's not related. It can't be.”
Harriot. Tami. Nadia. Michelle.
“The captain has already sent a car out to pick you up. Just get in it and come in. Help us out today and tomorrow you can go back to—whatever it is that you're doing.” He hung up the phone before she could answer again.
Victoria swore under her breath and opened her bedroom door to display Grace standing close, her eyes bright with interest. “Who was that?”
“Just a friend,' Victoria replied, then smiled broadly. “Someone I went to school with.”
Grace's face twisted into a scowl, and she turned and stomped away.
Fighting guilt and terror in equal measure, Victoria changed into a pair of jeans and a shirt. She pulled on a leather jacket to ward off the coolness of a fall night. As she kicked off her slip-ons to exchange them for a pair of sneakers, Victoria collapsed onto the end of her bed and put her face into her hands.
The car would be here soon. A few minutes at most. She wasn't ready. Her nerves twisted with anxiety. Images flashed and churned, twisted and scattered.
Tessa. Karen. Shelly.
#
“Guess I'm off your Christmas Card list,” Stanton said by way of greeting. Victoria ignored him and nodded a greeting at Arbeck, who was standing behind his colleague. He nodded back, a worried smile pulling the lower half of his face tight.
“Come down to the station, you said,” Victoria accused Stanton. The car had pulled up outside the Medical Examiner's office and abandoned her there. She'd worked it out en route, but the deception still made her bristle with irritation.
Stanton shrugged and tried an empty smile. “I'm just a pawn, like you. I do what my superior officer tells me.”
“Pity he hasn't told you to fuck off,” Victoria said. Her anger fueled even further by the knowledge that Stanton spent half his life in breach of one rule or other. He was a perfect example of a cop who didn't like living by the rules.
She suited up in the outer office and noted the tub of Vicks VapoRub sitting on the side-table. She raised her eyebrows at Stanton, and he nodded, his lips pressed into a thin line. Victoria rubbed some under her nose before she pulled on her mask, the elastic straps at once biting into the delicate skin above her ears.
In the cop shows she'd grown up watching on TV, the police always had a nice room to view autopsies from. Thick plates of glass or an overhead walkway separating them from the action. The medical examiner’s office she currently stood in had no such facilities. A working morgue, it had the autopsy room, or you stood outside.
The gown was protection against random splatters from the cutting and drilling. Not to mention the electric saw that would bite through bones as though they were soft cheese. The safety mask was protection against the stench of decay. The VapoRub provided an extra layer. One so associated in Victoria’s mind with decomposition, she now couldn't smear it across her chest when she had a cold without thinking of some poor, rotting sad sack laid out on a slab table. Waiting to be cut.
The shower cap over her head protected the lab against cross-contamination. It had only taken one stray hair to be picked up in a sample before Dr. Guardiola insisted on it across the board. Second nature to them all now, though among visiting neighbors it still raised some eyebrows.
At least, after this many years, Victoria felt safe she wouldn’t pass out in reaction to some gross indecency. Like the first time she'd flown—expecting at any minute to make use of the sick bag because why otherwise would the airline provide them—Victoria had spent her first autopsy expecting to throw up or faint.
An action that would be blamed on a weak stomach if she were a man but would be attributed to her gender if it happened to her. Fascination had taken over so within an hour she forgot it was her first time. Forgot that it was something she'd dreaded. She'd been entranced by the layering of bodily evidence until a conclusion was justified, or not as the case may be.
So entranced, Victoria had later volunteered to attend even when a more probably candidate was available. Although their professional relationship dictated distance, Victoria thought of Dr. Guardiola as a friend. A crime-solving friend.
He nodded to her as she entered the room, his eyes creasing briefly in a smile, then turned back to the table.
A teenage girl was laid out upon it, her hair caught up in a shower cap just as Victoria's was; her hands encased in plastic bags. There was an evidence bag stuffed full of her clothing on another table. Victoria's throat caught as she spied the glitter of gold sequins pressing against the plastic. A party dress.
I was going to a party, a voice whispered forlornly in her mind until Victoria shook her head to clear it. She needed to focus. Needed to pay attention. There would be enough time spent revisiting the horror the Birdman had wrecked upon her life and the lives of so many young women without her doing it here.
“I'm beginning my Autopsy of Jane Doe, case number 15-3357. The body is of a post-pubescent adult Caucasian female aged approximately 14-18 years of age, measuring 65 inches in length and weighing 116 pounds. There is some bacterial distension in the abdominal cavity due to early stages of decomposition, but the decedent appears to have a medium build, is well-developed and well-nourished. The brown head hair is 8 3/4 inches in length. The irises are blue, and the corneas are clouded. There is some loss of fluid resulting in a sunken appearance. Petechial hemorrhaging is present in the conjunctival surfaces of the eyes. The natural teeth are in a good state of repair, with wisdom teeth not yet fully descended.”
Stanton elbowed her in the ribs, and Victoria turned to him. A frown creased the center of her forehead. He mimicked
a yawn, holding his hand over his masked face, tilting his head back, and closing his eyes. She took a step away from him and turned back to the body. Watching Dr. Guardiola poking and prodding the dead for clues to aid the living was never boring to her.
“The head is normally formed with the soft tissues of the cheek and chin exhibiting acne. The trachea is displaced a quarter inch to the left-hand side, and the neck is crepitant and mobile. There are cutaneous depressions on each mastoid process displaying discoloration of the skin. There is a five-inch ecchymosis on the neck below the mandible.”
The routine of his words was familiar and comforting, even if their import was not. The hemorrhaging of the eyes and the bruising on the neck already told Victoria they were looking at a strangulation. The discoloration on the mastoid process—the thin-skinned area behind the ears—would be where the killer placed his forefingers while his thumbs dug into the front of her neck, digging deep. Closing her windpipe and forcing her tongue forward.
“Female genital structures are within normal limits. Examination of the pelvic area indicates the victim had not given birth. There is evidence of recent sexual activity but no indications that the sexual contact was forcible. Vaginal fluid samples are removed for analysis. The decedent was pregnant at the time of death.”
Sadness flowed up Victoria's body, weighting her lower limbs and turning her into an immovable statue. That was the hallmark she'd hoped to never see again. That was the Birdman's calling card.
Putting aside the trinkets he used to leave on his victims, that was the real reason he'd earned his name. Not starting out as the Birdman, that was a name quickly thought up and sanitized when a journalist caught on. He'd started out his life as the Rooster. Why? Because his chick's eggs were always fertilized.
They'd pretended later he was named for the feather bracelets that adorned his victim's wrists. Pretended so the station house humor, always edgy, always callous in the face of despair, wouldn't be trotted in front of the victim's families by a reporter trying to generate some click-bait.
She looked at Stanton and saw he was already staring at her. There was the glint in his eyes, a tear caught and reflecting the strident florescent lights. Over the past year, Victoria had tried to pretend to herself that her former colleagues were unfeeling monsters. Tried to parcel them into a neat package so she could point to herself as something different, something more worthy.
But all of that was a lie she couldn't fully convince herself of, even in the darkest moments of her depression.
Stanton was a father. He had a boy out in the world, was still paying off the student debts he'd racked up gaining a degree that wasn't put to good use. He bitched and moaned about his work-averse son and his wife who'd never met a credit card she couldn't max out. Nevertheless, he was still married after twenty-seven years, and his son still visited at holidays. Stanton was doing something right.
Nobody in the investigations unit was unfeeling. No one put in the time and effort they did just to bring home a paycheck.
They wanted to catch the monsters, to hunt them down.
She thought she had. Victoria had consoled herself for the last six months that even though her life was a shambles and sleep was something she'd never take for granted again, at least she'd stopped a monster. She'd shot him three times in the chest so he wouldn't kill again and then she'd shot him in the head for good measure.
Dr. Guardiola continued to recite the findings from the body in front of him. External examination over he picked up a scalpel to progress.
For the first time in an autopsy, Victoria saw the color drain out from the world. She heard her heart pounding louder in her ears, felt it thumping through the skin on her neck. And with each beat, the world grew more colorless, a study in grayscale. Until her immovable body crumpled into a different dream.
#
“Do you need a doctor?” Arbeck asked. He patted Victoria’s shoulder twice before stepping back and crossing his arms.
Victoria shook her head, her cheeks burning. Her tongue felt twice as thick as normal, and her saliva had dried into a sticky gum.
“I'm fine,” she murmured. “I just didn't get much sleep.”
The same answer she'd given twice before. She closed her eyes and rubbed at her eyebrow. “Look, I wasn't planning on spending my day watching another dead girl get sliced up. It's been a while, you know.”
“We could always get Guardiola to give you the once over,” Stanton suggested with a smile. “I'm sure he'd be happy to give a living body a prod for a change.”
Victoria jumped down from the table and staggered a step before catching her balance. “Have I done enough to go home for the day? I'll be fine as soon as I don't have to look at the two of you any longer.”
Stanton sniffed and turned away, walking toward the exit. “If you are fine, then Captain still wants to see you at the station. Hurry up, and we'll give you a lift.”
With his hand on the door, he looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You don't want the blues and twos to have to chaperone you everywhere, do you?”
All Victoria wanted was to lie down and forget that she'd ever dreamed of being a detective.
“Whatever. So long as I’m ending up with a paycheck at the end of this, I'm yours for the day.” As another wave of lightheadedness caught her, she clenched her thigh muscles tightly, warding it off.
“Yeah, just remember to take off the thirty minutes you were unconscious for,” Stanton said, stepping outside.
“Don't worry,” Arbeck said as Victoria glanced at her watch in horror. “It was more like two. If you'd been out for thirty minutes, you'd have woken up in the ER.”
He looked like he was about to ask her about a doctor again, so she hurried after Stanton. Victoria preferred his gruffness to concern any day.
“What'd I miss?” she asked as she got in the backseat.
“I don't know. We missed it too, thank goodness,” Stanton replied. He was silent for a moment as he navigated out of the parking lot, then jerked his head at Arbeck. “We've picked up the evidence bags. Otherwise, we'll have to wait for Guardiola's report for the findings.”
Arbeck sniggered. “He did pause long enough to ask us to clear you off the floor. I think he was afraid you were contaminating it.”
Victoria sighed and closed her eyes. If she were still working for the investigations unit, she would have been mortified. Instead, her cheeks were cooling from their flush.
The ribbing from the guys slid straight off her. Once, it would have been Dr. Guardiola's opinion she was concerned about. Her faux pas catapulting their relationship back to square one.
But Victoria didn't need a working relationship with a pathologist. Not anymore.
She picked up the top evidence bag from the seat beside her—tilting the thick plastic, so the joyful party dress sequins caught and reflected the light. Beneath it was another bag, smaller. Victoria picked it up and saw fluffy taupe feathers weaved into an elastic friendship bracelet.
Anxiety quickened her heartbeat into a short drum solo before settling back into its normal rhythm. She tossed the bag back down on the seat, sliding it under the dress when it snagged at the corner of her eye.
“What do we know about the victim?” Victoria asked. Arbeck flicked a glance to Stanton, and she realized what she'd said. We.
“There're a couple of missing kids on file who match the description,” Arbeck said. “We're waiting on dental records to see if we can narrow it down to one before we inform the parents. They'll be sent straight through to Guardiola when they arrive.”
“Won't they hear about it before then?”
Both men shook their heads. “There weren't any reporters on scene, and the onlookers didn't seem to realize what they were looking at. The tech unit set up a protective tent shortly after we left.”
It was a different world. From victim number four onward, there had always been heavy coverage in the media. Victoria had wondered if the papers were paying so
meone in the dispatcher's office, they got to the scenes so quickly. Every time she turned around it was to have a camera and mic shoved in her face. A constant stream of questions that she wished she could answer.
“No one's expecting it anymore,” Arbeck said quietly. “It'll take a lot before they put it together. Until then, we're free to do our jobs without the scrutiny or interference.”
“They'll know when we inform the lawyers. I don't know how long we can hold it back from discovery, but once they get it . . .”
He trailed off, and Victoria nodded. Once they had their hands on it, they'd be playing it up in every outlet that existed.
“It must be a copycat,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Both Arbeck and Stanton nodded, and her fury levels crept up again. “What sick pervert would copy that shit?”
“If it's a copycat they'll be careless,” Arbeck said. “He's fulfilling someone else's fantasy. Doesn't come across as a sign of intelligence.”
“Maybe not,” Stanton said.
They were getting close to the station now. Close to the familiar places Victoria was scared to visit again. “If someone's been out there planning this for the last year, he could be meticulous,” she said. “The Birdman's the one who grew bold and careless. Who got caught.”
“If he did,” Arbeck added.
Victoria clenched her jaw hard against a furious retort. You don't work here, any longer. You don't need to be part of this.
“He got caught red-handed,” Stanton said. The reprimand clear.
Victoria felt a flash of gratitude. It would be as close as the man ever got to rebuking his partner. He'd happily rip shreds off him in front of everyone in the station house if he caught Arbeck doing something embarrassing, but he'd never ridicule him by telling him off. Not even in private.
“We're looking at a copycat,” Stanton said firmly.
It was odd walking through the station house after her year-long absence. Everything was familiar but with an indifferent patina born from twelve months of other things happening. So strange. Like coming back to school after the summer holidays ended.