right down to the measurements and the tests. And he was stumped.
“‘Listen, Dresdan, that first body wasn’t found in my beat. It was a good ten kilometers away, for shit’s sake! I don’t know when the mix-up hap-pened, but it wasn’t on our end. Someone switched the heads before we found them.’
“So that’s the case of the day. Two bodies, two heads, more than ten kilometers from each other. And someone switched them.”
“Gotta be someone yanking you around,” Claymore said. His legs swung freely, since they didn’t come anywhere close to his barstool’s foot-rest. “Some sort of sick, awesome practical joke. Someone found the heads, that’s what they did, then switched them on you.”
“Sure, Clay,” I said. “Who would find the two bodies so far from each other? And then go to the trouble to travel back and forth? You gotta cross at least three gang’s territories to get from me spot to the other. Who would do that?”
“The Ancients, that’s who,” Zankenman said in that low voice of his that likely set off all seismographs within twenty kilometers. “They would think that sort of thing is funny. They can’t tell one ork from another any-way, so they would be amused to switch the heads around.”
Glint hadn’t found a seat, which was good, because if she had she prob-ably would have jumped up from it. She’s just over a meter and a half, but when she bounces like she does on her toes, she seems a lot taller.
“This wasn’t a joke,” she said, waving her hands emphatically. “This was a message.”
“A very confusing one,” Zankenman said.
Glint whirled on him, green eyes flashing. “Confusing to you,” she said.
“But that’s because it wasn’t meant for you.”
Hatchetman chose this time to enter the conversation. He has two ways of speaking—one is a mocking drawl, the other is an amped-up, hy-per shout. The first one may be annoying sometimes, but you take it, be-cause if you hear the second one, you know that shit’s about to get real awfully soon. “So tell us, girl. What kind of message would someone send by switching heads around?”
“I don’t know. It’s got to be…something about interchangeability. Like maybe one’s a new guy, fresh recruit to a gang, and the other is one of their top hitters, and whoever got them is saying ‘hey, both of these guys are the same to us. Your best is no better than your worst, as far as we’re concerned.’”
Hatchetman cocked his head. “Actually, that’s not bad.” Catching the bartender’s gaze, he jerked his head toward Glint. “Her next one’s on me.”
That was nice of Hatchetman and all, but as soon as he did it I wished
that he hadn’t. Glint got even bouncier, even more excited as soon as he said that, and that meant she was on me in a second.
“You heard that, right? It was a good theory. He said it was a good theory.”
“Yeah, Glint, yeah, I heard it.”
She leaned toward me, chin down, which gave her long nose a little foreshortening, which didn’t hurt. Her broad forehead tapered to a tiny chin, and her short black hair was spiked in ways that only come from sleep. She was dressed in fatigues and an armored vest that had been patched so often I wouldn’t place any faith in its bullet-stopping abilities.
“So, let’s go. Let’s find out what’s going on. We figure out what gang these guys were a part of, we can figure out what the message was.”
I laughed. “You’ve been watching too many Inquest of Truth trids. Cor-oners don’t go out solving crimes. I don’t do investigations. I don’t partic-ipate in interrogations. It’s not my thing, right? I check out the corpses, look at the wounds, test the blood, and slosh through whatever’s in the stomach. I’ve got plenty to look at without dancing out into the streets trying to find out who’s in what gang and why they’re killing each other.”
“But you’re not thinking!” she said. “You’re not seeing what we could do with the right information! Right now, you’re the only person with this information. We could give the message to the gang it was meant for, or we could find other gangs and tell them what’s happening. Gangs are always looking to get something over on each other—we could sell information to them.”
Then she came even closer, and I’ll tell you that her odor wasn’t so much intoxicating as intoxicated, but that was okay with me.
“But let’s put all that aside for a minute and forget about how we can make money or gain influence or a minute and think about the people that come into your shop every day. They’re loose ends, unanswered questions.
They’re stories without an ending. Don’t you want to know the endings?”
I smiled. Not my widest smile, because then I look like a jack-o-lantern, but a half smile. Which either makes me look wise and a little sad, or like I had some food caught in my gums. It’s tough to tell without a mirror.
“You’ve got it wrong, my energetic friend,” I said. “They’ve got an end-ing. The ultimate endend-ing. They’re dead. That’s not an ending I’m too eager to share. I get enough of it in my day job, right? Last thing I need is to take my work home with me.”
“But don’t you want to know—”
I cut her off with a laugh. “But I do know. I do. You want to know what happened? The same thing that always happens to people who come into my shop. They got in too deep.” I shook my head. “That’s no way to be.
The stuff you’re talking about, that’s at the deep end of the pool. I’m telling
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you that fewer people drown in the shallow end. And the water’s warmer besides.”
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t convinced, but she had a drink in her hand that Hatchetman bought her, then I bought her another one, and one after that. I hoped that would be enough to fend off foolish notions.
t
The night went on too long, and the morning came too early. The sun was rising somewhere not too far away, and in my white, stark room I thought about it because it kept me in a better mood than I’d be in otherwise. It was a quiet morning in Organ Grinders—no crush of bodies flowing in, no complicated cases leftover from the previous night—which I know meant only one thing. Something was coming in.
And come in it did, at 6:36. The time was recorded automatically as soon as the tagged corpse rolled into the shop. I was pleased to see Crab-bage walking in with the gurney. It’s not that I liked CrabCrab-bage much, but he tends to bring me good stories. His dull grey cybereyes made his face bland and soulless, and his cement-grinder voice didn’t change the impression.
“Dresdan,” he said. “Body for you.”
“So I see. What do you need from me?”
“Only the basics. Get an ID, basic cause of death. Nothing fancy.”
I pulled back the sheet.
“Any reason to think the stab wounds aren’t it?”
“No.”
I shrugged. “All right then. As long as Lone Star’s paying, I’ll look at anything. Let’s dive in.”
I’ve known some cutters who are really anal about their work, very
di-rect and organized, focused and methodical. None of them, to a person, are any fun. I’ve got all the computing power in the office I want. Once I’ve done, I can take the recording my headware made and edit it into some-thing relevant and cohesive. So why make work more boring than it needs to be? I launched in.
“Okay, let’s take a look here. Count ‘em up, we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven stab wounds on the abdomen. They’re pretty shallow, can’t say any actually penetrated either the thoracic or abdominal cavities—
whoa, except for this one! Check out this baby, lower right abdomen, that sucker goes all the way through. We’ll see just what that did to her in a minute. Her. Did I mention that part? Female human Caucasian, probably early twenties, but some hard years in there. Don’t see any visible bruising, which could mean she was sedated before she was stabbed, because other-wise you tend of thrash around, right? Wounds are pretty clean. Someone cleaned her up, not any dried blood around. Let’s check the back of the legs—nope, clean too, even the ankles. No blood, no dirt. Let’s bring in an-other character here, Lieutenant—it’s Lieutenant, right?—Slake Crabbage.
Lieutenant, where was the body found?”
“Alley. Redmond.”
“And what was she wearing?”
“What you see. Nothing.”
“So, naked body in an alley, stab wounds, but no blood, no dirt. You didn’t clean her, did you, Lieutenant?”
Crabbage just snorted in a way that I’d be replaying tonight at the Seamstresses Union.
“Okay, so either we’ve got a neatnik killer or a good samaritan cleaner.
If I was a betting man, I’d go with the former, but it’s not my concern. So, clean wounds, but still some blood clots, because that kind of thing’s going to happen. And it means the heart was still beating when she was stabbed, so plus one for stab wounds being the cause of death instead of happen-ing post mortem. Let’s take a look at the big one here. Wow. Look at that.
Crabbage, will you look at that? Are you looking?”
I looked at him so I could preserve his expression for posterity. He was looking at the wound the same way you’d look at a cat you’d just kicked out of your way.
“It’s clean! You see that? You see how straight that line is, how smooth the wound is? Someone was cutting with something sharp. I’m talking scalpel-level precision here! Very impressive! Now, he got through the abdominal wall and—hello! This isn’t clean all the way up. Look at this, Crabbage! It’s torn at the top. So how did that happen? You want to guess how that happened?”
“Knife got dull halfway through.”
“Ha! Good one! And people say you don’t have a sense of humor! No, human flesh isn’t rough enough to dull a sharp knife so quickly. No, this looks like the opening was stretched after it was cut, so the ends—both ends, by the looks of it—were torn. She wasn’t just cut, she was operated on!”
Now this is where I have to be ashamed of myself and admit that at this second I probably should have understood more. Should have gotten my bearings quicker. But I was zipping along too fast, not connecting the dots.
I like my methods, I enjoy the way I work, but maybe this one time I should have slowed down. But I didn’t.
“Best thing I can think of here is to pry her open and see what the sur-geon who opened her up was looking at, see if we can get any traces of his handiwork. So we’ll get a retractor in place, shine a light in the right place, take a look and … oh.”
And then came my second mistake. Don’t change. Don’t do anything out of the normal. That’s when people start to notice.
I don’t know how long I was quiet before Crabbage spoke.
“And what?”
I looked up and could not remember for a second why I had been look-ing down. “Beg pardon?”
“Said something, then stopped. And what?”
I looked down and wished I wasn’t seeing what I wasn’t seeing.
“Her kidney is gone.”
t
When I went to the Seamstresses Union that night, there wasn’t a big greeting, since I’m sure they didn’t want me to think I was the center of the place’s universe or anything. I came in, nodded at Claymore and Lady G, who were in earnest conversation at the bar, waved at Daisychain at the bar, then saw Zankenman sitting in a dark table in a corner. For tonight, that would be perfect. I sat next to him without a word, and we stared at our respective drinks for a while. I have to admit it was weird to be sitting there and not talking, but that’s what I felt like doing at the moment.
I saw Glint when she walked in, and she saw me. She started heading my way, got within a few meters, then saw I wasn’t saying anything, so I guess she decided she didn’t need to be near me. She went to the bar. That was fine—one obstacle avoided.
The evening went on, and things got a little rowdier near the bar, with Madam Sinful getting into a drinking contest with Norma Ray. It looked
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epic, and knowing those two, it had a chance to go late into the night. A good distraction for everyone, and it livened the place up. All was well.
Then Marrow entered. Now, the Union is Madame Sinful’s place, so she gets to set the rules, but if it was up to me, one of the first rules I’d institute would be no press. Who needs them? Yeah, I understand they need to un-wind too, but they got bars where they can hang out with their journo bud-dies and not bug the rest of us. It’s especially bad with people like Marrow, who don’t have any downtime. He could be totally in his cups, passed out on the floor, and if a hint of a juicy story drifted into his ears, they’d twitch and he’d be on his feet, already composing a lead paragraph in his head.
He moved like a trideo that was missing a few frames here and there, full of odd, jerky fits and starts. He had a datajack on his head that had looked red and inflamed, and he was always scratching it. His angular, bat-like face twitched, bat-like he was always hearing hints of stories in the air. Or like he was being lightly slapped by invisible hands.
I hadn’t been happy to see him enter the bar, and I became less happy when he made a beeline for me. I was about to say something to Zanken-man, when I realized he had slipped off sometime in the past few seconds.
“Hey hey hey, it’s the good Doctor Dresdan!” Marrow said with a smile that struggled to not look pained.
I smiled and leaned back. I know the drill—nothing sets people’s alarms off faster than if you act too different than you normally do.
“Marrow! How goes the pursuit of truth, the crusade to let people know what’s really going on in this filthy world of ours?”
“Great, great, really good. Because there’s so many stories to tell, right?
So many good ones out there. Like, you know, serial killers.”
I twisted my mouth. “Serial killers? People like that sort of thing?”
“Like it? They love it, can’t get enough of it. Especially when there’s one on the loose, right? A new one? They get both thrilled and scared. Great for ratings. Especially if, you know, you get on the ground floor.”
“I suppose.”
Marrow still hadn’t sat down, just slowly kept circling the table. I didn’t bother keeping up with him—he usually didn’t meet my eyes when I talked to him anyway.
“Doc…Doc, come on, don’t hold out on me. If you had a story, if you had something I could use, you’d work with me, right? I mean, it would be good for me, and good for you.”
“Good for me how?”
“Getting the word out! Keeping people informed, on their toes, on the look-out. You could stop someone from dying, or maybe the information you release could even help get the guy caught! Saving lives, what’s better than that?”
“Well, Marrow, maybe someday we could talk about whether there’s ever been a serial killer captured through crowd sourcing, and then we could follow it up with a conversation about how much Lone Star hates it when I release information they’re trying to keep confidential, but none of that matters because I don’t have a serial killer to tell you about.”
“Oh come on, Doc, I heard rumors. I’m not bad at what I do—I know what you think of me, but I do know how to get information—and I heard about a body. A body with, like, surgical stab wounds. Don’t play dumb.
You know what I’m talking about.”
“I may have examined a body with stab wounds and concluded that be-ing pierced repeatedly with a knife was in fact very bad for the individual’s health, but one stabbed individual does not a serial killer make. If it did, we’d have one hundred serial killers wandering the Barrens at this very moment.”
“Yeah, you’re joking, Doc, but that number actually sounds low to me.
Look, you know what I’m talking about, but I can see you’re not in a mood to share right now, and that’s fine. I just want you to think, as things move forward, about your pal Marrow, and how I can help you and you can help me. You know how to get a hold of me, so feel free to, you know?”
I nodded my head, even though I had never once called Marrow and did not intend to do so ever. He smiled at me and skittered away.
And there, behind him, was Glint.
I cursed silently. But effusively and eloquently. How had she gotten there without me noticing? It wasn’t as if my conversation with Marrow was so absorbing that I’d been ignoring the rest of the world. But I slipped up and was about to pay.
Glint watched Marrow go and slid up to my table with what seemed like a single long, gliding step.
“So, serial killer, eh?”
“No, Marrow had it wrong.”
“Come on, Dresdan, you and I both know Marrow usually gets it right.
If he came to you, it’s because he thinks he has something legit. What was going on at Organ Grinders this morning?”
“Same as usual, sweetie. Dead bodies and formaldehyde.”
“I understand you don’t want to say anything to Marrow, because tell-ing it to him is telltell-ing the world. But it’s me. Come on, it’s late, we’re in the Union. Tell me a story.”
Now, I’ve looked back a number of times, and tried to explain to myself why I told her. Was I trying to impress her? Was I just trying to kill time? Or was it just because telling stories in the Union was what I did, and it was too easy to fall into habit?
Now, I’ve looked back a number of times, and tried to explain to myself why I told her. Was I trying to impress her? Was I just trying to kill time? Or was it just because telling stories in the Union was what I did, and it was too easy to fall into habit?