Nocturnal (27 page)

“What kind of thoughts?”

Bryan stopped his kielbasa circle, then reversed it the other way. “Like that there are certain people who deserve to die.”

“There are,” Mike said. “Fuckin-A right there are. This about that gangbanger you killed in the restaurant? Pookie called me about that, you know.”

“You don’t say.”

“Don’t go busting his chops about it,” Mike said. “If your partner didn’t call me once a week, I wouldn’t have any idea what was going on in your life. It’s not like it would hurt you to pick up the phone once in a while.”

“Who is this little Jewish grandmother before me and where did she hide my manly-man father?”

“Fuck you,” Mike said. “Know how your mother is gone forever? I’m not that far behind her. You don’t stop by enough.”

There was no smart-ass answer for that. Bryan was lucky enough to have his father in the same city, yet he stopped by Mike’s place maybe twice a month at most.

“Sorry,” Bryan said. “I’ll do better at that. But it’s not about that gangster in the restaurant. This is something … something else.”

“Son, just remember that you’re a Clauser. I can’t pretend I know what it’s like to do what you do for a living. But at the end of the day, you’re a good man. You walk a line so that fat slobs like me can live in all this splendor. You have to weigh these bad thoughts against all the good that you do. Understand?”

His father had no idea what he was talking about. And yet, in a misguided way, the words made sense.

“Yeah, Dad. I understand. Look, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you mind if we just talk about the ’Niners?”

Mike Clauser leaned back in his chair, tilted his head back and wrinkled his face like someone had not only farted this time but also crammed a turd nugget up his left nostril.

“The
’Niners
? Good God, Son, don’t get me started!”

The next thirty minutes rolled by without one thought of bodies, dreams, symbols or death as Mike Clauser effortlessly solved all of the
San Francisco 49ers’ problems and guided them to Super Bowl glory the following season.

Goddamn Pookie. He’d known just what Bryan needed. Most of the time it sucked having a partner who thought he knew everything. But sometimes? Sometimes, it was fantastic.

R
obin Hudson had awoken that morning after a whopping three hours of sleep, walked Emma next door for a play-day with Big Max and his pit bull, Billy, grabbed a large coffee from Royal Ground (no sugar, a single girl has to watch her waist), pounded it like a sorority girl in a drinking contest, then rode her motorcycle into work.

When she arrived, work was waiting for her in the form of a list of five names up on the green chalkboard. Four NCs, and one question mark for
Parlar, J
.

She walked to the body locker, opened the door and pulled out the sliding tray that held Parlar’s body. A question mark didn’t seem necessary — not much of a chance this was due to natural causes: broken bones and contusions; multiple lacerations on his abdomen; and about 20 percent of the body had been burned, from the abdomen up to the chest and face.

The worst of the burns were on his face and hands, where there had been no clothes to protect him from the heat. Blisters covered his palms and the underside of his fingers — he’d had his hands up in a defensive position when the flames hit. An explosion or fireball of some sort, obviously. His hair was more burned off on the left side of his head than the right — he’d instinctively turned away when it happened.

Robin read the crime-scene investigator’s preliminary report. Bryan and Pookie had been first on the scene again? They’d found a murdered teenage boy for the second morning in a row. Weird. The report said that
Parlar, J.
, had not only been stabbed three times and badly burned, he’d also suffered a four-story fall onto a van.

“Sorry, Jay,” she said to the corpse. “Rough way to go.”

Robin thought back to Pookie’s call last night, asking if Bryan was capable of real violence.

She looked at the body.

What, exactly, was Pookie asking? If Bryan could do something like this?

No. That was impossible. Clearly, Pookie was talking about something else altogether.

Robin pushed the tray back in, shut the door, then walked to her computer. The karyotype results from Oscar Woody’s killer were waiting for her.

The spectral karyotype showed four rows of fuzzy, paired lines, each
set a different neon color. The image represented the twenty-three paired chromosomes of the human genome. The last pair, the one that determined sex, was usually an XX for female or an XY for male.

Oscar Woody’s killer had an X, all right, but its partner chromosome didn’t look like an X
or
a Y.

“What the hell?”

She had never seen anything like it. It didn’t make any sense. Was it a bad test? No, the rest of the karyotype looked perfectly normal.

It wasn’t Klinefelter’s syndrome; this was something else altogether.

The information would help Rich Verde and Bobby Pigeon’s investigation. But Verde had basically told her
not
to run the test, and Chief Zou also didn’t seem that interested in getting to the truth.

Maybe Rich wasn’t interested, but she knew someone who would be.

Robin pulled out her cell phone and dialed.

R
ex Deprovdechuk walked down the hallways of Galileo High. Not along the sides, not slinking around the edges the way he’d used to with his head hung low, hoping no one would see, wishing he were invisible.

No, not anymore.

Rex walked down the
middle
of the hall.

He’d heard it on the news that morning. Jay Parlar was dead. Alex Panos and Issac weren’t in school. Maybe they knew what Rex could do. Maybe they would just stay away.

Or, maybe Rex would
find
them.

He walked with his head high, staring at everyone who looked his way,
daring
them to make eye contact. These people had all stared at him, talked about him in whispers as he walked by, thought they were so much better than him. They despised him. They treated him like garbage.

But now Rex had friends.

He didn’t know who they were, not yet, but they did what he wanted them to do. They made his pictures come true. They killed his enemies. They gave Rex Deprovdechuk control over life and death.

They gave Rex the power of a god.

So he walked down the
middle
of the hall. People didn’t exactly get out of his way, but they weren’t knocking him around, either. Did all the other kids know? Did they know that Rex Deprovdechuk — Little Rex,
Stinky Rex —
could wish them dead? Did they know that if he drew their picture, they were doomed?

He didn’t belong here anymore. He had
never
belonged here. Fuck school.

Rex headed for the front doors. He’d been here for two hours already, and that was plenty.

Tonight, maybe he’d draw some more people.

Maybe he’d draw Roberta.

Rex was done being a victim. Those days were over. No one was going to hurt him, not ever again.

R
obin Hudson checked her appearance in the body refrigerator’s steel door, behind which lay the corpse of Oscar Woody.

The reflection wasn’t flattering.

Big Max was right — she did have circles under her eyes. She wasn’t in her twenties anymore; age and the job’s long hours were catching up with her.

She ran a hand through her black hair, untangled it as best she could manage. She hadn’t talked to Bryan in six months, and this was how he’d see her?

But why should she care how she looked for him? He’d moved out and hadn’t even called her once since. Two years they had shared her apartment. They’d dated six months before that. Two and a half
years
together. She hadn’t nagged him about getting married, even though she would have accepted his proposal without thinking twice. All she’d wanted was to hear the words
I love you
.

But he hadn’t said it. In all that time together, he’d never said it once.

The two-year anniversary of his moving in with her triggered some kind of realization that she needed to hear him say it. She couldn’t think about anything else. He loved her, she knew it, he just needed a little
push
was all, something to make him look deep inside and realize what they had together. She’d made it simple for him — if he couldn’t
say
he loved her, then he wasn’t
in
love with her, and he had to go.

But even with that ultimatum, he still hadn’t said the words. Only at the end did she realize she’d projected her desires onto him. She wished she could forget that final fight. How she had screamed, the things she had said, and he just stood there, calm, quiet, barely saying a word as she raged at him. Cold-eyed Bryan.
The Terminator
. He hadn’t loved her. Hell, maybe he wasn’t capable of love.

She’d told him to leave and he had. Unlike in the movies, he hadn’t come back.

He was probably out fucking anything that moved. She should be doing the same, but she just didn’t want to. Six months later, she still wanted only him. The way he could make her feel — no one else had ever been able to do that to her. She was afraid that no one else ever could.

The morgue door opened. Bryan Clauser and Pookie Chang came through.

“Hey, Robin,” Pookie said. “Damn, girl, you look
sexy
.”

“Right. I’ve had about four hours of sleep, but flattery will get you everywhere.”

Pookie grinned. “Come on, if I really wanted to get in your pants, I’d do something like pick you up those oatmeal biscuits from Bow Wow Meow that Emma likes so much.”

“Yeah, that would probably work.”

Pookie reached into his pocket and pulled out a zippered baggie filled with thick biscuits. “
Cha-ka-pow!
There you go, toots, now lose the bra.”

She laughed and took the bag. “What, you carry around my dog’s favorite treat?”

He shrugged. “Knew I’d see you sooner or later. They were in the car.”

“Pookie, how the hell do you remember this stuff?”

He pointed to his head. “There’s a lot of useless information floating around in here.”

“Well, I thank you, and so does Emma.” She put the bag in her pocket.

Robin turned to look at her former lover. “Bryan.”

He nodded once. “Robin.”

That was it. No
God it’s good to see you
, or
I hope you’ve been well
, just a simple
Robin
. Something on his forehead caught her eye.

“Stitches? What happened?”

“I fell in the shower,” Bryan said.

He needed to trim that beard of his, and he looked so tired. Not so much the bags under his eyes as a pallor to his skin, an expression that seemed … lost. What was he going through?

There was something about Bryan she’d never been able to define, never been able to ignore, and despite his sickly appearance, that something still burned hot. Her attraction to him hadn’t dulled in the least.

She stared at him. He stared right back with those beautiful, distant green eyes.

“Guys,” Pookie said, “I know y’all have a bit of backstory to work out, but can we lay off the wistful gazing? This ain’t a Joan Wilder novel, if you dig what I’m saying.”

Robin looked away from Bryan and back to Pookie. Pookie smiled apologetically, but he was right — this wasn’t the time to play
who hurts more
with her ex.

“Okay,” she said. “So I know I have to give all this info to Rich and Bobby, but it’s weird … it seems like Rich isn’t really that interested in the case. Bobby is, I think, but Rich calls the shots. What I discovered is kind of a big deal. Since you guys found both bodies, I figured you might
have a vested interest. But can you keep this quiet? Chief Zou asked me not to talk about the case, to anyone — if she finds out I did, it could jeopardize my candidacy for the chief ME position.”

Both men nodded. Pookie mimed turning a lock in his lips and throwing the key behind him. Maybe Bryan wasn’t the best boyfriend in the world, but he never went back on his word and neither did the incorrigible Mr. Chang.

Robin led them to her desk and called up the karyotype test results on her computer.

“We isolated samples from Oscar Woody’s body,” she said. “I’m ninety-nine percent confident that all of the samples come from a single person, meaning Oscar had just one killer. That killer’s DNA exhibited evidence of an extra X chromosome. Because of that, I ran another test assuming I would see XXY. Instead I found this.”

She pointed to the bottom of the karyotype.

Bryan leaned in to look, so close that his chest touched her right shoulder. He felt warm.

Pookie leaned in over her left shoulder. “I recognize that Y-thingee from my science classes, but what is that next to it?”

Robin shrugged. “I’m calling it a
Zed chromosome
.”

“What the hell is a Zed?”

“It’s like a Z,” Bryan said. “Only with higher taxes and with universal health care.”

“Ah,” Pookie said. “Canadian-speak.”

They all stared at the strange result; a Y and something else, something significantly larger. An X chromosome did, indeed, look like an “X” — two lines crossed up high, pinched together like a twisted balloon animal. Naming the male sex chromosome “Y” was a bit of a stretch, as far as name-equals-appearance went: two short, fat chunks came together, with a tiny ball of material where they joined.

The new chromosome looked like a chain of three sausage links. Sharp bends at the two joints made it
sort of
look like a Zed — or maybe that was just the first thing that popped into Robin’s mind after years of looking at Xs and Ys.

“This is totally unheard of,” she said. “There’s a Z chromosome in birds and some insects, but in those animals the chromosome is a little blob — it doesn’t actually
look
like the letter Z. So I’m calling this
Zed
to differentiate. This is the genetic code of Oscar Woody’s killer. It isn’t a fluke — this is a legitimate chromosomal aberration.”