Nocturnal (41 page)

She set the rib cage aside.

Robin reached for the heart — then stopped.

The broadhead had sliced into the right ventricle, nearly severing the pulmonary artery. A kill shot, no question. But it wasn’t the heart that stopped her cold.

“What the
hell
is that?”

The private room’s door opened. Bryan and Pookie walked in.

“Robin-Robin, Bo-Bah …” Pookie’s voice trailed off when he saw the corpse on the table. “Ew. That’s nasty.”

She lifted her visor and waved them over. “Guys, look at this!”

Bryan looked her up and down. “Don’t we need to suit up or something?”

“Screw OSHA,” Robin said. “Come here.”

The small room fit three comfortably. The boys walked up to the body. She pointed to the bloody, open chest, to a glossy, purple shape just above the heart. “What the hell is
that
?”

Bryan and Pookie looked at it, then at each other, then at her. She saw Bryan’s right hand move to his chest, his palm lightly resting against his sternum, making a slow-motion circle there. He again looked at the purple shape, then leaned back a little as if the sight horrified him.

Pookie didn’t look horrified; he looked excited. He leaned in close. “That’s his heart, right? Do I get a prize?”

“No, you idiot,” Robin said. She pointed to the maroon-red heart. “
That
is his heart, and it looks normal.” She again pointed to the purple shape. “I’m talking about this thing. I’ve never seen it before.”

She slid her left hand into the body and cupped her fingers under the strange bit of flesh — if felt firm, yet giving. Her right hand reached in with the scalpel. She carefully cut the purple thing free.

“Blargh,” Pookie said.

Robin lifted it out of the body. It was a shallow disc about the size of her palm, purple and slimed with tacky blood. She held it for Bryan to see.

He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Is it a tumor or something?”

“I don’t think so,” Robin said. “If it is, it’s not like any cancer or tumor I’ve ever seen, or even heard described. It could be an ectopic dysplasic organ — that’s a malformed organ that winds up in a different spot in the body than is typical. Sometimes, dysplasic organs are even functional, but … there isn’t any known organ that looks like this.”

Pookie tried to lean in and look but he clearly didn’t want to come close enough to touch it. “What does it do?”

Robin shrugged. “I have no idea.”

She walked a few feet to the scale. She had to weigh all the organs, might as well start with this curiosity.

“Hey,” Pookie said. He pointed to the man’s crotch. “This guy has no balls.”

Bryan let out a dismissive huff of a laugh. “Figures you’d look there first.”

“I’m serious,” Pookie said. “Look at Mister No-Nuts.”

Robin did. She’d been in such a hurry to get the body in here and remove the arrowhead that she hadn’t paid much attention to the subject’s genitalia.

“You’re right, Pooks,” she said. “I see no testicles.”

“Ball-less,” Pookie said. “And he’s not going to get any dates based on the rest of what he’s got, if you know what I’m saying.”

The subject’s penis was barely larger than that of a small boy. Robin lifted it and felt underneath.

“No scrotum,” she said. “And there doesn’t appear to be any scar tissue, so he was probably born that way.”

Pookie shook his head. “The poor, poor bastard.”

“He has multiple mutations,” Robin said. “Thick, oversized bones, abnormally dense muscle and an
unknown
organ. You guys, this is a really big deal.”

Bryan looked up to a clock on the wall. “It sounds important, but we need to hurry. Can we get the arrow?”

“Sure, sorry.” Robin left the organ in the hanging scale’s tray.

She picked up the bone saw and made a few more cuts to the severed rib cage, freeing the arrow. She held it point-up so they could all look at it. The room’s powerful lights cast glaring reflections off the bloody arrowhead’s bright metal. Robin noticed lines in the flats of the blades — blood
had coagulated in them, showing an engraved symbol. It looked like a cross with little
Vs
at the end of each point.

Bryan took out his cell phone and snapped a picture.

Pookie poked the blade with a pen. “Bri-Bri, you seen this cross symbol before?”

Bryan shook his head. “I’m … I’m not sure. I’ve never drawn it.”

Drawn it?
Robin had lived with Bryan for two years. She had never seen him draw so much as a doodle. She’d also never seen him
afraid
in that time, of anything, yet each new discovery from this John Doe’s body seemed to affect him even more.

Pookie pointed his pen at the arrowhead’s base, where it connected to the wooden shaft. Robin saw another symbol there, a different one: it looked like a knife or a sword, pointing down, the blade partly hidden behind a big circle with a smaller circle in the middle.

“Looks like a dagger,” Pookie said. “And the circle … that look familiar, Bri-Bri?”

Bryan nodded. “It’s an eye.”

It was a circle in a circle. In context with the dagger, Robin thought the circle might represent a shield, but Bryan seemed very sure. “How do you know it’s an eye?”

“We’ve seen other symbols like it,” he said. “Stuff that’s directly
related to the case. We’ll tell you about it later, I promise.” He pointed to the hooks at the base of the arrowhead. “This why it stuck in Blackbeard’s chest?”

Blackbeard
. She liked that. Much better than
John Doe
.

“I think so,” she said. “I can do some math on it later — mass of the arrow and arrowhead, distance traveled — try to come up with some force calculations, but I’m sure this arrowhead is
designed
to partially penetrate, then stop. Stop and
stick
.”

“That’s weird,” Pookie said. “Wouldn’t it do more fucking-shit-up if those big-honkin’ blades just went all the way through?”

Robin nodded. “If the arrow hadn’t lodged in Blackbeard’s sternum, it would have sliced his heart in half.”

Something caught her eye. She reached out with her scalpel and scraped the flat of one of the broadhead blades. The gooey blood moved, of course, but the scalpel tip also made a tiny trough — not in the metal itself, but in a gray smear on top of the metal.

“There’s some kind of paste on here.”

Bryan leaned in. “Poison?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to analyze it.”

“Sure,” Pookie said. “Of course. Why not? If the giant-ass broadhead won’t kill a brotha, you better poison him too, right?” He pulled out his cell phone and snapped several close-up photos. “I’m going to call Black Mister Burns and have him run these new symbols.”

Pookie walked to the door, opened it, then turned and smiled. “I’ll just go call him right now. Don’t you kids do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m gone. See what I did there? ’Cause I would do all kinds of stuff. It’s clever in that I’m saying you can fuck if you wanna.”

Robin couldn’t help but laugh.

Pookie closed the door behind him.

“Amazing,” Bryan said. “There’s a cracked-open body on the table, and he thinks we’re going to play spin the bottle?”

She was alone with him again. She didn’t know if she’d get another chance to help him open up, to find out what was happening to him. It wasn’t the time to be selfish and focus on her own needs, her own feelings — Bryan needed someone. Even if it hurt her to the core, she would be there for him.

“There’s more to this than a cover-up,” she said. “I know you, Bryan Clauser. I know who you are and how you think, or at least I did until all this started happening.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know you’re scared.”

He turned away, not looking at anything in particular, just looking away from her.

“Bryan, whatever this is, you can tell me. We broke up, sure, I get that, but I will
always
love you.”

He turned to face her. She expected to see his usual blank stare, but instead there was pain in those eyes, pain and frustration.

“Robin, I …”

Come on, let me in. Let me help you
.

She waited.

He closed his eyes, rubbed at them slowly with his left hand. He dropped his hand and blinked a few times, seeming to gather himself.

“Okay,” he said. “Man, where do I even start? This seems impossible, but—”

In the corner of the room, the RapScan machine beeped. Robin looked at the briefcase-sized machine; the karyotype tests had finished.

She turned back to Bryan. “Go ahead, you were saying?”

He tilted his head toward the machine. “That’s the results from Birdman’s killer?”

Robin sighed. The moment had passed. No way he’d talk now, not with those results waiting. Well, she’d tried. She wished he would confide in her, but that wasn’t what he wanted. It
hurt
, and it was out of her control to do anything about it.

She stripped off her gloves and stepped to the machine. Bryan followed.

The top of the monitor showed a notification icon:

“This sample is from the blood spatter in Rex’s apartment,” she said. “The other two samples will finish any second now. Let’s see what we have with this one.”

She hit a key to bring up the karyotype results. The colorful horizontal lines played across the flat-panel screen. Bryan pointed to the last box, the one that displayed the sex chromosomes. “A Zed,” he said. “So Bobby’s killer is also Oscar Woody’s killer?”

When she looked at the markers, she felt a rush of excitement, of pure discovery. She pointed to the second sex chromosome. “This is an
X
. Bobby Pigeon’s killer is Zed-X. Oscar’s killer was Zed-
Y
. Bryan, this means we have
two
people with the Zed chromosome!”

“So … they’re related?”

Related? One case, two killers, both with the never-before-seen Zed chromosome — what were the odds they
weren’t
related?

“Hold on.” She worked the touch-screen to enter new commands. “I’m telling the machine do a high-level scan for common sequences.”

“What will that do?”

“It will tell us if their Zed chromosomes are identical. If they are, they’re brothers.”

“Brothers?”

Robin hit
enter
. The machine returned a result almost instantly — the Zed chromosomes were identical.

“Brothers,” she said. “At least half-brothers. They either have the same mother or the same father.”

The machine beeped again. At the top of the screen she saw a notification icon:

She pressed the icon. The screen blanked out, then displayed the new karyotype.

Robin just stared.

“Uh, Robin? What the hell is that?”

She didn’t know. She really didn’t have a goddamn clue. Rex wasn’t XY, as a normal boy would be. He wasn’t XZ, and he wasn’t even YZ, for that matter.

Rex Deprovdechuk’s sex genes? XYZ.

“He’s trisomal,” she said. “I mean, that can happen — at first I thought Oscar’s killer was XXY, but this … I don’t know what to make of it.”

“What about his Zed? Is it the same as the other two?”

Robin tapped the screen again. The machine responded even faster this time.

“It’s the same,” she said. “Rex is the brother of both Blackbeard here and Oscar Woody’s killer.”

Bryan chewed at his lower lip. He stared at the RapScan’s screen. “This seems pretty convenient. You tell me no one has ever seen the Zed before this case, yet now they come up everywhere we look? Could the machine be on the fritz?”

“I doubt it. I ran the results on Oscar Woody’s killer three times and ran control groups of normal male and female samples as well. The control groups came up just as they should, while the results of Oscar Woody’s
killer replicated the same each time. What that means is, just trust me — the machine works fine.”

Bryan turned to her. “What now?”

What now? She had no idea. Where to even begin? She wasn’t even finished with the autopsy of the bearded man on the table. Her brain felt stuck in neutral. She couldn’t be seeing what she saw, yet it was all there in living color.