Storm in a Teacup (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

The jigsaw pelvis bothers me enough that I follow the coroner to the morgue with the gathered bits of splats and sit in the waiting room for three hours while she sorts them into four piles.

When she finally invites me in, I get up so fast that the claw wound in my side almost rips open again. Fast healing isn't instantaneous. I've gone and re-injured myself plenty of times. Holding my right hand to my torso, I follow the coroner into the autopsy room. I'm sure it has a proper name, but I'm not a doctor or a cop, so I don't care.

She has four separate tubs on four separate gurneys. For a long moment I look at the tidy organization she's made of the volcano of blood and bits from the tenement. Now that I see them compartmentalized like this, my question boils back to the front of my mind.

The coroner starts talking in a warm, motherly voice. She looks like she belongs in the PTA, and she has two white tufts of hair above her ears that stand out against the brown locks tied back into a bun at the nape of her neck. I don't hear what she says.

In three of the tubs, there are chunks of ribcage. Several long rib bones grouped together, most still bound by muscle and tendon. In the fourth tub, there are only shards. In three of the tubs, there are intact pelvic areas. One is cracked in half, but otherwise undamaged — though picked clean and scored by tooth marks. In the fourth tub, the pelvis is shattered.

"Can you explain this?" I point to the fourth tub, cutting off the coroner's sentence. She trails off on the word
subcutaneous
, blinking at me and opening her mouth like a baby turtle.

"This body is in much worse condition than the other three," she says.
 

"I can see that, Doctor. One of these splats is not like the others," I sing-song before realizing it's in very bad taste.
 

The coroner's lips curl into a tight smile. I guess if you work in a morgue, you have to enjoy some grim humor when you find it.
 

"Right, right." She steps closer to the tubs and snapping the latex on her gloves. "There are plenty of differences here."

"Like what?"

"First of all, the fractures on the first three are all caused by external pressure. A couple by blunt force trauma. Others by forcible snapping." She mimes snapping a bone in half like a kid might snap a twig. "But the most obvious difference is that the first three are male, and the fourth is female."

"Female." I scrutinize the fourth pelvic bone shards, but I'm no specialist. She could tell me it was a hippopotamus and I'd nod along. Could this have been Lena Saturn? Could she have been hiding out in that tenement all along?

It brings me back to Gregor's question, but I'm still stuck on the why of it.
 

"So the first three were broken up like kindling. What kind of fractures happened to the girl?"

"Woman. Early twenties. Some early bone deterioration caused by a calcium deficiency. Her fractures look like she was blown up from the inside."

Demons don't blow shit up. "That's not possible."

"You do your job, I do mine."

"You're saying there was a bomb inside her?" Even I can see there's no charring or heat-damage to the bones. And if there had been a bomb, there would have been some evidence of it in the apartment. Fire, bits of bone lodged into the walls, something.

"Something caused her innards to burst into outtards." She smiles at her own joke, but this time I don't return it.

"What could do that? A bunch of demons grabbing hold of her and playing tug-of-war?"

The coroner shakes her head, poking into the fourth tub. "No, no. Too much force from the inside directed out."

"Have you seen something like this before?"

She doesn't have to answer. The way her frown tugs at her left cheek tells me enough.
 

"When and where have you seen this before?"

"About four months ago, there was a case brought in. It happened out in a field that time, and the bodies weren't found for a week or so. The advanced decomp made it hard to put together the pieces, but it looked the same. Except the vic was a male."

"Male?" That gives me pause. I knew men were among the disappearances, but it doesn't quite fit my theory. "Any more?"

"Just that one."

If it's happened before, maybe it happened elsewhere as well. "Do you have any identification on the victims?" Who knows if the band used their real names?

The coroner shimmies her shoulders in what I guess is a shrug, then she lifts a blood-stained glove to point at the tubs. "Could you ID these? Best I can tell you from fragments of scalp and a hair is that you've got three mousy male brunettes and woman with black hair. All Caucasian."

"Black hair." Lena Saturn had light brown hair. "Could you tell if it's dyed?"

"It's black at the roots."

It's not Lena Saturn, then.
 

Then who? It's not like they're wearing labels that say HI, MY NAME IS DEMON CHOW. "No DNA? Dental records?"

"Demons tend to be pretty thorough when they splat people, Ms. Storme. I'm not a psychic."

"Well, maybe we should get one," I mutter.
 

If that's my best idea, I might need to find a new job. Too bad I'm stuck with this one.

I hate psychics.
 

They always look at you with a look that just says, "Oh," and you can almost see their brains nodding sagely even if their heads don't bobble on their necks.

They're like shrinks, but worse. Shrinks just
think
they can see inside your head. Psychics actually can. Sometimes. And you never know if they're going to get an image of you breaking a nail in a fight with an imp or if they'll catch you thinking about masturbating.
 

Plus, with splats and crime scenes, they just get overloaded by the emotions. The terror. The meteors of place-memory that come streaking at them the second they walk into the orbit. You try being useful when you're reliving someone getting pulped.
 

It's a shitty lot in life to draw from the big shiny ball of destiny. I'll take my violet-eyed life of sticking things with pointy swords any day.

I try not to be in the same room with a psychic for any more time than is absolutely necessary, which means I schedule them for ten to fifteen minute appointments and then flee as soon as the time is up. They never skeedaddle like I do, though. For whatever sick reason, they seem to get stuck in horror-limbo, and I always leave them standing like helpless children inside the police tape. The only thing missing is a teddy bear.

There are four or five psychics that the Summit keeps on Cadillac-worthy retainer, and I pick one at random. His name is Jaryn Trident, and I've worked with him once before.
 

He meets me back at the tenement right after I leave the morgue.
 

I haven't had nearly enough caffeine to get through this day.

Jaryn is standing slack-jawed in front of the entry when I arrive. You'd probably think all psychics are wispy little creatures, thin around the edges like a sprite or a fairy or some other mumbo jumbo. Jaryn is wispy the way a Freightliner is wispy, and he's got six inches on me. I'm not short.

He turns as I shut my car door. "Ayala Storme." He looks me over in what might be a leer from anyone else. "How's the shoulder?"

See, this is why I loathe psychics. It's none of his damn business. "Itchy," I tell him. "But that's not the point of this little expedition."

"Of course it is."

Ugh. Cryptic and annoying. "Whatever. It's this way."

"I know."

I click my fingernails together in irritation, and he smiles at the sound. Of course he knows why I'm doing it. They could occasionally make the effort to be less stuck-up and know-it-all about things, but instead psychics seem to take pleasure from making the rest of us normal folk deal with their tendency toward the insufferable.

The urine stench is even worse this time, and I have to wonder if a herd of cats came through and decided they'd missed a spot. I watch Jaryn's face as he walks beside me down the narrow corridor, searching for signs of discomfort.

I don't know why I do that with psychics. I guess it's because they can read my mind, and I think reading their faces makes it even.
 

Jaryn's face has lost any semblance of emotion by the time we reach the smashed apartment door. It shows as much as a brick wall.

At first glance, it looks like no one has cleaned anything, in spite of the four tubs of human bits back at the morgue. The place still looks like the sprinklers went off and rained down blood, and now that the crime scene investigators have cleared out, there are bloody footprints on the cleaner patches of carpet.
 

I didn't make it in farther than the living room last time, and now I nudge the single bedroom's door open with my boot.
 

Two twin beds sit against the walls on opposite sides, bridged by a carpet of dirty laundry. I can't smell the laundry over the pervasive stench parade, and for once I think I'd rather be smelling unwashed musician than my surroundings.

I leave Jaryn standing in the middle of the blood pool in his white leather shoes.
 

The walls of the bedroom are bare except for a long crack that extends from ceiling almost down to the floor to my left. Orange dust is ground into the carpet here, and I look closer only to determine it's just vestiges of stepped-on chips. For people nearing thirty, this room is pretty disgusting.

Nothing about the room suggests who the inhabitants might have been. Just mess akin to what you might find in a squatter's den, and given the condition of the building, that's precisely what this is.

I don't know what I'm looking for. I only know I don't want to be closer to Jaryn than I have to be.

"It's mutual, sweetheart," he calls from the living room. I imagine my hand flipping him the bird and hope he sees that too.

"Call me sweetheart again and lose your larynx." I don't have to have Jaryn's psychic abilities to know he's smirking. Rakath turd.

One of the twin beds has a makeshift nightstand next to it made of a wooden crate turned on its side. There's only a shade-less lamp on the crate, and I flick it on. Something glints at me through the wooden slats.

I move the lamp to the bed and turn the crate around. Inside is a huge pouch of yellow heroin. This much smack'd cost thousands. These guys shouldn't have that kind of dough. Beneath the heroin is a packet of hard candies with only red and purple remaining and a small picture frame. I turn it over and see a pretty girl with brown hair and long eyelashes blowing a kiss at the camera, one arm around a scrawny brunette in a Waffle Spot uniform. The pretty girl is Lena Saturn. Was she dating one of her band mates?

I pry the back off the frame. There's a letter sandwiched between the cheap particle board backing and the photograph. I get a tingle like I imagine Sherlock Holmes would, and I feel the sudden urge to pop on a monocle and declare that I've found a clue.

Unfolding the letter, I resist the urge to sit down on the side of the bed. If the state of the floor and building is any indication, there could be monsters in them there sheets.

The letter is short.

Remy,

It's going to happen. I can feel it. They've chosen me, just like you said they would. This will be it. I can't thank you enough, baby. You showed me the way.

Soon we'll all worship.

TRD, always.

Lena

Chosen. I wish I had Remy — the drummer? — handy so I could pummel some answers out of him. Of course, he's currently occupying Tub Number Two down in the care of our mother the coroner at the morgue, so I'll have to settle for blaming him in absentia. Could it be Lena in Tub Number Four? And what does TRD mean? The only thing that comes to mind is "turd," and I really don't think that's a particularly lovey-dovey salutation. It's my turn to snicker, thinking of my new epithet for Jaryn.

Hm. I guess it could mean "The Righteous Dark." Not nearly as funny.

Jaryn hasn't come busting in. I find something useful, he gets nothing. I think something nasty about him, he gets huffy.
 

Psychics.

My fifteen minute window is about up. I wade back through the ankle-deep sea of clothes and into the living room. He's still there, standing stock-still in the center of the room.
 

"Jaryn," I say.

He doesn't move. His eyes are fixed on the overturned armchair, which has been shoved off to the side. It wears a single, recognizable human handprint in blood.

"Hey, brain-suck boy." Not even that gets his attention. I frown and focus all my thoughts on how annoying psychics are.

He turns toward me, eyebrows smushed together over the bridge of his nose. "What? I'm working here."

"Don't blame me. I tried the polite way first." I leave out the bit where I called him brain-suck boy and wave the picture of Lena in front of his face. "See anything about her?"

"Nope."

"See anything useful at all?"