Bloodman

by Robert Pobi

  He moved his mind’s eye back and forth, taking it in. It was twenty-six or twenty-seven inches in length, and thin, wispy. It was well past yellow and on its way to white. He hoped Hauser’s guys had bagged it.

  Why hadn’t he said anything last night? Because he was used to working with the bureau boys, and their forensic guys never missed things like that. In a way, it was a test. A test he hoped Hauser’s people passed.

  He’d see the medical examiner in a few hours and there would be a lot more in the way of answers. Until he talked with the ME, and examined Madame X and the child, all he had was the three-dimensional model in his head. More than enough to work with. Enough to kill a few hours with at least.

  In his head, Jake left the room with the yellow hairs, turned, and walked on down the hall to the room where the murderer had spread Madame and Little X all over the floor. He stared down at them. Eyes massaging the scarlet mess for…for…

  “Can I get a drink?” a voice said out of the darkness and the model fell apart. He was back in the hospital in the chair in the corner and he blinked once, fiercely, and saw his father staring at him.

  He had lost none of the worldliness that had made him a favorite of critics and fans alike. He had never pretended to be polished or special. He believed he was what he was: a painter. And now he was a thirsty painter. “Well, dickhead, can I get a drink?” he asked again, his voice hitching up with a tremor of irritation.

  Jake stood up. “A drink? Sure.” Then he remembered Nurse Rachael’s story about the scotch. “There’s only water. No scotch.” Staring his old man in the eyes now, he felt nothing, not even a glimmer of the old poison. And his father’s snarl didn’t push any of the scare buttons it used to. Then again, he wondered if he even owned scare buttons anymore or if they had all been lost along the way.

  The old man smiled as if he were talking to a person of diminished capacity. “Of course there’s no scotch. It’s a hospital. You think they hand out scotch at a fucking hospital? What kind of a volunteer are you, anyway? Sitting there staring off into space. Aren’t you supposed to be reading to me or scratching my ass or some such bullshit since I can’t do anything myself?” He held up his hands, two clumsy stubs of white gauze, black-red where dark punches of blood had seeped through. “Why don’t you—” And then he stopped abruptly, as if someone had pulled the plug to his vocal transformer. After a few seconds of examining Jake’s face, he asked, “You look a little like Charles Bronson. My son looked a lit—” And then he stopped again, voice box on pause. He looked at Jake for a few heavy breaths, examining his features. “I can see it in your eyes,” the old man said, something about him suddenly very still.

  “See what?” Jake asked.

  “The dead people have started showing up.”

  11

  The room was cold and humid and the air tasted of steel and disinfectant. But the lighting was good and Dr. Nancy Reagan knew how to run a lab. There were only two permanent autopsy tables in the room, and Jake was grateful that they weren’t in the middle of the busy season. He often wondered how little country offices managed to solve any crimes at all with the limited resources they had; the ME for the greater Manhattan area had sixty-five full-time autopsy tables and a four-floor lab that occupied an entire city block. Not to mention a backup network of nearly 1,000 folding units in the event of a natural disaster or pandemic situation.

  Two bodies lay under semitransparent plastic sheets. Both were laid out straight now, the rigor mortis having either been eased or broken out of the joints. One body took up a lot less real estate under the sheet. Both looked black under the semi-transparent polyethylene covers, only going to red where a wet bit pushed up against the plastic.

  Sheriff Hauser stood at the foot of the two tables, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, his jaw clenching its way through half a pack of very strong mint gum. His hat was on a seat by the door and he stood a little lopsided—not very pronounced, but noticeable if you paid attention.

  Dr. Reagan had a home-court advantage here and she pretended to be busy for a few minutes before heading over. Jake thought about going to her desk and picking her up by the elbow but decided that he’d let her have her literal fifteen seconds. Of all the links in the chain here, Reagan was second in importance only to Sheriff Hauser—and it was an arguable distinction at this point of the investigation.

  Jake stood beside the longer body, his hands on his hips, his breathing down into the slow range, waiting for Reagan’s power trip to blow itself out so they could all learn a little more about what had happened to Madame and Little X.

  The ME finally stood up, straightened her lab coat, took a sip of coffee, and came over, her pumps—elegant and black—clack-clack-clacking on the cold linoleum.

  She stared down at the autopsy report. “First off, Special Agent Cole was right. I don’t have DNA confirmation yet but I do have a matched blood type that points to mother and child. AB negative.”

  “One person per hundred and sixty-seven individuals,” Jake repeated from memory.

  Reagan raised her eyes above the lenses of her glasses. “Female. Roughly five foot one inch tall. Age twenty-five to thirty-five. I’d lean to early thirties. Ninety pounds, postmortem. Pre? We can say roughly one-twenty, depending on how much subcutaneous fat she had. I’d go with very little. She was fit.”

  “COD?” Hauser asked.

  Reagan’s eyes stayed balanced above her glasses. “She bled to death. They both did.”

  Hauser nodded like he regretted asking, then lapsed into his former sullenness.

  “Distinguishing physical history?” Jake asked, his hand slowly climbing for the head of the sheet.

  The medical examiner shook her head. “Her right wrist has been fractured. It’s an old break, most likely a fall. It was compound. Other than that, no previously broken bones. No wounds, operations, or deep-tissue scars on her body.” Dr. Reagan flipped through her notes, and pointed to the corpse laid out on the stainless-steel table.

  “Last night makes up for that,” Hauser said, barely above a whisper.

  Reagan took a deep breath, but there was nothing theatrical or pensive about it, she just wanted enough oxygen to run through her findings. “Three fractures to her jaw caused by a single impact with a pointed object—it left an octagonal indent in the bone. Her nose was broken and her left orbit was caved in. She was hit twice in the sternum, the first blow breaking the fourth through seventh rib on the left, the second snapping the third through seventh on the right. These strikes were probably used to keep her from making too much noise.”

  “No one would have heard her way out there anyway,” Jake said flatly.

  Hauser shifted in his boots, and looked over at Jake, thinking back to the sonofabitch he had been to Scopes last night.

  “Race?” Jake asked, and locked his fingers around one of the plastic tarps. It felt like silk snakeskin.

  “Her eyelids were gone. No skin between the toes. Nothing.”

  Hauser swallowed again, remembering that Jake had got down on the blood-caked carpet and peered between the woman’s toes like some kind of perverted rubbernecker.

  Jake peeled back the plastic sheet.

  The sheriff saw Madame X, laid out like a blistering red roast. Her body had lost some of the humanity. He was grateful that it was no longer posed in the horror of agony, but in the Now I lay me down to sleep position that did absolutely nothing to soften the marks of violence on it. She still looked used, violated, and Hauser’s gum was tinged with the acid bursts of spit from the back of his throat when he swallowed. He turned around and spat the gum into a garbage can with a single bloody latex glove stuck just inside the rim.

  Dr. Reagan looked up at Jake. “We sent DNA samples out to the bureau this morning. Do you know what kind of turnaround times we’re looking at?”

  “Mitochondrial is twelve hours; we’ll get race, haplogroup, and confirmation of mother—child relationship between the two victims. Nuclear will ta
ke about seventy-two and hopefully we’ll find her in the system. Criminal record. Government employment. Diplomat. Missing person.”

  Hauser raised his head, cleared his throat. “I put a search out on every case of domestic violence in the past six months where there is a two- to four-year-old boy at home. Maybe she had a husband who beat her and she ran. Maybe he found her.”

  Jake shook his head. “This was not done by an angry husband.”

  Dr. Reagan paused patiently, and her eyes went to Jake’s skin. She looked down at his hands, crosshatched in dark ink that swirled out of his sleeve, down over his wrists, over his metacarpals, ending along the first knuckle of his phalanges. In all her time as medical examiner, she had never had anyone who looked or talked like Jake Cole come through—especially not in the capacity of law-enforcement specialist.

  Jake squinted at Madame X and took a flashlight off of a trolley to his right without moving his eyes. He leaned forward, flicked it on, and peered into her mouth. The splintered teeth glowed white and the dark black of the flesh went to a bright red under the harsh glare. “Dental records?”

  “She shattered most of her teeth—the FBI labs said the dental reconstruction will take about two weeks. I can tell you that she had three fillings—two porcelain, one silver. Her teeth broke because they weren’t that strong to begin with. She had a vitamin D deficiency at some point and she’s never really recovered.”

  Jake rolled the sheet back and away from Madame X. Bits of dried blood and muscle tissue cracked off and rained down. Jake put the sheet at the foot of the stainless-steel table and stared at the deep Y incision in her chest, now fastened with bloody baseball stitches in a braided line.

  Reagan removed the shroud from the boy.

  Hauser closed his eyes once, hard, and when he opened them his mouth was a tight line that said he was back in cop mode. At least for a few minutes.

  Jake ignored the child and kept his attention locked on the dead woman on the table. He thought about the hairs he had seen earlier in his head. “What about the blond hairs on the floor of the guest room? There were more in the living room in front of the window, too.”

  The effect on Hauser was instantaneous. “What blond hairs? I didn’t see any—”

  “I didn’t see them until this morning.”

  Hauser was frozen in a position that said he was either going to run or hit someone. “You didn’t go back in the house this morning. My deputy would have—”

  Jake tried not to sound flippant. This was the part they never understood. “Not the real house.” He lifted his hand, tapped his index against his temple. “I recorded everything I saw last night, then went through it this morning. And I found hairs.”

  Dr. Reagan gave him a hard brown stare. “They are equine.”

  Hauser, still stuck on disbelief, simply repeated the last word as if it were a question. “Equine?”

  Jake thought out loud. “The Farmers are sailors—not horse people. I didn’t see one ribbon or photo in the place that would make me believe that they were horse people. And if the hairs had come from the antiques, they’d be black.”

  “The antiques?” Hauser asked.

  “Antique chairs and sofas are stuffed with horsehair.” He turned back to Dr. Reagan. “Tox scan?”

  Reagan flipped through the printout and the pages rattled. Jake saw a coffee ring flip by. “I appreciate the late night.”

  Reagan’s subway-tile hue darkened a little, as if she were done holding her breath. “There are plenty of slow days.” She stopped. “Toxicology. All negative. I did a CBC, a WBC, and a WBC differential.”

  Jake waved it away. “That’s perfect.”

  “Her liver was pretty beat up, her gamma-glutamyl levels were high but aspartate levels were perfect, so it’s an old problem. She gave up drinking a while ago.

  “She had renal issues at one point—her kidneys had been stressed by something she used to take. Function was somewhere around seventy percent. I doubt she even knew she had problems unless she had a blood work done in the past little while. She smoked. Had at least one child. No venereal diseases. She was fit at the time of death—I’d say in super shape. No subcutaneous fat. No fat deposits in abdomen, posterior, under the arms, or around the neck. Her heart was in stellar shape.”

  “What was she skinned with?” Hauser asked.

  Jake stared down at the crescent-shaped ridges in the muscle. Without meaning to, he said, “Single-edged knife with a recurve blade. Heavy, probably a hunting knife.”

  Reagan looked at her notes and nodded. “About eight inches.”

  Hauser shook his head. “Not an ideal knife.”

  “Meaning?” Jake asked.

  Hauser swallowed. “A small curve-bladed skinning knife would do the job in half the time.”

  Jake nodded. “What does that tell us?”

  “That he had time?”

  “Bingo.”

  Jake examined the thin ridges along her muscles where the tip of the knife had left its mark, removing a little more of who the woman was with each swish of the razor-sharp edge. “Vaginal wounds?”

  Hauser had fallen back into a nervous silence, his lopsided stance a little more pronounced now. His eyes were no longer on the woman, but spent their time nailed to Jake.

  Reagan shook her head. “Nothing. Wash, swabs, and pelvic exam were clean. Nothing was put into her vagina.”

  Jake was examining the bottom of Madame X’s foot. He ran his index up the muscle as if he expected it to curl in a ticklish reflex. “Size six feet,” he said softly. “Small.”

  Hauser’s head tilted to one side in that canine way that was becoming familiar to Jake. His mouth opened up and in a monotone voice he said, “Female, roughly thirty-two years of age. One old break in her wrist. Slender athletic build. Good muscle mass. Light smoker. Weakened kidney function. Bad liver from an old alcohol problem. Three fillings and an old iron deficiency. Size six feet and her killer did not interact with her in a sexual manner.”

  Jake held up his hand. “Don’t say that. We don’t know yet.”

  Hauser pointed at Madame X. “No vaginal wounds, Dr. Reagan’s words, not mine.” Then, seeing his arm pointing at the dead, he let it drop to his side. “Was this about sex?”

  “Not in any way you or I could relate to. But to the perp? That bastard got a massive endorphin rush out of it. It’s too early to tell if this is sexual for him. Where’s her skin?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t there. We haven’t—”

  “Because it was taken. Maybe it was a little porn to jerk off to later so he can feel all big and powerful and in control of the storm raging inside the fucked-up fusebox that passes for his brain.”

  Hauser took a step back. “Jesus Christ.”

  Jake looked at Hauser, saw his hands twitching, his face going green like last night. “Go get some air. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.” Then he turned to Dr. Reagan. “Can I get copies of her tox scans? Especially the GGT, ALT, and AST ratios,” he asked, ignoring Hauser.

  Hauser spun and darted out of the room.

  The sound of a kicked garbage can was the last noise before the sheriff’s steps disappeared into the stairwell. Jake ignored the sound of the metal lid rolling in faster and faster circles and turned to the smaller hump on the next table.

  “Tell me about the child,” he said.

  12

  22,216 Statute Miles Above the Atlantic Ocean

  Sent into space during the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the geostationary satellite began its life as a tool of the Cold War, using thermal imaging to track nuclear submarines via the heat generated by their reactors. Under the watchful eye of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the satellite—internally designated Loki—was launched in early 1985. A few months later, perestroika began, and the Iron Curtain quickly started to show signs of metal fatigue. But Loki continued to track Soviet naval traffic in the Atlantic for eight more years, unt
il the SDIO was retooled as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under President Clinton’s administration. The satellite, written off the books as so much obsolete space garbage, was donated to the National Hurricane Center, and retasked to serve the people of the United States in spying on a less predictable adversary—Mother Nature.

  Now, a quarter-century after it had been launched, and performing a task for which it had not been designed, Loki’s unfeeling eyes stared down at the planet from its vantage point in space. Its taskmasters had focused its vast array of attention on a massive weather system that had somehow sprung to life nine days ago off the coast of Africa, gorging itself on heat and seawater, growing into a Category 5 hurricane—a hurricane now called Dylan.

  Loki’s data showed that in the past five hours, the distance from Dylan’s center to his outermost closed isobar was nearly nine degrees of latitude. Dylan was now the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, with a diameter of more than 1,200 miles. This data in itself would usually have been enough to cause a panic at the National Hurricane Center, but Dylan was not yet finished reaching into its bag of dirty tricks.

  Dylan soon began to generate massive vertical winds. These winds carried particles of water off the ocean up through the body of the storm with a force stronger than regular evaporation by orders of magnitude. As these vertical wind-driven water particles, known to meteorologists as hydrometeors, were slammed upward, they rubbed against one another. This friction generated a charge in the water particles. The hydrometeors separated by weight and charge—the negatively charged (and heavy) particles dropped to the lower regions of the hurricane, and the positively charged (and lighter) particles rose to the top of the massive storm turbine. This separation of positively and negatively charged water molecules created a new weapons system for the hurricane.