Nocturnal

by Scott Sigler

  “We have a preliminary ID from a driver’s license,” Sammy said. “Oscar Woody, age sixteen. We’ll get confirmation quick, he’s got a record and his prints are in the system.”

  “Already?” She found it endlessly sad that kids went bad so early in their lives. Had it always been that way? Probably. It just seemed more drastic now — as she got older, teenagers seemed progressively younger and younger.

  Jimmy cut away the victim’s clothes and started placing them in bags.

  “We got what we think are saliva samples,” he said. “All over the shoulder area. Probably from the tiger.”

  “Rottweiler,” Sammy said. “Robin, thanks for letting us help. If you want to prep your table, we’ll bring him in to you.”

  Robin nodded. “I’ll go do that.”

  She walked out of the prep area and into the long, rectangular, wood-paneled autopsy room. Five white porcelain exam tables lined the room’s length, the tables’ long sides paralleling the room’s short sides. At the moment, the tables sat empty. Robin had seen many days when all five tables were in simultaneous operation, with even more bodies backed up in the big walk-in refrigerated transit locker.

  Most morgues used stainless-steel tables. The Hall of Justice, to which the morgue was attached, had been built in 1958. This examination room — original white porcelain autopsy tables and all — hadn’t changed much in the last fifty-odd years. Metz often told her that other than the ashtrays being removed from the walls, it basically looked the same as it had on his first day of work four decades earlier.

  Sammy and Jimmy rolled the metal cart into the room. They slid the body onto the first porcelain table. As seasoned as she was, Robin couldn’t help but wince at the carnage.

  When the arm came off, the outer third of his clavicle had been sheared away. The stumpy bone stuck out of the ravaged pectoral. Blood on the clavicle’s jagged end was already a dry brown. She saw scrapes on the broken bone; gouges from teeth, probably. No teeth marks on the face, though — that damage had been done by blunt-force trauma: fists, elbows, feet and knees, most likely.

  Severe lacerations covered his abdomen. Severed pieces of intestine dangled out like bloody gray-brown sausages speckled with yellow globs of fat. She realized that the intestines had been pulled out, torn up, then crammed back in. That was the work of a person — animals didn’t stuff your guts back in for you.

  “Any evidence that could lead to the perps?”

  “Tons,” Jimmy said. “Sick bastards used the vic’s blood to write long live the king on a brick wall, and make some weird occult drawings. It’s all in the photos for you.”

  “Good,” Robin said. “So, where’s the arm?”

  Sammy shrugged. “We couldn’t find it.”

  Jimmy checked his watch. “Well, that does it for me today. I’m heading home. Robin, if you have any questions, call me, but I’m sure Bryan and Pookie can answer anything.”

  The sound of his name stopped her cold. “This is Bryan’s case?”

  “He and Pookie were first on the scene,” Jimmy said. “I’m out. Later.”

  Robin threw the departing Jimmy a half-wave. She pushed away any thoughts of Bryan Clauser and focused on her job. She did a slow walk around the white table. Oscar had been a big kid. Five-ten, would have been about a hundred and eighty pounds if the arm had been attached. Hopefully the arm was discarded somewhere and would soon turn up. If the perp still had it, that probably meant he was keeping it as a trophy. A trophy-taker could mean a serial killer. Or, perhaps even more messed up, the arm had been an atta-boy treat for the attacking animal.

  “Soft-tissue damage looks like it extends to the back,” Robin said. “Let me look at the scapula. Sammy, can you flip him over?”

  He did. The scapula remained intact, scraps of tacky human meat still plastered to the bone. She saw two long, parallel gouges about three inches apart — matching lines that curved and zigzagged. She lifted her camera, leaned in and snapped a picture. Sammy would have a complete set of shots for this and everything else, but Robin liked to record key areas with her own eye and angles.

  She let the camera drop to her chest, then reached out and gently probed the torn shoulder.

  “You guys are probably right about an animal,” she said. “These parallel gouges would be consistent with marks made by canines, like something bit him and shook him.”

  Sammy smiled at her. “Like I said, rottie, eh?”

  She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe.” She looked at the wide space between the parallel teeth gouges, tried to imagine the size of a dog that owned those teeth. “Jimmy might win the bet after all. I won’t rule out a big cat, as weird as that would be in the middle of San Francisco.”

  “Fascinating,” Sammy said. “You know, this sounds like great conversation material. Why don’t we talk about it over dinner. Say, tomorrow night? I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  Robin looked up from the body and smiled. “Sammy Berzon, did you guys really have a bet on what kind of animal killed this boy, or did you connive your way in here to ask me out on a date?”

  He smiled and held up his right hand. “Guilty as charged. I know this café on Fillmore with outside seating, so we can take your dog.”

  She laughed, felt her eyebrows rise in surprise admiration. “Wow, you’re good. Invite the dog, too?”

  He gave a half-bow. “You have to know the battlefield, my dear, but you make it pretty easy. Your desk is covered with pictures of the pup. He’s cute as hell.”

  “She.”

  “Sorry, she. So, how about dinner?”

  Sammy was a handsome man. He had rugged features, although maybe he spent a little too much time on his blond locks. Robin’s mother had always said don’t ever date a man who spends more time on his hair than you do. As a criminalist, Sammy knew the horrors she dealt with on a daily basis. They had that in common. And he’d catered to her near-obsessive love of Emma. Obviously, he was a perceptive guy. She looked back down to the corpse. Sammy would undoubtedly be a great date, but she just wasn’t up for it.

  “Thanks, but … uh … I don’t think I’m good dating company.”

  “Come on. You and Bryan split up six months ago. Live a little, eh?”

  She felt her anger rising, but fought it down — he was asking her out, after all. “You know how long it’s been since we broke up?”

  Sammy smiled. “Of course. Six-month rule. I couldn’t ask you out for six months out of respect for the Terminator.”

  Her smiled faded. “Don’t call him that.”

  His smile faded as well. He knew he’d made a mistake. “Sorry,” he said. “I mean, it’s not really an insult, you know?”

  She nodded. She hated the nickname. It insinuated that Bryan was cold-blooded, a machine that could just kill without remorse. She knew that wasn’t true. Still, in the bizarre world of male logic, the nickname was a compliment and Sammy hadn’t meant anything by it.

  She tried to change the subject.

  “And what do you mean by the six-month rule?”

  “You can’t ask a brotha’s girl out for six months,” Sammy said. “It’s man law. The six-month rule is kind of like an expiration date in reverse.”

  Men. Impossible to understand. “So … I was sour milk, and now I’m fit to serve?”

  “You got it. How about instead of telling me no, you just take a rain check on dinner?”

  “Fine. I’ll take a rain check.”

  Sammy’s wide smile returned. “Works for me. Later, gator.”

  He walked out of the morgue.

  Robin wondered how many people knew Bryan had moved out six months earlier. Everybody in the medical examiner’s department, probably, and obviously even more than that. Big city, big police force, but still a relatively small group of people that dealt with the steady influx of dead bodies.

  She turned her attention back to the one-armed boy. The shoulder wounds were definitely from a big animal, but she’d test the collected saliva
just to confirm it.

  She’d start with a short tandem repeat analysis test. The STR would come back within hours and provide a genetic fingerprint of the victim and the attacker or attackers — if those attackers were human, that was. That test would find thirteen key loci in human DNA that she could run against CODIS, the FBI’s genetic database of known criminals. Sometimes it was just that easy — process the evidence, isolate the DNA, submit it to CODIS and get a hit.

  Robin hoped they’d get lucky and identify the killer right away. Such savagery was beyond even the normal gunshot, knife and blunt-force trauma deaths she dealt with all the time.

  This was part of the reason she’d chosen an ME career instead of continuing on in medicine. In a world heading down the drain, she was part of the solution. Her job was intel, really. Intel in the war against crime. She provided the data that helped the guys on the front line — guys like Bryan and Pookie.

  Bryan. Not the time to think of him. He’d moved out, and she’d moved on.

  Robin closed her eyes, cleared her thoughts. She had a job to do. And if someone actually had taken the arm as a trophy, a very important job.

  Rex Gets Good News

  School had started an hour ago, but Rex wasn’t there for it. No way he was going there. No way.

  The cast on his arm was a badge of shame, a brand of weakness. Some would snicker; others would outright laugh at him. Everyone in school would know who broke his arm. That didn’t matter to Roberta — all she cared about was getting him out of the house. He’d pleaded with her to let him stay home, even cried a little, and all he got for his trouble was a slap in the face and a brief-but-intense lecture about being a crybaby.

  He hated the BoyCo bullies. Hated them.

  Roberta didn’t know about his secret places, his hidey spots. He walked toward his favorite — Sydney Walton Square, down by the Embarcadero. There he could sit with his back against his favorite oak tree. His backpack held his sketchbook, pencils, and his tattered copy of Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.

  Maybe he could read a little later, read about empires and knights and kings and queens, but first he had to draw. Draw more of what he’d seen in last night’s dream. Draw more of what had made his pants wet. It was wrong to want more of that, very wrong, but he had to draw it.

  If only that dream had been real.

  If only he was big enough, strong enough, to get an ax or a knife or whatever, use it on that stupid asshole, cut into his belly and drag out all his guts, hurt him, break his jaw so he couldn’t scream, couldn’t cry for help, could only whimper and make quiet begging noises. If only he were man enough to kill Oscar Woody.

  Whatever Rex had been in that dream, it most certainly was not a man. He didn’t care. It had been the best dream ever. Ever. Oscar going over that black gate. Oscar turning … oh, the look on his face! And something with Oscar’s arm … Rex couldn’t quite remember. Had he broken Oscar’s arm?

  It had seemed so real. But it wasn’t. He’d never be free of those bullies.

  Rex wasn’t strong. He was weak. A wimp. Pathetic.

  And that’s all he’d ever be.

  The sun peeked out behind the tapering point of the Transamerica Building as Rex walked east on Washington Street. He looked up just enough to see where he was going. The rest of the time he kept his gaze firmly affixed on his shoes and the two or three yards in front of them.

  It wasn’t until he reached Kearney Street that he looked around, and when he did, he saw a San Francisco Chronicle headline screaming at him from inside a beat-up newspaper rack.

  Rex stopped cold.

  GALILEO STUDENT BRUTALLY MURDERED

  16-Year-Old’s Arm Torn Off, Still Missing

  Those words called to Rex, but not as much as the picture that accompanied them. A small school photo of a smiling Oscar Woody.

  Oscar Woody was dead? His arm … torn off?

  An older couple walked by. Rex ignored them. Dream-recollections flooded his thoughts, crystallizing the visions of smashing Oscar’s face, throwing him to the ground, stepping on his chest, grabbing his arm and yanking until there was a muffled cracking sound and the arm gave way.

  Rex felt his dick stiffen a little in his pants.

  My dream … I did this. I MADE him die.

  Rex’s pulse hammered through his body. His face felt hot. He grabbed the newspaper rack and pulled. The locked door just rattled. He dug in his pockets, but he had no change. He had no money at all. He turned in a near panic, eyes scanning for the ever-present bums. He didn’t have to look far. An old man with a dirty beard and even dirtier clothes sat on his knees in front of the concrete steps that led into Portsmouth Square park. Head down low, hands cupped together and held at chest level, the kneeling bum waited for suckers to walk by.

  Rex sprinted to the man.

  “Give me your change,” Rex said. “Give it to me now.”

  The bum ignored him.

  “I said give me your change!” Rex reached back his right foot and kicked. His sneaker landed in the bum’s ribs. The old man cried out. What a baby — Rex hadn’t kicked him that hard.

  The bum fell to his side, his face screwed tight in pain. “Ohmygod ohmygod … you broke my ribs.”

  Rex leaned in until his face was only inches from the bum’s, so close Rex could smell breath that combined fruity alcohol and decay.

  “Give it to me now, you motherfucker, or I will cut you!”

  The bum shrank back, tried to bring his hands up in a defensive posture, but his face scrunched tight again and his hands shot to his side, where Rex had kicked him.

  “Please, boss, don’t hurt me!”

  Rex felt electric — this man, this grown man, was terrified. Rex’s dick stiffened, throbbed.

  “Hey!”

  The voice came from down the street. Rex looked up. A half-block away on Washington stood a big man with a beer gut straining a white wife-beater shirt. He had a thick black beard that hung down to his chest. He wore a green John Deere baseball hat, and he was looking at Rex.

  Looking so strangely.

  “Hey,” the man said again. “You can’t do that when people are looking.”

  Rex stared. More images, flickers of his dream phasing together in ghostly echoes. He’d seen this man before.

  He’d seen this man in the dream.

  Rex’s rage vanished. What the hell was going on? How could he see a man who had been in his dreams?

  Then, a strange feeling blossomed in his chest. A warmth, a buzzing. It felt so good. The guy looked like a pedophile from a TV show, but the sensation in Rex’s chest made it feel like he could trust this stranger.

  The man held out his hand. “I’ll help you. Come with me.”

  Rex stared, then shook his head. The man was coming from where Rex had been walking … had the man been following him?

  Rex turned to run, stopping only long enough to wind up with his right foot and kick the bum again, this time right in the face. The bum’s head snapped back, shaking hands reaching up to cover a mouth that already gushed blood.

  Blood. I made him BLEED …

  Rex sprinted down Washington, thumbs hooked under his backpack straps. He saw a Chinese restaurant and ran inside, pushing past anyone who got in his way. He slid past the tables, saw a door in the back and ran through it into the kitchen. People were yelling at him in Chinese or whatever, more in surprise than anger. Moments later, he found a door that led to a back alley.

  He sprinted away from the restaurant, away from the bum, away from the bearded man. The emotions that pounded through his body, his brain, were exquisite in intensity and texture.

  He had hit someone.

  For the first time in his entire life, Rex had fought back.

  Black Mr. Burns

  John Smith focused on his computer screen, using a stylus to hand-trace the lines of a photo from new graffiti found in the Western Addition neighborhood. He didn’t recognize the artist’s work by sight — perhaps a
new tagger from an existing gang, or, more likely, the markings of a brand-new outfit. John was so intent on mapping the image that he didn’t hear the office door open, didn’t even realize someone was there until that person spoke.

  “Black Mister Burns,” said Pookie Chang. “How’s life sniffing the silicon ass of the digital dog?”

  John turned and smiled at his former partner. “Computer work is just fine, thanks.”

  John reached out to shake Pookie’s hand. Pookie had to juggle his ever-present overflowing manila folders to answer the shake. Some things never changed.

  Years earlier, Pookie had used the unusual nickname to try and get a rise out of John. To most people, being compared to a character on The Simpsons would be less than flattering. Most people, sure, but not to a man who had the most common name in America, and in England.

  John loved his moms, but when other black mothers were naming their children sweet names like Marquis, Jermaine, Andre, Deshon, or even something crazy like X-Ray, his mom settled on the rather unoriginal John.

  When Pookie started calling John Black Mister Burns, it didn’t bother John at all. Then the rest of the cops picked up on it, laughing at how John’s overbite, long nose and his mottled bald head did, indeed, make him look like a black Mr. Burns.

  John had loved it.

  It was something people could remember — a name that wasn’t shared by over half a million American men. And for that, seeing Pookie always put a smile on John’s face.

  “Burns, you look good,” Pookie said. “Only mildly anorexic this time. How’s that bike restoration coming? Eighty-eight softail, right?”

  John’s smile faded, then he forced it back into place. “Finished it two years ago.”

  Pookie winced. “Damn, I knew that. Sorry.”

  Pookie Chang remembered the most obscure facts in the world. That he’d forgotten about John’s project showed how far apart the two men had grown in the six years since they’d last worked together.

  “We got something for you,” Pookie said. “Could use your help on this.”

  “Cool,” John said. “Where’s the Terminator?”