The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  “You’re right,” Oscar said, finally, and put down his glass. “There probably isn’t much to find, anyway.”

  He stood. The men shook hands.

  “Who was it?” Gillin asked.

  “We don’t know. A young girl.”

  “Addict? Hooker?”

  “I don’t think so,” Oscar replied. “Someone mutilated her and threw her into the sewer works, hoping she’d be pulped.”

  “Good Lord,” Gillin muttered.

  Oscar leaned forward. “Teddy, you nearly killed a girl. It was a mistake. But now here’s a chance to help bring one back from the dead.”

  Gillin looked up at Oscar evenly. “Are you sure you’re not doing this for exactly the same reason?”

  Oscar stared.

  The last of the spectators hurried past to the track. Oscar watched Gillin feel the pull of the tide. The old man drained his drink and stood. But he hesitated, troubled. “You bloody Marianis. Coming to me with your troubles.”

  He put his hands behind his back and began to walk away.

  “Doctor?” Oscar called. “Please?”

  Gillin walked another few steps, then stopped.

  “Bloody Marianis.”

  At Kannis’s butchery, a man Oscar recognized from his previous visit watched them for a moment, gave a comradely nod, and disappeared into the shopfront.

  “Unorthodox,” Gillin said.

  Oscar unlocked the side gate and the cold-room padlock. As his fingers closed on the door handle, he realized that his heart was stamping, and the flesh on his arm had grown tight, as if expecting to be grabbed. But when the fluorescent blinked awake, the girl’s body bag was lying small and still on the makeshift bench.

  They dressed in items Oscar had purchased en route: plastic aprons, face masks, latex gloves. Gillin stared at the white bag.

  “No X-ray,” he said. “No internal exam. No blood tests. I hope you have low expectations.”

  Oscar produced a notepad. “There’s always something.”

  They unzipped the cadaver bag, and again an exhalation of sweet early decay filled the cold air. Seeing the faceless skull, the gouges as deep as shark bites, the torn and twisted limbs, Gillin let out a hiss.

  “My good Christ, this isn’t a postmortem. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. And that”—his breath caught in his throat when he saw the symbol carved into the pale skin—“is unusual.”

  The symbol seemed to stare up from the girl’s belly. Even looking away from it, Oscar had the feeling it was watching. He forced himself to ignore it. “Let’s just see.”

  Gillin held the bag like a spout while Oscar collected in a plastic bucket the dark blood that had pooled. Oscar wiped down the body with clean rags and sealed them in a Ziploc bag. Then the men worked in near-silence, speaking only to read out measurements and repeat observations. Skull circumference. Body length. Limb length. Digit count. Mild seborrhea of the scalp. Shaved underarms and lower legs. Full adult dental count, no obvious caries. Bite marks on the tongue and on the inside flap of the remaining cheek. The trauma to the face and jaw made it impossible to know whether she’d been gagged. No signs of malnourishment. No froth in the windpipe, mouth, or nostrils that would suggest drowning; no marks or burst blood vessels to suggest asphyxiation by other means. Abrasions and contusions with inflamed edges around both wrists and ankles, consistent with restraint.

  “Cloth, do you think?” Gillin asked.

  “No rope fibers,” Oscar replied. “And none of the gouging you’d expect with hard leather or handcuffs. Yes, cloth or padded restraints, but tight.”

  The doctor moved down to the girl’s legs, one twisted and opened to the bone, the other attached and largely undamaged. Gillin lifted the good leg and bent it at the knee.

  “Dead how long?” he asked.

  “Sixty hours or so.”

  They inspected her limbs for puncture wounds and injection marks. None.

  “What do you make of this?” Oscar asked. He held up the girl’s forearm and pointed to the ring of nearly hairless skin near her elbow.

  Gillin touched it and grunted noncommittally.

  They returned to the torso. Oscar noticed the way the doctor avoided touching the carved symbol.

  “Can we tell if she was alive when that happened?” Oscar asked.

  Gillin shook his head. “I can’t.” He leaned closer. “Genital area is severely traumatized. Impossible to determine any signs of sexual activity.”

  “Blood tests?” Oscar asked.

  “They might tell you if she was taking oral contraceptives, or whether she had any STDs. The tox test will show if she was drugged or poisoned. Internal exam should confirm pregnancy, or …”

  The older man’s voice drifted to silence.

  Gillin was frowning as he probed the slash that had bisected the girl’s stomach: the deep wound that had opened her side and snapped her lower ribs.

  Oscar asked, “What?”

  Gillin returned to the cut across the girl’s upper belly. “This penetration,” he said. “Here.”

  Oscar leaned closer, and he felt his breath stop in his throat. He’d been so distracted by the symbol, so repulsed by it, that he hadn’t paid much attention to the gouge just below the girl’s navel. It was as deep as the other damage caused by the auger, but the cut was much cleaner.

  “The auger blade didn’t do this,” Oscar whispered.

  Gillin nodded in agreement. “I know you don’t want to do an internal exam, but the work’s half done.” He leaned toward the body. “Help me.”

  The doctor took Oscar’s gloved hands and put them under the small of the girl’s back.

  “Lift.”

  Oscar lifted the girl’s lower torso. The split across her belly parted like lips, and another puff of unpleasant, meaty air wafted up.

  “Hold,” Gillin said.

  He curled his fingers under a loop of small intestine. “How strong are you? Can you hold her with one hand?” Oscar placed his elbow on the cold steel of the makeshift table and nodded. “Give me your other hand,” Gillin continued. “Take this. Now pull it up and aside. Yes. Now get your fat head out of my way.”

  The doctor put one hand under the girl’s bladder and pulled it down. He stopped moving.

  “Good Lord.”

  “Teddy?”

  Gillin straightened, then stared for a moment at his gloved hand finger-deep in the wound. “Take a look.”

  He put one arm under the girl to take the weight Oscar had been carrying. Oscar leaned and looked into the raw crucible, and saw nothing but torn and cut flesh. “What am I looking for?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. It’s all just … it’s been cut up.”

  “Exactly. It’s been excised. And no effort to close off the severed blood vessels.”

  “Forget for a second that I don’t have a degree in anatomical sciences. What’s been excised?”

  “Her uterus, Oscar. The girl’s uterus is gone.”

  An hour later, Oscar emptied the last bucket of red water down a grate and wrung out the mop. He locked the cold room and turned the temperature down. The sun was a pale disk low in the west. Gillin sat straight-backed on the footpath, sipping amber liquid from a foam cup. Oscar helped him stand, and they walked together toward his car.

  As they drove in silence, Oscar thought about the girl and her rude, violent hysterectomy.

  Two recent cases stood out in his memory. The first from the late nineties: a young man with a history of mental illness claimed he’d become convinced that a rival’s child was gestating in his heroin-addicted girlfriend’s womb. He tied her to a bed frame, did her up with a shot from the girl’s stash of Aunt Hazel (he wasn’t thoughtless, merely motivated), and proceeded to give her an ad hoc abortion. His lack of surgical talent, evidenced by the pool of blood in which the police found the girl, was also reflected in his clinical skill: he had, mercifully, overdosed her before his knife touched her flesh. Outcome: served five years for mansl
aughter, followed by a spate of arrests for property crime until his own overdose resulted in profound brain damage; at last report, he was in institutional care in Western Australia. Case two, from a few years before Gray Wednesday: a teller who had worked at a bank branch near a Catholic girls’ school was laid off for breaches in protocol (read: yelling at customers). Neighbors in his apartment block complained about “out-of-hours renovations” coming from the former teller’s unit, and a representative from the body corporate visited. The teller denied doing any renovations but failed to adequately disguise the smell of rot coming from within his dwelling. Police discovered twin fifteen-year-old girls, students at the Catholic school and occasional users of the bank’s ATM. A witness had seen one of the girls refusing the accused’s attentions. The former teller, who professed undying love for the girls, had kidnapped them but agreed to release them—after he’d performed vulvectomies so that he would have keepsakes. One girl had bled out and died; the other had survived and, chained to the bathroom vanity, had used a toothbrush glass to tap on the walls whenever she thought her captor wasn’t home. Outcome: life sentence without parole. The teller had lasted less than a month in prison—long weeks, Oscar guessed, involving much physical and sexual assault—before he hanged himself.

  The light of the lowering sun caught Oscar’s eye as it flashed off the Ferris wheel going up in the show grounds a half mile from the city’s heart. Next week was Royal National Show Day. Had the dead girl looked forward to the holiday—to laughing as she ate cotton candy and corn dogs, and screaming as she rode the Zipper? Instead, her last screams were of terror, for her life, pointless. What went through her mind while someone carved into her soft skin a hundred times? Was she drugged? Did she faint? He hoped to God so. But if she was conscious, what sort of person could have tolerated her terrified begging?

  They reached Gillin’s tenement building. Outside, a line of men and women sat or stood at the front steps, waiting. When the nearest recognized Gillin in the car, a ripple ran quickly through the queue. Oscar realized that Teddy may have been struck off the register, but he still had plenty of patients.

  “Thank you,” Oscar said.

  Gillin grunted and picked his medical bag off the floor. He put his hand on the door handle but hesitated. “Catch the fellow, won’t you?”

  Oscar nodded.

  Gillin got out and closed the car door. With his old back as straight as a yacht’s mast on a calm day, he sailed toward the waiting men and women, and they rose like waterfowl to greet him. The last was a small young man who leaned like a collapsing derrick as he waited for the rest of the patients to climb the steps. The boy then hobbled up the steps with one hand on the rail; from his other arm hung an aluminum crutch by gray plastic loops.

  Oscar stared as the boy disappeared from view.

  Elbow crutches. Gray plastic cuffs. The hair worn from around the dead girl’s forearm.

  His Jane Doe had used crutches.

  The last of the public servants were leaving the Industrial Relations floor, giving Oscar polite nods as he wound his way between them toward his desk. Neve had her back to the rest of the branch floor; she was hunched forward, her head resting on one hand and her fingers tight in her hair. Foley sat at his desk, leaning back with his hands behind his head, talking to her.

  “… and the water’s warm all year round. You can get on that white sand and just roll around.…” Foley raised his arms above his head, revealing sweat stains as large as dinner plates, and waggled his hips luxuriantly. “Strip right down, feel the sun on your skin. Oscar! I was just telling Detective de Rossa about 1770. Ever been?”

  “No.”

  Neve didn’t look up. Every square inch of her desk was covered with files. On top of one pile of folders was a paper cup and an empty Paracetamol blister pack. Her hand covered her eyes, but her cheeks were the unhealthy color of new cheese.

  “Oh, you should go,” Foley continued. “It’s just so open. I’ve seen couples on the beach, uninhibited. Having sex right there on the sand. So beautiful, natural.”

  Oscar saw Neve shudder, and lifted the wastepaper bin in time to catch her stream of vomit.

  Oscar looked back at Foley. “Go on.”

  Foley stared at the slosh leaking down the side of the bin. “Nah, I’m good.” He stood and pulled his uniform cap on. He pointed at Oscar. “We gotta chat.”

  “Sure.”

  Foley left.

  “I hate him,” Neve whispered, and looked at Oscar from bleary eyes. “You missed his top tips for getting masseuses to work topless.”

  “I’m taking you home,” he said.

  She shook her head and wiped the corner of her mouth. “It’s just a headache. We need to get this operational summary done.” She cocked a bleary eye at him. “It’s a mess, Oscar.”

  He recognized the names on printed labels in the files’ corners. Tambassis. Dixon. A hundred others. Maybe one in seven was tabbed with a sticky note. Oscar felt a sharp pang. Was that their conviction rate? One in seven?

  “Home,” he said, and took her arm.

  She shook him off weakly, then relented and let him help her stand.

  Outside, the western sky was a burned welt. People hurried head-down to buses and trains, ignoring car horns and sidestepping piles of rubbish. Opposite headquarters huddled a line of taxis.

  “I saw Moechtar,” Neve said, throat croaky. “He said you haven’t signed my transfer.”

  “I forgot. I will.”

  She noticed a spot of blood on his sleeve. “What happened? You okay?”

  He nodded—I’m fine—and led her across to the first cab in the queue. “I looked over our Jane Doe today. I think she used crutches.”

  “And?”

  He folded her into the backseat. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. Beneath her clothes, she felt exhausted, limp. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a cab-charge voucher.

  The taxi driver saw the coupon and waved his hand as if dispelling a foul smell. “No, no! Cash.”

  “Cash? Sure. But first—” Oscar flipped open his badge, then reached in past the cabbie and pulled the man’s license ID off the visor; the man in the photo was not the man behind the wheel. “Just let me go photocopy this—”

  “Okay, okay! Fuck.” The driver shook his head, as if disgusted at how venal the world was. He snatched the voucher.

  Oscar looked in the backseat—Neve was already curled asleep. He gave the driver her address, and the cab rattled away into evening air that reeked of smoke.

  Alone on the Industrial Relations floor, he logged on to Prophet.

  In the Missing Persons files, Oscar counted thirty-seven teenagers around the state with physical disabilities or who’d had a leg injury at the time they vanished. Half those were boys, and of the girls he could eliminate most as too young or too old. Of the remaining six, one was Asian, one was too short, another was blonde, one was profoundly disabled and needed a wheelchair, and one was an amputee. He was down to one.

  He stared at the photograph of a fourteen-year-old girl with chestnut hair cut into a quirky bob, dressed in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the street spray art of the winking ghost in congress with a buxom woman. The girl in the photograph held the handle of a forearm crutch in one hand, the gray plastic cuff out of focus around her arm. With her other hand she pointed to her T-shirt and winced comically, as if to wonder, Is this for real? Oscar supposed that, if anyone could know for certain, she now did. He looked at her name.

  Penelope (Penny) Adeline Roth, daughter of Carole and Paul. Oscar reread the names. Carole and Paul Roth. Familiar, but he couldn’t place them. He read on. Penny was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age three. He gazed at her photo again. A plain but pleasant-looking girl with brazen eyes. Fun. Impudent. Alive. The mental jump from this cocky snapshot to the skull with a split jaw and no face was impossible.

  Oscar clicked to the next page, to see who had reported Penny missing, and from whe
re.

  He didn’t like the answer at all.

  Chapter 12

  The house had once been a filigreed gem, a Federation masterpiece in the Queen Anne–revival style. Narrow, white-framed windows with tiny colored top glasses; generous gables trimmed with fretwork as delicate as a wedding cake’s icing. Tall, slender columns above dark brick walls crawling with ivy; curved sunrooms topped by spires that prodded up between half a dozen tall brick chimneys. But the paint was flaking. Green-glazed edging tiles had chipped and hadn’t been replaced. The peppertrees and flowering plum were overgrown and turning wild. A wisteria pergola that had once been a shaded floral walkway was now a dark, throatlike nest that promised not refuge but spiders and hidden things. Ferns conspired under windows, and the summerhouse was black shadow inside.

  Elverly House easily fitted into a pattern of spiraling neglect. Since Gray Wednesday, federal and state revenues had plummeted. Key services were forced to run on budgets stretched as tight as piano wire; nonessential services lost funding altogether. Aged care, child care, and disability services received the bare minimum, and so relied almost exclusively on volunteers and private moneys, both of which were in short supply. Wards of the state brought in a small stipend. Already it was common to see the chronically disabled at train stations and bus exchanges with cups in hand, begging for coins.

  Oscar’s feet crunched on gravel overrun by chickweed and cobbler’s pegs. A perilously leaning signpost pointed one direction to ALL DELIVERIES and the other to RECEPTION. Elverly House and its rambling grounds were starkly incongruous with the plain, tall brick faces of warehouse buildings that boxed them in, making Oscar feel as if he were miniature and walking at the bottom of a box in a diorama creation of a secret garden that had somehow been corrupted by being left too long in shadow.

  He climbed a low set of granite steps to a tiled porch and pushed open the heavy door. Elverly’s foyer was a study in dark wood and old brass. Thin light washed in through a stained-glass window depicting native lizards climbing a fire-wheel tree. Oscar rang the bell and listened to the chime echo down the halls.