by Unknown
“Gee, thanks.”
My whole body was tingly, and my head itched. I wanted to get on with it and told Thicke just that.
“Of course. Please come downstairs with me.”
I was afraid of that.
Thicke pushed the wall panel; it clicked and opened again. I wanted to make a crack about the door, but Thicke wasn’t a guy I wanted to make small talk with let alone take jabs at. I wouldn’t want him to think we were buddies. Mo’Lock was right. The guy reeked of creepy.
I followed him downstairs. At the bottom was a large cement walled room, not unlike the basement I was currently hiding out in, except this room was filled with two embalming tables, a bunch of cabinets with jars of god-knows-what, and along one wall about six of those corpse filing cabinets. You don’t usually see those in commercial mortuaries, usually just city morgues.
“What’s with the body cabinets, Thicke?” I asked. “You saving bodies for a rainy day?”
He laughed, and I got a glimpse at those nasty little teeth. “No, no. I perform services for homeless persons—John Does—and I have to wait thirty days until the bodies are free to be buried or cremated. I had those installed for extra storage.”
“Amazing what you can get at Ikea,” I said.
I regretted it immediately. Thicke laughed so hard I thought those teeth would shoot across the room and attack me.
I scanned the room. One table was empty but still needed cleaning. There was diluted blood in the drain grooves. On the floor between the two tables was a drainpipe the size of a manhole, where everything was washed down.
There was a lot of blood clotted around the drain, and what might have been small bits of flesh.
I took Thicke for a lot of things; one of them wasn’t being a slob.
On the other table was a corpse being prepped up for embalming. It was an old woman, in her late eighties if I had to guess. She was completely naked, and next to her body was a wash pan filled with water and a large sponge. Thicke must have been washing her down when I rang.
Then I noticed the blood around the drain wasn’t entirely coming from either of the two embalming tables. There wasn’t much, just a pinkish wash, but some of it appeared to have flowed from those body cabinets in the wall.
By then the whole place was making me nauseous. The smell of the bodies and the chemicals and the fact that I was running on amphetamines made for a nasty combination. If we didn’t get on with it, I’d puke for sure.
“So why’d you call me down here?”
Thicke gathered himself and nodded like a nervous pigeon. “Yes… well…” he started, then wiggled his skeletal fingers at the cabinets in the wall. “Perhaps it’s best if I just show you.”
He walked slowly toward the wall and turned to me. He was nervous, like a guy who had done something wrong once and felt guilty about everything ever since. I knew the type. It meant they were capable of doing more bad shit if they were given the chance.
I followed about halfway to the wall and stopped as Thicke reached for the handle of the first drawer.
“I’d had a couple bodies go missing,” he said. “I reported those to the police, but when I found this I thought I’d better call you.”
The handle popped and clicked, and then Thicke opened the square steel door. Inside all I could see was darkness and the bottoms of two pale, yellowish feet
Then Thicke pulled the slide tray out, and I got a good look at the body.
“This is what I found this morning.” He finished and stepped back to let me take it in.
The body was a black male. He looked to have been around seventy years old, with thinning gray hair and a matching white beard. He was thin as a rail but with a huge bloated belly.
Problem was, most of the left side his bloated belly was gone now. From below his left nipple to just above the pelvis the flesh had been torn away violently and sloppily, like someone or something had dug it out with a dull fork. A good twelve-inch section of skin was completely gone, and whatever organs had been inside were also missing.
I could see veins and arteries and even a section of his upper intestines lying there like discarded tubing. Not severed or even chewed through, they looked like they had been yanked and pulled until they snapped and tore.
I looked at Thicke. He had backed away and was standing in a section of gray wall between two glass cabinets. He was waiting for a reaction from me.
“How many bodies went missing before this started happening?” I asked. I gave him no reaction besides the query.
He stammered a little bit. “Two or three.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying you’re not sure how many corpses disappeared?”
Thicke’s mouth was dry. His lips stuck and smacked when he spoke. “No, sorry. It was three,” he said. “I’m sorry. All of this is a little… disturbing to me.”
“Yeah, I bet.” I gave Thicke a good long stare. “All three John Does?”
“Yes. Yes, they were.”
I leaned in close and gave the wounds a better inspection. The tears were definitely not done with any kind of knife or surgical instrument, and I’d dealt with flesh-eaters before so I could see that the jagged grooves weren’t made by human teeth, or even animal for that matter.
The fork image stuck in my head. The skin was ripped away by something repeatedly scraping until it gave way. They might have been made by some sort of claws or even human nails, but my gut and brain told me it was too sloppy even for that.
Thicke remained in his cubby hole between the cabinets. He was watching me very carefully. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head.
“Is this the only one?”
Thicke shook his head slowly.
He was getting his story mixed up, and I was starting to get pissed.
“Where are the others then?” I asked.
I glanced at the mortician, and he motioned his head toward the other body files.
I walked around the one already laid out and grabbed the handle of the neighboring storage unit. It clicked and popped and opened as the other had. Again I was greeted with feet until I pulled the tray out and saw another body, a white male, with his entire midsection shredded away and emptied.
“You found both of these this morning?” I asked.
Thicke nodded and added, “And two more in the two shelves above.”
“Christ.”
I opened the other two and sure enough, except for being different bodies, they had the same problem: no flesh around the midsection and no internal organs.
I slammed the drawers shut. I’d seen enough.
“What did the cops do when you called about the missing bodies?”
Henry Thicke stayed where he was, between the two glass front cabinets against the wall. “A detective came by,” he stammered. “He took a report and that was that.”
“The detective leave a card?”
Thicke fumbled for his wallet, flipped it open, and retrieved a card. He didn’t give it to me. He just read the name. “He was a Detective Nathan Hendricks.”
I laughed. I knew Hendricks. He was a casebook bad cop, always on the take, big drinker; rumor had it he had some bouts with drugs as well. If he wasn’t such a scumbag, he might have been my best friend.
But the thing was, with me on the outs with the LAPD, Hendricks was probably the one cop who wouldn’t rat me out. I wasn’t sure this was my kind of case, and I might want to pawn it off. A bunch of mutilated dead bodies are pretty weird, but not my kind of weird.
I dialed Hendricks’s precinct and asked the desk sergeant to get him on the line. When he asked who was calling, I said Al Capone, and the dink didn’t even seem to notice I was pulling his leg. He just asked me to hold while he transferred me.
Thicke remained in the same spot. Behind him was one of those huge floor-to-ceiling diagrams of the human body with all of the organs showing.
He noticed me watching and made an attempt at eye contact, but then something above and behind me
distracted him. I turned to see for myself and saw the monitor that went with the security camera up front.
On the screen I saw three people, a black woman along with a younger male and female, also black.
I shot a look back at Thicke. He looked nervous, more than before. Now he had little be lads of sweat sliding from his hairline.
It didn’t take a detective to figure that it was the family of the first shredded corpse. Thicke’s reaction confirmed it.
“Oh dear,” he said, and finally moved from his spot. “I’d better go up.”
I gestured to the phone at my ear. “I’ll wait here.”
Thicke hesitated. He didn’t want me down in his playroom alone, but I wasn’t budging, and he had customers waiting, so he relented and went up the stairs, leaving me leaning against the table with the old lady.
Finally somebody picked up on the other end.
“Detective Hendricks.”
“Hendricks,” I said. “It’s Cal McDonald.”
There was a long pause. A second longer, and I might have hung up. Then he came back, whispering this time.
“You’re pretty popular these days. You don’t need me to tell you every cop on the street is looking for you.”
“It’s bullshit,” I coughed. “The Councilman trumped up those charges. I’ll deal with it later. Right now I’m on a case and your name came up.”
That got his attention. “Yeah? What case is that?”
“I’m down at Henry Thicke’s Mortuary.”
Hendricks sounded disappointed. “This about that missing body? I told that creepy old coot to cool his heels while I filed the report.”
“How many bodies he tell you about?”
“How many? Just the one,” Hendricks said, speaking louder. “There more?”
I glanced up at the monitor and saw Thicke in the receiving area doing his best to comfort the family. They probably wanted to see their loved one’s body. I was half-tempted to show them.
“Get this,” I said. “When I asked him how many he said two OR three.”
Hendricks laughed on the other end. “What’s he up to? You think he’s banging the merchandise?”
I paused and looked at the phone. “Okay, first of all, gross. Second, how would that make them go missing?”
“I dunno.”
Sick fuck. I wished I hadn’t called him, but I had him on the line, and the more I thought about it, the more this seemed like a normal, albeit strange case.
That’s when I glanced down at the drain between the two embalming tables. There was all sorts of debris aside from the blood on and around it, but just around the edge it was clean. I gave the grate a shove with the tip of my boot, and it moved.
The drain grate wasn’t sealed, and it looked like it had been moved recently.
“You need anything else, McDonald?”
I forgot I was on the phone. “Yeah, sorry, Hendricks,” I said. “Listen, how about coming down here? You should see what else Thicke has down in his embalming room. This is probably more up your alley than mine anyway.”
“What? No ghosts or witches haunting the place?”
I flipped off the phone.
“You wanna help or what?”
He didn’t hesitate. “What’s in it for me?” he said in true scumbag form.
I had a couple hundred left from what the ghoul gave me for drugs. I figured it’d be worth it if I could pawn this off on the cops. Besides, the ghoul had plenty more cash where that came from.
“I got a hundred.”
There was a half-beat pause, then, “Sure. I’ll be down there in fifteen.”
As soon as Henry Thicke finished with the family and came back downstairs, I was pointing at the drain in the floor. “Where’s this drain go?”
I either caught him off guard, or he was stalling. He hemmed and hawed for a few, then muttered, “To the sewer. But that’s just for hosing the floor. Blood drained for embalming goes to a septic tank that is drained and disposed of legally and properly.”
I held up my hand. “Okay. Christ. I just wondered about the drain.” I said. “It looks like it’s been opened recently.”
This is where Thicke blew it. He tried to be too casual, too cavalier, and all it told me was that he was hiding something from me.
“Hmmm,” he said. “No, I don’t believe I’ve opened it lately.”
I stuck out my foot and jammed the heel of my boot down on the side of the drain grill, and it kicked up and clanked back into place ever so slightly. It was heavy, but definitely not secured.
“Looks loose to me,” I said, glaring at him.
The mortician moved past me and again placed himself in front of the anatomy poster between the cabinets. The first time I thought he was just scared. Now I was thinking there was more significance to the location, especially after seeing his fondness for hidden doors.
I pulled out my gun and lowered it on Henry Thicke.
“What are you hiding?” I asked.
Thicke began to sweat like a pig. He raised his hands, not over his head, but just enough to keep them in plain sight. “N-nothing.” he said. “Please, Mr. McDonald, I can explain.”
I wasn’t interested in explanations. I wanted answers, and obviously the only way I’d get any was to get them myself.
“Step away from the wall.”
I guided him with my gun. He did what he was told. The lanky mortician vacated the space between the two glass cabinets.
Keeping an eye on Thicke, I edged to the wall, and with my free hand I gave the anatomy poster a push. It gave, followed by a click and a pop, and the hidden door opened.
I glared at Thicke.
He gave me a weasel smile.
It’s happened before, and it happened to be the one thing that pisses me off more than just about anything else: people trying to use me to clean up their own messes. I wasn’t exactly sure what Thicke’s mess was yet, but with the missing and gutted corpses I guessed it wouldn’t be pretty.
I gave him one more chance to come clean. “What’s in here?” I asked, gesturing to the partially opened hidden door.
“J-just my private workroom.”
I shook my head, then walked right over to him and cracked him across the face with my gun. He yelped and went down like a bag of bones and began whimpering on the floor. I was about to give him a boot in the head when I heard another gun click behind me.
It was Hendricks. All three hundred pounds of him. His hair was greasy and combed over a lopsided bald patch on the side of his head. His face was pockmarked, and his eyebrows were one stretch of thick black hair across his clammy forehead. His suit was a rumpled mess of mustard polyester.
“Put down the gun, Hendricks.” I said. “I think my client here is shaping up to be more of a suspect.”
Hendricks kept the gun on me as he moved into the room. “You still got my cash?”
“Yes.”
Hendricks put away the weapon. He had all the morals of a scorpion.
I told him to handcuff the mortician to one of the embalming tables, the empty one, not the one with the old broad on it. Once he was done with that I told him to check out the bodies in the storage units.
Whether it was because he was a seasoned cop or he just didn’t give a shit, Hendricks didn’t so much as flinch when he saw the corpses with their guts ripped out. He didn’t react at all.
But he did have a response. After he looked at the last body he closed the drawer, turned and kicked Thicke in the kidneys.
By that point I’d opened the hidden door and was peering down a short cement hall, no more than a yard or two. I headed inside. Hendricks was on my heels.
The hall led to a small box of a room, but it was too dark to see anything. I fumbled for a light switch and came up empty. Then a string brushed my face. I grabbed it and gave it a tug.
“Christ.” Hendricks said as the bulb flickered to life.
The hidden room was a private workroom all right, but the work being
done in here was anything but normal mortuary services.
There was an operating table so stained with blood you could hardly tell what the original color was. And not just blood. There was debris, chunks and slices of tissue dried, hardened, and stuck to the table. I glanced down and saw there was no drain like in the main room.
Next to the table was another smaller table with piles of surgical tools ranging from the smallest scalpel to a bone saw. They were about as blood-soaked and clotted with tissue as the table.
But the kicker was what lined the shelves that filled the rest of the room.
There was a Hand of Glory, a candle made from the hand of dead man. It was a legendary article of magic and mysticism, which purportedly allowed its possessors to access any place they wished.
Next to the hand was a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead, and next to that a small black figure of Baphomet, a common Satanic symbol referenced by occultists from the Middle Ages to Aleister Crowley.
The rest of the shelves were loaded with stacks of ancient-looking books and cheap paperbacks, all on the subject of the occult.
Where there weren’t books there were jars. The jars ranged in size and contained all manner of sick and twisted shit people generally associated with witchcraft, black magic, and the occult. There was a jar of severed human fingers. I saw eyeballs, probably human, in one, and a human scalp in a larger jar next to it. Stacked on top of the scalp was a smaller jar filled to the rim with what looked like fingernails.
On the left shelves were all chemicals and powders. They were arranged like a macabre spice rack. There were the usual items an occultist worth his salt would own like Tanis Root and Blessed Thistle, alongside Mandrake and Wormwood. There were also some rarer items such as Tetrodotoxin, a powder thought to be used to create zombies from the living, and a vial of the herb Datura, also used to drug people into trancelike states.
I’d seen all this shit before. It looked like Henry Thicke was doing more than dressing the dead up for funerals.
Behind me Hendricks wasn’t as relaxed as I was. “What the Christ has that sick fuck been up to?”
I glanced over Hendricks’s shoulder. Thicke was on the floor chained to the embalming table, but listening to every word we said.
