by Rhys Ford
“This coffee is shit,” he grumbled to himself. Without even thinking, he closed his hand over the lower drawer pull to his right, his blood thinned to the point of aching. The back of his mouth was tight, and his throat closed over the thick saliva pooling on his tongue. Spencer got the drawer open an inch before he caught himself. “Fuck.”
He jerked his hand away as if he’d been burnt, his fingers trembling with suppressed need. The drawer was empty. Or at least, empty of the bottle of bourbon he’d kept hidden in his Los Angeles desk. His stomach churned and twisted, already soured by the bag of greasy kettle chips he’d had for breakfast and the burnt coffee he’d washed it down with.
Rubbing at his face, Spencer muttered into the palm of his hand, “Just make it through the day. This is a day-by-day thing. You don’t fucking need it. All it does is screw up your life. New start. New beginning. None of that shit followed you up here. Don’t fuck this up, Ricci. You’re not going to get another chance at this.”
His computer screen seemed to dance about, a jumble of words he’d diligently tried to knit together into some semblance of rational thought, but there’d been no class in the Police Academy about how to write up a mummy. All around him, other cops were going about their business, chatting with partners or on the phone with leads and contacts. He didn’t know where Johnson was. Spencer wasn’t even sure if she had come in, but then, he really wasn’t expecting a lot out of her.
She just seemed to be biding her time and going through the paces of showing up. A lot like he had in Los Angeles.
“Do you ever sleep, man?” Salvation appeared in the form of a paper cup the size of a bucket from Whyborne’s down the street. A delicious chocolatey aroma wafted out of the sip slit of its lid, and mired in his distraction, Spencer had to look up to see who his guardian angel was. Sancho, a grizzled, seasoned inspector who’d spent most of his career at Central, patted him on the shoulder before plopping into Johnson’s empty chair. Hoisting a similar cup, Sancho chewed at his thick salt-and-pepper mustache, then said, “Hope you take it with cream and sugar because that’s what they gave me. Figured someone would want to drink that shit. I take mine black, so they had to make it over. Did you even go home?”
“I took a shower downstairs in the locker room. By the time I got home, I would’ve had to turn around and come right back. I’d some spare clothes in my car, so I figured I would just load up on coffee and start the case.” The brew was dark and strong, whispering of rich black soil and bright red beans ripened under a tropical sun. Nearly scalding his tongue on the first sip, Spencer forced himself to slow down, savoring the taste of heavy cream followed by a punch of sugar. “I might take a nap in my car before I have to head over to the morgue. Coroner said he’d be able to get the body open sometime this afternoon, or at least get started on it. I’m just waiting for the call.”
“Think she’s got a pen around here?” Sancho asked, rifling around at Johnson’s desk, a rickety wooden affair set up opposite Spencer’s desk so the sometimes partners faced each other as they worked. “I heard you caught a shit case. If you need anyone to bounce things off of, I’m here. I don’t want to say anything against your partner, but, well, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon and it doesn’t look like she’s going to make it in today.”
“She could be taking a personal day,” Spencer said automatically, instinctively covering Johnson’s ass, because that’s what he’d been trained to do for his partner. His own ass had gotten covered too many times for him to count, until Baker, his ex-partner, could no longer hide Spencer’s fuckups. “I’ll check in with the lieutenant in a little while. If Johnson isn’t here by the time I have to go down to the morgue, I’ll just take notes and catch her up later.”
“Who’s the attending death doc? Tell me you got Brady,” the older inspector said with a lascivious grin. “She is a fine-looking woman. Every time I go down there for an autopsy, she’s always got a couple of sweet words to pass on to me.”
“Isn’t Brady the one that looks like someone’s grandmother?” Spencer struggled to remember who he’d met during his first and only trip down at the morgue. “Graying brunette with red cheeks? Put a pair of wire-rim glasses on her and give her a short elf and a red suit with white fur, she could be baking cookies for her husband, Santa?”
“That’s the one.” Sancho sucked at his teeth, grinning wider. “Don’t give me that look. When you get to be this side of silver, you’ll be surprised at what catches your eye. Just if you see her, tell her Sancho says hi.”
“I’ve got Carter.” His gut twisted again, but this time with a tingle of desire. The flush of want came as a surprise. He’d fallen so deep into the bottle Spencer no longer had any desire for another man, but there was something about the doctor that tugged at long-dead strings. Not something he’d expected. Not after the booze sliced away any need for intimacy and desire. The want for Carter perplexed him, an odd puzzle piece found in an old game Spencer thought he’d lost a lifetime ago. Pursing his mouth, he had another look at his report on the screen. “Apparently, he gets everything weird. And this case is definitely fucking weird.”
“Not as weird as he is. That guy’s a fucking spook,” Sancho mumbled as he sipped his coffee. “Everyone says he’s a genius at what he does, but he’s a damned machine. I sat in on one of his cuts, and it was some floater, some guy fished out of the Bay. I had a couple of juniors with me because the DB was connected to a drug case they’d pulled, and one of them went down after Carter made the first cut. To be fair, I sat through a lot of autopsies, but when a couple of crabs start crawling out of some bloated guy’s sliced-open chest, it’s going to make you little green.”
Leaning back in his chair, Spencer couldn’t help but be fascinated. “So, what happened?”
“Branston over there went down like a drunk deer on ice, and Carter didn’t even look up.” The other inspector shook his head, smoothing down his mustache. “Carter told his assistant to drag the guy out after he had to step over his legs a couple of times, but the bastard just kept going, flicking the crabs off into a bucket as he went. Got down to his stomach and found a handful of heroin balloons. You’d have thought it was Christmas and Easter rolled up in one from the smile on Carter’s face. Guy is a weird sick fuck.”
“Lucky me then for pulling him,” Spencer growled, wondering what he’d gotten himself into. “I’m already on his bad side for getting on his ass for showing up late to the call. Came to find out he’d just gone off duty, and there I was busting his chops because I had a dead guy wrapped up in cut-up sheets.”
“Nah, I think something like that is the guy’s wet dream,” Sancho chortled. “He’s a hard-ass, but put him on the stand and the jury licks up every single word he says. If I ever get something funky or I need a good solid take on why somebody went tits up, I’d pick him over anyone down there any day. Even Brady. He might creep me the fuck out, but he gets results, and like I said, he’s a machine. Nothing fazes him. Nothing stops him. If anyone can figure out what’s going on with your fucked-up case, it’s him.”
“I hope so because we’ve got nothing, and no one seems to know a damn thing.” Spencer’s cell phone buzzed, and a quick look at the screen told him it was time to pack up. “That’s him. I’ve got half an hour to get down there or he’s starting without me, so it looks like Johnson’s going to miss all the fun. Thanks for the coffee and the reach-out. Wish me luck, because this case is going to be the most screwed-up thing I’ve worked on in a long time, and right now, Carter’s the only chance I’ve got.”
Three
“THERE’S A COP here to see you, Master.” Brian, his attendant, slunk into the room, hugging the shadows where the central lights didn’t quite touch the corners of the autopsy room. Glancing up, Xian sighed heavily, raking a judgmental gaze over the rail-thin, bookish young man he’d taken under his charge after Brian’s father retired from his inherited position as Xian’s right hand. Peering back at Xian through his filmed-up wire-
rimmed glasses, Brian attempted a thin smile. “Should I bring him in now or let him ponder his fate for a little while longer?”
“For the last fucking time, Brian,” Xian said from between his clenched teeth. “Stop calling me Master. It’s creepy and wrong. Why do you have to make this weird? You’re my assistant, not an indentured servant.”
“The Grants have been your humble servants for generations, Doctor. It’s my honor to call you—” Brian swallowed the word before it left his lips, probably silenced by Xian’s arched eyebrow. Muttering under his breath, he slid in another meek protest. “Besides, I’m your Renfield. It’s… tradition.”
Xian cursed under his breath, a fine Scottish Gaelic phrase he’d first learned in the back room of the Hong Kong whorehouse he’d been born in. “I wish to hell your father had never let you read that damned book. It’s warped your brain.”
Brian sniffed. “I’ll have you know that book is required reading for most literature classes.”
“I would bemoan the quality of education you received as a child, but seeing as I had none myself, I have no room to talk.” Xian glanced at the wrapped-up body laid out for him on the autopsy table. “If the cop outside is Ricci, then let him in. If it’s anyone else, take a message. And when you’re done with that, set up the x-rays they did for me this morning. I want as few surprises as possible going in.”
Brian slunk out the way he came in, muttering to himself as he went. The boy meant well, but Xian missed Brian’s father, Frank. While the man hadn’t followed Xian into a medical career so they could work side by side like Brian did, he appreciated the no-nonsense demeanor and clinical competence Frank brought to the table. Frank had embraced Xian and his family’s symbiotic relationship, taking advantage of every opportunity offered to him. When it came time for Frank to retire, he was nearly apologetic when he offered up his youngest son as his replacement, but no one else in the family had as much zeal and dedication as Brian, so Xian took him on.
His only regret was Brian’s fascination with being immersed in a demon’s servant’s role as imagined by one particularly idiotic book and the subsequent movies it inspired.
“I guess it’s better than him wanting to be Igor,” Xian muttered to himself, approaching the mummy. “He’d be going around screaming Frau Blucher, then whinnying. They already think he’s weird, and they’re not wrong.”
He would’ve liked to say he would be able to feel Ricci enter the room, but that would’ve been a lie. For all of the legends and myths about bloodsucking fiends, Xian was always saddened by the distressing lack of godlike heightened senses and mesmerizing powers that were supposed to have come with the fangs. He was definitely stronger than most humans and quite a bit faster. But the price he paid for alleged immortality was an acute sensitivity to light, an inability to eat a full meal, and the endless opportunity of watching everyone he loved age and die.
“Not like I had a fucking choice,” he said to his reflection, catching a warped mirror of his features in one of the stainless-steel drawers lining the wall. “Rodriquez was going to take his pound of flesh either way.”
The surgical arena set aside as his personal working space was as clinically clean and devoid of warmth as Xian’s life. He dug through the filthiest of humanity’s depravities and some of its deepest sorrows in the rectangular space filled with tables and knives and drawers where the dead lay waiting for his hands. Every time he thought he’d seen it all, something new crawled out of the gutter, and Xian once again fell into his spiraling fascination of death and the decay of human flesh.
Stripping down a corpse to discover how it lost its spark of life marked him as unclean, or at least in the eyes of the people he’d been born to. It was interesting how perceptions changed about the dying but the stigma of those who handled the dead remained. Even before he’d been altered and doomed to live in an eternal dusk, he’d been entranced by the moment the soul slipped from its earthly prison and the universe took back the energy it’d given to form a body’s mass.
Xian also appreciated the irony of being born into a fleshy stew of meat and sex where life and death were tightly intermingled, and now he stood in what was an abattoir of sorts, digging through the debris of others’ lives in order to give answers to anyone left behind… or at least anyone who cared.
The blue-tinted glasses he needed to wear under the banks of white light made him look like an idiot, or at least he felt like one, especially when he overheard the whispers of the staff when he walked by an open door. Judging by what he learned about human senses, Xian guessed he could see and hear better as well, but the only times it seemed to jump out at him was when he overheard a conversation he probably could’ve done without. It was difficult to live without anyone close to him, but he’d learned that hard lesson early on. Distance meant he couldn’t be betrayed, couldn’t have his heart broken, and most definitely never again have his soul ripped out when he revealed what he was to someone he’d fallen in love with.
It was just better that way. The Grant family were enough, Xian assured himself. They gave him a family member to assist him, and in return, they kept his secrets and received college educations and houses they wouldn’t normally have been able to afford. Brian was a stellar assistant, for all his quirks, and despite Xian’s exasperation, he wouldn’t trade the young man for anything in the world.
Most of the time.
“I’ve brought him to you, Mast… er, Dr. Carter,” Brian caught himself, paling visibly at Xian’s hot glare. “I’ll just go get the x-rays.”
Xian ignored Brian’s scuttling to get out of the room, choosing instead to study the inspector he’d met only half a day before. Inspector Spencer Ricci entered the room as if he owned it, filling the space with a visceral presence. He brought in with him the scent of the city, a bit of tar mingled in with stale sunshine, hidden beneath a musky, masculine aroma. Dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, a pair of blue jeans that looked like they had been dug out of a laundry pile, and a navy T-shirt silkscreened with the logo of some band or sports team Xian had never heard of, Ricci looked more dangerous than a cop had the right to look.
His long strides chewed through the distance between the main door and the table, his large hands clenching a paper mask, probably one Brian instructed him to put on before the autopsy started. Most cops liked to hang out outside of the perimeter of the cutting table, the more seasoned ones ensuring they were out of any splash zone. Spencer seemed like he’d gone more than a few rounds on the streets and would have enough sense to stay back, but the dead man lying on the table was going to be a different kettle of fish altogether, so having a ringside seat made sense.
Or at least Xian hoped their victim would prove to be as interesting as the inspector who’d come into his autopsy room as if he owned the place.
Up close, Ricci was a delectable tangle of bad-boy-gone-good, but those startling blue eyes were flat, nearly dead and expressionless as he drew near. Waves of tired rolled off of him in unpredictable tides, lack of sleep turning his skin sallow and deepening the shadows clinging to his face. His dark hair seemed to suck in the light, the silver strands running through it throwing back a glittering sheen. He definitely hadn’t shaved since the last time Xian saw him, because the scruff on his face was thicker, darkening his jawline.
He should’ve been a pirate sailing the Seven Seas or an adventurer roaming the earth for treasures and artifacts. Instead, he wore a gun and a star and draped himself in fatigue and cynicism, working at the edges of death in the hopes of finding whomever had chosen to become an innocent’s Grim Reaper.
Or maybe it was simply a job. Except Xian didn’t think that was the case.
“I’ve got the x-rays up, Dr. Carter,” Brian said from behind him, startling Xian. He hadn’t heard his assistant walk up or even fumble with the films. “I have laid out the sample trays for you, and if you like, I can run down to Tox to see if they’ve gotten anything off of what they took this morning. Sharon sai
d she might have something.”
“If she does, can you process that and break it down for the inspector?” Xian nodded at Ricci as if there was another cop in the room he needed to differentiate between. The inspector threw him off somehow, unsettling a part of Xian’s consciousness he’d buried years ago. “Thank you for setting that up, Brian. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”
He’d gotten a few draughts of blood after coming from the crime scene, but the punch of its adrenaline appeared to have dissipated from his body. Xian was hungry again, and it shocked him to discover the itch at the back of his throat was a longing to sink his teeth into any part of the inspector he could reach. Ricci was making him want. His mind whispered with ideas, a vision of the inspector’s broad, corded body stretched out over red satin sheets, his hands clenching at the iron headboard Xian bought at a flea market ten years ago.
“We just got these in, so I haven’t had a chance to look at them. I don’t know how many autopsies you’ve sat in on, but I can tell you, mummified victims are not usual.” Shaking off the whispering taunts, Xian turned to study the x-rays, very much aware of the inspector coming up behind him. “I wasn’t sure how you were approaching this or even how the person who prepared this man went at it. I was originally assuming that perhaps the man had been dead prior to the mummification, possibly from natural causes, and he’d expressed a desire to be prepared this way. I figured x-rays would give us a good look into what went into this process and whether or not it’s a traditional mummification or something someone did out of a ritualistic need.”
