Читать книгу Broken Monsters - Lauren Beukes - Страница 19

There are trajectories that cut through our lives, Gabi has found, that link things together. Sometimes those are literal, like the scar under Bambi’s arm.

A few years ago there were so many unclaimed bodies at the Wayne County morgue that the city had to rent a truck to store them all in, piled three-deep like a short stack. Only pancakes don’t get toe tags. It wasn’t that nobody loved them enough to come get them; the families had to save up to be able to pay for their funerals.

Now they’ve opened an additional pathology lab up at the university, and Bambi is enough of a novelty to get special priority. The new facilities still smell like dead people and preservatives and cleaning products and that peculiar metal tang you can taste in the back of your mouth. Hearts still make the same wet slop sound when they land in a bucket full of organs. The corpses on the metal tables are still uninhabited shells.

‘Foreclosed people,’ she observes to Marcus. The rookie nods sagely, missing the joke. He’s got a long way to go.

Boyd digs in his ear with one finger. ‘I think they’re more human like this. When you shoot an animal, you can only really appreciate what made it an animal when it’s gone.’

‘That’s beautiful, Bob, especially considering you still shoot them anyway. Can you quit picking at yourself?’

‘It’s itchy.’ He wipes the wax off on his pants. ‘I saw an ad for ear candles in a magazine. Do you think that works?’

‘Why don’t you try it and report back?’

There is a small crowd of people in scrubs gathered around her stiff. She can tell it’s Bambi by the six-inch dip in the sheet between the constituent parts of boy and deer.

Dr Mackay is poking around under the sheet, talking in a low voice. He looks like he’s from another century, with deep grooves in his forehead you could play like an LP record if you had a turntable. He keeps trying to retire, and they keep asking him to come back. There are two cops at the back, craning their necks to see.

‘Move it along, boys. This isn’t your case.’

‘We just wanted a look. That’s some crazy shit, Detective.’

‘Yeah, yeah, this takes the crazy-shit cake. Now hop.’ Boyd makes as if to move toward them, and his bulk is enough to get them going.

‘You letting every sightseer in, Dr Mackay?’ Gabi snaps. ‘Should we be charging?’

‘They got a body in here, same as you, Detective. Little more clear-cut than yours.’ He sounds as if he blames her personally. ‘And the others are students. There’s a lot of interest in this, as you might imagine.’ He nods at the serious young people in scrubs. ‘You’re excused.’

Boyd pinches his nose. ‘Didn’t you wash him?’

‘We’ve flushed the body several times with the high-pressure hose. What you’re smelling is the contents of the bucket. Stomach acid, gall and feces. Stuffing. Your killer didn’t do a particularly good job.’

‘You need some lipgloss, Sparkles?’ Boyd teases Marcus, who is breathing hard through his nose.

‘No thank you, sir. I’m mostly interested in the autopsy.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Gabi says.

Mackay flips the sheet, revealing the corpse, already laid open. Human excavations – the casual violation of the body’s integrity. They all peer into the abdominal cavity. ‘Very inefficient. See here, where he cut through the stomach. He made a hell of a mess.’

‘It’s not a hunter,’ Boyd says. ‘Hunter wouldn’t do such a half-assed job of gutting something.’

‘Unless he was in a hurry. Besides, I’d venture that there are a lot of amateurs running around the woods with semi-automatics who wouldn’t know the front end of a deer from its ass.’ Gabi nudges the bucket beside the table with her shoe. It’s full of wadded-up paper and a flaky fabric, sodden and reeking. ‘What did you mean by stuffing?’

‘Newspaper at a guess, although we’ll need to send it for testing. It was used to fill the cavity, probably to keep the shape after he removed the organs before he stuck it back together.’

‘Had to look right,’ Gabi ventures.

‘Why newspaper?’ Sparkles says.

‘What he had lying around. I’m pretty sure it’s not what professional taxidermists use. What do they use? Sawdust? Emulsifying foam?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Boyd shrugs. ‘You put Stricker on that.’

‘I believe they make casts,’ Dr Mackay says. ‘Now, here’s your fatal wound.’ He points out the blood-crusted hole halfway up the boy’s neck. ‘Blunt trauma severed the vertebrae. Could have been a hammer and chisel, but there was a massive application of force, and the bruising around the area suggests it was mechanical, probably pneumatic. I’d guess it was some kind of nail gun, which is something I’m telling you, not putting in the report because it’s speculation. If you could bring me the nail, that would be wonderful. But as you can see by this tissue damage, he dug it out. Possibly with pliers.’

‘How hard is it to get a nail gun?’ Gabi asks.

‘Hardware store sells them over the counter,’ Boyd says. ‘I’ll run a check.’

‘Now, this is the really neat part,’ Mackay says. ‘You see the seam where he was joined to the deer? I had to cut through it, but you can see in the cross-section, here, how the tissue has fused.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Like the kind of gluing a plastic surgeon might do, but not quite. It’s extraordinary really; a chemical reaction has caused the proteins to break down and mesh with each other. Think of it as a flesh weld. I’ve mailed some colleagues about it.’

‘Welding. Nail guns. We got fuckin’ Handy Manny on the loose,’ Boyd says.

‘I like how he tried to hide it by brushing up the fur. It’s a nice touch. Oh, I do have something else interesting for you. You’ll like this.’

‘Oh boy,’ Gabi says.

Mackay raises the boy’s skinny limb to reveal the soft private folds of the armpit, with its first tufting of pubescent hair. It feels somehow more invasive than seeing him laid open and Gabi’s first instinct is to look away.

‘Look,’ Mackay says, so she has to. Bambi has an old scar on his tricep. A pucker of scar tissue just above his armpit, like a tiny daisy. ‘Here’s where the slug went straight through. He was lucky. Inch to the right and it would have re-entered the body, gone into the chest cavity.’

Not so lucky this time, Gabi thinks.