“Those English people got it from eating beef.”
“Okay, it’s also possible to catch it by eating infected meat. That’s how cannibals get it.”
Sheehan’s eyebrows shot up. “Now this starts to get interesting. What’s this about cannibals?”
“Roy, this is completely irrelevant—”
“No, I wanna hear this. What about cannibals?”
Dvorak sighed. “There’ve been villages in New Guinea where eating human flesh is part of a sacred ritual. The only people who caught CJD were the women and children.”
“Why only women and kids?”
“The men got the choicest cuts—the meat of the corpse. The muscle. The women and kids had to be satisfied with the parts no one else wanted. The brain.” He watched for a disgusted reaction on Sheehan’s face, but the cop only leaned closer. In some ways, he was like a cannibal himself, eager to devour the most appalling morsels of information.
“So eating a human brain would do it,” said Sheehan.
“An infected human brain.”
“Can you tell it’s infected by looking at it?”
“No, it’s a microscopic diagnosis. And this is a stupid conversation.”
“It’s the big city, Doc. Weirder stuff happens. We get reports of vampires, werewolves—”
“People who think they’re werewolves.”
“Who knows? All this crazy cult shit going on these days.”
“I hardly think there’s some cannibalistic cult at Brant Hill.”
Sheehan glanced down as his beeper went off. “Excuse me,” he said and left to make the call.
Now I can finally get some work done, thought Dvorak.
A moment later, though, Sheehan returned. “I’m headed out to the North End. Think maybe you should come see this one.”
“What is it? A homicide?”
“They’re not sure.” Sheehan paused. “They’re not even sure it’s human.”
16
The smell of blood, cloying and metallic, had wafted even into the hallway. Dvorak nodded to the patrolman standing watch, ducked under the police tape, and stepped into the flat. Sheehan and his partner, Jack Moore, were already inside, as was the CSU crew. Moore was squatting by something near the corner. Dvorak didn’t cross toward him right away but held back near the doorway, his gaze carefully scanning the floor.
It was yellow and white linoleum, in a pattern of random squares with a ratty throw rug by the bed. Blood was still drying on the floor near the bathroom—a great deal of blood. There were smear marks, as though something had been dragged across the floor, as well as a confusing collage of bloody shoeprints. He also saw the distinct imprints of bare feet, small ones, tracking toward the dresser, then fading out.
He looked at the walls and saw no arterial splatter. In fact, there was very little splatter at all, just that congealing lake. Whoever had bled in this room had done so while lying quietly on the floor, and not in a panicked frenzy.
“Doc,” said Moore. “Come and look at this.”
“You got shots of these footprints already?”
“Yeah, those are from the EMTs. It’s all been photographed and videotaped. Just step around that way. Watch out for that set of footprints there.”
Dvorak stepped carefully around the imprints of the bare feet and circled around to where Moore and Sheehan were squatting.
“What do you think?” said Moore, moving aside to let Dvorak see what lay on the floor.
“Jesus.”
“That was our reaction, too. So what is it?”
Dvorak didn’t know what to say. Slowly he dropped down for a closer look.
His first impression was that it was a leftover Halloween gag, a one-eyed, flesh-colored monster fashioned from rubber and nightmares. Then he saw the streaks of blood drying on its surface, and the fragment of attached placenta, connected by an umbilical cord. This thing was not made of rubber, but flesh.
He pulled on a pair of gloves and gingerly touched the surface of the Thing. It felt like real skin—cold, but yielding. The single eye was a pale blue, with a rudimentary flap of skin for an eyelid, but no lashes. Below it were two small holes, like nostrils, then an open cleft. The mouth? He could scarcely identify any normal anatomy on this lump of flesh. Tufts of hair sprang out at crazy angles. And—dear God— was that a tooth poking out by the flipper?
He recalled a tumor he’d once seen removed from a woman’s abdomen. A teratoma. It had been the result of an ovum gone crazy, turning into a cancer made up of wildly differentiating cells. The tumor had had teeth and tufts of hair connected in a ball of skin.
Suddenly he focused on the pattern of dried blood on the floor, on the irregular smear leading from the larger pool, and the umbilical cord, stretched out straight. The realization of what he was looking at made him pull his hand away in horror.
“Shit,” he said. “It moved.”
“I didn’t see it move,” said Moore.
“Not now. Before. It left that trail.” He pointed to the flip-flop pattern of blood.
“You mean—it was actually alive?”
“It seems to be more than just a random collection of cells. It has rudimentary limbs. It moves, so it has some sort of skeletal structure and muscle attachments.”
“And an eye,” murmured Sheehan. “A fucking cyclops. And it’s looking at me.”
Dvorak glanced at Moore. “So what’s the story here? How did you get involved?”
“EMTs notified us. Ambulance was dispatched here around five A.M., after a female called in a medical emergency. They found a woman bleeding on the floor over there. There’s a lot more blood in the bathroom, in the toilet bowl.”
“Bleeding from where?”
“The vagina, I guess. They didn’t know whether to call it an unattended birth. Or an attempted abortion.” Moore looked down at the thing with flippers. “I mean, do you call that a baby? Or just part of a baby?”
“I think it’s multiple congenital malformations. But I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Yeah, well, I hope I never see another one. Can you imagine what it’d be like, to be Daddy in the delivery room? And to see that come out? It’d give me a fucking coronary.”
“What happened to the victim?”
“The woman was DOA at City Hospital, which makes her an ME case. We think her name is Annie Parini—at least, that’s the name the neighbors know her by.”
“What about the other female? The one who made the call?”
“She skipped out before the first patrol car arrived. EMTs said she looked pretty young. Teenager. The name she gave to the emergency operator was Molly Picker.”
Dvorak crossed to the bathroom doorway and looked inside. He saw more blood, splattered across the toilet and the shower tiles. A lake of it on the floor. “I need to talk to the girl.”
“You think she contributed to the death?”
“I just want to know what she saw. What she knows about the victim.” He turned and frowned at the Thing. “If Annie Parini was taking some drug—and if it caused that—then we’re dealing with a devastating new teratogen.”
“Could a drug do that?”
“I’ve never seen a malformation this severe. I’ll send it out for genetic analysis. In the meantime, I’d really like to talk to this Molly Picker. If that’s her name.”
“We’ve got fingerprints. She left them all over the place.” He pointed to one bloody set on the bathroom doorframe, another set on the wall near the Thing. “We’ll confirm the name.”
“Find her for me. Don’t scare her—I just want to talk to her.”
“What about Annie Parini?” asked Sheehan. “You gonna do a post on her?”
Dvorak looked down at the blood on the floor. And he nodded. “I’ll see you both in the morgue.”
The body on the autopsy table was now nothing but a hollowed-out cavity, gutted of its organs. Throughout the autopsy, Detectives Sheehan and Moore had said very little. Judging by the
pallor of their faces, both cops would rather be just about anywhere else. What made this victim more upsetting than usual was her age and her sex. A woman this young should not be lying on an autopsy table.
Dvorak had worked with a minimum of conversation, reserving his comments for the tape recorder. Heart and lungs unremarkable. The stomach empty. Liver and pancreas of normal size and appearance. All in all, a youthful, undiseased body.
He turned his attention to the enlarged uterus, which had been removed in one piece and was lying on the cutting board under a bright light. He slit it open, through the myometrial and endometrial layers, to reveal the cavity.
“We have our answer.”
Both cops reluctantly stepped closer.
“Abortion?” asked Moore.
“Not what I’m seeing here. There’s no uterine perforation. No evidence of instrumentation. In the old days, before Roe vs. Wade, the back room abortionists would usually insert some sort of catheter through the cervix to dilate it, and then leave packing or a tampon to hold the catheter in place. But there’s nothing here.”
“Could she have passed it? Flushed it down the john?”
“Possibly. But I don’t think that’s what happened.” He touched a probe to a mass of bloody tissue. “That’s a placental fragment that didn’t completely separate from the uterus. It’s called placenta accreta. It would account for the bleeding.”
“Is that, like, an unusual condition?”
“Not all that unusual. What makes this one especially dangerous was the fact the placenta implanted itself in the lower uterus. That can lead to premature labor. Massive hemorrhage.”
“So we’ve got a natural death here.”
“I would say so.” Dvorak straightened. “She probably had pain and went into the bathroom, thinking she had to move her bowels. Bled into the toilet bowl, got dizzy, fell on the bathroom floor. Lord knows how long she was lying there before anyone noticed.”
“That makes it easier for us,” said Sheehan gratefully, stepping away from the cutting board. “No homicide.”
“I still need to talk to the other female in the apartment. Those fetal abnormalities were unlike anything I’ve seen. I don’t like the idea of some new teratogenic drug floating around on the streets.”
“We got a hit on the name Molly Picker,” said Sheehan. “Arrested last year for soliciting. Bailed out by a guy we assume was her pimp. We’ll talk to him—he probably knows where to find her.”
“Don’t scare her, okay? I just need some history on this victim.”
“If we don’t scare her just a little,” said Sheehan, “she may not talk at all.”
Romy had had a shitty day, and now it was turning into a shitty night. He paced the street corner at Montgomery and Canton, trying to stay warm. Should’ve grabbed a jacket on the way out, he thought, but the sun hadn’t yet gone down when he’d left the apartment, and he hadn’t counted on this wind, knifing between the buildings. Nor had he counted on waiting around this long.
Fuck it. If they wanted to talk, they could come see him on his territory.
He left the street corner and began to walk with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands thrust in his jeans pockets for warmth. He’d gone only half a block when he realized a car had pulled over beside him.
“Mr. Bell?” the man said through the crack in the tinted window.
Romy glowered at the car. “You’re late, man.”
“I would have come earlier, except for the traffic.”
“Yeah, right. Well, fuck off.” He turned and kept walking.
“Mr. Bell, we need to talk about this little problem.”
“I got nothing to say.”
“It’s in your best interests to step into the car. If you want to keep doing business with us.” There was a pause. “And if you want to get paid.”
Romy stopped and stared up the street, the wind lashing his face, the chill cutting straight through his silk shirt.
“It’s warm in here, Mr. Bell. I’ll take you home afterward.”
“What the fuck,” muttered Romy, and he stepped into the rear of the car. As he settled back for the ride, his attention was focused more on the plush interior than on the man sitting in the driver’s seat. As usual, it was the guy with the white-blond hair, the guy who never looked at Romy.
“You need to find that girl.”
Romy gave an irritated grunt. “I don’t need to do nothing till you pay me.”
“She should have been delivered to us two weeks ago.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t one of my most cooperative bitches, you know? I’ll get you some others.”
“Annie Parini was found dead this morning. Did you know that?”
Romy stared at him. “Who offed her?”
“Nobody. It was a natural death. Nevertheless, the body went to the authorities.”
“So?”
“So they already have their hands on one specimen. We can’t let them find another. The girl has to be brought in.”
“I don’t know where she is. I been looking.”
“You know her better than anyone else does. You have contacts on the street, don’t you? Find her before she goes into labor.”
“She’s still got time.”
“The pregnancy was never meant to go to term. We have no idea if it will last a full nine months.”
“You mean she could pop it any time?”
“We don’t know.”
Romy laughed and looked out the window as the buildings glided by. “Man, you guys crack me up. You’re way behind on this. They already come by, asking about her.”
“Who?”
“Police. Dropped by this afternoon, wanting to know where she was.”
The man went silent for a moment. In the rearview mirror, Romy glimpsed a flash of panic in the man’s face. Molly Wolly, he thought, you got ’em scared.
“It’ll be worth it to you,” the man said.
“You want her whole? Or in Reese’s Pieces?”
“We want her alive. We need her alive.”
“Alive’s harder.”
“Ten. On delivery.”
“Twenty-five, half now, or fuck it.” Romy reached for the door handle.
“All right. Twenty-five.”
Romy felt like laughing. These guys were scared shitless, and all because of stupid Molly Wolly. She wasn’t worth twenty-five thousand. In his humble opinion, she wasn’t worth twenty-five cents.
“Can you deliver?” the man asked.
“Maybe.”
“If you can’t, I’m going to have some very unhappy investors. So find her.” He handed Romy an envelope. “There’ll be more.”
Glancing inside, Romy caught a flash of fifty-dollar bills. It was a start.
The car pulled over at Upton and Tremont—Romy’s home turf. He hated to leave those nice leather seats, to step out into the slicing wind. He waved the envelope. “What about the rest?”
“On delivery. You can deliver?”
String him along, thought Romy. Make it sound harder than it really is. Maybe the price will go up. He said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and he climbed out and watched the car drive away. Scared. The man looks scared.
The envelope felt nice and thick; Romy stuffed it in his jeans pocket.
Better hide, Molly Wolly, he thought. Ready or not, here I come.
Bryan invited her into the house and offered her a glass of wine. It was the first time Toby had been inside his home. She felt uneasy about it, not because of the unconventional nature of Bryan’s household, which consisted of two men, happily mated to each other. Rather, it was because she realized, as she sat on the couch in his living room, that she had never really spent time with Bryan as a friend. He had come into her home to care for her mother, had fed Ellen, bathed her. In return, Toby had written him a check every two weeks, pay to the order of. Friendship had never been part of the job description.
And why not? she wondered as Bryan set down a napkin and a glas
s of white wine on the coffee table in front of her. Why had the simple act of writing a check every two weeks made real friendship between them so impossible?
She sat sipping the wine and feeling guilty about never having made the effort. And embarrassed that only now, when she truly needed him, had she even thought to set foot in his house.
He sat down across from her, and a moment passed. They sipped wine, fussed with damp napkins. The lampshades threw arching shadows on the cathedral ceiling. On the wall across from Toby hung a black and white photo of Bryan and Noel on a crescent of beach, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. They wore the smiles of two men who knew how to enjoy life. A knack Toby had never picked up.
Bryan said, “I guess you know the Newton police have already talked to me.”
“I gave them your name. I thought you could back me up. They seem to think I’m the daughter from hell.” She set down her wineglass and looked at him. “Bryan, you know I’d never hurt my mother.”
“And that’s what I told them.”
“Do you think they believed you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did they ask?”
He paused to take a sip, and she recognized it as his way of delaying an answer.
“They asked about medications,” he finally said. “They wanted to know if Ellen was taking any prescription drugs. And they asked about the burn on her hands.”
“You explained what happened?”
“I repeated it several times. They didn’t seem to like my answer. What is going on, Toby?”
She sank back, drawing both hands through her hair. “It’s Jane Nolan. I don’t know why she’s doing this to me. . .”
“Doing what to you?”
“It’s the only way I can explain it. Jane comes into my home, and she seems like a—a gift from heaven. She’s bright, she’s kind. She’s perfect. She sweeps in and fixes my life for me. Then everything goes wrong. Everything. And Jane is telling the police it’s my fault. It’s almost as if she meant to ruin my life.”
“Toby, this sounds so bizarre—”