Eye Snatcher (2 page)

“What’s your name?”

The muscular guy took a few shaky breaths. Rubbed his bulky forearms. He was trying his best to look as masculine and unaffected as possible, but Brian could see him breaking already. “Dan. Dan Smalls.”

“And where’s the kid?”

Dan flinched. Long-haired guy hurled some more.

“He’s… he’s up the stairs. First—first set of stairs. Then go left and… and over the hole and he’s…”

He stopped. Turned away.

“Thanks,” Brian said. He looked at Brad. Nodded. “We’ll go take a look. Stay here for now, Dan.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Dan called, as Brad and Brian walked through the cobweb-covered doorway to the abandoned old hospital. “We… we was just fooling. Just—just chillin’ and lookin’ around. You know?”

Brad smiled widely. “Oh, we know. We know. Just don’t go anywhere. Or we’ll mention the weed poking out of your pocket.”

Brad turned around and led the way through the door, Brian following him, as Dan fumbled about with the cannabis in his pocket.

The interior of the hospital was as you’d expect from an abandoned place: stunk of damp, plants working their way up the graffiti covered once-white walls. Constant linger of pot in the air as rain trickled down onto the broken tiles.

“How do you do that?” Brian asked, as he stepped in front of Brad and made his way towards the stairway, the bannisters crumbled away and cracks all over the steps.

“Do what?” Brad asked.

“The weed,” Brian said. “Not to flatter you or anything, but… how the shit do you see things like that?”

Brad’s smile twitched up as they reached the bottom of the staircase. He shrugged. “I just, I dunno. Always been good at spotting the little things. Good detective brain, I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Brad said. “Explains that bloody big head of yours anyway.”

Brian couldn’t deny Brad’s technical expertise. He really was a fantastic cop. He’d proven that on the Avenham girl case last summer. He saw things—obsessed over the little details that nobody else would see.

And sure, Brad might suffer from chronic depression and be recovering from alcoholism and a broken relationship, but weren’t all cops? It was the police officer cliché for a bloody good reason.

Brian stepped onto the first of the steps. Felt the tile slipping away under his foot, almost tumbled onto his chubby arse.

“Watch yourself there, Gramps,” Brad said, stepping ahead of Brian. “Want me to grab you a zimmer? Should be one lying around here somewhere.”

Brian ignored Brad’s dickish remark and steadied himself. He walked up the slippery steps, feeling a bit dizzy the further up he got. There were used condoms and needles all over the place. Graffiti on the walls—“I DIED HERE,” weird shit like that written to try and freak people out.

But the creepiest things weren’t the falsities. They were the ancient normalities of the place. The little crumpled scraps of paper clinging to old notice boards from when this hospital was actually operational. The ward signs that clung to the decaying ceiling for dear life.

Brian couldn’t help but feel a little fluttery inside at the creepiness of this place.

They reached the top of the stairs. Looked left and right.

“Which way did that grease ball say?” Brad asked.

Brian saw the hole in the ground on the left. Saw the black door, ajar at the opposite side of it.

“Over the hole,” Brian said. “Running jump?”

“You can get stuffed,” Brad said.

They walked around the hole. Pushed their backs up against the walls as they stepped around the sides of it. Brian tried not to look down through the fallen-through floor as he moved. In the corner of his eye, he swore he saw a red stain on the solid floor below, but maybe he was just imagining it.

Although someone probably had fallen down there at some point in time.

Somebody a lot slimmer and lighter than him.

Shit. Just focus. One step at a time.

Brian reached the other side of the hole before Brad. As he did, he got a nasty whiff. A whiff that made his coffee regurgitate in his throat.

“Shit,” Brian said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of Armani aftershave Hannah had bought him as a “get well” present after his heart attack last year. He sprayed a few blotches of it onto a snotty old tissue and stuffed it against his nose, making his head spin in the process. “That smell never gets easier.”

“Thought your sense of smell deteriorated when you got ol… oh, shit. That is bad.” Brad coughed. Spat down the gaping hole in the middle of the floor.

“Shoulda brought your own aftershave,” Brian said, as he made his way to the ajar door. The closer he got, the more the smell of decay worked through the tissue. He’d never bloody wear this aftershave again. Associated it with death too much. Reminded him of when he rented a house with a few girls back when he was a young lad. He’d keep a bottle of aftershave in there to spray whenever he’d done a shit. Masked the bathroom of any evidence.

Of course, that particular aftershave reminded him of shit to this day.

“Squeezing your nose works just as well,” Brad said, his voice high pitched as he gripped his nostrils.

Brian took a few steps over the slippy, dusty tiles. He pressed a hand up against the wooden door, pushed it aside.

He wished he could take a few deep breaths to calm himself, to prepare himself before he went in, but it’d only make the smell worse.

The door opened up fully and Brian stepped inside the room.

The room was light. Windows at the other side of it were completely smashed, the sun peeking through the clouds and shining in as the rain continued to plummet down. The floor of this room, whatever it was, was covered with broken glass. Wooden cabinets had been torn away from the walls, smashed to pieces by hooligans who found pleasure in being moronically destructive.

“Watch your feet,” Brian said. “Do some of those ballet moves of yours to dodge the glass.”

Brad laughed. Laughed excitedly. But Brian heard the fear in his laugh. The nervousness. There was always nervousness before a discovery like this. There was always attempted humour, like waiting to go into an exam hall aware of the subject but unaware of what the questions would be like.

As Brian stepped further into the room, he soon got his answer.

“Got a Jonnie Doe alright,” he said, deflated.

Right in the middle of the room, there was a boy. A young boy, couldn’t be much into his teenage years. He was stripped naked, water dripping down from the ceiling onto his almost translucent pale skin. He had a little silver stud mark in his left ear.

“Shit,” Brad said, staggering in behind Brian. “Holy…”

Brian heard him throw up, and he felt like doing the same.

Had to stay cool. Had to stay professional.

He walked closer to the kid, feeling anger burn up inside. Anger at why anyone would do this. Anger at all the sickos in the world he’d arrested, all the sickos he was about to arrest.

The young boy’s sliced intestines were hanging out of his belly. Flies crawled around them. A mouse scurried away into the corner of the room, blood on its little snout.

Brian gulped down a coffee-tasting lump in his throat. Felt his knees go weak as Brad continued to spit out his breakfast, which was uncharacteristic for the usually cool Brad.

He lifted his phone out of his pocket. Dialled in for forensics and the coroner with his shaky hand, his head fuzzy and his vision blurred.

As he listened to the dialling tone, he stepped closer to the boy as the rain carried on lashing down outside.

He stood over him. Tensed his jaw.

“McDone?” DCI Marlow said. “What we got?”

“A Jonnie Doe,” Brian said, his throat dry. “Get… get forensics down here. Right away.”

The rest of the conversation was a blur as Brad walked up to Brian, stood beside him.

Brian stared down at this poor kid and felt a world of pity, a world of anger.

The kid couldn’t stare back up at him because his eyes had been torn out of their sockets.

Brian couldn’t get the smell of the Jonnie Doe’s decomposing little body out of his nose no matter how much aftershave he sprayed.

He stood in the coroner’s office. Forensics were investigating the scene, but it didn’t look like anything had been left behind. The coroner’s office was windowless and dark, with a sole white beam in the middle of the room lighting up the boy on the table. It made a hum—a hum that was the only sound in this room. A hum of death.

Seeing the boy again, stomach sliced open and eyes torn out of his head, Brian worried he might be the one throwing up this time.

“What you got?” Brian asked.

Jeeves, who was wearing a white coat and black trousers that had a little bit of chewing gum stuck to the front of them, tapped his teeth with a pencil and peered at the boy’s body through his thick-rimmed glasses. “Male, of course. I’d estimate his age at around ten, eleven. Pre-puberty.”

McDone gulped. Pre-puberty. Just like his son, Davey. Just an innocent kid like his son.

“Cause of death?” Brad asked. His voice was much more stable than it was when they’d found the boy. He’d steadied himself. Had his moment of freaking out and now he was stable again. Cops had to be good at doing that—at staying as collected as possible. Sometimes doing so required a few moments of letting the emotion in, of letting the pain take over you and the drive to find the offender fill your body.

Brian was finding it very difficult to switch back to professional mode with the state of the body in front of him.

Jeeves took the bitten-down pencil out from his mouth. Placed it down on a metal table next to the slab where their Jonnie Doe lay, a greenish tint coming off him and making him look like some kind of waxwork model. “The boy died from blood loss. Multiple horizontal incisions were made across the abdominal area. We’ve got severe wounds all across the gastrointestinal tract—the small intestine has been sliced at with a sharp knife, and the large intestines show signs of incisions too, although not as many.”

Brian went dizzy with the information. Felt a tightness in his gut and tried not to look at the boy on the slab, tried not to see him as the person he once was.

Brad looked on, glassy and grey-eyed, the professional of the pair of them. Roles reversed from the discovery stage.

Jeeves reached into the opening in the boy’s stomach and pulled some of the skin and muscle back with a metal rod. Brian looked away.

“What you won’t have seen is that the stomach has been completely severed away too.”

“I guess it goes without saying the boy suffered,” Brad said.

Jeeves lifted his head. Looked at Brian and Brad with the blankest, most morose expression Brian had ever seen on his face. “I don’t like to break professional code like this, but I haven’t ever seen an act of cruelty towards any human being like this in my entire thirty-six year career.”

Great. Just what Brian needed to hear right now.

Jeeves stepped away from the body. Cleared his throat. “The boy’s eyes look to me like they were removed post-mortem. One of them, at least. We can tell from the age of the internal wounds compared to those in the abdomen. It looks like our killer pried them out and then sliced them away by the optic nerve—”

“Fuck,” Brian said. He turned around. Leaned against the grey wall. His head pulsated. Skin tingled.

“Unfortunately the victim does have signs of anal bruising and evidence of anal haemorrhage. And the bruising on his knuckles suggests he put up a fight.”

“Semen traces?” Brian asked, still facing the wall.

“No sign. It looks like the perpetrator used a condom.”

“Course he did,” Brian said. “Which sick fucker would want to be found guilty of this?”

“Any prints?” Brad asked.

Jeeves shook his head. Pulled off his gloves and washed his hands. “No prints yet. And no evidence of tissue under the nails or on the body either. But we’ll see what rears its head over the next few hours.”

“That all?” Brian asked.

Jeeves nodded. “All for now.”

It was strange seeing Jeeves so taken aback, so stunned. He was usually calm and steady even in the sickest of circumstances. Brian always thought he was so controlled that there had to be something weird about him. But today, he wasn’t faking his posh accent that he usually did when he was giving a report. He wasn’t trying to get one up on Brian and Brad.

He was decidedly human.

And that was terrifying.

Brian and Brad left Jeeves’ office in a hurry. Headed down the corridors where officers buzzed by, nodded their heads at Brian. Brian said hi to them in return, but he didn’t know half of their names as it was.

And after what he’d just seen in Jeeves’ office, he knew even fewer.

He did his best to inhale the scents of deodorants and aftershaves and coffee as he walked through the corridor, did all he could to get the image of the poor kid on the slab out of his mind, but he wasn’t sure he’d be getting rid of that for the rest of his life.

Brad pushed open the double doors leading back to the main offices. Faces blurred by. Voices chattered on, rattling in Brian’s ears as the rain bounced off the upper-floor windows of the Preston Police Station. Outside, it was grey, and due to the torrential rain it was impossible to see the view of Preston but for the lights of cars stuck in traffic jams.

“Need to check on missing persons,” Brad said. “Can’t see a boy that age going missing for a couple of days and no reports being made. Carter, over here.”

Samantha Carter, who’d recently taken the role of Detective Inspector, walked over from her desk with a coffee in hand. She had gorgeous, chocolate brown hair. A little mole above her plump lips that added to her sexiness. She was a brilliant officer, and one that Brian had to admit he’d had an innocent crush on for quite some time. She walked over with her black blazer and trousers on, white shirt unbuttoned at the collar underneath, and she whistled. “Jesus Christ. You two okay? Got Ebola or something?”

“The Jonnie Doe,” Brian said, his throat tight and raw.

Carter’s face dropped into seriousness as she sipped on her coffee. “Ah. I heard about that.”