Nocturnal (40 page)

“It’s not,” Pookie said. He nodded toward the bearded corpse. “It will match this guy. And I bet it will also match the samples you took off of Oscar Woody.”

“You think this man killed Oscar?”

“Probably,” Pookie said. “He tried to kill Alex Panos, so odds are he whacked Oscar and Jay Parlar as well.”

It seemed obvious when Pookie laid it out. “I’ll start this guy’s tests right now with a machine we have in the van. You should have all three results in about an hour.”

Bryan nodded, then slid the probe up the feathers again.

Pookie took the probe and did the same thing, as if he just wanted to see for himself.

“Maybe this arrow is custom-built,” he said. “The way that guy shot, I’m guessing he doesn’t buy his archery supplies from a discount bin at
Dick’s Sporting Goods. If we find out who made this, maybe we can find out who bought it. Robin, how soon can you get it out of his chest?”

She leaned in, turning her head this way and that to examine the wound. She lightly touched the notch just above the feathers, then gave it an experimental push. The shaft itself flexed a little, but the arrowhead didn’t move a bit.

“It’s in there good,” she said. “I’m going to need a bone saw to get it out.”

“Shit,” Bryan said. “How fast can you make that happen?”

First Zou had rushed things, then Verde, now Bryan and Pookie? It was their investigation, but it was her job to do things correctly, methodically.

“Guys, Sammy said there’s another body upstairs and a third on the roof. We have to get all three in the van and take them back, so I’m going to be here awhile.”

Pookie knelt. Now all three of them were low around the body, as if the corpse were a small campfire on a freezing night.

Pookie looked around quickly to make sure no one was near, then spoke quietly. “Robs, you’re in charge of the department, right?”

She nodded.

“We need help,” he said. “Can you get wife-beater here to the morgue right away, then have another ME come and handle the other bodies?”

“But keep it quiet,” Bryan said. “Don’t tell anyone you’re taking this guy back, just load him up and go. Can you do that for us?”

She looked at the two men. That kind of action wasn’t illegal per se, but it wasn’t protocol. If people started questioning her decisions, and those questions got back to the mayor’s office, it would damage her shot at permanently taking over Metz’s job. But at the same time, Pookie and Bryan had never asked her for anything like that before. They seemed desperate.

“That’s not how we do things,” she said. “I could make it happen, but before I go off the reservation, you have to tell me what’s going on.”

“We can’t,” Bryan said. “Just do this for us. It’s important.”

It’s important, and so is your health, Bryan — so is your sanity
.

“You guys want something from me, I want something from you. I need to know more.”

Bryan’s eyes hardened. “It’s best you don’t. Just trust me.”

She shook her head. “You guys are asking me to do something that could jeopardize my career. So cut the
let’s protect the delicate flower
bullshit. Convince me.”

Bryan stared at her, then looked over at Pookie. Pookie shrugged.

Bryan turned back to Robin, looked at her over the body on the ground
between them. “We think Chief Zou and Rich Verde could be part of a cover-up,” he said. “She’s protecting someone involved with the murders of Oscar Woody, Jay Parlar and maybe even Bobby Pigeon. She could also be involved in a cover-up of those old Golden Gate Slasher murders.”

Bryan and Pookie both looked intense, focused — they weren’t kidding. But the chief of police? Covering up murders? “Why would Zou do something like that?”

“We don’t know,” Pookie said. “We only have theories, and don’t have time to go into them now. If Zou or Sean Robertson or Rich Verde shows up here, we’ll lose the chance to learn more before they shut us out. We
need
a good look at this arrow. Please, get this guy back to the morgue and start the autopsy immediately.”

Autopsies weren’t usually done at night. Bodies collected in the evening went into the storage area for the MEs to work on the following morning. Another deviation from the norm, another potential question about her reliability as the next chief medical examiner.

Not so long ago, she had trusted Bryan Clauser more than she’d trusted anyone in her entire life. Maybe he wasn’t the most emotional creature in the world, but he was a world-class cop — he wouldn’t ask for this if he didn’t believe it was absolutely necessary.

She nodded. “All right. I’ll take the body back, then send someone else to pick up the other two. Meet me at the morgue in an hour.”

Bryan smiled at her. It was forced, but it was still a smile. He and Pookie walked off, giving Robin room to do her job.

R
ex stopped walking. He knelt to the sidewalk and leaned against a building wall. He sat very still.

Rex waited.

A block ahead, a boy in a dark sweatshirt stopped and looked back. His head moved, his eyes searched, but after a few seconds, the boy turned away and kept moving down Laguna Street.

Rex waited a few seconds, then he followed.

Even in the rain and the wind, Rex smelled something that made his brain buzz, made his chest all vibratey.

He smelled blood.

Alex’s
blood.

Marco was probably dead. Rex felt sad about that. Marco had been a nice guy. He had
obeyed
. Rex had watched the brief fight between Marco and the man in black, then that arrow hit Marco in the chest. And just after that, Rex saw Alex running away.

Maybe Rex could have helped Marco, but he could not,
would not
let Alex Panos escape.

Rex had followed Alex, using the night, the rain, the wind and the blankets to stay as hidden as possible. He couldn’t believe how well the blankets worked — when he did pass people on the sidewalk, they steered clear. No one wanted to talk to a stinky bum. Rex was a shadow, like those black panthers in the jungle that moved so quiet no one saw them.

He had nowhere to go. The cops would know he’d killed Roberta, so he couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go back to Marco’s basement — what if Marco had ID on him with that address? The cops would look there, too. Rex didn’t even have a place to sleep.

And he didn’t care, because sleep didn’t matter.

What mattered was the
hunt
.

Rex felt
alive
, Rex felt
strong
, Rex felt like he could walk all night and into the next day. Sooner or later, Alex Panos would stop.

And then, Rex would make him pay.

R
obin prepped for autopsy.

She’d had the overnight ME staff help her shoot the x-rays, then brought the body into Dr. Metz’s private autopsy room. Once the body was prepared, she sent the overnight staff out to pick up the bodies of Susan Panos and Issac Moses, leaving her alone in the morgue.

The RapScan machine was almost finished with the tests on Rex Deprovdechuk’s sperm and the blood from Bobby’s assailant. She carried the machine into the private autopsy room so she’d get the results as soon as they came up.

The private room was just a smaller version of the larger main room. It even had the same old-school wood paneling. There was enough space for a single autopsy table, an area to walk around it, and counters and cabinets along the walls.

Robin was already regretting her decision to do what Bryan and Pookie had asked. Rushing a murder scene,
leaving
the scene — that was not the behavior of a senior medical examiner. And only now did she realize they hadn’t given a shred of proof to back up their claims.

Had she really been foolish enough to think she didn’t love Bryan anymore? She would do anything for him; it had always been that way, probably always would. He didn’t return that love, and that hurt, but it didn’t change the fact that she would never be able to let him go.

In the parlance of Pookie Chang, unrequited love sucked donkey balls.

Time to get down to business.

Despite Rich Verde’s dead-on description, she knew this wasn’t Bobby Pigeon’s killer. The body on the table was that of an out-of-shape slob, beer gut and all. There was no way he had the sheer strength needed to drive a hatchet through Bobby’s clavicle, part of his scapula, three of his ribs and an inch into his sternum. She also doubted the bearded man would have had the upper-body strength needed to tear off Oscar Woody’s arm. And, most of all, his teeth were perfectly normal — he didn’t have the wide incisors necessary to make those parallel grooves on Oscar’s bones.

So this man hadn’t killed Bobby
or
Oscar.

Robin flipped down her face shield. She stepped on a button that started her audio recorder, then picked up a scalpel from the tray next to the table.

“Beginning autopsy on John Doe. Caucasian male, approximately thirty years old. One hundred eighty-six centimeters tall, one hundred four kilograms. Subject appears to have been killed by an arrow that penetrated the heart.”

She saw two small, pink, puckerish scars on his chest. Her gloved hands traced them. She hadn’t noticed those in the dark and the rain. Could they … no, they were almost healed, they couldn’t be wounds from Bobby Pigeon’s final two bullets.

“Subject appears to have two small puncture wounds on his left pectoral, incurred possibly a week ago. The first is at two o’clock and ten centimeters from the left nipple, the second is seven o’clock and seven centimeters from the right nipple.”

She looked at her notes, checking positions of the two bullet wounds on the man’s back from where Bryan had shot him. Other than those wounds and the two marks on his chest, the man didn’t have a scar or a scratch on him.

But those healed marks on the corpse’s chest … had she seen something on the x-rays?

She reached over to the portable computer stand next to the porcelain table and called up the x-ray images. A bright white spot glowed directly under the healed wound near his right nipple. Could that be a bullet?

Bobby’s
bullet?

She shook her head. Bryan had shot this man twice in the back; one of those bullets had probably bounced off a rib and come to rest here.

She looked at the x-rays again. That was strange … there were
three
white spots.

But Bryan had only shot him twice.

Something else on the black, white and gray image caught her attention.

“Subject’s ribs appear to be thicker than expected. In fact,
all
bones appear to be abnormally thick. Possible high bone density due to a mutation in LDL-receptor-related protein five. Will examine more closely after initial autopsy is complete.”

None of this mattered if she didn’t get that arrow out of there in time for Pookie and Bryan to use it. That urgency now felt silly. What was going to happen? Would Chief Zou kick in the door to the private autopsy room and chase Robin out?

She picked up a scalpel with her right hand, a small hose with her left. She sliced from the right shoulder to the sternum, spraying the wound
with water as she went. Diluted blood ran down the body to the white porcelain surface, then flowed into the grooves that carried it to the foot of the table, where it finally passed through a hole and into a drainage sink. She made an identical incision on the left side, creating a V anchored by the arrow shaft sticking straight out of the man’s chest. From the bottom of that V, she sliced down to the pubic bone.

Robin then peeled and cut, peeled and cut, her scalpel scraping against the sternum, the ribs and the clavicle, separating skin, muscle and soft tissue from the bones. As she grabbed, pulled and tugged, she realized the corpse’s flesh felt different than she was used to … it felt strangely heavy.

“Subject’s muscle mass feels denser than normal. Subject may have LRP5 mutation. Again, will examine in detail after initial examination is completed.”

That mutation wasn’t uncommon; she’d read about it in several journals. Denser muscle could mean more cells per square inch, and more muscle cells meant more strength. Maybe she’d been wrong — could this guy have had the power necessary to inflict those horrible wounds on Bobby Pigeon and Oscar Woody? If he
was
Oscar’s killer, could the Zed chromosome be responsible for these mutations? And possibly for other mutations she hadn’t seen yet?

Hell, if she didn’t get the CME position, she could probably make a living on the Zed chromosome alone. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Robin Hudson? That had a nice ring to it.

She lifted the V-flap up over the perp’s face, exposing the neck muscles, then spread the side flaps open to expose the rib cage.

Time for the bone saw.

She lifted the solid, metal power tool. Its high-pitched buzz filled the air as she cut through the ribs where they curved down to the man’s sides. Blade on bone produced the smell of burning hair. After so many years at this job, that odor didn’t really bother her anymore.

After she finished with the saw, she set it aside and rinsed the body down. She sliced through the diaphragm, then lifted the now-severed, arrow-pierced rib cage away from the body.

The rib cage felt far heavier than she would have expected. Did the thicker, denser bone exist to withstand the stresses generated by stronger muscles?

Holding the pierced rib cage in her hands, she examined the embedded arrowhead.

“Arrowhead is a three-bladed broadhead configuration, approximately seven centimeters from tip to attachment point. Each blade’s cutting edge is approximately seven-point-eight centimeters. The blades are serrated. The bottom corner of each blade has a small hook, curving up toward the point.”

Such a horrible weapon. The point had penetrated John Doe’s sternum, driving right into the heart. The arrowhead probably would have punched clean through were it not for those little hooks. That seemed counterintuitive, as it would do more damage the farther in it went. The way this was made, the way it embedded in the rib cage … it looked like the designer wanted it to
stick
.