Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) (2 page)

“As long as I don’t have to get too close, I’m okay with it,” Esteban said, with an expressive shrug.

I dug out a second mask for him, another pair of gloves, and then pulled out my trusty old Pentax out of one of the case’s padded compartments. Esteban had to hold out both hands as I gave it to him. The Pentax had all the grace, subtlety, and weight of a black plastic brick. But nothing beat a digital single-lens reflex camera for minute detail.

I grabbed a set of forceps, took a couple steps forward, and knelt by the body. I waved my hand through the holding pattern of flies that circled above the corpse and began my observations. The smell of decaying flesh hung heavy in the air, like a wet curtain.

“Alanzo,” I said, “snap me a set of photos starting at the feet up. Individual body parts, left-to-right. Close up shots on any wound pattern or blood spatter.”

Esteban began clicking away with the camera. I looked over the man’s brown leather boots. Nice ones, too, by the look of it—hand stitching that would’ve done justice to the kind of Italian loafers you’d find for sale on Rodeo Drive. The footwear had seen heavy use, judging by the wear on the soles. His dun-colored trousers were made of some kind of rough cloth, and a light blue sleeveless top that looked like—well, to be honest, it looked like what my hippie niece would’ve called a ‘peasant shirt’. A very simple kind of tunic.

Something strange about his clothing made me frown. Suddenly my brain did one of its weird little
clicks
and it snapped into focus: the clothes really were simple. Too simple. The boot straps were adorned with a heavy iron buckle. So was his black leather belt. But his trousers were perfectly smooth, both on the sides, and in the crotch. No zipper teeth, no Levi’s button-fly. Instead, John Doe had a kind of rough leather lacing holding his split together.

My mind raced. When was the last time anyone made clothes without zippers and buttons? Hell, when was the last time anyone made a pair of everyday-wear men’s pants without
pockets
?

I kept quiet a moment longer as I looked at the strange wounds on the body. Deep, jagged cuts or slashes of some kind marked the corpse in a couple of spots. One on the left-hand palm, a second on the forearm. Another on the side of the head, where an ear dangled by a strip of pasty flesh. The worst of the slashing injuries yawed open in a fleshy red mouth that cleaved open the right-hand shoulder and exposed a compound fracture of the collarbone.

I spotted a fleck of black against the white edge of bone. I snatched it out with a nimble flick of the forceps.

“What’s that?” McClatchy demanded. His voice was muffled. Sounded like he’d pressed his nose into a pocket handkerchief. I heard the man fumbling in his pocket for something but I didn’t waste the time to look up.

“Chip of metal,” I said, as I turned the object over to get a better look. It was the size and shape of a pinky nail. “Whoever sliced open our John Doe here like a side of beef may have left us a clue.”

“Part of a blade?”

“Maybe. These slashes sure as hell didn’t come from a twelve-gauge.” I caught Alanzo’s eye and nodded towards my case. “Pull me a specimen bag out of there, would you?”

Esteban got one and brought it back, holding the edges open with his gloved fingers. I dropped the sample in and went back to work. The shoulder wound was definitely the nastiest of the cuts.

But that probably hadn’t killed the man.

No, what probably did the dirty deed was the fist-sized hole in the center of the chest. Actually, it wasn’t so much a hole as a fleshy, bloody
crater
. Whatever this guy’d been hit with, it had blown right through his shirt and smashed the sternum into bone powder. Blood pooled in a sticky, half-clotted mass in the cavity. Using the forceps, I pulled the tattered, burned-looking edge of the shirt away to see the edge of the wound.

The remaining skin on his chest also looked like it was made of tiny white scales. I shook my head again in amazement.

Who is this guy? Is he related to Persephone?

Persephone belonged to my college roommate, back around the time that I’d lucked into a scholarship at the University of Chicago. Funny, now that I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the name of my
roommate
, who I usually called ‘the bitch who keeps mooching my vanilla-bean and coffee ice cream’. But I did remember Persephone, her albino king snake. Pretty creature. And like this guy, the snake’s scales were a perfect mesh of little ivory crescent moons.

I was still struggling to figure out whether this guy was some freak of nature when I took another look at his face. His features were strong, generically masculine. The eyes stared out into nothingness like glassy brown marbles. But then I saw something that short-circuited the idea of calling up the FBI to see if they really did have someone to cover the ‘X’ files.

The ‘scales’ stopped at the base of the man’s neck. They weren’t the mark of some snake-human hybrid. It was a pattern that had been etched into the skin from some kind of pressure. Of course, that did jack squat for me, given that all it did was replace one mystery with another.

I leaned in closer to the body to get a better look. The itty-bitty hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as my nose caught the ghost of a scent. Something layered underneath the rotting-meat miasma of the corpse itself. I fought the nausea, rode it out like a wave on a choppy sea. I closed my eyes and inhaled, seeking that elusive scent, and found it.

Sulfur. Mixed with charcoal. Once I found it, the smell seemed to leap down my nasal passages, dig into my tongue, and dance around on it like a lit match. I moved my head back and forth, continuing to trust my senses. The sulfur-charcoal smell was strongest from the chest wound. And then, I smelled something else underneath the charred-sulfur smell. Dry, like fine gin, delicate like lace.

It vanished in a heady rush of menthol that wiped out my sense of smell and buried it under a tidal wave of eucalyptus-scented gel.

I came within a hair’s breadth of a snarl and looked up. That’s what McClatchy had been digging for—a tube of menthol to protect his delicate sinuses. Judging from how he kept wiping the snotlike substance under his nostrils, it wasn’t helping him much. All it really did was throw an effing monkey wrench—and a dozen extra monkey tools, as far as I was concerned—into my analysis.

My eyes snapped back to the red and black toothpick in McClatchy’s teeth. My brain did another one of its weird little flips. I saw that McClatchy’s toothpick was done up to look like a miniature lacquered chopstick from Chang’s Mandarin Five-Star. McClatchy liked Chinese food. I turned back to the corpse and began to speak, trying my best to sound casual.

“This your first time close to a corpse, McClatchy?” I asked.

“Unless you count the ones in the morgue,” he replied. I nodded to myself. That meant he’d only been exposed to the chilled, scent-reduced versions of dead humans.

“It’s something that takes time to get used to. I still run into things I never expect to see,” I continued. “For example, this one guy we found in the desert near Bakersfield. His intestines had dried up and shrank, like those crispy noodles some Asian places put out on the table for you to munch on.”

“Um,” McClatchy said. His face had taken on a distinctly greenish cast.

“Then there was this one time I came across a fresh corpse, a gang-banger who’d been gut-shot. So his stomach’s been ruptured, and the yellow of the stomach acid and the red of the blood all ended up mixed together. Just like the yin and yang symbol they do at some restaurants, you know, when they put the yellow hot mustard and the red sweet n’ sour sauce in a dish and make that little swirl for dipping your chicken egg rolls?”

McClatchy didn’t respond. He dry-heaved, held his index finger to his lips, and abruptly walked off. Esteban shook his head.

“Remind me never to piss you off, Dayna.”

“You just have to know how to get rid of extra people at a crime scene,” I said. “Back in Chicago, the winters made it easy. If there’s snow on the ground, you just hand someone a shovel and ask them to get ready to do some shoveling. You turn around and they’re gone, because now they realize that they might actually have to do some
work
.”

Esteban let out a snort.

I still couldn’t get the damned menthol smell out of my nasal passages, though. It hangs around, binds itself to the soft tissues of the sinus like eucalyptus-scented superglue, and the only cure is time.

“I’m almost done,” I said, as I probed the meaty pink pit of the chest wound with the forceps. “Might be good to call up the trace techs and then get our John Doe bagged up.”

“You got it.”

My forceps hit something deep within the chest wound with a
clink
. Frowning, I felt around under the layer of blood with the prongs. I grabbed whatever it was—it felt hard, oddly ridged, and flat—and pulled it out into the light of day.

I held up a golden medallion the size and shape of a Sacagawea dollar coin.

It gleamed like a polished yellow button. Esteban let out a low whistle. Instead of a Shoshone maiden, the medallion bore the imprint of a horse’s hoof and a series of grooved letters.

“I’m going to need another bag,” I said, abruptly dry-mouthed.

Esteban stepped away from me to rummage in my case. The reflection of the bright sunlight off the metal made it hard to make out the marks, and it didn’t help that they were streaked with sticky, rank fluids from the corpse. I could tell that whatever language it was written in, it wasn’t English. Latin, maybe? I pivoted slightly on my heels so that the coin wouldn’t reflect the sun into my eyes.

That’s all that saved my life that day. Blind luck.

I heard the
CRACK!
of a rifle shot.

The brim of my baseball cap exploded into feathery chunks of cheap cloth fiber. I stared dumbly at the floating blue and white shreds as my mind tried to get the switching gear working again.

Someone was shooting at us!

“Get down!” I heard Esteban scream, “Dammit, Dayna, get down!”

A second
CRACK!
and something bright and deadly buzzed past my ear.

Correction. Someone was shooting at
me!

Finally, my brain completed its de-icing procedure. I moved, trying to dive to my right and get as flat as humanly possible. I heard the sounds of people screaming, the shouts of the cops all around us.

My side crumpled in pain and everything went dim.

Chapter Three

My side burned where I hit the ground.

I fought for breath. Coughed and got a mouthful of sour-tasting concrete dust for my trouble. The scent of male sweat and sport deodorant blotted out John Doe’s stench. My left eye pressed up so close to Esteban’s silver badge that I could only make out half of his name.

I heard him shouting orders. The crackle of gunfire. More shouts, curses.

I squirmed, and the detective let me up from where he’d thrown his body across mine. I coughed again, then turned to the side and spat out the mouthful of dust. Esteban looked at me, his boyish face a mixture of pride and embarrassment, a sort of ‘ohmigod-I can’t-believe-what-I-just-did!’ kind of look.

I probably owed him my life about then. But his expression just sort of busted me up inside, made me actually say the first thing that popped into my head.

“So,” I said, “was it good for you?”

Esteban actually blushed.

He got to his feet, extended a hand, and helped me up. His palm was warm, smooth, and strong. I squeezed it in appreciation.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I mean to say…thank you. For doing…that.”

“De nada, Dayna.”

McClatchy pounded back up the rise and came to a stop before us. “Either of you hurt?” I shook my head. The detective followed suit. “Dammit! Now I’m going to have to detail even more of my manpower.”

Nice to see that even a professional bureaucrat cared. Thanks, jerkweed.

“Love you too, Bob,” was what came out of my mouth.