Helix: Plague of Ghouls (12 page)

“Not officially.” Buckle seemed momentarily impressed by Two-Trees’ pronunciation. Most cops called it, disparagingly, the Whiskey Bed Reserve. “That’s where you’re from?”

“A long, long time ago, yeah.”

Buckle nodded and looked like he was about to say something, but then decided against it. “I’ll show you what they found. We’re keeping all three for a while longer.”

“The charge?”

“Desecration of a corpse, interference with proper human burial, that kind of thing.”

“Jeez. What do they do when they’re bored on the weekend?”

“Don’t want to know,” Buckle answered. “You want to see what they party with on a school night?” He pointed toward a stairwell door.

“Show me,” Two-Trees said. “But you don’t have to hold me in suspense. What have you got?”

“The head,” Buckle said. He jogged down the stairs, while Two-Trees took his time and kept one hand on the railing. Stairs weren’t so much fun now that he couldn’t see his feet anymore.

“A head makes identification easier,” Two-Trees said, his voice echoing.

“Probably not. You haven’t seen the state of the head.”

“Is it intact?”

“Depending on your definition of intact, yes.” Buckle opened the basement door and held it open.

They couldn’t get far without signing in and filling out forms to explain exactly what they were going to look at, and why. Once the paperwork was completed, the evidence technician left them standing at the waist-high gate and went over to a refrigerator. From there, the gloved technician brought out a plastic box in a re-sealable bag. Buckle signed his initials in more places, and Two-Trees kept a good, healthy distance. Once the last formalities were done, Buckle slid his hands into a new pair of latex gloves and, in the presence of the evidence custodian, he opened the box and showed Two-Trees the contents.

Someone had taken a razor to the skull and done a poor job of scraping off the flesh. The jaw was still connected to the skull with tendons and tattered bits of muscle. The lips, nose, ears, facial hair, and all the skin had been excised. The eye sockets were empty and polished. A premolar was missing. Buckle turned the skull over and shone a light through the foramen magnum. There didn’t appear to be any brain tissue inside the skull. The rim of the spinal passage was stained purple.

“Whatever happened to lighting up and spray-painting a wall?” Two-Trees asked. “God, and we thought we were hard core as kids. How do they say this came into their possession?”

Buckle’s eyes were watering with the effort of suppressing a sneeze. “One of them says they bought it, fair and square. His mom’s coming over with the receipt, he says.”

“He bought it,” Two-Trees echoed. “From where, Amazon?”

“Ossuary Canada dot something or other, he said. I looked it up. It’s a genuine vendor. They sell animal and human skeletons, most of them acrylic, some natural bone. Perfectly legal, but usually restricted to medical students.”

“Yeah, but this looks like it’s still got tissue on it.”

“I know, and that’s why all three boys are still in custody.”

“Seriously, you can buy these online?”

“You can buy anything online, if you look hard enough for it,” Buckle said.

“They bought a skull with half its face attached, and they didn’t think anything of it?”

“You think he’s cute, the one you saw?” Buckle asked. “You should see the one we brought in before him. He was grinning when he told us they found it out in a field about a kilometre away from the drop site, about a ten minute walk from his friend’s backyard. Big, shit-eating grin, as if he was daring us to charge him with something. And then his lawyer came in, and that was the last we’ve heard from him. The lawyer says they had no idea that the skull was part of an ongoing murder investigation. He said they thought it was from ‘some Indian burial ground’, being so close to Waabishkindibed as they were. Anyhow, we have a search scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

“So he’s saying the head was nowhere near the body dump?”

“It’s a lead. We have to follow up on it.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’ll have to.”

Buckle held the skull up higher, turning it whenever Two-Trees asked to see a different angle.

“What the hell did they think they were going to do with this thing anyhow?” Two-Trees asked.

“They were drinking wine out of it.”

“How, for god’s sake? What’d they do, turn it upside down and drink out of its nose?”

Buckle shrugged. “You know, the most rebellious thing I ever did was walk out of a heated game of
Risk
. You think you can reconstruct a face for us?”

Two-Trees had him turn the skull around. At a glance, he figured it had belonged to an adult male. Statistically speaking, a jaw that wide and square belonged to a male face, though he wouldn’t be certain until he ran a 3D scan through the software. A DNA check would provide the only reliable conclusion though. He leaned in closer to get a look at the dentition. He’d need to bring in his equipment, because the wisdom teeth were hidden behind bands of tissue that kept the jaw attached to the skull. He couldn’t tell if the wisdom teeth had erupted yet or if they’d been removed.
The incisors were considerably longer than the rest of the teeth, but Two-Trees had seen worse. Even on her most human day, Bridget’s fangs were longer than that. The front teeth were straight, which meant either the deceased had been blessed with good luck, good genes, or good braces. Once they had a lead on who might be missing, they could contact the local dentists and seek a positive match, saving Two-Trees a lot of work but robbing him of an excuse to stick around. “Any X-rays on Chopper here?”

“Still pending. Medical examiner’s running some tests to confirm that Head A fits with Body B.”

“God help us if they don’t,” Two-Trees said. “How soon can I start?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Portable 3D scanner in the truck,” Two-Trees said. “Same with the computer with the facial mapping software on it. All I need is a desk and space.”

“We can provide,” Buckle declared, setting the skull back in the plastic box and letting the evidence technician seal it properly for him. He peeled off the gloves and rummaged for used Kleenexes in his pocket. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Give me a couple of hours, and I should have a preliminary analysis for you. Nothing that could be used in court, but enough to start comparing against missing persons reports. Speaking of which, do we have any bets yet?”

At that, Buckle frowned. “We’ve got three missing persons from this year, one from last year. All female. None of them as near as heavy as our boy. But I don’t want to jinx it. He could be from out of town. You need a hand carrying stuff in?”

“Wouldn’t mind the help.”

SHOUTING JARRED TWO
-Trees out of his work. It was almost three in the morning, and until that very moment, he hadn’t even felt tired. He stood up and followed the sound of Buckle’s voice. He saw him through the wall-mounted monitor. Buckle was at one end of the table, the jungle punk at the other, and DS Richard Palmer was moving from foot to foot.

Palmer hadn’t aged well—not that Two-Trees had. Palmer had gone bald except for a ring around the back of his skull, plus an extra-wavy tuft where a unicorn’s horn could have grown. Judging by the cut of his suit, all the mass from Palmer’s chest and stooped shoulders had slid south to his belly. Despite the paunch, his legs were skinny. It was hard to take a man like that seriously, and Two-Trees couldn’t remember why Palmer had been so scary, once upon a time.

“No, you
can’t
go home now,” Palmer said. Two-Trees heard it through both the monitor and the closed door. “You took somebody’s skull, and then you destroyed it. You tampered with evidence in a murder investigation!”

The kid shrugged and flicked his ragged bangs up with a flip of his head. “So?”

Palmer inflated with rage. He started off slow and quiet, then built up into a train wreck of hurled accusations, each shouted so loudly and so close that careless bangs flew back from the boy’s face. “You’re in direct violation of Section 182 of the Canadian Criminal Code, you sick puppy—indignity to a dead human body! You sick son of a—” The lawyer, who’d been standing off camera, stepped in to intervene, and Buckle would have done likewise if someone hadn’t run past Two-Trees to knock on the interrogation room door. Palmer was shouting something about desecration and psychological examinations when Buckle disappeared off screen, all except for his shoulders and back. He spoke with the person at the door, then with Palmer. A moment later, the lawyer sat down, as did Palmer, and Buckle came out of the interview room, following the constable who’d rushed by. Buckle went directly to Two-Trees’ borrowed desk.

“Come on,” Buckle said. Darting eyes switched from Two-Trees’ face, to his hands, then to the clock, to the constable’s back, and finally over at the front desk. “You’d better come with me.”

A courier had come in with a large document envelope from the hospital. Inside was a brief report confirming that the deceased had wisdom teeth which hadn’t yet erupted, which meant the deceased was probably under twenty years of age—more likely under the age of eighteen. Two-Trees read the rest of the dental report and was partway through the paragraph about cranial wounds when Buckle slapped down his photocopied file and said, “
Sheeyit.
Son of a camel-toed
bitch
.”

“So it’s good news then,” Two-Trees said.

“Skull A does not match Body B because of Blood Type O.”

“Oh.”

Buckle bared his teeth and tensed his upper body so much that ropes stood out along his throat all the way up to the corners of his jaw. “
Jesus
H. Murphy, we’ve got another victim.”

AROUND 3:30 A.M
., Two-Trees went back to the hotel to set up his laptop and connect to Wi-Fi. The party was in full swing, though occasionally a sober guest would stomp down the hall and threaten assault if the music wasn’t turned down. The noise helped prevent Two-Trees from falling asleep, though it did nothing for his powers of concentration.

His first search was for an all-night internet café; he found a café, but it was closed between one and seven a.m. His second search was for preliminary information about the latest murder. He half-hoped, half-dreaded, that something had already hit the newswires; with Palmer lurking about, Two-Trees doubted he’d get much of an inside scoop on either murder, so he’d have to settle for rumours. He found nothing, only the brief mention of a wanderer found dead overnight after having succumbed to the elements. It was better for the OPP to broadcast a flat-out lie, rather than make a few hundred people wonder why the press made no mention of an evidence truck and convoy of police cars on Range Road Twelve. Lies were bad, sure, but silence led to speculation, which led to public questions and national media coverage. They’d learned those lessons from the Pritchard Park incident.

He sent a situation report to Angie Burley, blind carbon copied to Gil Burton. Gil had a knack of asking off-the-wall questions, which would unlock a whole new avenue of investigation. As late—or as early—as it was, Two-Trees didn’t expect a response for hours. So, he went back to work.

For fun, Two-Trees decided to try three different body templates: a skinny young man, one of average weight, and one that was morbidly obese. Each body type would have a dramatic effect on the shape of the face, especially on the eyes. Then he decided to craft a fourth model: he’d toss out all prior guesses and assume the body was female. He could then play with each template: changing hair colour and hair styles, and adding accessories like glasses or piercings. In any case, judging by the general three-dimensional shape of the skull, the deceased had a pointed chin and bad underbite, a sunken nasal passage and a protruding forehead—no supermodel, to be sure. Multiple reconstructions meant painstaking, repetitive, slow work, but he had to start with the assumption that Head B did not belong to the morbidly obese Body A he’d seen earlier under the evidence tent.

Around 4:30, police lights turned Two-Trees’ flimsy curtains red, blue, and white. Boots clomped along the upstairs hallway, doors were knocked upon, the music died down. Voices rose and diminished. There was a shout, and someone fell yelling into the carpet. More boots clomped down the hallway, orders were issued, and boots marched away.

At five, Two-Trees drowsed in the middle of stretching a virtual muscle, giving the already grotesque figure an engorged tumour where a temporal depression should have been. He gave up, stripped down to his underwear, crawled under the sheets, and turned off the lights.

HE STARTLED AWAKE
when his cell chimed. He’d been physically shaken out of a bad dream he couldn’t quite remember. He felt nauseated, shaky, and even his blood seemed to vibrate in his veins. A text message was waiting for him from Gil. It was eight thirty—seven thirty in Varco Lake.

<
Bridge & gang en route. Bad news in truck. Have fun. XOXO>

Two-Trees considered sleeping for another two hours or so, but once he was up, he was up, and there was nothing more to do but eat and wait. He rolled out of bed, opened his laptop, and logged back into the Wi-Fi. There was no email.