Lizardskin (25 page)

Vlasic pulled the plastic all the way down to the foot of the tray. The torso was thick and muscular. Two incisions started at the points of the shoulders and ran inward, where they met the major cut, which ran from the breastbone down to the pubic bone. The man’s face was puffed and swollen, and the features had that imbalance that comes when the calvarium is removed and the skull-flap is peeled back over the face. The man’s head stopped at his eyebrows. Long thick black hair was matted around the back of the neck. The rest of his skull was missing. Beau could see the interior of the skull, like the inside of a nautilus shell, the arches and supports for the absent brain, the basal roots, the white nub of the upper vertebrae. Vlasic lifted the heavy left arm, let it fall.

“Rigor was sudden and passed in a couple of hours. Mainly confined to the face and upper neck. What we had here was an aboriginal male, in middle age, no congenital malformations visible. The eyes and the conjunctiva were normal, although there was some sign of old trauma in the left orb. Nares patent. Teeth all fucked up. Can’t have good teeth in America without cash. Hemorrhage in the canals consistent with ballistic trauma. See here, this entrance wound exposed the carotid,
pulled back on the lines of cleavage. This discoloration is normal postmortem lividity
in situ
. No forensic significance. Hey, we’re not looking for cause of death, anyway. You been to the shooting board yet?”

“Not yet. Probably sometime Monday.”

“Who’s gonna sit on it?”

“Hell—probably the usual. Meagher. Vanessa Ballard. Finch. Maybe Rowdy Klein.”

“Klein? You’re right to worry about him, Beau. He was in here earlier, taking pictures of everything. The CIB’s got something unseemly planned for you, I’ll bet. Anyway, how’s Meagher gonna sit on a shooting board when he’s one of the shootees? You better keep your back to the wall.”

“I’ll wear my chain-mail boxers, Marco. You were saying?”

“About the internal, we did the usual thoraco-abdominal incision. No hernias, domes were normal. So were the pleurals. Pericardium okay, contents normal. Mediastinum as well. Pharynx had clotted blood, same source. You want the whole thing? Lungs and lights?”

Beau shook his head. “Let’s go straight to dessert, Marco.”

“Well—stomach showed some incipient ulceration. Blood in the mucosa. Liver had some signs of previous hepatitis, but no necrosis.”

“Drugs? Needle sharing?”

“No tracks. No signs. I’d say, more likely he caught it on a reservation. Doesn’t look like a user to me. No, I wanted to show you something—give me a hand here, I want to turn him.”

Beau studied the Y-shaped incision. “Those stitches hold?”

Vlasic glanced down, grinned. “Like in that old
M.A.S.H
. movie, eh? Use big stitches, he’s an enlisted man. Hell, Beau, he’s not going to be hitting the beach anytime soon. He doesn’t care if he looks neat. They’ll hold. I’m a pathologist, not a seamstress.”

“That’s for sure. He looks like you stapled him together.”

“Here, just help me lift him up there.”

“You lift him. I just had breakfast.”

“Wimp. There … whoof. See these?”

Vlasic had rolled the body onto its side, exposing the back. The skin was stained with red blotches where the blood had settled. But Beau could see a row of white circles, five of them, each the size of a quarter and shiny with scar tissue. Vlasic let the body drop back onto the tray. The left arm flipped out and hung down at the side. Vlasic raised it back to the tray and arranged the body in a more natural position.

“What do you make of those, Beau?”

“Bullet wounds. Automatic weapons. The guy took a burst in the back. I’d say a long time ago. Big rounds. And fast. Probably military.”

“I’d say so. There were three exit wounds in the lower abdomen, and the pelvic bone showed severe scoring. But old. And the rounds were spent, or they’d have blown him apart. Ran into an ambush, probably. I think we have a Vietnam vet here, unless he was a mercenary. Caught a burst in Rhodesia—Zimbabwe now—or in Angola.”

Beau studied the blunt brutal features. Vlasic had closed the man’s eyes, but the movement had brought one lid up a bit, and the lower half of a cloudy black iris showed.

“Looks like a hard-handed man.”

Vlasic was wiping his hands on a cloth soaked in alcohol.

“Not anymore—now he’s mulch. You want to see the one you popped?”

“Christ, Marco. You’re such a sensitive guy.”

“
Vita brevis
, Beau. Especially when you’re on the case. Come over here, take a look at this.”

Vlasic pulled the cover back over the body. Beau watched it come up with a feeling composed of two parts sadness at the waste of life and one part joy that he was standing up looking down. Better you than me, friend.

“Now this is shooting, Beau. Classic head shot. Picture perfect. Such a good shot, you must have been aiming at something else.”

He was staring across the ruined flesh at Beau, a twist in his right cheek. The blue downlight gave him a sardonic shadowing. Beau took a long breath and came around.

The body lay on its back, naked, arms splayed out and slightly curled. One eye was closed, and one side of the dark and heavy-featured face seemed serene, at rest.

The other side of the face was gone. There was a ragged green and purple hole under the right eye. The orb itself was milky and protruded from the socket. Teeth and white bone showed in the crater that had been his cheek.

“And his wounds were all before him. Certainly wasn’t running away when you fired. What the hell did you use on him, Beau? A LAWS rocket?”

Vlasic raised the head and turned it on the limp neck. A massive exit wound, star-shaped, gaped in the blue light.

“See that. Like the nine-fourteen from Doomsville. Took him in the cheekbone there, powered right through, no deviation, no deflection. Hell of a round. You using that big nine-mill?”

“Yeah, the nine-mill. Jesus, Marco, put him down, willya? This isn’t a contest.”

Vlasic’s smile flickered off and then back on. He shook his head. “Yes, it was, Beau. That’s exactly what it was. This guy’s a killer. You can see it in him. You can smell it in him. Here’s a guy, been handing out death for a long time. You remember that when Vanessa and the gang start snapping and snarling at you tomorrow. I see a lot of death, Beau. Most of the people I see didn’t deserve it. But now and then, you see one like this, looks like it dropped in from the Jurassic period. A killer. The world’s a better place without things like this walking around upright.”

Beau stared down at the man for a long time.

There was a hell of a lot of dying going on around him, and none of it was making very much sense. This man had done his very best to kill Beau and had probably killed Peter Hinsdale as well. Maybe he deserved to die. But a lot of people who deserved to live were dead, and not everyone who died had died well or timely. He put out his hand and touched the shattered face. It felt damp and cool. A rough beard scraped against his fingertips.

There were two new scars above the man’s nipples. Lateral scars, paired like a mathematical symbol. Parallels.

“What do you make of these marks?”

Vlasic studied them for a bit.

“I’ve been wondering about them. We have what’s left of that Gall kid, the one these guys tried to steal? You don’t wanna see him. He’s pretty well toast. Shrunk down. Classic pugilist effect, you know, from the muscles contracting. Skin all baked off. But you could see there’d been—not incisions. They were into the pectoral muscles, just like here.”

Beau remembered those marks, and Finch and Klein had been talking about them at Bell’s Oasis.

“I saw them on the kid Bell shot. They were brand new, too. What do you figure made those marks? Animals? Some kind of machinery?”

“Hooks, maybe. Signs of tearing and pulling. Let me show you.”

Vlasic selected a scalpel from a standing tray and leaned over the broad chest, placing his fingers in a fan over the scar. He drew a thin arc. The skin opened behind the knife, showing blue flesh underneath. Vlasic peeled the tissue back, exposing the pink complex of muscles and ribs.

“See here—that’s tearing. Where the muscle has actually ripped. Somebody put a hook into this guy and pulled on it until the muscle ripped out. Ring a bell with you?”

“Not immediately.”

“No? Think
Dances With Wolves. Little Big Man
.” Then it came to Beau. He saw it complete, felt himself at the edge of illumination.

“Sun Dance? The ritual thing. Warriors used to do it—it was some kind of purification thing. Crazy Horse refused it. Sitting Bull went through it, just before the Custer battle. They have somebody pierce their chests with claws or something. The claws are attached to cords that go to the roof of the lodge, and they dance around the lodgepole, leaning back on the cords, putting their weight on it, until—”

Vlasic was nodding vigorously, bright with approval and enthusiasm.

“Until the cord breaks or the muscle tears. Try that the next time you’re depressed. You’re good, Beau. Didn’t think you paid any attention to history.”

“Marco, you can’t cross a coulee or ford a bend of any river in this state, anywhere west of the Missouri, without thinking about the people who used to live here. The country’s haunted.”

“So what do you make of this?”

Beau and Vlasic studied the body in silence.

“Well,” said Beau, finally, stepping back and drawing a long breath, “nobody’s gonna do that for fun. Why not just get a tattoo? No, this guy, he meant business. He was getting ready for something big. Something that meant a lot to him.”

Vlasic pushed the flesh into place and stepped back, reaching for an antiseptic tissue. He wiped his hands in an absent way, thinking about the puzzle.

“So the original beef was robbery, right?”

“That’s the story,” said Beau.

“But you don’t buy it?”

Beau was quiet for a while.

“It’s like this, Marco. Usually, when you’re trying to figure out why something happened, something criminal, it’s best to take the most obvious reason. Like, a wife gets killed, you take a hard look at the husband or the boyfriend. A bank gets taken for a major score, you look at the staff. There’s a hit in a crack house, you look at the tenants or the dopers next block over. Life’s pretty simple. But that Gall kid? He had close to seven hundred dollars in his pocket when he died. That doesn’t fit a robbery.”

“It would fit if it was part of an organized operation. Remember the Panthers, back in the sixties?”

“Organized for what, Marco?”

“Look at these wounds here. Can you imagine the pain involved, Beau? I cut myself shaving, it’s all I can do to get up the nerve to put on aftershave. Call it my manhood test. Scream when I do it, too. Drives my wife crazy. How you figure this guy here got the nerve to go through something like a Sun Dance?”

Beau shifted on his leg. The pain seemed electric. He saw it in his mind, a jagged bolt of blue lightning racing up his arteries, slamming into his brain.

Beau breathed out slowly and put a hand out on the edge of the table. Marco stepped toward him, then stepped back.

“How do people firewalk, Marco? Even Yuppies, New Age loonies in Oregon, they walk across red-hot coals. How do they do that?”

“Pain’s a mindless thing, Beau. Cut up these bodies, you can see the wiring. But it all runs to the brain, and the brain does what the mind tells it.”

“That’s a little simplistic, Marco.”

“Sure it is. I’m talking to you, right?”

“Right. So you’re saying, this guy was in a trance or something when this happened, when he went through this ritual?”

“Exactly. And what does that say about him?”

Suddenly, Beau felt very tired. His hand trembled on the stainless cart. “It says … belief. Fanatical belief.”

“Yeah. You know SPEAR’s into this thing, don’t you? You read about it in the
Gazette
?”

“Not yet. What’s the story?”

“Wait here. No, better yet, go over there and sit down. I’ll be right back.”

Marco led him over to a wooden chair at the end of a row of tables. Beau settled into it and put his head back against the wall. Vlasic looked at him for a second, then walked into his office.

Beau found himself staring at the top of a dead woman’s head. Her hair was black and shiny, worn in two braids. Her skin was pale brown, and her young breasts rose up under the plastic.

Beau looked away, closed his eyes, and tried to will the pain away. It wouldn’t go. He figured that was the price of being a lapsed Catholic. If he still believed, maybe he could rise above the pain on a cloud of religious ecstasy. Like Cochise over there, riding a steel tray all the way to Valhalla.

Vlasic came back, folding a newspaper flat against his green hospital overalls.

“Here we go. ‘An attempted armed robbery ended in death’ … wait a minute, it was farther on here. Yeah, here we are. ‘Spokespersons for the Society for the Protection of Ethno—American Rights have protested the shootings and the publicity surrounding them. The American Civil Liberties Union—’ ”

“Oh, fuck,” said Beau, closing his eyes even tighter.

“Oh yeah. This shit’s their bread and butter. They’ve applied for intervenor status—”

“They’ll never get that.”

“No. But they’ll get permission to audit. Have a lawyer at the hearings or whatever. Some BlueStones woman, she’s trying to link the accident out in Hardin with this. She’s talking about ‘institutional hostility.’ ”

“Man, the shit never stops, does it, Marco?”

“It’s tidal, Beau. It comes up and goes down. Right now, you’re in a high-water period, shit-wise. Anyway, my point is, you oughta be thinking cults. Terrorists. Remember those AIM guys? Russell Means? The guys who took over Wounded Knee?”

“Yeah, I remember. And I watched those Mohawks awhile back, at Oka. They killed a Quebec provincial cop. Took the Canadian Army to get them out of there.”

“Right! I tell you, Beau, this native rights thing, it’s building. It’s politically correct. All the university assholes are into it. These guys could be the … I don’t know.”