The Broken Ones (8 page)

“You’ll want to get down,” the supervisor shouted, opening a metal hatch and revealing another, narrower steel ladder.

The three descended to the thick concrete wall of the lower outlet tank from which emerged the twin screws and the most awful smell Oscar had ever inhaled. He offered his cigarette to Neve. She shook her head.

Three flukes of the screw blade had embedded themselves in the girl. At first glance, it looked as if she were embarrassed at being found in this awkward pose and had turned her head shyly away from spectators and into the half-tube—then Oscar saw that the blade had taken hold of her face, torn it from her skull, and stopped only after it had crushed the naked bone of her lower jaw. One leg had been severed and wrenched from its hip socket. Her torso had been split open, and one arm was gone. Steady rain had washed away much of the blood, but it could do nothing to hide a pink loop of intestine that trailed down toward the lower tank.

Oscar looked at Neve. The color had drained from her cheeks. He turned and yelled above the rumble of the other, working screw: “Her body tripped a load switch?”

The supervisor shook his head and spat into the sewage. “Her body fizzed the motor. Fucking shit thing was on its last legs. I’d been trying to run it out to the new financial year. My maintenance budget—I can hardly buy a fucking tube of white grease, let alone spring for a motor rewind. If the motor had been new, or working like number two there, the girl there would be mincemeat already—it’d chew her up like sausage. It’s used to shifting slurry, nothin’ solid. Auger blade hit bone, and that was that. The strain fried it.”

Oscar noticed bolt holes running up the sides of the tubes.

“Shouldn’t these things be covered?” he asked.

The supervisor scratched his nose. “I think they were, once.”

Neve wiped her mouth and shined her light into the pit of effluent from which the augers rose. “I don’t understand. Aren’t there bars or a filter to catch big things in the mix before they get here?” She gestured toward the long helices.

“Absolutely,” the supervisor replied, and lit another cigarette. His match flared brightly in the methane-rich air.

Oscar looked up to the landing they’d just descended from. “She didn’t arrive in the sewage system. She came from up there.”

Neve followed his gaze to the landing above. “Jumped?”

“Jumped,” Oscar said, “or dumped.”

He watched Neve, seeing how quickly she’d join the logic. She frowned and said, “If she jumped, she jumped naked. Which means she either arrived naked—pretty unlikely—or there’s a pile of her clothes around here somewhere.”

Oscar nodded and turned to the supervisor.

“Find any girl’s clothes?”

“No, but you’re welcome to look.”

“Do the augers run constantly?”

“There’s a cut switch in the lower tank,” the supervisor replied, angling his own light. “Switches off when the effluent drops below a certain level, kinda like the water valve in your home-toilet cistern, ’cept in reverse. But most times it runs. City keeps on shitting.”

Oscar looked out at the girl, then up at the landing. Rain fell on the handrail. There would be no dusting for fingerprints.

Neve said, “So if someone dumped her they didn’t wait around to hear her body jam the screw.”

“Or they heard it fail and took off anyway,” Oscar said, and looked at the supervisor. “After the warning light went on, how long before your lad—Luke?—got out here?”

The supervisor shrugged. “Eight, ten minutes?”

Oscar looked at Neve. Ample time for anyone dumping a body to make himself scarce.

“And he was with you in the control room when the warning light went on?”

“Just him and me.”

Oscar reluctantly stubbed out the last of his cigarette and indicated the motionless auger. “That thing isolated?”

The supervisor nodded.

“I’m going out.” Oscar pulled on a pair of latex gloves, put his flashlight between his teeth, and crawled hand over hand across the narrow concrete edge of the outlet tank.

“How did someone get in here?” Neve shouted. “Why didn’t your security stop them?”

The supervisor barked a laugh. “Love, my operating budget doesn’t stretch to running security lights, let alone security guards.”

“Cameras?”

“Don’t have ’em. Who wants to look at crap pumping around?”

Oscar reached the body and held tight to the slick concrete with one hand while he switched on his flashlight. He guessed the girl was in her early teens. Her wet hair was brown. The auger had opened her like a dull but brutally swung butcher’s cleaver, down to bone and in some places clean through. He gently touched the skin—cold. He gingerly
lifted an arm; it moved with a little stiffness, dragging up at the torso. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in.

He ran the flashlight beam down the ruined body and stopped at the girl’s belly.

Just above the smear of wet pubic hair, cuts had been carved into her slightly flabby flesh. Even in the shaky flashlight under steady rain, it was clear that the marking had nothing to do with the rude, machete-deep slashes the auger had inflicted. Oscar’s heart thudded. Looking at the pattern was like glimpsing a snake or the sheer fall of a cliff; a deep, fundamental fear sewn into his blood warned,
This is dangerous
. The overall shape—about the size of a man’s open hand—was made up of an intricate pattern of dozens of interlinked curls and lines. At the center of them was an elaborate cross, and imposed over it was a seven-pointed star.

Oscar pulled on his hat as he watched the two men from the funeral home extract the girl from the blades of the auger. The undertakers wore plastic overalls over their suits; they looked tired. As they lifted the torso out of the pit, the upper intestine and slick organs began to slump out. The men argued quietly, then tied a garbage bag around the open cavity.

Oscar saw how wan Neve was and sent her to scour the plant grounds for a pile of girl’s clothing they both knew she wouldn’t find. He’d telephoned Scenes of Crime, but there had been a triple fatality at a food cannery, so no staff was available to photograph and forensically assess the corpse in situ. Oscar returned to his car, to get his digital camera, then climbed back to the body only to discover that the battery—which had been fully charged that morning—was flat. He cursed and took pictures with the camera in his phone, a tiny thing better suited to capturing birthday cakes and beach cricket than murder victims. He wished that he’d bribed the supervisor out of his entire packet of smokes.

The undertakers laid the body on a small blue tarpaulin, and rain snapped on the plastic like tiny firecrackers. The dead girl stared up into the rain through the eye that had not been ripped away by the auger.

“Have you got a thermometer?” Oscar asked.

“For her?”

Oscar nodded. “A mercury one. A glass one.”

One of the men went to the hearse and returned with a long rectal thermometer. Oscar wondered where to put it—the girl’s lower torso had been badly chopped by the auger blade. He forced the thermometer down her split throat and felt unpleasant resistance as he reached the upper esophageal sphincter. He pushed harder, sticking the glass rod as deeply down her throat as he could reach. It came back just over 84 degrees. About two and a half hours had passed since the supervisor phoned the police. How long had the girl been dead before that? Another three hours? Four? It was hard to say—the combination of cold rain and evisceration was rapidly cooling the body. Oscar stood and wondered if he should wash and keep the latex gloves. He decided that was too parsimonious even for him.

Neve returned and shook her head once in reply to Oscar’s unspoken question. A bit of color had returned to her cheeks. Oscar nodded to the undertakers that they could now take the body to the morgue. As they unfolded a cadaver bag from their kit, his eyes were drawn to the girl’s body. Naked and broken, she looked utterly defenseless, exposed inside and out. So young. The awful marking on her belly glared like a brand. The cause of death wasn’t clear, but the girl didn’t carve her own belly and throw herself into spinning metal and stinking sewage. Someone had thrown her—dead or alive—into the auger. As the undertakers lifted the small body gently into the bag and zipped it shut, the nausea that had been squeezing Oscar’s stomach was gone. The deep weariness that seemed to have been his constant companion for years had also vanished. In their place was something volatile and bitter. He was angry.

“Did you phone Homicide?” she asked. “We shouldn’t release her till they come.”

“I’m not calling Homicide. We’re keeping this one.”

He felt Neve’s stare like a cold wind on the side of his face.

“You want to keep her,” she said quietly.

“It’s murder.”

The undertakers lifted the cadaver bag onto a stretcher and began to carry it up the steel stairs. Oscar followed, and Neve trailed after.

“Exactly,” she said. “It’s murder. But it isn’t a Clause Seventeen.”

“You saw that thing carved on her?”

“Listen.” She had to jog to keep up with him. “She’s got nothing. No clothes, no ID, no
face
. No suspects. A case like this needs feet on the ground. Haig has thirty people. We’re two. Giving her to Homicide is the best chance she’s got. It’s a case that needs their—”

“Brains?” The irritation inside him grew hotter.

“Resources. A case like this will take a month, and we don’t have a month. They’re going to shut us down! Oscar! We need to spend the next few weeks getting every conviction we can. We need to—”

“Bump up our stats?” Oscar asked.

He realized that Neve had stopped following. He turned and faced her, and she flinched.

“You know we do,” she said. “I do. I need my job.”

Oscar chewed his lip. Neve was right: this case would be a time pit. But that didn’t seem to matter to him.

“Or is this just a pissing contest between you and Haig?” she said. “Because I know who’s winning.”

He glared at her. “You know what Haig will do? He’ll glance in Missing Persons, and if there isn’t an instant match she’ll go on the back burner as a runaway Jane Doe, too hard to solve.”

Neve’s lips tightened. Oscar could see she was holding herself tight as a fist, fighting to keep her voice steady. “He’d have a point. There are ten murders a week here in the city. It’s terrible, but this girl is just one more. Let’s fight the fights we can win. Please, Oscar, be reasonable. Let Haig have her. If I bum out with you I’m back to Generals, and you know what the pay’s like there. No one gets by without—”

She bit her lip, but he knew what she was about to say. Taking bribes.

Oscar watched the undertakers gently lift the stretcher over the last rail and out toward the parking lot. The rain grew heavier. He looked inside himself for a gracious retreat, for polite agreement; all he found was anger. A girl had been stripped, mutilated, and thrown away like so much garbage. He wanted to find who did it.

“We’re keeping her,” he said.

His footsteps clattered as he went down the stairs.

He drove, quietly blessing the rain. The weepy dawn sky dropped a cold pall over the neglect and destruction, hiding the overgrown parks and unchecked weeds, damping down the reek of uncollected rubbish dumped on unswept footpaths, filling sore-like potholes with water. The sky looked almost solid: oystershell to the west, slate to the east, cobweb curtains of rain ahead—gray on gray on gray. The city had once been quite beautiful, but three years had made such a difference.

Three long years. A long time to hold a grudge, Oscar had to admit. After hitting the girl on Gray Wednesday, Oscar took a week’s personal leave. By the time he was back and Jon was out of the hospital, the investigation of Geoffrey Haig had formally ended. Haig had no doubt learned about the bug, and knew that Oscar had been inside his home. Oscar knew Haig hated him to the marrow.

“Left,” Neve said, jolting Oscar back to the present.

She had a street directory open on her lap but was staring out the passenger-side window. He could feel her ire bouncing against his own, like the same poles of two magnets repelling each other. Rain fell harder, drumming on the roof like an endless exhalation. Ahead, he caught glimpses of the city, glass towers all but shrouded by the downpour. The drabness they passed was briefly relieved by a blue banner across a half-finished building: T
HATCH
C
ONSTRUCTION
. People were building again. Maybe there was hope.