The No. 2 Global Detective (20 page)

The latter, he hoped.

Dr Faye Carpaccia is mixing a marinade of olive oil and lemon juice and some fresh thyme leaves in a small glass jar and outside it is unseasonably hot. Black thunderheads are beginning to build up like angry fists, masking the heat of the sun and as Dr Carpaccia crosses the room in which she is making the marinade, she decides that a storm will come.

She places the bottle of marinade on the gleaming steel surface, next to the body of the chicken that is stretched out on a gurney, naked and hairless now, ready for the Y-incision that Dr Carpaccia will make with one of the knives that her assistant has already prepared and laid out in a neat row where she can easily reach them.

Dr Carpaccia is a small woman, a very small woman, but she is a powerful woman and an elegant woman in her midnight-blue trouser suit, and she is very very kind, with a heart of gold that means she would do anything for anyone, although, in her own way, she is very reserved and does not like to talk to people she does not know unless they are dead.

Before Carpaccia touches the knives she politely nods to her assistant, a woman of Mexican extraction, with few prospects in life and a mass of dark hair that she is wearing scraped back into a hood. Along with the hood she is also wearing the standard uniform of purple scrubs, gloves, mask and safety goggles. She knows that when Dr Carpaccia gives her that nod, it means that she must turn on the ATMT Lite MP3 digital recorder that stands athwart an oaken shelf off to the left of the suite in which they are about to conduct the operation on the chicken, and this she does. Instantly the blue light that signals that the machine is working blinks on.

Standing by the bank of sinks against one wall is Detective Rambouillet, the investigating officer. He is dressed in black from his
Cats
the musical baseball cap to the Muji flipflops on his black-socked feet. He is a big man, and his big presence seems even bigger than usual in the cool air, so that Dr Carpaccia does not mind so much any more that he makes her feel even smaller than she used to feel, even in her own suite. He is chewing gum and looking bored and tough at the same time. It is a look that Carpaccia knows he adopts when he wants to hide the fact that his mind is whirring like a hamster in a hamster run, even though she has never owned a hamster or a hamster run or even seen a hamster in a hamster run.

Dr Carpaccia works her hands into a pair of surgical gloves and she begins to recite the words that she knows by heart now, having said these same words every week for almost ten years:

‘The subject is an approximately three and one half pound Caucasian female chicken, exhibiting evidence of a ritualistic beheading.'

Dr Carpaccia looks up and catches the eye of her assistant over the width of the gurney. Behind the super hi-spec PSVU glass of her hybrid goggles, Carpaccia can see that there are traces of tears she is endeavouring to blink away. Dr Carpaccia can also see the admiration in the woman's eyes and knows that this admiration is aimed at her and her alone.

Dr Carpaccia cannot afford to be distracted by the misplaced sensitivities of her staff and she returns to look down at the chicken on the gurney before her. She nods once again to the assistant and, together on the count of three, they move the bird onto one of the steel examining tables that occupy the centre of the suite in which they are carrying out the operation.

Even through the thin latex of her powdered surgical gloves, Dr Carpaccia can feel the chill of the bird's cold dead flesh. Rigor mortis has come and gone and the forelimbs of the chicken are responsive to digital manipulation.

Carpaccia estimates the time of death to have been no later than three days ago. This conclusion is backed up by the sell-by date printed on a label found on the material in which the chicken was discovered and which is now sealed into a slim clear plastic evidence envelope that is resting on the gleaming surface of another of the steel examination tables.

‘How was the subject found?' she asks Detective Rambouillet.

‘Same as the others,' he replies. ‘Lying on her back, with her wings and legs tied together with the same kind of twine in the same kind of knot.'

‘Was it preserved?' she angrily asks.

‘Jeez, Doc, I dunno,' he sarcastically responds. ‘Of course it was preserved. Along with the wrapping which we found all over her body. A kind of plastic. And a weird rectangle of paper – also a bit plasticky – that the body was sitting on, and underneath that there was a cradle of pressed blue cardboard. It's all in there, tagged, in the fridge.'

He nods to one of the four walk-in fridges in which they keep things at a constantly cold temperature.

‘What about the internal organs?' she mollifiedly asks.

Rambouillet nods his big head towards a bag on another gurney. Carpaccia crosses to the other gurney and picks up the bag and opens it with a pair of scissors that she takes from a drawer. She up-ends the contents of the bag into a copper bowl with a wooden handle attached and sets aside the empty bag. Inside is a mush of dark bloody material that includes the chicken's liver and kidneys, as well as a long section of bone covered in flesh upon which the skin is still identifiable. Absent are the feet and the head.

The smell is something that Dr Carpaccia has long since gotten used to. In fact, as she introduces a foot-long wooden-tipped instrument into the bowl, she is happy with what she sees. This is one of the things that has made her the most respected figure in her profession, the sort of figure whom people stop in the corridor to obtain an autograph and to ask advice on such matters as flying helicopters, scuba-diving, vodka sauce and directions to the nearest rest room. She is always polite and she never takes offence when she is stopped in the corridor and asked this sort of question, even when it is abundantly clear that she is not the sort of person who should be stopped in the corridor and asked any sort of question by an elderly person or an ugly person or by a person who simply does not possess very much money.

Dr Carpaccia reaches for a wooden pepper mill that she keeps on a tray along with other condiments and chemicals that she will use during the operation. She takes the top of the pepper mill with her right hand and the bottom with her left hand and she turns them against each other, one counterclockwise, the other clockwise. Instantly from the bottom of the mill flakes of pepper emerge and fall blackly into the bowl. Next she adds a thumb-sized lump of yellow butter, a pinch of sea salt and eight fluid ounces of an ordinary Merlot that she retrieves from a bottle on the gleaming surface. From one of the eye-line cupboards above her she takes a bay leaf from one jar, and an imported
bouquet garni
from another. These she also adds to the bowl, which she then sets aside over a low heat while she returns to the body of the chicken.

Still no one has spoken. Dr Carpaccia likes to work in silence and Rambouillet has learned not to break her concentration with any questions. He has complete trust in Dr Carpaccia.

‘So whaddya reckon, Doc? Is it the same man? Same MO?'

He is referring to the
modus operandi
, the way a compulsive murderer goes about his business.

‘I won't know until I open her up,' Carpaccia says, nodding at the chicken body. Only her voice betrays the emotion she feels. She takes a deep breath before gently parting the legs and wings of the bird. Rambouillet has stopped pacing the terracotta-tiled floor in his flipflops and is staring at what she is doing, his breath held, waiting for some signal. Her assistant, the Mexican woman in the pale purple scrubs, is nervous. She has drawn her breath too, and her dark eyes are wide with terror. This is the first time she has worked with Dr Carpaccia.

After a second Carpaccia looks up and nods to Detective Rambouillet. Dr Carpaccia has confirmed what they suspected from the moment Rambouillet had called her on his cell phone from the market to tell her that he had found another body in the chill cabinet.

The chicken has had her internal organs removed.

There is a thick silence in the room.

‘I don't suppose we gotta name, either, do we?' asks the detective.

Carpaccia shakes her head. This is what hurts most. The anonymity. It is up to her to make this dead chicken speak to her as she had never spoken to a soul while she was a living chicken. It is up to Carpaccia to get her to tell her story, so that the wrong of her death could be made right and the evildoer could be PUNISHED.

Afterwards, in the privacy of her study, Dr Carpaccia can let some of the emotion show, but for now she must continue with the operation.

Her assistant has passed her a Petri dish of some of the butter-yellow emollient they use as a humectant to increase the water-holding capacity of the body's
stratum corneum
, as well as to provide a layer of oil on the surface of the skin which further slows water loss and thus increases its moisture content. Dr Carpaccia takes some of the emollient on her hands and rubs it all over the chicken, paying particular attention to the thin skin of the breast. When that is done, she collects the husks of the lemon she had previously had her assistant squeeze dry and these she inserts into the cavity created by the removal of the internal organs. In addition to the lemon halves, she carefully inserts two cloves of garlic (skin on), and while her assistant holds the chicken upside down, a handful of thyme leaves and stalks and a generous scoop of salt and another extensive grind of the pepper from the mill she had previously used. There is a risk of cross-contamination, which is why Carpaccia is so careful.

Her assistant returns the chicken to a special body dish and again Carpaccia leans over and applies the salt-and-pepper coating. The crystals of the salt and the dark flakes of pepper stick in the butter and it is true to say that the chicken did not look as good as this when she was alive.

Carpaccia nods at her assistant.

‘Is the OVEN ready?' she asks, referring to the Occluded Vector Electron Neuroscope that needs to be pre-heated to gas mark eight before it can successfully treat the chicken's body. From the outside all that is visible of the oven is a set of dials and a steel-framed laminated heatproof hinged-glass window.

The assistant nods. The OVEN is ready. She opens the door and a wave of heat emerges like a physical force. The assistant backs away slightly, but Carpaccia is used to the heat. She has done this too often, she thinks.

Together they wheel the gurney to the OVEN and then, again on the count of three, they pick the chicken up in her special Teflon-covered body dish and slide her into the OVEN. Carpaccia's Mexican assistant closes the door and Carpaccia checks her Rolex watch, a gift from the grateful people of Bratislava.

A tear snakes its way down the smooth cheek of the doctor as she removes her gloves and balls them into a flip-top bin that she keeps for just such a purpose. She retreats along the corridor of the Facility to her study, where she sits at her desk and bites her knuckle, desperately fighting against the feelings that well up inside her, fighting the darkness.

In her career to date Dr Carpaccia has seen some horrific sights and she is all too aware of what a damaged human being is capable of, but this case touches her deeply. The chicken is so young, so full of energy, with so much to give. She still has her whole life to enjoy. Or not.

Detective Rambouillet knocks on Dr Carpaccia's ash-framed door. He is holding two Styrofoam cups of coffee. It is 3.30 in the afternoon and outside the storm that Carpaccia had predicted seems to have not materialised, but it is still hot in her study and she can feel the heat pressing down upon her head and upon her shoulders as if it were a living thing.

‘So what we got?' Detective Rambouillet asks. He places the cups on the desk and sits heavily down in the chair opposite her.

He seems not to have noticed that Dr Carpaccia does not like milk-free coffee and this hurts her, because she knows how he takes his coffee, so why should he not know how she takes hers? Once again she considers firing him. But he leans forward now and pours a sachet of refined sugar into his own coffee cup. He knows this is not good for him, and that it will make him sweat later on when he feels the sugar rush, and that it will make him fat and out of condition, but he does not seem to care and goes ahead and does it anyway.

They are sitting in Dr Carpaccia's red satinwood-panelled study. On the wall behind her is her extensive collection of what she humorously calls ‘sheepskins': diplomas from various universities including The American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders, based in Holy Toledo, Utah, and the New Hope Bioresonance University of Holistic and Drug Free Medicine based in a small but pleasant suburban villa in Maryland.

‘Is it the Butcher?' Rambouillet asks taking a good long slurp of his coffee. Carpaccia forces herself to concentrate and she nods and wishes that she had not so recently given up smoking. At times like this she misses her ex-lover, who was killed in the line of duty – the one with the strong warm tongue, who kissed and touched her, but fatally fell into the fire at the FBI clambake. Or was that another lover? She cannot recall.

‘So how'd he find her?' Rambouillet asks. It's a cop question. Not one that Dr Carpaccia is qualified to answer, but she has let herself become involved. She shrugs.

‘Until we know who she is,' she says, ‘we won't know for sure how he found her.'

‘But you got your own theory, right?' the burly detective asks.

Dr Carpaccia is once again startled by Detective Rambouillet. These are the moments during which she knows that she will not fire him. These are the moments she knows that she does not have the power to fire him. He knows her too well. He knows that she has a theory about how the killer found his victim. He knows that she does not have the power to fire him, since his pay comes from someone else's budget.