In my previous life, I’d been a pathology scientist and a paramedic. It was the latter job that introduced me to morgues. Body drop offs were the worst part of it. There was a finality to it, an admission that the fight had been lost. I’d never been to Brisbane’s morgue though and Erin agreed to meet me out front.
She was leaning against a wall, reading the paper I’d asked her to bring, when we approached. Auburn hair tied back in a pony tail, she looked young and fresh, a brightness in her eyes that was missing too much lately. Her husband’s cancer, while no worse in recent times, wasn’t any better, either. She didn’t talk about it much but it weighed on her more than she admitted.
At the sight of Dev, she cast me a questioning look, then back to him for a better appraisal. I couldn’t tell exactly what she thought from her expression but it wasn’t hostile, I knew that much.
For his part, Dev greeted her with a big grin and a kiss to the back of her hand when I introduced her.
“Randy Devantier,” he announced himself. “And it is all my pleasure to meet you, Erin McRea.”
If I hadn’t been watching her closely, I would have missed it. A flicker of surprise, followed by a slight thinning of her lips, quickly covered up with a genuine seeming smile.
“Texan, huh?”
“Ma’am, don’t ask a man if he’s from Texas. If he is, he’ll tell you and if he isn’t, well, no need to embarrass him.”
Erin laughed, though it sounded a bit strained. “Same story with the sorcerer deal?” She pointed to his t-shirt.
“Private joke,” he hedged.
Wondering just what had Erin spooked, I took the paper from her and shoved it at Dev. “She’s in the know. Don’t worry.” Nodding toward the doors to the Queensland Health, Forensic and Scientific Services building, I said to her, “Should we do this thing?”
“I only told Dr Carver there’d be two of us,” she said, frowning at me. “He’s very particular.”
“That’s okay, Dev’s got some reading to do. He can wait in the foyer.” The only reason he wasn’t in the car was because it was nearly hot enough to boil the bitumen and I didn’t have a bowl of water to leave him.
Not giving her time to protest, I headed in. They followed and Dev veered toward a row of couches just inside the door. Erin, giving me a look of pursed-lip disapproval, led me to the front desk. She said we had an appointment with Dr Carver and after a quick phone call, were directed through a door to the right.
An assistant met us on the other side. She was tall and skinny, almost androgynous, with thick framed glasses and long, brown hair pulled into a tight braid.
“Erin McRea?” she demanded with a direct intensity that demanded absolute attention.
“Yes,” Erin said, a little fast and startled. “We’re here—”
But the young woman had all she needed from Erin and turned her oil-drill stare on me. “And you are?”
Scared for my life, but I managed to mutter, “Matt Hawkins.” After a little hesitation—I mean, it felt like I was before a supreme court judge—I added, “I’m consulting with Erin’s agency.”
I was subjected to more staring until I felt utterly naked before this strange girl, then she spun and, straight backed, marched away.
“Follow,” she commanded and we did so, a trifle involuntarily. “Do not deviate from this corridor, do not touch anything. Dr Carver is very busy, do not waste his time.”
At precise double-time we were delivered to a set of wide doors. Our dictator snapped to a stop, faced us and announced, “This is Dr Carver’s office. Do not leave it without an escort. Do not touch anything.” And she waved us in with a curt, no-nonsense gesture.
We went in.
The doctor’s office wasn’t. It was, in point of fact, his autopsy lab. Thankfully, we only came in to a prep room. A wall of glass separated us from where he actually did the cutting.
There was a body in the room with us, though. On a trolley, in a bag. But, you know. Right there.
Once, when I’d been a paramedic, dead bodies hadn’t bothered me too much. Lately, though, dead takes on a whole new meaning and when there’s a chance they might get up and run off, all sorts of tolerance levels take a plummet. I had to resist the urge to shove a stake through the body on the trolley.
Apart from the body, we were alone. Cautious of the stern instructions, we stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, arms crossed so we didn’t accidentally touch anything.
“So. A sorcerer,” Erin murmured. She got that I’m-doing-investigative-thinking-don’t-bother-me expression. After a moment, she asked, “What’s his story? How did you end up with him?”
“He’s here chasing a spell, don’t ask, I don’t understand myself, and I got him because Aurum seems to think I’m the local tour guide.”
Erin shuddered. She’d not encountered Aurum himself, but she’d been up close and personal with the Violet Primal and I’d told her about Aurum. Her reaction was more than understandable. “You spoke with him?”
“More like he talked at me until I agreed to chauffer his buddy around.”
Whatever other questions Erin had she didn’t get a chance to ask them as the inner doors to the cut up room opened.
“Ms McRea.” The man belonging to the low, stately voice wore a blue lab coat and was average height, thin and balding, though you couldn’t tell because he also had the world’s most impressive and complicated comb over. Seriously, it looked like a single flap of grey hair was wrapped around his noggin like a turban and shellacked so hard the Tap Dogs could have done a whole show on it.
“Dr Carver,” she said, just as formally, no smile.
“You’ve come about one of my patients.” Not a question and said with such confidence that even if we’d been there selling Amway, we were now here to look at a body.
“Yes. He’s part of an investigation I’m doing. Dr Carver, this is my associate, Matthew Hawkins.”
He turned to me. Not just his head, but his whole body, as if his neck were too stiff to move.
“Hi.” I held out my hand.
Dr Carver dismissed my hand with a stupidity-is-catching glance. “Mr Hawkins.”
Okay. Not the time or place to try out some jokes about a coroner being called Carver, then.
“You said on the phone you’d looked at Sean’s body this morning,” Erin said.
“I did say that,” he pronounced. “An interesting case. I have not seen anything like it in twenty-six years.”
If he’d gone down to weeks, days and hours I would not have been shocked.
“You’ve seen something like it before?” I asked.
He nodded, once and sharp. “A hammer dropped from the eighth floor of a construction site. Hit a man directly on the crown of his head. Staved in the skull and made something of a teacup out of the victim’s head.”
Completely lost as to whether he was joking, I just nodded interestedly.
“But that isn’t what happened to Sean,” Erin said. “His head was... destroyed.”
“Same principle, larger impact.” Dr Carver turned and said, “This way.”
Erin went without question. I hesitated, wondering if we would get out of here alive. Noticing my reluctance, Erin waved me after her with a frantic little don’t-leave-me-alone gesture.
“The forensic team retrieved as much of the patient as they could find,” Dr Carver said as we entered the cut up room. “I have reconstructed as much of the skull as possible. It took myself and Belinda several hours to piece together the fragments.”
“Belinda?” Erin asked.
“My assistant. She escorted you in.”
My head filled with images of the pair of them working over Sean’s head as if it was a giant jigsaw puzzle. Do you have the parietal bone? No, but I do have a corner piece with clouds. Cue repressed, in-joke sniggers. What an absolute riot they must be together.
Erin and I hung back as Carver went to the table. There was a body on it, covered with a sheet. By the truncated nature of it, I knew it was Sean. Still, Carver went ahead and lifted the sheet, folding it back along a neat crease to reveal the ragged stump of his neck and chest, now sliced open in the classic Y incision. Although the flaps of skin had been smoothed down, no one had as yet stitched it closed.
Where the head would have rested was an array of bone shards still sporting skin and hair. It was, however, arranged in vague order, so that the face I had watched last night was now flattened and cracked, bruised and torn. The cracks between the jagged-edged pieces were canyons in the flesh landscape. Everything was slightly off-kilter and warped, as if a funhouse mirror had fractured, all the little bits distorted in different directions.
It happened all over again. Sean, right in front of me, smiling one moment, head gone the next. Alive last night, here this morning. One eye stared up at me, milky with death but still somehow accusing me of using a hot chick to lie to him in his dying moments.
I felt as if I might panic. As if I couldn’t breathe. Then Dr Craver spoke.
“Born of flesh,” he said, his dry tone flattened with extra gravity, “and at the end, stone and dirt.”
A shiver went down my spine, shaking me out of the moment and I glanced at him. He gazed at the body with a sad, almost sympathetic expression. Catching Erin’s eye, I quirked a questioning eyebrow. She just shrugged.
Freaky-as-hell commentary out of the way, Carver launched into his findings.
“Cause of death was due to blunt force trauma to the coronal suture,” Carver said, pointing out the pertinent area of shattered head. “The force of the blow caved in the parietal and frontal bones, the object driving into and through the brain, shattering left and right temporal bones, the right occipital bone and the left and right zygomatic bones.” At our blank looks, he clarified. “The cheek bones.” Moving on, he indicated the rest of the body. “Otherwise, Mr Carey was a relatively healthy young man. Some signs of privation and a history of drug abuse, but nothing that would have contributed to an early death.”
Swallowing hard, Erin asked, “And the object that killed him?”
Carver covered up the body again and turned to a second table. Another lump also covered, but this one was much smaller.
“Again, the Scene of Crime team could not find all of the pieces of the offending object. I did find some in the patient but there are still significant amounts missing. I have reconstructed it as best I can.”
This time, Erin and I crowded closer as he carefully lifted the sheet.
We stared at it. Then at each other. Then back at it. Carver was right. Bits were missing, but they were hardly significant. The nature of the object was clearly visible.
“It’s a monkey,” I said.
The partial face I’d seen last night was mostly whole now, and it was a monkey’s face. On a monkey’s body, but it wasn’t a classically posed monkey statue. Oh no, this monkey was quite capable of seeing, hearing and speaking evil. This monkey thought it was Superman. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. Stretched out as if in flight, or jumping, it was under a metre long from the top of its little head to tip of its tail. Whoever had sculpted it had been masterful. The details in the fur were exquisite, every individual hair carved out. An expression of cheeky glee was clear on the fractured remains of its face, as if diving into a poor kid’s skull was a trick for a delighted audience.
The sum effect was creepy.
Erin pulled out her phone and snapped a couple of shots, but by the frown on her face she didn’t know quite what to make of it, either. Sean stole some monkeys from a zoo, and then happened to suffer death by flying stone monkey.
One thing I did note, though, was that the stone of the monkey was very similar to the chips Mercy had bought down from the roof.
“Have the cops seen this?” Erin asked, putting away her phone.
“Not as yet. This patient is low on their list.”
Erin thanked him and we left. Neither of us were quite running, but it wasn’t strictly walking either.
Back in the corridor, the taciturn assistant found us again. Belinda bared our path, bringing us up short. Her unnerving, direct stare flickered over Erin, then pinned me with clear disapproval. Why, I had no idea. Perhaps she could read minds and didn’t like the disrespectful bent of my thoughts about her and Carver.
Before I could apologise for whatever I’d done, she snapped at us to follow, then proceeded to march us out.
Just before the doors to freedom, however, she stumbled and, arms flailing, tried to stop herself from taking a spill. Without thought, I rushed in and caught her around the waist. She stiffened immediately, muttering something probably uncomplimentary under her breath.
“Sorry.” I made sure she was steady, then let go, backing up.
Belinda stood for a moment, blinking rapidly, so still I had to check the rise and fall of her chest to make sure she was actually breathing. Then, slowly, she looked at me. Her gaze was as hard and impenetrable as previous, but this time, she held out her hand to me.
“Thank you.” It was forced and curt, but she was making an effort, so I took her hand in a quick shake.
“No problem.”
She pulled away fast. “Please leave now.”
We did.
Released back into the wild, Erin and I exchanged a relieved look.
“Odd,” Erin said.
“That’s one word for it.” I rubbed my hand, the feel of her dry, cool skin lingering. I looked around for Dev. He wasn’t there. “Great, now I’ve lost Aurum’s pet sorcerer.”
“He’s probably outside. Come on.”
Erin was right and we found Dev in the parking lot, on the phone, pacing. In his other hand, he held a page of the paper. It was scrunched up in his fist and he scowled furiously as he swung around. Seeing us, he waved but kept the phone to his ear.
“Did you get Mercy up to the roof last night?” Erin asked as we wandered over to Roberts’ car.
“I did. She didn’t detect any humans other than the cops but did find some stone fragments that resemble that of the monkey. I’d say the statue was launched from up there.”
“By whom, if Mercy says there was no one up there before the cops?”
I shrugged. “She’s not absolutely fool proof. Maybe it was a cop. Or someone who smelled like one.” At Erin’s narrow-eyed glare, I hastily added, “Someone who carries a gun and a taser and has big leather boots.”
Barely mollified, Erin conceded with a grunt. “It’s not very useful, though.”
“I know.” Glancing over to make sure Dev was still occupied, I leaned in close and asked, “What’s your issue with Dev?”
Erin snapped a startled look at me. “What do you mean, my issue with Dev? I only just met him. Why would I have an issue with him?”
I held my hands up to ward off the attack. “Okay, maybe it’s my issue. I just thought you seemed a bit, I dunno, surprised when I introduced him.”
With a snort, Erin muttered, “I was probably shocked he wasn’t a ghoul or demon or something. It’s not like you know a lot of ordinary people, is it.”
She wasn’t telling me something. Oh, her denial sounded real, but there was something in her eyes that didn’t sit right with the words. A touch of wildness that had been hinted at before, usually when she came across something that scared the hell out of her. I knew the look well, because it had been directed at me a time or two.
“Yeah,” I said instead of calling her on it. Now wasn’t the time, not with the subject of her weirdness within surprise tackling distance. “That’s probably it.”
The narrowing of her glare said she believed me about as much as I believed her. We couldn’t do anything about it though, because Dev finished his call with a few snaps, hung up and, plastering a smile on his face, met us at Roberts’ car.
“That was quick,” he said.
“And disturbing. You find something?” I nodded to the remains of the paper.
“Maybe.” He looked between us, quick and assessing. “Are we far from the Botanic Gardens?”
“Which ones?” Erin asked, then made a little noise of understanding. “I read that article while waiting. That’s your clue?”
“It’s a possible sign,” Dev said.
“Of…?” I asked.
“Earth sorcery. Are you able to help me or does Erin still need you?”
“He’s all yours,” Erin announced with forced brightness. “I’ve got some stuff to do at the office.” To me she said, with a grimace, “Thistlethwaite’s coming by for an update. That’ll be fun, telling him his suspect is in the morgue.”
Still a little unsure of the whole situation, I offered, “You sure you don’t need backup?”
“I’m a big girl. I can handle one uncomfortable discussion on my own.” With a wave she started back to her car. “It was nice to meet you, Dev,” she called over her shoulder, perhaps ironically.
Dev and I got into the tank.
“Where to?” I asked.
Smoothing out the crumpled newsprint, Dev said, “The Mount Coot-tha Botanic Gardens.” He pronounced the T on Coot, frowning at the sound of it.
“Great,” I muttered, not bothering with correcting his pronunciation. “Let’s go do the tourist thing.”