Broken Monsters (7 page)

She writes in her own name.

“ETA on the results?” Miranda asks.

“Six to ten days. Would have been longer, but we piqued their interest. It's a nice change from bullet wounds and semen.”

Sparkles is still musing. “There was a lot of graffiti at the scene, but I guess that's normal.”

Gabi scans the photographs. “Might be worth checking out the tags.”

“What, the killer left his signature?” Croff snipes. “Wouldn't that be something?”

“Like the idiot who murdered his wife and posted the picture on Facebook?” she says, honey-sweet. “Or the knucklehead who robbed the gas station on Dearborn two weeks ago still wearing his McDonald's name tag? Criminals do stupid things all the time.”

“You got an ID on your kid yet?” Miranda asks.

“Stricker and Boyd started on that this morning.”

“Pulled all our missing kids reports and put in a request with the other precincts. Got about a hundred we're going through. Ditched the girls already, working through the boys. Lucky it was cold out, so he looks like he looks.”

She knows what Luke means. Preserved. Couple of days in July, and he'd be swelled up like the Michelin Man. She had that once with a teenager pulled out of the water after three days. Her mother kept saying, “Nah, nah, that ain't my baby. My baby ain't fat like that, my baby ain't got those chubby cheeks.” It took two hours to persuade her otherwise, and she only succeeded because of the tattoo of the seahorse on the girl's ankle. Gabi gets it: you don't want to believe. Not in real life.

“We could hand over the kid's photo to the press,” Boyd says.

“We are not releasing the photo,” Miranda says.

“Doesn't have to be the whole thing. Crop it to a head shot.”

“You gonna make me repeat myself?”

“Just saying.” Boyd scratches his beard.

“We'll give it another day. It's going to be traumatic enough for the family without seeing it in the press.”

“Can I come with you to the medical examiner?” the rookie says. “I found him. I feel like I should see him through.”

“Fine by me, Sparkles,” Gabi says. “
If
your precinct commander signs off on it. But you better know that if you're in, you've bought a ticket for the whole ride. I will use you.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“Ovella, can you get on the Michigan Intelligence Center? Mike, you've got a friend in the FBI, right?”

“I don't have any friends, Gabriella, you know that.” No, just three kids and a happy marriage to a human resources manager. It's what makes him such a colossal wiseass. He can afford to be.

“If you could talk to someone with access to a better database than we have, that would be helpful. And it would be worth a beer.”

“Make it a six-pack.”

“Okay, people, everybody clear? You find anything, you let me know soon as.”

“What if we run out of minutes and have to radio it in?” Sparkles asks.

“Use a code.”

“How about ‘Faline'?” Croff says, tapping away at his smartphone.

“What's that?”

He turns the screen to show them. “Bambi's girlfriend in the movie. And that's you now, isn't it, Gabriella?”

There's enough laughter that she lets it go. “Fine. Faline it is. Everyone else, we're calling in to all the precincts. Similar stiffs, MOs, any connections. Start local, go as far as it takes. Biggest priority is identifying the boy and finding the rest of him. The deer too.” She writes it down. The marker gives out on her halfway through “
find the rest
.” She throws it at the wall.

“Is there
one
fucking pen in this precinct that writes?”

Clayton disappeared
into the work. Otherwise he had too much time to think, about his cracked windshield and the dent in his grill and the blood on the tarpaulin in the back of his truck. Everything was so muddled in his head. The memories were like silverfish that skittered away into dark corners. It was easier to look away than try to grab hold of them.

(Don't look in the refrigerator.)

Besides, the work was flowing. He was inspired. Like he hadn't been since he was twenty years old, when he was too young and too stupid to have doubts about what he was doing. He could slip away into it, like diving into the deepest part of the lake: the same pressure in his head, the tightening in his ears, the hurt in his chest, aching for air.

When he surfaced, blinking in the fluorescent light in the basement, hours had gone by. Days maybe. His body reasserted itself with all its tiresome urges. His stomach roiled with hunger, his back ached, his hands were cramped, with fresh calluses. But he had new work, in new materials, finally making use of all the things he had squirreled away in his basement over the years; pieces made of clay and wire and newspaper and reclaimed wood. Strange and beautiful work, like he'd never made before. The sculpture he'd promised Patrick languished untouched in the yard. It seemed brutish and clumsy now. But he couldn't be sure. He couldn't trust himself to judge. He could be going mad, he decided.

The last time he had blackouts was nearly ten years ago, when he was drinking too much at the squat in Eastern Market. He'd hustled his way in among the youngsters, because it felt alive and vibrant: a real arts scene, like Paris in the twenties, or New York in the seventies, nineties Berlin. But he didn't fit in. He was too old, his work was too strange, he didn't know how to talk to the endless stream of girls, with their tattoos and bright hair, who came to hang out, to pose for portraits or be photographed, usually topless, sometimes naked.

He never took to acid or any of those other drugs, although they were going around among the kids. Coke, speed, mescaline. The late-night parties where he was always the odd one out, sitting on his own on the couch. They would come and sit right next to him and not talk to him. He would drink to make it bearable, and wake up oblivious to whatever had happened the night before, stumbling out into the shared living space to ice-cold vibes. He would spend the day miserable, waiting for someone to finally confront him about what he'd done. Some inappropriate thing he'd said, some dumb practical joke that everyone had taken too seriously.

But he hadn't been drinking. Or sleeping, or eating, or taking his pain pills. He avoided the refrigerator, the thin Plexiglas shelves yanked out and set beside it. He also took care not to look at the black stains on his wall, which seemed to swell when he passed them. A trick of the light, mold from the newspapers piled up in teetering stacks in the hallway.

He opened a can of beans in tomato sauce, poured it into a dish and put it in the microwave. The device hummed and the glass plate turned around and around and around until PING. He was reassured by the normalcy of this, even if the act of eating seemed repulsive.

Spooning the food in, chewing the soft pulp, his tongue rolling it back toward his throat, swallowing—it was all automatic, like he was functioning on the muscle memory of someone he used to be. He patted his pocket for cigarettes and realized he didn't want them, the chemical taste in his mouth, the way they sucked away his breath.

He felt unlike himself. “Unlike.” He said it aloud. Words sounded strange. The meaning unraveled. It was as if Clayton was the skin and bones he pulled on.

He had to get out of the house. He had to talk to someone. Show them what he'd done.

(Don't look in the refrigerator.)

He had to fire these clay figurines—the ones he doesn't remember making, but that seem familiar. It's why he doesn't normally work in clay—because he doesn't have an oven, but he assumes Miskwabic Pottery would let him use their student kiln. He used to help pack tiles into boxes and move big bags of wet clay for Betty Spinks in exchange for pottery lessons.

He packed up the figurines and took them out to the garage, ignoring the cracks webbed out across the windshield—he'd have to get that fixed. He hauled the tarp out of the back and flipped it over to hide the rusty stains.

Yanking up the garage door, some part of him expected it to open onto nothingness. But it was a bright late-autumn day, the low cloud cover catching the sunlight and spreading it around.

He drove past rows of wooden houses with peeling paint and overgrown grass, the bare trees reaching up their branches as if to rip a hole in the sky, and took a shortcut through Indian Village, where the houses got a lot nicer, and all dolled up for Halloween, with pumpkins in the windows and spooky floss draped over the big old oaks and elms lining the driveways of the historic homes.

He pulled into the gravel parking lot of the cozy Tudor-style building and nudged the truck right up against the fence under the tree near the road, away from the other cars, to make it harder to spot his broken windshield.

The fat security guard held open the door for him as he carried his load in, warm air wafting out.

“Help you there, sir?”

“I'm fine,” Clayton said. It
almost
felt true, here in this bright shop with its shelves of arts and crafts tiles with their iridescent glaze. Historic buildings all over the city were decorated with Miskwabic mosaics, hallways turned into geometries of light, cornerstones and edgings marked out in bright patterns. But they don't sell anything like that here. Instead they have “gift tiles,” botanicals and devotionals and simple geometrics, the city skyline, a Tigers D, street numbers, a little ballerina girl, pumpkins for Halloween. You take all the beauty in the world and you boil it down to kitsch, he thought.

Inside, a family was browsing while a hipster with wild hair talked them through the history, paying special attention to the twenty-something daughter. Betty was behind the counter, her graying hair in a loose braid, wearing a red sweater and a necklace of colored beads. She looked up at the sound of his voice, peering over her glasses at him. “Knock me down. Clayton Broom, where
have
you been hiding yourself?”

“I got this,” he said, lamely, indicating the box in his arms.

“I can see that, sweetie,” she said. He's always thought of her as no-nonsense apple pie. “You want to bring that in back? Hey, Robin, when you're done flirting, can you mind the register?”

“Sure, Betty.” The youngster with the twists of hair nodded at him in a friendly way, but his attention was already swinging back to the daughter, who absolutely
had
to look at the earrings in the display case. Clayton watched them circling each other with the documentary dispassion of someone who had never got that right.

Betty marched through to the firing room, past the two industrial kilns sitting alongside each other like a history lesson—the old brick oven with the burn marks down the front beside the aggressively shiny steel kiln—to her office in the back.

She cleared a space on the desk, shoving her files onto her chair, so he'd have space to set down the box. “Now, what have we got here? Can I take a peek?” But she was already folding back the cardboard flaps and taking out one of the figurines, a woman with a bird's head, like a skinny Degas ballerina, her arms flung back as if she could lift off. There were a flock of them in the box, with various faces. “Hmmf,” she said, but he could tell she was impressed. “You been practicing?”

“Trying new things,” he said.

“That's important. I got my little goddaughter to try pottery, and now her parents are complaining they haven't got room for all her masterpieces.”

“Me too. I don't have space. I've been on a…binge. It all came out of me. It keeps coming.”

“Well, that's great. You got some of the muse pixie dust to share around, you let me know. I've been experimenting, too. What do you think?” She gave a self-deprecating nod at the workspace countertop, where an elaborate vase of overlapping folds glazed in delicate greens and whites running to dusky pink at the tip sat next to a decrepit old laptop. “I've been playing with shapes in nature. Flowers, insects, sea anemones.”

Clayton examined the tulip vase, the twirl of petals unfurling from the base. “It's pretty,” he managed and then blurted it out. “I think I have a brain tumor, Betty.”

Her eyes softened. “That's a big jump, honey. Have you seen a doctor about this?”

Clayton shook his head. “I don't trust 'em. They all work for the pharmaceutical companies. But my old man died of pancreatic cancer. I know the signs. I've been feeling shaky, and I've been seeing things. I can feel it inside me, Betty, like an octopus in my head, getting its tentacles into everything.”

“Sit yourself down, Clay. You want a cup of coffee? Tastes like gasoline, but it'll perk you up a little.”

He sank down into the seat by the door, lower than he expected it to be. She set the clay figure gently back into the box, careful not to damage it, then perched on the edge of the desk beside him.

“You been sleeping?”

“I don't know.” He corrected himself, “Must have. I've been dreaming. Bad dreams. People with papier-mâché heads. Monsters in the woods.”

“You've been neglecting yourself, honey. You should go home and get some rest, eat some food, then go see a doctor. Get some tests done. I'm sure it's not a tumor.” She gave his shoulder a hard squeeze. He could feel how strong and bony her fingers were, like coral. “You get yourself home and take care of yourself. You got someone who can help you?”

He nodded, fighting back the tears. Sympathy was the worst. Betty was savvy enough to see it. She closed up the box and changed the subject to brisk business. “Well. You leave these with me, and I'll get them fired in the student kiln. Call you when they're ready to come and glaze, unless you want to leave them raw, which could work for these. You want to pay now or COD?”

“I'll pay now. Can't guarantee I'll have the cash later.” He stood up to fish crumpled notes out of his pocket.

“Up to you, sweets. Twenty bucks. You want to pay me now, that's fine. You want to pay me in kind later, that's good too. God knows the storeroom needs cleaning out. We got boxes of stock in there, I don't even know what's broken, what's last season.”

“I'll pay now, I'm flush.” It was a lie, but he didn't want to owe her. He smoothed the bill out on the desk, ironing the creases flat with his fingers. The moth-wing texture of it got into the back of his teeth. “You ever think about how rigid the world is?”

“Clay isn't. This material we work with, I mean, not you.”

“But I'm rigid, too. We're all locked into what we are. Take this,” he held up the bill.

“I intend to, sweetie.”

“It's nothing. But people believe in it. Money makes the rules. This is what things
cost
. This is what you have, where you are, what you are, what you can be. Money is a dream that has made itself definitive.” He was caught up in it, his tongue doing a million miles an hour. It happened sometimes when he hadn't seen other people for a while. “Do you know that story about Michelangelo?”

“That he was homosexual?”

“Not that. About the Pietà, the Madonna and Christ. When he finished sculpting it, he struck it and cried out, ‘Now speak.' He expected his art to live. But it didn't. How could it?” He was on the point of tears again.

“I think God's the only one who gets to breathe life into mud, sweetie. And you're wrong, about being locked in.” She patted the box full of bird girls. “You see this, Mr. Smartypants? You see how far you've come, how much you've evolved as an artist? Late bloomer, sure, but you've transcended
yourself,
Clayton Broom. Don't come here talking about rigid.”

He nodded, trying to remember how to look happy, the precise facial muscle arrangements. “Thank you,” he managed. But he wondered if this was really what he wanted after all.