Prelude to a Scream (23 page)

Though the skin looked like that of a young person, and though it was male, the torso was pale and shrunken. The breasts looked shallow, emaciated.

But those details struck Stanley only later. His immediate perception was of the large, coarse sutures that transected the gaunt trunk like the legs of a pair of flattened millipedes. Their black so coarse as to render almost invisible the sparse clumps of fine body hair, the gleaming threads contrasted with the blanched skin as impersonally as the ebony mensurations embossed along its bevel contrasted with the ruler's yellow plastic. The livid, orthogonal incisions formed two meandering puckers, their bilious discoloration flowed along the pallor of the flesh into which they had been gouged. These, like nave and transept wickedly inverted, dissected the torso vertically, from groin to throat, and horizontally, along a line grazing just below the twelfth rib.

“That's called a radical cruciate abdominal incision,” Corrigan said over Stanley's shoulder.

He hadn't heard Corrigan come inside. Emanating from the shadows Corrigan's voice blasted Stanley's concentration as thoroughly as that voluminous sneaker wave had blasted little Tseng's rock at Land's End. Stanley jumped as if snatched by the scruff of his neck, straight up. The pictures tumbled to the countertop as he whirled with a balled fist and a torque at his incision and yelled “Goddamn fucking sneak-ass gumshoe cop!”

“Tsk,” clucked Corrigan, ignoring the fist and regarding Stanley, as if from afar. “Are we nervous about something?”

“I was fine until you showed up,” Stanley snapped. Too loudly.

Corrigan allowed the faint trace of a sour smile to be replaced by a not-so-faint contempt. “And that poor son of a bitch in these pictures was fine until you showed up, Ahearn.” He pointed at the photos on the counter. “Radical enough to be called butchery, that incision. Usually, it's practiced exclusively on cadaver donors.”

Stanley blinked. “What?”

Corrigan moved his face until it was a foot from Stanley's, and curled his lips in disgust. “There wasn't enough left inside that kid to feed a dog with.”

“What,” Stanley muttered feebly, “are you talking about?”

Corrigan bored in. “He was alive, when they gutted him. He had to be.”

“He had to be what?”

“Alive! So they could harvest his vital organs!” Corrigan shouted. “What do you think they took?”

Stanley was confused.

“
They
again?” he croaked.

“Both eyes, both kidneys, his liver, the heart, and both lungs. Get it? The works! Everything they can sell! Look at him!”

Corrigan swept up the photographs from the counter and shook them in Stanley's face. “There's nothing left of the poor bastard,” Corrigan shouted. Abruptly, recognizing the expression on Stanley's face, Corrigan's own face changed into an incredulous, almost cruel leer, accentuated by the bad light.

“You didn't recognize him,” Corrigan realized. “You don't know him.”

“Know who?”

“You think so?” Corrigan continued, not listening. “You think you don't know him?” He answered his own question. “You just didn't recognize him. Here. Have another look!”

Corrigan dealt the photographs one after another, in rows, like cards in a game of solitaire. There were at least twenty of them; twenty autopsy photographs of a disassembled corpse, of exposed vertebrae, of an empty ribcage hastily laid open by power-sawing the ribs, of abruptly terminated arteries, of a yawning, eviscerated abdominal cavity.

“You see.” Corrigan's face was contorted by horror and disgust nearly matching Stanley's own. But, unlike Stanley's, Corrigan's expression was steeled with disdain. “Now take another look at this one.”

Corrigan plucked up the second photo Stanley had looked at, that of the victim's eyeless head, shook it in front of Stanley's face, and threw it back down on the counter.

Stanley glanced at it, then looked away.

“I saw that one already.”

“But you didn't recognize him,” Corrigan said. “Look again.”

“Rec…?” He looked at Corrigan.

Corrigan looked at Stanley. At that moment, Corrigan's face could only be described as carnivorous.

Stanley forced himself to find salients in the picture aside from the eyes. The lips were well-defined, but appeared soft. The nose was almost cute. They might almost have been the features of a girl. But, still, his mind wouldn't place them.

“The name was MacIntosh,” said Corrigan at last. “Giles MacIntosh.”

Chapter Seventeen

A F
IRE ENGINE EMITTED A PRELIMINARY WAIL AS IT LEFT THE STATION
house on Stockton Street, two blocks away.

“That's number ten,” Corrigan said, pointing to the eyeless head of Giles MacIntosh. “But it's not meant as a statistic for the newspaper.” He shuffled the photos and chose one. “Have a look.” The ghastly photo displayed the trunk reopened, its sutures unzipped. Corrigan took a pen from his pocket and touched its tip to a small object resting inside the eviscerated cavity.

“See that?”

Stanley's esophagus was surging with bilge. “No. What is it?”

Corrigan chose another shot, a close-up.

“Recognize it?”

“It's a flower.”

“What kind of flower, Ahearn?”

“How should I know?”

Corrigan just perceptibly smiled. “You'd think a guy with your experience would know a purple aster when he saw one.”

He actually hadn't recognized it. Or maybe he just hadn't wanted to. For a guy Corrigan hadn't yet laid a glove on, Stanley was feeling pretty worked over.

“But why?” he managed to ask.

“It's meant as a warning.”

“To who?”

Corrigan's eyes showed the certainty of death. “To you, of course.”

Stanley stared at the photo of Giles' eyeless face. First Ted, now Giles. Come to think on it, the proper order must be the other way around — first Giles, then Ted. He felt sick. Should he tell Corrigan about Ted, soon to become number eleven? Maybe Corrigan knew about Ted already? If not, maybe there was still time to… Abruptly he dissembled: “A warning to me? Why me?”

“Come off it, Ahearn. You telling me you didn't know this guy MacIntosh? Really? If you think these pirates are playing mumblety-peg for bottle caps, take another look at this kid's eyes. Maybe, really, you don't get it. Did your back heal so fast? There're plenty more photos. Here's a good close-up. Have a look.”

“No, I —.”

Corrigan gathered Stanley's shirtfront into a bunch, twisted it until their faces came together, and said quietly, “Look at them, you spineless fuck.”

Stanley stared at Corrigan in disbelief. Weren't there laws about police officers getting physical with crime victims?

Corrigan released Stanley just as suddenly as he'd grabbed him.

Stanley smoothed his shirt while Corrigan, breathing like an asthmatic, carefully redistributed the photos over the counter. It was a gruesome collage.

“The short version is this,” Corrigan said, adjusting the photos so that few overlapped. “Sometime Tuesday night your friends picked up MacIntosh and took him for a ride.”

“
My
friends?”

“His, too. It's almost certain he knew who they were. His apartment showed no signs of forced entry or a struggle. No signs of chloral hydrate in what's left of his system, either. There was an appointment time penciled in on his calendar. Just a time. No name.” Corrigan jerked his head toward the room behind them, not looking at it. “His crib was in much better shape than yours. He was expecting to be home in time to cook supper for his mother. When he didn't show, she called us.”

The word
guiro
suddenly popped into Stanley's head.

“A homeless guy found him in the park.”

Rebozo. Guiro
and
rebozo.

“Another guy is missing too, one of MacIntosh's buddies. A colleague from the Center for Sexually Transmitted Diseases, where they both worked. Kid was the systems manager.”

Stanley pulled himself away from his sentimental reflections. “A contract guy? Worked mostly nights?”

Corrigan fixed Stanley with a look, and there passed between them the silent awareness that there was no longer any reason for Stanley to maintain some lame fiction about his connection to Giles MacIntosh.

“Name of Tommy?” Stanley added, his voice barely audible.

Corrigan touched various of the photos. “Tommy Quinn. Nice kid, they say. Bright. About twenty, light build, tall, thin, sandy hair, brown eyes, talks with a slight stutter. Been making it as a contract programmer since he was sixteen. You seen him?”

“No. MacIntosh mentioned him to me, but I never met him.”

“And so now I get to ask how you knew MacIntosh.”

Stanley told him everything he knew about the clinic — almost everything.

Corrigan shook his head disgustedly. “We go over that place with a fine-toothed comb, and you're telling me you just walk in there and finger the one guy who can open up this case like a can of okra?”

“I don't know from computers, Corrigan, but this kid MacIntosh does — did. He found it by accident. He knew about it when you were there, but he hadn't made the connection. That, and you didn't actually talk to him. He thought the glitch was some game or scam his hacker buddy Tommy was up to.”

“His hacker buddy needed a scam. His hacker buddy has been shorting the stock market, and is currently experiencing the flexible sigmoidoscopy of the IRS.”

“Why am I hearing about that everywhere I go, lately?”

“You must be in your forties.”

“So?”

“So what about you and MacIntosh?”

“He happened to tumble to it while I was there, that's all. I was following the only lead I had.”

Corrigan's face darkened. “Which was?”

“Which was, I got myself an HIV panel there a few months ago, and that was the only blood test I'd had since they took my tonsils out in 1954.”

Corrigan nodded nastily. “The type O-Negative would have turned up both times, but only the recent — computerized — one counted.”

“That had to be it. Otherwise, out of all the lushes in town, this outfit picked me by chance. Okay, maybe that's possible. Given the amount of time I used to spend in bars, I had a lot of exposure. But the O-Negative thing couldn't be a coincidence. You gave me the idea yourself. It's the donor blood type most in demand, and that makes me more valuable than most other people to organ thieves. So the clinic had to be the connection, and something or somebody in the clinic had to be connected to the connection. It was simple. Anybody could have figured it out.”

“Sure,” said Corrigan acidly. “All they needed was a little information.”

“Yeah. And some luck.”

“So how come you didn't provide your local police force with this lucky bit of information?”

“I didn't think of it until later, and even after it checked out, I had no proof.”

“You didn't think of it until later, and even when it checked out, you had no proof.”

Stanley shrugged. “Morphine dulls the senses.”

“That's okay, I got it all memorized. But morphine doesn't necessarily make you stupid into the bargain.”

“Who said anything about stupid?” Stanley said stubbornly.

Corrigan held up one of the photos.

After a while Stanley said, “I can't even tell what that is.”

Corrigan reversed the photograph and held it at arm's length, turning it to the light. “That's a tight shot of the inside of the kid's abdomen with the flower removed. What they found when they undid those quick sutures in the cruciate incision, see, was nothing. A lot of severed wires. It looks like a car with the engine snatched out.” He touched the photo with the pencil. “See the vertebrae?” He dropped the picture onto the countertop, face up. “They took anything they could sell.”

“Oh, boy,” Stanley cleared his throat.

“Yeah,” said Corrigan, watching him. “Even his heart.”

Stanley avoided his eyes. “So what's that tell you?”

“It tells me you were stupid. It tells me the kid let you sucker him. So far, he's picking up the tab for both of you. That's the warning. Of course,” Corrigan added, “they might not know who you are.”

“Huh?”

Corrigan shrugged, but he was watching Stanley. “The kid might not have talked.”

Stanley squirmed. “I don't get it. It was just a hunch. I just wandered over there like I was in a dream or something. I had no idea it was going to pan out. And when the kid said he'd get his friend the programmer to look into it —.”

“Tommy Quinn.”

“—get Tommy Quinn to look into it, I figured, well, let's just see what happens. Really, I never in a hundred years would have thought these guys would come up with anything we could use. Let alone get themselves killed.”

Corrigan's lip curled. “We?” he said. “We? What the hell you think I am, a fourth for pinochle?”

“No, no. Hell, I know this is serious. But I figured if this kid came up with something, I'd be sure to tell my friend on the force, Inspector Corrigan, all about it. I just didn't think it would pan out, that's all. It looked like a fluke.”

Corrigan built a quizzical frown with his face. “What are you thinking about, Ahearn? You playing movie shamus, here?”

“No,” Stanley shook his head. “No way.”

“I guess not. Nobody's that stupid. Even you. Not now, anyway.” Corrigan jabbed a finger at the photos spread over the kitchen counter. “But you must have been thinking about trying to play footsie with these guys. What for? Revenge? Get back at the guys that rummaged through your guts? They say it's like being raped. They say it hurts in ways that sneak up on you years later in your sleep.”

Stanley dismissed this line of reasoning with a wave of his hand, but Corrigan had the bone, and he wanted to worry it.

“Maybe trip them up enough to reveal their whole operation? Make them so confused they turn themselves in? Maybe make them feel guilty about what they do? Haunt them until they get nightmares and give themselves up? Until they come to me and beg me to lock them in a cell, hide them from daylight, hide them from the street, from the awful, the odious, the gore-encrusted, the dripping-fanged, the vengeful destroyer Ahearn, put them where Stanley Ahearn won't be able to get at them, won't be able to run them over with his monster truck — for so much as thinking of harvesting a kidney from him? Him, of all the drunken jerks?”

Stanley's face was burning with shame. Everywhere he looked, the autopsy photos glared back at him.

“No, Corrigan. No, I—.”

“You're crazy, Ahearn. It's that simple. Should I get the bruisers in fairy slippers to come zip you up and give you a shot? You want a scrip for Prozac? How about a ten-day free all-expense paid vacation in our new panoptical jail? You get to wear an orange jumpsuit and if you're good we'll give you a window so you can watch the suckers walk by on the sidewalk five stories below, enjoying their freedom. You might look at it as a vacation. Or maybe you're so fucking deluded you think on account your stellar detective work I should be hiring you to give the annual Hercule Poirot Forensic Deduction Lecture at the Police Academy?”

“No, I—.”

“Not you,
me.
I got
news
for you, lush. You have just fucked around and got a guy killed. Maybe by now it's even two guys.” He threw a photo against the dishrack. “
You
did that. All by yourself. Get it?”

Stanley blinked. An awful moment passed while he added it up. Two guys. It was hard to get around that. Probably impossible. But what enabled him to set his jaw and look Corrigan dead in the eye was the thought that maybe, by now…

Maybe it's three guys.

“Don't come on to me,” Corrigan continued, “about how you didn't know what you were doing.
I
know you didn't know what you were doing. But the problem is, you don't believe it. You think you did know what you were doing. Or at least, you
thought
you knew what you were doing. One has hopes that these photographs might change your opinion of yourself. You knew goddamn well that HIV test was a potential lead. Yet you deliberately withheld the information from the very people who might have been able to do something with it. Now one guy — practically a kid, for chrissakes — has been gutted alive. Since you forced our friends to play for keeps — as if they weren't already playing for keeps — they figured they might as well make some money out of it. So pour that over ice and suck on it. Moreover, if I can use a polysyllabic adverb on a fucking moron like yourself,
moreover
, that is to say, beyond what ugliness has already been stated, it's very bloody likely that MacIntosh's buddy Tommy, as you call him, was either in on MacIntosh's dismemberment and has blown town on the proceeds, or has himself experienced the joys of the harvest. In which case not only is that
two
guys you've done for with your little deductive fling, but you've pissed away our only leads into the bargain.”

Abruptly Corrigan looked at Stanley as if he had just seen him in an entirely new light. He cast a contemptuous look around the shack. “How long have you lived in this dump, Ahearn, feeling sorry for yourself? How long have you been taking advantage of a hard-working stiff who has real people to support, people who are related to him, people who perform actual meaningful emotional and physical labor on his behalf — letting him carry up food for you, this bum on his roof, rent you wheelchairs and pay your doctor bills and even provide you a vehicle to go get your willie sucked every Friday night? Huh? How fucking long? You sorry little sack of shit, you sniveling twit, you forty-seven-year-old delivery boy, when's the last time you did something for somebody beside yourself? I'll tell you. It was three years ago — three and a half! Christ. The most miserable cop on the beat does more for people in an afternoon than you've done but once in your entire fucking life. Hasn't your little reward thing gone on long enough? Has the booze infantilized you completely? I'll bet there was so much ethanol in your kidney those thieves didn't even have to sterilize it. Christ!”