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She gives me a saccharine bright grin, the kind people give you when they wish they could fucking kill you. I do not like Ramona Carrick, but that’s not surprising. Nobody does. It’s interesting to see that the feeling appears to be mutual.
“You’re up late,” I note.
“Evil never sleeps, and neither do I. Heard there’s another body. The Brooklyn Gutter strikes again.”
“The Brooklyn gutter? You referring to plumbing?”
“No. The way he”—she makes a sort of slashing motion with her claw-like hands—“guts them. Flays them.”
“What about the Brooklyn Flayer, then?”
“Well, no,” she says, turning her eyes skyward to think. “Flay is the wrong word. Plus, people might mistake flay with fillet.”
“It’s not easy finding a cute way to sell murder stories to a dumb public,” I pretend to sympathize.
“It’s really not. What can you tell me about the latest victim?”
“He’s dead.”
She smirks at me. “Stellar detective work. No wonder the killer is still roaming free. Are you even trying to catch him? Or are you just waiting for him to get bored and give up? There are half a dozen families looking for answers, you know.”
“Alright, have a good one,” I say, turning around and walking back inside. No cigarette for me, I guess. I have work to do, anyway. No need to take a few minutes for myself. Or check my phone. Or think about anything other than the bloody corpses that dance in my thoughts every second of every fucking day.
“Anything come in off the wire, Tessie?”
“Not so far,” she says, sitting up. She was asleep on the desk, her head on her hands, her little dog curled up in her lap. She’s sitting cross-legged on her chair, giving the little fucker a comfortable place from which to lurch and lunge at passersby. Obigor’s a biter, but he only has a few teeth left, so it’s not really that bad.
“I’m going to guess none of the store cameras, web cameras, or fucking cell cameras picked up this alleged monster, yet again?”
“No, ma’am. Not so far. Won’t know until the morning.”
“I’m going to go to the morgue. See if they have anything.”
Under normal circumstances, the body wouldn’t be processed until tomorrow. However, I happen to know that there is another night owl busy at work in forensics who will have metaphorically leaped upon this body the second she heard about it.
* * *
Ilona Hefe is the sort of person who likes the morgue because it is quiet. I hear her tools clinking gently as I enter the hallowed space. This place has always felt something like a chapel to me. This is where we make our last attempts to atone to those who have passed, to care for those who were not cared for, and to help bring them justice. Perhaps even peace.
“Sally!”
Ilona always uses my first name. She refuses to stand on formality. I don’t like people using my first name. Feels a little too personal. Disrespectful.
“Ilona.”
“They’re all the same,” she says. Ilona has beautiful dark skin and eyes. Her raven hair is always shining beneath the harsh fluorescents and medical lights. If you asked me to describe her, I’d be very tempted to use the word Goth, but it doesn’t suit her at all. Beneath her laboratory coat, she is wearing a bright pink sweater and deep fuchsia pants. Her feet are clad in what I strongly suspect are expensive, limited edition sneakers. But bright clothing does nothing for her, not in the context of this inherently dark place. There’s a shadow over this woman that all the neon in the world cannot illuminate.
“What are all the same?”
“The patterns,” she says, gesturing toward the poor bastard on her table. There seems to be even less of him now. I guess some parts have been taken for testing or similar.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Someone, or something, is feeding on these people. The wounds correspond to rasp marks. They haven’t been cut open in the traditional way. They’ve been sort of chewed through by something with mouthparts.”
“So I’m looking for something very large with mouthparts.”
She looks at me through her spatter-proof eye protection glasses. Unfortunately for me, they have indeed seen some spatter. Bits of person get in between our shared eyeline. “Like an oversized snail, maybe? Some snails are carnivorous.”
“I think we would have noticed a man-eating mollusk on the loose in New York, Ilona.”
