Broken Monsters. Lauren Beukes
dumping down by the river.’
‘Well, that’s an emergency,’ Boyd says.
‘It would have been if it was our body being dumped,’ Miranda says with calm authority. He’s not called ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ for the shade of his irises (which are, for the record, Italian-brown), but for his Sinatra cool.
‘So I take a shortcut under the bridge near Mexicantown and I see it. Him, I mean. First I think it’s an animal. Roadkill or something. But then I see his face. It’s clear he’s … gone. I keep driving—’
‘How is it clear, officer?’ Luke Stricker jumps in. Harsher than necessary, Gabi thinks. Cut the kid some slack. She should talk.
‘It’s in his eyes. There ain’t nobody home.’
‘You could see all that from your car?’ Miranda asks. ‘Could have been shock. Kid could still have been alive. You could have got an ID from him.’
Gabi steps in. ‘We know he died offsite, sir. No blood at the scene, and the prelim report from the medical examiner indicates that the body was in cold storage for a day or two before it was dumped. It’s going to take them a little while to establish time of death, but he was long gone by the time Officer Jones found him.’
‘Next time you check before you drive past,’ Stricker says. ‘Especially with a kid.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why did you keep driving, Officer Jones?’ Gabi says.
‘Maybe I woulda done it different if my partner was there, but I thought maybe the killer was still nearby. I was looking for a car pulling away, someone running. I called it in on my phone while I was driving. Got half a mile and then turned around. I couldn’t leave him lying there.’
‘That was good thinking, using your phone,’ Miranda says, mildly. ‘None of you boneheads would have thought of that.’
‘A lot of civilians got police scanners,’ Sparkles says. ‘I didn’t want rubberneckers. It didn’t seem right.’
‘It’s good protocol,’ Gabi says. ‘We can almost guarantee there will be another body, and when that turns up, let’s keep it on our mobiles.’
‘The department gonna pay for my minutes?’ Croff moans.
‘Oh, spare me!’ Washington looks up from her file at last. ‘When there’s another body, there’s another body. We all got plenty of our own to deal with. I’m sorry this little boy got killed. It’s horrible. But it’s one murder. Why should you get all the resources?’
‘Washington!’ Miranda warns. But Gabi doesn’t blame her. There are cases that catch all the attention. Kids especially. The whole department was obsessed with that little girl who got raped and murdered downtown several years ago. But in the meantime, there’s a killer who’s been gunning down prostitutes for five years. Washington’s been following him since her Vice days. Same MO every time – shoots them in the face. Thirteen down and counting, a baker’s dozen of hate. Never any witnesses. Nobody wants to talk. And besides, the feeling is that it’s just a bunch of whores. ‘City should put him on payroll for pest control,’ she’s heard some of the dickheads in this very department say.
‘Just like your killer, Ovella, this is unlikely to be a once-off. There’s a good chance of another mutilated corpse turning up. Might be six months, might be tomorrow. Our guy’s probably done practice rounds in the past.’
‘I’ll take that,’ Stricker says. He likes the pitbull work, the kind you can dig your teeth into.
‘I need everyone on it.’ Gabi picks up the black marker and tries to write ‘John Doe’ on the board, but the ink gives out halfway. ‘Goddammit.’ She tries another pen.
‘Shouldn’t it be John Fawn?’ Croff jokes.
‘What?’
‘The deer. It wasn’t a doe.’
‘All right,’ she concedes, rubbing out ‘doe’ and replacing it with ‘fawn’.
‘John Yearling,’ Boyd musters. ‘Unlike you pussies, I spend time in the woods.’
‘Bambi,’ Stricker says.
And that settles it. There is that frisson of rightness, everyone smiling and nodding. Coffee and black humor: the fuel that keeps cops going.
‘Very cute,’ Miranda says. ‘I hear anyone referring to this body as Bambi in public and I’ll put you on traffic duty forever. Do not write that down, Versado.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’ She scrubs ‘Bambi’ and goes back to ‘John Doe’.
Under that, she writes:
ID the body
Find the murder scene
Motivation
Murders with similar MOs
Boyd: Hunting associations, park rangers, nature clubs
‘Aw, shit,’ her partner complains.
‘Us pussies couldn’t possibly interview big bad hunter types,’ Gabi mocks. ‘You’ve already got an in.’
‘That’s true. But season’s in full swing. You got a million registered hunters in Michigan alone. You want me to go through all of them?’
‘You could start with the ones with any kind of record for violence.’
‘Apart from shooting widdle animals, you mean?’ Croff says in an Elmer Fudd voice, working his hustle for all it’s worth. Every department has workers and slugs, and Croff is definitely Team Mollusc. He lets Stricker do the hard stuff and relies on his smart mouth and leaning on his connections for the rest.
‘Domestic assault charges. Unnecessary cruelty to animals. Shooting out of season.’
‘Was it a white-tail or a black-tail?’
Gabi takes the photograph off the wall and hands it to Boyd. ‘White. That any help determining where the animal came from?’
Boyd puts on his glasses and squints at the photo. ‘Means it’s from a local population. Black-tail would have been better. He would have had to bring it in from Oregon or Canada. It would have been much easier to trace.’
‘There are deer on Belle Isle,’ Sparkles says.
‘Those are European,’ Boyd scoffs. ‘Fallow deer. This animal is definitely a white-tail, five months old.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Hasn’t lost its spots yet,’ he says smugly, tapping the white flecks on the flank.
‘And fawning happens in May or June,’ Washington says. ‘Don’t make out like it’s rocket science, Bob.’
‘So we know it’s probably from Michigan state, and probably killed recently because the age matches up, more or less.’
‘Unless the killer has a freezer full of dead fawns,’ Stricker says.
‘Point,’ Gabi says. ‘It’s a good fit. Did he get lucky on the first go, or is there a pile of dead deer somewhere of all the ones that didn’t match? Bob, I want you to add taxidermists to your list.’
‘Give me a break! I’ve already got a million hunters. Where the fuck am I supposed to get that?’
‘There’s probably a professional association,’ Stricker says. ‘Look on the Internet.’
‘That sounded a lot like you volunteering.’
‘Sure. I’ll take it.’
‘Fine,’ Gabi says. ‘And look into associated stuff too.’