He’d expected it not to open all the way, but it swung freely back on its hinges, revealing the body.
It’s one of those trivial facts that had stuck in Sergeant Elliot’s mind for years: a human being has one quart of blood for every thirty pounds of body weight.
The dead man was skinny, but well over six feet tall. He’d probably weighed around one-seventy, which meant that he’d had something on the order of six quarts of blood—a gallon and a half.
And it looked like damn near all of it was spread around the body, in a vast dark pool.
It was surprising, in a way, that the first thing Elliot had noticed had been the quantity of spilled blood. Oh, certainly in any other murder that would have been the salient factor. But the corpse here had suffered far more than just a simple bleeding out.
The right leg was severed from the body halfway down the thigh. Whatever had cut it off had done a remarkably clean job, slicing through the man’s jeans, leaving an edge on them as clean as if they’d been hemmed to that length. The leg had been severed just as neatly. Although the stump was now crusted over with a thick cap of dried blood, the cut looked as sharp as what a band saw would make through frozen meat. The actual leg, still wrapped in the tube of denim, its foot still socked and shod, was also present, bent gently at its knee, a short distance from the body.
But even that wasn’t the worst of it.
The head had been severed from the body and—God—the lower jaw had been sliced free from the head. He couldn’t see the jawbone anywhere, and—Christ—it looked like one of the eyeballs was missing, too.
The torso had been opened up, in one long line leading from the bottom of the neck down the center of the chest all the way to the groin. The decedent’s shirt had been ripped open—not cut, but ripped, apparently before the cutting had begun. The individual buttons had been mostly torn free, and the shirt opened, its sides like wings, now stiff and dark and fused into the great pool of blood surrounding the body.
The breastbone had been split in two, and the ribs spread apart left and right, sticking up like the maw of a bear trap from—
—from the empty torso. The organs had been removed. Elliot knew enough anatomy to recognize the heart and lungs, lying a few feet from the body. The other lumps, all crusted over now, were doubtless spleen and liver and kidneys and more, but which was which, Elliot couldn’t say.
At the bottom of the open chest cavity, there was all sorts of bluish-white connective tissue, and in places the vertebral column itself was exposed.
The last thing Sergeant Eliot looked at in any detail was the jawless face, now absolutely white, right down to the waxlike upper lip. This was only Elliot’s second shift with the Tosok entourage; he didn’t yet know most of the humans, but this one was familiar enough.
It was that guy from TV.
Cletus Calhoun.
Frank Nobilio was having the dream again. He was at university, in the sixties, wearing bell-bottoms and a flowered shirt. He was walking down a corridor when another student passing by wished him luck.
“What for?” asked Frank.
“For the exam, of course,” said the student.
“Exam?”
“In biochemistry.”
Biochemistry. Oh, Christ. Frank remembered signing up for that course at the beginning of the academic year, but somehow he’d forgotten to go to every single one of the classes. And today was the final exam—an exam he’d not studied for at all. How in the hell did they expect him—?
Frank found himself stirring into consciousness. Decades since he’d left university, but he still had that same damned dream. Oh, the details changed—sometimes it was American history he’d forgotten to take, sometimes statistics—but the basic story kept coming up over and over again, and—
Insistent knocking at the door. An earlier barrage of it must have woken him.
“What is it?” Frank called out. His voice was raw; he’d been sleeping with his mouth open.
“Dr. Nobilio? It’s the police.”
Frank disentangled himself from the sheet, got shakily to his feet, and made it over to the dorm room’s door. He opened it, and his eyes squinted against the corridor light beyond. “Yes?”
Two men stood in the hallway. One was Sergeant Ellis, Elliot, something like that, wearing a police uniform. The other Frank didn’t recognize: a compact man with an olive complexion, perhaps forty-five years old. He had wavy black hair, brown eyes, and a neat mustache. The small man flashed his ID. “Dr. Nobilio, I’m Detective Lieutenant Jesus Perez, LAPD. I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but there’s been a murder.”
Frank felt his jaw dropping. “Which one was it?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Which Tosok was killed?”
Perez shook his head. “It’s not a Tosok, sir. It’s a human.”
Frank let out a sigh of relief. Perez looked at him in shock. “Sorry,” said Frank. “I— I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, Christ, I hate to think what would happen if one of the Tosoks were murdered.”
“We want you to identify the body, sir.”
Frank’s heart skipped a beat. He was still waking up. “You mean it’s someone I know?”
“Possibly, sir.”
“Who?”
“We believe it’s Cletus Calhoun, sir.”
Frank felt like someone had driven a fist into his stomach.
The general commotion had awoken some of the other humans, too. By the time Perez got Frank over to Clete’s room, Packwood Smathers and Tamara Slynova were already there, standing on the threshold just beyond the pool of blood. Smathers’s white hair was wild, and Frank had never seen Slynova without makeup. Frank was in his pajamas; Smathers had a robe on over his; Slynova seemed to be wearing nothing but a robe.
Frank approached the doorway and looked in. Two LAPD criminalists were already working inside the room. Clete’s body had been covered by a white sheet, which was now stained with blood. The sheet tented up over the spread rib cage. Frank looked down on his friend’s face, missing its bottom part, the skin white as a marble statue’s. He fought the urge to vomit.
“Well?” said Perez.
“That’s him.”
Perez nodded. “We thought so. Found his wallet on him. Do you know who his next of kin is?”
“He’s not married. But he has a sister—Daisy, I think—in Tennessee.”
“Any idea who would want to see him dead?”
Frank looked at Packwood Smathers, then back at the body. “No.”
Frank made his way through the second, fourth, and sixth floors—each of which housed Tosoks—accompanied by the German scientist, Kohl. They went down the corridors, pausing at each occupied room to ask the Tosok within to join them. The aliens filed out, and they all made their way to the lounge in the middle of the sixth floor. It was now 4:30 A.M.
The Tosoks stood patiently. Frank did a quick head count—only six of them were present. Let’s see: there’s Captain Kelkad, and Rendo. Torbat. And—
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said a voice. “What’s happening?”
Frank turned around and had a shock almost as great as the one that had overtaken him when he saw Clete’s ruined body. Coming down the corridor with two-meter strides was a Tosok Frank had never seen before, with silvery skin.
“Who—who are you?” said Frank.
“Hask.”
“But— but Hask has bluish skin.”
“Had,” said the Tosok. “I molted earlier today.”
Frank looked at the being. He did indeed have an orange left-front eye and a green right-front eye. “Oh,” said Frank. “Forgive me.”