Kind of sad, his mind repeated. “What’ll happen to it?”
“The state takes them after sixty days.”
Jack nodded, attempted to distract himself. “I need to see it.”
Jan Beck’s eyes thinned behind huge glasses. “The corpse?”
“That’s right. The corpse.”
“There’s nothing to see, sir. She’s sewn up and bagged. She’s—”
Jack held up a hand to silence her objection. She thinks I’m a nut, he realized. “Just show me the corpse, Jan.”
Her expression constricted. She took him down the hall. TSD had its own autopsy facilities: the corpora delicti of the more excruciating homicides were brought here rather than the county hospital, to speed up evidence procurement. Jack had been here many times. They called it the Body Shop.
The shiny black door was labeled merely “Storage.” There were no slide-out drawers or such, just metal tables which hosted bulky black plastic bags. A stringent odor filled the cool room, a combination of formalin and iodine wash.
One of the bags was tiny: a baby, Jack realized. Another table contained several smaller bags. Pieces. Jan Beck approached the center table. There was no expected zipper but big metal snaps instead. The bag shimmered in fluorescent light.
Jack needed to see; that’s why he was here. He needed a sense of reaction to smash him in the face. Jan Beck unsnapped the bag, then opened the inner clear-plastic shroud.
Then she stepped away.
Silence seemed to rage in Jack’s ears — the silence of chasms, or of the highest places of the earth. He wasn’t looking nearly as much as he was being shown. But whose show was it? God’s? Fate’s? This is what the world does to people, whispered a voice that was not his own. This is what we do when we’re bored.
Shanna Barrington’s head had been shaved; metal staples — not stitches — reseated the skullcap. She looked like a bad mannequin. The notorious Y-incision — pathology’s universal signature — ran from clavicles to pubis, the black seam held together by big black stitches. Her organs had been weighed, histologized, and replaced. Jack thought of a grocery store turkey restuffed with its own innards.
Yes, this was what the world did to you sometimes — for kicks. The world didn’t care. Stone-still, he stared at the corpse. What a cosmic rip-off. The corpse’s white skin almost glowed. If this was what the world gave you for being innocent, then the world ate shit. Suddenly Shanna Barrington became Jack’s sibling, a sister of conception. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know her. He knew her by what she represented. Here was her reward for daring to dream: cold storage in a Parke-Davis cadaver bag. All she ever wanted was to be loved, and this was what the world had given her instead. Good and evil weren’t opposites — they were the same, they were twins. Horror was as much a monarch as God.
You are my sister now, he thought in a fever of blood to his head. He didn’t know what he wanted to do more: laugh or cry.
He grinned through gritted teeth. What he stood in now — a human meat locker — formed the answer to all his life’s questions at once. The answer was this: There are no answers to anything. Jan Beck appraised him from aside, the funkiest of looks, as Jack continued to appraise the corpse. The blue nipples had once been pink with desire. The blue lips had once kissed in a quest for love. Somewhere beneath the black-stitched seam was a heart that had once beat with dreams.
I will avenge you, Shanna Barrington. When I catch the motherfucker who did this to you, I’m gonna bury him with my bare hands and piss on his grave. I’m gonna feed him piece by piece back to the evil shit-stinking world that made him.
He stepped closer, through the vertigo of a thousand cruel truths. With the tip of his finger he touched the cadaver’s hand. Oh yeah, he promised her. I’m gonna make him pay.
Chapter 11
The subway took Faye Rowland to Capitol South Metro in about twenty minutes. Late morning had thinned the crowds; it was a pleasant, sedate ride which urged unimposing thoughts. Her coming tasks at the Library of Congress didn’t worry her. If there was information to be found, she would find it. Simple. She thought instead of Jack Cordesman. What was wrong with him? She knew little of police procedure and even less of police. Something shattered seemed to brood behind the man’s eyes, a drowned vitality. Something, or a combination of things, had left him standing on the edge of some oblique ruin. She could name no specific reason for feeling this; she knew it was pointless to care about every sad person in the world. But Jack Cordesman had passed that point. He wasn’t sad, he was crushed. He was a crushed man, yet somehow he prevailed.
Faye Rowland had prevailed too. The broken pieces she saw in Jack Cordesman’s eyes she often saw in her own. She’d been in love once in her life. Once was enough. He’d run out two weeks before the wedding. “I’m sorry,” was all he’d said. Perhaps love was indeed blind; her reaction made no sense. Faye blamed herself. She hadn’t been considerate enough. She’d failed to compromise. She’d pressured him, she’d been lousy in bed. She’d spent a year asking him to forgive her for flaws that hadn’t existed. She’d later learned that he’d been sleeping with other women for most of their relationship, but that was Faye’s fault too. She reasoned that she must’ve failed to meet his sexual needs and had left him no choice. Self-pity often bred self-indictment.
A year later, she finally came to see the truth. Her only flaw had been in trusting someone who was not trustworthy. The real thing seldom ever turned out to be real.
Once is enough, she thought, stepping off the car into the subway’s bowels. Here was where her real failing came. What scared her most of all was the risk of being hurt again. Faye Rowland would avoid that at all costs, even if it meant being alone for the rest of her life.
So why was she thinking so intently of Jack Cordesman?
He was a slob. He was skinny, pale, out of shape. He had long hair — which Faye hated on men — and he was probably an alcoholic. It was something inside that attracted her. Prevalence, perhaps, or shared negations. Jack Cordesman had prevailed and so had she. They both knew the bottom line because they’d both been at the bottom.
The escalator lifted her from darkness to light. First Street stretched on as a crush of dirty sunlight and harried pedestrians. Black limos roved past ranks of bums in rotted clothes. Pigeons excreted en masse on pristine white government buildings. To Faye’s left stood the Supreme Court. To her right stood a hatchet-faced black who asked, “Cokesmoke, frog, ice? I got whatcha need.”
The Adams building loomed over Second Street, a cluttered ugly edifice. Getting started always took a while: there was a text limit and a half-hour wait on book requests. The reference index ran on a data base now, which was quite simple to use. She punched up the subject file, then punched in O.
O, for Occult.
“Where did you disappear to last night?” Veronica complained, walking barefoot through the plush backyard grass.
Ginny looked remote, or tired. She wore white shorts and an orange halter, and sat poolside with her feet in the water.
“I was with Gilles,” she said.
Veronica joined her. Morning blazed through the trees. “What happened?” she asked, and lazily rowed her feet in the water.
“After dinner, if you can call that disgusting shit dinner, Gilles took me for a walk. The estate is huge. He took me along all these paths in the woods. I didn’t get to bed till two.”