They looked back and forth between them, but no one was taking credit.
“What? I have a secret admirer?”
“Well, I just followed the bright paper,” admitted Windemere. “I actually, uh, didn’t contribute.” She turned to her colleagues. “Yet!”
Hazel put her hands on top of the box. “So… this is from all of you?” No one said anything. She picked up the gift. “What’s going on?” she said, but then all at once she dropped the box on the table and stood, alarmed.
“What?” said Wingate, stepping forward into the room.
“That doesn’t smell right,” she said. “There’s something in there, that isn’t a… isn’t a -”
“Okay,” he said, “let’s everyone get out of this room -” but he didn’t finish what he was saying, because the box was moving. There was a sound from within it, like a mechanical whine, and then something was tearing frantically at the end of the box, moving it in short jabs toward the end of the table until it upended and went crashing to the floor.
“Jesus,” said Hazel, instinctively stepping away, but as she did something blew out of the top of the half-opened box, a red, screeching blur like a child’s firecracker, and she dove for the ground, batting at the air over her head. There was general disorder in the room, strange half-uttered cries, and a crush for the door, but then Forbes called out, “Hold on! Hold on -”
“Fuck!” yelled Hazel, now standing again. She stared at what Forbes was staring at. “What the fuck?”
It was a mouse. It was standing in the corner, its eyes shuttling back and forth between the two sides of the room. She supposed it was a regular white mouse, but this one was red, or at least it had been painted red, although she could see a darker line of what had to be blood dripping from its mouth.
“Why is that thing red?” said Hazel. “What the hell is going on here?” Forbes and Wingate stepped deeper into the room, walking carefully to the side of her desk where the game had fallen. Wingate toed the lids apart and then recoiled.
“Good god,” he said.
12
Down in Mayfair, on Jack Deacon’s mortuary table, it looked unreal, a movie prop. But it was real, and as Deacon turned it over with his living hand and Howard Spere took notes with a pen held in his gloved hands, the whole scene took on an even more surreal aspect.
Deacon was talking into a tape recorder as Spere wrote. “Left hand of a caucasian male, age between forty and fifty, no distinguishing characteristics -”
“Apart from its being separated from its owner,” said Spere.
“Apart from that. The cut has been made under the carpals, a rough cut to judge by its raggedness and the bits of shattered bone we find here. I can only hope the victim was knocked out or dead when it was done.”
“I don’t think he was,” said Hazel quietly. She was standing away from the brightly lit table, not wanting to look too closely on the thing that had been sent to her wrapped in colourful paper. She was sweating in the cold room. Wingate stood beside her, leaning forward to get a better look. “We have the attack on film.”
“We don’t actually have the attack,” said Wingate. “Just the moments leading up to it. There’s no proof that this hand and that… that person in the chair…”
“Is there a way to tell if the victim was alive when his hand was… removed?” asked Hazel.
“It’s not really possible to say with any certainty,” said Deacon. “Not with this body part, at least. I’d want to see more necrotized blood to be certain it was a post-mortem amputation. This thing is very pale indeed, so there’s been blood loss, and that’s consistent with an extremity disambiguated while blood was still circulating.” He held the hand palm up and studied it for a moment. “The wrist tendons have retreated into the cut a little – that windowshade effect you see when living tendon has been cut… and I guess that tends to argue for the hand being cut from a living body. But you’d still see some of this pre-rigor spring-back immediately post-mortem. So what we have in front of us doesn’t rule out that the victim was alive at the moment of amputation. Or that he was dead, mind you.”
“Jesus,” said Hazel. “Do you want us to throw up?”
“Look,” said Spere, “what about the puncture wounds, where the note was pinned? Is there any bruising?”
Deacon looked again at the top of the hand. A note written on a square white piece of paper had been attached there with a fishhook. A “nice touch” was how Spere had put it when he saw it. Deacon pulled the skin tight with latex-gloved thumb and forefinger and shone a pinlight onto it. “Good instinct, Howard. Hazel?”
She stepped forward reluctantly. “Do I really need to see this?”
“Slight purpling at the wound sites,” he said. “Dead bodies don’t bruise.”
Spere held his palms up to the heavens. “Ah, an answer.”
“That only means he was alive when the note was pinned to him,” said Wingate.
“That’s correct.”
“So this fuck pinned the note to the victim’s hand and then sawed it off?” said Hazel.
“That strikes you as particularly barbaric?” said Spere, wiggling a finger around in his auditory canal.
Wingate was holding the note, in its zip-lock bag, up to the light. “‘Just wanted to give you a hand with your investigation,’” he read.
Spere shook his head. “And he’s funny.”
Hazel had retreated again and was leaning against one of the autopsy tables on the other side of the room. If she had to look at that severed hand again, she really was going to be sick. “This brings things to another level,” she said. “We have to think through our options.”
“What if this person just wants us to watch?” said Wingate. “What if this is a demonstration of some kind?”
“Of what kind?”
“Of power.”
“And for what purpose?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She pushed off the table. “The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to visit the Record and see what they can tell us about Eldwin. Why is he writing about this stuff? The body in the lake, the fishhook, the note…” She fell silent a moment. “I’ll tell you one thing: he’s not getting any more ink, not until we understand what this is all about. We’ll flush him out: if he wants to keep telling this macabre story, he’s going to have to show his face.”
Wingate was looking right through her. He was lost in his thoughts. After a moment, he approached her and spoke quietly. “What if he can’t?”
“Will we know the difference between can’t and won’t?” Wingate didn’t have a response. “Fingerprint that thing and put it on ice,” Hazel said to Spere. He nodded to her, holding a finger up. His cell had buzzed.
“Just a second.” He held the phone to his chest. “I’ve got Allen Barry on the phone. He’s my imaging guy in Toronto. He wants to know if we can receive a file down here.”
“You mean couriered?” said Deacon.
“No, a singing telegram, Jack. He means over the net.”
“We can go up to my office.”
Spere put the phone to his ear. “I’ll call you back in five.”
Jack Deacon wrapped the hand and put it back on dry ice, in a red cooler like the kind you’d use to store beer for a picnic. It was going to put Hazel off her beer for months.
She realized she’d never been in Jack Deacon’s personal office. She only ever saw him under those harsh blue lights in the basement, surrounded by the stench of preserving fluids and human flesh arrested in its decay by science. He took off his white coat, under which he wore a proper suit, also the first time she’d seen him look like anything other than a nice ghoul with a scalpel. He looked presentable.