Nocturnal: A Novel

“Pookie, how the hell do you remember this stuff?”

He pointed to his head. “There’s a lot of useless information floating around in here.”

“Well, I thank you, and so does Emma.” She put the bag in her pocket.

Robin turned to look at her former lover. “Bryan.”

He nodded once. “Robin.”

That was it. No God it’s good to see you, or I hope you’ve been well, just a simple Robin. Something on his forehead caught her eye.

“Stitches? What happened?”

“I fell in the shower,” Bryan said.

He needed to trim that beard of his, and he looked so tired. Not so much the bags under his eyes as a pallor to his skin, an expression that seemed … lost. What was he going through?

There was something about Bryan she’d never been able to define, never been able to ignore, and despite his sickly appearance, that something still burned hot. Her attraction to him hadn’t dulled in the least.

She stared at him. He stared right back with those beautiful, distant green eyes.

“Guys,” Pookie said, “I know y’all have a bit of backstory to work out, but can we lay off the wistful gazing? This ain’t a Joan Wilder novel, if you dig what I’m saying.”

Robin looked away from Bryan and back to Pookie. Pookie smiled apologetically, but he was right — this wasn’t the time to play who hurts more with her ex.

“Okay,” she said. “So I know I have to give all this info to Rich and Bobby, but it’s weird … it seems like Rich isn’t really that interested in the case. Bobby is, I think, but Rich calls the shots. What I discovered is kind of a big deal. Since you guys found both bodies, I figured you might have a vested interest. But can you keep this quiet? Chief Zou asked me not to talk about the case, to anyone — if she finds out I did, it could jeopardize my candidacy for the chief ME position.”

Both men nodded. Pookie mimed turning a lock in his lips and throwing the key behind him. Maybe Bryan wasn’t the best boyfriend in the world, but he never went back on his word and neither did the incorrigible Mr. Chang.

Robin led them to her desk and called up the karyotype test results on her computer.

“We isolated samples from Oscar Woody’s body,” she said. “I’m ninety-nine percent confident that all of the samples come from a single person, meaning Oscar had just one killer. That killer’s DNA exhibited evidence of an extra X chromosome. Because of that, I ran another test assuming I would see XXY. Instead I found this.”

She pointed to the bottom of the karyotype.

Bryan leaned in to look, so close that his chest touched her right shoulder. He felt warm.

Pookie leaned in over her left shoulder. “I recognize that Y-thingee from my science classes, but what is that next to it?”

Robin shrugged. “I’m calling it a Zed chromosome.”

“What the hell is a Zed?”

“It’s like a Z,” Bryan said. “Only with higher taxes and with universal health care.”

“Ah,” Pookie said. “Canadian-speak.”

They all stared at the strange result; a Y and something else, something significantly larger. An X chromosome did, indeed, look like an “X” — two lines crossed up high, pinched together like a twisted balloon animal. Naming the male sex chromosome “Y” was a bit of a stretch, as far as name-equals-appearance went: two short, fat chunks came together, with a tiny ball of material where they joined.

The new chromosome looked like a chain of three sausage links. Sharp bends at the two joints made it sort of look like a Zed — or maybe that was just the first thing that popped into Robin’s mind after years of looking at Xs and Ys.

“This is totally unheard of,” she said. “There’s a Z chromosome in birds and some insects, but in those animals the chromosome is a little blob — it doesn’t actually look like the letter Z. So I’m calling this Zed to differentiate. This is the genetic code of Oscar Woody’s killer. It isn’t a fluke — this is a legitimate chromosomal aberration.”

Pookie stood straight and raised his hand. “Teacher, which weighs more, a fluke or an aberration? Or in other words, what?”

“I mean this isn’t random genetic damage,” Robin said. “It’s in every cell. The killer was born this way.”

Pookie crossed his arms. “Are you trying to tell us we’re dealing with some kind of fleshy-headed mutant from Planet Six or something?”

“Maybe not that, but something strange,” Robin said. “Come on, I’ve got something else to show you.”

She led them back to the body refrigerator. She opened a door and rolled out the tray holding Oscar Woody. Robin gloved up, then pointed to the parallel grooves on Oscar’s ravaged scapula. “This scoring appears to be from incisors spaced three-point-five inches apart. Average spacing for an adult man is one to just two inches, tops.”

Pookie looked up. “But those marks aren’t from a man. Jimmy and Sammy said a dog did it. There was dog fur all over the place.”

And here it was, the moment where she actually had to say it. She wondered if it would sound as crazy out loud as it did in her head. “That fur wasn’t fur — it was human hair. I’ve seen enough evidence that I’m convinced that there was no animal at all.”

Pookie stared at her, then looked back to the body. “A dude did this?”

Robin breathed deep, then let it out in a puff. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“It would have to be a seriously big dude, then,” Pookie said. “Or a perp with a really wide mouth.”

“Or both,” Bryan said.

Pookie nodded. “Or both. Awesome. Not to insult your magnificent intellect, Bo-Bobbin, but I’m not buying this. You’re saying the killer is big, with wide teeth, strong enough to tear off a guy’s arm with his mouth, and that he’s fucking furry?”

“Imagine that,” Bryan said. “I mean, someone might describe that as werewolf-like, right?”

Pookie looked annoyed. “Big dudes can wear costumes, too, Bri-Bri.”

Bryan shivered, then coughed hard. He sounded like hell. He cleared his throat, then hovered his hand above Oscar’s scapula, using his thumb and forefinger to show the spacing of the parallel grooves. Bryan brought his hand up and held it in front of his own face — the space between the tip of his thumb and forefingers was as wide as his cheekbones.

“A costume that comes complete with big, killing teeth? Come on, Pooks.”

Was Bryan arguing that a werewolf did this? Just how bad was his fever?

Pookie turned to Robin. “Are you sure those marks are caused by teeth? Could it have been some other kind of weapon?”

She nodded. “I suppose, but it would be a weapon designed to act just like a pair of jaws.”

“There’s a name for a weapon like that,” Pookie said. “It’s called fake teeth. Something that might come complete with a Hollywood-grade monster costume.”

Bryan rolled his eyes and laughed. “You’re really reaching, Pooks. And you can’t put a costume on a chromosome. You made a joke that this was a fleshy-headed mutant, but based on what we’ve seen, maybe that’s not a joke at all.”

She knew both men well — Bryan prided himself on being rational. He didn’t believe in monsters or the supernatural. The fact that they were arguing about this seemed completely out of character for him.

“Talk to me,” Robin said. “What did you guys see?”

“Nothing,” they said simultaneously.

So, they weren’t going to confide in her? Just like Rich Verde, maybe they thought her job was to examine bodies, not solve crimes. She wondered if this secret information had anything to do with Bryan’s wretched appearance.

Robin slid Oscar back into the rack and closed the door. She walked back to her desk. Bryan and Pookie walked with her.

“Technically, Pookie is right,” she said. “By definition, we’re looking at a mutation. The perp could have other physical deformities as well. There’s no way of knowing.”