Nocturnal: A Novel

Something caught her eye. She reached out with her scalpel and scraped the flat of one of the broadhead blades. The gooey blood moved, of course, but the scalpel tip also made a tiny trough — not in the metal itself, but in a gray smear on top of the metal.

“There’s some kind of paste on here.”

Bryan leaned in. “Poison?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to analyze it.”

“Sure,” Pookie said. “Of course. Why not? If the giant-ass broadhead won’t kill a brotha, you better poison him too, right?” He pulled out his cell phone and snapped several close-up photos. “I’m going to call Black Mister Burns and have him run these new symbols.”

Pookie walked to the door, opened it, then turned and smiled. “I’ll just go call him right now. Don’t you kids do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m gone. See what I did there? ’Cause I would do all kinds of stuff. It’s clever in that I’m saying you can fuck if you wanna.”

Robin couldn’t help but laugh.

Pookie closed the door behind him.

“Amazing,” Bryan said. “There’s a cracked-open body on the table, and he thinks we’re going to play spin the bottle?”

She was alone with him again. She didn’t know if she’d get another chance to help him open up, to find out what was happening to him. It wasn’t the time to be selfish and focus on her own needs, her own feelings — Bryan needed someone. Even if it hurt her to the core, she would be there for him.

“There’s more to this than a cover-up,” she said. “I know you, Bryan Clauser. I know who you are and how you think, or at least I did until all this started happening.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know you’re scared.”

He turned away, not looking at anything in particular, just looking away from her.

“Bryan, whatever this is, you can tell me. We broke up, sure, I get that, but I will always love you.”

He turned to face her. She expected to see his usual blank stare, but instead there was pain in those eyes, pain and frustration.

“Robin, I …”

Come on, let me in. Let me help you.

She waited.

He closed his eyes, rubbed at them slowly with his left hand. He dropped his hand and blinked a few times, seeming to gather himself.

“Okay,” he said. “Man, where do I even start? This seems impossible, but—”

In the corner of the room, the RapScan machine beeped. Robin looked at the briefcase-sized machine; the karyotype tests had finished.

She turned back to Bryan. “Go ahead, you were saying?”

He tilted his head toward the machine. “That’s the results from Birdman’s killer?”

Robin sighed. The moment had passed. No way he’d talk now, not with those results waiting. Well, she’d tried. She wished he would confide in her, but that wasn’t what he wanted. It hurt, and it was out of her control to do anything about it.

She stripped off her gloves and stepped to the machine. Bryan followed.

The top of the monitor showed a notification icon:

BOBBY PIGEON ASSAILANT SAMPLE COMPLETE.

“This sample is from the blood spatter in Rex’s apartment,” she said. “The other two samples will finish any second now. Let’s see what we have with this one.”

She hit a key to bring up the karyotype results. The colorful horizontal lines played across the flat-panel screen. Bryan pointed to the last box, the one that displayed the sex chromosomes. “A Zed,” he said. “So Bobby’s killer is also Oscar Woody’s killer?”

When she looked at the markers, she felt a rush of excitement, of pure discovery. She pointed to the second sex chromosome. “This is an X. Bobby Pigeon’s killer is Zed-X. Oscar’s killer was Zed- Y. Bryan, this means we have two people with the Zed chromosome!”

“So … they’re related?”

Related? One case, two killers, both with the never-before-seen Zed chromosome — what were the odds they weren’t related?

“Hold on.” She worked the touch-screen to enter new commands. “I’m telling the machine do a high-level scan for common sequences.”

“What will that do?”

“It will tell us if their Zed chromosomes are identical. If they are, they’re brothers.”

“Brothers?”

Robin hit enter. The machine returned a result almost instantly — the Zed chromosomes were identical.

“Brothers,” she said. “At least half-brothers. They either have the same mother or the same father.”

The machine beeped again. At the top of the screen she saw a notification icon:

R. DEPROVDECHUK SAMPLE COMPLETE.

She pressed the icon. The screen blanked out, then displayed the new karyotype.

Robin just stared.

“Uh, Robin? What the hell is that?”

She didn’t know. She really didn’t have a goddamn clue. Rex wasn’t XY, as a normal boy would be. He wasn’t XZ, and he wasn’t even YZ, for that matter.

Rex Deprovdechuk’s sex genes? XYZ.

“He’s trisomal,” she said. “I mean, that can happen — at first I thought Oscar’s killer was XXY, but this … I don’t know what to make of it.”

“What about his Zed? Is it the same as the other two?”

Robin tapped the screen again. The machine responded even faster this time.

“It’s the same,” she said. “Rex is the brother of both Blackbeard here and Oscar Woody’s killer.”

Bryan chewed at his lower lip. He stared at the RapScan’s screen. “This seems pretty convenient. You tell me no one has ever seen the Zed before this case, yet now they come up everywhere we look? Could the machine be on the fritz?”

“I doubt it. I ran the results on Oscar Woody’s killer three times and ran control groups of normal male and female samples as well. The control groups came up just as they should, while the results of Oscar Woody’s killer replicated the same each time. What that means is, just trust me — the machine works fine.”

Bryan turned to her. “What now?”

What now? She had no idea. Where to even begin? She wasn’t even finished with the autopsy of the bearded man on the table. Her brain felt stuck in neutral. She couldn’t be seeing what she saw, yet it was all there in living color.

The machine beeped a third time.

ARCHERY VICTIM SAMPLE COMPLETE.

ALERT! MATCH FOUND.

GENETIC MATCH WITH: BOBBY PIGEON ASSAILANT SAMPLE.

MATCH PROBABILITY: 99.9%.

They both turned to look at the body on the table.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “The first sample came from a bullet that Bobby shot through the chest of his attacker, but the guy on the table … he didn’t have bullet wounds on his chest.”