connection.
‘Wrong blood type and outside the time of death,’ Striker said, and couldn’t help but feel angry that no one had initially listened to him. He stared down the hall at Kirstin Dunsmuir who was still walking away from them, her high-heeled shoes clicking oddly on the painted grey cement. It was all he could do to look at her without being irritated. Maybe it was the ici-ness of her emotions. Maybe it was just him, frustrated and tired. He wasn’t sure. She got in the elevator, the door clanged shut, and the booth made loud grinding noises as it went up.
‘Probably scheduling her boob job,’ Felicia said.
Striker smiled, then turned and walked into the autopsy room.
The area where the bodies were located was labelled Examination Room B. Striker and Felicia stopped inside the doorway, smocked up, and put on latex gloves. Once done, they moved over to the nearest examination table. This one was labelled John Doe 1.
Better known as White Mask.
Striker studied him. To his frustration, when he scanned through the report binder, he found nothing new — save for one exception: the strange scars alongside the man’s ribs were listed as possible shrapnel wounds. Interesting. Mode of death had been a gunshot wound. Not surprising, considering the man’s head had been blown right off.
Identity remained unknown.
Striker bypassed the body and approached the second examination table. He studied the thin boy on it. There was a bullet-hole in his right cheek, the skin around the area blackened and pulled inwards. The skin of his face was looser than when Striker had last seen him, and a large Y-incision had been carved in his chest, then sewn back together.
It was Sherman Chan. Black Mask. The one Laroche had deemed ‘possibly innocent’.
This was the kid Striker had killed.
He looked down at the boy. Here, dead on the table, he looked so young. Too young to be the monster he had turned out to be. He smelled bad. Of old blood and strange-scented body cleaners.
Felicia took the black binder from the counter top and flipped it open. Striker gave her time to read the report. He looked over the body and waited for her word. After a good ten minutes, she finally spoke.
‘How many shots you think you fired?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I can’t even recall changing mags.’
‘Me neither, it’s all a friggin’ blur,’ she agreed. ‘Not that it matters. He took it twice. The Forensic Firearms Unit hasn’t confirmed the round yet but, according to Doctor Beautiful’s notes, they’re going to have to test your gun first to see if the bullets match. Right now they’re proceeding under the assumption that everything matches.’
‘Of course.’ Striker picked up a pointer from a nearby tray and placed it perpendicular to the bullet-hole in the boy’s cheek. The path through was about a 120-degree angle.
‘Read me the path-following entry,’ he said.
She found the relevant section. ‘Entered through the zygo-matic arch, passed through the nasal cavity, deflected medially and inferiorly, and eventually, the remainder of the round got wedged in the rear of the skull at the posterior fissure of the parietal bone.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘I think that means head.’
Striker held his hand flat to the boy’s chest, right at nipple level, angled approximately ninety degrees.
‘And the second bullet?’ he asked.
‘Entrance wound was between ribs four and five, left side, right at the costo-vertebral joint — that would be the back of the rib, near the spine.’
‘I know where it is.’
Felicia nodded like she didn’t care, ran her finger down the page as she read: ‘Says here that Black Mask must’ve been spinning after you got him with the first round, because the second one hit almost dead centre. It passed right through the left lung and aorta, then exited through the costal cartilage. Says here, “The resultant shock from such an injury would most likely have been fatal”.’
Striker let the pointer drop to his side, then looked at the body for a long moment before finding Felicia’s eyes again.
‘The paragraph about the first bullet,’ he said. ‘It say anything about tissue damage inside the body?’
She scanned the notes. ‘Yeah, she’s listed a few things damaged by the bullet fragments. Occipitalis and trapezius muscles — and there’s a few notes here on brain matter. Why?’
‘What about the second bullet?’
She looked through the pages, shook her head. ‘None yet.’
He said nothing for a long moment, then called her over. She put the black binder back on the counter and joined him beside the dead body of Sherman Chan. When she was set, Striker pointed to the bullet-wound beside the boy’s sternum.
‘Look at that. Not the first entry hole — I have no problem with that — but the second one.’
She did. ‘Okay.’
‘Now look at this.’ He placed one hand under the boy’s left shoulder and one under the boy’s hip, rolled him onto his right side, then used a hand to stabilise him. ‘Look at the exit wound of the second bullet.’
‘Okay,’ she said again.
‘Describe the exit wound for me,’ he said.
She gave him an odd look, but said, ‘It’s probably a half-inch in diameter, I guess, and almost perfectly circular, except for the distended skin. And it’s relatively clean with distinct edges.’
‘That sound like a hollow-tip round to you?’
She paused. ‘Well, no, actually it doesn’t — but I doubt the pathologist-’
‘With all the killings over the past two days, she’s had even less sleep than us. She’s done her examination assuming the rounds were hollow-tips. But they weren’t.’
Felicia looked over the wound, noting, ‘That would explain why there was less internal tissue damage from the bullet fragments.’
‘Because there were no fragments — it wasn’t a frangible round.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense. Sherman Chan was shot in the back — and by a Full Metal Jacket round. They shot their own, Felicia.’
Fifty-Five
‘I am glad that you know Sheung Fa,’ the old man said. ‘He is a good man to know. But this wound… the infection is very bad.’ He spoke the words softly, with a sense of practicality.
Red Mask heard them like a flutter of wings as he fell in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around the room. He saw shelf after shelf, each one covered with different-sized jars. Hundreds of jars. Containing roots, flowers, stalks, fermented creatures and many other things he could not even describe.
‘Very bad,’ the old man said again. ‘The arm may be lost.’
Red Mask felt removed. He looked from the flowers to the floor to the old television set, bolted high in the far corner of the room. At first glance it looked part of a video-surveillance system, all black and white and shoddy of picture, but then the BCTV News crest lit up the screen, and Red Mask realised he was simply looking at a very old television set.
The late-night news was on. St Patrick’s Peril.
Looking in that direction hurt Red Mask’s neck, and he had seen enough. He turned his eyes away from the screen.
‘Bullet… in shoulder…’ he murmured.
‘Rest, rest,’ the old man soothed.
Red Mask focused on the old man, who now stood at his side. He was thin, with a sickly pale face. As if he had been ill for a long time. As if he, too, had come from the camps.
‘The blood is dead.’ The old man pointed a long brown fingernail at Red Mask’s shoulder, then lightly dragged
