Ghouls

“No.”

“Come on, please…”

“No, Iy'>

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Out of range of your mouth!”

Kurt blew out of the kitchen, feeling unbearably cramped. Melissa pouted at him from her stool, probably aching to release cuss words. Kurt left the house as if yanked by an invisible tether.

The little that remained of his mood collapsed completely once he was outside. The sky dulled to a wash of gray, clouds mounting suddenly, and he shivered at an even more sudden chill; he was beginning to think that God had decided to extend winter at the last minute, for laughs. Starting the Ford, he pictured Vicky pale and battered in her hospital bed. He wanted to go there now and see her—Shit on Bard and his busy work, I’m not even getting paid—but that would be more irresponsibility, and he’d been irresponsible enough lately. Had belting Stokes in the face really been worth it? He rubbed his knuckles and smiled.

The beltway clicked by in a long, empty blur. He hoped the radio might disengage his thoughts, but the stations drifted maddeningly in and out of static until he was forced to click it off. In stages, the day seemed to darken as he drew closer to Reisterstown Road. This town depressed him, worse than Baltimore. Soon he spotted the sign PIKESVILLE BARRACKS and the immense lot filled with the new flesh-colored cruisers. Kurt had liked the old pale yellow state cars; this new color, designated supposedly to make the cars less conspicuous, stepped well past the bounds of ridiculousness. Perhaps next they’d change to flesh-colored uniforms, too—a nude police force.

Maryland State Police Headquarters reminded him more of a college campus than anything else. It was a condensed quadrant of land surrounded by buildings of varying style and age. He spotted the helipad, the fuel unit, and a steel skeletal radio tower whose peak was lost in the sky’s murk. Mist and rain clung to his face, deepening his annoyance. From one facade to the next, he found himself wandering, until he noticed a transom plate which read CRIMINALISTICS.

Inside, a preposterously large state trooper stared at him from behind bulletproof glass. Kurt’s street clothes made him feel uneasy in this regimented, spotless place; the trooper continued to glare until Kurt produced a badge and ID and stated his business.

Baritone instructions led him to an echoic far wing and a door of lacteal glass labeled POROSCOPY. Kurt entered, balking, and at once detected sharp chemical scents and something sooty. Ranks of glassware racks divided the room into sections; it brought back memories of tenth-grade biology class, and a teacher whose nickname had been “sweetlegs,” with good reason. High shelves of graduates, Erlenmeyer flasks, and Pyrex beakers glinted immaculately. To the right, a flank of cabinets and more signs: XYLENE, ANTHRACENE, SILVER NITRATE, LAMPBLACK. Mysterious machines on dollies crowded the other side of the room; the hatch of a Mosler arc furnace hung open like a mindless, obscene mouth. Through the room’s two meshed windows, dumpsters hulked en masse, and a tall, brick incinerator slowly oozed black smoke. Kurt lit a cigarette in the blue flame of an unattended Bunsen burner.

“There’s no smoking here” came a reedy, toneless voice behind him. Startled, Kurt turned to face a deviantly thin woman in a lab coat which seemed large enough for someone twice her size. Her hair was flat ashen brown and hung nearly to her waist; he doubted that she weighed a hundred pounds. In one hand she held a polycarbonate clipboard, and in the other a fat camel’s hair brush.

“But that’s all right, I won’t tell. I don’t trust a cop who doesn’t smoke.” Her voice droned, vaguely sexless, like a minister with sinus trouble; her brittle smile somehow intimated a subtle depravity. She set the clipboard down carefully and donned a pair of unbecoming glasses. “You’re the guy from— what?—Tylersville, is it?”

“Right. Kurt Morris.”

She extended her hand, which Kurt shook. It was like shaking hands with a glove full of ice water. “I’m Jan Beck,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Let’s not be hasty, he thought. “I came to pick up the evidence report on the stuff the county sent you.”

She gave a vacant chuckle that made Kurt’s scalp shrink. He sensed something abstrusely disturbing about this woman—her benign appearance and manner seemed a camouflage net for something atrocious. She made Kurt wonder about Melissa’s obsession with vampires. “Yes, the evidence report,” she said. “Let’s just hope you have a versatile sense of humor.”

“Why? Problems?”

She grinned, and Kurt found himself contemplating the length of her cuspids. “I’ve seen funny things in this business,” she said, “but I’ll let you be the judge.” Absently, she coiled a tress of hair around her finger; the finger was white, like bone. “I’ll give you the dull stuff first… Whenever we get something that involves a missing police officer, we tend to suspect the very worst, and spend a little extra time on the preliminaries. Fortunately, the level of decomposition on the hand wasn’t severe—the primary friction ridges were still in great shape—”

Kurt found it easy to picture her inking up Swaggert’s severed hand. “It was Swaggert’s hand, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and all the partials on the brass, the speedloader, and the Smith were Swaggert’s, too. No one else handled any of that stuff before or after he put on the sand gloves.” She pointed placidly to the black-topped counter where she’d set the clipboard. Beside a suds-filled sink lay a plastic bag containing wads of cotton stained with something orange, like Mercuro-chrome. She went on to explain. “Neutron-activation analysis on the glove itself found heavy traces of fresh antimony.”

Kurt was puzzled. “Why bother? Isn’t it assumed—”

“We don’t assume anything here,” she almost snapped. “Leave that to the other departments, the three-ring circuses. The first step was to determine that Swaggert had definitely discharged the weapon. This state is famous for police officers shot with their own guns. Shades of Terrence Johnson.”

“But that still doesn’t prove he wasn’t wasted by his own piece.”

“Theoretically, no. But statistically it does, almost without a doubt. Once a cop gets his hands on his weapon, no one ever takes it away. It’s not the cops that are the problem, it’s the holsters. All this quick-draw nonsense, open-tops, friction holsters, thumb-snaps. Dead meat. Cops should have their guns handcuffed to their wrists at the start of every shift. What kind of holster do you use?”

Kurt looked to the floor. “Uh, thumb-snap.”

“Then I guess you also carry around a banner that says TAKE MY GUN AND KILL ME WITH IT,” Jan Beck said, and scowled. “But to get back on track, next I tried to get a type and an Rh from the bitemark on Drucker’s arm, but the saliva had oxidized by the time I got to it. County ding-dongs don’t know how to preserve evidence. Antigen test was no-go, so was the antihuman serum test. And no chance for a good dental print. It was a lousy bite, not at all pronounced.”

Kurt couldn’t believe his ears. “We had assumed that the bitemark was from an animal after the fact. You think it was human?”

“I’m not paid to think. I run tests, and anything with a bodily secretion in it I check. You’d be surprised at the number of human bitemarks we get in here, and you’d be even more surprised at how many autopsies and stomach pumps bring up human tissue. We check every angle, every imaginable possibility, no matter how remote.”

Suddenly the lights went out, and Kurt shuddered when this woman actually took his arm and guided him across the room.

“Now the fun begins.” She took him to a viewing partition, where sat a Sirchie slide comparator. There was a sliding click; the twin screens flashed white, then darkened, bearing odd shapes. In the left block was a single enlarged fingerprint. The right block contained a dark oval. Jan Beck hovered over the screen, pointing the camel’s hair brush in the fashion of a knife.

“In the left box, we have a normal lampblack fingerprint, and in the right a tape-lift of one of the latents on the coffin. As you can see, they’re quite different from each other. The image in the right box possesses none of the qualities associated with latent fingerprints. No loops, no whorls, no bifurcations—no ridge patterns whatsoever.”

Kurt pinched his chin, thinking. Jan Beck stared at him as if in wait of a natural response. Finally, he said,