Coven Page 13

  Lydia told him regrettably that she’d missed that issue.

  He handed her a single piece of paper. “This the prelim?” she asked.

  “There is no preliminary report. This is a state quarantine release form. It authorizes that your agro site can now be safely reoccupied.”

  “Then what happened to the agro animals?”

  “We’re not prepared to release any conclusions as of yet.”

  “In other words,” Lydia observed, “you have no intention of cooperating with the local authorities.”

  “I am the only authority here,” Dr. Hatton said.

  White’s got this guy pegged pretty good. “Okay,” Lydia agreed, “but do you think you could take that Buick out of your ass long enough to give me something to tell my boss?”

  “It’s none of your boss’s business… Buick?”

  This might be fun. “You know what I think, Dr. Hatton? I think you’re not giving me answers because you don’t have any. You guys don’t know what you’re doing out here. You’re a bunch of pussies.”

  Hatton was getting pissed. “Pussies?” he challenged.

  “That’s right. Lightweights. You’ve been sitting out here for two days, blowing tax dollars and doing nothing.”

  Hatton glowered.

  “Did you at least autopsy some of the animals?”

  His tension strained further. He was getting closer to the line she wanted him on. “Of course,” he said. “Dozens. There was an inconsistency in some aspects of the structural pathology.”

  “Great answer, Doc. Show me.”

  Hatton smiled. “You don’t have the stomach for it.”

  Lydia laughed in his face. At D.C. she’d broken into hardhouses full of weeks old corpses of junkies. She’d hauled up maggot swollen floaters. She’d cut down drug stoolies who’d been hung upside down and gutted like deer. “I’ve seen things that would make your worst nightmare look like Ronald McDonaldland. You talk big, Hatton, but if you had any real guts, you’d show me what you’ve got in those rigs.”

  Now Dr. Hatton’s true self was beginning to glimmer through. “It would be a pleasure,” he said.

  He took her out to the closest semi rig. This would be his morgue on wheels; that’s what the generators were for, to run the coolers while the trucks were parked. Inside, buzzing tubes lit a tiny office. There was a water cooler, a coffeepot, and a little fridge for snacks. Cozy, she thought. A metal door stood opposite.

  “So we’re all pussies, is that it?” He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hood, then a plastic face shield. He looked ridiculous in it. “Well, I’ll show you what this pussy has been doing for the last two days.” He heaved open the metal door and led her in.

  Inside was very cold. High coolers gusted chill and noise through metal grilles. In back, pairs of animals lay strapped to steel shelving, probably a dozen pairs. Each had been split like a cleaned fish; body cavities were stuffed with bagged organs, and an eye had been removed from each beast, to check ocular potassium levels, she assumed. This great bulk of bagged meat whelmed her.

  Dr. Hatton stood by a metal table. On the table lay a dead horse. “You wanted to see? Well, take a look at this.”

  He tossed her a small plastic pouch which contained several ounces of some red marbled gray mush. A tag on the bottom gave an index number, time and date of dissection, and Hatton’s initials. The next line read: Palomino, white, 2 yrs. approx., testes.

  “They’re balls!” Hatton yelled at her. “Horse balls!”

  Confusion screwed up Lydia’s face. “It’s just mush,” she said.

  “They’re balls!” Hatton reiterated. “You know, nuts, pecker jewels, doodads! Those are from the first horse I autopsied yesterday! It’s the same for every male animal on the site!”

  Lydia had no idea what he meant. Hatton patted the horse on the table. “I was saving this baby to open for the people back at AHL, but what the hell! Who the fuck are you to come here and question my competence!”

  “Doctor, I wasn’t—”

  “Shut up!” Hatton barked. Then he laughed. “It’s show time!”

  Lydia gasped. Hatton raised a sixteen inch Homelite chain saw. It started up on the first try. Hatton flipped down his visor and went to work. He delved the blade up into the animal’s top hind leg, through the joint. The sound was atrocious, a searing, hitching scream. Lydia almost couldn’t watch.

  “This is what I’ve been doing the last two days, bitch!”

  He’s crazy, she thought. He’s fried.

  Hatton continued to saw. Clumped blood and shreds of muscle spat out of the meaty groove; his face-shield and coat were flecked with it. Then the horse’s leg flipped over on the floor. Hatton turned off the saw, then went right to work with a big autopsy scalpel, cutting a deep gash into the animal’s rear belly. He was a maniac. He grinned like a madman through the flecked visor.

  “Lo!” he shouted. From the gash, bare handed, he yanked out a flap of yellowed tissue. “A little of the old mesovarium! See?” He threw it on the floor and ripped out more. “A little peritoneal tissue, a little stroma!” Flap, flap! It all went onto the floor. “Ho! A kidney! My mistake!” Flump!

  What he withdrew next looked like a large strip of steak with a lump on the end. He slapped it down on the table. “See that?”

  Lydia nodded rather morosely.

  “It’s the infundibulum, ampula, left side. See that lump?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “That’s the ovary. Next to the brain, it’s the most complex organ in the body, and, like the male testes, it’s the hardest. Harder than the heart, the kidneys, etcetera. It’s dense, heavily celled, firm. Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  Hatton punctured the ovary’s germinus with the scalpel. Globs of reddish gray mush oozed from the puncture. “See, see?” he said. “It’s almost liquefied, just like the testes on the other horse. But they’re not supposed to be like this. They should still be firm.”

  “They’re decomposed,” Lydia ventured.

  “No, no, no!” Hatton snapped. “There wasn’t time. The things hadn’t been dead twelve hours before we got them cooled down; they were still in rigor. These organs could not possibly decompose to this consistency in twelve hours under any condition.”

  “Maybe it’s a disease, cancer or something.”

  “Cancer! In every single animal, at the same time? That’s not how it works.” He washed his hands at a metal sink then shook them dry against the wall, disgusted. “I’m supposed to be the expert here. Shit. My people are going to want an explanation and I can’t give them one. I don’t know anything more than I did the minute we pulled in.”

  Now Lydia understood why he’d been stonewalling. He was a preposterous sight, a grown man sitting dejected in a gore-splattered raincoat, hood, and face-shield. “How can you determine that the agro site is safe to reoccupy if you don’t know what killed the animals?”

  “State protocol,” he said, shrugging. “We simply followed the standard legal procedures. The bloodwork all came back negative, which satisfied the state quarantine criteria. We screened for everything and found nothing; I had lab couriers coming in and out of here day and night. We exhausted every standard detection test. There were no mold toxins in the feed, no poisons, no bacteria, and there was nothing wrong with the water. We even ran tests on the grass, the soil, the water table. Nothing.”

  “So what about this?” She pointed to the punctured ovary.

  “All I can say is we’ve got some thus far undetectable factor that has degenerated the reproductive organs of every animal on this site. Even the chickens, for God’s sake.” He shook his head in sheer disillusion. “Have you ever tried to autopsy a chicken?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” Lydia said.

  ««—»»

  “Chief White’s at the main office,” Sergeant Peerce informed her when she walked into the substation. He quickly stashed a glossy magazine, titled Pizza Slut, into a drawer. Porker sat
at the booking desk, taking care of a box of SafeWay chocolate cream wheels. He kept his face down when Lydia entered.

  Peerce was smiling, flipping the cylinder of his Ruger Blackhawk open and closed. Click, clack. Click, clack. Other officers in for shift-change were smiling too. She glanced again to Porker, but he still refused to look up.

  “Better get that prelim to Chief White,” Peerce advised. Click, clack. Click, clack. Smiling. “He’s been waitin’ on it.”

  Lydia left for Main Administration. Something was going on and she didn’t like not knowing what. White’s personal cruiser was parked next to the dean’s Rolls. Inside, she passed the dean’s office. The man looked up from his huge teak desk as she passed. “Officer Prentiss! Please come in!”

  Lydia hedged in. “Good morning, sir.”

  “And a very good morning to you. That was fine work you did at the agro site yesterday. Chief White told me all about it.”

  Did Chief White also tell you he’s putting a lid on it? “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I hope you appreciate the necessity to accentuate certain details of the incident for the time being.”

  Sure, lie to the public for convenience sake. Lydia nodded.

  “Good, good!” the dean said. He was trying to be cordial, but Lydia knew he’d only called her in to bust her chops a little. “Keep up the good work,” he added. “And have a nice day!”

  “You too, sir.” Lydia went back into the hall. Long display cases adorned the main lobby, local relics and artifacts disinterred by Exham’s archaeology department. Several battles of the Revolution had taken place nearby. One case displayed an array of sabers and bayonets. Another held firearms: flintlocks, wheel locks, cap and ball pistols. Lydia should’ve looked harder at the last case, which was hung with common tools of the colonial period. Rusted froes, cradle scythes, hammers, and mattocks. One space was labeled “Beam hewer, St. Clement’s Island, circa 1635.” But the large space over the label was empty.

  She killed some time scanning the cases. What could she tell White? Eventually she dawdled into her boss’s office. White was drinking from a coffee mug with a Confederate flag on it. “Ah, there’s my girl,” he said. “You get that prelim?”

  “It’s a health order, not a prelim,” she said, and gave it to him.

  White stuffed it in a drawer. “That guy Latin say what happened?”

  “It’s Hatton, and no, he didn’t. He’s taking the animals for more tests. He said whatever killed them isn’t contagious.”

  “Well, then, that’s good, ain’t it?”

  “Not when the papers ask about it.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The papers don’t know about it, and they ain’t gonna. It’s all taken care of.” He gave her the eye. “You get what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sure. You read my report on the burglary last night?”

  “A’course I read it. What about it?”

  “You want me to keep working on the prints?”

  “Why? It wasn’t no burgle anyway, just some two bit vandalism.”

  “Files were stolen, Chief. Someone specifically targeted them.”

  “So what?” he said. “Some punk joker probably just grabbed a handful and throwed ’em all over the Route. Big deal.”

  “So forget that too, huh? Like the agro site? Like the ax?”

  White gave her a big shee it shake of the head. “You still thinkin’ on that goddamn ax? Shee it. You wanna take a couple days off regular duty and follow up on that shit, then go ahead. I’ll even pay ya. How’s that sound?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Sure I’m serious. Go on an’ do your thing.”

  This didn’t sound right. “Do I get a cruiser?”

  “Hell, no. What I look like, fuckin’ Santa Claus?”

  Take what you can get, Lydia. “Okay, Chief. Thanks.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Prentiss, but remember. Anything you find out about any of this agro business, you report to me and to me only, ya hear?”

  “Loud and clear, Chief.” Lydia turned to leave, but—

  “Oh, and Prentiss?” The chief clapped once, rubbed his knees. “I almost forgot. I heard somethin’ a mite funny today, real funny.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Lydia asked.

  “Yeah, see, I heard you got a new boyfriend, and what’s funny about it is—and I mean real funny—”

  “Real funny, I heard you,” she said, and now she knew why Peerce had been smiling and why Porker hadn’t looked her in the face.

  “I heard this new boyfriend of yours is Wade St. John.” White stopped laughing. His face turned to brick.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “I had a drink with him, and since when does my private life have any bearing on work?”

  White was rubbing his eyes. “Prentiss, Prentiss, I been dealin’ with that phony con man cock hounding rich punk for the last six years. He’s a user, Prentiss. He’ll chew you up and spit you out, just like all the others. That nut chase son of a bitch goes through women faster than I go through cigars.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” Lydia walked out, bemused. For the first time this morning, she thought of Wade. Was he really as bad as White claimed? At least he’s a good kisser, she thought frivolously. No, a great kisser. And with that frivolity she finally acknowledged what she’d been repressing since last night. She liked Wade St. John.

  She liked him a lot.

  She wondered if that was a big mistake.

  ««—»»

  Wade leapt from bed, swearing. The goddamn Baby Ben hadn’t gone off, and now it was past 9 A.M., and he was going to be late for that humiliating parody he now thought of as “work.” Besser would come down on him, literally, like a ton of bricks. Wade grabbed a towel, dashed for the shower, when someone knocked on the door. Must be Jervis or Tom, he reasoned, and, dressed only in sagging Fruit of the Looms, he yanked open the door. “Can’t talk now, I’m late for—”

  It was Lydia Prentiss who stood in the doorway. She did not seem shocked by his appearance; it was Wade who was shocked. Instead of the usual tan cop suit, she wore flip flops, cutoffs, and an orange bikini top. Her hair in a ponytail, she appraised him through mirrored shades. Her faint smile betrayed her amusement.

  “Nice briefs,” she said.

  “Uh, um,” he said. “Excuse me.” He left her at the door and pulled on his robe, hoping that his trapdoor (a mysterious provision of all underwear manufacturers) had not disclosed what dangled within. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said.

  Lydia propped her sunglasses up and walked in. To his dismay, she was toting a small suitcase. “This is some dorm room,” she said. “You’ve got your own shower, kitchen. Even a trash compactor.”

  “Reckless luxury is what makes Exham College unique. Too bad the same can’t be said for academic performance… What’s with the suitcase?”

  She glanced at it, then shot Wade the biggest, brightest, sexiest smile he’d ever seen. It was an angel’s smile—the kind of smile, in other words, that a girl flashes when she’s going to ask for something. Wade felt lost in it.

  “Will you drive me to county police headquarters?”

  “Sure,” Wade said.

  Her smile faltered. “It’s only a hundred and fifty miles away.”

  “Sure,” Wade said, still floating on the smile. But then it all came tumbling down. “Oh, no, I have to go to work. I have to clean toilets today, and I’m already late.”

  “Well, not to sound presumptuous, before I came over, I took the liberty of asking the dean to give you the day off. He said yes. It’s all taken care of.”

  Wade gaped. “You mean I’m off? Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Wade rejoiced in silence. No toilets today, hot damn! He was showered and ready to roll in record time.

  “I really appreciate this,” Lydia said when they got into the Vette. Wade took off the sunroof and put the suitcase in back.

  “Thin
k nothing of it,” he replied, starting up his 400 horses. “I’d drive you to Timbuktu if it’d get me off work.” Within minutes he was out on Route 13. He noticed the same change in her composure as he had last night driving her home. The Vette seemed to unwrap some of her wires. He supposed that being a cop—particularly a beautiful female cop in a department full of shucksy Java men—had taken a toll on her. He saw that stress run out of her now, her hard edges going soft. “So what’s in the suitcase?” he eventually asked.

  She rested back. “A cope of impactation,” she answered.

  “A what of what?”

  “It’s a hunk of wood—evidence, in other words. The county crime lab agreed to take a took at it.”

  “How important can a hunk of wood be?”

  “Sometimes very important. Anytime you hit something with a metal object, it leaves a molecular trace of its surface oxidation—its rust. Analyzing the rust can sometimes identify the grade of metal used, and from that, if you’re lucky, you can ID the manufacturer of the metal object. Unfortunately you need special equipment and indexes, and that’s why they generally only do stuff like this for a major crime. White doesn’t think this is major, but he’s letting me do it anyway. He just wants me out of his hair for the time being; I’m a troublemaker in his book, so he doesn’t want me fanning any fires.”

  So Lydia’s a troublemaker, Wade thought. This could be interesting. “What did he think of the break in at the clinic?”

  “He’s burying it,” she said. “Says it’s not worth pursuing. He also says you go through women faster than he goes through cigars. Is that true?”

  That depends on how much he smokes, Wade thought. “You don’t believe everything you hear, do you?”

  “Of course I do. I’m a gullible woman. Oh, and here’s something you might find interesting. I talked to the physician this morning. He told me about the files that got ripped off.”