Dashiell wandered over to the table where the Medical Examiner was working with Regina. He had to hold back a gag. What hadn’t been obvious from a distance, and what hadn’t been broadcast on the news, was that there were two bodies laid out on the steel table. And one of them was that of an infant.
“My God. What the hell happened?”
Regina turned to look at him, the sadness hovering around her eyes more apparent from up close. “Some sick bastard sliced up a pregnant hooker, that’s what happened.” Her voice was like cold iron.
“The baby…?” Dashiell left it hanging.
“No,” the Medical Examiner said. “It was born alive. And then deliberately strangled. There’s obvious hemorrhaging in the eyes. Coupled with the blue color, and bruising around the neck, there’s little doubt.”
“Dashiell, there’s a sick bastard loose out there. I won’t have time to work with you. I’ve got to find this son of a bitch and bring him down.”
As Regina spoke, the Medical Examiner continued his inspection of the baby, moving from the main body to the extremities. “Detective,” he said, drawing the attention of both Regina and Dashiell. “Found something else.” He used a small metal implement to gently uncurl one tiny lifeless hand. The baby’s fingers were missing. “Somebody mutilated the body. From the minimal blood loss, I’d guess post mortem.”
Regina grabbed the edge of the metal table and gripped it hard, her eyes going hard. Dashiell put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay Regina?”
She shook herself. “It’s just….You think you’ve seen everything on this job, Dash, and then something like this happens….” She took a deep breath, held it, then slowly let it out. “Someone’s gonna pay for this, Dash. I just hope when we catch up to him, the bastard resists.”
Dashiell nodded. It was a hard sentiment to argue with. Anyone who spent any time in law enforcement had a case like that, somewhere in their background. But as much as he felt for Regina right now, he had his own work to do.
The Medical Examiner finished his notes on the hooker and her baby, then put on a new set of gloves and headed to the other end of the room. Dashiell followed after him.
“So Mr. Aldridge, what can I do for you today?”
“Metro hired me to investigate the death of that tiger at the National Zoo. As you know, this zookeeper was killed at the same time. I’m hoping you can tell me about how he died and who may have killed him.”
The Medical Examiner flipped open the chart. Dashiell looked over the body, laying cold and naked on the steel table. There was a neat Y incision across the chest. Apparently, the autopsy had been completed the day before.
“Let’s see….says the cause of death was a blow to the back of the head, with a blunt instrument.”
Dashiell looked up at the Medical Examiner. “Blunt instrument? He wasn’t stabbed?”
“No, sir. No evidence of a knife wound of any kind. No defensive wounds or signs of a struggle either. Looks like he didn’t see it coming.”
Dashiell thought for a moment. The killer had a knife. Why not use it? Well, if it was sanctified in preparation for the tiger, that might explain it. Still, that was a lot of trouble, to find another weapon to kill the guard. There were few spells that required that level of purity in the ingedients. This changed things. If the killer went to that extent, then he wasn’t using these tiger parts for mere home remedies. He was angling for something a great deal more powerful. But what?
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The Continuing Adventures of Dashiell Aldridge
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8 comments:
Sorry for the delay. Hope it's worth the wait! :)
MUCH better chapter, I'm on the edge of my seat.
Plus, Dash needs a kick in the head: the law of synchronicity states that when any two major events occur in close succession, it is more than likely that those two events stem from the same source.
Or, in other words, the pregnant hooker and the missing baby tigers are the same case! Too close together and too big as crimes to be just a coincidence!
Man, I wish I was his partner. I'd have SO much witty banter right now, along the lines of "Pay attention, dope-head."
Okay, maybe that's not so witty.
I'm glad to see it's back on track. When I finish this story, I do plan to go back through and edit those last two chapters, and probably give the whole thing a polish.
For now, I just want to get it out on "paper" as it were and go from there.
Thanks for sticking around. :)
Dude, I like this. I'm sticking around for sure.
I have this thing on Pages Unbound: the rating system is supposed to reflect both technical merit and the reviewer's enjoyment. There are some that are technically well written that I just find boring concepts. There are some that are fun concepts that are badly written.
You are working on your writing (aren't we all?) but the concept is fun, and your approach as an author (the conversations we're having) is meaningful to me. So I like this and keep track of it, even if it's not "the best" out there. Because I can see where you're going and I like talking to you.
Other than ToMU, the only other stories I'm really attached to are yours, Sonja's Mutants, and Sarah's Alisiyad. There are others I check once in awhile, but those are the ones I read the most.
Oddly enough, they all read me, apparently. I think we all like some of the same things, and that's why we write and read what we do. Make sense?
In other words, I'm glad you seem to be enjoying No Man an Island, I appreciate your comments, and I like your attitude about Superstition. It's going to keep improving, and I'm enjoying watching it happen.
Yes, much better chapter. Actually had to stop reading for a bit -- little squeamish about some things.
Though, Gavin -- I must disagree with you (hey, my nick isn't polemically inclined without reason ;) ). If I am reading this correctly -- the prostitute was "sliced open" and "slashed" to death presumably.
The zoo-keeper was killed with a blunt instrument.
And "synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern."
So, though I'm quite sure that the two events are linked in some way, it's not because of the Law of Synchronicity.
I made up the term "law of synchronicity" to make the point -- I'm sure a superstitious person would put it a different way. But it boils down to this:
In fiction, there is no such thing as coincidence. Writers don't write things to be irrelevant, they write what is necessary to the story. You don't introduce a cop and then take her out of the story with a plot of her own that we'll never see. Her subplot is related to the main plot.
To a superstitious person, a person with "magical thinking," all things are inter-related. A black cat doesn't just randomly cross your path, it's a harbinger of bad things to come. So, if you stub your toe, it was the cat's fault. A spoon falls on the floor -- that's not just gravity, it's a sign of a female visitor. It rains when you're crying, it's not just coincidence, it's raining because you're sad. Cause and effect aren't the same for superstitions as they are for science.
The similarity between superstitious people and readers, is that they look for meaning in the world they encounter. To a reader, the cop storyline must be related or it wouldn't be in the story. To a superstitious person, such a brutal crime in such a close time frame to the other brutal crime seems more than coincidence.
Synchronicity, in Jung's pyschology, is when two independent cause and effect chains, totally unrelated, end up in the same place at the same time, creating meaning. An example is that he treated a man who had dreams about beetles and scarabs, and at the same time he described his dream, a real beetle flew into the room. He didn't cause the beetle to come, and the beetle didn't cause his story to be told at that moment: but they both ended up in the same place at the same time.
To a superstitious person, that would be some weird "sign." I bet there's a name for it, but "Law of Synchronicity" certainly works.
And the prostitute's murder isn't related to the death of the zoo-keeper. That crime was secondary, the zoo-keeper was in the way. The real crime is the dissected (cut open) tiger.
I'm polemically inclined sometimes myself. ;)
Do a Google search: there are in fact 'laws of synchronicity' usually having to do with magic. And it's remarkably close to what I said.
How weird is that?
This chapter very nearly made me cry (I'm waaaaay more susceptible to that sort of thing after having kids..).
Seems fairly obvious to me that the baby's fingers are needed for whatever spell whoever needs the tiger bits for.
I agree with Gavin; someone hit Dash with a clue-by-four.
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