getting its tentacles into everything.’
‘Sit yourself down, Clay. You want a cup of coffee? Tastes like gasoline, but it’ll perk you up a little.’
He sank down into the seat by the door, lower than he expected it to be. She set the clay figure carefully back into the box, careful not to damage it, then perched on the edge of the desk beside him.
‘You been sleeping?’
‘I don’t know.’ He corrected himself, ‘Must have. I’ve been dreaming. Bad dreams. People with papier-mâché heads. Monsters in the woods.’
‘You’ve been neglecting yourself, honey. You should go home and get some rest, eat some food, then go see a doctor. Get some tests done. I’m sure it’s not a tumor.’ She gave his shoulder a hard squeeze. He could feel how strong and bony her fingers were, like coral. ‘You get yourself home and take care of yourself. You got someone who can help you?’
He nodded, fighting back the tears. Sympathy was the worst. Betty was savvy enough to see it. She closed up the box and changed the subject to brisk business. ‘Well. You leave these with me, and I’ll get them fired in the student kiln. Call you when they’re ready to come and glaze, unless you want to leave them raw, which could work for these. You want to pay now or COD?’
‘I’ll pay now. Can’t guarantee I’ll have the cash later.’ He stood up to fish crumpled notes out of his pocket.
‘Up to you, sweets. Twenty bucks. You want to pay me now, that’s fine. You want to pay me in kind later, that’s good too. God knows the storeroom needs cleaning out. We got boxes of stock in there, I don’t even know what’s broken, what’s last season.’
‘I’ll pay now, I’m flush.’ It was a lie, but he didn’t want to owe her. He smoothed the note out on the desk, ironing the creases flat with his fingers. The moth-wing texture of it got into the back of his teeth. ‘You ever think about how rigid the world is?’
‘Clay isn’t. This material we work with, I mean, not you.’
‘But I’m rigid, too. We’re all locked in to what we are. Take this,’ he held up the note.
‘I intend to, sweetie.’
‘It’s nothing. But people believe in it. Money makes the rules. This is what things cost. This is what you have, where you are, what you are, what you can be. Money is a dream that has made itself definitive.’ He was caught up in it, his tongue doing a million miles an hour. It happened sometimes when he hadn’t seen other people for a while. ‘Do you know that story about Michelangelo?’
‘That he was homosexual?’
‘Not that. About the Pieta, the Madonna and Christ. When he finished sculpting it, he struck it and cried out, “Now speak”. He expected his art to live. But it didn’t. How could it?’ He was on the point of tears again.
‘I think God’s the only one who gets to breathe life into mud, sweetie. And you’re wrong, about being locked in.’ She patted the box full of bird girls. ‘You see this, Mr. Smartypants? You see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve evolved as an artist? Late-bloomer, sure, but you’ve transcended yourself, Clayton Broom. Don’t come here talking about rigid.’
He nodded, trying to remember how to look happy, the precise facial muscle arrangements. ‘Thank you,’ he managed. But he wondered if this was really what he wanted after all.
There are trajectories that cut through our lives, Gabi has found, that link things together. Sometimes those are literal, like the scar under Bambi’s arm.
A few years ago there were so many unclaimed bodies at the Wayne County morgue that the city had to rent a truck to store them all in, piled three-deep like a short stack. Only pancakes don’t get toe tags. It wasn’t that nobody loved them enough to come get them; the families had to save up to be able to pay for their funerals.
Now they’ve opened an additional pathology lab up at the university, and Bambi is enough of a novelty to get special priority. The new facilities still smell like dead people and preservatives and cleaning products and that peculiar metal tang you can taste in the back of your mouth. Hearts still make the same wet slop sound when they land in a bucket full of organs. The corpses on the metal tables are still uninhabited shells.
‘Foreclosed people,’ she observes to Marcus. The rookie nods sagely, missing the joke. He’s got a long way to go.
Boyd digs in his ear with one finger. ‘I think they’re more human like this. When you shoot an animal, you can only really appreciate what made it an animal when it’s gone.’
‘That’s beautiful, Bob, especially considering you still shoot them anyway. Can you quit picking at yourself?’
‘It’s itchy.’ He wipes the wax off on his pants. ‘I saw an ad for ear candles in a magazine. Do you think that works?’
‘Why don’t you try it and report back?’
There is a small crowd of people in scrubs gathered around her stiff. She can tell it’s Bambi by the six-inch dip in the sheet between the constituent parts of boy and deer.
Dr Mackay is poking around under the sheet, talking in a low voice. He looks like he’s from another century, with deep grooves in his forehead you could play like an LP record if you had a turntable. He keeps trying to retire, and they keep asking him to come back. There are two cops at the back, craning their necks to see.
‘Move it along, boys. This isn’t your case.’
‘We just wanted a look. That’s some crazy shit, Detective.’
‘Yeah, yeah, this takes the crazy-shit cake. Now hop.’ Boyd makes as if to move toward them, and his bulk is enough to get them going.
‘You letting every sightseer in, Dr Mackay?’ Gabi snaps. ‘Should we be charging?’
‘They got a body in here, same as you, Detective. Little more clear-cut than yours.’ He sounds as if he blames her personally. ‘And the others are students. There’s a lot of interest in this, as you might imagine.’ He nods at the serious young people in scrubs. ‘You’re excused.’
Boyd pinches his nose. ‘Didn’t you wash him?’
‘We’ve flushed the body several times with the high-pressure hose. What you’re smelling is the contents of the bucket. Stomach acid, gall and feces. Stuffing. Your killer didn’t do a particularly good job.’
‘You need some lipgloss, Sparkles?’ Boyd teases Marcus, who is breathing hard through his nose.
‘No thank you, sir. I’m mostly interested in the autopsy.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ Gabi says.
Mackay flips the sheet, revealing the corpse, already laid open. Human excavations – the casual violation of the body’s integrity. They all peer into the abdominal cavity. ‘Very inefficient. See here, where he cut through the stomach. He made a hell of a mess.’
‘It’s not a hunter,’ Boyd says. ‘Hunter wouldn’t do such a half-assed job of gutting something.’
‘Unless he was in a hurry. Besides, I’d venture that there are a lot of amateurs running around the woods with semi-automatics who wouldn’t know the front end of a deer from its ass.’ Gabi nudges the bucket beside the table with her shoe. It’s full of wadded-up paper and a flaky fabric, sodden and reeking. ‘What did you mean by stuffing?’
‘Newspaper at a guess, although we’ll need to send it for testing. It was used to fill the cavity, probably to keep the shape after he removed the organs before he stuck it back together.’
‘Had