Monsters Got Blamed for Murder, So I Relived the Victim's Last Hour novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: Four Straight Tines
On the table, Halina finds four straight punctures where a fold's claws would curve, a flake of orange paint and a carbon page that match her reading, until the Bureau's courier van arrives early and the club's rifles come up.
The tagger read the word twice, and the toothpick went from one side of his mouth to the other.
"Homicide," he said. "On a Directive case. That's a new one, Doc."
"It's a new wound," I said.
He folded the transfer slip into his vest pocket and smiled at me, unbothered.
"Courier's at six. I'll let Dr. Pashek know you've got an opinion."
He went down the corridor humming a hymn I almost knew.
Only when the dock door banged did I notice my left hand shaking against the counter.
In eight years this dock had sent the Bureau's courier 2,206 Crack dead.
I had signed the paperwork on a hundred and forty of them.
Every one of those forms had carried the same typed word, and nobody had ever opened a single body to check it.
Deloris came in with her reading glasses on their chain and looked at my face for about as long as it took to know.
"You read him," she said.
She had been standing on that dock the night I read the child.
"I did," I said.
"Who?" Deloris asked.
"The man with the tag gun."
Her mouth went flat, and she did not ask me how I could be sure.
She opened her purse instead and took out a square of thin paper folded in quarters.
"Terrence tore me his pages at twenty-five after nine," she said.
"Every Saturday since 2014, so I can type them for the club's tin. I haven't looked."
I unfolded the carbon and carried it under the light.
It was his slanting pencil, eleven kills in a column, and at the bottom one line.
Found: ring, left forefoot, grown in. D+K. Tag 41,887.
[Reading confirmed: the ring entry. +100 XP.]
I read it twice and had to set the page down.
"The man on the flyers," Deloris said. "His wife's been hanging his picture since March."
"The tagger took the ring and the book, Deloris."
"Then we had better be careful with what he left."
I opened Terrence Bayne at 3:20.
The suite was cold and bright, with the hum of the exhaust fans in the ceiling, and Deloris held the light.
My left side ached where the hook had gone into his.
Eleven minutes in another man's body does that.
I was carrying three hours of other people now.
They were a shooting victim at Stroger, a six-year-old with a ceiling fan turning over her, and Terrence Bayne.
They replayed whenever I closed my eyes, and the fan always went around once more.
The left breast pocket of his shirt held a smudge of blue carbon the size of a spiral book, and nothing else.
The man in the alley had taken the book.
Under the lamp, the wound was a row of four punctures in his left flank, each a little under a centimeter wide.
They ran in a line, straight, and an inch apart.
I measured them twice and photographed them with a ruler.
A fold's claws are curved, and there are three on each forefoot, splayed wide.
Anything a fold does to you comes in threes and curves.
It also leaves a film of pale mucus that stays on the wound edge for hours.
I swabbed all four punctures and found no film at all.
[Reading confirmed: four straight tines. +100 XP.]
The track went in five inches, through the kidney and the edge of the liver.
He had lived about six minutes after it, and I had felt every one.
In the third puncture, down against the muscle, something caught the light.
I lifted it with forceps and held it under the lens.
It was a flake of orange powder-coat paint, thinner than a fingernail.
"Same orange as the drag hooks on the dock," Deloris said.
"Bag it. Both of us sign the tag."
[Reading confirmed: orange paint. +100 XP.]
Then the window changed, and I stopped with the forceps in the air.
[Last Hour, Level 2. XP: 300 of 1,200.]
[Unlocked: Scrub. Stop at any minute of an hour and replay it, up to three times.]
I had never moved off zero in four years, and in one night I had been right three times.
The skill did not care what I thought of that, and neither did the three hours in my head.
"How long do you have him?" Deloris asked.
"Seven days. After that the hour goes flat."
"And the Bureau burns him in three."
She said it flatly.
At 4:50 my phone lit up with the Chief's name, and I answered it over the open body.
"Colleague." Dr. Pashek's voice was soft and a little wet. "A Bureau contractor tells me you have opened a Directive decedent."
"I have, Dr. Pashek."
"Close him," he said.
"I will when I'm finished," I said. "He was stabbed, with a tool, by a person."
"Dr. Mroz, the Bureau's courier arrives at six, and I will be at the dock at five-thirty."
He hung up without waiting for my answer.
Deloris pushed her glasses up her nose.
"Eleven million," she said. "He's going to say it three more times before breakfast."
At 5:25 I closed the incision, sealed the bagged flake, and signed the chain-of-custody sheet with Deloris beside me.
When I stripped my gloves, the dock door boomed upstairs, and then a second time.
I went up the corridor to the glass, where the sky over Harrison Street had just begun to gray.
A Bureau van sat on the apron with its rear doors open, nearly half an hour early.
Two agents in gray windbreakers stood beside it.
A tall man in a third windbreaker was already walking toward the building with a rubber stamp in his hand.
On the other side of the glass, the six Honore Street men stood shoulder to shoulder across the dock steps, rifles held low.
The retired Marine with the bad leg took one step down to meet him, and the rifles came up an inch.
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