Chapter Text
The bodies had been jammed into the boot of a four-seater motor carriage and left by the river for a week in the humidity of late summer. By the time the autopsies were done—all three and a half of them—it had started to rain.
“I don’t think I’m going home tonight,” Kim said. He zipped up the final body bag before more rain could hit the face of the deceased. “I’m going to walk right into the pale instead.”
“A place beyond smell,” Harry said, as Kim stripped off his latex gloves and replaced them with leather. “God. And no more humidity, either.”
“That’s the dream,” Kim said. If he squinted through the rain on his glasses, and the fog, he could see across the murky water of the Esperance to the familiar city skyline of Jamrock proper. Instead, he looked down at the body bags, which were already glossy with damp. Water slid down the neck of his jacket. He sighed deeply and monumentally. “Help me get these in the back of the motor carriage.”
The bulky Blanc-Sterling R20 was as far from a Kineema as you could get while still being on four wheels. Kim hated both looking at it and driving it, but he’d never been more grateful for a shitty vehicle than after heaving four body bags into it. If he’d had to do that to a nice motor carriage, he would have cried.
“I think we should catch the bus for a while after this,” Harry said, tipping his head back against the passenger headrest of the passenger seat as Kim carefully reversed out of the mud. There was a gentle squelch; his hair was plastered down with a mixture of rain and sweat. “Charge forty or fifty air fresheners to the RCM, throw them in, close the door, and let it sit for a while.”
There was a loud rumble and the vehicle shook. Kim wasted two seconds wondering how he’d messed up the gear change that badly before he realised that it was thunder. It’d been a long day. “It’ll just smell like pine needles as well as corpse,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “This calls for a Hjiemdall-style funeral. Let’s set it on fire and push it out to sea.”
Harry grinned and fell silent, flipping through the pages of autopsy forms. After a pause, Kim dug into his inner pocket and passed his notebook over.
“You reckon we missed something,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s weird that there was no fuel in the tank,” Harry said, in the distracted way he had when most of his brain was working the problem. “But no footprints, either.”
“None we could see,” Kim corrected. “The tank could have been emptied earlier in the week—or by scavengers with no sense of smell. Why?”
Harry flipped through Kim’s notes. Kim wasn’t precious with his notebooks—he couldn’t be, considering the myriad fluids that policework exposed them to—or with their contents. Fresh eyes were always appreciated, and Harry was one of the few people he’d worked with who could actually make sense of his handwriting.
There was a pause as Harry read, flipping back and forth between autopsy forms and notes. He was assembling his case. “I’m just wondering—was the vehicle abandoned before the bodies, or with them?” Harry asked, drumming his fingers on the clipboard. “Or… after?”
“After?” Kim said, raising an eyebrow. He indicated onto the ramp to the motorway and floored it as best as the scrapheap he was driving would allow. Conversation paused as he coaxed the R20 up through its gears so that he could merge with the traffic. The engine chugged under the extra weight of corpses in the back. “Come on, baby,” he murmured, patting the dash. The fuel lines gurgled mutinously.
Fourth gear was sticky, but once he settled it into fifth, it could hurtle along at its bone-rattling full speed of about eighty kilometres per hour.
“I think making it do this speed counts as police brutality,” Harry said, knuckles white where he clutched the door. There were grinding noises coming from under the bonnet. “Should it make that noise?”
“Some engine noises, you turn the music down to hear,” Kim said. He flipped on the single radio station they could both tolerate. “This is the other kind. Now; tell me how the vehicle could have been abandoned after the bodies stuffed in its boot.” Harry tapped his pen against his teeth, deep in thought. Kim whacked his knee. “Autopsy pen,” he said. Harry winced and dropped it in the footwell, out of reach of his fiddling fingers absentmindedly picking it up again.
“I’m not sure,” he said, returning to drumming his fingers on the clipboard. “But come on—no tyre tracks except for ours, Kits. It’s been raining for more than two weeks. The bodies weren’t two weeks old.”
“They weren’t.” Kim thought about blue-grey skin and messily severed bone and putrescent bullet wounds and shuddered. The victims had been packed in so tightly, in such a low-oxygen environment, that what they’d mainly been decomposing into was each other. They’d estimated it as six days. “Two weeks would have been even worse.”
“Two weeks in this heat?” Harry said. “We wouldn’t have found separate bodies. We would have found corpse soup.”
Harry was right, of course. It was a discrepancy. Kim frowned. “So, then. What do we know for sure? They were dumped with—or in, at least—a motor carriage by the river. It was called in by a dog walker who noticed the smell. Three of them were shot. And we agree they weren’t killed in situ.”
“Not with how little blood there was,” Harry said. “And, of course…”
“Half of one is missing,” Kim finished.
“I’d personally go with two thirds missing,” Harry said. “Each leg is about 16% of your body weight.” Kim made a face, and Harry grinned and changed the subject while he was ahead. “Hey, were you serious about not going home?”
“Hm?” Kim said, and replayed the last half hour of conversation in his head. “No, I changed my mind on walking into the pale. And I’m not going to sleep in the precinct. Why?”
“We’re gonna keep working on this tonight, aren’t we?” Harry asked. He was trying to push his drying hair back so that it wouldn’t fall in his eyes, and it wasn’t cooperating. The air in the car was hothouse-humid and stinking even with the fans on full bore, but Kim’s body still found a way to flush warm. He ignored it with long-suffering expertise. Harry continued, “I need to be home by like… eighteen hundred. It’s my night to cook dinner.”
“Oh?“ Kim raised his eyebrows, and then remembered. “Right—your deal with your neighbour.”
Harry hadn’t remembered any recipes, and someone in his building—Régine, Kim recalled—had needed help after she had a baby. They’d figured out a system, and the routine had given Harry something to do with the endless spare time of sobriety. Though the baby was months old now, she and Harry were still exchanging ingredients, recipes, and cooking them for each other, leaving tupperwares at each other’s doors. It was a classic Du Bois move—the man couldn’t help but invest in strangers until, suddenly, they were his friends.
“So, come help me cook, and I’ll feed ya. And then we can keep working.” He sniffed his sleeve and grimaced. “Oh, and maybe use the laundry. Because, holy shit.”
The motorway hit an incline as it rose over the warehouses below. The R20 juddered, engine struggling, until Kim gritted his teeth and changed down.
“I wouldn’t mind dinner,” he said, as he negotiated with the R20 over how low the revs should be to tackle a slight incline. “So long as we can walk there.”