Although death isn’t necessarily permanent since the Big Uneasy, it still isn’t pretty. And if this murder scene was gruesome enough to disturb even McGoo, I knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic.
I gave the coroner a ride in Robin’s rusty Ford Maverick, affectionately known as the Pro Bono Mobile. I invited Robin to join us, but she’s squeamish about seeing murdered bodies in situ. For someone who takes pride in being called a bleeding heart, she has no stomach for real blood.
But I didn’t press the issue—I’d put her through enough already. Even after all these months, I still felt guilty that she’d been the one called down to the morgue to identify my body after I was shot in an alley. You’d think that having a bullet through your brain would be the worst part, but Robin and Sheyenne felt the hurt of my dying much more acutely than I did.
Personally, I don’t remember any pain whatsoever, it was so fast, although it was damned uncomfortable to wake up underground in a dark and stuffy coffin, then have to work my way out. It took forever! I couldn’t breathe (not that I needed to), and by the time I poked my head back out of the fresh sod, I thought that newly turned earth had never smelled so sweet.…
With Archibald Victor seat-belted in, I drove us over to the Motel Six Feet Under, known for its slogan “Dirt Cheap for a Dirt Nap: We’ll leave the lights off for you.” The coroner worried far too much about being seen arriving with me. “How are we going to explain to Officer McGoohan that I was at your place of business? You promised you’d be discreet. You can’t tell him that I hired you!”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “There are a million reasons why a coroner could be at Chambeaux and Deyer investigations.”
Archibald wove his pale fingers together, then extricated them, then tangled them up in a different way. “But what are we going to say? What will you tell him?”
“The correct answer,” I said as I pulled into the parking lot of the Motel Six Feet Under. “That it’s none of his damn business.”
Two police units were in the lot, lightbars flashing; a crowd had begun to form. An ambulance was already there, but the two EMTs lounged against the side, smoking cigarettes. They obviously had nothing to do, always a bad sign.
As Dr. Victor and I got out of the car, an approaching coroner’s wagon rocked and swayed as it took the curves too fast, roaring down the block toward the motel, scattering curious pedestrians. The wagon carried the coroner’s assistants, three ghouls who enjoyed their job far too much.
“We’d better hurry inside and have a look at the crime scene,” Archibald said. “My boys tend to get so excited by a particularly gruesome setup that they scramble evidence.” The body wagon pulled up with a screech of brakes, slewed sideways, and took up two spots.
The Motel Six Feet Under was a typical seedy place where rooms could be rented by the hour, week, or phase of the moon. This motel had a special relationship with the police department, due to the sheer frequency of crimes committed there. Four spots were reserved in the parking lot for handicapped parking, one for a police unit, and one for the coroner’s wagon.
With the commotion clustered around the bright red door of Room #3, we assumed that was the place to go. Archibald and I stepped into the room and immediately smelled blood, large quantities of it, as if someone had purchased a double family pack of the red stuff from a price warehouse club. The coroner’s concerns about being seen with me vanished with the whiff of murder and violence. McGoo wasn’t concerned about somebody’s private life when he had a more-than-disemboweled vampire corpse to occupy his attention.
Archibald had left his pickle jars of organs in Robin’s car and now carried his standard medical bag and tool kit. He entered the crime scene and spoke sharply, maybe to distract McGoo. “What’s the situation, Officer?”
“Dead vampire found on the bed.” McGoo looked relieved to see me—not for the help I could provide, but just to have a friendly face around.
“Don’t see many dead vampires,” Archibald said.
McGoo gestured, and we saw the corpse of a fish-belly-white vampire male manacled to the bed with a set of silver handcuffs. He’d been cut open, his insides scooped out like a Halloween pumpkin.
“His heart’s gone, along with everything else,” McGoo said. “I guess they wanted to be sure they took all the right organs.”
Archibald bent over the body. “The technical term is that he was disorganized.”
The incision went from the navel to the neck. The vampire was flaccid, like a deflated balloon, because nothing remained inside—no heart, no lungs, no stomach or digestive tract, no liver, no kidneys, not even a spleen (defective or otherwise). The top of his skull had been hacked off, and his brain was gone, as if removed with a large ice-cream scoop.
“Not the way you normally see a vampire killed,” I said.
“Not the most efficient way, certainly,” the coroner muttered. “Since vampires heal rapidly, this must have been a lot of work. But they held him in place with the silver handcuffs, so they could take their time removing every organ. And there are limits to what even a vampire can survive.”
I gave my well-considered assessment. “Eww.”
“Somebody sure as hell had a grudge, Doc,” McGoo said. “Do I really need a complete autopsy so you can state the cause of death?”
“I can make my preliminary assessment on the spot,” Archibald said.
I had heard of people harvesting a kidney from an unsuspecting victim picked up at a singles bar. I also knew that some unscrupulous vampires would intoxicate a mark, drain a couple pints of fresh blood, then let them wake up in a room without even orange juice and cookies to help them recover.
This, though, was something entirely different.
The three ghoul assistants from the coroner’s wagon shouldered their way through the door, bright-eyed and jabbering. “Nice room!”
“I wonder if they have free breakfast,” said another.
The third looked at the vampire corpse on the bed. “Looks like lunch is ready.”
Archibald scolded them. “Boys, be professional!”
“We’re ready to take the body,” said one of the ghouls. “We even hosed out the back of the wagon.”
All three hurried to the bed, frowning down at the inconvenient silver handcuffs that held the body in place. “Nothing’s ever easy. Should we go get a saw?”
The motel manager had been hovering outside the door, wringing his hands, trying to cope with the disaster. He, the policemen, and the coroner were all on a first-name basis. “If you cut up my headboard, you’re going to pay for the damages!”
“We wouldn’t cut the nice headboard. We were going to go straight through the wrists.”
McGoo got out his own handcuff keys. “Standard issue. These should work.” The cuffs popped open, and the dead vampire’s limp wrists flopped to the bed.
“You are going to need new sheets, though,” Archibald said to the manager. “And a mattress.”
“No, that’ll wash out. I’ve got a really good detergent that I buy in bulk. And the mattress has a liner—do you think I’m nuts?”
“The sheet is evidence. We keep it,” McGoo said. “You know the drill by now. We try not to disrupt your business much.”
“That’s all right.” The manager looked around, appraising the crime scene. “Murder rooms go for a premium. I can charge an extra ten bucks a night now.”
“Everybody’s happy, then—except for this guy,” McGoo said.
The three ghouls wrapped up the eviscerated vampire in the bloodstained sheets (saving the expense of a fresh body bag) and carried the body out of the room. They knocked a lamp off the nightstand, and the manager rushed forward, yelling for them to be careful.
Seeing a vampire victim harvested of organs was certainly novel. I glanced at Archibald, remembered why he had come to Chambeaux & Deyer in the first place. I needed to have a look at that spare parts emporium as soon as possible.