The Grotesque Corpse - Chapter 2

The Fairview Municipal Center

Sage Marlowe heard the gunshots just before entering the alley. The man with the gun was shaking where he stood, the gun dangling from his trigger finger. On the ground in front of him was something grotesque, covered in fur, and bleeding out on the pavement. Sage pulled out her cell phone and called Maya Lee.

“I have a situation.” Sage slowly approached the man with the gun and took it from him. “There’s been a shooting. The victim is bleeding out as we speak. The gunslinger is in shock, fortunately.” Sage encouraged the shooter to sit down while she turned her attention to the injured beast. It snarled at her at first. The shot had gone through the beast’s ribcage puncturing a lung and nicking a pulmonary artery. There was nothing that Sage could do to save it. She settled for keeping it calm while it died.

While she knelt beside the strange beast, a patrol car slowly inched down the alley and stopped a few feet away. Officer Niome Baer stepped out of the car casting a large shadow. “Care to fill me in?” she asked.

“Medical Examiner has been called. She’s on her way. Tell your partner to back the patrol car up and clear the alley.” Sage made a note of the time on her phone. “Guy sitting against the back wall shot it with that.” She pointed to the handgun laying on the pavement. “I should probably get lost.”

“You should stay.”

“I didn’t see the shooting. I heard it.”

“You messed with the crime scene, and we’ll probably need your help to identify the victim.”

“Seriously? What if it’s just a poor unfortunate with a bad case of hirsutism?”

“With pointed hairy ears and a snout?” Niome used her baton to turn the victim’s head. “And what about the perp? He looks traumatized. We might need you to get past his trauma. You do still do hypnosis?”

“That would be Maya’s schtick. I just do magic.” Sage sat down next to the man at the wall. She slowly moved her hand toward him, eventually grasping his hand. She closed her eyes and waited.

Scott Casey was walking down the alley toward the back door of his apartment building when he heard a noise behind him. Living in a rough neighborhood, he had bought a handgun for protection. He turned around when he heard a growl. He had drawn his gun. Bracing to fire, he shouted a warning. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” The creature took a step toward him and Scott pulled the trigger. Everything turned surreal.

Scott swore the creature spoke to him. It said a single word, “why?” Then the strange woman showed up and the world slowed down. He could hear his heart pounding. The woman took the dangling gun out of his hand and sat him down. She tended to whatever it was that he shot. He wondered if she had called the police, but they showed up too quickly. “It must have been someone else,” he thought.

Sage released Scott’s hand when Maya arrived with her van. She helped Maya load the deceased into the back of the van. Niome helped Scott to his feet after bagging his gun. After the van left, she called her partner to come pick them up.

The municipal building was a large complex consisting of the police station, the medical examiner’s office and county morgue, and the county health department. Maya drove her van into the garage of the county morgue. The ride from the alleyway had been full of silence while Maya ran through the litany of questions that she wanted to ask Sage. Sage spent the ride weaving together the two sets of images that she had garnered from both shooter and victim. The victim’s images were troublesome, both human and savage beast engaged in a fight for control.

As they unloaded the corpse, Maya asked her first question. “What are we dealing with here?”

“I have no idea,” Sage droned.

“You touched it before it died. You must have gleaned something from it,” Maya insisted.

“I haven’t made sense of it yet.” Sage helped Maya place the corpse on a gurney. “It’s all muddled.” The two women pulled the gurney down the hall to Autopsy. “Maybe the autopsy results will help.”

“Am I... am I un... under arrest?” Scott stammered from the back seat of the patrol car.

“No, Mr. Casey,” Officer Baer responded through the metal grid separating the rear seats from the front. “We’re merely taking you in to make a formal statement. If you’d like to call your lawyer first, we can wait.”

As her partner backed the car out into traffic, he asked, “Do I want to know?”

“Not really.” Niome didn’t want to drag her new partner into it.

“Another weird one?” He laughed. “You do seem to catch the weird cases, don’t you?” Officer Jerome Walker was familiar with her reputation for attracting strange cases. He glanced back at the man fidgeting in the back seat. “What did this guy do?”

“He shot a big furry monster.”

“You’re joking,” Walker replied incredulously.

“Honestly, Jerome, I wish I were.” The drive to the police station was quiet. Walker pulled the car into the discharge lane and Niome escorted Mr. Casey to an interview room and waited for her partner to arrive.

As rigor mortis had not yet set in, Maya and Sage arranged the body for the scanner. Maya had no desire to go poking around blindly with a scalpel. Doctor Maya Lee had talked the municipality into purchasing a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner for the Medical Examiner’s Office. This would enable the ME to look for abnormalities in the body of a deceased person without cutting the body open. It also would appease those who objected to an invasive autopsy on religious grounds.

“The subject measures approximately two point four seven meters from head to foot. Weight is approximately one thousand kilograms. Subject has a coat of thick agouti fur ranging in color from pale yellow to dark brown. Fur is noticeably absent around the eyes and ears. Eyes are sepia. The pointed ears do not have lobes. The long hairy forelimbs end in pale yellow hands, and I’m using that term liberally, which have thick leathery digits that end in claw-like nails. The feet resemble that of a rabbit or more accurately that of a Hobbit as the bottom of the feet do not have fur.”

After completing her narration, Maya and Sage transferred the corpse onto the sample platform. “How long is this going to take?” Sage asked.

“An hour or two,” Maya finished setting up the scanner. She walked over to where Sage stood. “I take it you have to be somewhere.” Maya pushed Sage through the double doors of the autopsy room out into the hallway. “Go.”

On the walk over to the police station, Sage added Maya’s visual autopsy to her mental notebook. She tried to relax and center her emotional focus. Police stations were a cauldron of anxiety peppered with a dash of rage. She braced herself and walked down the hallway to the interview room where Scott Casey sat nervously drumming his fingers on the steel table. He stopped drumming and placed his palms on the tabletop. “Who are you?” he demanded. Sage smiled wanly, took a seat near the wall, and waited.

Officers Baer and Walker arrived around five minutes later with four bags of takeout from a nearby burger joint. Niome handed a bag to Sage. “I figured you’d be here by now. It’s your favorite – bacon cheeseburger.” She turned to her partner, “Jerome, hand me that lime cola.” She passed it on to Sage. After handing off the rest of the bags, she sat at the table. “We already took a statement. We want you to look it over before he signs it. It should be here in a few minutes.” She bit into her burger. Sage pulled a few curly fries out of her bag. It was bad enough that a private investigator was on her case. Now, Niome wanted to read in her partner. A knock on the door drew everyone’s attention.

A uniformed officer stepped into the room and offered a clipboard to Niome. Niome passed the clipboard to Sage. Sage took her time reading through the statement and reread it before handing it back. “It’s fine. He didn’t leave anything out. Let him sign it and send him home. I need to get back to the morgue.”

As Sage opened the door, Niome asked, “How long until the autopsy results are ready?”

“Maya said it would take at least an hour,” Sage replied before closing the door behind her. She hurried back to the deathly quiet of the morgue. As she entered the building, she could hear the hum of the MRI scanner. It stopped when she was halfway down the hallway. As she pushed through the double doors, she saw Maya building a three-dimensional representation of the specimen on the fifty-five-inch monitor. “I thought you said this would take an hour or more.”

“I may have overestimated the time, just in case you were asked by the police. They did ask, didn’t they?”

Sage nodded and took a seat. “Shouldn’t we put our hairy corpse on ice?”

“He’ll be fine for a couple of hours.” Maya picked up the microphone and began dictating notes. “The creature’s skull resembles that of a common black bear minus the pronounced canines. From the neck down, the creature’s skeleton resembles that of chimpanzee. The legs and arms are those of a hominid. The feet are large and structured like rabbit feet as mentioned previously. The internal organs include larger lungs and heart than that of a human. Pelvis is that of a male, confirmed further by the presence of a ten-centimeter long baculum.”

“Excuse me, a what?”

“A baculum. It’s a penis bone. You know, like a dog.” Maya went back to her dictation. “Cause of death was massive trauma from blood loss caused by a bullet passing through the anterior rib cage and nicking the pericardiophrenic artery before exiting through the posterior ribs. The scan shows a second bullet lodged in the gluteus maximus, possibly a ricochet. I won’t know until I extract the bullet.” Maya paused to take a deep breath before continuing. “The specimen has an unusually large brain for a bear equal in size to a human brain. The rest of the internal organs appear to be normal for a gorilla. The arm-length to leg length ratio is one to one consistent with that of a biped. The hands are leathery with clubbed fingers and claw-like nails. As noted earlier, the feet resemble those of a rabbit – a very, very large rabbit.” Maya turned off the recorder. “I get the feeling that I’m repeating myself. Maybe I should put Bigfoot away. It’s lunch time anyway. Have you eaten?”

“Niome gave me a burger and fries, but I could use a cup of coffee.”