Chapter Text
The sun filtering through the windows into the squad room was a welcome change to the bitter cold of last night. I’d left for work earlier than usual this morning; the drive to the station striking a balance between the controlled chaos of the day and the peaceful silence of night.
Leaning back in my chair I rub my face, getting out some lingering sleep from the corners of my eyes. As I let out a weary yawn, a deer on the desk across from me watched me with alertness as I exposed my teeth.
Despite my biology, I was by no stretch of the imagination a night-faring mammal, getting up from bed this morning was torture. I had made myself an extra strong coffee; its buzz had gotten me through the drive here, the mundane elevator ride and walk to the squad room. After I said hi to Murphy, a hartebeest that talked with a thick Hissisippi accent and was always chewing tobacco, the coffee pumping through my veins dried up, and as I slumped into my chair fatigue wrapped its claws around me and I soon found myself nodding off.
As I sat in my chair fighting off the urge to fall asleep, the doors to the squad room swung open. Turning in my chair to see who walked in, I saw Victoria wearing navy blue jeans and a white button-up shirt, her badge and gun on her belt. I noticed she was carrying two takeaway coffee cups.
As she walked over I gave her a wave, nearly falling asleep and landing face-first on my desk. She chuckled and gave me a smile, sitting down behind her own and passing over the coffee. Grabbing it, I placed the cup on my right beside my computer monitor. “Morning Henry. You’re here early.” She said as she got comfortable in her chair.
“Decided to beat the rush. Besides, I couldn’t sleep. You manage to get any?”
“None at first. When I got home I just lay awake in bed for hours staring at the ceiling. On the bright side, I’ve made a reminder to go and get a new tin of paint, but yeah, I did eventually get some sleep. Still, the dreams I had last night didn’t help me sleep any easier. ”
“Oh I’ve been there plenty of times.” I picked up the cup, the smell of freshly grounded coffee beans filled my nose and darted around my brain like a pinball,, lighting up my neurons like birthed stars against the infinite void of space. “So, is that what these are for?”
“Oh hell yes.” She picks up her own cup, swirling it around a bit before taking off the lid “Take a drink of this stuff and you’ll feel like someone’s hooked you up to the grid.” As she began drinking her own coffee ,I looked down at my own.
I allowed my senses to be swamped by the coffee, by its smell and the warmth of the cup as it tantalized my digits. Sure, it smelt good, but I’d become accustomed to a fine home-brewed coffee; one of the few things I could thank Maw for. I always thought that, if I’d ever fall out of police work, I could become a barista.
I took the cup back, and as soon as the steaming coffee passed my lips and lapsed onto my taste buds, the feelings that my brain was experiencing from the smell multiplied tenfold. I felt like I was experience the equivalent of an acid trip, and after only a single gulp I was forced to put the cup down. “Holy shit.” I muttered under my breath.
“Oh yeah. It’ll do that the first few times. But trust me, you’ll get used to it.” She said, continuing to drink from her cup. After about twenty seconds she’d finished, and threw it to a bin over across the room. It soared across the room, landing right in the bin and not even hitting its brim.
“Where did you get this from?” I asked her as I took another gulp, my mind indulging once again in the coffee’s high.
“From this little café down on Cud Street. I should take you there someday; the mocha they make is something to die for.”
“I’ll have to go there sometime.” As the coffee swirled down my throat and my brain was made alive with thoughts, something pinged in the back of my head. “I just remembered, Becky told me the coroner rang up about an hour before I got here while night shift was packing up. They’ve got an autopsy report on that impala, figured you and I would go and check it out.”
I stand up, taking the last drink of my coffee and looked around for a bin, noticing one by the doors. “We better get going. You know where they keep the unmarked cars?”
“Yeah, follow me.” She got up from her desk and we made our way to the doors.
“See you later guys, hope the case goes well!” Becky said to us as we left.
‘It never does’ my subconscious replied.
Following Victoria out of the squad room, we walked over to a set of elevators on our left. These were not the ones I’d been taking to get up from the first floor, and since there were no other elevator doors on the bottom floor, they must head straight to a car park below the station.
Victoria walked up to the doors and pressed one of the buttons, far less worn than those on the elevators I’ve been using. I glanced over to Victoria as the elevator began to descend. I noticed has she was biting her lip, as if there were words she wanted to say but hesitation danced in her mind. She looks over to me “Hey Henry?”
“Yeah Vic?”
“When I was lying awake last night, I thought about what you said.”
“Did you come up with anything else?”
“No…” She looks away from me to the elevator doors, letting out a deep sigh that was heavy with pent up stress and anxiety. “I was just, praying that you were wrong.”
“I much as I hope that you're right Victoria, I just know that this wasn't an accident. Something is telling me that this thing is just scratching the surface of something much bigger. Like intuition.”
“Well what’s your intuition telling you now?”
“That whatever this is, it’s going to develop into one shit storm after another. I tell you this Vic: this thing has got more scope than just the doe. She’s the catalyst to discovering something much bigger.”
“Is that seriously what you think?”
“I don’t know.” I smacked my lips, the coffee making my mouth feel a little arid and dusty. “It’s just back in Maw, everything was connected. You could trace a mugging to a gang war or a company merger to a mob hit. This seems like something that is linked back to something else, like a web, and we just can’t see it. Might mean were already tangled up in it and we’re just too preoccupied to see the approaching spider.”
I felt the elevator come to a stop. With the ‘ding’ of a bell, the doors opened up to a hallway, the walls painted cream with a navy blue stripe running horizontally either side. It ran for about five meters before opening up to the car park, a counter covered in a metal grid marked a security office to our left. On the left side of the counter was a wooden door with VEHICLE WARDEN/CHIEF MECHANIC printed in gold against its stained wood.
Victoria walked up to the counter, tapping on the mesh a few times. “Hey Nick, you in?” I heard a shuffling from inside followed by the rummaging of boxes and the clattering of metal hitting the floor. Victoria mouthed ‘oops’ as she recoiled back slightly.
“Oh son of a fucking bitch!” There was a momentary pause of sound from within the office, as if whoever was inside realised they were within earshot of other mammals, and was screaming internally. “Uh…Hang on I’ll be a sec!” The sound of metal being picked up from the ground and placed in cupboards and boxes emitted from the office once more before going silent. The sound of paw pads tapping across the tile floor started from somewhere deep in the office and steadily became louder as it approached, stopping at the desk before a red fox popped his head up behind the counter. His left eye was a rich emerald green while his right was lavender and it looked in a different direction to his left. “Hi Vic! Good to see ya!” He turned his head to face me with his good eye while his right looked towards Victoria, as if he was watching us both. “And who may you be my good sir?”
“Henry, Henry Gorden.” I extended my arm through a gap in the grid, Nick grasping it with his comparably smaller paw and shaking it with all of his might. He gave me a big smile, flashing a collection of pearly white teeth.
“Name’s Nick, Nick Smith. Well Henry, it’s good to meet ya. So, what can I do you two for?”
“We’ve got a body waiting for us at the morgue.” I said
“Hang on, I’ll get you an unmarked.” He grabbed a clipboard and hopped down from the desk. He walked to a set of keys locked within a glass cabinet above him. Looking down on him from the desk, I noticed that he walked with a limp on his right leg and wore a shoulder brace over his blue uniform.
He grabbed a stepladder and set it down in front of the cabinet, walking up and grabbing a key ring from his belt, unlocking the cabinet and looking over his clipboard. “Hey Gorden?”
“Yeah?”
“Is your name spelt G-O-R-D-O-N or with an E-N?”
“E-N.”
“Thanks” He flipped a page on the clipboard. “Ah! Yep, here you two are.” He grabs a key from the cabinet and locks it, stepping carefully down from the ladder and returning to the desk, handing the keys to Victoria’s extended paw. “Okay so your body’s registered at Raven’s Rock Morgue. Victoria here should know the way but if you need to, you could use the GPS, but don’t count on it, the systems these things use isn’t worth a pint of piss. Yours is the tan Crown Vic in park thirteen, call sign is Ink One-One.”
“Anything else?” Victoria asks.
“Transmission on that one’s a little flimsy, me and the boys are going to have a look at it this weekend, but for now try and avoid rapidly changing gear uphill unless you want to risk a stall.”
“Thanks Nick. Have a good one.”
“You too guys.” As we walked away he hoped down and got back to whatever work he was doing before we came. We passed numerous unmarked and patrol cars until we got to a tan Crown Vic that sat alone in park, number ‘13’ printed onto the concrete in front of it. I went around to the passenger’s side while Victoria climbed into the driver’s seat, putting the keys into the ignition and filling the car park with the primal roar of the car’s engine.
We headed up a ramp leading out to the station’s aboveground car park. Victoria drove the car around to the front of the station where the charismatic taxi driver had dropped me off, and where my Cowdi lay parked now. It was sandwiched between two squad cars and was basking in the morning sun that caused its paint to further peel. ‘Lucky son of a bitch’ I thought to myself as Victoria followed the path of my taxi driver, waiting for an entrance before merging in with the traffic and driving us to the morgue.
Despite the traffic around us, the rumbling engines, the noxious fumes, the blaring horns and screeching tires and the oh-so-many traffic violations, the drive was quiet. I had my elbow on the window seal and was resting my head on my paw; watching as the buildings passed by like mountains. The cabin’s silence was broken only by the quiet lulls of the radio and the muted sounds of the outside world.
“Where do you think we should go once we get the autopsy report?” Victroia said as we rounded a corner.
I took my arm off of the window and shifted in my seat so I could face Victoria “I’m thinking we should contact her relatives, find out anything that her immediate family might know; she could have been seeing someone. We should then expand to her life outside of her family; where she lived, where she worked and if she was in a relationship that her parents may not have approved of.”
“You think it was something personal? Lover’s quarrel or some rivalry?”
“No, I’ve still got a feeling that we’re dealing with some sort of psychotic. But I’ve also got a feeling we’re not dealing with someone insane.” She goes to say something but pauses, a perplexed look on her face.
“Okay, now while I could chew you out for sounding like you’d given that seed some water, I’ve just got to ask you, how can whoever did this not be considered insane? Someone ripped out a doe’s fucking neck Henry. That sounds pretty fucking crazy to me.”
“You know, I think I worded that just a little wrong. What our suspect did last night was express what they viewed as love, and from that we can build an idea of what their view of lust and affection is. From this we can construct how they view world. It’s a twisted and warped picture for sure, and from this we know that they’re unstable. But just because they’re unstable doesn’t mean they’re insane; being insane and unstable are two completely different things.”
“While I’m sure any psychologist who’s passed high school would beg to differ, entertain me Henry, how are the two different?” Her voice was full of joke mockery.
I gave her a smile, continuing our conversation “Well Victoria, insane can be given to a mammal who has no conscious awareness of the consequences of their actions. A kid who shoots up a diner because he’s lived a life of trauma can be called insane because he’s been sculpted into something that is sub-mammal; he’s unable to understand his actions and feel empathy for those he hurts. Now lets take the sick motherfucker who took a chunk of this doe. If it is an expression of their love, then they understand that their actions have a consequence; this being the application of their love and lust onto a canvas, the doe, and that it would have an affect on that canvas. Now, I admit, this may not mean they understand the concept of mortality, but it does mean they know actions have consequences. And with that, Victoria, our suspect, if this wasn’t an accident, is not insane but instead unstable.”
“You could have just said that sociopathic was a more appropriate word.” We pulled up at an intersection, the dashboard GPS stating that we were around twenty minutes away from the morgue. “And Sheepus Christ Henry, you yourself sound a little unstable. Maw really did a number on you didn’t it?”
“That my friend is the understatement of the century.” I gave her a light-hearted smile, trying to downplay the significance of what I had just said. I’d rather avoid coming off as the depressed melodramatic cop to Victoria, firstly because I’d doubt that it would make working together any easier and secondly because the depressed melodramatic cop from Maw would be a dead melodramatic cop from Maw.
“I bet a shrink could write a book about you.” We drove for another fifteen minutes, cutting through the middle of downtown across the Maribou River, we pulled into the morgue’s car park. We were in one of the old areas of the city; remnants of it’s early beginnings hundreds of years ago. Maw was an equally old city, it’s beginnings dating back even further than Zootopia’s. Maw found it’s fortune off of the hardships of the slave trade and industrial revolution, but unlike Zootopia, city planners didn’t care much for conserving the marks of Maw’s past.
On the outside, the Morgue looked like something out of a Dovecraftian novel. The steps that led up to it from the car park were large and intimidating, near impossible for anything smaller than a fox to walk up. Its walls were a deep charcoal colour, mighty columns held up the roof overhanging the front of the building, making it look like an ancient temple. The capital of each column had been sculpted into a raven perched atop skulls. Whoever designed it certainly wanted to install a sense of dread into anyone who walked up those steps.
As we walked up the final steps we came to the entrance; two oak doors large enough for an elephant to walk through. Above the doors was a crest showing a raven holding a sickle and femur bone, below it in golden lettering was ‘RAVEN’S ROCK MORGUE’, standing out against the canvas of black.
I opened the door for Victoria, and I was taken back by how much the inside contrasted the look of the outside. The floors were cleaner than back at the ZPD and the walls were painted stark white. The strain that the bright lights were causing my eyes forced me to rapidly blink to adjust. Victoria looked down as she rubbed her eyes “I’ve come here at least a dozen times and these damned lights always hurt my eyes.” She sighed, looking up and blinking a few times. “Come on, let’s go.” I followed behind her, my eyes finally adjusting to cope with the intense light.
The hallway led us to a waiting room, a television mounted in the top left corner, the room led off to another hallway ahead of us. To our right was a reception desk, a Pangolin at the counter, who looked up as Victoria and I approached. “Can I help you?”
“Hi there, I’m Victoria Kloar and this is Henry Gorden. We’re with ZPD homicide, we’re here to have a look at a body associated with a case we’re investigating.”
The Pangolin looks over her computer screen, tapping away at the keyboard and scrolling with the mouse before coming to a stop. She then pushed back in her chair and leaned below the desk, grabbing a clipboard and pen. “Hmm… your body is the one from last night that was recovered from James Street. We’ve got her over at Body Holding, I’ll call up the coroner, they'll take you to have a look, won’t be a moment.”
“Thank you.” I said as the attendant grabbed a phone receiver and pressed one of the speed dial numbers. I wandered over to where Victoria was standing in front of the television. Walking up next to her, looking up at what was on the screen. “What’s on?”
“Nothing yet, I’m looking to see if they’ve got anything from last night on.”
“Really?” I looked at my watch “But it’s like, seven thirty, you’d have kids watching right now. I wouldn’t even expect the morning shows to be reporting that sort of stuff.”
“They’ve got it on a nocturnal channel, about now is when they start their late-night news block.” I looked back up at the television, only just noticing that the news anchor was a bat.
“You think they’d have anything already?”
She laughed. “Never underestimate reporters in this city Henry. They’re just as much of a pain in the arse as the criminals…well, maybe not as much: a bit more I think.”
“They’re that curious?”
“Oh yeah. After that Night-howler thing from a few years back every single mammal who was on the city’s payroll was under suspicion. Mammals feared the government more than the damn mafia.” She looked away from the television to me “Can you believe that?”
“From where I’m from Victoria, that is very believable indeed. Mammals fear what they don’t understand. No one understood at first why predators went savage, so, as what I’m guessing was a social defence mechanism, they attributed it to something that defines predators.”
“Biology.”
I nodded. “And I’m guessing the protests weren’t the worse things that happened with every deliberate fuck up that Ewe bitch made.”
“That, Henry, is the true understatement of the century. There were riots everywhere; predators and prey rioting, smashing up shit and burning down entire blocks. I can tell you from experience Henry, Bellwether never needed to manipulate a flower to throw the city into chaos.” She takes a deep breath, reaching for a packet of cigarettes but returning it to her pocket.
“Those riots were such a fucking mess.” She said as she got her paw and rubbed it over her head, pulling her ears back before they flopped back upright.
“I feel sorry for you, seeing stuff like that.”
“Can’t imagine that it would have been worse than what you’ve seen.”
“Well…not really. I mean Maw was bad, and I don’t doubt that it’s gotten worse. The crime there is like an untreatable cancer that you can still find everywhere. I remember that it’s most obvious symptom was poor bookkeeping. But even then…it was organised. Controlled chaos is the best way to describe it I think.” I took a deep breath “But what happened here way back, it was just pure chaos.”
“I think you’ve hit the nail right on the head Gorden.” She looks back up at the news channel, nothing seeming to be on “I just hope this isn’t somehow related to that. I hope it…that it isn’t like a ghost from this city’s past coming back to haunt it.” We stood in silence together, just looking up at the television but not paying any attention to what was on, as if our minds wanted to preoccupy themselves but weren’t taking anything in. I smacked my lips and swallowed as my mouth became dry, a taste other than coffee beginning to swell in it.
Rust.
Instinctively I turned my head towards the hallway, an antelope walked into the room and over to us. He was wearing a white lab coat and a blue hospital gown underneath, a surgical mask hanging around his neck. I turned my body to face him, Victoria doing the same as she noticed him approach. “Hello detectives” He extended his hoof to Victoria, who shook it and then to me “I’m Abraham Valentine. I was the coroner who arrived at your crime scene and examined the body.” After our pawshake he put his hoofs back into the pockets of his coat. “We’ve got her body in holding. I'll take you to have a look.”
“I have to tell you detectives,” He said as we walked down the hallway “In all my forty years, I have never dealt with a case quite like this one.”
Ahead of us the hallway split, one way turning left, and the other leading to a pair of swivelling metal doors with BODY HOLDING printed across them along with numerous biohazard warnings. The doors opened up to a large rectangular room, the walls lined with two rows of mortuary refrigerator doors. In the centre of the room were two metal tables positioned parallel to each other. On one of them lay a body, covered in a white blanket.
As Victoria and I walk over to the left side of the table, Valentine went to the right, leaning over and furling the blanket to the head of the doe. Her head lay limp to one side, her eyes were closed and her lips had turned a purple colour. It was weird to think so, but she almost looked peaceful.
“Well detectives, I’m sure you don’t need me to explain the doe’s cause of death.” He snaps on a pair of rubber gloves, removing the blanket further to reveal the doe’s neck and it’s gapping hole. “She died as a result of her right carotid artery feeding back blood into her heart and lunges. While it’s possible that the heightened state of shock may have sent her into cardiac arrest, but considering her lunges were so full of blood and mucus, I’d say she would have dry drowned.”
He then moves his hoofs to the wound, placing them around the exposed flesh. “The puncture to her carotid artery was from someone taking a deep chunk of flesh out. This wasn't taken out with anything like a machete or blunt object, it was definitely by another mammal. You’d be looking at a mammal with a lot of jaw power to cut through flesh, a Hyena, for example.”
“Any implications on how the bite was taken?” Victoria asks.
“What do you mean?”
“She means is there any evidence that it was intentional or…”
“Oh no” He shakes his head “The bite was taken with intension.” He puts his hoof near the top of the wound, grabbing a dangling artery and holding it in the palm of his hoof. “The arteries have been torn outwards, the flesh running horizontally to her chest is mattered while running vertically it’s much cleaner, muscle and skin tissue are cut by clear tooth incisions. Means that they sunk their jaw into her neck deeply, pressing down hard before clamping and ripping out the flesh, quite aggressively I must add.” He leans back away from the doe “If it was accidental, then there would be no signs of such significant pressure.” What he just said perked my interests, I went to ask a question about what he meant when Victoria spoke up.
“You said before that they tore out the chunk aggressively. But it was her carotid artery that was punctured. When we arrived at the scene, my partner noted that there was very little blood if she was bleeding out, even if she was dry drowning.”
“Well, detectives…that is where it gets a little…odd. We ran a contemporary toxicology screening of her blood. We found traces of methamphetamines and neurotic hormonal steroids.”
“So she was drugged with meth and pastor?”
“Yes, at least that’s what the CT detected. I’m sure that you’re both aware that pastor is, for a lack of better words, a day rape drug. Now what makes pastor so…popular , is when mixed with certain substances it causes the blood to thicken, less of it gets to brain and as such the victim becomes less coherent. Mix that in with the influx of a sex drive…well I’m sure you know the result.”
“Yes.” Victoria said, swallowing a lump in her throat.
“And unfortunately for this doe it appears the pastor was used to make her an easier target” He grabs the bottom half of the blanket, quickly rolling it up and revealing the doe’s crotch. “There is evidence of vaginal penetration; I have no doubt that she was raped.” Her crotch had been shaved and her vagina was mangled, the skin around her entrance had a red rash while the vagina itself was welted and scarred. I kept myself steady; reminding myself that I’d seen worse, and that I’d probably see worse by retirement. I looked to Victoria; her face seemed emotionless, like she couldn’t react. “There is evidence of bleaching around her vagina and surrounding crotch, most likely to remove any DNA residue. Swabs indicate that they used hydrogen peroxide. A relatively easy bleaching agent to come across so I'm afraid that doesn't narrow down the search for your suspect.” Valentine then took the blanket and unfurled it to cover up the doe.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about what happened to her, anything that could give us any leads?” I ask him as he walks over to a sink, disposing of his gloves and washing his hoofs.
“Other than the obscurity of it? Not much.” He turns off the tap and dries his hoofs, walking back over to us. “I won’t have much more to tell you until I get the thorough toxicology report back, but whoever bit into her, it was a predator. Large one too with very strong jaw power; hyena comes to mind but there are further tests run, we’re going to see if we can get and tooth impressions out of the flesh to narrow it down.”
“Thank you for your help.” Victoria said as we turned to leave.
“No problems detectives, I’ll let you know of any updates.” We leave Body Holding and into the waiting room. As Victoria headed to the counter I wandered over to the television, curious to see if, be it a one in a million chance, they were covering anything on our case. As luck would have it, fortune favoured those odds.
“…And in recent news a murder has been reported near the bustling nightlife district of Owl Street, early reports indicating that the murder took place at ‘U Rent’s Storage Facility on James Street between the hours of one am to two thirty. Details are still sketchy but it is believed that the victim is an impala doe. The ZPD is yet to release a statement detailing the victim or if they have any leads but we’ll keep you up to date on any further developments. Now to Ricky with finance…”
I noticed Victoria walk up behind me with the autopsy report in hand, passing it to me and looking up at the television. "They were reporting it weren’t they?”
“Yeah, they moved on from it quickly though.” I say as I begin to flip through the dossier.
“Don’t breath a sigh of relief yet Henry. Just wait till the daytime channels get a hold of it. They’ll try to martyr us when we have to give the press release.”
“Well then we better get back to the station, report on what we’ve got.” I continue flipping through the dossier, turning a page and looking it over. “This thing seems like it has just as many leads as it does dead ends.” I follow Victoria as she begins walking out of the waiting room, catching up with her and walking by her side out of the doors and down the morgue’s steps. “How do you think mammals are going to react when they start running this on the six o’clock news?”
Victoria sighs, getting out the keys from her pocket “This city is still licking its wounds Henry, it never just ‘moved-on’ from what Bellwether did. The fear is still there...it just lies right below the surface. This…is probably going to bring it all to a fucking head. Nice little prey girl gets raped and mauled by a big scary pred? Those fifteen minutes of fame is all that the zealots will need. This city…it’s something beautiful Henry, no doubt about it. But it’s so fragile and it’s only one bad day away from tearing itself apart.” We each get into the car, Victoria starting the engine and pulling out of the car park onto the road, heading back towards the station.
“The first thing we should do is try and back step the doe’s night. Find out what she was doing, if she was out with any friends or family.”
“She could have been out clubbing near Owl. Whoever targeted her slipped a roofie in her drink at the bar while she wasn’t looking. Got her a bit tipsy, took her out to Sahara” She takes a breath “Rapes her and dumps the body.”
“It’s a textbook crime isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes it is.”
“Still…why dump the body somewhere like a storage lot? It would’ve been found sooner or later. If you wanted to dump a body, you’d dump it…well, in a dumpster. They left her in a storage lot poorly enough to be found by the guard. I’ve got a feeling that they sort of wanted her to be found.”
“Why would they want her to be found?”
“Well I think that stems from the animalistic desires of this thing. They murdered this doe because of desire; they picked her out, hunted her down and killed her. Maybe they subconsciously like the idea of being on the other end of the spectrum; the hunter becomes the hunted so to speak. This isn’t a mammal who operates and thinks normally, so they wouldn’t react normally to something like this.”
“Yeah…honestly I don’t know what to think of whoever did this. But what we need to do is start asking questions in the right places to the right mammals. We’ll head back to the station and get some names. Someone must know what happened to her.” I nodded, looking out my side window as we drove on through the traffic. As we passed the buildings I looked over to the sidewalk, noticing a wildebeest and jaguar who were walking arm in arm, adoring the city sights. I felt uneasy as I noticed how they got a few stares from passing mammals, as if it was foreshadowing to something coming.
I felt as if the two of us had become tangled in the web, and we were blind to the spider.