Night Warriors, page 2
‘I don’t know, I’m just making an observation,’ the medical examiner replied.
‘You observe that the body is lying further up the beach than the seaweed and the logs and the other trash?’
‘That’s correct.’
Lieutenant Ortega sucked at his teeth again. His earlier efforts obviously hadn’t succeeded in dislodging the fragment of food that was worrying him. ‘You observe that the body is lying further up the beach than the seaweed and the other trash, and from this observation you conclude that the girl was not drowned at all, but that she died in some other way and was left on the beach, either by accident, or with the deliberate intention of making it appear as if she had drowned?’
‘You said it, not me,’ replied the medical examiner, palpating the dead girl’s right leg, and watching to see what finger-marks he made. He snapped his fingers and one of the gum-chewing medics brought him his alloy medical-case, and opened it up for him. He rummaged around inside it until he found his thermometer, which he lubricated, and then unceremoniously inserted into the body’s anus. ‘If she’s been floating around in the ocean all night, the probability is that her body temperature will be far lower than if she’s been lying on the beach. That will depend when she died, of course; but this beach is pretty well crowded right up until sundown, isn’t that true?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Detective Morris agreed. ‘Sometimes well after sundown, too, when the kids have cookouts.’
The medical examiner waited patiently for the girl’s body temperature to have its effect on the mercury in his thermometer. Meanwhile he looked up at Henry and Gil and Susan, and said, ‘Who are these people? Gawkers, or what?’
‘These people found the body,’ said Lieutenant Ortega.
The medical examiner asked Henry, ‘Ever see anybody dead on this beach before?’
Henry shook his head.
‘Fine way to start the day, finding a body,’ the medical examiner remarked, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. He withdrew his thermometer and frowned at it carefully. ‘Sixty-one degrees.’
‘And what does that mean?’ asked Lieutenant Ortega.
‘It means that the temperature inside the body is sixty-one degrees,’ said the medical examiner.
‘But what do you conclude?’
‘Conclude? I don’t conclude anything. It’s up to you to make the conclusions. But you could take into consideration the fact that the air temperature here is something like fifty-five or fifty-six degrees, and that the ocean temperature is something like forty-two to forty-eight degrees.’
‘So, if the body had been floating in the water all night, her body temperature would have been lower than sixty-one degrees?’ said Lieutenant Ortega.
‘Possibly,’ the medical examiner replied.
Lieutenant Ortega let out another of his short, testy breaths. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Now can we turn her over?’
The medical examiner stood up, and fastidiously brushed the sand from the knees of his pants. As he did so, the two medics came forward, and positioned themselves on either side of the body. Henry, watching, was gripped by an irrational feeling of dread, and he had the strongest urge to turn and look the other way. Somehow, however, he found that he couldn’t, that he had to watch. Otherwise the girl on the beach would remain faceless forever, and when he dreamed about her at night, which he inevitably would, he would see nothing but that mermaid hair, tangled with weed, and nothing but that long pale back.
‘Be careful,’ the medical examiner instructed the medics. ‘I don’t want any extra bruising.’
He came over and stood next to Henry and Gil and Susan. ‘You didn’t touch her at all, or try to move her?’
Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think I would have had the nerve.’
Susan ventured, ‘Do you suppose that somebody might have killed her? I mean, on purpose?’
The medical examiner pulled a face. ‘Girls of this age are always susceptible to being killed, either on purpose or accidentally, or else through carelessness. Pretty girls especially. They have more power than they know. Their youth and their looks give them power. The trouble is, they never know how to use it. Not safely, anyway.’
With exaggerated care, the two medics eased the girl’s body out of the sand, and then rolled her on to her back.
Her arm fell against the wet beach with a slapping sound and then one of the medics said, in a peculiar voice, ‘Jesus Christ.’
Henry stared, but at first he couldn’t understand what he was staring at. The medical examiner moved forward at once, and stood over the body, his face disassembled into no recognisable expression at all. Fear? Horror? Fascination? The two medics took a step back, one of them holding his hand over his mouth, and looking watery eyed. Lieutenant Ortega had been standing with his back to the body, talking to Morris and Warburg; but then Warburg nudged him and he turned around and saw what the girl really looked like.
Her face was almost beautiful, in spite of the fact that it had been swollen by the sea. A classic blonde, with classic American bone-structure, the sort of girl who could easily have found herself an acting part in Matt Houston or Magnum, P.I. or even Dynasty. Wide shouldered, large breasted; but beneath her ribcage the horror began. Henry suddenly understood what he was looking at, and whispered, ‘Oh, God,’ and Susan buried her face in her hands.
The girl’s abdomen had been completely ripped out, from her ribs to her pelvis, and inside her abdominal cavity scores of silvery-black eels were writhing; a tumultuous nest of slithering creatures, twining and untwining themselves, blindly feeding on what was left of the dead girl’s softer organs.
Gil turned away, buckled at the knees, crouched on the sand, and retched. The uniformed policemen stared in alarm and helplessness; even the photographer crossed himself. For minutes on end, there was nothing that any of them could do but watch the knotted tangle of eels as they heaved and twisted and wriggled, and the pale emotionless face of the girl whose’body they were slowly devouring.
The medical examiner turned to Lieutenant Ortega with widened eyes. ‘Ever see anything like that, ever!’
Lieutenant Ortega abruptly shook his head.
‘Me neither,’ said the medical examiner. Then he turned to the medics and said, ‘Get rid of those things.’
The medics looked unhappily down at the body. ‘You mean …?’
‘Whatever they are, those eels. Those snakes. Get them out of there.’
One of the medics picked up a stick from the beach, and approached the body gingerly. He leaned forward, and prodded the eels with the tip of it, just once. Immediately, the eels wriggled and twisted even more furiously, and the medic jumped back with a high-pitched ‘aah!’ of irrepressible disgust.
The medical examiner impatiently took the stick away from him and circled around the body himself. While everybody else watched him with flesh-crawling apprehension, he prodded the eels two or three times, and each time they boiled in the dead girl’s stomach with the same slippery fury. Suddenly, however, the medical examiner managed to hook the end of the stick underneath one of them and flip it out on to the beach.
The eel was almost three feet long, with a flat chisel-shaped head and tiny blind eyes. It flapped and writhed on the surface for a while; then it burrowed its head into the sand, and within seconds it had disappeared, leaving nothing on the sand but a slight indentation. Almost immediately, the remaining eels poured out of the dead girl’s pelvis, and scattered in all directions, burying themselves deep into the sand.
‘Catch one!’ the medical examiner shouted, urgently.
One of the uniformed policemen snatched at the tail of the last eel to disappear, and tugged at it furiously.
‘Give me a hand for Chrissake!’ he gasped to his uniformed partner. His partner came hurrying across and gripped the eel’s body nearer to the sand, and between them, cursing and grunting, they gradually managed to drag the creature backwards out of the hole it had been burrowing for itself.
As soon as its head was clear, though, the eel lashed and looped and twisted wildly around in the air. Henry saw its teeth flicker; and then it wriggled like a whip, and caught one of the policemen directly in the face, clamping its jaws over his upper lip and part of his nose.
The policeman shrieked out loud, and snatched at the eel’s head, trying to prize its jaws apart. Henry watched in horror as the man danced around the sand, the silvery-black eel wriggling from his face like a carnival nose. Bright-red blood began to sprinkle all around them.
Lieutenant Ortega dodged forward, and seized the officer from behind, tripping him up so that they both fell heavily on to the ground. The policeman was screaming wildly, and his legs were jerking like an epileptic marionette. Lieutenant Ortega reached around to the officer’s face, and clutched the eel right behind its chisel-shaped head, squeezing the gills closed so that the creature would be unable to breathe. Then he held up his free hand and yelled, ‘Knife, for God’s sake!’
The medical examiner dug hurriedly into his pockets, and came up with a single-bladed clasp knife. Lieutenant Ortega snatched it from him, and then cut into the welter of blood in front of the policeman’s face. The policeman screamed again and again while Lieutenant Ortega sawed through the eel’s body. The eel’s own blood spurted out dark, like bile, and splattered all over Ortega’s hands and arms. Its tail lashed furiously from side to side, right up until the last moment when Ortega cut its spinal column, and flung its body across the sand. The headless body lay twitching and jerking, and the medics cautiously stepped away from it.
The medical examiner knelt down on the sand and examined the policeman closely. The policeman was shivering and trembling and Lieutenant Ortega was doing everything he could to soothe him. The eel’s severed head was still gripping the policeman’s face, and when the medical examiner quickly dabbed away the blood with cotton and distilled water, he could see that the creature’s teeth had already detached half of the policeman’s nostril and most of his upper lip. The eel’s jaw muscles showed no signs of relaxing; it was plain that any attempt to pull its head away would make the injury far more severe than it was already.
Henry came up, and although he was trembling himself, he said, as steadily as he could, ‘You know what they used to do in Vietnam, to get the leeches off?’
‘That’s right,’ said the medical examiner. ‘They used to burn them off with lighted cigarettes. Does anyone here have a cigarette?’
Everybody looked at each other. In the end, Detective Warburg said, ‘Nobody smokes, sir.’
‘Jesus,’ said the medical examiner. ‘Only in Southern California.’
‘Perhaps a cigarette-lighter, from one of the cars,’ Henry suggested.
Detective Morris jogged off to the nearest car, and came back a minute or so later with his belly bouncing, and a glowing cigarette-lighter held up in his hand. He handed it to the medical examiner, and the medical examiner immediately touched it against the eel’s raw neck.
There was a sharp sizzle, a sickly odour of burning; then the eel’s jaws clamped convulsively tight and bit away the whole of the policeman’s upper lip and nostril, dropping on to the ground in a sudden spurt of blood. The policeman let out a tight, choked shriek, his upper teeth hideously exposed, and Lieutenant Ortega had to wrestle him down against the sand.
‘Plasma!’ the medical examiner shouted. ‘And you!’ he ordered the injured policeman’s partner. ‘Take that head and cut the damn thing in half, and get your buddy’s face out of its mouth!’
It took the medics less than five busy minutes to bandage the policeman’s face and set him up on to a plasma drip, to reduce the effects of shock. While they worked, the policeman’s partner manhandled a pair of bolt-cutters out of the trunk of his patrol-car, and nudged the eel’s head around on the sand so that he could position it between the blades. He tried twice to cut it in half, but both times the head slipped out. Then Gil came forward and rested the head against the toe of his shoe, so that it wouldn’t roll away. There was a sharp, crisp crunch, and the eel’s skull was chopped apart. The medical examiner stooped down and extracted the bloody rag of flesh that the creature had wrenched away from the policeman’s face.
‘I want that bastard in a plastic bag,’ he told Detective Morris. ‘Head, tail, and anything else you can find.’
Lieutenant Ortega looked at his watch. ‘It’s almost seven. Let’s get this beach cordoned off. Warburg – call for some back-up. I want a digging detail. If those eels killed that girl, I want them dug out and destroyed. I want the coastguard alerted, too. They’ll probably want to put up a temporary ban on swimming. Morris, you go along with the M. E. I want the fastest post mortem in the history of the world.’
‘Is there anything that we can do?’ asked Henry.
Lieutenant Ortega stared at Henry as if he had never seen him before. ‘You? Oh, you can go home. Give your name and address to Detective Morris here, he’ll come and talk to you later. And, please, don’t leave the area, not until you’ve made your statement. And don’t talk to the newspapers or the television. This is one of those situations that causes panic, you understand me? I’d rather we kept the whole thing quiet, just for now.’
Henry said to Gil and Susan, ‘That’s it. I guess we can leave.’
Susan was very pale. ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ she said.
‘Sit down for a moment,’ Henry told her. ‘Put your head down between your knees.’
While they waited for Susan to recover, Henry looked across the beach at the body of the girl they had found. From where he was crouching, next to Susan, he was unable to see the gaping cavity of her stomach; the girl could have been lying serene and naked in the mist, waiting for the sun to break through. She was really quite beautiful, Henry thought to himself, and somehow that made her death seem even more horrifying.
‘I’m all right now,’ said Susan. She tried to get up, and Gil gave her his arm.
Henry was watching the medics lift the girl’s body off the beach, and zipper it up in a body-bag. Against the mist, the figures looked like an Oriental shadow-play. ‘I never saw anything like that before in my whole life,’ he said. ‘Those eels – did you ever see anything like that? And I used to be married to an oceanographer.’
They walked up the beach together. When they reached the boardwalk, Henry suggested, ‘Come and have a drink. That’s my cottage, right over there. I expect you could use something to settle your nerves.’
‘I think I want to get home, thank you,’ said Susan. She glanced back down at the beach and her eyes were staring with repressed hysteria.
Gil asked her, gently, ‘Where do you live? I could take you.’
‘Do you have a car?’
‘Sure, that Mustang convertible right across the street.’
‘Okay, then, thank you.’
They walked off together, Gil and Susan, leaving Henry standing alone. After a while, Henry shrugged, and walked the sixty yards back to his cottage, unlocking the door with the key which he always kept around his wrist. He went through to the living-room, opened up the glass-fronted cocktail cabinet, and poured himself a very large vodka, straight up, no ice, and drank it.
He coughed as the vodka burned its way down his throat. Then he filled up his glass again, and walked over to the wide sliding windows which led out on to the balcony.
He could see the police cars from here, with their flashing lights, and Lieutenant Ortega in his cinnamon-coloured suit. Further down the beach, towards Del Mar, two uniformed policemen were already dragging trestles across the beach, marked Police Line – Do Not Cross.
Henry watched the police activity for almost twenty minutes. Then he went back into the cottage and sat down on the white-painted bamboo sofa, and stared at himself in the shiny glass door of the stereo cabinet on the opposite side of the room.
Life after death? The only life in that poor dead girl had been those wriggling eels; and what kind of life did they represent?
He thought about the morning’s events and all he could see was a series of frightening still pictures. The girl’s hand, clutching at the beach. The silver chain on her ankle. The whiteness of her back. Then the eels, in their complicated Chinese-puzzle pattern. And the severed head of that single captured eel, gripping the policeman’s face like an ancient symbol of evil persistence.
He finished his third glass of vodka, and then tilted across to the cocktail cabinet to drain the bottle into his glass. ‘Stolichnaya,’ he pronounced, with what he liked to think was a thick Russian accent. Then, ‘Zdarovya.’
With inebriated care, he went to the bookshelf at the end of the room, under the window, and ran his finger along the spines of all the marine books that his less-than-dear departed wife had left behind her. At last he came across a large illustrated volume entitled Anguilliformes: Migration & Life-Cycles of Common Eels. He tugged it out, took it over to the coffee-table, and opened it up.
It was the quotation on the opening page that caught his attention first of all. It said simply, ‘The eel was eaten in olden times because it was thought to give exceptional potency. In certain parts of ancient Scandinavia, shoals of eels were described by a single mystical word which meant “sperm of the Devil”.’
Henry was about to take another drink, but he paused, and read the quotation again. Then he looked towards the balcony, and out towards the beach, and frowned.
Chapter Two
Gil and Susan said very little as they drove back to Del Mar Heights Road, where Susan lived. Gil glanced across at Susan from time to time, but he could see that she was still shocked by what had happened at the beach. He was pretty queasy himself, thinking about those eels writhing silvery-black in that woman’s white body, and how that policeman’s face had been half bitten off.
Susan said, ‘Here – here it is,’ and Gil steered the shiny yellow Mustang up the steeply angled concrete driveway, and yanked up the handbrake. He hopped out of the car without opening the door, and went around to the passenger side to let Susan out.
