Broken Monsters (23 page)

It is
a train wreck with a plane crash on top. The police have to lock down three blocks. They have to hold four hundred partygoers against their will, not including the ones who have already piled into their cars and slipped away, while they search every damn inch of every damn house for anything that may or may not be related, and with some of this stuff they can't even begin to guess.

Evidence Tech is not happy. Neither are the officers, who are trying to get statements out of drunken revelers who keep insisting that they know their rights! It turns out that they do not know their rights, they're reciting lines from TV shows. But then some wiseass does an online search for their actual rights and starts passing them around, and Gabi has to wade in and point out that there has been a murder and the DPD appreciates their cooperation.

A cluster of people become hysterical. It's catching.

She leaves the uniformed officers to handle the demands for trauma counseling, and gets on with interviewing the most useful people, starting with the curator.

There are two of them, but they've only been able to track down the one so far. Patrick Thorpe is a slight barely-thirty with a shaved head who speaks with the low reassuring musicality of an insurance advertisement, even though he is spitting with outrage. Boyd hates him instantly on principle.

“Art fag,” he leans in to mutter in Gabi's ear, as if he is telling her something useful. Score one for the homophobes.

“Is this how the city of Detroit encourages a creative economy?” Patrick stutters. “We have all the permits!” She realizes that he is very drunk and in shock, which she is going to use to her advantage.

“Not for open alcohol containers in the street, sir. And not for exhibiting human remains.”

“This is ridiculous. The bone gallery is made of pewter casts of animal skeletons. There are no human remains.”

“Bone gallery?” Boyd raises an eyebrow.

“Send someone to check that out too,” Gabi says. For all she knows, this place is full of corpses. “I'm going to level with you, Patrick. You remember Daveyton Lafonte?”

“The kid who was killed?”

“He was found cut in half together with the remains of half a deer. The missing halves just turned up in your show. Now you can help me try to identify who left it here, or we can continue this downtown. Do you know what that means?”

“I'm a suspect?” His legs wobble, and Gabi grabs his arm to steady him.

“You can start by telling me if you commissioned this piece or recognize it.” She shoves her phone in front of him with the photograph of the thing Layla found in the yard.

“No. God, no.” His eyes widen. “That's hideous. I would never…”

“You're saying this wasn't an official work?”

“No. No, no, no.” He shakes his head violently.

“I'm going to need you to sober the hell up, sir. In the meantime, can you give us a list of your participating artists?”

“A catalog?”

“I need names and contact details. And I need to know who had access to that yard when you were setting up. All of it.”

Cas's phone
goes straight to voicemail. “Yo, bitches. Don't leave a message cuz I can't be bothered to check. Text me like a normal human being.”

The cop called Marcus drives her home, because her mom is going to be up all night.

“You did the right thing,” the rookie tells her in the car. But Layla doesn't even know what that is. The whole night has been a series of stun grenades.

 Back at the house, she helps him set up the sleeper couch through the shell shock. The last person to use it was her dad, over a year ago. She'd come downstairs to find him sitting on the couch in his boxers eating Frosted Flakes, the sheets balled up and shoved behind the TV cabinet, as if she was too dumb to work it out—the halfway house between the marital bed and the door. She remembers how irritated she was about it. Stay or go—don't fucking linger. But then he did go, and Layla realized that there are worse things than indecision.

“Bet you didn't think your official police duties would include babysitting.”

“I don't mind,” he says, but she can see he does. He's so earnest. He's got really long eyelashes, which make his eyes look bigger and a small chin, like a black manga Tobey Maguire. She tries to imagine her mom like this, full of eager faith. Give him a few years of department bureaucracy and see if it doesn't wear him out and break up his relationship.

“Sucks to be junior rank,” she says.

“I'll be right here if you need me,” he reassures her. “Try to get some sleep.”

She hovers in the doorway. She can't face going upstairs and being alone with her nonresponding phone and thoughts of the thing. “Hey, do you want to watch some TV?”

“
Now?
” He looks at his watch. She likes that he has one. He checks himself. “If you want to, sure.”

She can't stand the flit of pity that crosses his eyes. “Probably only infomercials anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, my mom canceled our cable.”

“If it's bothering you—I mean, you could sleep here and I could sit in the kitchen. Do paperwork.”

“Do you have your paperwork here?”

“No.”

“Don't sweat it,” she says and clumps upstairs. She tries not to see the deer-boy in the darkness. But it turns out there are worse things to see.

It takes no time to find the video. It comes up in the first few results. Not on YouTube, because it doesn't meet the community standards, but there are other sites. For every takedown, for every violation of service, there are mirrors and subthreads with links where you can stream it or download it to watch in the comfort of your home. It's right there under “honk_honkboobsUNCUT.mp4.” They used to put people in stocks to shame them in public. Now you just need a wi-fi connection. On the Internet, humiliation lives forever.

Cas is a beautiful, shiny California blonde. Wearing bubblegum-pink lipstick and a tank top with a skull picked out in shiny pink studs and a denim miniskirt. She is drooping, her arm around the neck of a teenage boy Layla doesn't recognize. Fuck. She can't look. She can't.

“Oh my God, she's soooooo drunk.”

“Help me.”

“Dude, she's passed out.”

“Get her over to the couch.”

“She's heavy.”

“That's why I need you to
help
me.”

“Lose some weight, lard-ass.” The sharp sound of a slap.

“Wait, wait. I want to get a picture of this.”

“Pull up her top.”

“Dumb slut.”

“Learn to handle your liquor, girlie!”

Another slap.

A boy doing a falsetto voice: “Oh, spank me, Daddy. Harder! Harder.”

“Help me prop her up.”

“Oof.”

“Okay, that's good.”

“Take off her top.”

“And her bra.”

“How does this thing unclip? Wait, I got it.”

“Hoooooly shiiiiiit.”

A wolf whistle.

Laughter.

“Take a photo. Me and Isabella's bazoombas. We're in love.”

“I want to get in there. Take a picture of me!”

“Get out of the way, douche bags. Hey, Trent. Hey, get a picture of this. Honk-honk! Boobs!”

“Oh my God. Dude, that's hilarious. Do it again.”

“Oh man, what a dumb fucking bitch.”

“Honk-honk! Honk-honk!”

Layla shuts down the player. There are still eight minutes of video left. She doesn't need to see the rest. She sits very still in front of her screen. Then she shuts herself in the bathroom and kneels in front of the toilet. She spits and spits, but nothing comes up. She'd be a terrible bulimic. She turns her head and rests her cheek on the cold porcelain, wrapping her arms around the bowl. She closes her eyes and the footage starts replaying in her head. No. She forces her mind away. Something harmless. She narrates the play to herself, runs through the whole thing, everyone's lines, not just hers, and the songs, again and again, until the words all run together.

Her mom finds her like that, asleep on the bathroom floor. “Come on, bean. You can't stay here.” She lifts her up and Layla clings to her neck. Gabi helps her into bed, still wearing her skirt and ripped tights and the stupid sequin top, and pulls the covers up around her shoulders. “You did good,” her mom says, and kisses her on the forehead. “I'll make a plan for Aunt Cheryl to come pick you up in the morning. I'm going to have to go back to the scene.”

“Mom!” Layla calls her back. Her mother pauses in the doorway, the light haloed behind her head. But everything is scrambled up, and she feels sick and sad and she doesn't know how to say any of the things she needs to.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“I'm sorry you had to see that,” her mom says.

Me too, Layla thinks, and falls away into a fractured sleep.

The crime
scene has become a grand spectacle ever since the sun came up, and it's getting worse by the hour. On the other side of the police tape, crowds have gathered, pulling up chairs and beers in brown paper bags, hoping to see something horrible. Gabi has commandeered a kitchen in a neighboring house for processing interviews and identifying possible witnesses, sending the most likely on down to the station. It would be nice if their man was among them, but so far they have nothing but rumor and speculation and some of the artists are screaming from the sidelines about how they're gonna sue and you think this city's bankrupt now, you wait till my lawyer is done with you! Apparently the sanctity of creative expression trumps life.

Jessica diMenna wants Gabi and Boyd to drop everything and get down to the mayor's office to discuss strategy, and that's a fair point, what with the media clamoring around the edges, trying to get shots, cameramen climbing trees, a press helicopter hanging low overhead, adding to the racket, and someone's even got a drone. Local and national out in force; hell, someone said Al Jazeera was here, somebody else heard that as Al-Qaeda, and then they had to shut everything down for an hour to control the panic: no terrorists, no bomb threats. Only a sick serial killer who may or may not have hidden more body parts in other places. It's sensational enough on its own.

She's managed two hours' sleep in the last twenty-eight hours, when she raced home to check on Layla, and now she has to sit with the goddamn curator, Patrick Thorpe, who hasn't had any sleep either and is becoming increasingly hysterical, although that might also be from his hangover. Eventually, they send him to dry out down at the station, a very grumpy officer accompanying him, and continue the interview with the other curator, a woman called Darcy D'Angelo, who is ruthlessly cooperative, especially when it comes to dismantling the art for forensic testing. Gabi gets the uneasy feeling she likes watching things get taken apart.

They have to bag everything. She's sent the blogger's phone for processing. Ovella Washington is taking statements, downloading phone footage from people willing to share their videos without a warrant, taking names for those who aren't, plugging each phone into a laptop they've got for this purpose, but the card reader is acting up and they have to get a technician in to sort it out and everyone is impatient.

Some idiot decided it would be a good idea to let Daveyton's parents know, and they've come down to see for themselves, even though the body was moved hours ago. The press descend on the Lafontes—their first public appearance—like starving pigeons on a crust of bread, jostling for space, screaming questions. Mrs. Lafonte flinches with each camera flash. They cling to each other, terrified, while Boyd tries to cover them with his jacket and hustle them through the hordes.

“I'm so sorry, your son isn't here,” Gabi tells them. “I don't know why they told you to come down.”

“I asked them to,” Jessica diMenna says, leaning in the door, dressed for television. “Thank you for being here. We've got a media caravan where you can sit quietly and prepare. If you could just say a few words about how relieved you are that the DPD has found the rest of Daveyton, it would be such a gesture of faith and solidarity in these men and women who are working so hard to bring his killer to justice.”

“But where is he?” Mrs. Lafonte asks, confused. “Where's our boy?” She's shrunk into herself since Gabi saw her last.

Mr. Lafonte is the opposite. The news has energized him, focused grief into rage. “The way they're talking about it on the news, Miss Mayoral-la-di-da, I get the idea
these men and women
haven't done shit. I heard Davey was propped up on display, like a lynching.”

“This wasn't a lynching,” Gabi is quick to tell them. God, that's the last thing they need. “We don't believe this is race-related. There was another victim on Friday. A white woman from Indian Village.”

“Another murder?” He's furious. “And where is this killer you're bringing to justice? Is he here? I don't see nobody in handcuffs. He's still out there, probably doing this to someone else's little boy right now. Or some other nice white lady. And you want me to go on TV? Talk to the press? Oh, I can do that. I'm ready to do that right now.”

Jessica is backpedaling furiously. “Please, Mr. Lafonte, I think Detective Versado's right. This is a terrible shock. You should be with your boy.”

“Miss, let me tell you straight, there is nothing on God's green earth that is going to shock me again. I am disappointed that you cannot do your job, but shocked? No.”

“I'll drive you down to the morgue,” Gabi says, even though she is so tired she can barely see straight. She just prays that Dr. Mackay, pulling overtime, has the body—or its constituent parts—presentable by now. “Bob, can you get someone to supervise dismantling the collection? Not you. I need you and Sparkles to start following up on those artists' names. I'll catch up with you later.”

“No problemo,” he says, even though he's as tired as she is.

“There's a spreadsheet of participating artists—start with a criminal record search, work your way down, cross-reference with the officers who have been taking statements, if any of the names jump out. Some of them work under pseudonyms, so you're going to have to establish their real names first.”

“I know, Gabi.”

“Sorry.”

“We'll look them up in the car, get on the door-to-door soon as we can. You take care of your people.”

“Thank you.” She ushers Mr. and Mrs. Lafonte out the door, hissing at the mayor's aide as she passes: “No more fucking surprises, okay?”