‘I sort of wish we had Bibi Roth here,’ Tony said.
Curt made no verbal reply to that, but the flash of his eyes suggested that was the last thing in the world he wanted. The Buick belonged to the Troop. And anything that came out of it belonged to the Troop.
Curt opened the door of the storage closet and went in, pulling the chain that turned on the little room’s green-shaded hanging lamp. Tony followed. There was a table not much bigger than a grade-schooler’s desk under the light. Small as the closet was, there was barely room for two, let alone three. That was fine with Sandy; he never stepped over the threshold at all that night.
Shelves heaped with old files crowded in on three sides. Curt put his microscope on the little desk and plugged its light-source into the closet’s one outlet. Sandy, meanwhile, was setting up Huddie Royer’s videocam on its sticks. In the video of that peculiar postmortem, one can sometimes see a hand reach into the picture, holding out whatever instrument Curt has called for. It’s Sandy Dearborn’s hand. And one can hear the sound of vomiting at the end of the tape, loud and clear. That is also Sandy Dearborn.
‘Let’s see the leaves first,’ Curt said, snapping on a pair of the surgical gloves.
Tony had a bunch of them in a small evidence bag. He handed it over. Curt opened it and took out the remains of the leaves with a small pair of tongs. There was no way to get just one; by now they were all semi-transparent and stuck together like clumps of Saran Wrap.
They were seeping little trickles of fluid, and the men could smell their aroma — that uneasy mix of cabbage and peppermint — immediately. It was not nice, but it was a long way from unbearable. Unbearable was at that point still ten minutes in the future.
Sandy used the zoom in order to get a good image of Curt separating a fragment of the mass from the whole, using the pincers deftly. He’d treated himself to a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and here was the payoff.
He transferred the fragment directly to the stage of the microscope, not attempting to make a slide. Phil Candleton’s leaves were just the Coming Attractions reel. Curtis wanted to get to the feature presentation as soon as possible.
He bent over the twin eyepieces for a good long time nevertheless, then beckoned Tony for a look.
‘What’re the black things that look like threads?’ Tony asked after several seconds of study.
His voice was slightly muffled by his pink mask.
‘I don’t know,’ Curt said. ‘Sandy, give me that gadget that looks like a Viewmaster. It has a
couple of cords wrapped around it and PROPERTY H.U. BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT Dymotaped on the side.’
Sandy passed it to him over the top of the videocam, which was pretty much blocking the doorway. Curt plugged one of the cords into the wall and the other into the base of the microscope. He checked something, nodded, and pushed a button on the side of the Viewmaster thing three times, presumably taking pictures of the leaf fragments on the microscope’s stage.
‘Those black things aren’t moving,’ Tony said. He was still peering into the microscope.
‘No.’
Tony finally raised his head. His eyes had a dazed, slightly awed look. ‘Is it … could it be like, I don’t know, DNA?’
Curt’s mask bobbed slightly on his face as he smiled. This is a great scope, Sarge, but we couldn’t see DNA with it. Now, if you wanted to go up to Horlicks with me after midnight and pull a bag-job, they’ve got this really beautiful electron microscope in the Evelyn Silver Physics Building, never been driven except by a little old lady on her way to church and her weekly — ‘
‘What’s the white stuff?’ Tony asked. The stuff the black threads are floating in?’
‘Nutrient, maybe.’
‘But you don’t know.’
‘Of course I don’t know.’
‘The black threads, the white goo, why the leaves are melting, what that smell is. We don’t know dick about any of those things.’
‘No.’
Tony gave him a level look. ‘We’re crazy to be fucking with this, aren’t we?’
‘No,’ Curt said. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction made him fat. You want to come in and take a peek, Sandy?’
‘You took photos, right?’
‘I did if this thing worked the way it’s s’posed to.’
‘Then I’ll take a pass.’
‘Okay, let’s move on to the main event,’ Curt said. ‘Maybe we’ll actually find something.’
The gobbet of leaves went back into the evidence bag and the evidence bag went back into a file cabinet in the corner. That battered green cabinet would become quite the repository of the weird and strange over the next two decades.
In another corner of the closet was an orange Eskimo cooler. Inside, under two of those blue chemical ice packets people sometimes take on camping trips, was a green garbage bag.
Tony lifted it out and then waited while Curt finished getting ready. It didn’t take long. The only real delay was finding an extension cord so they could plug in both of the Tensor lamps without disturbing the microscope or the attached still camera. Sandy went to get a cord from
the cabinet of odds and ends at the far end of the hall. While he was doing that, Curt placed his borrowed microscope on a nearby shelf. (of course, in those close quarters, everything was nearby) and set up an easel on the desktop. On this he mounted a square of tan corkboard. Beneath it he placed a small metal trough of the sort found on the more elaborate barbecue setups, where they are used to catch drippings. Off to one side he put a jar-top filled with Push-pins.
Sandy came back with the extension cord. Curt plugged in the lamps so they shone on the corkboard from either side, illuminating his work-surface with a fierce, even glow that eliminated every shadow. It was obvious he’d thought all of this out, step by step. Sandy wondered how many nights he’d lain awake long after Michelle had gone to sleep beside him.
Just lying there and looking up at the ceiling and going over the procedure in his mind.
Reminding himself he’d just have the one shot. Or how many afternoons there had been, Curt parked a little way up some farmer’s lane with the Genesis radar gun pointed at an empty stretch of highway, calculating how many practice bats he’d have to go through before he dared tackle the real thing.
‘Sandy, are you getting glare from these lights?’
He checked the viewfinder. ‘No. With white I probably would, but tan is great.’
‘Okay.’
Tony unwound the yellow tie holding the neck of the garbage bag shut. The moment he opened it, the smell got stronger. ‘Whew, Jesus!’ he said, waving a gloved hand. Then he reached in and pulled out another evidence bag, this one a large.
Sandy was watching over the top of the camera. The thing in the bag looked like a shopworn freak show monstrosity. One of the dark wings was folded over the lower body, the other pressed against the clear plastic of the evidence bag, making him think of a hand pressed against a pane of glass. Sometimes when you collared a drunk and shut him in the back of the cruiser he’d put his hands on the glass and look out at the world from between them, a dazed dark face framed by starfish. This was a little like that, somehow.
‘Seal’s open in the middle,’ Curt said, and nodded disapprovingly at the evidence bag. ‘That explains the smell.’
Nothing explained it, in Sandy’s opinion.
Curt opened the bag completely and reached inside. Sandy felt his stomach knot into a sick ball and wondered if he could have forced himself to do what Curt was doing. He didn’t think so. Trooper Wilcox never hesitated, however. When his gloved fingers touched the corpse in the bag, Tony recoiled a little. His feet stayed put but his upper body swayed backward, as if to avoid a punch. And he made an involuntary sound of disgust behind his cute pink mask.
‘You okay?’ Curt asked.
‘Yes,’ Tony said.
‘Good. I’ll mount it. You pin it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes, goddammit.’
‘Because I feel queasy, too.’ Sandy could see sweat running down the side of Curl’s face, dampening the elastic that held his mask.
‘Let’s save the sensitivity-training session for later and just get it done, what do you say?’
Curt lifted the bat-thing to the corkboard. Sandy could hear an odd and rather terrible sound as he did so. It might have been only the combination of overstrained ears and the quiet rustle of clothes and gloves, but Sandy didn’t actually believe that. It was dead skin rubbing against dead skin, creating a sound that was somehow like words spoken very low in an alien tongue. It made Sandy want to cover his ears.