"Destroyer 022 - Brain Drain.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The room darkened, and Waldman felt himself becoming light, but he kept his balance and made his way out the door again, where he breathed deep the blessed stench of natural city air. Years of training and using his common sense took over. He got the police photographers in and out quickly, warning them beforehand that they had a horror ahead of them and that they should dotheir job as quickly, and especially as mechanically, as they could.
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The photographs would place the parts of bodies where they had been in the room. He personally tagged limb and head and random organs on a large chart of the room. He placed a limp eyeball in a clear plyofilm bag and labeled it. He got two detectives to question people in the building, another to track down the landlord. He had interns from nearby St. Vincent's Hospital help detectives to un-wedge the remnants of people from the walls and ceiling.
The butchered pieces were brought to the morgue. It was when they tried to reassemble the bodies for identification, which he knew by sight would be impossible-only fingerprints and dental work could identify these leavings-that he discovered the other beyond-reason element in a slaughter he had already stamped in his mind as beyond reason. The chief coroner was the first to point it out.
"Your people forgot to pick up something."
"What?"
"Look at the skulls."
The brains had been scraped out. "It was such a mess in there," said Waldman.
"Yeah. But where are the brains?"
"They must be here," said Waldman.
"Your people get everything?" asked the coroner.
"Yeah. We're even cleaning up now."
"Well, the brains are missing."
"They've got to be here somewhere. What about those bags full of gook?" asked Waldman.
"The gook, as you call it, includes everything but the brains."
"Then that organ of the deceased bodies was
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transported from the premises of the homicide by the perpetrator," said Waldman.
"That's right, Inspector," said the coroner. "Somebody took the brains."
At the press conference Inspector Waldman had to tell a Daily News reporter three times that the organs of the deceased that were missing were not the organs that the reporter thought they were. "Brains, if you really want to know," said Waldman.
"Shit," said the Daily News reporter. "There goes a great story. Not that this isn't good. But it could have been great."
Waldman went home to his Brooklyn apartment without having dinner. Thinking about the homicide, he had trouble sleeping. He had thought he had seen it all, but this was beyond . . . beyond ... beyond what? Not reason really. Reason had patterns. Someone, obviously with power tools, had taken apart human beings. That was a pattern. And the removal of the brains, no matter how disgusting, was a pattern. The arms in the walls, but not the legs, were part of the pattern. And so were the trunks of the bodies.
It must have taken a good two hours to whack out the crevices in the ceiling and the walls and to insert the bodies properly. But where were the tools? And if it did take two hours or even an hour, why was there only one set of bloody footprints when he had entered. The rookie cop had taken one look at the doorway and been escorted up by a detective. The first doctors to arrive had just looked inside the room and made a blanket pronouncement of death.
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Only the coroner's footprints were on the stairs when Waldman went in. How had the killer or killers left without leaving bloody footprints?
"Hey, Jake, come to bed," said Waldman's wife.
Waldman looked at his watch. It was 2:30 A.M.
"At this hour, Ethel?"
"I mean to sleep," said his wife. "I can't sleep without you near me."
So Inspector Jake Waldman slid under the quilt with his wife, felt her snuggle to him, and stared at the ceiling.
Assuming the homicides were rational, because of the pattern, what was the reason for the pattern? Arms in walls and bodies in ceilings. Brains removed.
"Hey, Jake," said Mrs. Waldman.
"What?"
"If you're not going to sleep, get out of bed."
"Make up your mind," said Waldman.
"Go to sleep," said Ethel.
"I am. I'm thinking."
"Stop thinking and go to sleep."
"How do you stop thinking ?"
"You drop dead already."
Jake Waldman sucked the last small fragment of salt from his right lower molar.
In the morning, Ethel Waldman noticed that her husband didn't touch the bagels, only picked at the lox with onions and eggs, and hardly bothered to sip his cup of tea.
"There's something wrong with the food already ?" she asked.
"No. I'm thinking."
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"Still thinking? You were thinking last night. How long are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking."
"You don't like my eggs."
"No. I like your eggs."
"You like my eggs so much you're letting them turn to stone."