I shook my head. “He was my first stop tomorrow morning. I heard he’s being kept in for the day, and I know full well that he would hate me to see him laid up in bed.”
“I’m certain he is not being a good patient,” Brooke agreed. “I’ll tell you what. I let you in here to look at this dead Nazi, and you tell me everything you currently know about what’s happening.”
“I’m not sure I know an awful lot more than you do,” I said, unsure if that was actually true or not.
The smile on Brooke’s face vanished. “Let’s go see our corpse. Just one thing you should know.”
I paused halfway through the door. “What?”
“Doug works night shift here this week. I’d hoped he was on days.”
“Ah, crap,” I said and continued on into the mortuary.
The mortuary in Clockwork, Oregon, looked pretty much like every single mortuary I’d ever been in. The reception area was full of calming paintings on the wall and comfortable seating. Several vases of flowers were dotted around the room, the different colors giving some brightness to what, I assumed, was otherwise a difficult place to work.
“The body is this way,” Brooke said, taking the lead. “Lower basement.”
Once at the lowest floor, we followed another white corridor to a room with several sinks. I washed my hands, and Brooke passed me a pair of surgical gloves. Once we were both ready, we entered the main morgue. There were twelve silver hatches in the walls of the big room. A large wooden desk sat in the corner. It was spotless except for a computer, a printer, and several notebooks.
“Which one is he in?” I asked.
Brooke walked over to one of the lower hatches on the wall in front of me and pulled open a drawer. She unzipped the black body bag, revealing the dead Nazi. Or what was left of him, anyway.
“Holy shit,” Doug said from behind me as he walked through the door.
“What the hell, Doug?” Brooke asked.
“I just wanted to see it,” Doug said, in the same voice that a young child might use after being caught doing something they shouldn’t have.
“It’s a corpse,” I told him. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you normally want to see.”
“Yeah, but look at it,” Doug said, as Brooke mouthed an apology to me and tried to usher Doug out of the room.
“The file is on that desk,” Brooke said as I was left alone.
I found the file and took it over with me to the body of Jackson Miller. A swastika was tattooed on his sternum. It was about the size of the palm of my hand, and directly under it in red were the words Blood and Soil. There were several more unpleasant tattoos representing his beliefs across his body, and not one of them made me feel bad about being happy he was dead.
“Fuck you, Jackson Miller,” I said. “I hope it fucking hurt.”
I guessed it probably had, considering something had torn part of his face off and ripped his arm off at the shoulder. The autopsy report suggested that after a large part of his face had been removed, he’d bled out once the arm had been torn free. He hadn’t died where he’d been found, which meant nothing particularly good, except that whoever had done it wasn’t someone who went around in public ripping people’s arms off.
The gouges on his face were deep, to the bone in most cases, and his lips, his nose, and one eye were all missing. One cheek had been torn free, too—the doctor had surmised that it had most likely been bitten off. And indeed, there were large teeth marks on the flesh of the body. The doctor had made a private note on a subsequent page suggesting that if the death had been committed anywhere in the woods, he’d have expected a bear to be involved. He’d also noted that bears were not known to kill in the woods and carry their prey to an alley to dump them. He had a fair point.
“So you see anything interesting?” Brooke asked as she reentered the room.
“The official cause of death is murder,” I said. “The doctor has put his personal notes on a separate sheet. He thinks that Jackson went into shock and bled out.”
“Any ideas what killed him? The prevailing theory is that it was a werebear, werewolf, werelion, or basically any of the were family of creatures.”
I shrugged. “I guess it’s possible, but the file says that they found hair in the wound that doesn’t correspond to either human or any known animal. Honestly, I have no idea what did this. The list of things that could have is massive, and I can’t think that any of them would be good to have running around Clockwork.”
“You think it was a message?” Brooke asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Honestly, I think it was an accident, and they dumped the body.”
“You think that this,” Brooke said, motioning toward the body, “was an accident?”
“The body dumping was a panicked thing,” I said. “If they’d have thought about it, they’d have buried his body in the woods and been done with it. Let nature take its course. No, this sounds like he died, and people were worried they’d be blamed, but they’re also idiots, so they just dumped the body. Otherwise, why bother? What message does this send, and to who?”
“We’ll rip your arms and face off if you cross us?” Brooke suggested.
“Okay, but who’s the threat aimed at? The alley rats? I read in the notes here about where they found him. It was inside a dumpster, in an alley that’s one of the first stops on trash pickup. Someone thought they could get rid of him with the use of the landfill. Can’t go there themselves, too many cameras, too many witnesses. Can’t bury him in the woods, just in case some hiker finds him, and then it leads back to them. Like I said, they panicked and figured this was their best bet.”
“I thought you said if they were smart they’d have buried him in the woods?” Brooke said.
“Yeah, well, they would have. Deep down. But I imagine they didn’t have time. Which leads back to the idea of them panicking.”
“You think his Nazi friends were in on this?”
I nodded. “Without a shadow of a doubt. The biggest question is, What killed him? There have been no other deaths in this town that match this one. People would be talking if a spate of bodies turned up missing limbs. So what do those Nazis have that could accidentally kill one of them? This is just hypothetical, but it also makes sense to me. Not a were, though, not unless it’s caged up.”
“Could a caged were do this?” Brooke asked.
I looked at the body and nodded. “He gets too close, it attacks him, kills him, and they dump the body.”
“But why would they have a caged were?”
“The KOA are working with them,” I said. “Maybe they brought one.”
“The mayor had a visit from some Avalon personnel. She told us to allow them every freedom to do their job.”
“Did you meet them yourself?”
Brooke shook her head. “I did some looking into the KOA, and it looks like they hunt down the enemies of Avalon. I couldn’t really find more than that, but the KOA could use a were for that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they could.”
The door to the morgue opened, and Doug walked in again. “You’re going to have to leave,” he said, fear in his voice.