The Big Meow

Helen lifted her second glass of wine as the Silent Man drank about half his fifth cup of coffee at a gulp. “You should really cut back on that,” she said. “It’s going to make a mess of your nerves.”

They’re a mess already, the Silent Man said. And this beats the alternative. But he put the cup down. Look, I could use a map of this, and a timeline. It’s been too much bad news at once.

Helen nodded and started moving plates and glasses around on the table, and pushed off to one side the gloves she’d shed when the food arrived.

“Six more murders,” Arhu said. “And all ‘unaffiliated’ ehhif, out-of-pride types…”

“Transients,” Helen said, “or people who had no relatives or interested others who’d have noticed or cared when they vanished.” As she spoke, Helen started drawing with one finger, apparently idly, on the tablecloth; but where her finger passed, precise narrow lines started to show up on the linen, sketching out a bare-bones rendition of the area between downtown and the Hollywood hills, with Wilshire Boulevard the spine of the map, and various cross streets and avenues sprouting out of it on either side, like ribs from that spine. “Here, and here,” she said, adding a dot in one spot and another on either side of Wilshire, near the center of downtown, “ – these were the first ones. About a month ago. Both males, both apparently long-term vagrants who stayed in residential hotels down in the old Skid Row area, both in their early fifties. They both used all kinds of names at the places where they stayed, so neither has been positively identified. In this man’s case, they’re still trying to find dental records: in this one’s case, there was no way to find them.” She glanced up at the Silent Man. “I didn’t mention, when we started: his head was missing, too.”

He had been scribbling on his pad as Helen drew, making a copy for himself. Now the Silent Man paused. Now why on Earth?

Helen shook her head, kept drawing. “Here, and here,” she said, adding a couple more dots, again on either side of Wilshire but closer to Hollywood, “the next two. One of them was an escapee from one of the local psychiatric institutions, a man in his late sixties, possibly someone mentally or developmentally impaired. The hospital he got out of was a fairly tight-security kind of place: it’s hard to tell how he got loose. That would have been about three weeks ago.”

“When the earthquakes started,” Siff’hah said, leaning over the edge of the table to watch Helen draw.

“That’s right. The fourth one may have been another escapee, but from a different hospital. Same general presentation as the other victims, though. Found on waste ground – a vacant lot behind a bar, in this case – heart cut out.”

“Was that what killed him?” said Arhu.

Helen gave him a slightly cockeyed look. “That would do it for most of us, I’d think.”

“Oh, come on, I know that! I mean, was that how he was killed? Or did something else happen before he died and then they took his heart out?”

“Oh, sorry. No, nothing else happened, as far as the coroner could tell.” The look Helen gave Rhiow suggested that she was regretting the vast difference between the kind of forensics that would have been available in their home time and the kind available here and now. “The only possible alternate cause of death, in a couple of cases, was alcohol poisoning: or in one case, drinking booze that had been contaminated with denatured alcohol.”

Old-fashioned bathtub gin. Or else Sterno drinking, the Silent Man said, still scribbling away at his pad. Common enough behavior among the poorest bums down on Skid Row. The ‘canned heat cocktail’ is pretty popular down there.

“The coroner didn’t think either of those victims had drunk enough, or were drunk enough, to have died of what they drank,” Helen said. “His opinion was pretty much that whatever was used to cut their hearts out had done the real work.”

“They were all cut out?” Hwaith said.

“As far as the coroner could determine,” said Helen. “There was some question in the case of the headless man: I’ll get to that shortly. But the instrument used seemed to have been the same one in all cases: and it was very, very sharp. The autopsies all comment that the wound edges were as sharp as if a scalpel had been used. But no one makes scalpels with such big blades, or so strong: the incisions go right through the breastbone in every case.” She looked grim. “The coroner was getting very disturbed about that by the time he got to the fourth case or so. He said in one report that it was like someone had done this many, many times before, and was practiced at getting a heart out in just a thrust, a cut and a twist.”

They used to be big on that kind of thing down in Central America, weren’t they? the Silent Man said. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why nothing remains of those civilizations.