The Innefible Detective

Part One

Detective Geoffrey Jones hunched down beside the woman's body to get a good look at her face, slowly turning it over. To his horror, he realized in an instant that the corpse was that of his own wife. Flashes overtook Geoffrey's fractured brain as it reeled for purchase on the footholds of his crumbling mindscape, but his mind failed him yet again as the room continued to spin relentlessly. The veteran detective with the face that wasn't quite a face but obviously, clearly, still was one in a way, fell to the rickety wooden floorboards along with his beloved wife; who, fortunately, did have a tangible facial construct. He held the memory of her tangible facial construct dear to him. Dearer than anything else in the world. Her petite nose and those adorable big brown eyes... Eyes that would never open again. That smile that would light up a room, gone forever. The water-stained ceiling above surged and warbled atop Geoffrey as the boards began to writhe and constrict beneath him, until suddenly, they had splintered free and pierced through his navy blue three-piece suit and straight into his fickle broken heart.

Geoffrey awoke in his bed in a sweat. He brought two fingers to his unface and caressed it tentatively, just to make sure that he still didn't have a face. That enigmatic unface which his darling Clara had fallen in love with so eagerly, so completely, despite the then recently trained detective's best warnings. He told her time and time again, "Clara, honey, I don't have a face."

Yet she loved him still. Geoffrey hoped that she carried that love into the ground with her, even though he knew that she probably hated him now, if she could even feel a thing besides death's indifferent pins and needles. Geoffrey sighed mournfully, tired, rubbing the temples of his unface in an effort to soothe himself; although he knew that the only real comfort on offer for him was a night in a whorehouse with the town's skankiest broad at best, and a cruel whiskey-riddled stillborn dream at worst. That goddamn hoor was the only one left around that could stand to love that ineffable unface anymore...

The rotary phone on the bedside table began to ring, the receiver rattling in its hold. Geoffrey considered letting it go and closing his eyes, but he knew that sleep was way out of the picture once more. Any hope of seeing her again, alive or dead, was crushed under the oppressive weight of another day. Groaning, he snatched the phone, dragging it into bed and pulling the receiver to his ear; cradling it between his unface and his shoulder.

"Jones here, state your business."

"It's Lou!" The kid, Lanyard, was Geoffrey's new assistant. Excitable as always, fresh out of high-school with something to prove. Geoffrey had resisted Lou's attempts at charming him into letting him help out with cases at first, but he'd quickly proven himself to be an invaluable asset to the agency. People often didn't react so well when Geoffrey showed up at their house chasing leads. The jarring sight of his unface was enough to scare most women and children, and the affable young Lou with his normal features opened doors for Geoffrey that otherwise would have been firmly slammed shut. "We got another stiff down by the docs, it's a lady this time!"

"Don't sound so chipper, kid." Geoffrey began sternly, rubbing at his temples again in an attempt to quell his burgeoning headache. "That's a woman you're talking about. Have some respect, goddamn it."

"Ah-I'm sorry, boss! Fact is I'm down at the docs right now, as it happens... coppers are swarming, shaking down all the boatmen who came in this morning for information." That damn kid. Geoffrey had laid it out for him that Lou wasn't to go out on his own, not until he was ready. Problem was, the kid was ready, an innate investigator with an inquisitive sensibility, and Geoffrey knew it; but he didn't want any danger to come to the boy on his watch. He'd already lost too many people over the years. Seen too many good ones turn bad. "There anything you want me to do here first? I called you soon as I knew what was what. Honest, I did!"

"Just stay put and don't ruffle any feathers, kid. My deal with the station's shaky enough as it is, I don't need you rubbing those cops the wrong way." Geoff sat up, feeling his bare feet on the coarse exposed wood of the decrepit floorboards. Suddenly, he remembered the dream, and the details flooded through him; fuelling his throbbing headache. "Look, I'm on my way. Keep your head down and your ear to the ground."

"Will do, boss-"

Geoffrey slammed the phone back onto the bedside table, groggily getting to his feet and walking over to the pin board fixed on the wall. He looked over the documents and photos and handwritten notes scattered across its wide cork surface, wondering with dismay at what had all gone wrong. The case had been ongoing for just over a month after Geoffrey had been contacted by a relative of the first victim. Now following just a few weeks, they not only had a second but a third body; two men and a woman. He hoped that dead dame lying on those docks was unconnected, because if she wasn't, then what the city was looking at was a killer unlike any it'd seen before. The thought made Geoffrey sick violently to his stomach. Literally queezy, and not just from the previous night's boozing. Scribbling a fresh note, he tacked it to the board before getting dressed and heading for the door, grabbing a fedora from the rack before he left. If he kept his head down, sometimes Geoff could make it halfway down the street without somebody gawking after him.