Dragonfire: A Gulliver Swift Adventure

The Process of Elimination

 The blow-up between Lloyd and Gulliver outside the museum was sharp and brief and ended in the breakup of a beautiful friendship, Swift feeling the reporter hadn't had his back and Robertson feeling the archeologist hadn't been straight with him. 

Shit, had used him. 

"You're not out to help the police find a killer," he rasped, "the only reason you took the case was you thought it'd help you prove you're sane and the rest of the world has been blind."

Beatrix had him pegged, and the reporter was really P.O.'d to have given Swift the benefit of the doubt.

"Doesn't matter you're a psycho or a con artist—or both—I should have known the minute you had me ignore that bottle of Lone Star even though my reporter's instinct was screaming, 'it's not the freaking feces, it's the beer!  Don't leave it there—go stick it in Larrabee's face!  Get him on camera, see if he can explain it.'  Well," Lloyd went on, "I didn't leave it there, I took it with me."

It was in an inner pocket of his photographer's vest.  And if Gulliver would excuse him he had a billionaire he intended to interview. 

"Sure as hell aren't going to get one of your killer dinosaurs on camera."  He was unlocking the Corolla and Swift could take a hike.

"Ambush journalism," the archeologist was all in favor.  "Be better, though, the crime lab said the billionaire's fingerprints were on the longneck before the big confrontation."

"Who says I won't say they said that?" retorted Robertson, leaving Gulliver in a cloud of exhaust, hollow-eyed, jar of peanut butter in his hand, Ivan Marsh's phone number on the speed dial of the I-phone in his pocket.  

His initial instinct, to call the psychoanalyst from the privacy of his office, got him halfway past the visitors queued at the donation counters in the museum lobby—and then what he'd just said to the webcaster made him reverse course, cellular untouched.

Thirty-seven minutes later he walked into Ichabod Lovelace's surgery at the Medical Examiner's office, finding the gangling ME in scrubs and surgical gloves shearing the sternum of the hunk on the autopsy table.  If the sight of an exposed chest cavity made Swift feel ill, "barf bags are on your right."  If he felt faint, "do me a favor and fall away from the table."

Gulliver wasn't about to do either, struck not so much by the viscera within what was once Justin Edward Larrabee III as by what even now remained of the masculine perfection without—the reason people of either gender had been so eager to pay him a hundred or more for an intimate encounter.  "No wonder he didn't think he needed daddy's billions to make a go of it."

Did Ichabod still have the kid's clothes?

"Over there."  A gesture toward the adjacent walk-in, open cubicles floor to ceiling occupied by laundry bags.  "Third row in, one up from the bottom."  What was the archeologist looking for? 

The bag tagged Larrabee out of its cubby, Swift loosened the drawstring and pulled the still sodden garments out, separating them on the polished aluminum of the unoccupied slab adjacent: the pullover hoodie, the T shirt, the jeans, the briefs, all ripped, shredded, partially burned, splotched with bloodstains and offal from the Canal and Brick's colon both.

And then he drew the Levis up and pressed his nose against the crotch.

"For God's sake, professor," Ichabod exclaimed, "he peed his pants.  People tend to do that a lot, they're being eviscerated."  His own examination of the clothing had already determined the hustler had wet himself—"we do try to be thorough."

"Able to analyze the urine?" Swift inquired, the jeans exchanged for the briefs.

"Lab's still working on it, we ought to be hearing back any minute now," Lovelace reported, hands steady as he cut through the inferior vena cava and extracted the hustler's heart out of the chest cavity.  Why was the Commissioner's consultant giving the underwear such a close inspection?

"Because," the Commissioner's consultant explained, "if Brick pissed himself the briefs should have been even more soaked than the pants, and they're not."  He reached for the hoodie and the tee.  "They don't get their own urine on their pullovers, either."

"Defiled the body after the kill," Gulliver was saying, "correct?"

A nod.   "Primitive show of disrespect."

"Doesn't automatically suggest we're dealing with some sort of antediluvian troll," the ME pointed out, scalpel slicing the forehead at the hairline, revealing the skull beneath.  "Don't be disappointed if it turns out we're dealing with a low-IQ parolee, or somebody escaped from a mental institution."

"Depends on what the crime lab has to say about the bite marks," Gulliver expected, the PC dinging on the counter cantilevered along the length of the wall.  Several pages slid into the pick-up tray of the combo printer-copier-fax.

"Speak of the devil," said Lovelace, Stryker saw buzzing.  "Be my guest."

"It's the devil, all right," Swift had to say after a first fast perusal of the documents.

"Don't keep me in suspense."  The ME was placing the hustler's brain onto the hanging scale above the table, surgical gloves splotched with residue.  "Missing link or homicidal maniac?"

The archeologist hesitated.

"You're putting me on."  The ME snapped the protective gloves off his hands in such haste one went flying. 

"I don't know whether to cry or crow." 

"Bite marks and urine," Lovelace read aloud—muttered, really—"and the only match the lab can come up with—"

"—Is with a phylum that hasn't walk this earth for a few million eons, Christ."

"Got to be an error."

Except the lab had run the samples three separate times, the report said.  "Same results."

"We can't show this to anyone," Ichabod insisted.  Gulliver could put his neck on the chopping block, "my professional reputation is at stake.  I need more."

"Already had mine on the block once," when everyone said he'd seen things.  "Had me believe it myself."  He hadn't seen one of the beasts this time—not yet—"but if the traces are here it's here, it's hostile, and it is not extinct."