Delusion in Death (In Death 35)

CiCi Way and friends, party of four, having cocktails and bar food. Women visit the bathroom, go back. And CiCi’s work pal turns into a demon and stabs her boyfriend in the face with a fork.

Brewster, party of one. Comes in, takes his usual table, consumes nothing, and his waitress turns into a giant bee.

An entire bar of office drones and suits turns into a battlefield of makeshift weapons for—given current data—approximately twelve minutes. Result: over eighty dead.

Both survivors interviewed reported a sudden headache, and both came to with blurry memories, but no signs of continued hallucination.

For now, she decided. No telling if whatever had caused it to happen would reoccur.

She walked into the morgue. The long white tunnel, usually quiet, thrummed and echoed with activity. She saw lab coats and protective gear, harried faces, hurrying feet. She could smell the death, still fresh, still bloody as she made her way to Morris’s autopsy room.

He had three on tables, and she assumed more stacked somewhere. He wore a clear work cape over his sweater and pants, and had something soft and sorrowful playing on his speakers. Blood coated his sealed hands.

“Busy night,” he commented. “We love our work, you and I, in our strange and twisted way. But this? This tests resolve, even dedication.”

Delicately, he laid a brain on a scale, programmed for analysis.

“So many dead,” he continued, “and by whose design? What would cause someone to want so many people, strangers, surely many of them strangers, to slaughter each other?”

“Is that what happened? You can confirm it?”

“Our number two—” He gestured. “She has flesh under her nails, in her teeth—not her own flesh. Number one, not all the blood on him is his own, and three? He has deep gashes in his palm, his fingers—right hand. Sliced there from a glass shard held this way.”

Morris gripped his hand as if holding a knife. “His hand’s cut to the bone from it. I’ve people working with other bodies, and reports coming in of the same sort. Offensive and defensive wounds, claw marks, flesh and blood under nails, in teeth, bite marks, some of them savage. We’ve already found human flesh in some gullets.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Or whatever deity you might name.” He moved to a sink to rinse blood and God knew what off his sealed hands. “Your on-scene speculation on COD on these three and the TOD established are accurate. Opinion?”

“Please.”

“Specific COD in these cases won’t matter as much as what turned these very likely ordinary people savage. Stabbings, beatings, gashing, chokings, the broken or crushed bones and skulls. It’s an ugly variety pack, Dallas.”

“We still need them, every one.”

“Understood.”

Curiously, she lifted the right hand of number three, studied the wide, deep gash. “A wound like this should’ve made him scream like a baby, drop the glass.”

“Should have, yes.”

“I need tox reports, as many and as quickly as possible.”

“Also understood. We’ve been rushing them as we go. The lab’s not pleased with us, or you.”

“Fuck Dickhead and the horse he rode in on.”

Morris’s lips curved with a combination of amusement and sympathy. “He’s suffering from a broken heart, I’m told.”

“He’s suffering from shitheaditis most of the time.”

r /> “Unfortunately true. In any case he and several of his key people have come in to work it, and we have the initial reports on some that expand on what I’ve been able to process.

“Down and dirty?” he asked after a pause. “Or scientific and complex?”

“D&D, for now.”

“Every sample from every victim so far processed shows traces of a complicated cocktail of chemicals—in the nasal passages, on the skin, in the mouth and throat, and in the blood.”