A/N: This chapter's warnings include descriptive gore & misogyny. Also, a lot of profanity. Also, appearance of characters who only appear in the manga/second series. Also, um, don't check my facts too closely: I've extended artistic license to include anatomy and chemistry in this chapter.
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X. Quickening
The courtyard before Central Headquarters seemed bigger than life. How many weeks had it been? Three? Four? Edward had not spent so much time away from his office since he had had an office to claim as his own. The sun off the concrete made it look like a desert of stone and glare, and with the aching in his automail leg, Edward didn't look forward to traversing it.
The oddest thing about being away, Edward thought, was knowing that everything else hadn't paused while he was pursuing his own interests. Alphonse had not changed too much in the time Edward was in Xenotime—he was still in classes, still spending long evening hours over his homework. The addition of regular doctor visits was different, but Alphonse was never one to let his deepest sufferings grow too loud, making any benefits of the treatment invisible to anyone but him. Things with Winry had certainly evolved—he hadn't had that much sex in one week since, well, ever—but that all had happened since Edward had come home. Returning to Al and Winry had felt like returning to a record player and putting the needle back where he had stopped.
But if there was one thing Edward had learned from the Double-A, from being a State Alchemist, it was that humans never cease discovering the nefarious underbelly of the intoxicating power of alchemy. Edward knew he would come back to his office to find his colleagues either twiddling their thumbs between cases or working in the thick of one. And they would talk about things done in his absence, findings made by eyes other than his. Edward never liked the notion of the inexorable turning of time without him.
Edward tightened his grip on his briefcase and headed for the main entrance.
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All eyes flicked toward him when he entered the office, and Edward immediately knew that he was interrupting something. The beige walls and dark desks seemed like a distant memory, like stepping into a photograph, perhaps, but the moving parts, the people within, were a jolt, snatching him back to his life here.
Maria Ross and Jean Havoc stood on either side of General Mustang, who was seated at his desk. The General had a manila folder open and propped against the edge of his desk, and he was mid-motion, passing a sheet to Ross when Edward opened the door and stepped in.
"Fullmetal," Mustang said, his face the only part of the greeting that revealed his surprise.
"Look who darkens our door," Havoc said as he stood up straight. He came around the desk and approached Ed. He clapped him on the back so hard that Edward stumbled forward. "Didn't expect to see you for another couple days or so."
"How are you feeling, Edward?" Ross asked, straightening her back but remaining at Mustang's side.
"Not as much like hamburger meat as the last time you saw me," Edward said. He put up his right arm, fist closed. "Been good and overhauled, and I'm ready to do something productive."
Edward saw Mustang cock an eyebrow, and he knew immediately that he had said something that he would regret. "Overhauled, eh? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?"
"Must be," Havoc said as he walked back toward Mustang's desk. "That is a spectacular hickey there, Ed."
Edward's eyes opened wide, and he clapped a hand to his neck where Winry had bit him good and hard the night before. He pulled his hand back and looked at it, half expecting to see blood.
"Lay off him," Ross chided, turning a frown on Havoc and Mustang, but when she turned back to Ed, he knew exactly what was going to come out of that smirk. "So, how's Winry?"
"Ross, you, too?" Edward croaked. He could feel the heat in his face, and he knew he was red from the collar up.
Ross shrugged and smiled.
"We're only teasing, Ed," Mustang said. "We're very happy for you."
Edward slammed his briefcase down on his desk. "Don't you people work here or something?"
Mustang glanced at the face of his pocket watch and said, "I would think that some of us do."
Ed scowled. "I show up late to work once, and I get this shit? That's funny coming from you, General I-was-late-to-work-because-I-couldn't-remember-whose-bed-my-boots-were-under."
Havoc furrowed his brow and muttered, "Ouch."
Mustang, of course, did not miss a beat. "I suppose that theory explains your usual punctuality, Fullmetal." It took a second for that one to sink in, but once it did, Ed was ready to rip out Mustang's trachea.
"All right, all right," Ross said, putting up her hands. "Before HR comes up here to investigate sexual harassment claims, let's save the sophomoric pissing contest for after work hours, shall we?"
"He started it," Ed said, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Ed!"
Edward threw up his hands. "Okay, fine. What are you all gawking at, anyway?"
The air of jocularity went out of the room like water through mesh. Edward watched a shadow pass over his colleagues as Ross picked up a sheet of paper from Mustang's desk and Havoc began examining the ceiling tiles.
"You'll recall a case I was looking at shortly before you left? The double homicide?" Mustang began.
"The one that wasn't our jurisdiction?" Edward offered.
"That's the one," Mustang said. "It's gone from double to quintuple."
Edward grimaced. "That's terrible and all, but what has it got to do with alchemy?"
"I was wondering that myself, sir," Havoc said to Mustang.
The General collected his papers and slipped them back into the file. "Perhaps this warrants a briefing," he said. "Have a seat, and I'll explain," he added and gestured toward the desks in the middle of the room. His subordinates took their seats, Edward across from Ross and Havoc on Edward's left. The desk to Ross's right remained vacant and had been for four months now.
The familiarity of it brought Edward some comfort. This formula was the preamble to all the Double-A cases, although cases introduced in this fashion were typically theirs, passed to them from other departments. This was, perhaps, their first purloined file to earn such treatment in a year, and they did not speak much of the last one, the one that had cost both Edward and Havoc a promotion.
Mustang rose from his desk with file in hand, and he lifted a larger, folded sheet from the left-hand drawer.
"February twenty-seventh," Mustang said as he approached his subordinates conjoined desks. He set down his file on the corner of Ross's desk and unfolded the sheet where the others could see it. It was a map of Central, one which Edward recognized. Mustang pointed to a red X on the Teague River, which ran down a concrete chute through the city. The X was, Edward noted, just upriver from the paper mill. "Rebecca Henson's body was pulled from the river by an engineer working on the effluent pipes along the bank." Mustang pointed to another X farther upriver. "March eleventh. Diane Propst. Found by some kids near the overpass." Another X. "Tamara Arlington, a week later." Mustang set his index and middle fingers on two adjacent X's. "Allie Deel and Pyrrha Pulliam, April fifth.
"Basic forensics tells us to find commonalities," Mustang began. He held up his hand and counted off. "All these women have been reported missing in that last six months, Propst being the first in November of last year, and Deel most recently in January. All these women were working as prostitutes at the time of their abductions. All these women were in their second or third trimesters when they disappeared."
"What?" Edward snapped. "They were pregnant?"
Mustang answered, "And they were, according to the autopsies, very close to being done with their pregnancies. Henson might have been in labor when she was killed."
No one noticed Havoc turn a shade paler.
"Did these women drown?" Ed asked, sitting back in his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and grimaced up at Mustang.
"I wish, for their sake, they had," Ross muttered.
Mustang looked at Ross, who was staring down at the map with a furrowed brow. "That brings me to why I think this case might be making its way to our office soon." Mustang lifted the folder from Ross's desk, opened it, and removed a single photograph. He passed it to Edward first. "They were all eviscerated."
Perhaps a month of vacation had made Edward soft. Perhaps it had been a long time since their last case that involved brutalized women. Perhaps it was his burgeoning attachment to Winry, to someone who might have children of her own one day, to someone who had needed his rescuing in the past. Whatever the case, when Edward took the photograph from Mustang, he felt his disgust like a jolt to his spine.
"Oh, Christ," Edward swore, turning his eyes for a moment.
The eight-and-a-half by eleven inch, glossy, black and white photo showed what was once a woman sprawled on the concrete bank of the Teague. She was naked, her long limbs spread out around her as though she was a loose-jointed doll dropped on the floor. From her position in the dark pool, Edward could just imagine investigators pulling her from the water by her shoulders and ankles, lowering her to the ground. She was white and slippery; in the areas where decay hastened, irregular splotches of discoloration mottled her skin, and all over her, across her face and breasts, her skin looked thin and stretched over the tumefied, water-logged flesh beneath. Cold veins stood out stark across her chest and her thighs and around the pock marks and divots where animals in the river had taken out chunks of her. She had long hair, light-colored despite the river water, and it coiled around her head like hungry bottom-feeders.
But all that was rather standard dead-body business. Certainly not pleasant, but decay happened to everyone. What distinguished Miss Rebecca Henson was the part that did not happen to everyone, and Edward could not help but wonder how one who believes in some manner of Providence might justify this. Was it because Henson was a hooker? Because she was some faceless woman carrying the child of some faceless man? Or was she being punished for something else, something he couldn't see in the photo, something that warranted punishing her child, too?
The incision began just below Henson's sternum and ran down the front of her body. Her skin was baggy and flopped back like the slack opening of a leather satchel. Within were the rotting remnants of some loops of viscera, but Henson's body was more dark, bloated cavern than anything else. Like a big, festering mouth.
"Autopsy says she was dead for, perhaps, two days before she was found. That's a lot of time for things to go missing in the river, but the coroner was able to distinguish, at least, what was deliberately removed." Mustang pulled another photograph from his folder and passed it to Havoc. "That's a close up of a series of ligaments that were removed from Henson's pelvis. The lacerations are clean and only slightly frayed, which led the coroner to believe that this was done by a scalpel."
Edward held the photograph he was looking at toward Lieutenant Ross, who put up her hand and shook her head. She had already seen it. Instead, he pushed the photo toward Havoc and held out his hand for the next one.
When Edward got the next image from Havoc, he sat back in his seat and examined. On a white background, three small bundles of greyish, striated flesh rested. They looked like bands, and, indeed, both ends of the bands were cleanly cut. Edward set the photograph down and said, "What was done with a scalpel, General?"
Mustang leaned back against his desk and tossed the file down. "If it had to do with her pregnancy, it's been removed." Mustang pointed toward the photo before Edward. "Those ligaments once anchored Henson's uterus to her pelvis. It's all been cut out. And every woman in this file has had the same treatment."
The sound of Lieutenant Havoc's chair scraping the floorboards rent the weighty quiet after Mustang's words. Without preamble, Havoc left the room, slamming the door behind him. His hurried, heavy footfalls echoed back to them.
They were silent in the wake of Havoc's exit. Edward made eye contact with Mustang, whose face was blank and hard.
Ross rose to her feet. Her mouth was set, and she shook her head a little as she blew out a curt sigh. "Permission to speak freely, sir," she said to Mustang.
"Granted," he replied.
Her scowl split open wide. With the whites of her eyes standing out stark in her face and her brows knit tight, she looked from one superior to the other and said shrilly, "You're both monsters, you know that?"
That was a great deal more personal than Edward had anticipated. He put his hands down on the desk hard and stood. "If he wants to be taken off the case, then he can be. It's not even our goddamn case yet!"
"That's not the point, Ed!"
"Then what is? Do we want to be professionals about this or do we want to get irrational?"
"The point is I never should have found this case," Ross said, the anger in her voice tempered, turned inward. She crossed her arms over her chest and walked toward the large window behind Mustang's desk. She kept her back to her superiors and said, "We shouldn't take this case. No one should take this case. It shouldn't exist."
Edward fell back into his chair and pushed away from his desk. He propped his feet on the desk and knotted up his arms tight. Ross was letting her emotions slip out of control, Edward knew, and, therefore, he shouldn't take it personally, but being called a monster during a conversation about cutting fetuses out of prostitutes was crossing the threshold to a door Edward did not want to open with her.
Mustang sighed. "The case does exist. That's not going to change. Despite your and Havoc's sentimentality," Ross turned the most sincere frown on Mustang that he had ever seen on the woman, "All we can do now is make sure the right people with the right equipment take over. Someone has to take it, and it should be us."
Lieutenant Ross glared at Mustang out of the side of her eye and made a knife-life gesture with her right hand, slicing through the air. "With all due respect, sir—"
"Are you going to be able to handle this or not, Lieutenant?" Mustang asked. While the question was certainly demeaning, Edward could hear the concern behind it. This was the cruelest case to cross the desks of the Double-A in quite some time. If they were going to investigate it, Mustang was going to need stolid back up.
Ross clearly did not hear the reason behind Mustang's question. "Tell me you'd pursue this case, General, if Captain Hawkeye were here."
The silence fell like the weighted curtain from a proscenium. Edward did not know much about Hawkeye's transfer, but he could tell that there, clearly, was a great deal more to it than he thought. The ire on Mustang's face was a different manner of ire than Edward had seen in the past. And Edward had seen all sorts of shades of Mustang's anger. Not this one, though. This was mingled with shock. This one was cold and personal and livid. He hoped never to see it again.
"You are dismissed, Lieutenant Ross," Mustang ground out.
Ross gave Mustang a hard look, one that seemed to repeat the question with all the layered implications that Edward did not understand. She tore her eyes away, stormed toward her desk, snatched up her coat, and left the office.
As Ross exited, she pushed past Havoc. He pressed himself to the side of the doorway to make room for Ross, who made no sign of seeing him there. He watched her go, a little flustered by her haste, and came back to his desk.
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" Mustang asked flatly.
"Had to go vomit, sir, but I'm fine," Havoc answered as he sank into the chair at his desk. He fished around in his pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. When he felt Mustang and Edward's gaze, Havoc looked up. "I'm fine, sir," he repeated and lit a cigarette between his lips.
"Good," Mustang said as he came around his desk and gathered up his coat, "Because we begin investigating this case today. It's in General Berman's office right now, but I'm going to fix that while you two go meet with the coroner."
"It's not our case, General," Edward reminded him.
"Pay him off if you have to," Mustang said as he buttoned the front of his uniform coat and straightened his sleeves, "But I want you personally, Ed, to get a good look at those corpses." Mustang's single-eyed gaze fell hard on Edward.
Ed held it for a moment, but he knew, for a variety of reasons, that he would not win this one. "Fine," he muttered. He knew that Mustang knew that he was the only one there qualified to find out what they needed to find out from those bodies. And he fucking hated him for it.
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The County Coroner's Office was one of a handful of forensic agencies in a single building downtown. Edward had always gotten the impression that while all the investigatory legwork was done out of Central Headquarters—they were, after all, the men with all the funding and the matching outfits and the memberships to the on-campus gym, so they, therefore, did the best with the inevitable media coverage that came with large-scale investigations—all the investigatory clean up was done out of the Carther Building on the corner of College and Broadway. If you did not work out of the Investigations Bureau or in the Carther Building itself, you would have never heard of it.
The building had no signage on it. It did not have the showy grandeur of all the other military-affiliated structures—no columns or verandas or sun-soaked porticos. Carther was brown-ish and stucco. The windows were tall and lined with a sort of dark film that kept them smudged black mirrors to anyone on the outside.
Havoc and Edward stood outside the car, parallel-parked on the street because among the other absent accoutrements, the Cather Building lacked a parking lot.
"You okay?" Edward asked as they lingered, side by side, hands deeply pocketed and eyes trained up at the building before them.
"Don't worry about me," Havoc replied. "Along with my breakfast, I left that thin skin at headquarters."
"Good," Edward replied.
They remained a minute or so longer, neither making any move toward the building.
"What are you waiting for?" Havoc asked.
"I was following you."
"I thought I was following you."
Edward and Havoc turned and looked at each other simultaneously.
"I really don't want to go in there," Edward said as he pulled his gaze back toward Carther.
Havoc squinted up at the sun glinting off the windows of higher floors. He sighed, "Me neither." And together, they headed for the entrance.
The vestibule within was short and narrow and ended with an older woman at a receptionist's desk. She flipped through a rolodex with her left hand and fluffed her cotton-candy textured hair with the other. As they entered the vestibule, Edward quickly and surreptitiously snagged Havoc's sleeve and pulled him around next to him to make it look like they were both examining a framed poster describing the features of integrity.
"Obstacle one," Edward muttered and reached out to fiddle with some brochures in wire racks.
"The broad," Havoc replied lowly.
Edward watched her out of the side of his eye. She did not seem to have noticed them despite there being no one else in the hall. "Sic her," he said.
Havoc scrunched up his face. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Charm her," Edward whispered exasperatedly.
"You know what really cramps my charm-factor?" Havoc asked. Ed furrowed his brow. "This," Havoc hissed and waved his left hand in front of his face. His gold wedding band glinted in the incandescent light overhead. "Not to mention she's old enough to be my mom."
Edward snatched Havoc's hand and slammed it down. He checked the receptionist to see if she had noticed, but she had not. "You don't have to gesticulate wildly with your left hand, do you? Look, it's this or we blow our cash on her," Edward snapped and then added, "And I outrank you."
Havoc scowled at Edward and made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. In brusque motions, Havoc popped the collar of his coat, adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves, and ran a hand through his hair.
"Excuse me, Miss," Havoc said as he approached the desk. Ed watched him put his left elbow on the counter and lean forward. Havoc hooked his right thumb in a belt loop, effectively pulling his overcoat back to reveal his blue uniform underneath.
"Can I help you?" the woman asked, her voice the kind of gravel Havoc could expect in ten years if Amity didn't force him to quit smoking.
"My associate and I are trying to find Mr. Conner. Is he in today?"
Edward picked up a flier on government funded whatevers and pretended to scan it.
"Do you have an appointment?"
Havoc chuckled, looked away casually. When he swayed his gaze back to her, he was wearing the most potent smile in his arsenal. "No, no, I don't. In fact, I'm free all day until... well, what time do you get off?"
The woman behind the counter gave a coy smile and refluffed her hair. "Well," she said, her voice a rumble deep in her blackened throat. "Dr. Conner is in today, Bright Eyes. Go through that door to the left, take the stairs down, and follow the signs to the morgue."
Edward was already escaping toward the door to the left of the receptionist's desk when Havoc said, "Thanks, darling," and sauntered away.
Once they were safe in the stairwell, Edward asked, "What did you call her?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Havoc answered, his voice cracking a little.
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Edward pushed open the door to the morgue and was suddenly struck by the grotesque irony of the baby-blue tiles that lined the walls. The floor was bare concrete and gently sloped toward a grate in the floor—for easy clean up, Edward thought. Havoc slunk in behind him, uncharacteristically quiet. They entered a cold, wide hallway of a room that, up ahead of them, turned left and hid someone working around the corner. Edward could hear the shuffling of feet and the hollow sound of metal on metal, all of which stopped suddenly when Havoc closed the door behind him loudly.
"Someone there?" a voice called from the other end of the room.
Edward walked farther into the room, past the empty gurneys that lined the walls. "Dr. Conner?" he called.
"Yes, yes, come on back," the voice called. The juxtaposition of the warm welcome in the doctor's voice and the sheer morgue-ness of his surroundings made Edward's stomach clench.
Edward glanced over his shoulder at Havoc, who looked significantly less creeped out than Edward did. They trod toward the back of the room, Havoc a few paces behind Ed. As they turned the corner, Edward saw a short, middle-aged man striding toward them, tugging off thick, black gloves that came up to his elbows. The light reflected off Dr. Conner's head like the hood of a car.
"Well, well," Conner said, tucking his gloves in the ties of his apron. "It's been quite some since I've had Blue Backs in my neck of the basement." He came to stand directly in front of Edward, who noticed an odd smudge on the Doctor's glasses and couldn't help wondering what dead body had gotten what fluid on them.
Before Edward could say anything, Conner pointed at Havoc. "I know you, son," he said. "You're the soldier that dragged that monster down here, asked me to do something with it."
Edward cast a curious and rather accusatory glance at Havoc over his shoulder.
"The hyena-pig?" Havoc offered to jog Edward's memory.
Ah, yes, how could Edward forget the hyena-pig chimera that had taken up residence in the meat-packing plant outside of the city? The one they were called in to remove.
"This guy," Conner continued, gesturing to Havoc, "drags this thing down into my morgue, and I said to him, I says, 'I'm a mortician not a veterinarian.' And he says to me, 'Good thing it's already dead!'" Conner bent forward and slapped his own knee hard. "It's already dead! I tell him, then he must be in the right place!" Edward let the Doctor go on guffawing until he was empty and just breathing hard. "So what can I do for you gentlemen?"
"I was hoping to get a look at Pyrrha Pulliam," Edward said.
Conner nodded. "I've got a lot of those girls in here still, but if you've seen one, you've seen them all."
"The killer was that meticulous?" Edward asked, grimacing.
"Oh, sure," Conner replied. "Practically surgical." He paused and narrowed his eyes. "You know, General Berman usually gives me a call before he sends boys down here."
Edward resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at Havoc. "We're not here under Berman's orders," he said.
Conner put his hands on his hips. "Oh, really? Then under whose orders are you?" he asked, putting on an official-sounding voice to mock Edward's. When Edward hesitated, Conner looked to his right, toward a wall of small, square doors. "You know, it gets real hard to remember what body's behind what door," he said. "My old memory doesn't work as well as it used to."
Keeping his face blank, Edward slipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat. Between his index and middle fingers, Edward pinched the metal clip cinched around a wad of bills. He brandished the notes to the Doctor. "Does this help?" Just holding the money, freshly withdrawn from his research account, just suggesting it to the man made Edward feel like a scumbag.
The Doctor, however, did not seem to have that hang up. He plucked the money from Ed's hand and stuffed it into the breast pocket in his apron. "You're in luck, friend," Conner said. "I've started keeping a log of who's where for moments just like these." He turned and headed toward the wall of doors. "Step into my office," he said and laughed at his own gruesome humor.
Edward felt acutely aware of Havoc's presence to his left. Typically, when he and Havoc were on assignment, there was a reciprocity to their interactions. More than once, Edward had been grateful to have an alchemy layman as a partner: he himself could only think like an alchemist, which was, in many ways, like a criminal mastermind. Of course, the occasional villain they pursued was one; however, more frequently, their target was not. And Havoc, for all the other assets he brought to the table, had the ability to think like a normal guy. That combined with a mastery of marksmanship Edward would need another decade to achieve made Havoc downright indispensable.
Now, however, Havoc was a silent specter of himself.
"Little Girl Number Five," Conner said as he opened a particular door in the wall.
A gust of cold air blew out of the opening, and Edward held his breath until it passed. Conner reached into the hatch and pulled out a gurney on tracks. It trundled out, and the doctor stopped it once the body on the stretcher was just over halfway out of the cooler.
Dr. Conner stood on one side of the body while Ed and Havoc stood on the other, and when Edward allowed himself to breath again, he could smell refrigerant and river water.
"There are a few things right off that bat that are pretty remarkable about her," Conner said as he folded down the drape over the body. She lay there, revealed to the thighs, bloated and pale and sliced open from sternum to groin. Conner had, in a gesture of generosity Edward would not have expected from an eccentric like the doctor, folded the loose skin over her belly closed. "Typically, when you fish a prostitute out of the river," Conner said as he pulled his gloves back on, "she either has been strangled or has suffered head trauma. Miss Pulliam, however, died of neither." He pointed at her long, white throat. "You'd see contusions around her neck or fractures in her skull."
"What did she die of?" Edward asked. He schooled his features, kept his face blank, and willed himself not to check on Havoc.
"My guess?" Conner offered. "Her lungs were full of water when she was pulled out. I'd say she was unconscious when they threw her into the river, and she drowned about as peacefully as a person can."
It didn't bring Edward any comfort.
Pyrrha Pulliam looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. She had long, dull black hair that splayed out around her head. Her eyelashes were dark and long and stood out over the vivid redness around her closed eyes. She could have been pretty with her soft, blue mouth and high cheekbones.
"I'm going to assume that, if you're willing to pay for it, you've seen the uterine ligaments?"
"Yes," was all Edward could bring himself to say.
"Well, come around this side, and I'll show you something," Conner said, gesturing for Edward to come stand by his left. Ed complied. "When I said it was surgical, I meant it. Take a look at this." Conner folded back the skin over the body, opening the abdominal cavity.
Edward had seen dead bodies. Plenty of them. Even some that were rather cut up, as well. And while this one was a woman whose baby had been ripped out of her, Edward forced himself to believe that it was no different than any of the rest.
With one hand, Conner peeled back sheets of skin and fat and fascia, and before Edward was entirely sure what he was looking at, there were the yellowy-gray peaks of the bowl of a pelvis nestled in dead, red flesh.
"This right here," Conner said, pointing to a joint in the most anterior bones in the pelvis, "Is the most telling part. What it's telling, I'll leave up to you gentlemen."
"What am I looking at?" Edward asked, his voice steady and schooled.
Conner ran his index finger over a cluster of rubbery-looking bands that attached to the crest in the pelvis. "Look at how this is cut." It was a clean, angled slice. No sawing or hacking. Conner pushed the flesh he was holding back to free of up his hand. "Let's say I'm a right-handed lunatic who happens to know something about obstetrics." With his left hand, Conner pantomimed gripping something wide and round deep in the pelvis. He went through the motions of pulling it back and away from the bone and then, miming a scalpel with his right hand, he cut at the ligament in clean, even strokes.
"It's telling me," Edward said as Conner folded up the cavern in the body, "That we don't have a garden-variety butcher on our hands."
"That's for damn sure," Conner said.
A thought occurred to Edward, and he started to reach for the closest arm to flip it over, but paused, thinking better of it. "Have you noticed any puncture wounds on the arms of the bodies? Like an IV drip insertion?"
"I checked for that, actually, but didn't see anything." He paused abruptly and held up his right index finger. "Oh, I almost forgot!" he said. "Now this part is just odd."
Because no other part of this strikes you as odd, Doctor? Ed thought but let Conner go about his business anyway.
"Another consistency among these girls," he began and reopened the end of incision in the body below the sternum. Just under a layer of skin and fat, Conner revealed a large grey-purple organ shaped like a kidney bean. "Normally, you've got a liver in the way here, but the fishies took care of that one," he informed Edward. "They wouldn't touch this, though," he said and gave the organ a poke. "This is her stomach here, and in a normal body, it has a soft, rubbery texture to it. But this girl, along with all the others, has hard lumps in her stomach. It's like it's ossified in part. Here, touch it and see."
"I'll take your word for it," Edward said, knitting his brows and drawing back a little.
"Suit yourself," Conner said. "If this girl had come in with the rest of her GI tract, I bet you would find ossified patches. Any part of an intestine I've pulled out of these girls has been like that. Even their esophagi." Conner let the layers of flesh fall back into place with a slurpy sliding sound. He put his fists on his hips and turned to Edward. "Now what the hell could have happened to these girls to make their digestive tracts turn to bone?"
"Isn't there a degenerative disease that turns soft tissue to bone?" Edward offered, though he knew how far-fetched that was.
Conner cocked an eyebrow. "Don't try to blow sunshine up my skirt, son. Do you know how rare that condition is? And even if there were a particular syndrome that exclusively targeted females, you wouldn't live to be old enough to make money the way these girls did."
Edward looked at the Doctor for a long time, trying to determine if he had any theories that he was not sharing. Certainly, Edward had one in particular, but he was going to save that one for Mustang.
He blew out a sigh and shifted his gaze up toward Havoc, now across the body from him. The Lieutenant's face was stony, his eyes wide and jaw set. He gave Edward no signal one way or the other, but Edward had a feeling it was time they left.
"That'll be all for today, Dr. Conner. Thanks for your help," Edward said.
Conner slid Pyrrah Pulliam back into the cooler and closed the door. "Pleasure doing business with you gentlemen," he said with a smug grin. "Come back any time."
Edward scoffed. Right. He'd be back next fiscal year when his discretionary fund was replenished. He gave Conner a nod and then turned to leave. Before he and Havoc could round the corner in the morgue, the Doctor stopped them.
"I've got a gift for the road for you," he said and disappeared behind the door of a metal cabinet against the tiled wall. When he reappeared, he had something closed in his fist. He shut the doors to the cabinet with his elbow and tossed the contents of his hand toward his departing guests.
Edward caught the object and examined it. Conner had thrown him a small glass vial, about as long as Edward's palm. He pinched one end and held it up to the light.
"Scraped that out of a hooker's descending colon," Conner said.
Inside the vial was a fine, pinkish-white powder. Edward gave the vial a tap with his index finger, watched the powder tumble over itself, and pocketed it.
x
x
x
When Havoc and Edward returned to the Double-A, the office was vacant, the door shut. Edward felt a certain degree of succor from being back in the familiar comfort of his own territory. Both men entered in silence and sank into their desk chairs side-by-side. Edward watched Havoc bow his head and rub at his eyes with the heels of his palms. He wanted to ask the Lieutenant if he were all right, but he knew, regardless of the answer, Havoc would be more annoyed than comforted.
"You were notably quiet in the morgue," Edward said, watching his feet as he propped them up on his desk.
"I hate that fucker," Havoc said, for a moment letting his Eastern, backcountry accent—a dialect Edward's mother had gently cultivated out of him—slip through. "It's one thing to be comfortable with death. It's another to be irreverent."
Edward reached into his pocket and pulled out the vial Conner had given him. He dropped his feet to the floor and set the vial in the center of his desk.
"He might be an asshole," Edward said, "But he's good at what he does."
Edward watched that vial, watched the powder twitch as it settled in its new location. Already, he was envisioning the equipment he was going to have to purchase that afternoon to furnish a laboratory in his basement. Along with all the samples of red water he had waiting for him, Edward was generating a list of tests he would need to run on this powder. He had a strong suspicion about the identity of the substance, but a part of him hoped he was wrong.
"You know what that is, don't you?" Havoc asked, nodding toward the vial.
Edward started and sat back. He had been gazing at the vial for a moment before Havoc spoke.
"You know why those girls' insides were turning to bone, and you didn't want to say anything to that crazy fucking coroner."
"I've got an idea, yeah, but I wouldn't say I—"
"Bullshit, Ed," Havoc snapped, shaking his head. "You know what that is because you know what all of this has got to do with alchemy. I thought I was going to figure it out when we saw that body, but I still have no idea what's got you and Mustang sniffing around this one." Havoc paused, waited for Edward to make any kind of motion toward filling him in. "And you're not going to tell me, are you?" he asked, shaking his head.
Edward blew out a sigh. Boy, was he sick of having this conversation. "I don't know for sure about any of this, and I don't want to jump to conclusions."
Havoc stood up suddenly, the feet of his chair screeching across the floor. "Fucking alchemists," he muttered. "It's always cloak and dagger with you bastards."
Edward did not often find himself in situations where he could simply resolve not to get offended, but on this occasion... well, they had just spent their morning looking at an eviscerated sixteen-year-old girl. He would let Havoc off the hook for this one. In response, Edward shrugged. He couldn't really argue; the biggest assholes he ever knew were alchemists.
"You can't even tell me why the General singled out this case at all?" Havoc asked, spreading his hands.
Edward thought for a moment and said, "Have you ever met a female alchemist?"
Havoc considered the question. "Never. Didn't think the military permitted it."
"Exactly," Edward said. "They're terrifying. Too powerful to control, and they learn too fast. You've just got to hope that they're on your side and then never piss them off. I haven't done the research into it, but there's something, I guess, about women that just... lends itself to alchemy." Edward shrugged. He had suspected it had something to do with the mother-creator dynamic inherent in women, but it wasn't a subject he thought of much considering he could count on one hand the number of female alchemists he'd met.
"So when you learn about somebody chopping up hookers for their lady parts, the first thing you think is alchemy?"
While that was not exactly how Ed would have worded it, he answered, "In a nutshell, yes."
Just then, the door to their office, which Havoc had quietly closed behind him with the intention of wringing some answers out of his smaller, younger superior, burst open and slammed hard against the wall. Edward leapt forward and snatched up the vial and stuffed it into his pocket. Havoc jumped and spun around to see General Mustang storm into the room, uniform coat draped over his right arm. Edward and Havoc remained still, not bothering to salute, and watched Mustang approach his desk. He came up around the side and set his hands down on the surface. For a moment, he stood still, his head bowed down, his chin almost touching his chest.
In an eruption of motion, Mustang stood up straight, spun around, and threw his coat down hard in his desk chair. "Goddammit!" he barked.
"We've been busted," Havoc stated knowingly.
Mustang turned on his subordinates. "Some secretary from Carther called Berman's office just as I was leaving and asked why he hadn't cleared two soldiers to inspect the latest body. I just spent the last twenty minutes getting ripped a new one by Lieutenant General Beryl while that little shit Berman shook his head and simpered."
Edward crossed his arms over his chest and watched his desk.
Havoc breathed a hard sigh, looked Mustang in the eye, and said, "Sorry, sir."
The General shook his head and rubbed his good eye. "It's not your fault. I shouldn't have sent you down there in the first place. It was precipitous and stupid." He ran a hand through his hair and blew out a short breath. With his face turned down, Edward could not read his expression, couldn't guess whether Mustang was about to tell them to drop the case or not. Ed closed his fist around the vial in his pocket. "Now tell me," Mustang said to Havoc, "I didn't just get my first lecture on impulsivity in two decades for nothing." The Lieutenant turned to Edward, who was still hunkered down in his desk chair.
Edward pulled the vial from his pocket and tossed it to Mustang, who, despite having no depth perception, snatched it deftly out of the air. "The hell is this?" he asked, peering down at his palm.
"The coroner said he scraped it out of the intestines of one of the bodies. He said it occurred in all five of them," Ed answered.
Mustang switched on his desk lamp and held it up to the bulb. "Any guesses as to what it is?" he asked.
Edward felt the pressure of Havoc's gaze on him. "I've got an idea."
Mustang looked up at Ed and waited. "Are you going to tell me, or do I have to ask nice?" he said mordantly.
This was, Edward knew, one step below being ordered to disclose all he knew. "An insoluble white powder in a body? Fifty bucks says it's calcite."
Mustang furrowed his brow. He looked down at the powder then back up at Edward. "This came out of a hooker?" he clarified, holding the vial up in his right hand. Ed nodded. "Why the hell would these girls have calcium deposits in them?"
Edward stared so hard at Mustang that his eyes started to hurt. He knew that if his mail from Russell Tringham was being intercepted from within military headquarters, now was not the time to discuss it and the office was not the place.
Mustang must have gotten the message because he checked his desk clock and declared, "That's enough for one day, don't you think?" He then slid the two files from his inbox onto his desk and opened the first one.
"Sir?" Havoc began.
Mustang scanned the first page in the file. "You, Havoc, have a pregnant wife to attend to," he said as he scribbled his signature at the bottom of the page. He open the second file and did the same while telling Edward, "You, Fullmetal, need a leg tune-up. And I," Mustang clapped down his pen with finality and looked up at his subordinates, "Am a lazy asshole." He dropped both files into his outbox and stood up.
Edward took the hint. As they began filing out a the office, Mustang snagged Edward by the elbow and said with a false sort of warmth, "You want a beer?"
Edward looked at his pocket watch. "It's ten o'clock in the morning, Mustang."
"Great, I'll buy you a beer."
x
x
x
While Edward was grateful that Mustang offered him a ride—Winry had the car that day—he was feeling the dark, creeping tendrils of regret when they turned into a paved lot without any overhead lights or painted parking stalls. The creepers really took root, however, when Mustang walked him around the front of the building and they paused under a large, pink and yellow sign bearing in embellished, curvy lettering "The Honeypot."
"You took me to a brothel?" Edward asked shrilly as they stood on the sidewalk.
The pretense of cheer had vanished from Mustang as soon as they had left headquarters, and he answered flatly, "It's a safe house."
"The house part I'll buy, but unless the definition of safe has changed since the last time I used it, you're totally crossing a line right now, Mustang."
"And here I thought getting Miss Rockbell to pay attention to you would compel you to grow up a little."
"That's not funny!" Edward squawked. "And it's none of your goddamn business!"
Mustang chuckled. "I'm only joking," he said. "I know the management. We can talk about the case here without being overheard."
"You mean know in the old-timey sense or know in a normal-person-who-doesn't-go-to-a-whorehouse-during-work-hours sense?"
"That's disgusting, Ed," Mustang snapped, glaring at his subordinate. He was quiet for a moment and then looked toward the building. He added in a tone of resignation, "This is my mother's establishment."
Mustang headed for the door, but Edward was too stunned to move. "You what now?" he asked.
"You heard me the first time," Mustang replied darkly without looking over his shoulder.
Ed was too shocked to laugh, too shocked to generate the perfect, stinging retort that the situation truly deserved. It was just too good. "I'm going to keep this one in my back pocket, Mustang," Edward said as he strolled forward and caught up with the General. "We're even now for that carrying-me business."
Mustang opened the door for Ed and as he passed, said, "Fair enough."
The interior of the building was spacious and well lit from a row of windows high in the street-facing wall. To the left of the entrance was a long, curved bar, behind which an older, doughy woman sat counting bills and making notations in a ledger, and on the right, a generous seating area opened, filled with comfortable sectionals and overstuffed chairs. Three or four young women lounged in various poses on the couches. Not in a sexy, scarlet woman way, but in a I-fell-asleep-here-last-night way.
The woman behind the counter looked up and gave a lopsided smile that didn't touch her eyes but did make her jowls jiggle.
She plucked the long stem of her cigarette out of her mouth and said, "Roy," in something that might, in a less friendly world, sound like maternal warmth.
"Chris," Roy said, smiling. He led Edward over to the bar, and they took stools next to each other. The bar looked clean enough, but Edward couldn't shake the feeling that he might catch the clap if he touched anything. He set his hands in his lap and made as little contact as possible.
"You're here awfully early," the woman noted as she flicked the ash from her cigarette. "And you brought a friend? I doubt any of the girls are up yet." She put the stem between her teeth and went back to counting notes.
Edward felt his face heat up, and he tried to slump below the bar. Mustang caught him by the arm, though, and jerked him back up. "We're here on business," Mustang said. "Is it too early for a couple drinks?"
She grinned and said without looking up from her fingers adroitly riffling money, "No such thing." Once she was done tallying, recording, and stashing her cash, she reached under the bar and produced two brown bottles, both of which she opened with her teeth. Edward cringed.
The Madam dropped the drinks in front of her visitors and leaned her elbow against the bar. "Tell me, Roy," she said and pointed to Edward, "This isn't an illegitimate son of yours, is it? You know those programs are popping up all over the city, trying to reunite sons and fathers."
Edward sprayed beer all over the bar.
Perhaps under different circumstances, Mustang would have let out a belly laugh. Instead, he snorted and shook his head. "No," he said. "This is a colleague of mine, Major Elric."
Edward choked again. "Don't tell her my name!" he hissed, earning himself a merciless kick in the flesh and bone shin.
"A colleague? From headquarters?" she asked incredulously. The Madam sized up Edward and concluded, "They're getting 'em while they're young these days."
"Can you do me a favor?" Mustang said, sidestepping any preamble.
"Turn up the gramophone and disperse anyone who comes in?" she said after a long pull from her cigarette stem.
"You know the drill," Mustang said with an odd tone of gratitude that Edward had never heard come out of the man.
The Madam stood up with some effort and waddled toward the end of the bar. She opened the hatch and made her way toward the gramophone where it sat on a dark, heavy table. Before she dropped the needle, she turned to Mustang and called out, "You know, we just finished the opium den in the basement. First visit is on me." With that, she started the music, a sultry-voiced woman over a big band, and waddled off into the backroom.
After a long silence, Edward turned to Mustang. "This explains a lot about you, General."
"You know one of the benefits of subordinates with automail?" Mustang said, sipping his beer. "They always carry perfectly good bludgeons with them. All I have to do is rip it out of the socket first."
Edward gave an ah-ha! sort of laugh. "You brought me here, General."
"Which, I hope you realize, reflects the seriousness of our situation."
Edward looked over his shoulder at the room around him. The women in the lounge were still beauty-sleeping away. Madam Christmas was gone. No haggard-looking men were staggering down the stairs from the balcony above. "What did you get from Berman?"
"Almost nothing," Mustang confessed. "He made it very clear that this was his case, and if he's willing to drag Lieutenant General Beryl into it, he isn't kidding. I don't know if he thinks I'm an idiot or the Double-A is a joke." Mustang paused to take a draw from his beer. With the bottle still in hand, Mustang wiped his mouth with the back of his fingers. "He told me not to get involved in this one. He made it sound like a threat."
"You don't think he's being territorial because he just transferred here from Eastern?" Edward offered while he picked at the label on his bottle with his thumbnail.
Mustang let out a bark of a laugh. "That's uncharacteristically generous of you, Ed."
"I just don't want him complicating things. They're complicated enough."
"Well, they're going to stay complicated. If one officious secretary can undermine this entire investigation, we've got our work cut out for us. What did you get from the coroner?" Mustang pulled the vial of powder from his pocket and looked at it in his palm.
"I got that working with dead people makes you into one creepy fuck," Edward answered. "And, apparently, not above bribery."
"That's good news."
Edward snorted at that. The fact that one corrupt mortician could be considered good news, he thought, did not bode well for them. "A couple things," Edward began. "Whoever is killing these women is right-handed, dabbles in obstetrics, and, most importantly, is goal-oriented."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean, this guy has more than an MO. He has a procedure. The coroner said it was practically surgical, and from the looks of things, he's right. I've seen murder victims, and this didn't look like one. This looked like a patient." Edward shook his head and willed away the girl's face from his memory. Her cold, pale, swollen face. "I checked for something like IV punctures, but there weren't any in the usual locations."
Mustang downed a long swallow from his drink and set down the empty bottle. "They didn't look like patients in the photographs," he said. "They looked like livestock."
"What?" Edward hissed.
"From the pictures and what you've told me, it sounds like someone is harvesting from these women."
"Jesus Christ," Edward swore, dropping his elbow hard onto the bar. He leaned his face into his hand and rubbed his eyes. "That doesn't explain the white stuff."
Mustang hummed in thought and picked up the vial. He furrowed his brow suddenly and jumped up from his stool.
"What are you doing?" Edward asked, dropping his hand from his face.
The General followed the length of the bar, lifted the hatch, and walked around back. "A little experiment," he answered as he came to stand across from Edward. With very careful fingers, Mustang pried the cork from the top of the vial and tapped a small amount of the powder into a pile on the bar.
Edward watched his superior bend down behind the bar and riffle through something he couldn't see. The stale smell of an icebox struck Edward along with the sharp clink of glass bottles bumping together. When Mustang stood back up, he was holding half a lemon and a knife. He cut a wedge out of the lemon and set down the rest.
"You know what's a really good idea?" Edward said, scooting away from Mustang's experiment.
"What's that?" Mustang asked without looking up from his work. With the lemon wedge hovering over the powder, Mustang squeezed out one, two, three drops of juice. They hit the pile and began to foam and fizzle.
"Dropping acids onto unknown powders," Ed snapped.
"I wouldn't call it unknown," Mustang said. "I have a strong inkling."
Edward now dropped his other elbow onto the bar and leaned into both hands. "How did a rube like you ever get your Doctorate?"
Mustang ignored him. "What do you think? Calcium carbonate?"
"Why don't you just try some and see if your indigestion goes away?" Edward suggested sarcastically.
"I suppose I deserved that," Mustang said quickly, "But it worked. We've got a vial of basic, reactive, insoluble white powder that came out of a prostitute."
"So someone is feeding hookers Dr. Pinkerton's Stomach Tabs and taking their babies?" Edward offered. "The body I saw had enough of this stuff in it to leave deposits in the esophagus and stomach. The coroner said that, in the bodies that still had digestive systems, he found calcified lumps throughout."
"You'd have to feed someone crates of stomach tabs to get that reaction."
"Or less of something harder," Edward said.
"Like what?" Mustang asked, "Not to mention why?"
"Like..." Edward began with a furrowed brow, but as a terrible idea dawned on him, his face softened. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open.
Why, he had wondered with Russell, was the red water level dropping so suddenly? Where was that volume of such a noxious liquid going? And why, he wondered now, was the drop in volume concurrent with these murders? "Like limestone."
"Limestone?"
"Dissolved limestone in a medium," Edward said. When he saw Mustang turn his head slightly and narrow his eyes, Edward realized that he was not making the connection. "When I was in Xenotime, Russell Tringham and I found an underground body of red water. Judging by the formations in the walls of the cave, the red water had been at a particular level for a very long time, but something had begun draining it. You don't get caves without dissolved limestone, and you don't get red water without caves. This would be one hell of a coincidence, General."
"Are you suggesting that someone is feeding red water to pregnant women?"
Edward paused for a moment to determine if he were, in fact, asserting that. And he was. "Yes, I am."
Mustang looked down at the bar, his eyes shifting as he thought, and he covered his mouth with his right hand pensively. After a moment, he brought his eyes up to Edward and slid his hand from his mouth. "I don't care what you have to do, Fullmetal. Get Tringham here on the next train from Xenotime."