Brown pools dotted the living room’s wooden floor between the couch and a decorative pillar. A yellow evidence marker stood at each of the largest splotches. Doc approached, fist tight around the handle of her black bag. When the police called ABP, they didn’t call their own forensics team. They would wait until she assessed whether this was ABP’s problem or theirs. How many cases fell apart during those delays?

“That’s nothing there,” the officer said. “You like that, you’ll love the bathroom.”

Doc did not love the bathroom. At a glance, she could tell it hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time, even before the body and the gore. Blood caked black in the grout between tiles. Bright red residue stained the tub’s porcelain basin as if someone had recently dyed their hair in a pink mess.

A bigger mess lay on the floor. Doc was glad her gas mask guarded her from the corpse. He wore a T-shirt and boxers, both slashed apart. Hunks of flesh had been torn from his torso and limbs, leaving chewed gashes.

Worst was the head, or what was left of it. Someone had cracked open his skull, less a blunt cranial injury, more like an egg.

And the yolk was missing.

“He got a name?” Aziz asked. He and Greenwich kept outside the bathroom door, giving Doc space to examine.

“Bryant Peters,” the officer said.

Doc wasn’t sure why Aziz had asked. Maybe he was a more decent human than herself and wanted to respect the dead, but no bedside manner could help a corpse. She drew steel tongs from her bag, pulled a sheet of plastic from the ends, and plucked at Bryant’s clothing, inspecting each wound.

The officer cleared his throat. “We usually use a—” He choked on his own

words. Aziz must have turned to him, and despite their own humanity-free face shields, most officers found ABP gas masks unnerving.

Doc couldn’t blame them. Still, there were more unnerving things in this city than ABP agents. She found one nestled in Bryant’s flesh and had to swap tongs for tweezers to snatch it. She’d seen one before, yanked from Aziz’s neck.

Two inches long, made of bone or cartilage, a leftover from vaginal limbs.

Doc had hoped Yaya might have scrounged up cash and hopped on a bus headed west. There were places where she would be miserable, but there were also places where she could disappear. But she hadn’t. She was here, and she was lethal.

Doc showed her team the splinter. Greenwich kept focused on his phone until Aziz nudged his arm.

The officer tried to peer between them. “That a porcupine quill?”

“No,” Doc said, standing from the corpse. “It’s very human.”

“Betancourt, prime suspect, as speculated,” Greenwich said.

Aziz’s gas mask scanned the bathroom and then his shoulders flinched.

“Betancourt really did this?” he asked. “Weird equipment in her lap, but seriously, that little thing she was?”

Was being the operative word. Yaya was a mystery, even to Doc, Magenta having brought new adaptations. Doc wondered at their catalysts. Which ones necessitated that Magenta crack open and empty Bryant’s skull?