Free Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes Page A

an ID on your kid yet?” Miranda asks.
    “Stricker and Boyd started on that this morning.”
    “Pulled all our missing kids reports and put in a request with the other precincts. Got about a hundred we’re going through. Ditched the girls already, working through the boys. Lucky it was cold out, so he looks like he looks.”
    She knows what Luke means. Preserved. Couple of days in July, and he’d be swelled up like the Michelin Man. She had that once with a teenager pulled out of the water after three days. Her mother kept saying, “Nah, nah, that ain’t my baby. My baby ain’t fat like that, my baby ain’t got those chubby cheeks.” It took two hours to persuade her otherwise, and she only succeeded because of the tattoo of the seahorse on the girl’s ankle. Gabi gets it: you don’t want to believe. Not in real life.
    “We could hand over the kid’s photo to the press,” Boyd says.
    “We are not releasing the photo,” Miranda says.
    “Doesn’t have to be the whole thing. Crop it to a head shot.”
    “You gonna make me repeat myself?”
    “Just saying.” Boyd scratches his beard.
    “We’ll give it another day. It’s going to be traumatic enough for the family without seeing it in the press.”
    “Can I come with you to the medical examiner?” the rookie says. “I found him. I feel like I should see him through.”
    “Fine by me, Sparkles,” Gabi says. “ If your precinct commander signs off on it. But you better know that if you’re in, you’ve bought a ticket for the whole ride. I will use you.”
    “Thank you, ma’am.”
    “Ovella, can you get on the Michigan Intelligence Center? Mike, you’ve got a friend in the FBI, right?”
    “I don’t have any friends, Gabriella, you know that.” No, just three kids and a happy marriage to a human resources manager. It’s what makes him such a colossal wiseass. He can afford to be.
    “If you could talk to someone with access to a better database than we have, that would be helpful. And it would be worth a beer.”
    “Make it a six-pack.”
    “Okay, people, everybody clear? You find anything, you let me know soon as.”
    “What if we run out of minutes and have to radio it in?” Sparkles asks.
    “Use a code.”
    “How about ‘Faline’?” Croff says, tapping away at his smartphone.
    “What’s that?”
    He turns the screen to show them. “Bambi’s girlfriend in the movie. And that’s you now, isn’t it, Gabriella?”
    There’s enough laughter that she lets it go. “Fine. Faline it is. Everyone else, we’re calling in to all the precincts. Similar stiffs, MOs, any connections. Start local, go as far as it takes. Biggest priority is identifying the boy and finding the rest of him. The deer too.” She writes it down. The marker gives out on her halfway through “ find the rest .” She throws it at the wall.
    “Is there one fucking pen in this precinct that writes?”

BEFORE: History of Art
    Clayton disappeared into the work. Otherwise he had too much time to think, about his cracked windshield and the dent in his grill and the blood on the tarpaulin in the back of his truck. Everything was so muddled in his head. The memories were like silverfish that skittered away into dark corners. It was easier to look away than try to grab hold of them.
    (Don’t look in the refrigerator.)
    Besides, the work was flowing. He was inspired. Like he hadn’t been since he was twenty years old, when he was too young and too stupid to have doubts about what he was doing. He could slip away into it, like diving into the deepest part of the lake: the same pressure in his head, the tightening in his ears, the hurt in his chest, aching for air.
    When he surfaced, blinking in the fluorescent light in the basement, hours had gone by. Days maybe. His body reasserted itself with all its tiresome urges. His stomach roiled with hunger, his back ached, his hands were cramped, with fresh calluses. But he had new work, in new materials, finally making use of