He heard one of the EMTs say "Ugh."
He had never heard an EMT go "Ugh" before. The poor bastards saw everything. Officer Funkhauser thought he had seen everything, too.
So he took his eyes off the line of cars and cabs and glanced down.
What he saw hit him like a mule's kick.
The victim's face was turned up to the sky. The sun was shining down with a clarity New York City only enjoyed on cloudless days.
The victim's eye sockets were scarlet caverns. There was no blood. No eyeballs. Just the red bone that was designed by nature to hold the human eye in place.
"Jesus, where are this guy's eyes?" blurted the EMT who hadn't said "Ugh."
At that point, the dead guy's mouth-there was no question he was dead-dropped open. The sun shone directly into it. It showed the interior of his mouth. And showed without a doubt that the dead man had no tongue. No uvula, either.
"I think we have a homicide here," the first EMT muttered.
"Fuck," said Officer Funkhauser, who knew he had to call for Homicide and a morgue wagon and didn't think his upraised hand and his badge could hold off the growling cabs much longer.
"I think it was a mob hit," Officer Funkhauser volunteered when two homicide detectives made their appearance.
"What makes you say that?" the black one asked while the white one knelt over the body.
"Guy had his eyes gouged out, and his tongue is missing. That says mob hit to me."
The homicide detective grunted and said, "We deal in facts."
"And it's a fact that poor guy's lacking eyes and a tongue. They didn't melt in the heat. It won't break sixty-five today."
"We deal in facts," the detective repeated. "Harry, what have you got?"
"I think we'd better get this guy photographed and off the street before we all get run down."
That took all of thirty minutes, and when the body had been photographed from every angle and the outline traced in metallic silver to withstand tire prints, the coroner's people laid him on a gurney and started to cart him off.
The body wobbled on the gurney, and as they raised it to the level of the wagon, the eyeless head rolled to the left. Out of the left ear poured a pinkish gray gruel, and the seasoned veterans on the scene recognized it as brain matter.
"Jesus."
They gathered around the gurney as it was set back on the ground.
"Brains don't liquefy like that, do they?" Funkhauser muttered.
"How long has this guy been dead?" an EMT wondered aloud.
They poked and prodded and noticed the flesh hadn't even cooled, and decided less than an hour.
"Brains don't liquefy," the homicide detective repeated.
No one disputed him. But they were looking at human brain matter lying like so much custard beside the man's left ear.
The medical examiner got down on one knee and shone a light into the corpse's right ear.
"What do you see?" asked Officer Funkhauser, who was by this time fascinated. He had always wanted to go into Homicide. This was very educational.
"Step aside," the M.E. barked.
When he did, the M.E. gasped.
"What is it?"
"I see daylight. I can see clear through this man's skull."
"Is that possible?"
"If the man's head was empty, it is," he said, climbing to his feet. His knees were shaking. He said, "Load him up and get him out of here."
Officer Funkhauser watched the body slide into the back of the meat wagon and spoke the obvious.
"The mob doesn't normally mess with a guy's brains. Do they?"
AT THE MANHATTAN MORGUE, the body was identified as that of Doyal T. Rand by the contents of his wallet.
Chief Medical Examiner Lemuel Quirk X-rayed his skull and determined it was empty of all soft tissue. No tissue, brains or soft palate. Other organs were missing, too. The pineal gland. The thyroid. The sinuses. And the entire auditory canal.
When they cut him open, they discovered an undigested mass in his stomach that caused Quirk to go as pale as sailcloth.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at human brain matter," he muttered.
His assistant took a quick look, gulped hard and grabbed at his mouth. As he ran from the autopsy room, he could be heard retching all the way down the hall.
Dr. Quirk scooped out the contents of the stomach, weighed them and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, probed them.
Brain matter all right. Liquefied, like scrambled eggs that had set. But mixed in were red bits of pulp and flecks of matter he realized with a heart-pounding start were the clear lenses of a human eye.
"How...?"
Going to the head, Quirk pried open the mouth and shone a penlight down the man's gullet.
"No soft palate ...yes, it was possible."
Somehow the man's brain, eyes and other soft tissues had been churned to a liquid and simply slid down his unobstructed esophagus into his waiting stomach via natural apertures in the basal skull like the foramen magnum, the clivus and possibly the cribiform plate. Since there had been no digestion, the liquefaction had occurred at or just before the time of death. It was all very logical, the biology of it.
Except it was impossible. People's brains did not turn to liquid and go sliding down their gullets.
Not unless there was a terrible new agency of death out there.