Lee never picked up.

  Garcia reasoned that, depending on how close Lee was tailing Okawa, he’d have his phone on silent. However it still struck him as odd that his partner hadn’t responded to any of his texts in the time it had taken to return to Plant Projects.

  When he arrived back at Plant Projects, Garcia was told by the scientist pair that Lee had spoken with earlier that Okawa had suddenly decided to take off early. Thankfully, Garcia was able to grab a home address for him from the pair. And so, on the pretense that Garcia really needed to hear about those fibers in the bodies, Garcia went to Okawa’s apartment, where he was increasingly becoming distressed to find that Lee hadn’t responded. A feeling of nauseating panic welled up from within him, a feeling that grew worse when he realized where the address for Okawa’s apartment had taken him. Okawa’s apartment was in the building right across the street from where the first victim had lived.

  Garcia’s body shuddered, and though he couldn’t say why, he would soon understand.

  A few minutes later, Garcia was standing in front of Okawa’s door, having knocked, and waiting for an answer. In waiting for a response, his mind began to wander, as it tended to do in the past few weeks and days, to one of the victims. In this instance his mind had drifted to the male victim, the artist.

  He had been able to explain away his obsession with the first victim as something psycho sexual, the victim, although she had been sliced open for all the world to see, had been amply preserved in such a state as to still be found, in some sick way, as beautiful, as a woman. He had reasoned that some part of him, an old reptilian part, had latched onto this and so let the idea of the woman live in his head rent free. He could not explain away his obsession with the artist in the same way.

  With the artist it was more difficult for him to even explain to himself why he was so entranced. In pure grotesqueness the artist’s body had not been so terrible, and so he couldn’t even hold up sheer horror as a reason for his obsession, and so he had begun to understand it, reluctantly, as a sort of appreciation. The killer had preserved the artist’s ability to draw, and yet revealed the mechanism with which the artist did this, exalting the artist’s creative ability while also removing the magic of it by revealing the gritty, visceral mechanicha by which the artist rendered his art. Garcia believed that something similar had been what truly played into his appreciation of the first victim, but he did not have much time to muse on this as he realized that he had been standing in front of Okawa’s apartment for a long time without the door being opened.

  Garcia knocked again, and this time, there was an answer, and Okawa stood before him.

  He appeared as he had in the lab. The day’s work had made a few hairs from his bowl cut stand astray. His lab coat, as well as the tie he had been wearing earlier, was missing. His sleeves were rolled up, and his forearms and armpits were damp. Garcia may not have had his partner's powers of perception, but he guessed that he had just bothered Okawa in the middle of some kind of physically intense labor.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” said Garcia as soon as Okawa opened the door.

  “No, not at all,” said Okawa. “It’s a pleasure to see you detective, and a surprise. Did you have some more questions for me?”

  “No, actually I was here to ask you about a sample that was given to you to examine. A strange set of fibers.” Garcia saw a droplet of sweat form and fall on Okawa’s forehead. “You’re sure I haven’t interrupted anything?”

  Okawa then seemed to take stock of his own appearance, and noticed that his hands were damp.

  “Just doing the dishes,” he said, after a pause.

  “I see,” said Garcia, thinking that it did go some way toward explain the state of the man. Perhaps Okawa worked up a sweat fairly easily, and hadn’t it been warm in that lab? Regardless of his surface thoughts, Garcia felt a chill. “May I come in?”

  “Of course, I always have time for the police,” said Okawa, after a delay that might not have been noticeable to anyone but Garcia.

  Garcia was ushered into Okawa’s apartment.

  It was homie, lived in. It was much more nicely decorated than Garcia expected of a single male– as he suspected Okawa was –and if he wasn’t then Garcia would like to meet the woman whose skin didn’t crawl at the sight of him..

  “Will you be staying long?” asked Okawa. “Can I get you something? Some tea maybe?”

  “Sure,” said Garcia, who had never been too fond of tea. He had agreed to a drink out of instinct, something inside him wanted to be able to give the living room a quick search while Okawa wasn’t looking.

  “I’ll be right back then,” said Okawa, leaving Garcia alone in the living room.

  Garcia did as his instincts had bid him, and began to look around the living room. His eyes scattered across the room. His eyes passed over and lingered on Okawa’s window several times, and at last, he approached it, drawn to it by some instinct he didn’t understand– though his mind had perhaps been working it over ever since he parked his car outside.

  Peering through it, Garcia could perfectly into one of the apartments from the shorter building across the street, moreover he could tell which apartment he was looking into because of the yellow police tape that cordoned off the area around the bed of the apartment. The apartment of the first victim.

  How very interesting, thought Garcia, wondering if this hidden thought that had been whirring away in the back of his mind had been the cause of his unease, but when he checked with himself he found that that feeling was still there. Something else is very wrong here.

  “Tea’s brewing,” said Okawa from behind, causing Garcia to jump inside his skin.

  “Ah, good,” said Garcia. “Can I ask you about those fibers now?”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “Actually I need to finish taking care of something before we start.”

  “Can’t the dishes wait?”

  “Right, the dishes, just finished them, actually. There was something else I was putting away, and I’d like it to not be available to dust. One of those things.”

  Garcia grunted in reply, giving Okawa a nod as he watched the man disappear into his apartment.

  Stranger and stranger.

  Garcia sat down in Okawa’s kitchen, only long enough to notice that Okawa’s dishwasher was open, and full of dry dishes. He stood up and checked just to be sure, and again found that there were no wet dishes, and that Okawa’s sink was empty. He found the sink dry and free of foodstuffs.

  It was then, with sudden clarity of mind, that Garcia realized what the unease that had been troubling him was. It was Lee.

  Lee had been following Okawa, and Garcia had dismissed Lee’s silence as him keeping a tight watch on Okawa. But here Garcia was. Inside Okawa’s apartment. Unless Lee kept such a close watch on Okawa that he had decided to sneak in and hide in his closet, he should have been able to see Garcia enter Okawa’s building. Even if his partner hadn’t bothered checking his phone, he would have seen Garcia and should have thought to send him a message. Garcia checked his phone just to be sure he hadn’t missed a text, and found that his inbox was empty.

  Something is deeply, deeply not right.

  Stirred by instinct, Garcia rose from his seat in the kitchen, and drew his weapon.

  Did he have probable cause? He wasn’t sure, probably not, almost definitely not.

  Okawa’s hall had three doors. At the very end of the hall there was one with light coming from underneath it.

  Garcia approached the closed door, and shredding the last of his doubt as to whether he was overreacting, he kicked in the door. What he saw would stay with him the rest of his days.

  It was his partner, Lee.

  The back of Lee’s head was blown open, like a single frame from a high speed camera capturing the moment that a man had his head ripped apart by a shotgun. Pieces of his skull were hanging in the air, exposing the pink matter of his brain, which appeared to also be sectioned, scattered and hanging in the air. The scene was pure horror. Or it was, until what Garcia had assumed was Lee’s corpse began to cough.

  “Garcia…” said Lee– at least, Garcia thought, it had come from the lips of Lee’s corpse. There was no way the man was alive.

  “Oh I assure you, he’s very much alive,” said Okawa.

  Garcia blinked. He had been so transfixed by Lee’s blown up head that he had failed to notice Okawa standing in the middle of the room. He had also failed to notice that Lee’s eyeball had been pried free from its socket, the optical nerve pulled as taught as it could be without tearing.

  Okawa stood, smug, beside the hanging eyeball, a dropper of water in his hand. He squeezed the rubber end of it and dripped a few drops onto Lee’s eyeball.

  “I have to keep it moistened, or else he’ll go blind in that eye,” said Okawa.

  Garcia didn’t have any words. He was stuck somewhere between rapture and revulsion. Had Lee been dead it would have been easier, he would have shot Okawa down and be done with it, but with Lee alive… there was a sort of magic in the air, as if he were in the same room as da Vinci, watching him having just brushed the final stroke on the Mona Lisa.

  “No words?” asked Okawa, smiling. “I thought not. I can see your appreciation for my art clear as day. I sensed that we were as kin when we spoke at the lab. You have… an unsettling presence about you Mr. Garcia. People can tell that you aren’t like them. Every ball is a masquerade for you, isn’t it?”

  Garcia swallowed, unable to speak, even this he found very difficult as his throat was very dry. His eyes kept falling in between the bits and pieces of Lee’s brain. The pieces had been cleaved clean, and yet, somehow, Lee seemed surprisingly lucid– all things considered that is.

  Lee was groaning, and didn’t exactly appear to be all there, but for a man whose brain had been hacked apart? Lee was doing beyond great.

  “You’re probably wondering how he’s still functioning. Truth be told I’m not entirely sure myself. I do know that my mycelium is responsible. I learned with my first art piece that my mycelium was somehow able to connect autonomic parts of the nervous system together. Things like breathing, heart regulation, etc. I hadn’t realized I needed to take that into account until her heart had stopped. I attempted to resuscitate her, and found that it had only worked when my mycelium had formed connections in her spine. It’s a shame I hadn’t worked out the kinks with her though. Of all my art pieces, her, the artist, and now your partner, she had been my first and greatest love and inspiration.”

  “You’re sick!” yelled Garcia, trembling. His hands were shaking with his finger over the trigger.

  “And so are you detective!” countered Okawa. “Admit it, you’re thrilled by my art! Your man here, I know, has a keen ability for observation. He can disassemble the world with his mind, I felt him taking me apart even as he silently stood by your side in our interview. And here I have rendered him and his ability for all to see, the man and the mechanism! Isn’t it glorious!”

  Lee croaked a plea for aid that Garcia could barely understand.

  “How is he still alive?” asked Garcia, and he realized that he had started crying. “How?”

  “Weren’t you listening? Perhaps not. You’re too captured in my art. It’s okay. I’ll spell it out for you again,” said Okawa, wetting Lee’s eyeball again. “It’s my mycelium. Not only does it continue to carry the nutrients in the body’s blood, but also the signals from its neural pathways. It’s really quite something. A slight modification, incorporating strands of DNA from the cordyceps variety allows me to selectively paralyze the target as well. He’s all there I assure you, despite his difficulty in speaking.”

  Garcia remained silent, still trembling.

  “Or perhaps you’re curious about how I captured him? It’s not too long winded of a story. He just didn’t suspect that I knew he was watching me. It was as simple as having him follow me somewhere I knew no one was looking and catching him unawares.”

  Garcia once again found the will to speak, though he did so weakly.

  “I’m bringing you in, this ends here, now.”

  “Oh don’t be so hasty,” said Okawa. “We have so much more art to create, you and I. Why not? Why not be with your own kind detective, give yourself the freedom to conceptualize what others will not– cannot.”

  Garcia’s finger was still hovering over the trigger of his weapon. He had all the leverage here. All the power. It was his decision to make, and yet… why did he feel trapped? Why did the room feel so hot and small? Why… but of course he knew. Had always known it.

  Garcia was sick. Sick in the head, in the heart. He chased demented killers, half for a paycheck, half because it was the right thing to do, and half again because he couldn’t help himself. Each crime scene had always been a fresh joy, a new gallery of blood, of pure human emotion on display. When a man killed another there was almost always a reason, or perhaps it was better to say that there was very little reason– yes, thought Garcia –that was it, no reason, only emotion, raw and simple.

  Garcia wiped the sweat from his brow. He wasn’t seriously considering this was he? Joining Okawa?

  “You can stop being the critique, and start being the artist,” said Okawa, with a smile.

  Garcia could hear his heart in his ears, and then, a voice, hoarse, dry, and weak, but it cut through to him like a dagger. A voice he felt in his soul

  “Partner…” said Lee weakly.

  And the choice was made.

  Garcia fired his weapon, and for the very first time in his life, created his own art.