Blood & Baltazar

by Liam Inscoe-Jones

  “How does that work?” The Chief Detector quizzed, then realised what he’d done and groaned; frustrated he'd satisfied Josiah by asking.

  “This morning, when the effect had faded, my mind has an awful lot of catching up to do. And my brain working at full speed is one hell of a powerful thing.” He sniffed. “Of course that requires a highly attuned brain; it wouldn’t work for most people and especially not you. Drugs are a bad thing; drugs are not good; hence the reason Lylith is currently having one of the worst showers of her life.”

  “Wha…” Marcus began, only to find his lips blocked by the stranger’s finger. Slowly the Detector turned, and found himself facing at last the vast Mill Plain. The grass started to fade once again to peat as the snow-capped hills of the valley wall slipped away around them, opening up to the tranquil meadow. As Fraun’s eyes filtered over the moist soil, he found the ground start to split and turn at the edges, pressed firmly around the base of the pristine wooden skirting bolted to the first of many hundreds of windmills.

  The structures themselves were relatively small, with wooden slats wrapping around slim, hexagonal shapes. Their features were limited, with the most of the walls continually repainted with brilliant whites or browns, with only a few small windows cut into the woodwork. The buildings started to curve inwards towards their tops, making way for their most elegant features.

  The giant fans rotated at the peak of the buildings, four wooden slats turning at increasing speed as the breeze rose again. Each arm of the fan was smooth to the touch, the brief sun filtering off the gloss-varnished shells. Each wooden arm was carved into a perfect curve, catching the wind as it funnelled through the valley. The buildings were fashioned into lines, each almost identical in structure but with a different company name etched to a sign above the entrances. And the rows spanned for miles, each fan folding in on itself as they sloped across the bare land of the meadow, growing bigger and more extravagant the further back the mills were commissioned.

  Both their attentions were naturally drawn towards the very back line, where the slumbering giant’s arms turned slower than the rest, arching in on themselves as the blades continued to roll. The formation of fans created quite a sound, the swooping of woodwork echoing for miles across the hillsides.

  “Impressive.” Josiah nodded, feeling he needed to comment. “I was here when they built it.”

  “So was I.” Marcus Fraun replied. “We all were.”

  “No, I mean I was actually here.” He pointed towards the ground. “…Sitting on this very spot. They kicked me off in the end - I kept giving them advice.” He finished his sentence and turned around, feeling the presence of a hand on his shoulder. He smiled as he found Lylith White standing behind him, one hand on her hips and waiting patiently. She was still soaking wet, her thick brown hair lying heavily across her clothes, the dampness seeping through the material.

  “You’re still wet.” Josiah stated simply.

  “You didn’t have any towels.” Lylith muttered.

  “Oh, sorry about that.” Hartt said. “I usually use the hairdryer.”

  “That must take hours.” She said, shaking herself off.

  “It does. I don’t usually wash.” Josiah clapped his hands together, turning back to the meadow and the cool breeze of air it wafted down the valley. “Right, sightseeing over. There’s a body fresh for the waking.”

  Deputy Detector Rosin Ash stood beside Field Specialist Elisa Smith as she hovered her cold scalpel over the skin of the lifeless body resting on the soil. For the second time he had found the body himself. This time he was sweeping, as with every morning, down row after row of windmills on the Plain; checking for illegal trading or break-ins. Usually Stonemoore was so quiet most of his work seemed to be checking just in case something that had never been known to happen had finally taken place, and to his frustration it rarely had. Not today though.

  The man below Rosin’s feet was tall, with long legs sprawled across the dirt. The body’s hair was greased with various products, an accompanying sharp suit trying desperately to mask the growing wrinkles and bugling stomach.

  Beside the corpse as the Detector had found it was another replication of the symbol, scrawled in yellow paint upon the perfect white panels of one of the smaller mills. The pale pine fans rolled above their heads, like the propellers on an old biplane: it’s cool draft drying the sticky paint and rustling his rain soaked hair.

  “I think you should stop that.” Ash muttered to the only female member of his team as she started to score the man’s skin with a knife. “He alive you know – just paralysed.”

  “And who told us that?” She snapped, jolting her head sideways. “Yeah, he did, that man who you’ve let come to and fro upon fresh crime scenes whenever he likes. And just like you always do Rosin; you hung on his every word. For all you know he might be murdering these people himself and sauntering back here, mocking you just by his presence - masking his steps with some fancy words that you just can’t comprehend. Why should I respect what he thinks?”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” The Deputy Detector said. “But everything that man has told us makes sense, every word of it – and we need him Elisa. The things he’s found, if it weren’t for him Roseanne Price would have been cut up while she was still alive. I resented him at first just like you, but maybe we should put our pride behind us and listen to what he has to say…”

  “Well as it happens, Deputy, I trained long and hard for my position here, and I’ll be damned if I’m giving all that up for one strange man and his amateur theories! I’d bet my next pay check Josiah Hartt is behind it all….”

  “If he is then isn’t it better he’s here among us. You know what they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer... I certainly did that with you.”

  “I’m not your enemy…” Elisa leant upright, heart beating fast, “… am I?”

  “No.” Rosin sighed. “But you’re certainly not my friend.”

  The Specialist sighed a breath of relief “That may be the case, but my point is, sir, he just isn’t qualified. The state of him; he couldn’t pass an interview let alone get a degree…”

  “He’s delivered so far!” The Detector spat. “And I have a hunch soon he will lead us to our dealer. He’s arrogant as hell but I like him, and for now I trust him, so tidy up before they arrive. We don’t have much time.”

  “Oh, of course.” Elisa sighed, pulling off her thin cotton gloves. “Because you refused to shut down the Plain, meaning we need to finish up and ship the body off before all of those rowdy workers out there can notice…”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Deputy Ash quizzed. “Think of the chaos if we locked them all out – thousands of people asking questions and banging on our doors. Bad news spreads quickly; at least we can contain it so the whole town doesn't get hold of what we have here…”

  “And just what have we got here?” A voice came from behind the Deputy. He turned and found, observing them, Lylith White and Marcus Fraun– with Josiah Hartt already racing past him, his long coat wiping through the air awash with excitement and frenzy.

  “Another poor, debt riddled victim?” Hartt queried aloud. “Doesn’t look too poor though, nice ring, fancy suit – a haircut like that must have cost him a fair bit…” At first he ignored the body and ran his fingertips over the freshly dampened dirt. “Only one set of footprints this time…”

  “There was only ever one.” The Field Specialist groaned.

  “Not true.” Josiah stated, waving his fingers in the air. “Very untrue. Like I said down at edge of the forest: there were two very different tracks. Like with the first body, it looked like the drugs were delivered by a barefooted man, pinning the packet to the wall, masking it with graffiti and disappearing for the victim to receive a nasty surprise from the package they came all this way for. But those prints were faded and long since retrodden by a completely different person, sporting a nasty limp and a very nice pair of shoes. Th
is second man tidied up the body and left us a little message, a paper marked with the number four, buried in the ground. No sign of two arrivals this time, so what was so special about poor frozen Mr Acrimony?” Josiah Hartt rubbed his hands together, leaping over to Marcus Fraun.

  “I presumed that’s why you’re here.” The Chief Detector muttered. “To find out why the other man was visiting the scene after the dealer had …”

  Yet the Detector barely had a chance to croak his final word before Lylith White stepped forward with her mouth wide open and her eyes alight. “Oh God…” She spluttered. “I know him…”

  “What?” Rosin Ash snapped, face jolting forward as his body followed, imposing himself above her. “Why didn’t you say so – who is he?”

  “I didn’t realise it was him.” Lylith trembled as she leant closer, running shaking fingertips across his cold white flesh.

  “Does he work with you?” The Deputy Detector interrogated.

  “No…well…sort of I suppose…” Lylith White replied. “He’s an Inspector. Mr McCoy - I never knew his first name. I suppose he’d be on his morning rounds about now, checking each mill is working to the enforced limits etcetera - he must be what, about fifty five? Not a nice man; his job was to be disciplined but he went far beyond necessity. Everyone hated him but he was as straight as an arrow… I can’t imagine him ever taking drugs; I can’t imagine him doing…anything.”

  “Well obviously he was Miss White.” Elisa Smith sighed.

  “Obviously he was…” Hartt skidded to Lylith’s side. “But actually he wasn’t. At least I extremely doubt it, and if he was he must have been an incredible idiot. Though he was an Inspector; I very much doubt the higher ranks would just let anybody among them.” His eyes traced the row of blank faced Detectors surrounding him. “No; forget I said that.” He muttered under his breath, once again crouching down and placing his hand on the Inspector’s firm ankle.

  “Here…” He began, speaking to himself a hurried diagnosis. “…Swollen muscles around the ankle, veins pronounced beneath his skin…” Josiah ran his hands up the man’s body; finally placing his palms on the man’s chest. “His clothes are far too big for him, but the suit fits perfectly around his shoulders and crotch so it must be tailor made - the weight loss is relatively recent…” Hartt’s hands found their way to the man’s eyes as he pulled them open with the squelch of cold flesh. “Here around his eyes, big bags, big bags. Poor Mr McCoy has not been sleeping well; is his job keeping him up all night? I doubt it. So what exactly is the cause of those bags?” He sniffed. “…Moving finally then to his skin. It appears now very pale and flushed, although I’d say this is rather abnormal judging by the areas between his fingers and toes, the areas that remain unaffected…”

  “Unaffected by what?” His companion asked.

  “By the symptoms heart disease Lylith.” Josiah muttered, coat swooping behind him as he strolled around the body on the ground. “Swollen veins, pale skin, insomnia, fatigue: it’s the bumper pack of rotting arteries and malfunctioning veins.”

  “…and that’s why he’d be an idiot to take the drugs.” Chief Detector Fraun nodded. “One dose could send his whole body into collapse. It would give him an instant heart attack, a stroke even…”

  “And so it did.” Elisa Smith tutted. “He must have taken them and then just collapsed to the ground. Foolish man. Foolish, foolish man.”

  “But his disease didn’t do this to him, he never touched any drugs.” Josiah announced, once again turning all heads to face him.

  “We know that now Elisa, the victims barely get to taste any,” Rosin Ash went to explain. “The Repo Glacialis is hidden in with the Slide; it bit him when he opened the bag…”

  “Except the spider didn’t get him either. There are no bite marks, no cobwebs – there were never any Repo Glacialis here. Even if he was stupid enough to be a person who’d come to a drug drop-off there is plenty more to say he didn’t: he looks fairly well off, either he could afford the habit which, given the wages around these parts is certainly not the case or… he spent his money wisely and never touched the Slide at all.”

  “…and so if the spider didn’t paralyse him, the drugs didn’t finish him off; what did?” Elisa snarled.

  “Iron!” Josiah exclaimed, raising a finger to the air.

  “I’m sorry?” The Field Specialist squinted.

  “Can you smell iron? I can smell iron.” He turned to Lylith. “Can you smell iron here or is it just me? Yes, my iron senses are tingling, there is definitely an iron-y way about things today…”

  “Where are you going with this?” Chief Detector Marcus sighed. In response Josiah’s knees snapped forward, his whole body suddenly dropping a foot or so as his shins slammed into the ground and he leant forward. He flipped the body on its side, revealing beneath the corpse a small, insignificant patch of damp settling on the ground, dripping slowly from the top of the silent Inspector’s trousers.

  “Blood Detector.” Josiah muttered; his once sing-song voice now deep and deadly serious. “There’s one set of footprints here but I never said to whom they belonged. Unlike the first two traps where the graffiti was surrounded first by the marks of the bare-footed Iceman; this time there’s no sign of him. However the other set of prints, the ones left around Robert Acrimony’s body belonging to the man who visited the scene after the biting, tidied it up and then planted a message in the soil, they’re still here. Hello Mr Shoes; only this time he wasn’t just delivering a message, he was dishing out the punishment himself…”

  Marcus Fraun marched across the body and over to Field Specialist Smith. His voice trembled as he pulled her aside and snapped, eyes alight with bubbling anger. “Why is there blood on the ground? What is wrong with you Ms. Smith, you didn’t even check, you didn’t even think to look beneath him?”

  “But I did…” Elisa Smith stammered, genuinely shaken by the findings. She wasn’t lying: she had checked there, and she’d found the ground to be thoroughly bare. Her face showed her confusion too, features contorted as her mouth dropped.

  “Of course you did.” Josiah nodded. “The man that did this was very cunning indeed. Had we arrived a few minutes earlier we might have left without having realised he was dead at all.”

  “Dead?” Lylith flustered. “But you said this was just like the others – the symbol on the wall, the drugs – I thought he was frozen, I was waiting for him to wake up!”

  “That’s what you would think, as would any untrained eye and that’s exactly what the Inspector’s killer was expecting: complacency. So far we’ve seen two traps set by a drug dealer where the victims were paralysed, we come here this morning and we see another body surrounded by an almost identical scene what do we think? That McCoy was paralysed like the rest. Until we got back to the morgue there would be barely any checks to try and prove otherwise because we’ve came to expect the same. Eventually we’d find out this time round it’s something entirely different but by then there would have been plenty enough time for the killer to get away - or be free long enough to plan something bigger…”

  Lylith was still trembling, “So how did they do it, how did they murder Inspector McCoy without us realising for that long?”

  Josiah Hartt paused a moment, pulling the man’s trousers outwards and peering inside to test his diagnosis. He blinked a little as he found as he had expected blood slowly pooling across the man’s skin. “He was killed by a thin blade inserted through the rectum which punctured almost every one of his major organs. It was so subtle in shape and breadth it barely left a mark on his flesh, just leaving his body to slowly bleed from the inside out. It would take at least half an hour for the first drop of blood to even appear. By now the killer is almost certainly long since gone. Whoever did this had a plan; and a good one… and a very, very sick one.”

  “Then why the drugs, the graffiti?” Rosin Ash murmured in an attempt to quench his confusion.

  “It appears to me that someone is usin
g this drug crime to cover up another. A tiny little trick to hide a big, black, dark one. I wasn’t just saying Inspector McCoy was foolish to try the drugs but the spider beat him to a coronary; I was saying he’d never even go near a trap like this. He was murdered on his rounds and Iceman’s trap was replicated around him, alluding to us the fact that this was another drugs set-up when really it was everything but.

  I realised it was a fake as soon as I arrived here. The symbol is there and relatively accurate, but there are no pin holes in the fabric of the wall, and no gap in the paint from where the bag has been taken. Similarly his fingertips were clean, and his lips were scent free; there were never any drugs here - strange for a drop-off laid by a dealer. McCoy’s killer visited the crime scene by the forest when he went to bury the message; he saw the trap set by Iceman and all he had to do here was replicate the Modus Operandi. It worked for the most part too, the simulation was good enough that without me you’d never feel the need to suspect it was different until you’d ship off McCoy to the morgue and find out a day too late that this man will never be waking up. Unfortunately for them I saw through their little replication…”

  Rosin Ash expressed her confusion. “But all that to, what, stall us?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m working it out.” Josiah Hartt leapt across the corpse and dived towards Lylith White. “These killers think that we’re still on the back foot, that for all we know we are just dealing with a minor drugs pandemic. But now we know this is way bigger than that. They knew you would find that out in the end, but not soon enough. By then it would already have been too late. But there’s one thing they didn’t reckon on. Me. Right now we‘re three steps ahead of them, and that gives us to chance to end this today….” In one swift move his hand clasped Lylith's, and he pulled her slowly away from the gathering of outclassed Detectors. Josiah called back to them as he slipped away. “It seems the man who left the slip of paper last time did this to Mr McCoy, so the chances are he left another little message.” He grinned to himself. “So get digging!”