Breed

by Goingback, Owl

  Seeing Jack’s car pull into the lot, the city worker put down his newspaper and climbed out of the truck. Jack was in an unmarked patrol car, which was still easily identifiable as a police vehicle. He was also wearing a suit, standard clothing for undercover cops.

  “Mr. Everette?” Jack asked, climbing out of his car. He already knew who it was, but was asking out of respect.

  “Yes, sir. I’m Curtis Everette. You the detective I spoke to on the phone?”

  He nodded. “I’m Detective Colvin.” He shook hands with the man, then followed him to the back of the pickup.

  Reaching into the bed, Curtis picked up a length of chain and handed it to the detective. “See what I mean? The chain’s been broken, not cut.” The chain had indeed been broken. Several of the links had been pulled out of shape, and one link was completely pulled apart. “Someone must have used a crowbar to stretch the metal like that. Maybe they hooked a winch to it, or used a truck.”

  Jack studied the chain for a few moments. He didn’t worry about fingerprints, because the chain had already been handled by Curtis. It looked to be an exact copy of the one he had found yesterday, broken in two by pulling one of the links apart. “It took a lot of force to stretch this chain. Mind it if I hang onto it?”

  “No. Go right ahead. I don’t need it for anything. It’s no good anyway.”

  Opening the passenger door of his patrol car, Jack dropped the chain onto the seat. “I spoke to your supervisor; he said he would get another man on that job he assigned you. Since you have a few minutes to spare, let’s say we take a look through the cemetery. You still got the keys to the front gate?”

  Curtis nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ve got the keys right here. I’ll be happy to look the place over with you. No need to hurry, because I’m really not all that anxious to get back to work. If you know what I mean.”

  “I understand perfectly.” Jack smiled. “I’m not much of a morning person myself.”

  They left the vehicles where they sat, and walked across the parking lot toward Cordova Street. As they crossed the lot, they passed a green Dumpster sitting next to the fence that separated the parking lot from the Tolomato Cemetery. Passing the Dumpster, Jack detected a bad odor coming from inside the metal container and wondered how often it was emptied.

  The metal gates of the Tolomato Cemetery were closed, held secure by a new length of chain. It was the second time in two days that the chain had been replaced. Approaching the gates, he noticed that the two center posts were now slightly bent. He suspected the previous chain had been pried off the gates, which would explain the condition of the posts.

  The detective couldn’t help feeling a bit of déja vu as he entered the Tolomato. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since his last visit to the graveyard. Funny, but he no longer had a desire to sketch the cemetery. As a matter of fact, he no longer had a desire to sketch any cemetery. Finding human remains and working overtime took all the fun out of drawing.

  Entering the cemetery, he turned right and followed the fence line to the back of the grounds. Turning left, he wandered between the headstones until he reached the mausoleum. He stopped and checked the door of the stone mausoleum, making sure that it was secure.

  From the mausoleum he continued south to the corner of the fence line, then walked back toward the front of the graveyard. Finding nothing out of the ordinary along the fence, he wandered slowly back through the cemetery toward the front.

  Jack had an uneasy feeling that he was going to find something upsetting in the cemetery, but this time he came up empty-handed. There were no human remains, ornate silver rings, or pieces of tattered clothing. He let out a sigh of relief, thankful not to have another incident on his hands. So, why had someone broken into the cemetery during the night? Had the perpetrator returned to the scene of the crime, a murderer checking to see if the remains of his victim had already been discovered? Perhaps it was someone merely curious, wondering why so many police officers had been in the Tolomato the day before. It might even have been a local reporter in search of a story to write.

  “Find anything?” Curtis called out. He was standing by the front gates, waiting for the detective to finish his search.

  Jack shook his head. “No. Nothing. Whoever broke in here last night didn’t do any damage. Nothing was taken. Nothing destroyed.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Curtis said. “But didn’t something happen in here the other night? I think there was even a write-up in the paper about it, something about a body being found.”

  The detective stepped out into the street and lit up a cigarette. “We didn’t find a body; just a few bones, teeth, and some clothing. Someone might have taken the remains from another cemetery, but we’re treating it as a homicide until we know otherwise.”

  “I’ll be damned. You never know what you’re going to find around here.” Curtis glanced at his watch. “You finished here, or do you need to look around some more?”

  “No. I’m done. Go ahead and lock it back up.”

  “Okay then, I’ll put the new chain back on the gates. Thanks for giving me a break this morning; I guess I had better get back to work.”

  Curtis closed the double gates and wrapped the new chain around the two center posts. Fastening the chain in place with a heavy duty padlock, he said good-bye and walked back to his pickup truck. Jack stood in front of the cemetery for a few more minutes, finishing his cigarette, waving as Mr. Everette drove past in his truck.

  “I guess I had better get back to the office. Nothing more here to be seen.” He dropped the cigarette butt on the street, crushing out the fire beneath the toe of his shoe. Walking back along Cordova Street, he circled around the Old Drugstore to the parking lot where he had left his car.

  As he walked across the parking lot, he again noticed a rancid odor coming from the green Dumpster that sat next to the fence.

  “Jesus,” he said, coughing. “What in the hell did someone put in there?” He had searched through the Dumpster the day before, looking for clues to the homicide, and the only thing it contained were empty cardboard boxes. Apparently, someone had come along after him, and tossed something foul into the container.

  He started past the Dumpster, but stopped and turned back around. The stench coming from the metal container reminded him of rancid bacon or grease, an odor that would be almost expected if the Dumpster was being used by a restaurant. Discarded food scraps could stink to high heaven, especially on a hot summer day. But there were no restaurants in the area, just the Old Drugstore, a few homes, and the cemetery.

  Curious, Detective Colvin retraced his steps back to the Dumpster. He opened the lid and peeked inside, looking for the source of the offensive odor. The smell was even worse with the lid open.

  “Damn, that stinks.”

  At first he didn’t see anything, just empty cardboard boxes, but then he spotted a large strip of greasy brown material. He thought it was a piece of plastic, but that was until he noticed the tiny hairs growing out of it. There was also a dark stain on one end that, when stretched tight, took on the shape of a turtle.

  Jack dropped the material and stepped back, holding his breath to keep from gagging. He removed a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his hands. What he had mistaken for a piece of greasy plastic was actually a long strip of human skin, complete with tiny hairs and a turtle tattoo.

  “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”

  Looking around, he spotted a coat hanger lying on the ground a few feet from the Dumpster. Picking up the hanger, he bent the wire back and forth until it broke. He then straightened out the wire, forming a hooked rod he could use to poke around in the Dumpster.

  He used the wire to pick up the piece of skin for closer examination, making sure to hold his breath as he lifted it from the Dumpster. He discovered more pieces of skin hidden beneath several empty cardboard boxes. Almost a dozen pieces altogether, all of them much smaller than the first he had found.

  Tossing the empty boxe
s out of the way, he found another large piece of skin in the bottom of the Dumpster: a jagged oval, about nine inches long and five inches across, complete with a man’s lips, a nose, eye-holes, and part of a beard.

  “Sweet mother of God.” He dropped the coat hanger as if burnt, stepping back from the Dumpster. A human face was staring up at him from the bottom of the container, a man’s face that had been literally peeled off of some poor bastard’s skull.

  And though he looked away, he could not shake the hideous vision of that face from his mind. Nor could he stop the bile that burned its way up from his stomach to his throat. The detective had seen a lot of grim sights in his line of work, but nothing compared to what lay in the bottom of the small green Dumpster. Grabbing his stomach he leaned over and heaved, throwing up a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and those little sausage links he liked so much.

  Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, Jack straightened up and turned around. He felt better now that he had thrown up, but he made no move toward the Dumpster. He had seen enough, and he had no desire to take another peek inside the metal container. Nor did he want to smell any of the stench that hovered above the trash container, the reek of rotting human flesh and death.

  He had another murder on his hands, another brutal homicide with skin and no body. Two murders in two days, both of them very similar. But who were the victims, and where in the hell was the rest of them?

  He stared at the Dumpster for a moment, then turned his attention toward the cemetery on the other side of the fence. He was pretty sure the Tolomato Cemetery was in some way connected to the homicides, but he wasn’t sure how. So far, the ancient graveyard was refusing to give up its secrets.

  “What am I not seeing here?” he asked himself. “What clues am I missing?”

  Chapter 9

  The sun was already shining brightly when Ssabra returned to Cypress Point, which made the events of the previous evening seem distant and far less frightening. It was hard to think about unseen intruders when the mockingbirds were singing in the tree tops, and there was the smell of the ocean in the air. Invisible intruders and eerie happenings belonged to the night, and to the world of darkness, and had little substance on a beautiful September morning in northeast Florida.

  Still, a tingle of apprehension danced down her spine as she climbed out of Jenny’s car, saying good-bye to her friend and thanking her for all that she had done. Jenny offered to take a look through the apartment one more time, just to be on the safe side, but Ssabra declined. She didn’t want her friend to be late for work, nor did she want her to start waving around a pistol again.

  Climbing the twenty-one stairs to the second floor, she slipped a key into the lock and opened the door. Even though it was already daylight out, the tiny apartment was still draped in heavy layers of shadows. It was also much cooler than the outside temperatures, but not nearly as cold as it had been the night before. Apparently, the air conditioner was still working normally.

  Standing in the doorway, she tried to sense if there might be someone in the apartment waiting for her. She listened for sounds of movement, breathing, or something else that might warn her that she was walking into a trap. But the apartment was quiet, the only sound to be heard was the soft hum of the refrigerator. Nor did she detect any smells that were out of place: no lingering trace of tobacco smoke, cologne, or sweat.

  Concluding that everything seemed to be back to normal, Ssabra entered the apartment and closed the door behind her. She flipped on the lights and opened the curtains over the living room windows, doing a quick walk around to make sure no one was hiding behind the furniture.

  From the living room she went into the kitchen, opening the cabinets to check under the sink, and then into the bathroom to look in the shower and behind the door. She retraced her steps through the apartment to the bedroom, searching through the closet and under the bed, breathing a sigh of relief to find that she really was alone. Nor could she find any evidence that anyone else, other than Jenny, had been inside the apartment.

  She walked back into the bathroom and flipped on the lights, staring at the mirrored door of her medicine cabinet. Except for a few tiny spots of dried soap, the mirror was completely clean. No lettering, words, or anything else out of the ordinary. What she had seen the previous evening was probably due to condensation and nothing more. Maybe her mind had played a trick on her, and she only thought she had seen a word written on the glass.

  Stepping to the side, she examined the mirror from a different angle. Perhaps Jenny’s theory had been right. Maybe someone had traced the letters with a fingertip, the oils of their skin causing a word to form once the glass had steamed over.

  That would mean someone had indeed been in her apartment yesterday, or sometime last night. But why would they sneak into the apartment just to scrawl graffiti on a bathroom mirror? Would a stalker do something like that? Or a pervert? Surely a thief wouldn’t be that stupid, since touching the glass would leave behind identifiable fingerprints.

  She stepped closer to the mirror, trying to see if there were any fingerprints. She didn’t see any prints, and there weren’t any marks to indicate that an oily finger had been dragged down the glass. The mirror was the same all over, clean except for the tiny soap spots.

  “Weird.” She turned away from the mirror and left the bathroom. The more she thought about it the less convinced she was that anything strange had happened. Her imagination had probably just been working overtime. One thing for sure: Ssabra was extremely thankful she had not telephoned the police. They would have thought her an idiot for calling them, because there was no evidence to suggest that an intruder had been inside the apartment.

  Stowing her overnight case in the bedroom closet, she slipped into a clean change of clothes. She then donned her makeup in the bathroom, and heated up a pot of water for instant coffee. She had a tour group that morning, and needed to be awake and looking her absolute best. Pouring a touch of hazelnut creamer into the cup, she took her coffee into the living room.

  Setting the cup down on the coffee table, she took a seat on the sofa and grabbed the remote. She turned on the local news, hoping to catch the weather report before heading off to work. The weather in Florida could change at a moment’s notice, so it always paid to be prepared. The dress she wore for the ghost tours was expensive, and she didn’t want it to get ruined by an unexpected shower.

  She set the remote on the sofa beside her and started to reach for her coffee, when the cup suddenly slid across the table away from her.

  Ssabra Onih let out a scream and jumped up off the sofa, watching in shocked surprise as the full cup of coffee slid magically from one end of the coffee table to the other. It stopped near the edge, in danger of falling to the carpeted floor, and then it slid back toward her, stopping where it had originally been placed.

  “No way,” she said aloud. “That didn’t just happen. It couldn’t have happened. I didn’t see my cup of coffee slide across the table.”

  As if in answer to her comments, the cup again slid across the coffee table, causing her to let out a cry and run to the other side of the room. The cup again stopped near the edge of the table, and then returned to its original spot.

  “It’s moisture,” she said, trying to find a logical explanation for what she had just seen. “There must be condensation on the table. That’s why the cup slid.”

  But the table was dry. So was the cup. And even condensation would not cause the cup to slide back and forth in two different directions. Somebody, or something, had moved it.

  “First the bathroom mirror, and now this.”

  She thought about what Jenny had told her in jest at the sandwich shop, her arms breaking out in goosebumps. Then again, you spend an awful lot of time at the cemeteries. Maybe one of the local spirits followed you home.

  No way. It couldn’t be. Ssabra didn’t believe in ghosts. Not really. She had wanted to believe in ghosts when her fiancé was killed in an automobile acci
dent, had hoped and prayed that Allan would come back from the grave to visit her. But his spectral image had not returned to say his final goodbye, or give her one last kiss before departing on his way to the spirit world. Since then she had dismissed all reports and stories about ghosts as nothing more than make-believe.

  Even though she was half-Cherokee, and Native American culture was quite open to the beliefs of spirits, she had never had an encounter with the unexplained. Not that she followed her cultural heritage all that closely. She knew very little about the Indian side of her family, her full-blooded father having abandoned her when she was just an infant. She inherited his looks: straight black hair, dark complexion, dark eyes, but none of his knowledge.

  But now, unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, and unless there was some scientific explanation for why the cup was moving under its own power, it would appear that she was indeed having an experience with the unexplained. She was having her very own supernatural encounter in the middle of her living room, an encounter with forces that could not be seen. Spiritual forces.

  She nervously looked around the room. Her apartment had grown alien to her, as if she was seeing it in a dream. She would have run for the front door, but was terrified that, like in a dream, the white carpeting would suddenly become liquid marshmallow, slowing her attempted flight from the room. Not that she could find the strength to run for the door, because her legs were shaking so bad it was all she could do just to stand up.

  Her attention riveted on the coffee table, Ssabra held her breath as she waited for the cup to move again. A minute passed, maybe two, but the cup remained stationary, sitting in the same spot she had originally set it. Had she really seen it move, or was it just her imagination? Maybe she was still afraid from last night, and her eyes had only played a trick on her. Maybe the cup had not moved at all.