A Warrant of Wyverns

by Michael Angel

  I let out a gasp. Then, with a comic-book worthy FWOOP, the paper vanished. I repeated my motion twice more for the other notes, and they vanished as well.

  Well, that was easy enough.

  I finished my fill up and had just gotten back into the van when the ring pulsed with cold twice in quick succession. Reflexively, I held out my hand. With a final FWOOP, a small piece of Andeluvian parchment appeared between my forefingers. I snatched it out of the air before it could fall and quickly scanned the brief note.

  Dame Chrissie,

  Your latest update on King Fitzwilliam is greatly appreciated. There is nothing to report from here that would hold your interest. The three knights you sent forth have not yet completed their quest. I shall inform you immediately when they return.

  Magnus Killsheven

  Rightful King of the Centaur Realm and (regretfully) Regent of the Kingdom of Andeluvia

  I grinned at that last bit. Folding up the message, I tucked it into an inner jacket pocket and shifted the van into gear. Instead of yet another hillside mansion, the road dipped between the rolling hills to end at a disreputable-looking campground.

  One quick downshift, and I guided the van along a steep descent towards the grounds. A weather-beaten guard shack at the end of the road listed to one side like a lonely, decrepit sentry.

  Just beyond a lowered entry bar, several police cruisers and another OME van sat in the sloppily mown parking lot. A uniformed officer leaned out of the shack’s broken window. He gave me a scowl as I pulled up.

  “You’re not needed here,” he said. “The OME already sent someone. Unless you’re still looking for a source of ‘rock butterweed’.”

  The cop’s comment made me pause for a moment. Apparently, my story about showing up at Karl Nystrom’s house shortly after a lethal gunfight had made the rounds at the LAPD. My story was that I’d been out driving, looking for a plant that had shown up during an autopsy of Maxwell Cohen’s remains.

  It looked like that story had stirred up a little skepticism. I wasn’t planning on confronting anyone over that right now. But I also wasn’t in the mood to take surliness from a random badge-wearing jerk.

  “That’s not your call, unless you’re the ranking officer here,” I said, in an equally chill voice. “Senior Homicide Detective Alanzo Esteban asked for my presence. I suggest you ask him if I should turn around and go home.”

  The officer flushed pink and clamped his mouth shut. Then he leaned on the entry bar, lifting it so that I could drive through. I brought the van around into an empty space, shut down the motor, and got out.

  Scents of mountain laurel and cut grass flooded my nose. I went around to the back of the van and threw open the rear doors. I glanced around as I pulled the parts of my kit out and put them on. The badly mown parking rectangle was surrounded on three sides by shaggy trees and tangles of mountain scrub. The fourth side sloped sharply downwards out of sight, though a trail marker and information board had been erected at the edge.

  I sat on the rear bumper while I suited up. Meanwhile, I glanced around, looking for the officers from the parked cruisers. Except for Mister Sunshine at the guard shack, I didn’t see anyone. Finally, a pair of patrolmen emerged from the underbrush next to the trail marker. They stood panting for a moment until they spotted me.

  Neither man gave me so much as a second glance. I closed the van doors and walked on past them. Neither one offered to help me carry my crime-scene case down the slope, either. I shook my head.

  It looked like I was still persona non grata here.

  I made my way down a winding switchback trail, switching the heavy case back and forth between my hands as I did so. The air grew moist, and the nose-tickling pollen scent gave way to smell of freshly turned earth and charcoal.

  And something else. Something faint and off-putting. My nose sought it out, but whatever it was vanished in the breeze.

  The babble of a forest stream greeted me as I reached the bottom of the slope. The water ran along the back of a large clearing easily the size of three or four city blocks. A couple of wooden cabins shot through with dry rot sat off to one side. Several circles made up of fist-sized rocks indicated at least three or four crudely constructed fire pits scattered haphazardly about the grounds.

  Uniformed policemen walked the perimeter, combing the area near the stream for evidence. Several more formed groups that were busy setting up crime scene tape around the fire pits. I noticed that three of the people present wore jumpsuits and gloves similar to mine. I recognized the closest as Myun-Hee, the lab tech who’d worked on the case involving the attempted assassination of Chief McClatchy.

  I paused, wondering where I should start, before Esteban’s voice called out to me.

  “Dayna, over here!” He waved me over to where four other members of the LAPD were animatedly discussing the crime scene.

  One of the officers, a blonde woman with the build of a heavyweight boxer, sported a blue jacket with a yellow ‘K-9’ on the back. She held a glum-looking German shepherd on a leash. The other officers’ mouths took on a hard-set line as I stepped up. One of them, Detective Isabel Vega, greeted me with an open glare.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said flatly.

  “It sounded like I was needed,” I replied. “Is this case under your team’s control, or Esteban’s?”

  “It’s his baby today. His partner’s on leave, mine’s out sick. So we’re working together temporarily for the next week or so.”

  “Speaking of being needed,” I added, turning to Esteban, “it looks like OME already sent some people out this way.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but this is practically their first field outing. My gut says that this is important, possibly chueco. And these kids…I don’t think some of them know which end of a magnifying glass to hold.”

  That got a rough chuckle out of the group. Esteban motioned to one of the male officers, an older man with a sunburned complexion, balding head, and jowls that would make a basset hound proud. “Sergeant Dietrich, can you fill us all in?”

  The man nodded gruffly. “Sure can. My partner and I were on patrol along Skybridge Parkway when dispatch alerted us. Strange noises and lights were reported by nearby hikers in the before-dawn hours. We’re familiar with this address, so we came as quickly as possible.”

  “Familiar?” I asked. “Why? This looks like the middle of nowhere.”

  “Because it’s surrounded by steep hillsides, brambles, and a boatload of poison oak. Great concealment for a perp to make use of. We’ve nabbed people refining ketamine or even mescaline out here. More than a few times.” Dietrich paused and let out a grunt. “Not today, though. Just a bunch of weird stuff.”

  “‘Weird stuff’?” Vega asked pointedly. “That’s not narrowing anything down for us.”

  The officer fidgeted a bit under the sudden scrutiny. He half-turned and pointed at the nearest fire pit. “We didn’t encounter anybody upon our arrival. But each of these fire pits still had live coals in them. Smell of sulfur, charcoal, and burned-up meat.”

  My head came up with a snap. That was what I had scented on the way downslope. The faint smell of carrion. Of charred, rotting flesh.

  “I got a bad feeling about that,” Dietrich concluded, “so I requested the presence of a K-9 unit to confirm.”

  “You find anything, Beswick?” Esteban asked the beefy blonde woman.

  “Nothing specific,” she said hesitantly. “Tanner started actin’ all hinky once I got him out here. Like he’s scared of something.”

  “Seriously? I’ve seen that dog take down guys in body armor. I didn’t think he could even get scared.”

  Beswick shrugged. “Like I said, he was off his game today for some reason. But he did get wind of something, that much is for sure.”

  “What of?”

  “Remains. Decomposing flesh. All ‘round these fire pits.”

  “Right,” Esteban said heavily. “What do you think, Dayna? Any ideas?”


  “Only one,” I replied. “We need to find some shovels. Because we might need to start digging.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’d just made that pronouncement when Lee Myun-Hee spoke up. She was young, relatively new to the OME, and shy when outside her comfort zone. Since her comfort zone was in the lab and no more than an arm’s length from her computer, I had to strain to hear her.

  “We brought the GPR with us,” she said, in a reed-thin voice. “It…I thought that it might come in handy here.”

  “Lee, do you know how to run that piece of equipment?” I asked.

  She beamed. “I passed my certification last week, as a matter of fact. The trainees that came out here with me might benefit from a demo in the field.”

  I considered it. The Ground Penetrating Radar, or ‘GPR’, was a machine the size and shape of a clunky push-mower. You slowly pushed it over a site of interest, and it would emit pulses of radio waves into the ground. Building an image from the echoes, it allowed you to locate anything from hollow chambers to recently disturbed layers of soil.

  “It’s a great idea,” I said. “You have it handy?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I drove the team out in the spare OME van. The van is back up in the parking area.”

  “And the radar is still in the van,” I said with a sigh. “That’s an awfully rocky slope to roll something as delicate as a GPR down.”

  “We’ll be careful,” she assured me. “We can carry it over the worst spots.”

  “Okay, I can put people to work here while your team lugs it down.”

  “I’ll get right on it.” Myun-Hee called over her two interns and together they slogged back up the hill.

  “What do you need us to do in the meantime?” Esteban inquired.

  “Continue sweeping the perimeter, for one,” I said. “Aside from that, I want to sift through some of these ashes. Any chance that this campground has a couple of rakes?”

  “There’s a tool shed behind the cabin over there,” Dietrich said, as he jabbed a calloused thumb to one side. “There’s a pair of rakes in there, plus four or five shovels. Standard fire safety gear for this part of the San Gabriel range.”

  “Then let’s go put those tools to good use.”

  Esteban and Vega followed the older patrolman over to the tool shed. While they brought back the equipment, Officer Beswick led her dog back towards the fire pits, showing me exactly where he’d sensed something. For his part, the German shepherd looked unnaturally cowed, hanging close to his handler and keeping his tail down.

  “I’m taking him back up,” Beswick announced. “He can’t do any more good for you, and I want to get him checked out. Maybe he’s got a bug in his tummy.”

  She headed back up the hill as Esteban and company rejoined me, tools in hand. I had them set the shovels aside for the moment. Taking one of the rakes and gave the other to Dietrich, I instructed him on how to carefully comb through the ash for unusual debris.

  We each chose a fire pit and went to work. The coals weren’t red anymore, but I could feel the heat radiating from inside when I held my hand over the thickest parts of the pile.

  Right from the start, I could tell that something wasn’t quite right with the leftover ashes. They weren’t the pure ‘flakes’ one found in a simple wood fire, either. Several parts were clumped or mashed together, telling me something else had been part of the mix. And the ash consistency changed as I dug into ever deeper layers. For an abandoned camp site, someone had been setting multiple fires here and letting them burn out on their own.

  My nose kept tingling, trying to work through the charcoal that blotted everything else out. I did my best to ignore it and let the reptile part of my brain do its job. In the meantime, Myun-Hee’s team had huffed and puffed their way down the switchbacks to the camp site.

  They quickly got the GPR working and started pushing it back and forth around the pits at a walking pace. The heavy little machine let out an electric hum that would’ve done credit to a hair dryer. One of the interns followed along behind, sticking a slender metal spike topped with an orange flag at various spots.

  “Okay, we’re done,” she said, as she walked back over to the two Homicide Detectives.

  “Are you sure you’ve got that thing working right?” Vega said skeptically. “You’ve put what, a half-dozen flags out there?”

  Myun-Hee sounded about as confident as I’d seen her in the field. “That’s what the GPR is telling me. Freshly disturbed spots in the soil, about two feet down. No hits for metal, precious or otherwise.”

  “Two feet down,” I said darkly, as I got up and joined them. “That’s the right depth for a shallow grave.”

  “Right,” Esteban said. “Let’s get to work, then.”

  He picked up a spade and went over to the fire pit next to mine. To her credit, Isabel Vega didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the remaining tool, headed to another of the orange flags, and began to dig as well.

  I went back to raking through the piles of ashes in front of me. Myun-Hee had the interns lug the GPR back up to the lot and then took turns on the rake with me. Time crawled by and the day started to get sticky-hot. The chuff of shovels going into the dirt mixed with the scrape of the rakes through the fire pits.

  Then, Esteban frowned. He turned over yet another a spade’s worth of soil, then aimed the shovel head a little to one side. The tic of a tool hitting something harder than dirt made everyone look up.

  He leaned on the handle, and we all gazed at something long, hard, and slimy poked out of the ground. The smell of rotting meat kicked up a notch, hitting a hard ‘3’ on my soon-to-be-patented Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness.

  “Dayna, I think this is where you come in,” Esteban said, quickly stepping away.

  I put the rake aside, opened my crime scene case, and quickly slipped on my protective gear. Wielding a trowel and a big plastic sample bag, I knelt by the hole and managed to scoop it into the sample bag without much of a fuss. Then I held it high to get a better look at it.

  “It’s a bone,” Myun-Hee said, as she came over to stand next to me. “And I’m thinking that it was buried quickly, as opposed to being left on the surface for a while. Otherwise we’d be seeing evidence of more insect activity.”

  “A lot more,” I agreed. “Also, notice how moist it still is. Since there’s been no rainfall, I’d say that it was buried recently. No more than several hours ago.”

  “That would tally with the report that was called in to Dietrich and his partner,” Esteban noted. “About the lights and noises reported at this campsite before dawn.”

  Myun-Hee frowned as she stared intently at the item. Obviously, it wasn’t fitting easily into any of her mental categories.

  “It’s one of the body’s long-and-straight bones. I’m guessing that this is…a femur?” she said uncertainly. “Or maybe a tibia? But no, that’s still too thin, too small. Unless it’s from a child?”

  “God, I hope not,” I said with a shudder. “Let’s see what else we have in here.”

  I dug around in the earth, once again noting the odd smells coming from the dirt. Gone-off beef, wet loamy earth, and something like…overcooked broccoli? All I knew was that the wetness in the hole wasn’t from blood or intestinal fluids.

  Blood retained its clotting factor when mixed with soil, which would have made this job a heck of a lot stickier. And the acids from the GI tract would have immediately assaulted my nose in a completely different way. My trowel touched a couple harder items, and I pulled up more large bone pieces. They weren’t fragments, not exactly, but they were all broken and scraped up.

  “I’ve got something over here,” Vega called. “The edge of my shovel’s hooked on something.”

  Gripping her tool, she heaved backwards, pulling up yet another semi-sodden mass from her excavation. Everyone present came over to look at the latest find, before recoiling from the same strange smell.

  This was my
job, so I pushed through the miasma. I knelt by the latest item, which looked like something out of a bad dream. It was a tangle of long curved bones, tossed together in a tight heap. This pile hadn’t been fractured as badly, and there were still a few sinews attaching things together.

  “Again, these are so…well, so light,” Myun-Hee said. “Almost fragile, in a way. What on earth could this mean?”

  My brain was asking the same thing and getting very little in the way of an answer. I tried backing up a step from ‘what could this mean’ and asked ‘what are these items I am looking at’ instead. Biological structures, obviously. Weight-bearing bone, though with strangely delicate features. I hadn’t seen anything like this on an autopsy table before.

  But hadn’t I seen something like this before on an autopsy table? At least once?

  Yes, I was sure of it now. The answer was right in front of me, all I had to do was look at it carefully enough.

  My mind put two and two together, and I knew exactly what I was looking at.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In an oddball sort of way, crime scene analysis is about storytelling.

  That’s because you’re trying to reconstruct events – typically clandestine, violent events – that happened hours or days or even weeks ago. And all you have to go on are slender threads of evidence. Fibers from a mat. Stains on a shirt collar. A smudge of prints on a glass.

  You build a case for the story you’re telling from that piece of evidence. Sometimes, when you get that ‘eureka’ moment, it’s electrifying. But as you build your case, you can get ‘invested’ in it. Even ‘wedded’ to it. Subconsciously, you’ll give weight to things that buttress that story in your head.

  And that can lead to a mental version of tunnel vision.

  We’d been ‘prepped’ to see human remains by the K-9 unit’s results. And maybe by Dietrich’s report that he’d run into drug manufacturers here. That’s why the long slender bones had appeared to come from a child.