by John Conroe
About five months ago, I had the first of these new type visions. It was the scene of a vampire attack, and the events of that attack played on my mind’s movie screen and then across the pages of my sketch pad, detailing the assault like a movie director’s storyboard.
My hand started drawing of its own accord and I watched to see what it revealed.
This one had six scenes laid out. The first showed a skinny middle-aged guy with too-large glasses walking on the side of the road, a small mixed-breed dog on a leash. It seemed to be late afternoon by the shadow of the speed limit sign. I looked ahead and slightly to my right, spying that very sign about twenty-five feet away. Looking back at the rapidly evolving picture, I could see three pairs of eyes that peered from the forest edge behind him. The next showed the dog looking back in fear, the man (I assumed this was Lassiter) staring myopically at the dark forest. The third scene showed a huge blur, streaking across from the wooded shadows, where the other two sets of eyes remained. Lassiter was in the midst of dropping the leash and the little dog was bolting ahead.
Number four was filled with a wolf the size of a black bear, Lassiter’s thigh in its mouth, the animal holding him off the ground as it savaged the leg. Scene five had the man on the ground, with both legs torn up, the wolf now chewing an arm. The final scene showed the wolf moving off to the woods, only one pair of eyes still waiting, Lassiter unconscious.
My hand stopped drawing and I became aware of an audience. I smelled Gina, Duclair, Adler, the female – Balls – and the male technician; all looking over my shoulder at the carefully detailed, cartoonish drawing.
“That’s…amazing!” Duclair said in a thoughtful voice.
“Yeah, they are incredibly useful,” Gina said.
I handed the sketch up and over my shoulder to Gina, then stood up and shook out my leg which was just a little stiff from sitting. The five were all crowded around the sketch, studying it for clues or just fascinated. Gina and Duclair both looked up at me. I directed my comments to Gina.
“I’m gonna look in the woods where the wolves were standing, see if there are any old tracks or anything.”
* * *
The ground at the edge of the forest was thick with leaf litter, too thick to hold any kind of track, but knowing where they had stood made a good starting point for starting an arc search. I moved in ever increasing semi-circles, scanning for any sign, until I finally found a print. It was about sixteen or so yards back, pressed into soft earth and well hidden by leaves that had blown over it in the month since it was made. The very leaves that had hid it had protected it from the elements. First I laid a six-inch flexible ruler from one of my vest pockets next to it to add size perspective and then snapped a couple of pictures of it with the digital camera in my cell phone. It was almost as big as a salad plate and perfect in detail.
Next, I laid my gloves over it to mark it and then searched for more, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
I went back to the vehicles and raided a crime scene kit for dental plaster, a mixing bowl and a wooden spatula. Back at the track, I mixed the powder with water from my Camelback hydration pack and worked it smooth with the spatula. Holding the spatula down into the print cavity, I poured the pancake-batter like plaster down the length of the spatula and into the print. Doing it this way protected the print from impact damage by the heavy plaster. Then I marked the casting with a couple of sticks pushed into the ground and crisscrossed over the track.
I found Gina with Duclair, the sketch spread out over the hood of an SUV, a small army of agents studying it and then moving to the real locations to search for possible evidence. Gina looked up at me and raised her eyebrows in question.
“I found one track, about fifty feet in. I’ve got a cast drying in it as we speak,” I said, holding out my cell to show her the picture. She reached for the phone, but Duclair got it first, snagging it from my hand. She did allow Gina to look over her shoulder at the picture.
“Damn big track! How big would the wolf be that made it?” Briana asked.
She knew damned well how big werewolves were. She was sucking up to me, making me feel important, trying to undo the damage she had done earlier. I wasn’t gonna play that game.
“Bigger than a bread box,” I said with a snort, then turned toward the scent of donuts. I could feel her eyes boring into my back, but I ignored it and instead hunted down the tantalizing odor of coffee and donuts.
Someone had set up a little break area on the folded-down tailgate of a Bennington Police SUV. Two state troopers were chatting with their hands full of coffee and donuts. They took in my tactical appearance and I could tell the exact moment that the first one spotted my empty holsters. He elbowed his companion and moved ever so slowly out of my way.
“Hey, nice rig you got there. Maybe when you’re old enough, they’ll let you carry a gun!” he guffawed, his friend joining in.
Great! More stupid cop games. Not in the mood.
I smiled in turn, then snatched my knife from behind my back, jabbed a hole in the bottom of each of their paper coffee cups and re-sheathed the big blade, all before they could react. I kept it slow enough for them to see the knife, but just faster than their reaction time.
They froze and coffee spattered on the ground, splattering their shiny shoes with mocha colored drops.
“Guns are for pussies! No sport!” I said.
The comment maker came back to himself, and covering his fear, started to bluster. I took off my glasses and looked at him long and level. Apparently, they didn’t like the color purple, because their faces went ashen gray and they stumbled away without another word.
That left me alone to wreak havoc and destruction on the donuts. A moment later another presence joined me, but I recognized the footsteps before she spoke.
“You’re getting pretty reckless with your displays, don’t you think?”
I gave Detective Sergeant Velasquez my coldest stare.
She held both hands up in a placating gesture and said, “Just sayin’!”
She wasn’t really intimidated by me. I suspect she knew I wasn’t capable of harming my friends. Despite my generally piss poor mood, I still liked that she never smelled of fear around me. Smell is such a good indicator of true feelings. She pointed at my mouth and offered me a napkin. I realized that the powdered sugar around my mouth from the jelly donut might have ruined the effect of my glare.
“Chris, I realize a lot has happened in the last twenty-four hours and from your perspective it’s really bad, but it might not be as it seems. When you’re ready, I have some information that you don’t.
‘Kay? ‘Kay,” she said, grabbing a donut and coffee and heading back into the fray, before I could respond.
I grabbed a coconut flake and a Boston crème donut and refilled my cup with cocoa – who ever heard of cocoa at a crime scene? Then I crossed the road to the non-busy side and sat on a big glacial boulder that had been there since the Ice Age. Sitting cross legged, I studied the swarm of agents while I ate. Gina’s words forced themselves back into the forefront of my thoughts. I was displaying too much of the wrong kind of ability in front of the wrong kind of people. If I wasn’t careful, Briana would try to put me in a lab somewhere to study me. The operative word would be try. Even Gina didn’t know all my abilities and nobody (except Lydia and Tanya) knew that Okwari was never very far away. I wondered at the cryptic comment about information that I didn’t have. What more did I need to know? Tanya had chosen another – a vampire more to her liking.
Something else was pushing for attention, another thought that had been prickling the back of my mind for awhile now. The image of the crime sketch popped into my head and my internal eye focused on the little dog. The dog! What had happened to the dog?
The third scene had shown the dog bolting ahead. The final scene had shown only one pair of eyes waiting on the attacking wolf. Had the other wolf gone after the dog?
I popped the last bite in my mouth, drained my cocoa and
hopped off the rock. I wandered up the road, away from the crime scene, in the direction the dog had gone. I watched the shoulder of the road, where years of road sanding by snow plows had left alluvial type deposits. Lots of tracks in that moist, compacted silicone. Bird, deer, a fisher track, running shoe imprint and finally, small canine prints. In a C-shaped gallop pattern, with the hind prints in front of the fore-feet prints. Little dog moving fast! Bingo!
Trouble was, my sand deposits were intermittent, so I ranged forward until I found another set and then another. The little guy had run along the edge of the road, panicking and following familiar territory. He would have done better in the thick forest, where the underbrush and trees would give his small size an advantage. On a straight run, the bigger, faster wolf would probably catch him….there! A huge canine print in the sand intersecting the little dog’s, then no more little dog prints.
The wolf track came in at an angle from the road. Acting on a hunch I searched the ground in direct line with the vector of the track. Sure enough there was a partial print heading back into the forest. I noted the vector on my compass and followed the line. Thirty feet into the woods I found another partial and then a fluff of white and black fur. Lassiter’s dog was white and black in the sketch, or I should say, had been. I followed the line for a mile, hitting tracks intermittently. Suddenly, I could see daylight through the trees ahead. I came out on Route 9, east of the Harbour Road turn-off. A long black streak ran on the concrete into the road from the shoulder, about like the track from a motorcycle smoking its tire. My cell phone has one of the GPS applications so I made note of the exact coordinates in my little notebook.
I tracked back toward my starting point and about a third of the way back I found another track – a man’s size nine or nine and a half walking shoe. It crossed the line of the wolves and headed northwest, which gave me an idea. I noted its location in my little book before trudging back to the attack scene and helping myself to the big terrain map laid out on the lead SUV’s hood. Our location was marked, as was Lassiter’s house. I rough guessed the GPS coordinates on the map and noted the direction that the shoe print had been heading. It almost lined up with Lassiter’s house.
Next I looked through the report folder on Lassiter. George Lassiter was thirty-eight years old, lived alone, worked as a salesman at a men’s store in Bennington. The hospital report had a detailed list of his possessions when he was brought in by ambulance. Bingo – size nine men’s Rockport walking shoes were listed.
“Gordon, you find anything?” Eric Adler asked from his spot in a group that included Duclair and Gina. I nodded.
“I found where the wolves left their motorcycles on Route 9,” I offered.
The entire cluster of people came over and I showed them on the big topographical map. One of the technician types popped open a PC on the hood and snagged the coordinates from me. He plugged them into the laptop and then let the program draw a more exact map. Duclair took one look, then detailed Adler to take some agents and check out the Route 9 location.
“What else?” Briana asked, looking at me.
“I want to go check out Lassiter’s house. I’m starting to get a feel for him and I think his home will help me dial in.”
She nodded and motioned one of the drivers over. “Take Gordon here, up the road to the house.”
“I’ll go with you,” Gina said, climbing in the back seat.
Chapter 11
Lassiter’s house was small, with wooden clapboards in need of fresh white paint. The trim was a dark green that had seen better days. But overall, the house was fairly tidy. The yard was well groomed and a large garden plot had been laid out with care, freshly tilled, with cold weather broccoli and cabbage already planted. George was a gardener, a plant lover.
Gina moved into the house while I prowled the back. The property rose almost immediately behind the house, climbing to become Maple Hill, with a summit above 2600 feet, according to what I remembered of Briana’s map. A path from Lassiter’s back door headed straight for the back of his lot, but stopped at a fairly sheer cliff face that rose about thirty feet above the yard. There was no obvious way up it and the foot path just sort of ended.
After glancing around to be sure no one was watching me, I jumped to the top of the cliff. Cool? It’s sooooo freaking cool! Still can’t get used to being able to do that.
I looked around my perch. The top of the cliff was bare granite, but dirt and moss started just a few feet back from the edge. A narrow little trail was pressed into the moss, heading straight up into the forest on the mountain's side. I glanced back down the face of the clifflet and noticed something – a nine-inch-wide ledge of rock angling up the face of the cliff, just big enough for a person to climb. I hadn't seen anything of the sort from the ground and my vision is sharp.
I jumped back down, not bothering to Lighten at all, just bent my knees and touched one hand to the ground on impact. Reducing my weight, would slow my fall, if only a little, and I didn't want to be seen jumping thirty feet in either direction.
Back at the base, I turned and looked at the cliff. No ledge. I walked closer and put my hand up to feel the rock. There it was, but the outer edge was higher than the edge closest to the cliff face, effectively hiding the easily climbed trail, from ground view.
I heard Gina come out to the back porch, so I turned and waved her over. After pointing out the trail, I stood back and watched her climb it. Piece of cake for the fit detective. I jumped back to the top and met her as she finished the climb.
“Show off!” she accused.
“Hey, I'm great at parties!”
She smiled at that, probably because it was the first wiseass remark I had made all day.
I pointed at the footpath leading up the mountain.
“I think old Georgie has a little spot up there to take in the scenery and maybe hide out from the world. I'm gonna climb up and see if I can nail him down.”
“Wait up a sec,” she said, pulling her own patrol bag off her shoulder. She opened it and pulled out a Subway bag with three foot-long subs in it, sat down and patted the rock next to her. Where and when she had gotten those I hadn’t a clue.
“How about lunch first, eh, Skinny?” she asked.
Gina was in league with my stomach, constantly reminding me to eat and be careful of my burn rate.
She grabbed a six-inch section of the Italian meat combo on wheat for herself and pulled a bottle of water from her bag.
I'm not hard to sell on eating, ever, so I quickly polished off one seafood, one turkey and the other half of the Italian sub, finishing up before she was done. She shook her head but didn't bother to comment.
My ability to eat is legend in our squad. Chet Aikens, skinny beanpole that he is, is no slouch, but he is in complete awe of my regular intake.
“How are we going to play this?” she asked, wiping her mouth with a napkin from her seemingly inexhaustible patrol bag.
“Well, seeing as you're not packing, I'm gonna bounce up there on my own and see if Mr. Lassiter is available for lodging in the local jail cell, hopefully with one of Brock's weres flown up to talk him through the change.”
If that were to happen, and we had one of the New York wolves handy, Mr. Lassister would be fine. Without that tricky set of conditions, he was gonna go insane. Gina shook her head.
“Briana won't let the New York pack near him. I overheard them talking, they want to capture him for study, even though he won't be sane. They have zoo-grade tranquilizers, heavy tasers and bullets filled with diluted silver nitrate.”
Wow! Talk about stupid! Pharmaceuticals didn't affect weres, tasers only pissed them off, and good luck getting enough diluted silver nitrate into the bloodstream without overdosing and killing your subject. Not to mention keeping an insane were around at all. Like crossing Hannibal Lecter with a grizzly bear.
“Chris, he'll have to be put down,” she said softly.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Lydia
and Afina both told me a rogue were can't be saved.”
Afina was the Alpha female and she had also met Gina, another of my stupid ideas. Lydia, I had finally discovered, didn't date vampires. She had a soft spot for weres and regularly went out with members of the New York Pack. Between what she learned and Afina, Gina's information was solid.
I glanced at the sun, rather than my watch. Holding my fist at arms length, I counted about four and half hand widths from the sun to the horizon. Less than five hours till dark. I stood up and dusted off.
“Okay, I'm gonna track him down. I've got my squad radio on my vest here, so I'll call you when I've got him,” I said.
“You’re not packing either! You need to be real careful. I'm not gonna be the one to explain to Tanya and Lydia if something happens to you!”
I frowned at Tanya’s name and she went on immediately.
“We're not going to get into that right now, but you don't know what you think you do!” she said.
I looked at her for a long time, then nodded once.
“Alright then, I’m gonna go catch me a wolfie, and yes Mom, I’ll be careful.”
* * *
I found his hideaway about five minutes later. The two miles I had traveled had been straightforward and I slowed when my nose picked up the scent of unwashed human. My senses told me he wasn’t in residence.
His lean-to was tucked on the west side of the mountain, about fifty yards from the proper summit. It was built near the slope of the hill, a flat ledge in front of it that peered out with a great view of what Briana’s topo map had named Bald Mountain. It was a nice spot, easy to imagine George coming home from work, climbing up with a beer and his little dog and watching the sun set over the mountain.
The lean-to had been there a while, maybe years. The sorry pile of clothes and old blankets was a newer addition. Dirty cooking gear was strewn about, flies buzzing on the moldy cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. Lydia had told me that some weres, mainly the young and newly made, got moon-drunk as the full moon drew near. It sure looked like a drunk had live here. The fire pit was warm, as if a fire had burned in the morning or maybe the night before, the coals only now dying out.
