Unidentified Flying Suspect (Illegal Alien Book 2)

by Carrie Harris

  “The fu’uwit is a scavenger race, like the pyrex. Earth has many resources to take. It wants some of them. It will kill if needed to avoid discovery.”

  “Hence the dead sewer workers. But why kill them but not me?”

  “It will do what is necessary to avoid discovery. It could sneak up on you unseen. Probably one of them saw it, and then it had to kill to keep humans from knowing of its existence.”

  “I’m with you so far. How does it kill?”

  “Tentacles. It squeezes you.”

  I remembered that horrible feeling of pressure on my head and the lack of air in my lungs. The memory made me shudder, but I pushed it away. If I could understand it, I could stop it. If there was any way to avoid nightmares in the future, that was my only hope. I had to stop it.

  “How do I find it? How do I kill it?”

  “I do not know where it is. Belowground somewhere. It can be killed, and easier than the pyrex. Fu’uwit do not heal as the pyrex do. But first you must catch it, and they are very fast. And their tentacles are dangerous.”

  “I figured that last part out on my own,” I said, rubbing my neck.

  She looked out the window and pointed at a Rally’s fast food joint on the corner. “Drop me there.”

  I pulled over almost reflexively, even though I still had oodles of questions to ask. But she opened the door as soon as I rolled to a stop, so apparently, this little interview of ours was over.

  “One thing,” she said, looking back at me with those strange dark eyes. “People must not know about the aliens. If you kill the fu’uwit, you must not turn the body in.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. I’d been looking forward to having some proof all this time, and now she was telling me that I couldn’t use it if I got it? Bull freaking pucky, as far as I was concerned.

  “The people will panic if they know. You must keep it secret. They will not believe you anyway. They will think you faked it. Promise me that you will not tell others what I have said to you. Promise me you will keep it a secret.”

  “Fine, I promise,” I said, but I wasn’t entirely sure I was telling the truth. “But I have more questions.”

  “I cannot tell you more,” she said, opening the door. “I have already said too much. Enough to get me in trouble with the Conciliation. But I will keep watching, and I will help you more if I can.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” I said, only half meaning it.

  “You are welcome,” she said, completely serious. Then she got out of the car and left me there, trying desperately to process what she’d told me and wondering if maybe I’d like to go back to wondering if I was losing my marbles after all.

  CHAPTER 32

  I stopped at the grocery store to pick up some lunch and desk essentials since I was already running late. If I worked through lunch and ate at my desk, the hours would all work out. Hardwicke had been absent from the office on a regular basis anyway, so if someone wanted to shake the department down, I wasn’t going to be first in line. Plus, if pushed to justify my repeated lateness, I could say I’d been meeting with an informant, which was technically accurate. Tsishe had provided me with plenty of information, even if none of it was shareable. Not because she’d forbidden me to spill, but because everyone I told would think I was nuts if I did. Probably even Bug, and he’d proven to be remarkably open to weird stuff as far as I’d seen.

  As I made my way through the prepared foods section of the deli and tried to decide which sandwich looked the least wilted, I thought through everything I knew about the killer in the sewers. I still wanted to call it a fuckwit, partially because it amused me and partly because I couldn’t quite duplicate the hitching way Tsishe spoke the name. So a fuckwit it was, at least in my parlance.

  Finding it would be difficult. I’d neglected to ask Tsishe about what requirements it had—what it ate, for example—but I felt fairly certain that it didn’t need the same things humans ate. I couldn’t count on it to shake down a grocery store for food, because chances were that it didn’t eat human food at all. It lived underground and had tentacles, which felt to me like an assurance that all bets and assumptions could be chucked out the window for all the good they’d do me.

  After the discovery of the dead fellows in the sewer, I knew the area was under close investigation. Assumably, Hardwicke would tell me if they found anything. It seemed like he’d thawed toward me a bit, so I felt like I would have heard anything worth hearing. If not from him, then hopefully from Scorsone, although the silence from his office worried me too. I did pause in my evaluation of the lettuce in a roast beef and cheddar sandwich to check my email on my phone and see if he’d sent me anything. Nothing from him or from the still-absent Hardwicke, but I did have a message from Bug describing the findings from his full autopsy on the murder victims. They’d all been suffocated by something thick and smooth, yet to be identified. Sure sounded like tentacles to me. They’d died over the past three or four days but hadn’t been reported as missing yet because two of them had been roommates, and the third lived alone. The roommates hadn’t been scheduled to work again until the weekend, so they hadn’t been missed at work. The third had been assumed a no-show, and he’d done it before, so his lack of appearance hadn’t raised any alarm bells. He’d simply been fired via voice mail.

  I put the sandwich in my cart and went searching for sunscreen to stash in my car and antibacterial wipes for my desk. As I maneuvered my way through the aisles, I tried to put myself in the alien’s space shoes, or whatever the extraterrestrial set wore on their feet these days. I wasn’t up on alien fashion trends. So, if I was the alien, and I was living in the tunnels, and someone discovered my stash of corpses, what would I do? The most logical choice was to get the hell out of underground Dodge. Skedaddle. Vamoose. But if my business wasn’t completed, I wouldn’t be able to just up and leave. Tsishe had said that the fuckwit was a scavenger, so what was he scavenging?

  And more importantly, how was he getting it out of the tunnels? Scavenging wouldn’t get him very far without some way to move the goods. I remembered the markings on the ground, the ones that I’d thought were snakes. They might have been made by the fuckwit’s tentacles, but they were too narrow. Perhaps they were made by the alien dragging out whatever it had found underground to its handily parked UFO or whatever escape vehicle it had.

  If that was the case, I wouldn’t have to hunt through the entire maze of tunnels to find the fuckwit. I just had to locate its drop off point.

  That revelation excited me so much that I let out a little squeal of excitement that made a little blue haired lady in the beverage aisle scowl at me like she’d caught me doing something lewd. I grinned at her, partly because I was thrilled by what had just happened and partly because I’d found that reacting with sunny delight when people were assholes just pissed them off more. That made me happy, because I’d always been an asshole too.

  I took off for the doors, eager to test my theory.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” someone said behind me.

  I didn’t think they were talking to me. That was ridiculous; I was practically running. At that speed, I couldn’t be in anyone’s way. Anyone going faster than me would have to have rockets strapped to their boots. So I ignored them until the alarms on the door went off, and then I realized that I still had my cart, and one of the baggers was hurrying toward me with a scowl on his face.

  “You have to pay for that, or we’ll call the police,” he barked at me.

  “I am the police,” I said, sighing. “But of course I’ll pay for it.”

  By the look on his face, he didn’t believe me. I fished out my wallet and managed to flash my badge as I pulled out my cash. Because I had always been and still was a total asshole, but I was an asshole who’d figured out how to catch a fuckwit. At least I sure hoped so.

  CHAPTER 33

  It seemed ridiculous to drive fifteen minutes to get to the office, then turn around and backtrack to the air field. Instead, I made a few phone
calls to check in and have any messages forwarded to my cell and stopped at my apartment to print off the map of the drainage system I had stashed in my email. Excitement had me now. The thrill of the chase thrummed through my veins. I was locked onto my target like an eager dog straining at the leash, only with less humping. More’s the pity.

  Of course, my printer picked that moment to pop up a low ink notice, and it took me almost a half hour to figure out where I’d stashed the spare cartridges. They turned out to be hiding in the back of my utensil drawer, which made no sense to me at all. Then, once I’d found them, I realized I’d left my groceries on the counter to steam in the Toledo heat. I’d invested in one of those programmable thermostats since I figured it was silly to cool an apartment that I barely inhabited during the daytime, but I liked coming home and lounging around without getting puddles of sweat under my boobs. So right now, the air conditioner was off, and it looked like the lettuce on that sandwich had given up the fight. I hadn’t checked on the boob sweat status, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Under other circumstances, these setbacks would have soundly annoyed me, but I knew I’d finally cracked this mystery, so the aggravation barely registered as I tossed the sandwich into the garbage. I usually treated myself to my favorite Chinese takeout the day after I solved a particularly difficult case, and I felt determined to cash in even if I was already swimming in General Tso’s. I replaced the cartridge and managed to get ink all over my pants in the process, and even that failed to get more than a huff of annoyance out of me.

  Finally, the printer chattered out a copy of the map, and I settled down with my Toledo road map to look things over. It was awfully old lady Luddite of me, but in certain situations, I preferred to use a print map rather than an electronic one, and I had a nice bound copy that I updated every couple of years and kept dual copies at my home and office. I liked the fact that I could write on it when working on mapping out a crime, although Jenn kept joking that if I kept this trend up, I’d soon be standing out on the porch in a flowered house dress, yelling, “Get off my lawn!” to passing children.

  I liked my paper maps anyway. And I didn’t own a single flowered house dress, so I figured I was safe.

  Since I’d never read sewer maps before, and I hadn’t done anything with this particular map other than open it and see that it wasn’t blank, it took me a few moments to orient myself. Once I managed that, I spent a little time figuring out how the underground map corresponded to my street map. It wasn’t that tough once I found a couple of orientation points, but I took extra time to make sure I had it right. Last thing I wanted was to drive up and down the street umpteen times to look for a manhole cover or drainage pipe. It would be annoying. Double annoying if somebody called the cops, thinking I was up to no good, and then I’d have to explain my theory to some of my coworkers before I was ready.

  Once I figured it all out, I jotted a few notes on a sheet of paper, trying to codify what I was looking for. I knew that the fuckwit was strong after he’d nearly popped my melon like a…melon, I supposed. If it had been dragging something out of the tunnels because it couldn’t carry it, that something would be heavy. He wouldn’t want to drag it far. And the something had been fairly sizeable, if the marks on the ground were any indication. The narrow marks had run in parallel, which suggested a canvas bag, or some fabric with ridges. With that in mind, he’d want a place to park a vehicle that would be relatively close to the tunnels. If the thing really had tentacles, he wouldn’t want to be seen, so it would have to be a fairly remote site. And I’d give higher marks to sites that were close to my exit point and the air field.

  At first, I assumed that there would have to be easy road access for the exit point and rated my potential locations accordingly, but then I realized that was a human assumption. If this dude was flying a ship, he wouldn’t need roads at all. That lead me to go back and mark a few spots that I’d initially dismissed as unlikely candidates.

  I ended up with a list of five sites that I considered highly likely, and another eight that weren’t quite as attractive for one reason or another but would be worth checking out if the others didn’t prove productive. I marked them all carefully on the map and made my best effort at typing the locations into Google maps, because no matter how much I liked my paper maps, they didn’t give me driving directions. I knew the streets of Toledo pretty well after spending years on a beat, but the area around the air field was outside my area of expertise.

  On my way out the door, I briefly considered phoning Hardwicke. It seemed like the thing to do, even just to check in out of politeness’ sake. The less mature part of me pointed out that he hadn’t called me either, not even to check in when I was clearly late to the office, but I firmly squashed that and dialed his desk number. It went to voice mail, and I left one explaining that I was running down some leads on the case and to call me if he had any questions. I hung up feeling proud of myself, like I’d successfully checked the adult box for the day and could now feel free to act like a spoiled brat for a while.

  With that amusing thought, I let myself out the front door with all my maps and papers tucked under one arm. That alien wouldn’t stand a chance against my keen mapping skills. Which fell into the category of sentences that I never thought I’d have cause to say, but it was true anyway.

  CHAPTER 34

  When I let myself out of the building, I dropped the maps in shock. Next to my car stood Erich Bieber of all people. Although we seemed en route to rekindling a tentative friendship, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was doing there. He didn’t live in the area. He worked a couple of miles away. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any friends in my building, and I knew all the residents. The place only had four units. Mrs. Gunderson, the landlady, was in A, and the only “people” she liked were her cats. B was vacant, and D, the unit next to me, was occupied by an Indian couple who were so introverted that sometimes I worried they might spontaneously implode. None of them really seemed like the kind of folk that Erich would hang out with.

  “Hey, let me help you with that,” he said, pushing off my car and heading up the walk toward me. He looked all friendly-like, as if his appearance outside my place without warning or invitation was perfectly normal.

  The surprise made me even more blunt than usual.

  “If you marked up my car, I’ll demand a blood tribute,” I said.

  By now, he knew me well enough to not take this personally. He snorted.

  “I was gentle, I promise. Here.”

  He knelt down and picked up my papers. Luckily, it wasn’t a particularly windy day, so we didn’t have to chase them down the street. It had happened to me before, and I’d gotten scolded by an uppity mother for cursing up a storm while I did it. Apparently, her kids had never heard such language before. I felt bad for them. Cussing was good for the blood pressure. Mine, anyway.

  “Whatcha got here?” he said, looking the pages over with interest.

  I snatched them from his hands before he could get a good look. Not like he would have known what any of it meant, but it struck me as rude that he’d just grab my stuff and read it without asking. What if it had been confidential, case-related information? Plus, I felt taken aback by his sudden presence. I didn’t like people just showing up at my house unannounced. It made me feel off-kilter and out of control of my own space, and I’d felt enough of that after it got broken into. I didn’t need a repeat performance.

  “It’s work stuff,” I said. “Why were you leaning on my car?”

  “Oh, I was in the area, and I saw it parked outside. I figured I’d wait outside for you. Say hello. You know.”

  I gave him a once-over, trying to decide whether I believed him or not. He wasn’t really dressed for a casual hang out by the car in the heat. Instead of his usual nerdy-professor jacket or casual t-shirt, he wore a nice black suit that reminded me of when he’d come to Ronda’s funeral. He’d shown up unannounced then too, so maybe this w
as just how he rolled. I still didn’t like it, but the pattern reassured me. I liked patterns that I could anticipate, even if they were annoying ones.

  “Well, I’m on my way to work,” I said. “But maybe we could hang out some other time. As friends, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said ruefully. “I remember. Whatcha working on?”

  I shot him an exasperated look as I unlocked my car. “You know I can’t talk to you about that. I don’t know why you keep asking.”

  “Aw, come on. I’ve proven I can keep a secret. I never told anybody about the UFO.”

  His voice wasn’t too loud, but I still hissed at him to keep quiet anyway.

  “Erich, my landlord is one of the nosiest neighbors in written history. I wouldn’t put it past her to bug the bushes.”

  “Is it me, or does that sound vaguely dirty?” mused Erich.

  “Quit changing the subject!” I snapped. “And don’t bring up that thing you just brought up again, not unless we’re behind closed doors, okay?”

  “Are you sure she doesn’t bug your apartment too? I mean, if she’d bug the bushes…” he trailed off, giving the aforementioned greenery a skeptical look. I couldn’t decide if he was being intentionally obtuse or if he honestly didn’t recognize what a pickle dick he was being.

  I’d never really been a people person, but I didn’t have too tough of a time maintaining a few close friendships, mostly because I chose to hang out with people who respected my boundaries. Jenn and Leah and Bug all knew where my buttons were, and they made their best efforts not to push them. Even Aunt Rose and Greg, who would give me a tough time out of familial obligation, wouldn’t step over some lines unless they were really stressed out. But Erich hadn’t gotten the picture, and his behavior had managed to really and truly piss me off.

  I kept my voice level with effort as I said, “Erich, I’m so glad you stopped by to give me a hard time, but I really have to get to work now. I’ll call you later.”