The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution)

by Mike Arsuaga

  “Why am I here?” she asked the detective in charge, a sergeant. Normally, a lieutenant didn’t attend routine bank robbery scenes, even ones occurring in posh, upscale, gated communities.

  With a jerk of a finger in the direction of the vault interior, a man with a slick, brown-skinned face responded. “I dunno. Mike wouldn’t let it go until I called you.”

  The back and hindquarters of her favorite pain in the ass squatted among a pile of long metal boxes. Each container had various widths and depths, but all were narrow compared with the length. The thieves had ferreted through the contents, leaving what they didn’t take scattered in a hopeless jumble on the floor. They’d sought a quick grab, cash or jewels, ignoring the rest.

  “They tunneled in from the building next door,” Mike said without interrupting his inspection of the boxes and contents, mostly papers, on the floor. He always seemed to sense her proximity. It irritated the hell out of her.

  “Why am I here?” she repeated. “On the way over, I heard we caught the dirt bags who did this.”

  “True, Princess, but lookey here.”

  She glanced around to see whether anyone had picked up on use of the reviled “P” word. No one had. All present continued their work without pause.

  Coming alongside him, she followed the direction of his attention to one of the largest boxes. It lay at his feet, with the gray hinged cover bent all the way back.

  “If you want to know anything about The Others, here’s the place to start.” He held up what appeared to be the White Pages of an old but ordinary telephone directory. The pages were brown, with splits on the edges.

  Taking it from him, she thumbed through the digest. Each page held a list of faded names along with their addresses. “It’s a register of the complete community.”

  “It’s not any current record of you guys. Check out the date. It’s forty years old.”

  Continuing to examine the document, she sought out her family surname. The White clan took up the first several pages. Lorna thumbed to the back of the book. At the bottom of a page, the last name read “Baby Lorna”.

  “Wow, there are the names, along with contact information, of all the elders. It’s been out of date for years, but a private collector would pay a fortune for it and ask no questions.”

  The idiot robbers tossed aside what was probably the most valuable item in the vault.

  “That’s not all.” Mike produced a handful of papers. “There are letters and pictures. Here’s a photo of the First Parents in a family portrait.” The photograph showed a tall, handsome vampire with dark hair and eyes. His arm affectionately enveloped a small, red-haired lycan.

  “Except for the retro fashion style, they look the same now as back then,” Lorna said.

  Mike held the portrait up to the light. “Looks to me like the present Ed White favors his granny in most every department except for being about twice her size.”

  Spying a packet of letters, Lorna knelt to pick them up. Handwritten on expensive stationery, they dated from the late forties. One or two still carried a trace of perfumed scent, detectable at the limit of lycan sensory range, and were addressed to Cassandra White from someone named Claire Bevis. Lorna searched the litany of The Others genealogy drilled into all the children by the teachers at the orphanage.

  How does it go? First Parents Sam and Jim had triplets Ed, Cassandra, and Claire; the next litter, Louie and Beatrice, died from the plague. Ed arose from Ed. Claire bore… The rest became confused in the complexities of genealogy.

  “This must be very personal to someone,” Lorna thought out loud. Then she turned to Mike. “I want you to personally bag and inventory any contents you find belonging to this box. Put it somewhere safe. Make two extra copies of the inventory. One for me, the other you keep. Treat the contents with extreme care, because I think someone will be after it soon.”

  After two days, the technicians completed sorting the contents of the ransacked boxes by owner and bagged all the items, to be held as evidence until the trial. Many of the wealthier families in the area kicked up a fuss about the delay in returning their property. Lorna stood by every day while police brass far above her pay grade or even the level of Watch Commander Bell dealt with brush fires surrounding the issue. A few of the complaints received run time on the local news. Email to members of the Regional Congress overloaded the congressional server, but the corporation’s weigh-in on the matter remained conspicuously absent.

  CI made its move the next week.

  Carrying a cup of coffee along with a case folder she’d taken home the day before, Lorna stepped out of the elevator to begin her Saturday shift. Outside, a full moon painted the building front across the street pale white. She passed the captain’s office, instead of the usual whine of chair springs, he called out, “Lieutenant Winters, I need to see you.”

  Talk about a first. “Be right there, boss.” Poking into her office long enough to drop off the file, she stepped into his.

  Waiting behind a well-worn desk with a smile on his pasty face, as if the expression pained him to put it there for her, he narrowed his eyes. “The watch commander wants to see us.”

  “Now?” Normally, he arrived at the more civilized hour of seven a.m.

  “Yes, now,” Gregg said firmly. “He’s in the main conference room.”

  “Well,” Lorna answered with airy nervousness, taking a gulp of coffee that was too much. The hot, sugar-laced, liquid caffeine burned going down. “Let’s not keep the Big Guy waiting.”

  Right away she suspected the pre-dawn meeting concerned the documents. Watch Commander Bell had no equal as a boss, but he was also a man of uncompromising routine. To get him to the office three hours early on a weekend took some real doing. They met their big boss in his office from where he hustled them to a conference room a few doors down the hall.

  The motivation for Watch Commander Bell’s uncharacteristically early appearance, Lorna realized when they entered the room, was Assistant Chief Durning. With him were two elderly people Lorna didn’t recognize at first. Each was about seventy-five years old. The man curled up in a chair, a compact little fellow with a wrinkled face and clear blue eyes. The bend to his back made him appear gnomish. Recalling the information gleaned from several Internet excursions in search of information on the White family, Lorna realized who they were.

  Biographical pictures, taken decades before and posted on the company site, showed the man’s chalk-white hair once was reddish-blond. The woman was taller, with gray hair. Like her companion, youthful portraits showed a willowy dark haired beauty, but that splendor had receded with age into frail elegance, augmented by the best cosmetic products and medical procedures available, according to the tabloids. One thing was sure. They wore expensive clothes, better than the brass’s upper end off-the-rack stuff. The three occupied chairs at the far end of a dark, wood table. The polished top showed one or two damaged spots.

  Upon Lorna’s entrance, the assistant chief and the strangers rose to their feet with a loud scraping of chairs. “So kind of you to come, lieutenant,” he said with an engaging twinkle in an angular face. To the captain and watch commander, he said, “Thank you, gentlemen. That will be all.”

  Both of them hesitated, partially because they seemed disappointed at being excluded, but also because in the back of any supervisor’s mind, Lorna well knew, was at least the glimmer of unwillingness to abandon a subordinate to the clutches of senior brass without knowing why. It’s a loyalty burned in the blood—one even a self-serving asshole like Gregg couldn’t purge from his system.

  But rank hath its privilege. After vacillating a moment, they backed from the room, closing the door quietly behind them. Assistant Chief Durning made introductions. “Lieutenant Winters, I want you to meet Thomas White and Karla May. They represent Coven International and are here today about some of the material you found in a recent bank robbery.”

  Lorna surveyed the corporate pair. “Mr. White, you favor your grandmother,
Samantha. But not as much as your half-brother, Edward does.” She directed her attention to the woman. “You, on the other hand, resemble your mother, Cynthia the fashion model.”

  The pair turned to each other, then back to Lorna. “I am impressed,” said Karla. “You’ve done your homework. My brother and I are fraternal twins. Our mother was Cynthia Meadows.”

  Once again, Lorna delved into the results of her internet search. “Even now, over seventy years after her untimely death, the entertainment and world opinion in general, still consider your mother a classic beauty whose name comes up on any list of the most beautiful women who ever lived.”

  “Right again,” Karla said.

  Lorna warmed with satisfaction. “I try to keep up.” Leaning forward, she met them with a level gaze. “How can I help you?”

  Thomas took up the conversation. “You have in the custody of your department certain documents misplaced by our family for years. Our brother wonders if some accommodation about their return may be reached.”

  Lorna glanced at the assistant chief’s noncommittal expression. Turning back to Karla and Thomas, she replied, “As I’m sure you know, they’re part of the evidence in a major criminal investigation. To return them prematurely could ruin the case, possibly letting felons walk.”

  “We see your position, but these documents have great personal as well as historical value for not just our family but the community in general. They are to us what the Declaration of Independence represented to the former United States. If that document had been among your findings, would you treat it like common evidence?” Thomas stated with measured temperance.

  “I understood the priority was to catch criminals and lock them up.” More sarcasm slipped into her tone than she wanted. Her eyes implored the assistant chief for support.

  Ever the politician, he framed a neutral response. “No one disputes your dedication, Lieutenant.” He paused a moment, glancing to the twins, then back to her. “We all understand the law, placing release of evidence before trial under your purview and the district attorney’s. Perhaps there’s room for compromise.”

  “We came out of courtesy,” Karla said. “These documents have great personal meaning for our grandparents and brother, along with the rest of the family. If they are damaged, destroyed, or stolen, the loss will be unfathomable. To safeguard them and ensure their return, we will use all of the resources at the corporation’s command. Careers are made or ruined on less.”

  Lorna’s eyes narrowed. “Are you threatening me?”

  Karla’s eyes locked on Lorna’s and she continued in the same brief, foreboding tone, “It isn’t a threat, it’s a promise you can count on. If one paper is damaged, you’ll be walking a beat in Parramore for the next thousand years.” Then she addressed her brother. “Come on, Tom. Let’s go. I told you it wouldn’t work.” Signaling the meeting’s conclusion, she snapped to her feet.

  Assistant Chief Durning’s face went ghost-white. Going to war against Coven International was insane, even for a large police department. Eyes wide in desperation, his mouth opened and shut without making a sound, like a fish out of water. “Wait,” Lorna thundered above the noise of heavy wooden chairs sliding backward. “Perhaps if we went to the evidence locker and I showed you how secure your property is, you might be satisfied. After all, the trial shouldn’t take more than a year to come up.”

  The siblings considered the proposal. After a moment, Karla’s internal pressure appeared to drop. “Well, I suppose it won’t hurt.”

  The floor above the morgue contained the evidence room. In an age of utility rationing, they were the only parts of the building with full air conditioning. When the party approached with Lorna in the lead, a bored, sleepy little clerk raised her eyes from a crossword puzzle. She sat on a battered, wooden folding chair behind a steel Dutch door. Metal bars comprised the upper half. Behind her stretched a vast, rambling space of loaded metal shelves. A musty odor of old paper and, to Lorna’s lycan senses, small animal droppings, seeped around the clerk from the room behind.

  “As you can see, the door is steel, set in a reinforced concrete wall,” Lorna pointed out.

  Upon recognizing the assistant chief from his uniform brass, the clerk’s mouth dropped. Her eyes acquired an appearance of apoplectic shock. In the drab, quiet world of evidence, with nothing but the inanimate for company, assistant chiefs floated above the clouds, mythological entities whose appearance portended events like saints coming down from Heaven, cattle giving birth to monsters, or the sun reversing its direction in the sky.

  Lorna attempted to break the clerk’s comatose rigidity. “We need to see some evidence that came in last week.” Then she added, “It works better if you let us in.”

  Her frantic expression passed from Lorna to the Assistant Chief, returning to settle on Lorna. “Yes. Yes. Of course.”

  “Check IDs first.”

  The clerk gave a quick thumbs-up. In her excitement, she checked both police IDs about four times.

  Lorna signed in the siblings under her badge number. “Where is the Fargo Bank evidence?”

  Relaxing in the face of receiving a request within her comfort zone, the clerk brightened. “Row twelve, section six,” she said in the monotone of the safe daily routine where ethereal entities didn’t intrude.

  “Got it. Thanks.” Lorna pulled a slip of paper from a purse side pocket. She studied the numbers for a second and put it back.

  “There it is.” Assistant Chief Durning pointed to a large box, and then reached for it. “What the hell?” He hefted the unexpectedly light box to the floor. The small assemblage observed the empty container with various emotions, none being pleasant.

  The siblings turned baleful, demanding faces toward the assistant chief. He appeared to Lorna at the moment as if the ground opening up and swallowing him whole held more appeal than facing the consequences of the empty container.

  “Wait,” Lorna said. “What you’re seeking is actually over here.” Walking to a box on the bottom shelf of the next steel rack, she slid it out until it hit the floor with a heavy clunk. Removing the cover revealed, to everyone’s general relief, the documents stacked in sealed plastic bags.

  “I don’t understand,” Thomas said.

  “It’s an old police trick. The officer in charge stores evidence in a secret location if he or she feels there’s a chance of tampering or theft. I had one of my most trusted detectives place documents in a location we alone knew. I took this step after word began circulating about the value of this packet.” Addressing the siblings, she continued. “In the rifled box, my detective and I placed blank paper in opaque plastic bags of the approximate weight of your papers. The thief wouldn’t know he had the wrong items until he got to some place he believed safe, outside the police building, and opened one of them.”

  Thomas nodded approvingly. “Very clever. Excellent work, Lieutenant Winters.” He fired off a frosty-eyed wink.

  “I’m convinced more than ever our property must be returned,” Karla added. “Your most guarded places are insecure.”

  “I’m as outraged by the compromise as you are, and I’ll launch a full, immediate investigation, but in order to preserve your property while serving both of our needs, I have a solution that might work,” the assistant chief said. “Suppose we move your documents to a safe with a combination known by a limited number of trusted personnel?”

  The twins drew off by themselves, not surprisingly beyond the range even of Lorna’s lycan hearing. Lorna and Assistant Chief Durning waited in concerned silence while a spirited, at times contentious, conversation ensued between Karla and her brother. After a few moments, the pair reached some kind of agreement. Turning briskly, they returned to earshot. “Will the safe be in a protected environment to prevent deterioration?” asked Karla.

  “It can be arranged.”

  “In an office where someone is present twenty-four hours a day?”

  “We can do that, too.”

  “M
ay we provide a representative to witness the transfer?”

  “Of course.”

  Karla conferred again with Thomas.

  Breaking their huddle, Thomas said, “We agree to your plan. There is one more thing.”

  The assistant chief, relieved to put the problem to bed to the satisfaction of all interested parties, hastened to answer. “Yes, anything.”

  Thomas pointed at Lorna. “She’s the only one on the police force who’ll have the safe combination.”

  * * * *

  They transferred the documents the same day to a safe just outside Lorna’s office in the squad room, in plain view of at least twenty officers twenty-four hours a day. A portable humidifier controlled the safe’s interior atmosphere. Thomas insisted on personally setting the combination in Lorna’s presence.

  Five weeks later, the trial ended. Within an hour of the verdict, Thomas appeared with two men pushing a hand cart. In ten minutes the pictures, letters, and all the rest departed for corporate headquarters.

  Having predicted a year would pass before the case came to trial, Lorna underestimated the power of the corporation’s influence on the local judiciary. By the first week of February, less than a month after the morning meeting with police and CI brass, the defendants accepted a plea with a sentencing recommendation comparable to that of a guilty verdict. At the allocution, the defense attorney who in pretrial came out with a flurry flamboyant talk to the media on his clients’ behalf presented a subdued manner.

  “Not even so much as a thank you,” Lorna carped to Mike over coffee in the canteen.

  “What do you expect? They’re “brass.” To them, we’re wire brushes, to be used and thrown away when the bristles wear out.” Lorna commiserated, forgetting Department policy stated entry-level brass began at the rank of lieutenant.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s gone. The whole time those documents sat outside my office, I couldn’t sleep right.”

  CHAPTER FOUR