Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels)

by E. A. Copen

He paused, waiting for an answer as I scribbled down a list of rules. Don't touch the stove. Don't open the windows. Check the caller ID before answering the phone. Don't give anyone your real name. I still wasn't comfortable with the idea of leaving him home alone while I worked, but I didn't have much of a choice. Even back in Ohio, he'd given every sitter I hired a run for their money. Hunter insisted that he was old enough to look after himself, but I wasn't sure. He was only eleven for Christ's sake. Leaving him alone seemed more harrowing than dealing with a dead werewolf.

  “Mom?” I looked up to see him standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his skinny, white chest. “Are you going to go to work?”

  I swallowed and looked down at the dishes instead of directly at him. “You know I don't have a choice. These people need the law as much as everyone else.”

  “Why couldn't we stay in Ohio?”

  Finally, I looked up and met his eyes with a stern glare. “You know why, Hunter.”

  “Is it because of that fight I got into at school? Because I told you, Chad started it.”

  That made my heart sink into my toes. I went to my son and hugged him. “Hunter, this has nothing to do with you. It's...” I stumbled. How do you explain to an eleven-year-old boy that doing the right thing got me blacklisted from just about every major police force in the country? I'd had to pull quite a few strings to keep from getting fired altogether. After what I did, not even L.A. wanted me and that was saying something. L.A. was desperate for agents. “It's complicated, kiddo. We got dealt a crap hand but we're going to play it out. I promise things will get better.”

  “That's what you said in Chicago and Philadelphia, too. And Cleveland.” I patted him on the back and he sighed. “I guess there's no further down to go once you hit rock bottom, huh?”

  I gave him a playful shove back toward the TV. “Go watch your cartoons.”

  I finished my list of rules, jotted down some emergency phone numbers and checked the locks on the windows one more time. Then I went and kissed my boy on the top of the head and told him I was going to work. “Take care of the place while I'm gone. And I'm going to call to check in randomly. But don't feel the need to wait on me. Call me if you need anything.”

  Hunter gave me a shove out of the way so he could see the TV better. “Uh-huh. Yeah. See you later, mom.” Kids these days.

  I grabbed my keys, checked the window locks and the emergency numbers one more time and then left to meet a detective about a werewolf autopsy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My car can put Frankenstein's monster to shame. It's officially a sixty-eight Firebird but it has parts in it from every major car on the road because it's constantly breaking down. The body is black and the doors are red. The bumper is a dented up strip of silver and the clutch is a bit touchy but it works most of the time. She breaks down on occasion only to start just fine the next day. While I could probably afford something better, there is a certain appeal to me in being able to say that I drive a classic car, even if it looked like it'd been through a war zone.

  I can only change radio stations if I bust out a Phillips head screwdriver and pull some wires out of the dash but I've never bothered. The AM station it's stuck on was just static in all the other places I lived but there, on the reservation, it was an oldies station that played mostly seventies and eighties rock, which seemed to suit the car just fine. “Stayin' Alive” by the Bee Gees was playing that morning as I pulled into the gravel lot next to a building that could have served as a backdrop in a John Wayne western. It had that perfect, flat front with pretty white columns and hitching posts out front. Maybe the building was old enough to be authentic but now it bore the scars of modern remodeling. The doors were the pressure sensitive, automatic kind instead of the swinging saloon doors that might have fit better. A big red neon cross glowed against the dawn, the only bit of neon in the whole town.

  There were two other vehicles on the lot: Tindall's Cadillac and a class A motor home that took up the majority of the parking lot. I parked and got out to look at the motor home with a whistle. There were some trailers on the reservation that weren't as nice as that thing. Still, it had seen some road. An inch of dirt was caked to the side, though someone had painstakingly wiped down the back end to make sure the bumper stickers, of which there were plenty, were still visible.

  Inside, I stopped by the receptionist window, which was empty. Tindall was sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a magazine. He spoke to me without looking up. “Body's in the back. Doc's waiting on you.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “Listen, Black. Where you come from, maybe they got fancy, well equipped law enforcement teams that handle this sort of thing but Paint Rock is a backwater God-forsaken place. Don't ask me how this place attracted talent like Doctor Eugene Ramis. The guy's probably foremost in the field of weird dead things, even if he isn’t a certified through the state. Still, he’s the closest thing we’ve got. That’s how it is here. We work with what we’ve got. But if something goes wrong it’s my ass in the fire, since I am employed by the state.”

  “So,” I started, “what you're telling me is that you need someone to pass the blame to if he screws up?”

  “Bingo.” Finally, he looked up from his magazine. “And, since you technically outrank me, you get to deal with that nut today.” I tried to object but Tindall just jerked his chin in the direction of the door down the hall. “Get on down there before the place starts to stink even more than it already does, will you? I've got other things to do today.”

  I clamped my jaw firmly shut and started down the hall. The elevator music faded the further I went, shifting into a different rhythm. By the time I reached the end of the hall, I realized the door was vibrating to the familiar beat of Michael Jackson's “Thriller”. Despite myself, I was smiling when I opened the door. The smile quickly faded when I realized that Doctor Ramis wasn't the only one waiting for me on the other side.

  Three corpses, not counting the werewolf we'd brought in, stood in the middle of a small, temporary stage, dressed in the tattered remains of dust and dirt sodden suits and prom dresses from what could have been another century. They weren't behaving much like corpses, though. Every single one of them was up and walking around. More accurately, they were dancing.

  The doctor, a stick of a white guy with an honest to God afro and thick glasses, sat in his white lab coat, tapping the beat out on his CD player with a drumstick and mouthing the words to the song. The song reached the chorus and he got up, tapping on the wall, and acted as if he was going to join them. When he saw me, he did a cartoon style double take, then dropped his drumstick and shrieked.

  The corpses behind him immediately stopped moving around and stood there blankly staring ahead with dead, glassy eyes. The doctor adjusted his glasses and composed himself before clearing his throat and shutting off the music. “You scared the bejeezus out of me!”

  I raised an eyebrow and forgot to be disturbed by dancing zombies for a moment. “You're in here, dancing with a bunch of actual zombies and I scared you?”

  “Yes, well...” He turned and waved a hand across the room. “Dormite,” he commanded. His zombies shambled off to lean their foreheads against the wall and he went to draw a curtain over them.

  He was walking a fine line with the existing law, keeping zombies. There wasn't a law against it, I supposed, except for all the old abuse of a corpse laws. Whether or not zombies qualified as corpses, though, was a matter still being decided in the courts. In fact, almost everything regarding zombies was still being argued in the courts. Unlike vampires, werewolves and most varieties of the fae, they weren't yet afforded any rights at all. I could have double tapped each and every one of them and walked away clean.

  “Isn't it a little redundant?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Teaching a bunch of zombies to dance to that particular song?”

  He gave me a deer in the headlights look. “Why?”

  “Never mind.�
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  “Sorry I'm not ready. It's just that there's this show coming up and it has us all in a bother. I've got less than a month to get them ready. If we win...” He stopped bumbling around with the gurney that held the body bag to smile to himself. “Think of the difference we can make, the attention they can draw to their own cause.”

  “Dancing zombie activists,” I muttered. “What'll they think of next?”

  “Make light if you want but it won't change the fact that their rights are still limited. They might be undead but they're capable of doing a lot of things and deserve the same rights as every other supernatural out there. If it's legal for vampires to buy blood, then why can't we legalize tissue donation for zombies?” He put on a pair of latex gloves and held another pair out to me. “I know what you're thinking. Why dance? Well, they can't very well speak. They'd been too long without a proper feeding for the language center of the brain to be salvaged. The poor idiot that had them kept them in a cage and used them for target practice. Target practice.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how far they've come.”

  I cleared my throat, eager to redirect him to my purpose so I could get out of there. “Eugene? Doctor Ramis?”

  “Doctor Ramis was my father,” he said with a snort. “And I hate my first name. Doc will do just fine.” I started to introduce myself but he cut me off. “You're Judah Black with BSI. Tindall told me to expect you.”

  “You do a lot of autopsies out here, Doc?”

  “Not really. I mean, I did a few in medical school. You have to in order to get your license. Here, I do maybe one or two a year, mostly exsanguination. You know, vampire kills? They get a little overzealous sometimes.”

  I wasn't sure I would call drinking a person's blood to the point of death overzealousness. The casual attitude with which Doc approached death was more than a little unsettling and it made me wonder just how many crimes had slipped by without ever making it to the state authorities.

  He pulled and tugged at the body bag until it was free of the body and then tossed it to the floor. “This is going to be a fun one. The change makes their organs go all screwy until they balance out on the other side. Going to have to do some digging.” He started poking at the body. My stomach twisted. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lied and tried to ignore the cold sweat I'd broken into. “Do you recognize him?”

  Doc took the corpse's chin in his hand and turned his head stiffly from one side to the other. “Nope. Of course, being half changed, making a positive ID is going to be hard. He won't even have the same prints.” He went to a filing cabinet on the other side of the room and pulled out a digital camera, a small produce scale, a tool belt full of sharp things and a zippered pouch that was labeled: phlebotomy kit. He tossed the last item to me and then retrieved a pen and paper that he also passed to me. “I'll do the fun part. You take the notes. That is, unless you want to help?”

  I swallowed the bile that had decided to creep up my throat. “No. I'm good with just notes.”

  Doc shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said before he walked over to press the button on his CD player and flipped through a few songs before he found one he liked. I don't know what was more unnerving, standing by while he cut open a dead werewolf or the fact that he was doing it while listening to Olivia Newton John.

  “All rightie, then,” he said, cracking his knuckles. He walked around the body, snapping a few pictures. Every once in a while, he would stop to measure something with a tape measure or to turn over the appropriate body part as he spoke. “Subject is an uncircumcised male, approximately five feet eight inches in height and one hundred twenty to one hundred thirty pounds. Body temperature taken rectally upon arrival places death sometime between four and five this morning. Presence of secondary molars and physical development suggest the age of the subject somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, probably on the younger side of that scale. Looks to be of Hispanic origin, definitely a werewolf. No obvious identification with the body. We'll skip the prints due to the presence of phalangeal deformity.”

  I was really fighting to keep up with the pace at which he was talking, especially since he was using jargon. “What was that?”

  He picked up the half formed left hand and waved it stiffly at me. “Phalangeal deformity. Let's see. Where was I? Um...Distinguishing marks. Subject has a black tribal tattoo band on the upper bicep of the left arm. Evidence of piercings in both ears, likely silver and removed to allow for the change, since werewolves can't change while wearing silver.” He looked over at me with one eyebrow raised. “Can they?”

  “Some,” I confirmed, reaching back in my memory for the early days of my training with BSI. “But not easily.”

  “Right. Well, he's not wearing any silver. You'll probably find it at the scene somewhere if you look hard enough. There are some markings here in the bend of the left arm. They look like track marks. None of them look fresh but it's hard to tell with the way they heal.” He took several pictures of the track marks. When he seemed satisfied, he dropped the camera and then held his hand out to me expectantly. When I didn't give it to him right away he looked up and demanded in an irritated tone, “Phlebotomy kit.”

  I handed it to him and watched as he tried to poke at the inside of the werewolf's femoral artery without success. Doc muttered a mild curse to himself and then wandered off to search through a drawer before coming back with another needle. “Silver needles. Should've thought of that the first time, Doc.” He tried it again with the new needle and finally managed to get what he wanted. Doc collected five vials of blood and placed them on a little plate before labeling them and passing the plate to me. “Put this in the fridge, will you?”

  I looked around. The only fridge I saw was next to the curtain he'd drawn over his zombies. They probably weren't any threat, sleeping as they were, but that didn't change the fact that I was uneasy about going over there. Come on, Judah, I thought. Woman up. They're just zombies. I walked over to the fridge. One of his zombies was leaning against the side of it, snoring. Carefully, I opened the door and sat the plate on the middle shelf next to a brown paper sack before hurrying back to start jotting down more notes.

  “No obvious defensive wounds, though the rate of accelerated healing and deformities due to shifting makes a visual inspection inconclusive. I'll swab under the fingernails momentarily. Several large pieces of glass are protruding from the superior regions of the skull, though I doubt any of them are large enough to have penetrated the skull itself. The absence of a petechial rash suggests rapid healing accounts for the lack of bruising so if any injury to the cranium contributed to the cause of death I won't know that until I open up the cranial cavity. However, the location of the wound on the right side of his neck and lack of quick healing combined with advanced tissue necrosis suggests that the severing of the right internal jugular vein may be the cause of death.”

  I lowered the paper, knowing it was hopeless to try and keep up with him. “In layman's terms, Doc. What does all that mean?”

  “There was a fight. I can't tell if he resisted or not. Your killer acted with near medical precision using a sharp instrument. Your victim bled out in two minutes or less but likely lost consciousness after about thirty seconds. It was fast and relatively painless.” Doc watched my face for a reaction.

  I swallowed and nodded. “Silver lining, I guess.”

  “A poor choice of words, Black, considering the attacker's weapon of choice was likely a silver knife given the level of decay at the wound site.” He sorted through his tool belt, coming up with a nice, sharp looking knife. “I'm going to open him up.” Doc lowered a face mask over his nose and mouth as if he were about to do some welding instead of making an incision and pressed the blade against the werewolf's shoulder.

  The door behind us swung open and an inhuman growl echoed through the room. Doc shrieked for the second time in an hour as a big Latino guy wearing a cowboy hat stepped into the room with Tindall on h
is heels. The Latino guy growled at us again and then pointed at Doc and said, “Get the hell away from my brother.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  At six feet tall and roughly two hundred and fifty pounds of supernaturally dense muscle, our new visitor wasn't the kind of guy that I wanted to cross. A low, rumbling growl vibrated through the room when Doc didn't drop his knife right away. Somehow, I didn't think talking this guy down was going to work. He had a look in his eyes, somewhere between murderous rage and righteous contempt.

  “I said get away from him!” He took another step forward and had barely gotten his heel back to the ground before Tindall pressed the barrel of a gun against the back of his head.

  “Go ahead and take another step, Valentino. Give me the excuse I need.”

  “You got three seconds to get that piece of shit gun away from my head, gringo, before I rip your face off,” the big Latino guy presumably named Valentino said.

  “Now, wait just a second.” I put down the pen and paper as gently as I could. “Let's all just calm down.”

  “One...”

  “Not in here,” Doc pleaded. “Please, God, not in here...”

  “Two.”

  “Tindall, put the gun down!” I came forward, drawing protesting growls from Valentino but I didn't care. I figured it was better to anger him by moving than to let Tindall pull that trigger. If I didn't diffuse the situation, and fast, Tindall was going to be on a slab right next to our John Doe. “That's an order, Tindall.”

  Technically, I outranked Tindall as a federal officer. He was just a local detective and, in a perfect world, he was obligated to follow any order I gave him. That didn't mean he had to like it. By the scowl on his face, I could tell he was thinking the same thing as me. Shoving my weight around was likely going to shorten my life expectancy here. It worked, though. Tindall lowered his gun but kept his finger on the trigger. “Today's your lucky day, Mr. Garcia.”