She listened as Meckler explained to Samuel the procedures he liked to use. The young assistant was obviously a new member of the team and soaked up his words like a sponge. Meckler double-checked his work including the temperature readings.
Ken flicked a finger against the driver’s licence he held. “I’m going to run this. Maybe Vincent has a record.”
She nodded. “Good idea.”
Ken went back to the car.
“That’s about all we can do for now,” Meckler said, and Samuel packed away their equipment.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“About what?”
She nodded at the corpse.
“Well… he’s dead,” Meckler said and Samuel grinned. “Died sometime last night—within the last few hours I’d say. Before you ask, no, I can’t be more specific. You’ll get the time of death when I write my report.”
“A vamp do him?”
Meckler scowled. “You should know better than to push me into hasty declarations, Lieutenant. All I’m willing to say is that he died this morning of massive blood loss via the jugular—for want of a more poetic term, his throat was ripped out.”
“I could’ve told you that!” she said crossly. “Give me something I don’t know.”
“Well, he didn’t have time to shift his shape. The teeth don’t count. Shifters who spend too much time in animal form take on their beast’s characteristics. This young man seems to have bucked the trend a little. Instead of his eyes staying fixed, it was his teeth.”
“Unusual?”
“Not especially, and quite convenient from his point of view. He could pass for human as long as he kept his mouth shut, which is not something you can do if your eyes have slit pupils or glow in the dark. I once had a guest at my facility with a full set of claws on each hand. Strangest damn thing I ever saw. I’m sure you noticed the blood.”
“Of course. What about it?”
“There’s not enough of it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No. Oh, there’s a good amount here, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting a vampire fed on him—not yet at least. Throat wounds are messy. There should be spatter over a wide area.” He waved a hand at the ground. “He bled out here, but I doubt he was attacked here. No spatter and not much blood left in the body. It might be worth your time looking for the rest.”
She frowned. If this was a body dump and not the actual murder scene, she might never solve the case. Any evidence to be found would most likely be waiting where the attack occurred. There was nothing to indicate the murder happened anywhere else, but… she looked up. The fire escape maybe?
Meckler followed her gaze and nodded. “Could be.”
“We’ll check it out.”
Meckler nodded again. “Come along, Samuel.”
Chris waved the med techs over to bag and transport the body to Meckler’s hotel for the terminally dead. While the Doctor led his puppy-like assistant away, she scouted around the alley hoping to get lucky. She ignored the arrival of the CSU forensic team. The white-coverall-clad men and women were setting up to conduct a meticulous search of the alley with their robotic sensors and probes. If there was anything to find, they would find it.
Ken returned, stepping carefully around the forensic team and watching where he put his feet. “Our Vincent has a sheet a mile long,”
“Oh, really?”
“He did his apprenticeship in carjacking, for which he served three years. When he got out, he tried his hand at extortion and robbery—served a total of five for that. He got himself deported from Luna for pushing hallucinogenics to the miners there—some guy got killed when he went for a walk on the surface without his suit. Must have thought he was on the beach or something. When Vincent got back here, he went straight for a while—”
“Or he didn’t get caught,” Chris interjected.
“—but then he went down for assault with a deadly. Got out a year ago and disappeared off our scanners.”
“Until now.”
Ken nodded.
“I doubt he went legit, so maybe this was just business.”
“You think he crossed someone, maybe did something worth killing him for?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know… maybe. Meckler says he lost a lot of blood.”
“I can see it.”
“Har-de-har. I mean he really lost it. It’s not here. Have we got an address?”
“Not one that’s current. What we have puts him out of state as of two months ago—traffic violation.”
She nodded, staring up at that inviting fire escape. Her eyes narrowed when she noticed a curtain flapping in the breeze. Thinking about broken glass and a lack of blood, she shielded her eyes to see better, but she couldn’t tell if the window was intact or not.
“Hell, I’ll have to check it out. I’ll go nuts wondering about it.”
“Check what?” Ken asked, trying to find what she was looking at.
“See that open window… fifth floor third from the left?”
Ken shaded his eyes and looked up at the building. “Uh huh, you think someone tossed him out?”
“Maybe they attacked him up there and he jumped out. Shifters are tough, but tough enough to make that jump?” she shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he would try it if he was desperate enough. Maybe he tried for the fire escape and fell.”
“Let’s go see,” Ken said.
“Let’s.”
It wasn’t as easy as that though. The removal of the body had lessened people’s interest in the scene, but not altogether. Channel 5 was doing a live report, and had dragged up the usual crime statistics for the area. She watched as Ed Davis held forth on the Department’s lack of will to tackle the problem. She scowled, hunched her shoulders, and hoped not to get noticed. It wasn’t lack of will on her or the Department’s part that had allowed crime to spiral; the Mayor and his liberal policies were to blame. Under funding was the direct result of a Chief of Police more interested in making the Mayor happy than in controlling crime. She had requested stakeouts and been refused due to lack of manpower or funding so many times, she had come to expect it. Cappy did his best by prioritising the Department’s caseload, but that meant many cases were deemed of lesser concern—most notably those like her current one, which looked more and more like a monster on monster crime. Such cases ranked alongside vampire slayings, a crime no one but the vamps cared about, and shootouts between rival gangs, where no one but the guilty were hurt. She knew that Cappy would give her two days at most on Vincent Fairman. After that, she would be required to shunt the case into storage where it would remain open but inactive in the Department’s archives. Inactive files outnumbered the active by a significant amount, and she rarely had the luxury to go back to them.
“Lieutenant Humber!” Davis called and the cameras panned toward her. “Have you a statement regarding this heinous crime?”
“Heinous? He’s been reading up,” Ken muttered under his breath.
Chris snorted. “I have no comment to make at this time, except to say that the investigation is proceeding.”
Davis blocked her progress and played to his audience. “Come now, Lieutenant, you must realise that tensions are running high within the shifter community. Not since the urban revolt of 2024, has the preternatural issue been so solidly in the forefront of people’s thoughts. Three mysterious deaths in a little over a week, and now a fourth right here in Monster Central. People are beginning to smell a cover up.”
Chris’ eyes narrowed and Davis’ smile turned sickly. She didn’t appreciate the implication of a cover up and he knew it, but alarm bells rang in her head at his mention of the other dead shifters. Could there be a connection between Fairman and those other deaths? Baxter was primary on those cases, not her, but she would have heard through the grapevine if a single killer was being sought for those deaths.
“Who says a shifter is involved here?” she asked.
“Vincent Fairman was a shift
er, Lieutenant. Doctor Meckler mentioned it not five minutes ago. Are you denying a link exists between this death and the three previous slayings?”
Meckler mentioned it… I’ll kill him!
“I can neither confirm nor deny any such link at this time. Now if you will excuse me, I have work.”
Coldly furious at Meckler for being so stupid, she pushed through the crush and stormed up the steps to the building that backed onto the alley.
“That was Lieutenant Chris Humber, primary investigating officer of the latest in a spree of brutal shifter slayings,” Davis continued unconcerned by her lack of cooperation. “With the police at an apparent loss…”
“Meckler should know better,” Ken hissed.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Meckler is an old hand. He does know better than to mouth off about a case, let alone one of mine.”
“But good old Ed said—”
“Maybe he just wanted to yank my chain. He doesn’t like me, remember?”
Ken snorted. Ignoring the protests of the rust-spotted robot guarding the entrance, he held the door open for her. “Why the hell you ever let yourself get involved with him I’ll never know. I warned you—”
“Don’t start. Just don’t start okay, Ken? I’m not in the mood for one of your lectures, especially not one about my love life.”
Ken grumbled something under his breath that she did her best to ignore. The robot attempted to follow them through the door and prevent their further progress into the building. Ken waved his badge at the scanner plate that comprised its face, and it apologised. It reversed course back out the door.
“Stupid thing,” Ken grumped.
They found the building supervisor—Frank Goodwin it said on his door—in his office with his feet up watching a rerun of yesterday’s ball game. Ken sidled around the desk trying to see the screen. Chris had little interest in the game. She preferred hockey.
She offered her badge for Goodwin’s inspection. “Lieutenant Humber. Your fellow fan there is Detective Hart. I need to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. Goodwin.”
Goodwin dropped his feet to the floor and stood. “If you’ve come about the permits, you’re wasting your time. The owners cleared all that up just last week.”
“I’m not here about that—”
“The health inspection then?”
“No. I need to know if you have a tenant by the name of Vincent Fairman living here.”
Goodwin nodded. “Vince moved in last month. Is there a problem?”
“You might say so. He was found dead in the alley running behind this building.”
“Goddess… poor Vince. I saw all the police outside, but I thought they were raiding Zero Gee again. Worst thing they ever did letting that place open its doors. Vince dead… an accident?”
“No. I need to see his room.”
Goodwin unlocked his desk drawer and retrieved a key card. “Master key,” he said going for the door. “You’ll want copies of the security discs too, I suppose?”
“Absolutely,” Ken said sounding surprised. “This is an old building, are there cameras on all the floors?”
“Cameras yes, but the locks aren’t the best. The owners wouldn’t pay for the scheduled upgrades.”
“Record on, Ken,” Chris said. Ken activated his equipment and nodded his readiness. “What can you tell us about Fairman?”
Goodwin led them to an elevator and joined them inside. “The agency we use sent him over. We had a vacancy when one of our older tenants died—heart attack. I didn’t have time to clear out old John’s stuff, but Vince said he didn’t mind taking care of it. He took it all down to the shelter—some of it was pretty good.”
“You liked him.”
“Yeah, I guess so. He’s quiet—never any trouble out of him. Not like some I could name.”
“Anyone asking around about him, visitors, a girlfriend maybe?”
Goodwin shook his head. “He kept to himself. Like I said, he’s the quiet sort… was the quiet sort. Poor Vince, I can’t believe he’s dead.”
Ken looked at Chris over the supervisor’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. She rolled her eyes in return. One thing Vincent Fairman hadn’t been was the quiet sort. From his record, she knew he’d had a tendency toward violence. Nice wasn’t one of his qualities.
“You get any problems with shifters around here?” she asked, watching the indicator lights above the elevator doors.
“Nah, they know better.”
“How’s that?”
Goodwin grinned. “They don’t call it Monster Central for nothing. The local packs won’t stand for outsiders causing a ruckus.”
“What about the locals, any problems there?”
Goodwin looked sideways at her as if unsure she was serious. “No.”
The elevator doors opened and Goodwin led them to Vincent’s apartment, but when he reached to unlock the door with his master key, he found it already ajar. Chris moved him carefully to one side, drew her weapon, and nudged the door with a foot.
Ken peered inside. “Well, that answers that.”
She nodded. Vincent’s apartment had been trashed. “We need forensics up here.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Ken said and used his link to contact Central.
“You stay out here, Mr. Goodwin,” she said and stepped into the apartment.
The window she had seen from the alley was directly opposite the door. It had been smashed outward, outward and not in because when she looked, she found shards of glass on the fire escape. She noted the Dumpsters in the alley directly below her, and made a note to check them for anything interesting. There were bloody hand prints on the railing of the fire escape—probably belonging to the victim, but CSU would tell her for sure. The blood missing from the alley was here in abundance. Spatter covered the window frame and the wall just below it. She prodded the carpet with the toe of her shoe. It still squelched. She didn’t doubt that someone had attacked Vincent here. Maybe the perp followed him home from Area 51. It was worth looking into. The attack must have occurred by surprise—the lack of defensive wounds seemed to suggest it at least. Vincent had probably tried to escape by going out the window, but his injury had proved too severe. He either fell or climbed down to the alley, but his strength had given out on him. He died alone choking on blood.
Ken joined her by the window, careful not to tread on the sodden area of the carpet. “Forensics is on the way.” He began recording the broken window and the bloody carpet. Panning around the room, he pointed to the communications centre. “Message light is flashing.”
Vincent’s link was a bottom of the range model; the controls were easy to figure out. Messages were saved on a reusable disc in the base of the unit, but rather than remove it right away, she pulled on a fresh pair of surgical gloves and pressed the menu button. There were a couple of messages stored from someone named Tony. She played both. One was a simple request for Vincent to contact him. The second was far more interesting.
“Vince its Tony, are you there? Pick up if you’re there… okay listen, we have to meet. Danny is dead and I think Marty is too. No one has seen him. Some guy was asking around about you and Jay this morning. It’s got to be that fucking tight-arsed Ryder. If you don’t get in touch, I’m going to the boss with what I know. I don’t know what else to do. Call me, okay?”
“Well now,” Ken said. “We have ourselves a suspect. Goody.”
Chris nodded thoughtfully and retrieved the disk. She held it up and watched the light reflect in a rainbow of colours, knowing it represented their only lead. She needed to think of a way to make it seem more than it was. When Cappy called her into his office and insisted she archive the case, as he inevitably would, she wanted to have her argument ready. Shifter or not, Vincent did not deserve to die like an animal in a dirty alley. Many would dispute that, insisting that an animal is exactly what he was, but although she did sympathise with that view in some ways—shifters weren’t human after all—she drew the line at br
eaking the law. Killing shifters in the Republic was illegal. Until made legal again, which it never would be for fear of international condemnation, she would hunt down the perpetrators of such crimes and bring them to justice.
“Ryder… no first name,” she mused. “Not much of a suspect, but better than nothing I guess. We can ask around, see if anyone named Jay or Danny has turned up dead. That might lead us to a connection we can use.”
“Baxter is working on the Shifter Slayings…” Ken began. Chris narrowed her eyes at his use of the media headline, and he quickly altered what he was going to say. “I mean he’s investigating three homicides concerning dead shifters. Maybe—”
“Maybe we should hand Vincent over to him and concentrate on our other cases… on our human victims. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Don’t say it like that. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
She sighed. “Yeah I know. Sorry.”
“It’s just that Baxter is already working a case like this. Maybe this one really is connected.”
Vincent’s killer could have killed the others, but the method used was completely different. Baxter’s shifters had been killed with readily identifiable weapons—guns and knives, but Vincent died at the hands of another shifter or something worse, like a vamp. His throat was torn out by hand or claw. That was her assumption anyway, an assumption she hoped Meckler would verify when he made his report. Baxter had his eye on AML supporters for his perp; they were all human of course. She had no doubt that the Anti Monster League was capable of killing those shifters. It was their avowed purpose to rid the Republic of all monsters—meaning non-humans—no matter their species or form. She tried to imagine an unarmed human ripping someone’s throat out, but she couldn’t, and especially not if that someone was a shifter. Nothing human killed Vincent; she was sure of it.
“I’ll think about it,” she said to mollify Ken. “I can at least ask him about the possibility. He might not want the case.”
“Why wouldn’t he? It’s high profile.”
“The shifter angle is the only thing linking this case to his. The methods, the murder weapon… even the locales are different. I don’t think they’re linked, Ken. Baxter might—he’s been working his case longer and might have an angle—but I doubt it. We’ll see.”
Shifter Legacies Special Edition: Books 1-2 Page 53
