by Lee Driver
“I’m interrogating him and his…” he grinned at Sara… “associate. Need to send them both down for printing.”
“Well, if either of them are suspects, you better take my prints, too. Because on more than one occasion I have wanted to kill Miss Monroe myself.”
Dagger squeezed Sara’s hand. “Come on.”
Spagnola barked, “She stays.”
“Over my dead body.”
Sheila watched them leave, those tear ducts starting to pump. “Are you going to let them leave?”
Spagnola sighed. “I know where to find them.”
“Thanks for the rescue,” Dagger told Padre.
“You owe me one.” Padre escorted them from the building. Chief Wozniak didn’t need to see Dagger. It was just Padre’s way of getting Dagger out from under Spagnola’s eagle eye.
Dagger told him about the maps in the Building Department and how he had found a couple good possibilities for fire-proof structures. “While I was there I also obtained a list of residents living in unincorporated areas. Not that our suspect is using his real name. Never know if one of the names might jog Sherlock’s memory.”
“Why don’t we go look at those structures? I’ll call Marty and we can swing by and pick him up. Sherlock is supposedly napping. That guy stays up all night and naps during the day.”
Dagger stopped short of his truck, which Sara had driven to the police department. She had refused the police escort to the station and instead insisted on driving herself.
“I’m going to go home,” Sara said.
“Sure?” Dagger held the truck door open and she climbed in. “You okay after…? He tossed a nod toward the police station.
Sara smiled. “I’m fine. But I don’t understand why Sheila hates me. I haven’t given her any reason.”
“With women like Sheila, there doesn’t have to be a reason,” Padre said. “She’s possessive and hard of hearing.”
“Hard of hearing?” Sara said.
“Yeah,” Padre chuckled. “Doesn’t quite hear the phrase, not interested.”
Sherlock heard someone say “room service.” He hadn’t called room service. He stuck his glasses back on his nose and pulled the door open.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t order anything.”
The waiter smiled. “Your neighbor was afraid you were going to forget to eat.”
Sherlock smiled at Marty’s thoughtfulness. He had been too busy to bother with lunch and had thought about going down to the restaurant. But the aromas coming from the chafing dishes were enticing. He moved several stacks of papers away and watched as the waiter set the three plates, wine glass, and wine chiller on the table. A bottle of white zinfandel was buried under a mass of ice. The waiter uncorked the wine and filled his glass. Sherlock handed the man five dollars and closed the door behind him.
He didn’t realize how hungry he was until he lifted the chafing dish and saw the size of the steak. Under the second chafing dish was a baked potato and green beans. Under the third was a loaf of bread.
“Thank you, Marty.” Sherlock took a swallow of wine and sat down to his early dinner.
CHAPTER 24
October 11, 6:10 p.m.
Marty opened the door to his hotel room and switched on the lights. “Refrigerator is behind the counter. Help yourself to something cold. But don’t…”
“I know, I know,” Padre said with a wave of his hand. “No alcohol. Gotta keep a straight head.”
Dagger parted the drapes and stared out into the haze. Dusk was fast approaching. Another night and they were no closer to finding Paul Addison. Drawing the drapes open, he said, “I think the structure we found off Tower Road will work just fine.” Tower Road was an unused gravel road leading deep into Beacon Preserve, a forest preserve south of I-80 and near the quarry. There weren’t any parks or picnic groves and it was the most isolated site they had found.
Padre twisted off the cap and took a swallow of juice. “Now all we gotta do is lure the guy there. Going to be hard when no one seen much less talked to him.”
Dagger looked away from his friend. How could he tell Padre that Sara had heard from Paul Addison without him wondering how? “If he was in the crowd at the crime scene areas and if he’s done his homework, then I’m sure he already knows who we are.”
Marty shuddered. “That’s a comforting thought.” He stripped out of his shirt and tossed it on the bed.
“Getting all dolled up for Sara?” Padre joked as the Indy cop washed up in the bathroom.
“I’ve been in the same damn shirt all day and it’s sticking to me.” He struggled into a clean undershirt and a blue pullover. Wetting his hands, he patted down the stray hairs on the sides of his head.
“If you put on aftershave, we’ll know you aren’t getting dolled up for us.” Padre swallowed the last of his juice and tossed the bottle in the garbage.
Marty’s face flushed as he walked to the adjoining door. “Sherlock better not be sleeping.” He pulled open the door and peered inside. “Yo, Doc. You up?” He took a tentative step into the room. “Looks like he already ate.” Remnants of food littered the plates on the table. Stacks of papers had been moved to the side next to the laptop, its screen dark.
Padre lifted the half empty bottle of wine. “Thought we were keeping a clear head?”
Dagger pointed toward the bathroom door which was ajar. “Someone else is probably primping for Sara.”
Marty rapped his knuckles against the door. “Hey, Doc. We’re going over to Dagger’s house to talk about the final hour. You coming?”
No answer.
Marty looked back at Padre and Dagger, then back to the door. “HEY. Fall asleep on the can?” He rapped again, letting his knuckles push the door open. He wasn’t prepared for the scene before him. “Oh, jeez, Doc.”
Marty sat on the bed in Sherlock’s hotel room, his face pale, eyes cast down. He had found Sherlock’s nude body lying in a tub of bloody water. The professor had used the steak knife to slit his wrists.
“I still can’t believe it.” Marty kept shaking his head. “I worked with the guy for over two years.”
Padre squeezed Marty’s shoulder. “But it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? How he knew so much about the killer, the history of the murders. It isn’t uncommon in psychological cases that the killer blocks out the actual events and denies any involvement.”
“But what about Paul Addison? My god, we were sure we had the right guy.” Marty’s gaze drifted to the bathroom where he could hear the medical examiner’s instructions to his staff on removing Sherlock’s body.
“He did a good job of throwing everyone off track.”
Dagger stared at the laptop where Sherlock had typed a two-sentence confession:
I killed them all
I have to stop myself
Could Sherlock have really created such an elaborate history to make it seem as if there were some uncontrollable evil from 1800? And so convincingly that he would have the police believe him?
“Well, at least we can release J.D. now,” Padre said. “I never fully believed that shapeshifting shit anyway.” He squeezed Marty’s shoulder again. “Don’t blame yourself for not seeing it. Hell, he had Dagger almost convinced and that’s a hard thing to do.” He sat down next to Marty and they watched as the gurney carrying Professor Sherlock was wheeled out of the room. “I’ve seen it before. Killers are so out of it that they convince themselves that someone else is doing the killings. And how many times has the killer been part of a community group helping the police?”
Marty just stared, wiped his eyes. “Guy was like a son to me. I got to know him pretty good the past two-and-a-half years. I just…” He hung his head and stared at his hands.
Padre looked at the stacks of reports Sherlock had labored over. “I don’t suppose you want to keep any of this?” Marty shook his head no. “Does he have next of kin?” Marty shook his head again.
“I’d like to take them,” Dagger said. He located Sherloc
k’s briefcase and stuffed the reports inside, then placed the laptop in its carry case. “Why don’t we go back to my place. I think we can all do with a beer now.”
“I still don’t believe it.” Sara hugged herself. She wasn’t sure whether to be elated it was over with, no more voices in her head, or sad because Professor Sherlock was dead. “He was so nice.”
“So was Ted Bundy.” Padre dipped the bread into his chili and shoved it in his mouth.
They sat around the kitchen table. Marty plunged his spoon into his bowl, finding it difficult to get anything but the beer to go down. The bread was warm and oozing with butter and although it smelled of herbs and cheese, it had no taste. Nothing had taste, not even the beer. It was as if all of his senses were on shutdown.
“Do you know how many deaths might have been prevented if I just had my eyes open?” Marty took a pull on his beer bottle. “I’m definitely retiring when I get back home. Every time I close my eyes, I’m going to see the faces of all those victims.”
“He had us all fooled, Marty. Guy comes in here like an authority figure, we should have sensed something was up.” Padre looked to Dagger for help.
“He was clever,” Dagger offered. “To be able to get that cop’s body and the motorcyclists up in those trees.” He watched Sara pick at her crab meat salad. Every now and then her eyes would dart toward the windows to search the darkened yard. She probably wouldn’t be convinced until she could spend the night without the killer contacting her.
By ten o’clock they poured Marty into the front seat of Padre’s car and sent them on their way. Dagger watched the monitor to make sure the gate closed and locked, then set the alarm and settled down on the couch. Sherlock had done a lot of research on the Addison case and Dagger was curious how much material he might have on shapeshifters.
He started sifting through the reports, surprised at the detail. The first report he read was on the origin of Halloween and how it was started with the Celts. The god of death was some idiot by the name of Samhain. The Celts believed that ghosts and spirits, some evil, roamed the earth on October 31. So they built huge fires and wore disguises to scare off the evil spirits. Druids, a name Dagger had often heard in relation to Halloween, were actually Celtic priests, and they sometimes offered sacrifices to Samhain. Druids also performed magic and with the clash between the beliefs of Christians and Celtics, it wasn’t surprising that ghosts, witches, black cats and other weird things became symbols of Halloween.
Dagger wondered if this was how Sherlock fabricated the ancestry of the Addison family tree, that it all started with Henry Addison being feared a warlock. How many years did it take for Sherlock to concoct this fantasy explanation? And he could have shaken just about any family tree to come up with a history of witchcraft. So why Addison? He was local and convenient?
The dishwasher hummed in the background and he saw the light click off in the kitchen. “Going out?” Dagger asked as Sara walked over to his desk.
She shook her head and looked out through the large plate glass window at the moon looming overhead, just thirty hours shy of being completely full. “I think I’ll feel more comfortable going out after October fourteenth.”
“Know what you mean. This entire case has given a lot of people the willies.”
Sara sat down at Dagger’s desk and touched the mouse. The screen came alive. A three-inch square in the upper right hand side was dark gray. “Guess Skizzy hasn’t been able to move Mick from under the hat.”
“No, but he’s working on it. The audio detected something but the thief hasn’t picked up or moved his hat.”
Dagger’s eyes caught a page in Sherlock’s stack on Shimmers. Supposedly just like shapeshifters but they transform into alien creatures. Dagger chuckled as he read about people who straddle different dimensions and how their physical beings bleed through from one dimension to another. The pages looked like information Sherlock printed off of a web site on alternative life forms.
An extreme close-up of the Manitou, a vicious, wolf-like humanoid from Native American folklore. The concept of a man transforming into a beast-man can be found in all cultures. The monstrous, towering Manitou lurks in the shadows of a cabin. Man-animal related murders predate the oldest X-File by 150 years; members of the Lewis and Clark expedition wrote of Indian men who could change their shape into that of a wolf.
This from a trading cards database. Sherlock had been a very busy man elaborating this farce. Dagger pulled a sheet on lunar phases onto his lap and leaned back to read it.
Scientific research shows no causal factor between the full moon and abnormal behavior, although people who work in state mental hospitals do notice an increase in anxiety among its patients. There are more calls to telephone crisis centers and more babies are born around the time of the full moon.
Dagger chuckled again trying to correlate a water bag breaking to the lunar gravitational pull.
However, although science doesn’t support the lunar effects, people do believe it. Psychiatric nurses and emergency room technicians see a noticeable increase in the number of people admitted. Close to eighty percent believe the full moon affects people’s behavior.
Dagger watched Sara. She had been standing in front of the aviary door for the past five minutes. Slowly she moved over to the wall of plate glass windows and looked out into the moonlit yard. To the casual observer, the moon looked full. According to Sherlock’s notes, the moon officially is considered full for only three minutes.
Another report on shapeshifting caught Dagger’s attention. Sherlock had scribbled notes in the margin: bear, fox, leopard, seal, tiger, wolf. Were these the only animal forms people could shift into according to these bizarre web sites? Or were they what Sherlock wanted to believe? Dagger looked at Sara and wondered why Sherlock hadn’t listed a hawk. And what about the falcon or whatever bird Marty claimed left feathers at the murder sites back in 1998?
According to Sherlock’s notes, there were advantages to shifting between forms.
The transformation doesn’t include any of the shifter’s equi ment or clothing. A shapeshifter in animal form can communicate with other members of its species but cannot speak or use social skills. In human form, the shifter possesses all the characteristics of a normal human but does vaguely resemble features of its animal form.
Dagger again looked over at Sara. The hawk and the wolf both possess her dazzling turquoise eyes. And her hair in its multitude of colors resembles the coat of the wolf and the feathers of the hawk. He lifted the beer bottle to his mouth and slowly took a sip, his eyes trained on the papers. The report delved into some deep subjects talking about physical and astral planes. Then his eyes caught the word regeneration.
A shapeshifter loses all special regenerative powers when in human form.
That wasn’t true, Dagger thought. He had watched Sara regenerate in human form. Maybe it is faster in animal form. He read on.
Massive tissue injury such as burning, can result in the death of a shapeshifter. A shapeshifter is virtually immune from death in animal form.
Dagger smiled at the paragraph on silver allergies. The mere touch of the metal causes burn-like welts. Dagger conjured up in his mind the old wolfman movies where the beast can only be killed with a silver bullet.
Turning the page, he read about automatic shifting, primal forms, and blood shapeshifting. “Where the hell did you find all this?” Dagger whispered. Sherlock must have worked half his life digging up information and inventing a fabulous tale but why something so utterly unbelievable just to cover up his serial killer tendancies?
He took another swallow of beer, kicked his shoes off and dragged his legs onto the coffee table. As he read, he realized there had to be others out there just as strange as Sherlock to have even put this stuff on the Internet.
But a part of him was finding validity in what he was reading, especially the part about automatic shapeshifting. The body can shift automatically when in danger. He thought of the instance in
one of their previous cases where a suspect was attempting to rape Sara. She shifted instantly, not caring that the man would witness her shifting.
He read on. It said if the shifter is drowning, the body will shut down, allow itself time to shift into an aquatic form. According to the report, the primal form was the most vicious. It is more bestial in nature, out of control, and can constantly change to adapt to its threat.
Blood and demonic shifters can imitate anyone they want. They have the ability to duplicate internal organs providing extra eyes or limbs. They can grow wings, gills, scales, talons, without having to shift into a specific form. They can also be in psychic contact with others.
A shudder ran through Dagger’s body. This sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie. Although he couldn’t deny Sara’s ability, he still found it hard to believe there was anyone else like her, or someone as vicious as these reports implied. But then…
“Sara.” When she turned from the window, Dagger asked, “Are you sure you heard someone talking to you last night?”
“Yes, positive.” She walked toward him. “Why?”
Dagger set the report down and studied the young woman. She was childlike in some ways but was far from a gitty teenager, didn’t exaggerate, and sometimes was more analytical in her thinking than he was.
“We’re all trying to dismiss Sherlock as some serial killer and nothing metaphysical. But how does that explain how he communicated with you?”
