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DEVIL BABY AND THE HOUSE THAT KILLS
A Jack Daniels/Boone Childress Mystery
David Macinnis Gill
writing in the world of
J.A. Konrath
About Devil Baby and the House That Kills
The TV Show The House That Kills visits Humes House, a B&B in a posh Chicago neighborhood haunted by the evil Devil Baby, and locks an innocent contestant in a room to spend the night. If he makes it, he gets a thousand bucks. If he doesn't—
When the room is opened, a dead body greets the TV audience, and former firefighter turned forensic investigator Boone Childress joins forces with Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels, a veteran Chicago detective, to see if The House That Kills has done it again.
Authors’ Note: “Devil Baby and the House That Kills” was originally published under the title “Boone Childress and the House That Kills” featuring different characters. If you read the original, there is probably no need to read this one, unless you’d really like to, then please feel free.
"Step away from the dead guy," I said, "and put your hands up."
The twenty-something male stopped knocking on the wall and turned slowly toward me. He was well over six feet, dressed in a plaid shirt, faded jeans, and heavy work boots, with short-cropped hair and three days of stubble.
The kid lifted his hands and half-smiled like he had all the time in the world. "Hope you're not going to arrest me."
"I'm Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels, Chicago PD." I pulled the badge from my jacket, letting him see the .38 in my shoulder holster. I was wearing flats and a matching skirt, which was too thin for a cold October night in Chicago. It was the best outfit I could manage at three in the morning. "You're interfering with a murder investigation. Why shouldn't I arrest you?"
"Because," he said with a southern accent, "this is a mystery, not a murder investigation."
The investigation in question was taking place in the attic of Humes House, a former resettlement house that was turned over to private owners a year ago. Now a B&B, the house had a reputation for what the TV people called, "spectral occurrences." The rest of us called them ghosts. In this case, the ghost was named the Devil Baby. Legend had it that the baby was born to a witch mother upstairs in the attic and had hoofs, horns, and a long tail.
It sounded more like a goat baby to me.
A foot away from us, a stiff with a butcher knife in its back lay facedown on a makeshift bed. The victim was a Caucasian male, about six feet with dark hair, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers with no socks. No belt on the jeans. The knife was buried to the handle.
What was missing was blood. There wasn't a drop of it anywhere.
I leaned closer and noted that the skin was discolored, and there were odd patterns on the flesh around the ears. With the back of my hand, I felt the skin. Just as I expected. I'd been in Homicide longer than the kid beside me had been alive. I'd solved hundreds of cases and I'd never seen a victim quite like this.
"Let's start with your name, kid," I said.
He handed over his license. "Boone Childress."
I shucked the nitrile gloves. I'd seen enough to satisfy my curiosity for now. In the hour since the call came in, CSU had done their magic on the room. There was not much to see in the small room—a hearth on the opposite wall, one small window, and a bed. The walls were clean except for some soot by the hearth and a smudge mark above the bed. They were also in excellent shape. The clean walls and the shiny floors told me that the space had been renovated recently.
"Stand by the door, Childress." I pointed to some loose soot near the fireplace. "You're tracking evidence."
"The crime scene unit already finished gathering evidence." He lifted his boots and showed me his hands. Gloves and booties. "I lifted them while the investigators weren't looking."
Smart ass, I thought as my partner, Sergeant Herb Benedict, arrived. Though I heard Herb wheezing all the way up the stairs, the first thing I saw was his gut. It was stretched tight inside a too-small dark green shirt that made him look like an over-ripe avocado. The color went nicely with his tomato-red face.
I was wearing plastic booties over my shoes. I tossed a pair to Herb, who threw them back. He had never been able to get them over his feet without pulling a hamstring.
"Not a chance, Jack," Herb said. "The EMTs are here for the body."
He stepped aside and the EMTs entered with a gurney. We watched intently as they team-lifted the dead weight. As I suspected, there were no bloodstains on the sheet, just some clear liquid discoloration and a badly torn hem. CSU would need to come back and preserve it for evidence.
"Got an ID on the vic yet, Herb?" I asked.
He inhaled deeply, trying to catch his breath. "The owner of the house said his name was Adam Stahlke, age twenty-two, apprentice carpenter."
"That's a start," I said. "Mr. Childress, still think this isn't a murder investigation?"
"No, ma'am." He smiled, and I wanted to swat him. "The dead guy wasn't murdered."
One glance at the vic and I knew that. "Yeah, it's obvious, so no brownie points for you. Let's go downstairs while you answer some questions, starting with why you're in the middle of my crime scene."
He walked down a set of winding stairs to the first floor. "Would you believe that I just happened to be in the neighborhood?"
"You're not from Chicago," I said.
"North Carolina."
"You're very calm for a murder witness."
"There's been no murder," he said. "We established that."
"Tell that to the poor SOB on the gurney."
We reached the bottom floor. Outside, the front lawn was a media circus. A crowd of at least a thousand people filled the street, and I decided the dining room was a good place to conduct the interview. "What brought you to town, Childress?"
"Pizza."
"Pizza?"
"What's wrong with that?" Herb said. "I would fly across the country for a pie."
"Herb, you couldn't run across this room." I turned back to Childress. "So pizza?"
He picked up a soggy cardboard box from the table. "I spent four years in the Navy. I was in Great Lakes for boot camp, and everybody kept talking about this place called Marie's that had the best pizza in the city."
"Oh yeah," Herb said, "they've got the best pie. How'd you like it?"
Boone shook his head. "I shipped out before getting the chance to try it. I had some time off, so I found a cheap fly and thought, why not?"
"This is not Marie's," I say. "How did you come to be at Humes House?"
"My host is a big fan of The House That Kills. After we got pizza, she said we should come watch the taping."
"Your host?"
"Erica Schultz. I'm couch surfing at her apartment."
"What surfing?" Herb asked.
"You crash on a stranger's couch, Herb. All the kids are into it."
"I used to do that in college," he said. "Unt
il I woke up canoodling a hundred pound Rottweiler."
"Poor dog." I handed the kid's license to Herb. "Run Mr. Childress through IAFIS. See if he has any priors."
"Come on, Jack, it was just getting interesting," he protested, but went to do the search anyway.
"No offense, kid," I said. "Standard procedure, and it keeps Herb occupied. Otherwise, he gets bored and starts pestering the uniforms."
"None taken," Childress said. "My conscience is clear."
"What about your record?"
"It's clear, too."
"Back to the subject," I said. "You and this Erica Schultz decided to spend the night watching a cable TV show."
"Watching them film a cable TV show, yes," Boone said. "The House That Kills. Erica wanted to see if the victim could spend all night with the Devil Baby."
Turned out, this cable TV show was a big deal with college kids. It traveled town to town visiting haunted houses. The producer would get some poor sucker to spend the night in the house. If the sucker survived until the next morning, they got a thousand bucks. Not bad money for a night of sleeping.
According to Childress, the production at Humes House grew such a big crowd, the producer staged a raffle to choose the "victim." The raffle was won by one Adam Stahlke. Stahlke was locked in the attic with just a bed. TV cameras were set up with night vision lenses so the cameras could film him sleeping. Then the only door into the room was locked and sealed with wax.
"This Adam Stahlke," I said. "You saw him in the attic room?"
Childress nodded. "Me and a few hundred other people."
After the producer sealed Stahlke in the attic, the crowd outside watched him on a Jumbotron. At midnight, the lights in the attic were turned off. Stahlke was cast in the pale green light of night vision goggles. As the local church bell chimed, Stahlke came to the window one last time to give a thumbs-up before turning in. A ghostly figure appeared in the window, but on the Jumbotron, Adam was clearly pictured sitting on the bed alone.
"That was a neat trick," I said.
"The film crew just projected the ghostly image onto the window," Childress said. "An old magicians sleight of hand. A few seconds after that, the power inside the house died. When it came back on, Adam was apparently on the bed, a knife in his back."
"Let me guess," I said. "While the crowd stood there in shock, you ran inside to check things out?"
"To investigate, yes," he said. "I left my pizza on the table here."
"You've got a lot of experience with crime scenes?"
"A fair amount," he said. "Fires, mostly. Back home, I'm a volunteer firefighter, and I study forensic anthropology at Carolina Tech."
"So you decided to put this vast repertoire to the test, instead of letting the professionals handle it?"
"Lieutenant," he said a hint of swagger, "I regularly run into burning buildings. Climbing a couple of stairs to save a stabbing victim seems pretty mild in comparison."
I couldn't argue with that.
"Before the producer could evict me," he continued, "I saw that both the window and door were locked. There's no way Adam Stahlke could've gotten out of the room."
"How did you get back in?"
"I followed the CSU guys upstairs." He held up the nitrile gloves and plastic booties he pinched. "It helps if you look the part."
"You were knocking on a wall when I came in," I said.
"Want to know why?"
Not yet, kid, let me figure it out for myself. "How did you know the body wasn't Adam Stahlke?"
Childress shrugged. "Same way you did. The corpse was suffering from rigor mortis and was covered with melting ice crystals. That means there's a cadaver missing from somebody's morgue."
"IU med school. They reported a cadaver theft yesterday." Not bad, kid. "How does a volunteer firefighter know so much about dead bodies?"
Childress shrugged again. It was becoming annoying. "Common knowledge."
"Not unless you're a coroner."
"I learned about forensics from my grandfather, Abner Zi—"
There was knock at the door.
"Did somebody call a coroner?" This from Mortimer Hughes, Medical Examiner's office. Hughes was the opposite of the typical ME, with bright eyes and a quick smile, which came in handy when your whole job was pronouncing strangers dead. "Hello, Jack. I've just examined the body. You realize your victim was a medical cadaver?"
"Yeah," I said. "IU is missing one."
"Not any longer," Hughes said. "We matched their inventory list to a toe tag found inside one of the sneakers. That means my work here is done."
"Great," I said. "Go home and get some sleep."
Hughes cleared his throat. "Pardon me for intruding, but did I hear the words 'Abner' and 'forensics' in the same sentence? Would that be Dr. Abner Zickafoose, who did groundbreaking research on the life cycle of blow fly larvae and the effects on time of death identification?"
"The one and the same." Childress perked up and shook Mortimer's hand. "I'm his grandson, Boone Childress. I practically grew up in Abner's lab."
"Mortimer Hughes," he said. "Your grandfather was often a keynote speaker at the IAC&ME training conference. He certainly is a unique personality."
"That's a nice way of putting it," Boone said as the two of them drifted into the living room to compare notes.
So the kid had legitimate training, but could he really help me with a locked room switcheroo with a live body and a cadaver? Did he know how Stahlke got out of the attic? I was taking a few notes when Herb came back inside. He returned Childress's license.
"Anything?" I asked.
"Clean as a whistle. Four years in the service. Volunteers for his hometown fire department in Galax, NC. Probably rescues cats and feeds shut-ins in his spare time."
"His grandfather was also a forensics expert who taught him a few tricks about human identification. The kid has this case all worked out. Or thinks he does."
"What exactly is this case, Jack?"
"Not sure yet."
"Can you ask Childress so we can get breakfast? It's the most important meal of the day."
"It's three in the morning."
"I'm always hungriest before the dawn. Pancakes and bacon go perfect with a sunrise."
"They go perfect with a coronary, too." The man had survived one gunshot to the heart already. He didn't need to ruin it by clogging his arteries. I felt like a horrible friend always bagging on Herb about his weight. He was a great cop, and I wanted to see him last until retirement.
In the living room, Childress and Hughes shook hands. Mortimer gave us a wave goodbye.
"The man sure knows his blow fly larvae," Childress said when he joined us.
"That's nice," I said, still scribbling.
"Want to interview some other people?" Herb asked me when I didn't look up from my notes. "I got the producer and his crew cooling their heels outside."
I circled the words cadaver, handprint, and no blood. "Later. I'm still interviewing Childress."
Herb pointed at the pizza on the table. "You going to eat that?"
Childress handed the box over. "Help yourself, Sergeant."
"Come on, Herb. Pizza for breakfast?"
"It's the most important meal of the day," the kid said.
"Don't aid and abet the gluttony, Childress."
"Thanks for the grub." Herb took a huge bite of a slice. A drop of sauce oozed down his avocado belly as he wandered outside. "Mmm, still the best in town."
"Lieutenant," Childress said. "Did you notice the wallpaper in the room?"
Yes, smartass, I did. "Let's go back to the point where the producer evicted you from the attic. After you left the crime scene, what did you do?"
"First, I made sure the producer was calling 911," he said. "Then I decided to check out the house's electrical system. The owner was in the kitchen, so I knocked on the back door and asked to look at the breaker box."
"What did the owner say?"
"He didn't answer me, jus
t shut the door in my face," Boone said. "But I did hear him talking to his wife."
"Anything interesting?"
"Only that the whole publicity stunt had backfired, and they were worse off than before."
"Their B&B business is in trouble."
"How did you guess?"
"Simple. No guests in the house," I said. "The owners invited the cable show here to drum up business. Probably something to do with the Baby Devil thing."
"Devil Baby."
"Does it matter?"
"It did to Adam. When he worked for the owners, he kept asking about the history of the house. He seemed obsessed."
"The victim worked for the owners?"
"That's what they said. I may have misunderstood them. My ear was pressed to a keyhole."
Sneaky but effective. "Where are the owners now?"
"Still in the kitchen, fretting. I think they fret a lot."
The kitchen of Humes House was a contrast to the mansion's Italianate architecture. It was open and modern, with soapstone counters and polished chrome fixtures. It also had the smell of a serious money pit.
"I'm Lieutenant Daniels." I introduced myself to the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Faulk. "My partner took your statement, I know, but I'd like to ask you a few follow-up questions."
"Of course," the husband said.
The wife took a sip of coffee. For three AM, they looked very alert.
"I understand Adam Stahlke did some work for you?"
"Odds and ends, mostly," the husband said. "Stahlke did the finish work on the attic—hanging wallpaper, refinishing floors, all that. But his work was subpar, and I had to fire him."
"That's what you get for picking the low bidder," the wife said.
The husband winced like he'd been kidney punched. "After the cost overruns on the kitchen, there wasn't much left in the budget."
She ducked his counterpunch and went for the jugular. "It was your idea to open a B&B in the first place. Surprise, surprise! No one wants to stay in a house haunted by Baby Devil."
"Devil Baby," he said.
Mrs. Faulk rolled her eyes. "Whatever."
"Back to business," I said. "When Stahlke was fired, how did he react?"
Jack Daniels and Associates: Devil Baby and the House That Kills (Kindle Worlds Short Story) (Boone Childress Mysteries Book 7) Page 1
