Dark Heart

by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin

He sniffed. “Yeah? So? Smells like Chinese food.”

  “Think about it, Mac.”

  “Think about what? So he liked Chinese food.”

  “Did he? Does it look like it?” She waved at the pizza boxes on the floor.

  McKenzie shrugged. “Okay. Maybe not. Why?”

  “The archive at the university smelled the same way.”

  His forehead wrinkled again. “Yeah, you’re right. It did.”

  He thought some more. “So what’s that mean?”

  “Could mean nothing. Could mean something. But it’s another similarity.”

  As the techs lifted the bag with Madrone inside, Sandra saw something. She moved closer and knelt by the stain on the floor that had been hidden by his body.

  “Hey, Mac,” she said, “what do you make of this?”

  McKenzie made his way over and crouched next to her. Imprinted in the carpet, barely defined in the bloody fibers, was a strange depression about sixteen inches in length, roughly half that in width.

  “What is that?” McKenzie cocked his head to the side. “Footprint?”

  The print was an elongated star shape. Three prongs pointing toward the wall, one long prong opposing them, facing the other way.

  Sandra leaned down and sniffed the print. “Yeah. Looks like it. Grab one of the forensics techs.”

  She waited until Mac found another photographer. The first was still busy getting pics of the scratches on the brick wall.

  As he stepped back and light bloomed from his flash, she shook her head again.

  “Great. Fucking great, Mac. What we got is Bigfoot, who’s a Chinese food–eating, rock-climbing, frustrated heart surgeon. Our case reports are starting to read like some kind of Star Wars movie.”

  McKenzie chuckled.

  But the thing did look like a footprint, though like no footprint she’d ever seen. For some reason she felt a sudden, chilly breeze along her spine.

  “This case is developing a very big suck factor, Mac,” she said.

  “What kind of shoes do those really crazy climbers wear?” McKenzie asked.

  “That’s a good question. I haven’t got a clue,” she admitted.

  “I’ll look into it,” he said.

  One of the crime scene boys was dusting the door handle, lifting prints, and taking photos before he washed the blood off it into a sample vial. Sandra tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I want a preliminary report, along with fiber and DNA data as soon as you get it.”

  The techie nodded. “Sure, Detective McCormick.”

  “You know me?” Sandra asked.

  “Detective Sandra McCormick,” the techie replied in a flat, noncommittal tone of voice.

  “Good. So have somebody give me a call when the preliminary results come in. I’ll come get the report.”

  “Sure.” The tech had as little enthusiasm in his voice as before. He went back to dusting the doorknob.

  Sandra moved away and let the tech do his job. She looked at McKenzie. “What about Madrone’s partner?”

  “I don’t know,” McKenzie said. “Dunno if he even had one. I’ll check it out.”

  “Okay.” She sighed and stretched, looked around the room once again. “We’ll keep the tapes up, keep this place off-limits. Mac, can you put out a bulletin to the hospitals? We’ll want immediate notification of any gunshot wounds. Maybe Madrone managed to pop this guy after all. We can hope anyway.”

  “Sure, Bruce.”

  She rubbed hard at her face. Her skin felt like dough, flat and without elasticity. She yawned.

  “I’m gonna go home and get some sleep. You should do the same.”

  “You watch yourself, Bruce. Whoever it is, they’re taking down cops now.”

  She nodded. “You do the same, Mac.”

  He stared at her somber expression. “I want this guy,” he said.

  “So do I, Mac. So do I. So we’ll get him. Right?”

  He nodded grimly. “Yeah, right.”

  On the way home, rolling through the silent city, she thought about it. Most times, she’d walk into a crime scene and find some stupid hairball crying that he’d never meant to kill her, he just wanted to show her who was boss. Or that she was asking for it. Or there’d be some scumbag ranting that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could. Or there’d be gangs or drugs or some other obvious indication of means, motive, opportunity.

  But it always made her a little jittery when she had to run over the possibilities without a clear picture in her head of what had happened, some kind of familiar framework within which to set her ideas. Like a puzzle board. But when the puzzle clicked, when the identity of the killer became clear to her, it was an amazing feeling, one of the reasons she’d chosen this career in the first place.

  Twenty minutes of driving through rain falling on empty city streets brought her to her condominium. The sky was still dark. Not even the first gray glimmerings of false dawn lit the horizon.

  She turned left off Lakeshore Drive into the quaint gentrified area east of Michigan Avenue, between the Miracle Mile and the lake itself. After parking curbside, she checked the seat of her car to make sure she hadn’t left anything to attract the smash-and-grab artists, got out, locked up, and walked to the front gate of her building, an old warehouse converted to condos for urban dwellers. A man was walking toward her. She marked him with her peripheral vision as she punched in her security code.

  He passed her by, his footfalls loud on the sidewalk. Once his steps faded into the distance, she opened the gate, went in, and closed the gate behind her. She looked at the elevator, and then decided to take the stairs.

  She took the steps at a quick pace, running to the beat of a rhythm in her mind. Her legs weren’t burning even after eight flights, and her breathing had returned to normal by the time she reached her door. Martial arts training didn’t buy you big muscles, especially if you were a woman, but you got endurance like crazy. And that’s something, she thought, pleased. I endure.

  She liked the thought.

  No sooner had she entered than she heard the creak of a wheelchair. A man’s silhouette blocked the light coming from down the hall. He paused a moment there, then wheeled himself toward her. Loose sweat-pants hid his thin, wasted legs. A tank top covered his well-muscled torso. His shoulders and arms were ripped with muscle, carved like marble from the effort of moving his wheelchair all over the city.

  In the half-light, the scars on her brother’s face weren’t too noticeable, but the part of his nose that was missing looked more grotesque than usual. He ran a hand through his blonde hair, scratched the side of his head, and adjusted his glasses, a fairly typical gesture for him. He smiled at her.

  “Working late? Or did you have a date?” he asked.

  She moved past him into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, suddenly stricken with the urge to rustle up something to eat. “You know where I was, Benny. And if you don’t quit teasing me, I’ll never go out with anybody. Just to piss you off.”

  He deftly spun his chair about. He’d always been well-coordinated. She winced inwardly every time she thought about how much he’d lost in that motorcycle accident. It had been more than four years ago, and the tragedy still haunted her. She could only imagine how bad it was for him.

  Four years ago, he’d received a full scholarship to Cal Tech. He’d jumped on his motorcycle and raced off to his girlfriend’s to celebrate. It was rainy and cold that day. Typical Chicago fall weather. He’d lost the bike on an icy curve, broken his back, and left a good chunk of his face on the pavement. His helmet had kept him from cracking his skull open and killing himself, and at the time he’d regretted wearing it. He’d felt, in the first few months after the accident, that death would have been preferable. He seemed to Sandra to have revised that opinion, but she never asked him if that was so. He’d tell her what he felt she wanted to hear.

  The physical and emotional costs of that accident weren’t the only ones Benny paid. His college plans had fal
len apart and so had the relationship with the girlfriend. He spent six months in the hospital.

  In Sandra’s opinion, the whole situation wasn’t fair. But she also knew that her opinion didn’t change anything. The world was never fair, never had been. Sandra had known that for a long time now.

  “But I don’t know where you were. So tell me. A hot date with a hot prospect? Give me some details here, feed my fantasies….” Benny said.

  “The man in question had a hole in his chest and was rapidly cooling before we spent time together.”

  “You know, sis, you never go out with anybody living these days,” Benny said.

  Sandra looked up. “See, here we go again,” she told the ceiling.

  “Not all guys are assholes,” Benny said. “Just because you married one asshole guy once upon a time doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen to you again.”

  Sandra shook her head. “You never give up, do you, Benny?” She took out a jug of milk and poured herself a glass. As she drank, she leaned back against the counter and relaxed. “I can pretty well guarantee that dead guys aren’t assholes, at least not anymore.”

  “Okay, Ace. How’s this, then? I think you should mope around your entire life, avoid any kind of intimacy with anyone except your invalid brother, hang out with the recently dead chasing fingerprints, hoping to find out that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the conservatory. It sounds like a fabulous life—at least for a David Lynch film. Not enough dwarves in it for Fellini.” He reached up and adjusted his glasses.

  “Fuck you, Benny,” Sandra said, tipping her milk glass at him.

  Benny sighed. “Even leaving out the incest angle, you’d be the first in a long time.”

  “Pity party now?” Sandra arched an eyebrow. She’d meant it in jest, of course, but as soon as she said the words, she regretted them. They steered too close to dangerous waters. Dammit, she was tired. She should go straight to bed. She wasn’t alert enough to wrangle with Benny right now. He was smart, funny, and three steps ahead of her even when she was at the top of her form.

  “You seemed to be in the mood for a bit of pity,” Benny said. Sometimes Sandra thought he brought up these subjects just to watch her squirm as she tried not to hurt his feelings.

  “All right, all right. I give up. I can’t beat you with words, and I’m too tired to kick your ass properly. Can we save the yack-fest for another time when I’ve had more than, like, two hours sleep out of the last twenty-four? How’s the computer game design coming?”

  “Almost finished. The project’s not due for another month. I’ll be done in a week.”

  She nodded.

  “How’s the case?” he asked.

  She sighed, shook her head, “I don’t know. Not too good. I need to come up with something more for us to go on. I’m going to start checking specialty climbing shops or exotic blade-making shops or something tomorrow. The entire case sucks. And our guy did another one tonight. Just like Baxter.”

  Benny raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It was family tonight, though. A cop named Jack Madrone. You’ll probably read about it tomorrow in the papers under a suitably gruesome headline, no doubt, or maybe even catch it on the Net before then. We’re trying to keep the details of the murder quiet, but the killings are so sensational somebody will leak it. Probably already has leaked it.”

  “Same way?”

  “Yep. Same exact fuckin’ way. Hole straight through the rib cage.” She drank the rest of her milk and began rummaging again for solid food, a sandwich maybe, something to calm the rumblings in her gut. “Some kind of incisions on the chest surrounding the open wound.

  “Yuck…” Ben wrinkled his nose.

  “Yeah.” She paused. “I don’t mind telling you, Benny, this one creeps me out. Bad. Same feeling I got when I first saw Baxter’s body. Never felt it before on any other case. You’d think that finding number two would give us something to go on, but the case just keeps getting more improbable. Murder is supposed to make more sense the more data you collect, not less.”

  He smiled. “You sound spooked.”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, spooked is right. And it takes a lot to spook me. But I’m intrigued, too. It’s weird, the whole thing is, and I want to figure it out.”

  “Fine, then. Go for it. But do me a favor, huh?” Benny’s voice turned serious. “If your killer is taking cops, just make sure you don’t end up on his dance card, okay?”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

  “I always worry,” he said.

  four

  A spattering of rain fell upon the dark rooftop. Deep music thrummed from below, a rhythmic base note under the twentieth-century snarl of the city.

  Another sound intruded—the whoosh of air displaced by two mighty wings. A multitude of tiny puddles fled from the sound, blown from their resting places by the blast. Then came the thud and rustle of something heavy settling on the pebble-covered tarstrapped roof. Had there been anyone near enough to listen, they’d have heard the crunch of footprints among the rocks and the light scrape as a tail dragged along the surface. A series of small noises moved steadily closer to the skylight protruding from the roof’s surface. Then came the scrape of metal against metal as the skylight edged open a crack, apparently under its own power. The faint glow from the room below created ghostly highlights on the falling raindrops nearby. Off-key mechanical music carried through the night, the electronic tones from the security panel as an unseen claw pressed the keys that disabled the alarm system. A whirring sound and then the skylight opened fully, a mechanical maw. With a rush of wind, a shadow dropped through. The glass skylight closed behind it.

  The creature who called himself the Wyrm flapped his wings once as he settled to the floor. Shadows fled from him as his clawed feet pressed deeply into the thick blue carpet.

  He moved across the room with a snake-like grace. Muscles rippled under his scaly skin as he crossed the plush rug, which muffled the sound of his passing.

  A full-length mirror stood on a smooth, marble dais roughly seven feet in diameter. He ascended two steps to stand before it. The mirror was old, older than he was himself. It was framed in wood, intricately carved. Knights with spears and shields fought dragons whose curved necks formed symmetric patterns at the mirror’s corners. The wood was layered in lustrous gold leaf, now cracked and flaking in places despite the loving care it had received through the centuries.

  The Wyrm looked at his reflection. His flattened nose was ribbed with toughened skin, double ridged from the holes of its nostrils to the prominent bar of its brow. His mottled, scaled body was top-heavy, bowed by the heavy muscles required for flight. His was a physique built for strength, speed, and death—for chasing, trapping, catching, and killing prey.

  He heard his muscles sing thrilling songs of carnage as he moved. They craved violence. They cried for him to open his huge wings and go hunting. To glide to the street and wreak bloody havoc. Dive into the petty humans standing below and scatter them like sheep before the wolves. To rend them with claws and slaughter them in great red waves of death.

  The creature straightened and stretched, feeling his power. Shivers coursed through his body in waves. His wings filled the room from side to side. The curved claws at the tip of each of his wings scraped along the ceiling. The need to escape the confines of the tiny room was almost unbearable. His lips pulled back to reveal rows of sharp teeth, jagged and askew. The creature let out a soft, whispery sigh, and slowly returned to its crouch.

  “Enough,” he said. The creature’s voice was guttural, harsh in the silence. He dropped the skin he’d taken from the detective’s apartment onto the marble floor of the dais.

  The creature brought his hands to his scaled chest, crossing them. A wet snapping sound filled the room. The creature grunted, clenched his teeth. Another snap sounded, quickly followed by a popping sound. The creature gasped as his wings crumpled down, b
ending and somehow folding into his back. The scaled skin around the wings warped and went flaccid, like a tent with the supports removed. The creature’s low growl became louder as the process continued. Flesh tore away from underneath the scales. Bunched, powerful muscles receded to normal size. Bones twisted and morphed, growing smaller, more delicate. Claws pulled away from the edges of fingers no longer curled like talons.

  Instead of a nightmare creature, a man stood before the mirror, his human body surrounded and obscured by a translucent, gleaming cocoon—the skin of the monster he’d been. He fell to the floor, writhing as the last of the old skin ripped away. The agony lasted only a moment, but the intense pain left him weak and unable to move. Finally, slowly, his strength returned. His hands pulled viciously at the scales covering his chest, tearing them away, revealing his human flesh underneath, red and angry as a newborn’s. Justin emerged, wriggling naked from his prison, his raw skin shining wetly in the dim light.

  Before he could take a breath the last miracle of transformation began. The redness of his skin faded before his eyes, leaving it smooth and pale. Healed. He was immortal. No illness could hold him captive, no injury or wound mar his body for more than a fleeting moment.

  The face and form he saw reflected in the mirror were now quite human and very handsome, even obscured as they were by the strings of mucous that hung from his long black hair and naked body. The vile substance was a natural barrier between the human and the reptile parts of himself.

  Justin gathered his hair into a ponytail and stripped the excess moisture from it. Droplets of fluid speckled the marble on the floor, already slimed and bloody from his transformation. He tried to think clinically, think about something other than what he was, what he’d done, and how he’d done it. Anything was better than thinking of that.

  He stared down at the dots of blood on the marble. They made him think of a too-close view of a pointillist painting, maybe a Georges Seurat masterpiece of a walk in the park. The dots of color that formed the picture would be nonsensical up close. Viewers could only make sense of them at a distance. Seen as it was meant to be seen, the painting gave the illusion of people walking through the park, an illusion comprised of tiny dots of white, pink, green, blue, dots of red…red like blood.