The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1)

by Casey Matthews

  “Mercy General. Guy’s a wreck. Can’t hold this train up, sorry.”

  “Define wreck.” Kessler followed the medic to his door, since he didn’t break stride.

  “Compound fracture to the femur, missing teeth, and his ribs are like a bag of broken sticks. Somehow the femur break didn’t nick an artery, or he’d be in a bag. Face looks like he made out with a sausage grinder, but that’s old. Didn’t happen here.” The medic got into the cab.

  “Got an ID on him?”

  “No ID, but said his name’s Walter Banich.”

  “He say who did this?”

  The medic gave a short, cynical laugh. “Yeah. The Grim Reaper.” He slammed the door and drove off.

  Kessler absorbed the scene and tried to sort out what could cause this much damage. There were no burn marks on the broken pillars or the cars, no evidence of explosives. No shell casings, either. It looked like collision damage, but somehow they had limped away in whatever car had done it.

  “It’s a black-binder case,” said a gruff voice from behind him.

  Kessler swiveled and came face to face with an obese detective with thinning red hair and a bushy mustache. His clip-on tie was half tucked in and had a food stain. Kessler had never met a more out-of-shape or ugly detective in his life. “Black binder?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah. A weird one. I put ’em in a binder, the weird ones. Going to write a novel someday. You the one from the Four-Three?” He clapped a firm hand into Kessler’s. “I’m Detective O’Rourke. Central.”

  “Detective Kessler. Central called me out. Word came down the pipe that a van belonging to one of the freshly released mental-health patients had caught fire. Wanted me to check it out, since the van’s registered in the Docks and I have some rapport with the mental-health people. By the time I got here, all this happened.”

  “Military, huh?”

  “Former. Making the transition. How’d you guess?”

  “You’ve got the look. All neat, straight lines. What brings you here?”

  “Home sweet home.”

  “What’s your experience like?”

  Kessler sensed scrutiny in the fat detective’s deep-set eyes, so he said, “Only a year as an investigator. Before that, my main job was putting bullets through bad people.”

  O’Rourke rubbed the bristle on his double chin. “Why the transfer?”

  “Slow on the trigger. Fraction of a second.”

  “Hn.” O’Rourke turned from Kessler and he had the distinct impression that O’Rourke didn’t like him.

  “You going to fill me in?” Kessler asked. “What the hell happened to these cars?”

  “No idea. Not going to bother.”

  So he was one of those cops. “Ah.”

  O’Rourke turned partway around and gave him the fish eye. “The cars are black binder. Trust me, when it’s black binder, you need to simplify. Ignore the pieces that are incidental. So let’s forget the cars. They either help us solve our puzzle or they obfuscate it. Core to the heart of the puzzle: who did this? Banich and a stranger. Our job is to find the stranger.”

  Okay. Maybe not one of those cops.

  “Blood trail tells half the story and our vic fills in a little more,” O’Rourke said. “Banich jumped her over there. She ripped stitches out of his face, then fled. Tough girl. Made it behind that SUV over yonder, then sprinted for the stairs. That’s when it got interesting. That’s when Player Number Three entered.”

  “A second assailant?”

  “Girl says she saw something else.”

  “Something?”

  “There you have it,” O’Rourke said. “I ask her, she says ‘something.’ Not someone, something. I ask her to clarify, and she says she didn’t get a good look. I ask her: animal or person? She says probably a person.”

  “Probably.”

  “There you have it again. Careful, if you turn out to have a brain, I might end up liking you. Now, I figure the vic is scared and seeing things, but damned if we don’t have cars tossed around, and then that fucking thing.” He motioned to a handgun on the concrete.

  Kessler knelt. The gun was sliced in half. It was bisected straight down its barrel, a cut so clean it looked like it had been manufactured that way. Even the bullet that had been chambered was sliced length-wise, the powder from the cartridge dusting the floor. “What could do this? It’s like someone took a diamond saw to it.”

  “No. There’d be shavings, irregularities at the edges—nothing portable cuts that way. So. What do we do with the gun?”

  “Black binder?”

  “You’re spoiling all my preconceptions about you, detective.”

  “Wait. Preconceptions?”

  O’Rourke kept going. “Way I see it, Banich had his rental van over yonder loaded with a rape-and-torture kit. It was torched. Third Player is the likely culprit. He burnt up the van, then beat Banich into half a lifetime of rehab. Now, I’m not going to lose much sleep over Banich, but if there’s someone out there who can do damage like that, I want to know.”

  “Isn’t the damage in your black binder?” Kessler asked.

  O’Rourke waved a hand. “The binder’s a method for cutting through the bullshit. It’s not for assessing threats. This person? He’s a threat. We should find him. Because it’s possible he was working with Banich.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Accomplice who got cold feet,” O’Rourke said. “Maybe a fellow wacko. The girl was a senator’s daughter. Think about it: two creeps meet and share an obsession with this girl. One proposes the kidnap-and-rape scenario, and the other goes along with it and figures, ‘I kill the other guy, I get into her good graces.’ ”

  “All right,” Kessler said. “Maybe I can get something from the security cameras.”

  “Good luck. Report said the power went out on this deck. One of the maniacs probably cut it. But find what you can.”

  “How’s the vic, by the way?”

  O’Rourke shrugged. “Scared. Get ready to put in some OT on this one. Like I said, her daddy’s Senator Bradford. He’ll be leaning on the captain, and the captain leans on us. I need everything you’ve got.”

  “Mind if I ask you a straight question, O’Rourke?”

  “Best kind.”

  “You under the impression that I’m bad at my job? That I’m slow on the uptake or that I need a senator breathing down my neck to solve crimes?”

  “Let me ask you something. Can you run a mile in under five minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bet you can bench, what, two hundred? Two-fifty? And you probably spent enough time on the range to put a consistent two rounds into a man’s skull at a fair distance.”

  “So?”

  “So you trained a long, long time to do all that shit for God and country. You ought to be proud. But a man’s only got so many hours in his life to get good at things, especially if he’s only been trying for a year. And I’ve seen a hundred tough guys come up from street patrol and make detective. Good cops. Diplomatic and streetwise. Excellent lung capacity. But shitty puzzle solvers. Try to understand, Detective Kessler, I love puzzles, and I know way too many guys doing this job who don’t. That said, I’m pleased to have you here.”

  It didn’t seem like it to Kessler.

  “You’re probably thinking, ‘Sure doesn’t seem like it,’ but you strike me as earnest. Dedicated. It’s not worth as much as you’d like it to be, but I can work with it.”

  “So what now?”

  “Do the security footage and work your contacts in the mental-health system. We compare notes tomorrow. You need any resources, drop my name at Central. If that doesn’t work, drop the senator’s name. This is a high-priority case.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  ~*~

  Kessler hunched over a bespectacled guard at the wall of monitors in the mall security station. “I swear, I’m really good at this,” the guard said. “But I haven’t found anything—an
d I mean anything—on the van fire. It was set by a ghost.”

  “That can’t be right. There’s got to be twelve cameras on that deck.”

  “Eighteen. Here’s the van door pre-blaze and here it is post-blaze, but no one approaching or walking away. If he came in or out of the mall around the time of the fire, though, he’ll definitely be on the camera that overlooks the walking bridge. No rotation, no way around it. But there had to be forty, fifty people passing in that time frame.”

  “Copy me the footage. What about the fight on the parking deck?”

  “Almost nothing.”

  “Almost?”

  “Cameras came back on after the fight. Got a glimpse of… something. Here, it’s easier to just show you.”

  The monitor blinked on. It was static at first and then showed the parking deck. Banich lay on the concrete. “What am I looking at?” Kessler asked.

  “Took me a few times too. Let me put it on loop.”

  The video looped. Kessler strained his eyes. Shadows seemed to shift. No, not shadows. He leaned in close. On one of the loops, something inky-black slid from the corner of the frame and leapt out of the parking deck’s open side. Kessler shot back three steps. “The hell is that?”

  “I know, right? I think it’s a person going over the edge. And the drop is five stories. We’ve had a suicide off that parking deck.”

  “Those light fixtures above the opening,” Kessler said. “How high up would you say they are?”

  “I don’t know. Eight feet?”

  “If that shadow’s a person, even crouched like that, he can’t be over five feet tall. Small guy. Banich had to weigh two hundred and fifty at least. How’s someone that size do that to a person?”

  “With a baseball bat? Or a car.”

  “Copy that footage too,” Kessler said.

  A thought crept over him. He knew a person in New Petersburg who was about that size, who could scale a sheer wall, fight like a demon, and send the shivers straight up his spine. She’d just got out of Sacred Oaks less than a month ago.

  On his way out of the office, he dialed Victoria Cross. “Victoria. It’s your ex. Uh, David. We need to meet.” More quietly, he added, “It’s about Ryn.”

  ~*~

  They met at a sandwich shop in Whitechurch. When Kessler had left New Petersburg more than a decade ago, the crime rate in Whitechurch had been dropping. The graffiti had since been replaced by spray-painted murals, the fire escapes dotted with spice-garden planters that would bloom come spring, and the streets flooded with educated people who wanted to live in the city between Graystone University and where they worked in Commonwealth Plaza. Its revitalization had driven up property values and chased out the poor. Now it was full of trendy restaurants, the sandwich shop flanked by a sushi bar and a vinyl record store.

  Kessler found Victoria at a booth, surrounded by a fortress of case files. She’d been nothing but bones and wit in high school, and she’d kept her lean physique, except now her hair had a done-up, professional quality that projected competence. Nevertheless, the clasp could not quite contain her energy, and a few curls busted loose. She worked her case files at the pace of a mad scribble.

  He sat. “Victoria. You look good.”

  “You should order the house club,” she said.

  “Not hungry.”

  “Order the house club and you will be.”

  “I’m here about Ryn.”

  “I know. And I don’t talk about my cases, so you’re wasting your time. Unless you order the club—then it won’t be wasted at all. It’s that good.”

  “You need to trust me. Especially when it comes to her. She wouldn’t be under your care if it weren’t for me. This isn’t business, Victoria. This is personal.”

  “Personal?” Her voice had an edge.

  “Yeah.”

  “Personal like, say, what we had in high school?”

  Shit. “This isn’t really the time—”

  “It’s relevant. Do you remember the Tuesday after graduation, David? Because I do. That was the day my boyfriend of four years broke up with me, by phone, while on his way to boot camp. Which surprised me, since I had thought we’d decided to move in together.”

  He ran his hands through his close-cropped hair, trying to contain the same surge of frustration she’d always incited. “Moving in was your plan, goddamnit. I didn’t want to go to school, and I didn’t want to meet all my girlfriend’s college friends and explain that I worked in the Docks. I didn’t want to stand still. That life would have killed me.”

  “What—living with me? I grew up two floors beneath you, you dolt. We were practically living together already by the end of high school. I used that fire escape next to your bedroom more than the alley cats.”

  Kessler deflated. “It wasn’t you.”

  She made a face.

  “I swear. I know everyone says that, but it’s true. It was… well, my dad.”

  “I loved your dad, too. He was important to me. He used to walk me home when I was a little girl, down both flights, to my door. A gentleman, your father. Don’t use his memory to excuse your meltdown. When you told me you were going into the military, you didn’t say ‘because my father died in a war,’ you said ‘because I have to do this.’ It was duty. Honor. You chose that, and you chose it over me. So when you say Ryn is personal, I say I don’t believe you. Because I know your priorities.”

  Kessler had avoided this conversation for ten years.

  She removed her glasses and folded them. “It’s not a bad thing. Duty, honor, service. Great things. Just… not for eighteen-year-old me. Maybe not for her, either.”

  “I tried to talk to you about my plans.” Folded over his spot at the table, he lifted his jaw and squared her in his gaze. “A hundred times. But you weren’t the sort of person who took ‘no’ for an answer. I’d say the words, but you’d never hear them. I’d say, ‘I’m not sure about moving in,’ I’d say, ‘I can’t find the kind of work I need.’ You’d try to argue me out of it, like if you could present enough points in a logical enough way, I’d feel differently.”

  “So,” she said, grinning. “It was my fault.”

  He sighed. “Fuck. Yes. All right? Yes, it was.”

  Victoria paused over her case files and actually smiled. “I know.”

  Kessler threw his hands up. “Then why the fuck are we talking about it?”

  “I needed you to say it.” She shook her head. “You’re too damn noble. We broke up because I was a selfish girl who thought she could drag you along anywhere I went. You don’t get to take the bullet for me, years later, after I figured all that out through the awesome power of a graduate degree in psychology.” Pausing, she added, “You’re exactly like your father.”

  “Not in a good way.”

  “What do you mean not in a good way? Your father was the best.”

  “Yeah. Big, dead hero who wasn’t around for my first fight in elementary school. Had to learn to shave from my mom. Had to learn to drive from you, and that’s done me no favors. So there I was, doing big-hero things an ocean away and ignoring all the pain in the city where I grew up. Don’t think I left for the nobility of it, or whatever else you think. I was just running. Same as him.”

  “Bullshit.” Victoria leaned in. “They were murdering children.”

  Kessler had read the report a hundred times—the real one, not the press release when they’d awarded the posthumous medal. It had been an ugly border incursion from the Soviet side—“freedom fighters” who had holed up in a school with enough firepower to push back the small NATO contingent stationed there. They’d started the executions as some insane bid to erase the line drawn through their country by the Soviets and NATO. “It was a goddamn trap, Victoria. They’d done it before—wreak some havoc, kill some kids or some soldiers, then fade back across the border.”

  “And your dad walked into a trap,” Victoria said. “Outnumbered. While everyone else tore for cover. He lived long enough to fire ev
ery bullet they gave him. Sixteen monsters walked into that school; only two walked back out. And the kids? All those little hearts kept pumping because just like you, he couldn’t follow an order, even if it might have saved his life. That’s not what a runner does.”

  “He was my dad. I was eight. I didn’t care about grade-schoolers half a world away. It was my birthdays he missed.” Sitting up straight, Kessler said no more until he had his voice under control. “Selfish, I know. But I was eight.”

  “You can’t be a father and see children—anywhere—without seeing some of your own kids in them.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You never told me any of that when we were kids.”

  “You wouldn’t have let me get away with bitching.” He cracked a smile.

  “I’d have definitely told you to suck it up.” She closed her last file. “I trust you more when you act like a human. Explain this thing with Ryn.”

  “I think she’s in deep shit. Last night someone beat a two-hundred-fifty-pound, would-be rapist named Walter Banich into the concrete. They dodged two dozen cameras and disappeared off a seven-story parking structure. Torched a van, too.”

  “Sounds like ninjas. Have you put an APB out on ninjas?”

  “We both know who it sounds like. And the lead detective on the case thinks Banich had an accomplice. He had a history in the mental-health system, same as Ryn. Then there’s this.” He slid a folder from his coat and showed her a surveillance still. The blurry image showed Ryn crossing the mall’s walking bridge.

  “That might not be her.”

  “It might not be. But it is.”

  “Ryn is not this man’s accomplice. That I can tell you with absolute certainty.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. Ryn’s not like that.”

  “Treat me like I’m a hostile prosecutor. Convince me so I can convince the other detective.”

  “Fine. Ryn has an aggressive form of reactive attachment disorder. She doesn’t socialize with anyone unless she trusts them, and she trusts so few people it’s less a circle than a straight line connecting her and me. To conspire, you have to talk to people. Ryn doesn’t do that. If she beat your man up, it wasn’t because she turned on her buddy. It was probably because he tried to rape someone. That, actually, does sound like Ryn.”