by J. R. Rain
“Damn tint,” says Rick.
“Reading my mind, are we?” I poke him in the side.
“Think that was coincidence? Two people leaving at the same time?”
“Considering one of them had been sitting in the car all the way in the back of the lot? My ‘hunch’ says no, but…” I rewind to 9:30 p.m. and lean close to the monitor. “The truck’s still there.”
Rick puts an arm around my back so he can get his face closer to the screen. “Yeah, looks like it.”
I back up further in ten-minute increments, until the truck finally disappears around quarter after eight. It’s too dim and far away to make out any details of the plate or driver. When I let the video play, the small pickup rolls around the rear of the building at 8:14 p.m., and backs into a space all the way at the end of the lot―and sits there. The mid-summer sun goes down at 8:59 p.m., and the little truck doesn’t move again until it follows Angela Cortez.
At the point with the best view of it, I pause, staring at a three-quarter angle. Only a shadow’s visible in the windshield, but I can make out a baseball cap. The side window’s as dark as the night sky, and there’s a bizarre glowing smear where a license plate should be.
“Looks like a mid-2000s Ford Ranger, black,” says Rick.
“Oh.” I roll my eyes as my hair droops over my face. “That only narrows it down to about a thousand people… in a hundred miles.”
“We could always check conspiracy-nut websites.” He points at the glowing strip. “Guy’s put something over his plates to beat traffic cameras. That’s illegal.”
“So, we just wait for him to get pulled over?” I ask.
“Nah. Stuff doesn’t show up under normal lighting. To the naked eye, it looks no different. Could be a spray-on coating or a plastic cover that looks like an innocent protective shield.”
“Great.” I rub my forehead.
“Hey. It’s something more than we had at least.” Rick stands. “I’ll go pull DMV records.”
I lean back, tapping a finger on the mouse but not hard enough to push a button. “I’m tempted to watch the showroom footage, but I don’t even know who I’d be looking for.”
“Mid-to-large male who notices Angela, maybe?”
“He parked and sat there. By Friday, he was already hunting her specifically. I don’t think he went inside.” I sigh. “Suppose he could have been inside earlier, drove away, and came back. Okay. I’ll check… and maybe the lab can get the plates?”
“I’d have more faith in your magic.” Rick wags his eyebrows and walks out.
I chuckle. Now that gives me an image of the Goddess sitting on a tree stump in her regalia of leaves and vines―dumbfounded by a computer.
Chapter Sixteen
The Violent Ones
Wednesday Afternoon – July 19, 2017
My super-exciting ‘movie day’ is interrupted at 11:42 when a call comes in from Sergeant Gutierrez of the Pahrump PD.
Our conversation is brief and simultaneously reassuring, sad, and frustrating. The cops down there confirmed Miguel, Angela’s hubby, had been in the area for at least four days, which would put him there within the timeframe of her murder. It’s reassuring not to have a case of spousal homicide on my hands, but also heartbreaking that their family has been ripped apart. According to Gutierrez, the husband and daughter are going to return to Olympia as soon as possible.
Rick sweeps in front of me on my way back to the media room. “Lunch?”
“Yeah. My eyes need a break.”
“Anything interesting on the video?”
I smirk. “Only if you count a toddler throwing up on a sales guy.”
“Hah. Guess the kid didn’t like the deal.”
“Any luck with the Ranger?”
“I’ve got a list of a couple hundred registrations.”
Head down, I groan, following Rick down the hall to the doors. “Ugh. This is going to take a whole pot of mugwort tea.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Mugwort is a potent reagent in divination magic. Helps with spells used to see things or seek knowledge.”
“Maybe you should whip me up some of that stuff, too.”
I lift my head, swiping my hair off my face to smile at him. “You probably wouldn’t like the flavor. It’s an acquired taste.”
“Heh. So is police work, but I like that.”
“Fair point.”
***
Since it’s close to the station, we hit the Fish Tale. The whole building’s covered in blue paint and fish. The smaller Fish Brewing Company building across the street has this ‘surreal blue fish swimming in orange stuff’ mural going on. Never did figure out if that’s supposed to be beer.
One couple is seated at a row of tables outside, but we head in to get out of the mist. Sadly, since we’re on duty, we can’t do the beer thing. I’m not honestly sure if a fried fish sandwich is healthier than a cheeseburger, but I go for that while wondering how the hell Rick is going to eat that whole burger. We toss ideas back and forth about the case over food, and keep coming back to the highly unappetizing notion that we are hunting for a serial killer. There’s no connection between the victims that I can see. One’s a white male, the other’s a Hispanic female. One’s single, the other’s a married mother. I haven’t gotten into Angela’s finances yet, but I don’t think I’m going to even look there… at least not yet. Nothing makes me think she’s involved in anything shady that would’ve gotten her killed.
Rick does finish his huge burger, and he’s not even groaning.
“Dude. By the time you retire, you’re going to need a second pension for your gut.”
“Nah.” He dabs a napkin at his mouth. “I stay pretty active. Basement gym’s almost done. Pretty soon, I’ll be free from membership fees. Burgers’ll only kill you if you eat them, then sit on the couch and do nothing.”
“Everyone’s metabolism is different, I suppose.”
We settle the tab and get ready to leave, for once a little early. That’s one advantage of the place since it’s only two blocks away from the station. Even walking here, we have plenty of time. Rick leads the way out. Once again, my hair decides to be funny and gets trapped in the door when it shuts behind me, jerking my head back.
Before I can even yelp in pain, a white car barreling down Jefferson Street swerves up onto the sidewalk, mows down both tiny trees by the pub’s outdoor seating, and takes out the fence by the tables to my right. Scraping metal and sparks, the sedan whistles past me less than a foot away, flattens the stop sign at the end of the block, and goes squealing across Legion Way into a telephone pole at the corner with a hard bang that sets off a shower of sparks from the top of the pole.
“Holy shit!” shouts Rick.
My hair pops free of the door. Holy shit is right… I think that snag just saved my life.
“I swear that son of a bitch tried to hit us,” says Rick. “He looked straight at me and swerved onto the sidewalk.”
Rick and I sprint after the car, which hasn’t tried to move since it struck the pole, tilting it. Hissing and smoke emanate from the engine; fluid’s leaking everywhere. I skid to a stop by the driver’s door and yank it open with a groan of metal. Blood covers the face of the driver, a dark-haired man in his early twenties. He doesn’t react at all to our presence. I grab his arm and pull, trying to drag him out, but the console’s crumpled down, compressing his legs and trapping him. As soon as I attempt to remove him from the car, he wakes up with a scream of pain.
Rick calls it in, however, a patrol unit’s already racing up Legion Way toward us, lights aglow. They couldn’t have been more than four or five blocks away when the guy hit the pole, and must’ve seen (or heard) it.
“He’s stuck!” I shout. “Legs are trapped.”
“Sorry,” wheezes the driver. His eyes go wide. “Something happened to me.”
“It’s all right,” I say, taking his hand. “Help’s on the way.”
“N-no,” he says be
fore gurgling. “I-I couldn’t m-move. S-something made me crash. Took over… body.” He convulses. “I couldn’t move.”
“Hold on, buddy,” I shout. “Medics are already coming.”
Two uniformed officers run up on us and check the scene out. They figure out pretty quick the guy’s trapped.
“Sorry,” whispers the man. “Couldn’t… something took hold of me.”
“I believe you.” I squeeze his hand as distant sirens grow louder. “Hear that? The ambulance is almost here. I only need you to stay awake for another minute, okay? You can do that.”
“Y-you believe me?” He chokes up blood. His breathing wheezes and sputters.
Crap… his lungs are filling.
“Yes. I do. Not your fault.”
The driver manages a weak smile, right before his head slumps.
“Shit!” I tug at his leg again, but it’s wedged too damn tight. “Hang on! Stay awake!”
When he doesn’t react, and I can’t feel a pulse in his neck, I wedge myself into the car and try to do chest compressions. I’ve got no leverage whatsoever, and he’s in a horrible position, but I can’t just leave him to die. The first time I push down, my hands go in way too much. Oh, shit… he’s not wearing a belt. He got a chest full of steering wheel on impact. His whole ribcage must be smashed.
A uniformed officer notices the squish and pulls me back, shaking his head.
Rick lunges in from the passenger side and struggles to push up the dashboard, but it’s not going anywhere. A few seconds later, an ambulance arrives, and I back up to get out of the EMTs’ way.
My heart’s pounding so hard my hands won’t stop shaking from adrenaline. I lose a moment; Rick seems to teleport from inside the car to standing beside me.
“Nothing you could’ve done,” says Rick.
“Yeah,” I mutter.
“That guy tried to hit us. On purpose.”
I start to put my hands over my face, but stop at the sight of blood. “He was made to.”
“Made to?” whispers Rick.
We take a few more steps away from the wreck as a fire engine pulls up. By now, a significant crowd of curiosity seekers has collected at the corners. More uniformed officers close off the streets around the site and keep the onlookers back.
After a quick look around to make sure no one will overhear me, I whisper, “The shadow. It was trying to hit me. It took him over.”
“Please don’t repeat that to the wrong people. You wouldn’t look good in a straitjacket.”
I sigh. “They don’t put all nutjobs in straitjackets… only the violent ones.”
Rick finally loses some color in his face, as if the shock of a speeding car missing us by inches only now hits him. “Holy shit.”
“You said that already.” I cringe at the grim expressions on the EMTs’ faces. “They’re going to call this an accident.”
“I’m sure that guy came at us on purpose. Maybe not us specifically, but he wanted to nail someone coming out of the pub.”
I hold up my bloody hands, frustrated that I can’t put them in my pockets, fold my arms, do anything without getting the stuff all over myself. “That man didn’t want to hit anything. The entity was definitely gunning for me.”
“Well, look on the bright side.” Rick pats me on the back. “We don’t investigate vehicle accidents. C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.”
Chapter Seventeen
Management
Wednesday Late Afternoon – July 19, 2017
A little after three, we’re cleaned up and in Captain Greer’s office for a routine status meeting on our open investigations. We fill her in on our working theory of a serial killer, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t go over well.
I mean, she’s thinking along the same lines, but dreading the media circus it’ll cause once word gets out. Considering the giant mountain of nothing we’ve got for evidence so far, I’m having waking nightmares of this guy going on for years and causing a statewide panic.
Maybe I’ll wind up the sixty-year-old retiree visited by the hotshot new detective who just caught the one I could never touch.
I sigh in my head at that idea.
This might even be the case that kills my career. Rick and Greer’s conversation melts into a meaningless ramble of sound like I’ve gone underwater. I can’t stop dwelling on the notion that everyone this guy murders before we find him is tantamount to me killing them. On an intellectual level, I know that’s not true, not unless I slacked off on purpose or didn’t take the case seriously. But on an emotional level, I’m stuck between furious and feeling like a failure.
“Oh, Wimsey…” Captain Janet Greer snaps me back to the here and now by dropping a printout on her desk in front of me. “I’ve got some bad news.”
No cop or detective ever likes the phrase, ‘I’ve got some bad news’ coming from their captain.
“Great.”
I pick up the page and recognize the face of the man who died in front of me two hours ago. Terry Farmer, age twenty-two. Nothing on the form looks terribly significant, other than his being way too young to die. Worse, I know exactly what happened here… he’s dead over Elise’s four-years-ago mistake. I can’t tell her that, but I need to stop this thing. I’ve got a much better chance of doing that than finding the killer right now, but there’s no way I can explain taking time from this case for ‘paranormal stuff’ in a way that won’t get me dismissed or sent to a psychiatrist.
Frustration rushes into my cheeks in the form of warmth. My cheeks must match my hair at the moment for color. “It’s the man from the car accident.”
Greer nods. “Do you recognize anything else about him?”
“Should I?” I bring the picture closer, studying his face. “Other than seeing him die?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she hands me another page. This one’s a case report for misdemeanor disturbing the peace. Terry Farmer had to be ejected by the police from a bookstore for harassing one of the employees―Tamika Bowen. It had been Farmer who had harassed my friend for wearing the pentacle.
“Crap,” I mutter.
“That’s one way to put it.” Greer folds her arms. “And according to multiple witnesses in the Fish Tale, Farmer swerved onto the sidewalk directly at you and Detective Santiago. It certainly looks like that church is stepping up its game.” The captain is pissed off, but not at us. She’s livid at what on the surface appears to be a brazen attack on our lives. “This isn’t good. That man’s a congregant at that church that’s been giving you problems. So is his father.”
“It’s not that… he was awake for a few minutes.” I hesitate, trying to come up with some halfway believable explanation. “He told me he had some kind of medical issue and didn’t mean to crash.”
Rick gives me the side-eye.
“Are you sure that’s the angle you wanna take here?” Greer lets her arms fall at her sides. “I bet his old man―or that pastor―put him up to this.”
“Rick was there. He heard the guy, too. One of the patrol guys as well. Farmer said he couldn’t move.”
Greer stares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Why do I have the feeling you’re holding something back?”
“Nothing you’d believe, Captain… supernatural stuff.”
“Oh, boy.” Greer sighs. “Well, you might as well say it since I’m not going to believe it.”
“How would Farmer know we were going to walk out the door of that place at that exact moment? He was screaming down Jefferson at least doing sixty. He would’ve had to have either been on that street or have turned from no closer than 4th Avenue to be able to get up to speed. Can you explain, other than something paranormal, how Farmer would know the precise moment to be on that road at that time to catch us the instant we stepped out the door?”
“Gotta admit,” says Rick, “the timing was almost too perfect to believe. If Wims’ hair hadn’t gotten stuck in the door, she would probably have walked right into his grille.”
> Greer makes a noise like a kicked pigeon, the bastard child of a squawk of disbelief and a laugh. “Your hair got caught in a door again?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I gather it at my chest in a grateful embrace. “A bit of good/bad luck.”
“Right…” She pinches the bridge of her nose.
“You’ve got Farmer, who couldn’t possibly predict when we’d leave the restaurant from blocks away, flying down the road with such precision timing that the few seconds the snag delayed me made the difference between me sitting here right now and possibly being a guest of the medical examiner’s office.”
“So, you’re calling this either a coincidence or…?” Greer can’t bring herself to complete the question.
I help her. “Look, either there’s a malignant paranormal entity coming after me, or Farmer happened to have a heart attack in the world’s most freakish case of ‘worst timing ever.’” I lean back in the chair, trying to keep my lunch down. Between the accident, anxiety over the official case, and anxiety over that shadow, I may never sleep again. And, oh yeah, sleeping like crap last night is probably why I feel like I’m a tiny alien sitting in a cockpit behind my eyeballs.
“Let’s wait and see what the ME report says about Farmer. So far, neither Waters nor any of his people have made any public statements.”
I huff out a long breath, and don’t much care that my hair picks that moment to cover my face. “I doubt they’re even aware of it. You know me well enough to realize I’m giving you the truth here, Captain.”
“Which leaves me in the unenviable position of either believing in spooky shit or thinking that you’ve cracked and sincerely believe you’ve got a demon trying to kill you.” Greer falls back in her chair, making it creak. After a moment, she waves dismissively. “All right. Sidebar the Farmer thing for now. I’ll take your word for it that this wasn’t attempted murder on a pair of my detectives.”
