The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “Oh, she certainly satisfied me,” Gideon said with a nod. His hand clutched tighter on the handle. “I think I might have worn her out, though.” He tilted his head toward the stairs. “She was still sleeping when I left.”

  “Of course,” Ms. Cherry gave him a smile that was all politeness. “I hope you’ll grace us with your presence again, Mr. Gideon. Colleen would certainly enjoy spending time with you in the future.”

  “Sure she would,” Gideon said without any inflection.

  “And if your tastes were to change, I or my other girl would love to help you fulfill all your fantasies,” Ms. Cherry said with that same smile. “Good day to you, Mr. Gideon.”

  “Good day,” Gideon replied stiffly. He opened the door and walked out. The air was heating up already, felt humid. He looked up and saw a sky half-filled with clouds. By the time he’d reached the bottom step of the porch he thought for sure he’d be sweating any moment now. Had to be.

  He got to the car and started it up in a hurry. He looked up at the whorehouse, the faded panels and worn siding. He hit the accelerator and knew he’d have to get a new car. Soon. Real soon. He rolled the window down and stared up at the second floor window where he had spent last night. Where he’d done something he’d never done before.

  Taken a human life when he was RIGHT THERE. It was a new kind of high. He was discovering lots of those lately. It was an awakening for him.

  As he was pulling away, he heard the screaming start. He steered a left at the end of the street, headed out toward the edge of town. It wouldn’t do for him to get caught now. Not yet. He had one last thing to do before he left this town for good.

  And it was gonna be the biggest high yet.

  He was sure of it.

  15.

  Erin killed the lights and sirens on the patrol car as she pulled onto Water Street. She could see Arch’s Explorer, the doors just opening. She’d gotten the call when she was a good ways out of town but hauled ass to get there. She’d heard of the whorehouse here, but knew that Reeve hadn’t ever gone after them because they’d kept their noses clean of complaints.

  As she let the car drift to a stop, she suspected his days of letting it slide were pretty well over.

  Reeve and Arch were getting out of the Explorer, which was an interesting pairing. She wondered how far up the sheriff’s shit list Arch was sitting at this point.

  She opened the door and felt the warmth of the semi-cloudy day shine down on her. The air reeked of weed. She looked down the street and saw a guy standing out on his porch with a joint in his hand. She gave him a hard stare and he put the joint behind him. Dumbass.

  “I’m gonna go talk that possession charge waiting to be booked,” Reeve said as he stepped up to the curb. “See if he saw anything.”

  “Be gentle,” Erin said, “he looks dumb.”

  “He’s smoking reefer on the street in broad daylight with two police cruisers in plain sight,” Reeve said, giving her a look that expressed his annoyance and called her a dumbass all in one. “That don’t exactly scream out ‘brain trust.’” Reeve turned and started making his way up the grey concrete sidewalk.

  Erin turned to look at Arch, who was waiting by the curb, staring up at the whorehouse like it was gonna reach down and bite him. “You make your peace with Reeve?” she asked.

  “We came to an understanding, yeah,” Arch said.

  “Uh huh,” Erin said, watching him. He looked a little shifty to her, and that was odd because shifty was not in Arch’s character.

  “Let’s get this done,” Arch said, and started up the walk.

  The house was a rambling, old-style Southern home. Looked like it could have been a haunted house, even, just based on the outside appearance. It wasn’t quite Addams-family style, but close. The gables were peeling even worse than the paneling on the rest of the house, but once upon a time it might have been white. A long time ago.

  Arch reached the front door before her, his long legs allowing him to outpace her without any trouble. She thought about hurrying to catch up but she didn’t want to seem too overeager. This was basically day two for her, after all, and she wanted to get it right.

  The door was already cracked open, but Arch knocked lightly. She almost shoved him out of the way but thought the better of it. “You’re too damned polite,” she said and pushed it open.

  There was a woman waiting in the front hall, a white silk robe laid open and her chest and belly exposed in a strip right down the middle to her crotch. Erin could see a well-groomed pubic mound, waxed like it was a spot that saw regular visits from the hedge trimmers. The woman was dark of complexion, like she was of Mediterranean extraction, and the raven hair on her head matched the minimal carpet.

  “Uhh, excuse us, ma’am?” Arch sounded all tentative, a step behind her, like he was afraid to cross over the threshold without an invitation. That drew to mind the thought of vampires and demons, which she quickly dismissed once more as utter stupidity. It did set her blood to a quick boil, though.

  “Come in,” the woman said, and her jaw was set like it had been sculpted into place. She had a figure like a statue, too. Erin felt a little swell of envy. If she looked that good in her early forties, she’d be surprised; she’d gained ten pounds in the year since high school graduation and was doing her best to ignore it. She knew she still looked good anyway.

  Maybe not as good as this lady, though.

  “My name is Melina Cherry,” the woman said, her expression near blank. Her eyes looked like they might have been a little puffy.

  “Ma’am,” Arch said in acknowledgment. At least he didn’t hold out his hand to shake it. Erin checked. He was hanging just a couple steps behind her now, examining the white crown molding that ringed the walls. Doing anything but looking at the nearly naked woman in front of him. Reeve would have been gawking. Politely, jaw firmly closed and tongue reeled in, but he’d have been gawking. Ed Fries wouldn’t have bothered to even try and look polite. That fat boy was a perv.

  “You called and reported a murder, ma’am?” Erin asked, trying to awaken the woman out of the trance she appeared to be in.

  “Yes,” Melina said, focusing her striking green eyes on Erin. Erin wondered if they might be contacts, they were so incredibly bright and vivid. “One of the girls that lives here,” Cherry paused, presumably waiting to see if Erin would interrupt to call her a hooker or worse. Erin didn’t, just kept her lips buttoned tight and listened. “She had a gentleman caller last night.” Cherry’s eyes flashed. “She went to bed with him. After he left this morning I went to check on Colleen and found her …” Ms. Cherry’s dark complexion lightened for a moment, “… found her as she was.”

  “Dead?” Arch asked.

  Melina Cherry turned and gave him a scalding, you-idiot look. “Yes. She’s fucking dead, Officer. Which is why I called to report a murder and am talking to you now about her rather than the other girl that lives here that is still alive.”

  Erin made a mental note to ask where the other girl was but first things were first. “Where’s the body?”

  “Upstairs,” Ms. Cherry said, pointing up the banister.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?” Arch asked. Erin looked back at him. He didn’t seem chastened by Ms. Cherry’s earlier berating. She figured Arch probably had thick skin for that sort of thing, having probably had his ass chewed a few times.

  Ms. Cherry gave him a withering look. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said, her voice below freezing.

  “All right,” Arch said. “One of us should go look at the body.”

  “Yeah,” Erin said with a nod then turned back to Melina Cherry. “One thing first. Where’s your other employee?”

  Ms. Cherry gave her an insincere smile. “You mean the other girl that lives here? This is just a boarding house, you realize.”

  “Of course,” Erin said, rolling her eyes. Ms. Cherry pretended not to notice, but her own eyes narrowed marginally. “Where is she?”

  “She didn
’t see anything more than I did,” Ms. Cherry said.

  “Still,” Arch said, “we need to question her.”

  “Lucia,” Cherry called out, tilting her head toward the open parlor just to their left, “come here.” She smiled, a little more warmly now. “Lucia is new in town, hasn’t been here for more than a few weeks. She’s already quite popular, though …” Ms. Cherry turned her head as a woman appeared at the entrance to the parlor. “Lucia, these officers want to ask you some questions.” Cherry smiled insincerely again. “And since they haven’t bothered to introduce themselves, let me just go ahead and handle this by reading you their names off the name plates on their uniforms. This is Officer Harris,” she pointed to Erin, “and Officer Stan.” She turned back to the entrance to the parlor and Erin turned with her.

  The woman standing in the entry to the parlor was taller than she was, with pale skin. She wore a tank top under an overshirt and tight jeans, and looked like she might have just gotten dressed. She wore no makeup, and her eyes were downcast but blatantly green, maybe even more vivid than Ms. Cherry’s, from what Erin could see.

  And her head was fire red, glimmering in the glow of the morning sun peeking through the windows of the whorehouse.

  “Starling,” Erin whispered.

  ***

  Lerner let a long, slow exhale cause his lips to sputter against each other, making a THBBBBBBT noise. It annoyed the shit out of Duncan, he knew, but he did it anyway. Besides, Duncan was trancing against the wall, taking a listen to the things going on outside of the motel room. The cowboy looked like he was ready to pass out on the bed.

  “I think I need to sleep,” Hendricks said, slurring his words.

  “You shouldn’t have taken those painkillers if you wanted to stay awake,” Duncan said from his spot on the wall. His suit clashed with it horribly, the colors wrestling for dominance of Lerner’s sight.

  “I didn’t see him take any painkillers,” Lerner said. He hadn’t. And he’d been watching the cowboy pretty close.

  “He did,” Duncan murmured, eyes closed. “I saw it.”

  “Maybe if you fuckers hadn’t aggravated my injuries, I wouldn’t have needed them,” Hendricks said. He was slurring worse now. “Do you know what it feels like to have broken ribs?”

  “No,” Lerner said. “I don’t have any ribs.”

  “Right,” Hendricks said, and nodded. His cowboy hat was beside him on the bed, and his eyes were fluttering.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back,” Duncan said from beside the door. Lerner looked over at him and Duncan went on. “He’s gotten wind of us. It’s only the reason he’d mask himself. That means he won’t come back here.”

  “Unless he’s trying to bushwhack us,” Lerner suggested. It could happen. It had happened before to their people. No one really loved being policed, after all.

  “You’re thinking like he’s a fully-formed criminal mind,” Duncan said with a shake of the head. “He’s not. He’s evolving right now. Awakening.” He paused, closed his eyes again. “Something’s going on across town. Lots of agitation.”

  “Another … incident?” Lerner asked. He glanced over at the cowboy. Hendricks’s eyes were closed now.

  “Another dead body, yeah,” Duncan said.

  ***

  “No, no,” Melina Cherry said as Arch stared at her. “Her name is Lucia.”

  Arch was desperately uncomfortable. The whole place smelled heavily of perfume and was decorated on the inside in high Southern style. He supposed it was all to make the johns feel better and more comfortable, but it was having the opposite effect on him. He had a sense of what this place was supposed to be like—the brothel had been here since he was a kid, after all, and his teammates had come here in high school—and this wasn’t quite it. He imagined it smokier, like a speakeasy, a place where illicit dealings happened in a glamorous setting.

  “Right,” Erin spoke up, nodding. “Lucia.” She turned to “Lucia” and pursed her lips. “We could use a word.”

  Arch stole a glimpse at Lucia again. She was Starling, there was no doubt in his mind about that. He’d seen enough of the woman, even in the dark places she usually appeared, to know what she looked like. This was surely her, though her eyes looked different.

  Plus, she had an actual expression on her face. Lips quivering, eyes darting a little tentatively from Arch and Erin to Ms. Cherry. Arch would have guessed she looked a little … intimidated. That was certainly new.

  “Anything you have to say to her you can say in front of me,” Melina Cherry said. She didn’t move, but Arch had a mental image of a mother thrusting herself in front of an attack on her baby.

  Or a criminal trying to keep an accomplice from getting rolled by the cops. That was probably more likely.

  Evidently Erin saw it that way, too. “We’re not here to investigate any unrelated crimes that may have taken place here,” she said, focusing in on Ms. Cherry. Arch could see she was trying to be reassuring. “We only want to talk about the murder.”

  Ms. Cherry seemed to relax at that. “Why don’t you go take a look at the body? We’ll wait for you here, and you can talk to us however you’d like afterward.”

  Arch caught Erin’s look back at him, and he could tell she was thinking the same thing. “Ma’am, we can’t leave the two of you alone right now.”

  Ms. Cherry rolled her eyes. “I am a pillar of this community. I’m not going anywhere and neither is Lucia.” She must have caught their hesitation, Arch thought, because she immediately backed down. “We’ll follow you up the stairs and wait outside the door.” Ms. Cherry held up her hands in a show of surrender. “We are willing to cooperate in any manner possible.” Her face hardened. “To make sure justice is done for Colleen.”

  Arch looked to Erin as she looked back at him. “Fair enough, ma’am,” Arch answered for both of them. This time he couldn’t tell what Erin was thinking.

  Arch took the lead, walking up the carpeted stairs and ignoring the white French insignias that were stenciled on the walls. What were they called? He couldn’t remember. Flower something. He kept his hand on his holster even though he knew he was heading up to see a body. It was unsecured scene, after all, so technically he could have been running into anything.

  “Just stay a couple paces behind me,” Erin said to the two women. Arch couldn’t bear to think of them as anything other than women. He didn’t want to consider their jobs, because it wasn’t the sort of thing he cared to dwell on. He knew plenty of others willing to cast more than a few stones their way, but he didn’t do that sort of thing. Mary Magdalene had walked their path once upon a time, after all.

  Every step Arch took up the stairs made him feel the nerves more and more. He took a quick breath and let it out slowly, blowing it out quietly between his lips. When he reached the top of the stairs he took careful steps, as though any squeak of the floorboard would wake the dead. If that happened, he’d have bigger problems than breaking the news to Hendricks that Starling was actually a woman of the night in some sort of disguise.

  He frowned. She’d always seemed stronger than a normal woman to him. He kept himself from glancing back at her, didn’t want to blow her cover with her employer. Something about this whole thing was awfully bizarre, though. Nothing about Starling had ever seemed coy or shy. She hadn’t ever blinked away from him like she did downstairs.

  But then again, he’d never had a conversation with her in the brothel where she apparently worked, either.

  Arch reached the door. It was open just a tad, and he reached out and pushed it further with his elbow. He could hear Erin just behind him, now, could almost feel her breathing down his neck. He inched inside one slow step at a time.

  As soon as he was clear of the frame he took a step to the left and just stood there. What was waiting on the bed was every bit the horror he was coming to expect since the demons had come to his town. He knew the girl on the bed; she’d been a freshman when he’d been graduating. Colleen something.r />
  “Damn,” Erin said from next to him, standing in the middle of the door. “Colleen Hudson. Her daddy works at the mill.”

  Arch nodded. She was all burnt up on the inside from what he could see, like she’d swallowed a cup of molten lava and it had all bled out of her. He wanted to cover her up, though there wasn’t much left of her that was improper to be shown, but he knew that’d interfere with the crime scene. “I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” he said.

  “It’s kind like she got blowtorched,” Erin said. “From the inside.” Her voice was hollow and she sounded to Arch like she was somewhere else.

  “What’s that on her mouth?” Arch asked. He started to take a step toward her, but Erin’s hand on his shoulder stopped him.

  “It’s a gag,” Erin said, and she only met his eyes for a second. “He gagged her so no one would hear her scream.”

  Arch stared back at the body for a moment before turning away. He’d seen about all he could stand of this. So many dead yesterday and now another one on the pile. This one wasn’t even close to human in its execution. More demons. Maybe the same one, the … Sygraath. They’d found that burning stuff on the pavement, after all.

  Arch wheeled around and looked again. She wasn’t Colleen anymore, that was certain. Her face was ashen and her eyes rolled back. If her mouth was gagged, and something burned her from the inside … His eyes roamed the corpse, and he cringed as he did it. Not because of the gruesome state of it—though it was—but because he was looking at a naked woman who wasn’t his wife.

  She was not burned at the neck, not really, but all the way through the chest and down to her pelvis. It seemed obvious to him, though he was hardly a coroner. There was a black, burnt strip on the bed next to her and he lowered himself to his hands and knees so he could see that it had carried under the bed.

  Another strip of burnt-out wood. Something glimmered in there, like oily liquid, and Arch knew. He knew.

  It was the same guy.

  ***