Crime Rave

by Sezin Koehler

  Red Feather nods and Liria screams in the DJ’s ear: “MONSTER!” He flinches, big time. Almost like a seizure.

  Agent Quatro feels a chill emanating from the empty corner that terrifies the DJ.

  “John, we have several accounts from other survivors who claim that people started dying when you started deejaying. Care to explain?” Red Feather asks, his voice stern.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” The DJ looks away. Günn smells rotting flesh again. She gives Red Feather the signal, and this time Quatro also catches it.

  “I think you’re lying to me, John. That is not a good idea.” Red Feather’s bad cop voice is steel even Superman couldn’t bend.

  Liria starts poking the DJ. Hard enough for red marks and the start of bruises to emerge. He jerks each time and soon starts swatting her. Quatro begins to see the outline of a hazy figure with long blue hair.

  “Tell him or I’m going to drive you crazy!” Liria the ghost screams.

  “You are already driving me crazy, you dead bitch!” DJ Fetish screams back.

  “TELL HIM MOTHERFUCKER! TELL HIM WHAT YOU DID TO US!”

  Liria begins to beat the DJ in long swoops, he puts up his hands to fend her off. He can’t.

  Red Feather knows a thing or two about ghosts, as does Agent Quatro, though neither had ever seen one so dramatic in its machinations before. Günn’s mouth drops open: This is not happening.

  “Stop!” The DJ screams. “Stop! You bitch! I’ll tell! I’ll tell!” John Doe sobs.

  Liria stops, but stands over him, her distended face in a grimace and her hand raised to hit in case he loses his nerve.

  “Tell them what you did to me first,” Liria commands.

  “Detectives. Fuck.” He looks at Liria and shakes his head. “I killed my girlfriend.”

  “This would be your girlfriend who you claimed went missing last year?” Red Feather refers to CSI Chang’s notes.

  “Yes. It was an accident! I swear!” The DJ puts his hands out in supplication.

  “So why didn’t you call the police if it was an accident?”

  “Because we were both on drugs and she was already dead and I knew it would ruin my career. I was just hitting big time. So I dumped her in a manhole near her house and told everyone she left me.” The DJ starts to cry. “But I never did drugs ever again after that! I went totally straight!” As if that excuses a murder.

  “She overdosed?”

  “No,” The DJ sobs, “we were on E and we were in the park hugging, just hugging, and it felt so good, but I guess I hugged her too hard or too long or something because when I stopped she was dead and I didn’t even know when she died. Fuck!” He punches the mattress.

  “Where is her body?”

  The DJ gives Red Feather the address and Günn leaves the room to call it in. Liria steps back from the bed, a smug look on her bloated face.

  “What about the rave last night? What do you remember?” Red Feather asks.

  He thinks about lying again but the moment he does Liria is on him, pummeling, screaming.

  “Okay! Okay! Goddammit! Mr. Crane hired me to help him kill everyone at the party!” The DJ shouts over Liria’s screams.

  Liria sits back, satisfied. Red Feather’s eyebrows shoot up. Quatro knows he’s finally telling the truth; she felt it the moment her skin made contact with his. The smell of putrid flesh leaves Günn’s nose.

  “Crane got loads of acid and mescaline-laced E to spike the water. I was working on a program that pinpoints vulnerable parts of the brain while on drugs. I figured out how to cause embolisms with messages coded into my music.”

  “For God’s sake, why?” Red Feather is at a complete loss, looking at this mass-murdering lunatic.

  “The scene! The rave scene wasn’t what it was when I started making music. So commercialized and pathetic. You know, in the old days you had to know someone who knows someone to even find where the next party was. Totally underground. Totally pure. Now they just put the address right on a flyer! Club rats call themselves ravers! As if they have some fucking clue about what raves are! And then my girlfriend died and I realized raves weren’t even about music and art anymore—they’re a glorified place to get high. Everyone is invited! Where’s the exclusivity? Where’d the underground scene go? The gritty? The real? All fake, now, man. And the longer I didn’t do drugs, the more I saw it. And I thought they deserved to die for being part of a corrupt world. The rave is just a metaphor, see? Everything’s eventually corrupted by money! By consumerism! By fucking wannabes who take a great thing and fuck it up!” Sheepish pause while he catches his breath. “Plus Crane paid me a million dollars.”

  Red Feather sees spots dancing around his eyes and anger makes his hands shake. “Let me get this straight. Thirty-fucking-thousand kids deserved to die? Because you didn’t believe in the rave scene anymore?” He can see his fist going through the DJ’s face, clear as a crystal geyser. Quatro puts a hand on his shoulder. It calms him, but doesn’t make him any less angry.

  “I’m sorry, okay!” The DJ cowers. “I don’t know what I was thinking!”

  “And why the explosion?” Red Feather’s breathing is staggered.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that, I swear!” The quick penitent.

  Quatro believes him and nods at Red Feather.

  “And what was yours and Mr. Crane’s brilliant plan for after you murdered all those innocent people? Huh? What were you going to do with the bodies?”

  “That wasn’t my deal, man! I don’t know what he was going to do. My role was the music. That’s all.”

  Red Feather takes out his handcuffs and cuffs the DJ, dragging him from his bed.

  “John Doe, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit mass murder and for contributing to said mass murder.” Red Feather Mirandizes DJ Fetish, while Liria laughs a cruel bray of justice.

  Two patrolmen walk the DJ from the hospital to lock-up. Liria follows, taunting DJ Fetish with her screeching.

  1:00 PM The Fairchild Home

  On a Pasadena street lined with Victorian revival mansions, Officer Tim Tippett and his partner Hank Rodriguez are the first responders to Detective Günn’s dispatch call about a potential DB. Tippet and Rodriguez find the manhole in question and set up crime tape, awaiting the CSI team, who arrive still wearing lab coats. Priority is as priority does.

  CSIs Pete Mazzotti and Tina Vasco—still on shaky terms after their rough morning—are the first on scene. They nod to the officers and hunker down to slide open the manhole cover. The rancid sweet-sickly smell of decompositions hits them in the face. Tina gags and Pete fights a full-on dry heave. Tina is less successful, turning her head as her breakfast comes up in a projectile scream.

  “Fuck! Sorry guys!” She hates when this happens, wipes her mouth and rinses it with water, spitting away from the crime scene.

  Pete Mazzotti shines a light into the depths, its halo scouring the dank below until it catches on the gleam of a skull, peppered with tiny pieces of flesh. “We have a body.” Mazzotti attaches a flash to their Polaroid camera and photos the remains in situ.

  He looks at Tina.

  “Guess I’ll be going to get her? Your fat ass will never fit,” Tina jokes, trying not to think about the smell. He’s just as slim as her, only taller.

  “You are also the rock climber.”

  “Goddammit.” CSI Vasco suits up as Mazzotti sets the small crane in place, body bag attached. Tina climbs down into the space, eyes watering from the stink, ignoring the tittering rodents into whose lair she descends. Vasco examines and photographs the body with a waterproof disposable camera. She notices thick gashes in the vic’s ribcage. This girl was knifed, not suffocated. Multiple times, by the look of it, though some tool marks might be obscured by rat teeth.

 
“Pete!”

  “What you got?”

  “Prelim exam, this woman was stabbed to death. Knife toolmarks all through the ribcage. Frenzied attack by the looks of it.”

  “ME’s on route. Yell when you’re ready for a hoist.”

  Pete goes to call Detectives Red Feather and Günn when a tired-looking yet perfectly-coiffed blonde woman walks toward them. As she gets closer, Mazzotti sees the coiffing can’t mask the madness of desperation in her eyes.

  “What’s going on? What did you find? My daughter’s been missing! What did you find?!” Her hysteria blooms into a full anxiety attack as she rushes into the crime scene, something she’s been doing all over Los Angeles whenever she hears over the police scanner that a body’s been found.

  “Ma’am please, we just got here. We don’t know what we’ve found yet. Officers, please escort this nice lady back to her home and wait with her.”

  From inside the manhole CSI Vasco yells, “Okay, Pete! Bring her up!”

  The woman’s eyes widen. “Her?!”

  “Figure of speech, ma’am.” Mazzotti guides the woman toward the officers, who ask her to sit on the stairs. “Detectives will be here any minute, but in the meantime, do you have anything that might have your daughter’s DNA on it? Hairbrush? Toothbrush? Anything like that?”

  “Her room’s just as she left it. For when she comes back,” her chin trembles.

  “Okay, Mrs. —”

  “Fairchild. Edith Fairchild. Pleased to…oh.” Force of habit. She’s not pleased at all.

  “Mrs. Fairchild, if you could bring me those things I’d greatly appreciate it.”

  Mazzotti hustles Mrs. Fairchild into her house as her daughter’s human remains are lifted from the ground.

  John Doe, AKA DJ Fetish

  You don’t understand why Liria won’t leave you alone. You’ve done what the dead bully wanted. You confessed. Shouldn’t she go into the light or some shit? Why does she keep taunting you with that laugh and the occasional poke in the chest?

  And then you remember what really happened the night she died.

  You were in the park. On ecstasy. Everything was perfect. You even thought you’d ask her to marry you, so filled with love and desire and respect for this gorgeous woman.

  But she laid it out differently. Her father didn’t like the idea of his precious daughter dating some working class boy, a disc jockey no less. That her family thinks you’re a bad influence with her dying her hair blue and the tongue ring, tattoos. She’s supposed to date lawyers, doctors, engineers, respectable men with family names everyone recognizes and old money. This night was her goodbye. Let’s leave it on a beautiful note, she says. I really do care about you. And I’m gonna miss you. So much you don’t even know.

  But you won’t take that as an answer. Just as quick as the loving feelings toward her surged they morphed into a hatred so black you didn’t even realize you’d taken out your pocket knife, the one you keep in your jeans to open plastic vinyl covers, and stabbed her a dozen times. The face, the chest, over and over again. She didn’t even have time to scream. You come to and realize what you’ve done. The love of your life is dead. By your deejaying hand.

  You pick her up and hug her close, you try to breathe life back into her body, but she’s gone. You dump her in the manhole, rewriting the story in your mind. You can’t accept what you’ve done, see? You can make it different. So all you keep is the holding her, hugging her so tight, so in love, so happy. She stops breathing. You panic. You tell no one.

  With the remembering comes silence. Liria stares at you, her sad eyes asking why. You imagine the wonderful future she would have had without you, and for the first time, you feel the slightest tinge of a most unfamiliar feeling: guilt. You push it down. You know if it takes root, it’ll kill you for all the things that you’ve done. All the lives you’ve ruined in just a few fell and thoughtless blows, just a few turns of your records.

  1:00 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital

  Out in the hallway Günn’s phone rings. Patrol. One body in a manhole. Crime scene investigators on site.

  “Unbelievable,” Günn says as she hangs up. “The DJ’s story checked out. But Tina found knife marks on the body. Liria Fairchild was not hugged to death.”

  Special Agent Quatro nods. This is not news to her. But it is news to Günn, who didn’t smell the lie because the DJ didn’t think he was lying. Quatro knows because body memory trumps the brain.

  “Well then,” Quatro says, “that and the long plane ride certainly worked up my appetite. Ready to eat?”

  Red Feather is pensive. “Reminds me of this one time when I was still on patrol—we got a call that some Hell’s Angels were trashing an apartment complex. We get there and it’s just one guy. The PCP levels in his blood were the highest the LAPD ever clocked. He was acting out all the parts. His buddies were in the bathroom, throats slit.”

  “Where’s he now?” Quatro has a real thing for multiple personalities.

  “Psych ward. Belleville. With about a dozen more personas to boot. His mind just broke on the drugs.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “I thought so. Then again, I suppose a poltergeist trumps a drug-fueled male biker Sybil?”

  “Could be.” Quatro likes this Red Feather.

  “My appetite whet even further. Shall we?” Special Agent Quatro walks toward the elevator with Red Feather at her heels.

  Günn sighs. The last thing on her mind is food, but her rumbling stomach disagrees.

  Detective Atticus Red Feather

  Two weeks ago you dreamed about the explosion. It seemed so out there, even for you, that you disregarded it. Like your partner’s talent for sniffing out lies, a dream don’t hold up in court. Talk of visions will get you an appointment with the LAPD shrink and a lot of funny looks. Might even get you out of the detective circuit. And after all your clawing to get in, you’re not giving up that hold. Not now, anyway. You’ve managed to keep your visions between your partner and you, and she’s only humoring you because you’re so often right. You know on some level she thinks that it’s coincidence upon coincidence.

  As much as you’ve always believed in miracles and divine intervention, it’s a whole other thing to be faced with it. Literally. It doesn’t feel as validating as you would think. Like the unknown magical forces in the world now have faces, and as marvelous as they are, it still reminds you of the scene when Dorothy pulls back the curtain to find the Great and Powerful Oz is just an old man, from her own state no less, and a fraud to boot.

  You find yourself thinking about Grandfather again today. You miss him. He’d have a story to tell. He’d have an explanation for all of this. He’d probably even know right away what’s eating Günn that’s escaping you. He’d know a healing ceremony for the survivors.

  All you can do is leave little bits of tobacco in your wake, sending up prayers and hoping for answers.

  1:05 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital Cafeteria

  “I thought you were joking about the Zagat rating.” Special Agent Rosario Quatro is surprised that the cafeteria is a Michelin-starred joint rather than the run-of-the-mill hospital desperation centers that don’t have the good sense to be in Beverly Hills. High ceilings, big windows, outside seating, warm earthy tones in its interior design. The smells of made-to-order Mongolian barbeque assaults Günn’s nose and she feels her stomach turn. Red Feather and Quatro, on the other hand, salivate over the extensive sushi and salad bar as well as the assorted hot meals and daily specials like rack of lamb persillade and scallops in a garlic cream sauce.

  “Have whatever suits your fancy, detectives. My treat.” Quatro heads for the lamb. Red Feather nods in thanks, his eyes on the Mongolian barbeque. Günn orders a plain baked potato, steamed vegetables, and a Sprite to settle her stomach. She hopes she’ll get through the meal without barfing over her c
olleagues’ lamb and meat plates. She hopes Red Feather doesn’t notice her carnivorous appetite is in remission.

  After paying, they take a seat next to a window overlooking the hospital’s small pond. Two of three tuck into their food with gusto.

  “So,” Quatro says wiping her mouth, “start from the front and fill me in.”

  Red Feather appreciates her idiomatic error, English not being his first language either. His father made sure all the kids learned to think in Lakota first, English second.

  Red Feather tells Quatro about the body parts impossibly found at the vaporized site and how the limbs grew in front of their eyes. The wolf girl who was missing a leg that also regenerated before she turned back into a human. The bird girl who flies and has lost the ability of human speech, but not the ability to write or eat gummy worms. The older woman in an induced coma because of an apparent internal scream that short circuits hospital machinery. A pale gentleman with very sharp incisors who claims to be a three-hundred-year-old vampire and cannot be captured on film.

  Next, the DNA lab results collated by Stacey Chang: The three alien women and the so-called Roswell Institute. Their warning that mercenaries would be en route to re-incarcerate them. Their tale of the vulval pink ooze that killed Charles Wallace Crane, owner of the destroyed mansion and Hollywood hill.

  The giant fifteen-year-old cyclops with the power to turn people to stone, allegedly. The woman connected with a castration murder, with only circumstantial evidence to link her to the crime. Quatro says nothing but the word “interesting” over and over.

  “And that brings us to DJ Fetish, girlfriend-killer and mass murderer, now in the custody of the LAPD awaiting trial. I wouldn’t be surprised if they reinstate the death penalty for this bastard.” Red Feather’s food cools. He’s lost his appetite.