Evangelina

by MaryJanice Davidson

  "Oh."

  She caught sight of Susan's exasperated look in the headlights. "Monster or nothing, you said. So now that we've handled the 'monster' part, you're going to keep pressing on the 'nothing' bit? You know better, Vange."

  "No I don't!" Seeing the woman's disdain, Evangelina was truly outraged now. "I can't do anything when I'm like this!" She waved her spindly arms over the dash, linguine with bones. "I can't fly, or run so fast, or do any--"

  "Can I do any of that?"

  "Huh?"

  "You heard me." Susan had opened her own door and slid in. "Answer the question."

  "No."

  "Am I nothing?"

  "Of course not. You're Aunt Susan."

  "You're damn right I am. I'm the real thing, baby. Here--hold on to my pocketbook." She turned the ignition and peered into Evangelina's face, like she wanted to memorize her or something. "You're so beautiful, Vange. And so strong. When you're in your other body, sure. But like this, too. You're the most lovely thing I've ever seen."

  Evangelina couldn't speak. She opened her mouth to try, and burst into tears instead.

  "Now, what's this?" The girl was pulled into the woman's warm embrace. "What's all this? Gorgeous and strong and not too bright sometimes, huh? And you're lucky, too, babe. You think, somebody with your bodies, your abilities, your birthright and your personality and your brains, you think someone like that just shows up every day? Vange, you're one in a billion. The moon can be full or crescent or missing or green . . . it doesn't matter. Because you're one in a billion no matter what. The moon's a big tease, Vange. You're the real thing."

  "Thanks, Aunt Susan." She broke the hug and wiped her eyes.

  "You're welcome." The car jerked forward, tires squealing. "Let's blast this rocket home. The wolves will eat with us tonight, and I love their songs so much."

  "Me too." But Evangelina wasn't thinking so much about the wolves, as she was about what Susan had said.

  The real thing. Not a monster. Not a weakling. A real thing. The Real Thing.

  After that, when Aunt Susan really wanted her attention, or wanted to show Evangelina she'd done especially well, she called her RT.

  No one else knew why.

  CHAPTER 6

  Saint George's ended up largely a waste of time. First, as Lue suspected beforehand, what hadn't burned down a few weeks ago in a mysterious "accident" was under very tight security. Local law enforcement had never really gotten a crack at the scene, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation, combined with National Guard troops, had swooped in with alarming speed and force, keeping local law enforcement at arm's length. Chief Smiling Bear was still fuming about it.

  Now, the federal agents were gone, and only a small complement of National Guard troops remained behind to back up the facility's security force. Cops could get in now; but staff were tight-lipped and fond of saying, "we can't recover that right now, due to the incident."

  So it was a lot of: do you have the personnel file for David Webber; and no, we don't have that because of the incident; and are there any coworkers we can talk to who might have shared Webber's last shift; and no, we don't have the shift records because of the incident; and what about any videotape of that incident and let me guess, you can't give me that because of the incident; and thank you for understanding, sir, the incident really has thrown us for a loop; and how about coffee, do you have coffee, or did the incident whisk away your coffeemakers, and at least they got two cups of mediocre coffee that still would have been better than anything Meenay could have scrounged up at the morgue.

  Lue dreaded having Art there for this embarrassment. He would have dreaded having any out-of-town colleague see such a shambles, but knowing this stocky, reserved BCA agent was seeing it was somehow worse.

  At least, the other detective appeared already to know all about the escape of two inmates, and the destruction by fire of about a third of the facility. In fact, it was Art who suggested moving on right away to David Webber's residence.

  It was at that residence that Lue found himself watching Art, contemplating a solemn truth.

  All crime scenes are different, and exactly the same.

  Lue considered sharing this wisdom nugget with the BCA agent, then reconsidered.

  Oh, why not? "I was thinking, Lieutenant McMahon, about how all crime scenes are different, and exactly the same."

  Art was squatting on the porch, studying the spot where David Webber had been found, a scowl rippling across his features. "That makes no sense."

  "It does if you have seen as many scenes as I have. Get it? Seen, scene? Did you catch that clever wordplay? That, my new partner pro tem, is what is known as a homophone. Cue immature snickering." He paused. But there was no snickering to wait through. Excellent! "Other examples in the English language would be pear and pair. Not and knot. Aides and AIDS. Err, air. Aweigh, away. Bred, bread. Sent, cent, scent." A triple homophone! Oh, lovely day.

  Speaking of scent, Art was . . . was he sniffing? He was! He had stiffened and was sniffing the air, like some sort of glowering, tightly cropped Irish setter in brown corduroy.

  "David Webber was not alone," Art said.

  "Yeah, we figured that, from the way someone killed him. And from the way I saw someone else, or something else, and fired my gun." He pointed to the empty holster under his tweed jacket.

  "And someone else."

  "You mean a third person? What do you base that on--your sense of smell?"

  Art gave him a crooked look, and then pointed to the siding behind some stacked patio furniture. "Good hiding place."

  "Great, a good hiding place. How do we know someone actually used it?"

  "Look closer."

  Lue bent down and finally saw what Art was getting at: there was a series of small, carved marks on one of the panels, as if someone had been ticking off time with something sharp.

  "Three sites in Bemidji have those," Art explained.

  Lue was, for the first time in Art's presence, thinking too hard to speak for a while. He thought about the coincidence, and what could make marks like that, and whether they in the Moorston police ought to have caught this detail on their own or if that was asking too much, and a few other things, mostly that he would need to take a really thorough look at any Bemidji files Art could offer.

  "Okay," he finally said. "So whoever or whatever I shot, was definitely in this spot for a while before David Webber came home and cracked open a beer on his porch. The marks are ticking off the time--maybe minutes, maybe more random than that."

  As he spoke, he could see it. He could see Art seeing it. "So David lies down, he has his Mark V with him, but that does not matter because his attacker has the element of surprise, is already too close, and has a great angle for a killing stroke. The guy probably deserves some credit for squeezing off as many rounds as he did, given all the disadvantages. So how does all this point to someone else, in addition to the two of them?"

  Art's lips wrinkled into a grimace . . . no! It was a smile. "You missed it."

  Annoyed, Lue scratched his scalp. "Yes, okay, Detective, I missed the scratch marks. You might consider cutting me some slack, given the fact that you have the benefit of additional crime scenes upon which to draw . . ." Which I really, really need to check out . . . for the sake of both ego and conscience.

  "I mean, you missed something else."

  "Oh."

  "Come with me."

  "There is nothing I would rather do." Except have a root canal.

  A few steps off the porch was the small copse of maples that separated Webber's property from the next. The two of them had passed it coming in, as multiple Moorston police officers had walked back and forth past it while investigating the scene not twenty-four hours ago. Art, Lue recalled, had barely paused here on their way to the porch. Yet the man now pointed to something that no one else had seen, including Detective Lue Vue himself.

  "Snapped branches. Bark burns. And different scratches." He was pointing
at the base of one of the thicker maples.

  Lue examined the slender branches in the area Art indicated; several were broken recently. In addition, there was a palm-sized dark mark toward the bottom of the trunk. Getting closer, he saw that the mark was not typical rot, as any casual observation would suggest--but was instead almost certainly the result of a recent chemical reaction. Above the burn were scratches. Unlike what defaced a tiny bit of the porch siding, these marks were wider, less subtle, and more rugged. What the . . . ? Something like a . . . a bear might have left them.

  Might.

  "There's nothing like this on the porch," he admitted. "But this may have nothing to do with what happened last night." Except it looked fresh. He might not have years and years of cop experience, but he'd had a cop's brain long before he went near the academy. So he didn't believe in coincidences like that. He hadn't even before he'd gotten married.

  "You shot at the suspect?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  They walked over to the spot by the cedar fence. There were still some evidence markers on the scene, but Art didn't look there. He was picking through the grass--not for shells or blood, Lue realized, but for something else.

  "Here."

  As he bent close to the turf, he saw what his colleague had: several of the blades of grass were not cut short by a lawnmower, but rather burned down halfway.

  It was incredible that Art had known to look for these things. Lue comforted his hurt, shriveled, dying ego with the knowledge that the man had simply known what to look for, from the Bemidji scenes. I've got to look over those files. He'd been schooled more in the last five minutes than he had in years. And by a man in corduroy!

  He shut his eyes and tried to think some more, this time aloud. "So why no burn marks on the porch? Why was this person here at all?"

  "Good questions."

  Lue sprung to his feet, even though he did not feel energetic. He felt out of his depth. "This is not conclusive. It is still possible that whoever was by the tree, and whoever I shot, was also on the porch."

  To his surprise, Art reached out and gave his back an almost tender pat.

  "There's no shame here."

  "I know that." He tried to sound sharp, but it came out more like a confession.

  "Any other knife killings you're working on?"

  Lue thought about that. "We have an unsolved murder case about two months old. It's not mine, so I don't know if it's a blade or not. I'm sure Chief won't mind if we look into it."

  "You know the address?"

  "I can call the station." He was already trotting toward the car.

  CHAPTER 7

  About an hour later, they were standing in an abandoned house, a small Cape Cod-style, three bedroom, two bath, that the bank was still trying to sell . . . with no luck.

  The former owner, Janice Pohl, was a lonely woman who had worked for years at the local grocery store for barely enough to pay the mortgage . . . all this according to the file (Mark, the patrol officer who had irritated Lue last night, had sent PDF files to Art's smart phone).

  There had been no witnesses, and the autopsy only indicated bleeding to death through what appeared to be a knife wound. All reasonable traces of the murder would be long gone, Lue knew, courtesy of a repaint job and fanatic cleaning.

  It didn't matter. The murder had taken place months ago under mysterious circumstances, and Moorston was small enough where everyone was still talking about it, and so this perfectly nice, perfectly underpriced house with wall-to-wall carpeting and an assumable mortgage at 5.25 percent sat empty. Given the vast numbers of homeless trapped on the planet, some considered that a worse crime than the actual murder.

  "And that would be where . . ."

  "The body was found," Art replied, tapping his smart phone. He was prowling all over the first floor like an impatient panther.

  "There is no way we will find any new evidence here," he protested. "I mean, what you did back at Webber's was impressive, but that crime scene is fresh. All we are going to find here is mouse turds and paint."

  "No mice."

  Art began climbing the stairs, and soon Lue was following him through the upstairs rooms: bathroom, bedroom, bedroom, a tiny office-which-was-an-office-as-it-was-toosmall-and-the-window-was-too-small-to-meet-code- requirements. New paint and new carpet were everywhere.

  "Sure, Art, no mice. You know that because, what, no mice in Bemidji, so none can be here?"

  "You know that's not what I'm saying."

  "Well, what are you saying? That we have nothing but dead ends? It feels like that. We have no witnesses to the attack here, and thus the presence of mice can neither be confirmed nor--hmmm." Nice view. Come to think of it, this house is a pretty good value. As a single male in a hazardous, low-paying job with lousy hours, yet excellent health benefits, Lue had been resigned to apartment living for the next several decades--or until he could seduce another woman and charm her into marriage and having children, and even, if they were true soul mates, buying joint property, assuming the interest rates weren't dreadful.

  But this place, this pretty little house . . . unlike the average citizen, Lue knew that not only were crime scenes not haunted, the killer rarely returned. They were always a good bargain, for rational decision makers.

  It's wrong that I'm thinking about using a horrific neighborhood tragedy to make an offer on a house, right? I should be focusing on the crime and the victims and the suspects, right?

  Right, his subconscious agreed. So it was settled. It was wrong. It was insensitive. Maybe even creepy. Okay. Case closed.

  "I wonder if I could qualify for a mortgage on my own," he mused aloud.

  "Let's try outside."

  "There are definitely mice outside," Lue agreed. "But no witnesses."

  "I mean for evidence."

  "She wasn't killed outside." Of course, Lue knew that reasoning was false. Checking outside was perfectly sensible, given the circumstances. But he simply could not resist twisting Art's tail. Call it a failure of character.

  When they found small scrapes on the siding behind the shrubs not far from the back door, Lue didn't know whether to feel relief or deep irritation.

  Pohl's neighborhood was more thickly settled than Webber's, so there were no tall cedar fences or maple copses where anything could hide long enough to leave burn marks or anything else. And of course, poring over the grass would be useless at this point.

  "Maybe what I saw at Webber's never came here," he mused aloud.

  Art kept searching the base of a lone oak toward the back of the property. "That is possible."

  "It could be something the person who leaves the scrape marks knows about, it could be unknown to that person, it could be hostile or friendly to that person or people."

  "All possible."

  Lue took a deep, steadying breath. "So. I have used what and it quite a few times, and you seem okay with that. Even though most murder suspects are people. So I think we can both agree that whatever left the burn mark at Webber's, whatever singed the grass there, whatever I shot at and whatever seems not to have been here . . . it is not a typical suspect."

  He internally cringed, waiting for Art's derisive laughter or brusque comment. But the shorter redhead only nodded as he began to walk back to the car.

  Lue let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Okay. So we do agree on something beyond human. That is . . . huge, actually. I thought you would be harder to convince."

  Nothing from Art. Lue began trotting after him. "Why are you so easy to convince?"

  Still nothing. And it was interesting, wasn't it, how Art hadn't answered?

  Don't jump to conclusions, he told himself with deepening unease. You're projecting.

  But still he wondered. Art had popped up out of nowhere, almost literally. And Lue had the distinct impression the man could disappear from sight as quickly and easily.

  Lue was getting tired of playing catch-up all day. There were all sor
ts of new things in his life now that he knew very little about. Case in point, the Bemidji files . . . and maybe he'd pull Art's folder, too. One of the gals in HR owed him a favor. Knowledge was power, and Lue Vue liked to store it up like a dragon guarding treasure.

  Dragons.

  Ha.

  CHAPTER 8

  Detective Lue Vue liked to fancy himself a master interrogator. But trying to unlock secrets from Art McMahon was, he began to think, like trying to pry pearls out of live oysters. Art looked annoyingly unmoved by the other man's threats and hoarse promises of dire consequences if he didn't come up with full disclosure immediately!

  After watching Art stare back at him through a full thirty-minute "interrogation" in the car on the way back to the station, Lue's shoulders slumped. "Fine, don't tell me why you were so easy to convince about monsters! But I will find out."

  "Mmmm."

  "I warn you," he warned, warningly. "I am a pit bull clenching a severed limb, in matters such as these."

  "So you'll talk less now?"

  "Not hardly. You will eventually cough up what I want to know."

  "Yes. When you take a promise of silence."

  "Vow. A vow of silence, you . . ." Lue mentally flipped through a catalog of potential insults. "You know what? The whole vow/promise distinction can wait; we can circle back to the . . ."

  " 'Circle' sounds right."

  ". . . we can circle, all right. First, we need to discuss trust. Partners need to trust each other."

  A snort was the only response to his speculation, which emboldened (emboldened! there was a word he hardly ever got to use) Lue to continue said speculation. "Once we trust each other, we can focus on the questions at hand: Why is this monster here, instead of in the countryside where monsters belong? Is it targeting victims, or killing randomly? If not random, why these victims? But for as long as we have no trust, those questions have to wait."

  Lue waited for a brief, unhelpful retort. What he heard instead was, "The victims were not random."

  "Not random? So why these victims?"