Bare Bones

by Debra Dunbar

  Canton. I blinked as I realized where we were and why I was recognizing the scenery. In fact, I was really recognizing the scenery. Then I went into a state of astonishment as we pulled into a very familiar driveway.

  Good Lord. “I know this house. Tremelay, I was here yesterday. I met this Amanda woman as well as her brother, Bradley.”

  Tremelay put the car in park, and the two detectives swiveled their heads to stare at me in the backseat. I applauded their synchronicity of movement, the similarity of expression. It was almost as if Tremelay and Norwicki had been practicing the move for weeks. I guess that’s what happened when you spent more time with your partner than you did with your spouse.

  “You know Amanda Lewis?”

  Wow, they even spoke in harmony. Amazing.

  “Yes. My friend is a reporter and she was here doing a piece on an exorcism. Amanda was convinced that a demon had possessed her brother because he’d started eating meat, doing his own laundry and was looking for a job. She even called a priest in.”

  Norwicki blinked, his mouth open. “Hell, I’d be jumping for joy if my brother started looking for a job, not calling in a priest.”

  “She sounds like a nutjob,” Tremelay growled. “Maybe her brother did kill her for nagging him all the time. Can’t say I hadn’t thought about it a few times with some of my sisters.”

  I didn’t know any of Tremelay’s sisters, but judging from his selfishness with the cookies I bought, I was thinking they might have had a good reason to nag him.

  “Anyway…” I glared at the two detectives. “The priest threw a bunch of holy water on the brother. Nothing happened. Then the brother left to go to a job interview.”

  It all came back to me in Technicolor—us leaving abruptly because the brother had suddenly turned into smarmy player-boy the moment he saw my tattoo, the stupid white carpeting everywhere. I wondered if Amanda was killed in a room with the white carpeting. I hoped for her sake it had been somewhere with easier clean-up. I could completely see the woman haunting her killer if he caused her to bleed all over the thick, white plush floor covering.

  Bradley. Sympathetic at first then a complete creeper. I thought of the Rabid Rabbit shirt he’d had to change after it became wet with holy water. I remembered the oak floors of his bedroom that matched his furniture to a “T”. I remembered my foot hitting his backpack, the feel of it squish as if he’d filled it with soggy clothing or Jell-O.

  Slow-motion, like a film replay, I again saw my foot hit the backpack. It was the same foot, the same shoe that was drying in kitchen sink because it had been stained with blood.

  “Guys? I think maybe the boyfriend is right. I think Bradley is involved in his sister’s death.” I relayed the details of the squishy backpack and my blood-stained shoe.

  “Are you sure?” Norwicki asked. “Maybe you accidently kicked a dead possum crossing Pratt Street. It happens.”

  Ew. No, it didn’t happen. “I think I would have noticed that. I’m not positive one hundred percent that the blood was from the backpack, but I’m pretty sure.”

  “Okay.” Tremelay unbuckled his belt and shifted in his seat as he opened the door. “We’ll make sure we look for the brother’s backpack in the house and have the techs run it through for trace. Ready?”

  We slid out of the car. The neighbors were conspicuously outside, trying to look like they weren’t gawking while they pruned manicured hedges or nearly wiped the paint off their car in endless circles over the same spot. A few had given up pretending and just stood with their arms across their chest, lips tight as they watched. Tremelay’s car was parked half-in the drive, flanked on either side by marked cruisers. Two officers stood outside, ensuring the neighbors kept their gawking to their own side of the property line.

  Neither of the detectives had to flash badges. The uniformed officers gave them a nod of recognition, narrowing their eyes at me as I followed Tremelay and Norwicki inside. Not having a badge or my sword, I instead flashed the Templar tattoo on my wrist, which earned me a nod of acknowledgement. It seems Tremelay had been talking and had spread news of me around the station. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  The white carpet in the foyer and living room was pristine, but as we made our way up the stairs and to the master bedroom, I saw my hopes for Amanda’s eternal rest were dashed. Her body lay twisted on the ground, white carpet stained bright red in a lopsided circle around her torso. The padding underneath must have been thick, because I knew how much blood the human body held (thank you vampires) and it all seemed to have been soaked up pretty much directly under her body.

  I’d thought she was a crazy pain in the butt when I’d met her yesterday, but now I felt a pang of remorse as well as guilt for my uncharitable thoughts. No matter how unlikeable I found their personality, no one deserved to die like this. Amanda was naked, her legs twisted unnaturally as if they’d been dislocated at the hip. Her arms and hands were covered with slash-marks. Defensive wounds? I couldn’t really tell. They weren’t the only knife marks. There were also ones along her neck and shoulders, as if someone has slashed in a parallel fashion to her body rather than stab at her.

  “How’d she die?” My voice was husky. I’d seen dead bodies before. A month ago I’d seen so many dead bodies I’d become rather numb to the experience, but something about this woman’s death seemed so wrong.

  “Neck snapped,” a tall woman by the bed announced. Others around her were taking pictures or bagging items with tweezers. She stood like Pharaoh commanding the slaves, latex covering her hands and feet as she made notes on a clipboard. “Cuts were perimortum by my initial impression.”

  “And her hips?” I’d seen my share of knife wounds and blood, but the angle of her legs kept drawing my eyes like a horrible magnet.

  “Before death.”

  I choked back bile. The idea of a woman—a financial analyst, day-trader, brother-nagging woman—having her legs dislocated at the hip, then fighting off an attacker with a knife for God-knows how long until having her neck snapped? In a way it seemed just as horrific as the death magic sacrifices last month. Worse, actually. Both legs dislocated at the hip? I knew how strong those muscles were, how big those joints and ligaments were. It must have been excruciating. It must have been damned near impossible.

  “How the heck did someone dislocate both her legs?” I had to ask. And I had to look around the bedroom for any sign of a medieval rack or a couple of truck winches.

  “I’ll know more when I get her back to the morgue,” the woman said, tapping her pen against the clipboard. “The boyfriend’s story was one guy running from the scene, so this would have been difficult to do. The killer might have brought along some kind of device, but then how could he hold a struggling woman down and hook her up to equipment meant to pull her legs out of joint? Either he was inhumanly strong, or there two assailants.”

  She was right. I envisioned the strength it would take for one man to dislocate a woman’s hips by hand and shook my head. Maybe if he were a vampire, or some other supernatural creature. If not, there had to be some sort of pulley that he used. Otherwise…no way.

  “A lot of blood for those superficial cuts,” Tremelay mentioned.

  Shit, he was right. I hadn’t even thought about that, so preoccupied with Amanda’s leg dislocation. Where the heck had all the blood come from? Yes, there were a lot of cuts on her arms, hands, and neck, but not enough for the amount of liquid needed to turn the white carpet that glistening shade of ruby red.

  The woman walked forward, stepping carefully, and placed one hand under Amanda’s shoulder. She cautiously turned the body over and we all leaned in. There, on the back of Amanda’s neck, was a large puncture wound.

  “But I thought you said she died from having her neck broken?” I stared at the puncture wound, knowing that it would have killed someone within seconds.

  “I did. This was postmortem. Very soon postmortem. Soon enough that a few heartbeats pushed out a good bit of b
lood. Gravity did the rest.”

  I didn’t get it. “They must have happened almost simultaneously. Maybe the killer intended to stab her and broke her neck in the process?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. I get the odd feeling that he was trying to drain as much blood out of her as possible after her death.”

  “Like a deer?” Norwicki choked out. His face was full of horror. “Like draining a deer to prep for butchering?”

  “Well, he didn’t eviscerate her or hang her upside down. Unless he was interrupted before he could get to that, I doubt he was treating her as a trophy kill or potential dinner.”

  How these detectives went about their jobs every day, I had no idea. Actually I had no idea how this M.E. woman managed. I’d seen a man who had been skinned, and now this? There really were some sickos out there in the world.

  There was something nagging at the back of my mind about this whole thing, but I just couldn’t grasp it. “Do you think the killers were interrupted?” I asked the woman. “I’m assuming she died this morning and was found pretty soon after she died?”

  She nodded. “She couldn’t have been dead long. The boyfriend had spent the night and gone to work, but had to come back before he was more than a few miles away to grab some papers he’d forgotten. When he found her, she was still warm. He says he heard a door slam, then looked out to see a man running through the backyard and over the fence.”

  I couldn’t imagine running home to retrieve papers and finding my lover dead on the floor. For a brief second I envisioned Dario’s reaction to me naked and murdered in my bedroom. He wouldn’t have called 911. No, the vampire would have taken it upon himself to find my killer and deliver a very slow and painful death. Of course, he wouldn’t have found my body until nightfall. And he wasn’t my boyfriend.

  What a weird fantasy to be having at a crime scene. I shook my head and tried to rid my mind of all thoughts of Dario. “And the boyfriend thinks the brother did it?”

  Tremelay cleared his throat. I jumped, giving him an apologetic glance. Crap. When did I take over the investigation? I was along for the ride. This was a human-on-human crime. Not my thing.

  “We’re searching for the backpack,” he told me. “The boyfriend says that the brother had been living here for the last two years ever since their parents died in a car accident. Seems the stereotypical parasite of a younger sibling, sponging off his business-savvy and successful older sister. They had a lot of arguments. Amanda asked him to move out last night. Boyfriend says he was relieved because the brother was a constant source of tension in the house.”

  I could imagine. I headed for the bedroom door. “Mind if I check his bedroom?”

  Tremelay put out a hand. “No, the techs are in there now. If you want to nose around, it needs to wait until we’re done.”

  “Detective!” A voice shouted up from downstairs. “In the garage. We’ve found something.”

  Tremelay ran, me right after him. Norwicki had done a moment of indecisive back and forth, then stayed with the body. As we tore through the kitchen and into the garage we saw two officers. One held a backpack, what appeared to be bloody untanned leather spilling from the top. The other stood by a giant white cooler. I craned my neck and saw what appeared to be a side of beef inside the cooler, packed with ice and water.

  What the heck? I was seriously having a déjà vu moment here.

  “Is that…is that a human skin?” Tremelay looked rather green as he stared at the bloody leather protruding from the backpack.

  “Yes, sir,” the tech said. “I’m gonna bag it in the backpack, but we’ll get photos of it laid out once I get it to the morgue.”

  I know I had the same slack-jaw, deer-in-headlights look as Tremelay did. Skinned body at the Walters Art Museum. Skin stuffed into a backpack at a house in Canton. And what was in the cooler. “I’m assuming that’s a body in there? That’s not lamb or a gigantic pork loin, is it?”

  The tech shook his head. “No, it’s a body. But not the same body. I mean, the body in the cooler is male, and it’s skinned. This skin is male, but it’s younger, like that of a teenager. I didn’t pull it all the way out because I wanted to preserve any trace evidence, but I could tell.”

  I felt the weight of Tremelay’s stare on me, and I looked up to meet his eyes. “What do you think, Ainsworth?”

  I shrugged, because none of this had anything to do with me. “I think you’ve got a crazy serial killer on your hands, Detective. That’s what I think.”

  Chapter 8

  THE FOX WAS back on top of the Peterson’s book when I got home, but none of the pages had been moved. Hoping for the best, I started to read about chupacabras. As interesting as it was, I kept thinking of what we’d found at the house in Canton and texting little notes to Tremelay. He hadn’t responded, so either he was out of pocket or ignoring me. Probably the latter.

  Did the John Doe from the museum have a broken neck too?

  Puncture wound to the back of the neck?

  Hips dislocated?

  Was skinning cleanly done, or evidence of defensive wound/knife cuts?

  I figured it would take a while for the medical examiner’s office to get around to the bodies, and skin, from the Canton house, but hopefully they’d performed the autopsy on the John Doe. If we could just figure out what was similar and what was different between them, maybe we’d have a direction to go in. Right now other than cross comparing medical implant records and missing person’s reports, and searching for Bradley Lewis as a “person of interest” we had nothing to go on.

  We. When would I get it through my thick head that this was a human serial killer? As intriguing as it all was, I was a Templar and a part-time barista. Tremelay was kind enough to loop me in as a friend. That was it.

  And he was busy. I needed to stop texting him and continue to read about chupacabras.

  I was just starting to get to the intriguing part, where Peterson discussed the times chupacabra had been mistaken for werewolves, when there was a knock on my door. The book had amazing full-color, detailed photography of the corpses of each, pointing out the differences in physiology as well as hair patterns, so I was reluctant to answer it. Janice always texted before she came over. Dario wouldn’t be here during daylight hours and he just opened the door and let himself in anyway. Whoever it was could just go away.

  Another knock. “Solaria, I know you’re in there. Answer the door.”

  The last person I ever expected was at my door—my mother. I practically dropped the book on the floor in my haste to let her in, all sorts of horrible scenarios running through my mind. We Templars were pretty good about keeping in touch via modern communication methods, but certain things required a personal visit—things like sharing the news of a family death.

  Oh, God. My Dad? He always seemed so healthy, but things happened. It couldn’t be Essie. My great-grandmother was probably one-thirty if she was a day, but I honestly expected her to outlive us all. Besides, I’d just spoken to her yesterday. Jet? Oh, not Athena’s new daughter. We’d had a huge family party two weeks ago when she and Pietrus got home from Korea with her. I thought of the little girl’s thick black hair that stood out from her head like one of those troll dolls, her round, pinchable cheeks, her sweet, rosy bow of a mouth. Not Jet.

  I threw open the door and stared mute with panic at my mother.

  She didn’t look sad, she looked stern. And that sent a wave of relief through me that nearly brought me to my knees. I was used to stern Mom. Heck, that’s about all I’d gotten from her since I’d refused to take my Oath. She wasn’t here to tell me of a loved one’s death, she was here to pester me about something, and when Mom had that look on her face, she was hard to resist.

  I was one of the few who ever successfully resisted, stubborn intractable child that I was.

  Moving aside to let Mom in, I suddenly realized how absolutely unprepared I was for visitors. Trusty took up the majority of my kitchen counter. The sink was full of dirty dishes�
��most of them coffee cups. Clothing lay across the back of my sofa, hooked on chairs, puddled on the floor. It looked like I had a habit of disrobing as I walked about my apartment and just leaving my clothing where they dropped—which actually was the truth. I lived alone, and modesty wasn’t my thing. I twisted my T-shirt in my hands, suddenly regretting I’d chosen to wear the one with giant red lips emblazoned across the front.

  Mom looked down at my T-shirt and I swear I saw a smirk before she carefully schooled her face into one of cool determination. “This is a nice little apartment, Solaria. You’ve made it quite homey.”

  By which she meant it was just like the mess I’d kept of my room back home. Oh well. One of the advantages of being an adult was being able to have a week’s worth of dirty coffee cups in the sink and throwing your clothes all over the place.

  “I’d have cleaned a bit if I knew you were coming.” I moved a few piles of books off the sofa. “Sit. Can I get you something to drink? I can make a pot of coffee. Or wine?”

  I didn’t normally have wine, but knowing Dario was going to be out of town for a while had driven me to an impulsive purchase of Chianti. I envisioned myself pouring a glass each night, an hour after sunset, as a sort of nod to whatever the heck we had going on. And they say I’m not romantic.

  My mother sat on the sofa, looking over the research books I had on the coffee table. “I’ll have some wine.”

  Ugh. That Chianti had cost me a fortune, way more than I’d usually spend for wine. Outside of Emergency Beer, I didn’t buy the pricey stuff. My wine usually came in boxes—the cheaper the better.