Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

  “Any minute.” The pathologist gazed past Allison, watching Glass leave the room. “You sure slapped him down.”

  Allison dug a handful of cashews from a package in her pocket. “I’m just establishing the proper pecking order. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Heading across to Communications and Records in the adjoining Law Enforcement Unit, she reflected that she should really be out interviewing non-clan volke. But it was also important to know what the body revealed about the hunter.

  From the crime scene Allison had phoned not only queries to Austin and NCIC that Kerr asked about but a second set for suspects with volke descriptors, both male and female to hide her interest in females. And she requested a computer search of their own records for complaints over the past two months involving animal killings and wild animals stalking or chasing citizens. If the hunter were juvenile, this kill did not come on her first Shift. They all had to explore and experiment with the new energy level first. It had felt so wonderful...finally, finally breaking free of the everyday limitations of her body...experiencing for herself, exulting in, the power she tasted for so long in her dreams. But it had been all power, no control. She kept overshooting turns, misjudging distances, falling all over herself...and could only watch in chagrin while every deer or wild pig she picked for a target at that Gathering scrambled away unharmed. Learning to control the power took practice...as the other clan members kept telling her, giving her reassuring hugs while they reminisced about their own initial clumsiness. If the hunter practiced locally, she had to leave signs of it.

  Communications had already informed her she had hits on the descriptor queries and Allison read the teletypes standing at the desk. The one from Austin and six of the seven from NCIC were on males, no help...but NCIC had one female FNU LNU–first name unknown, last name unknown–sought as a material witness in the February disappearance of a man in Coral Gables, Florida. Allison frowned at the teletype. That witness might have nothing to do with her hunter, but she could not afford to ignore any possibilities. She requested details from Coral Gables.

  Then she hurried back across to the morgue, reaching the autopsy room as Pedicaris finished tying on her paper gown. The body, its odors mixed with that of the disinfectant used to clean it, smelled even more pungent here than it had at the crime scene. The overhead fans pulling contaminants from the room did little to reduce the odors.

  Pedicaris pulled on surgical gloves. “Our Y-incision is almost superfluous on this one.” The left side of the rib cage moved like a trap door as she lifted it outward. “Talk about cracking open a chest. I never want to meet this guy, not even with bars between us. Ready, Jeff?”

  She began going over the skin, noting each bruise and wound and dictating the details into the overhead mike while her assistant took photographs and marked the location of the lesions on a body diagram.

  Allison leaned against the counter running along one wall and flipped through the complaints printout as she listened to the monologue.

  Despite the number of incidents Records found for her, they lacked the pattern of escalating severity she would expect to see with a juvenile volke. And more incidents occurred in February than in the past few weeks. Allison doubted anyone knew how long it took for the local environment to affect personal scent, but if an outsider had been ingesting local food and water since early February, her scent would reflect that by now. Most of the incidents had also occurred on the western edges of the city, which made Allison consider coyotes the likely culprits. Patrolling on foot in her uniform days she had met a number of the animals who wandered into town, some so bold they refused to move out of her path until they read her scent.

  Rubber soles squeaked on the tiled floor. A male scent overlaid by that of wintergreen identified the newcomer even before she glanced around...Dr. Neil Hertzel. She tucked the printout under her arm. If the hunter were a juvenile, she had honed her hunting skill somewhere else.

  The pathologist started to greet her, but broke off, staring at Demry’s body. “Son of a bitch. That takes me back.”

  His tone raised goosebumps on Allison. “To where?”

  “My days as a medic in Vietnam.” He pulled a couple of pink lozenges from the pocket of the lab coat covering his scrubs...popped one in his mouth and held the other out to Allison. “Having my butt saved by a tiger.”

  The lozenge fragmented between Allison’s teeth, but she barely noticed its pungent sweetness filling her head.

  Pedicaris glanced around. “By a tiger?”

  Hertzel smiled wryly. “Normally our unit’s patrols were pretty safe. We had this buck sergeant named Dove with a genius for sniffing out Charlie before he found us. Build and coloring like yours, Goodnight. A raving lunatic. He loved being in country. He’d started his sixth tour when I went. He’d always take the point...ghost off into the jungle ahead of us, and when we caught up with him later he’d be sitting there by a neat row of bodies with their throats cut or necks broken, saying some Vietnamese prayer for the dead over them. ‘Worthy opponents must be treated with respect,’ he’d say. It was surreal.

  “But this one time the NVA got behind us. Several men went down before we could find cover and return suppressing fire. It was deafening for a couple of minutes and then suddenly the jungle behind us kind of explodes. I thought we must be surrounded and were done for, but...out into the middle of us springs this monster of a tiger. The fuckingest tiger I have ever seen! I thought, oh, shit! But the tiger ignores us. Just heads for Charlie. I remember feeling this big blast of heat as it went by. There’s crashing and shooting and screaming. Then everything went dead quiet. When we got up to check it out, the bodies looked like this one...eviscerated, throats torn out, arms and hands bitten off.” He shook his head.

  “Jesus,” Pedicaris’s assistant said. “One tiger did that?”

  One Dove perceived as a tiger...because that was the Big Powerful Dangerous Life-form everyone expected in the Asian jungles.

  “He was one big mother of a tiger,” Hertzel said. “But the weirdest part was, in the middle of the slaughter stands Dove, who I thought was off the other direction. He’s covered with blood– not his because he has only minor wounds in an arm and thigh–picking his teeth with the point of his Ka-bar and looking like someone who’s just had an orgasm.”

  Allison envied him. She could imagine the rush...legitimately hunting other men...pitted against quarry prepared for the game...armed, clever, tough...and stalking you.

  Hertzel shook his head. “Dove says, ‘Some fun, huh? Sorry I smelled them too late to keep them off you, but at least I got here in time to give the coup de grass to a few the critter didn’t finish off. How about breaking for grub? I’m starved.” Hertzel rolled his eyes. “Beaucoup dinky dau, as the locals would say...absolute fucking madman. I don’t think the hair on my body laid back down for an hour.”

  It amazed Allison that Hertzel saw no connection between Dove and the tiger. All hail the age of reason and science. He might never link them unless some event forced him to change his view of reality. She needed to make sure no such event occurred.

  Allison arranged her face into appreciation of the story. “That’s incredible. But I doubt our victim met a tiger on Lavaca Street.”

  “Or a werewolf, either, I’m afraid,” Pedicaris said. She and the assistant laid the body flat again. “The bite marks have the dental arch of a human bite, not a canine’s.” She picked up her scalpel, then stopped and leaned close over the chest, peering at one site, then another. “Damn. Didn’t notice that before.”

  Allison forced herself to remain relaxed against the counter. Pedicaris need not have seen anything dangerous. “Notice what?”

  “This anomaly in the bite marks. Neil, take a look.”

  Shit. Allison straightened, laying the printout on the counter. Physical similarity let her people blend with the human population. But differences existed...and those included teeth. “I’d like to see, too.”

  Tying on masks, Hertze
l the one he pulled from his lab coat pocket, Allison one from a drawer under the counter, they moved to stand on either side of Pedicaris.

  The pathologist pointed her scalpel at an arc of dark marks on the skin above one raw edge of flesh. “It’s a good imprint of some maxillary teeth, right? Both middle incisors, right lateral incisor, right canine. But we come to the first premolar and only the lateral side leaves an impression.”

  Hertzel eyed her. “Yes. His tone said: and your point is? They all knew a multitude of factors affected bite marks, starting with the angle and the amount of pressure applied.

  Allison breathed slowly, waiting to see how close this bullet came to the target.

  Pedicaris frowned at the bite mark. “Deep as the bite is, the medial side of the premolar should make an impression, too, so I thought maybe he fractured the tooth in the course of biting through the forearm and ribs.”

  Hertzel nodded. “A possibility.”

  “For one tooth, yes, but check out this other bite mark.” Pedicaris pointed with her scalpel. “Now we have the left maxilla, and the imprint includes both its premolars. And on both of them only the lateral edge shows. I don’t see him fracturing three teeth identically.”

  Not a bull’s-eye maybe...but she hit the edge of the target...uncomfortably close.

  Hertzel bent down until his nose almost touched the bite marks. “The shape is a bit odd, too, especially this second premolar. Jeff--excuse me, Goodnight, but I need you out of the way--let’s have more pictures, concentrating on the premolar imprint. We’ll blow them up and see what that can tell us. I think I also see tooth marks on a rib there. Photograph that as well.”

  Allison moved back from the table. New anger at the hunter hissed through her. The bullets kept coming closer. A blow up of the imprint could identify that “odd shape” as conical cusps. It might not cause harm as long as Hertzel and Pedicaris did not recognize the second premolar as a meat-shearing carnassial tooth, but if they did, it could start them thinking about the tiger and the werewolf wisecrack. Allison’s mind raced. And the body was not the only site she had to worry about for bite marks.

  “Let me run over to the lab and check Demry’s leather jacket.”

  “Right!” Pedicaris grinned. “I remember seeing bite marks on it. Maybe one of them shows the premolars.”

  Allison hoped not. She picked up her printout. “Meanwhile, it would help me if I knew about the victim’s last meal. If you can check that for me please?”

  Minutes later, on the Ident side of the floor, she tapped on the shoulder of an Ident tech peering through the lens of a magnifier lamp at a sweater. “I need to see the clothes from the Lavaca Street murder.”

  Corinne Yeo looked up. “Wet or dry?”

  “Wet. The conference room?”

  Yeo yelled, “Janice! Where’d you put the clothes from your murder!”

  From another room came: “Hesston’s conference room.”

  Allison raised her brows. “The stuff from the Lost Creek stabbing isn’t dry yet? We arrested the nephew on Sunday.” Garroway’s last hurrah as a detective.

  Yeo shrugged. “Those, yes, except for the rug, which still has us locked out of the ladies’ room and lounge.” She pulled a key ring from the pocket of her lab coat as they headed up the hall. “But now there’s a whole washer load of clothes spread over two conference rooms. We look like a tenement.”

  Washer load. “Another Mr. Clean burglary?”

  Yeo nodded. “And this time he threw in the whole contents of the victims’ hamper along with his own clothes. Left wearing black palazzo pants and a gold mesh tank top from the daughter’s closet.” Yeo unlocked the director’s conference room. “You know the drill...keep the door closed while you’re in there; don’t touch anything you don’t have to; close the door behind you when you leave.”

  Pulling on a pair of latex gloves from a box outside the door, Allison nodded. Inside, the conference table sat against the back wall with the chairs on top of it. An assortment of clothing lay draped over their backs and on folding wooden laundry racks set up on the floor...all drying before the pieces Mr. Clean abandoned were separated from his victim’s laundry and packed in evidence bags. The intestinal/fecal/blood smells from the Demry crime scene hung in the air. After a couple of sniffs to localized the scent, she found the leather jacket stretched across the end of a rack to the left of the table.

  Inch by careful inch, she went over it. Tears at the end of the right sleeve marked where the hunter bit through Demry’s wrist, probably as he raised it in defense. The lapels were ripped, too. Around each site long scrapes on the leather marked other bites, but none with any definite impression of the teeth. Only the right shoulder showed a clear bite mark...upper incisors penetrating just in front of the shoulder seam, the rest of the bite to the rear. Allison visualized the action...the hunter springing on her prey’s back and trying to sink her teeth into his shoulder. But Demry had no bite on his shoulder, so the jacket must have stopped her teeth. Not that it saved him for long. Allison smoothed the leather, and let her breath out in relief. The teeth had bitten almost through the leather, leaving clear impressions of upper and lower incisors and canines...but only a hint of upper premolars...nothing identifiable.

  She returned to the autopsy breathing easier.

  “Oh, well,” Pedicaris said when Allison reported on the jacket. “Update on this end...your psycho likes organ meat. He ripped out the victim’s heart and I guess took it with him. Victim’s stomach is empty except for liquid...which isn’t coffee.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “That’s my guess. We’ll see for sure. We’re also running a blood alcohol level on him.”

  “Good.” Allison checked her watch. “I have to go. If you come across something earth-shaking, let Carillo know. Otherwise I’ll wait for the written report.”

  Before heading to the car, she ran up to the office to shove the printout and the Austin and NCIC responses on the descriptor queries into a drawer and check for messages. One lay beside the phone...brief, just the name and phone number.

  Carillo appeared in the doorway of his office. “How’s it going?”

  She shrugged. “Unremarkable autopsy, victim’s car located but in the North Bay so it isn’t likely to help us, and Kerr’s canvassing the names in the victim’s address book.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  Being more efficient than she wished. Not something she could say aloud. “He’s bubbling with enthusiasm.” Stuffing the message into her coat pocket, she headed for the door.

  In the car, she called the number. It reached a clan alpha who knew of an outsider visiting another household.

  “We met him at a cookout this past weekend,” she said. “They’ve invited him to attend Gathering with them, so he’s still in town.” The alpha paused. “I have to say, though, that he doesn’t strike me as a rogue.”

  Being male, he could not be the hunter. Allison reassured the alpha of that.

  Starting down through the five names Honora had given her, she reached the first two immediately and arranged meetings with them.

  The first outsiders belonged to a household, which made them a poor candidate for including the hunter. The pair of sisters had come to Arenosa through a job transfer last month, bringing along the mate of one and the other’s seventeen-year-old daughter. Five minutes of conversation with one sister while checking the scents in the house cleared them as suspects.

  Her next appointment fit more of the hunter’s criteria...a female who came into town on Friday and lived by herself on a cabin cruiser at the Bourbon Street Marina, making no contact with the local clan beyond one introductory call to Honora.

  Approaching the boat along the dock, Allison found it backed into its slip, a female in a micro bikini and wraparound sunglasses stretched on chair on the rear deck. “Fiona Church?”

  The woman turned her head languidly. “Yes. You’re Goodnight? What can I do for you?”

  Allison vaulted
the stern rail, alert for the other’s reactions. “I’m hunting a non-local female who butchered a human last night.”

  Church stiffened, but no heat waves from an impending Shift blossomed around her. She went bonelessly submissive in the deck chair. “I didn’t do it.”

  Allison took a deep breath, analyzing Church’s scent while gulls screamed overhead and water slapped the hull. It smelled nothing like the hunter’s. She relaxed, though wanting to snarl in frustration. “Okay.”

  Normal body tone flowed back into Church. “I know you wish I had, so you’d have your rogue. When did it happen?”

  “Sometime between twelve-fifteen and one.” Allison sat against the gunwale. “I think she may have picked up her victim in a bar. What do you do evenings?”

  Church smiled. “Burglarize businesses to test their security systems. Glendower-Morse Security and Trust in Houston is my current client. I’ve been checking all their branches down the coast. I hit the one in Freeport last night. Tonight I try yours, then I’m finished. We’ll have the assessment meeting in Houston tomorrow afternoon, then I’m out of here. And under the circumstances, I’m glad. Though while I’m here, if I see or hear anything useful, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks.” Allison handed her a card.

  Heading back up the dock for her car, she punched the next number on Honora’s list into the phone.

  9.

  Zane pushed away from Demry’s desk, stretching. What ever made him want to become a detective? He had anticipated wearing out shoe leather canvassing the area around crime scenes for witnesses, not sitting in Solitary with a telephone. Thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones, he had managed to reach many of the Rolodex entries...the active ones anyway. But no one he reached, or who called his cell phone in response to messages he left, had seen Demry last night. So despite entertaining himself during the calls by reading the e-mail jokes and going through the file cabinet...where he discovered a folder of black-and-white photos of the victim in 8 x 10 and 5 x 7 sizes, the latter perfect for use in canvassing...he felt weary, stiff, and discouraged. His stomach snarled.