by Lee Killough
“What do we have?” she asked Viapiana.
Something bad. The area reeked of blood, and the ebony of Viapiana’s complexion had a grey cast. Viapiana, whom she had seen wolf down catsup-drenched french fries as he tagged body parts in a multi-car pileup, and crack jokes while searching the pockets of a maggot-infested corpse.
“I’ve barely arrived myself. I should probably just let you take over. But...it starts there.” He pointed at the solitary unit.
Starts? Her stomach knotted.
Phadatare half-crouched, photographing something on the lower edge of the driver’s open window. A few steps closer and Allison identified the object as a human hand, amputated at the wrist, clutching the window frame. The knots in Allison’s gut jerked even tighter, until she realized the hand was not long and narrow enough for a volke’s. Below it, blood covered the door. From there a trail of blood and bloody barefoot prints crossed the hood of the unit...and both blood and footprints continued on into the alley on the western side of the street.
Allison gripped the strap of her shoulder bag to keep from dropping to the paving to confirm the presence of the hunter’s scent. Not that she needed more than that dismembered hand.
Kerr muttered an awed, “Son of a bitch.”
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Viapiana said.
“Who’s the officer?” Allison asked. “How is he?”
“Travis Cherry, and he’s alive, but his leg’s smashed and he looked concussed. He was pretty out of it but managed to tell the first officers reaching him that a man came running out of the east alley screaming for help, and something about a woman being killed. When Cherry started to exit the unit, the door was slammed on him. Now come this way.”
Keeping off to the side, they followed the trail of blood. Viapiana raised his voice above the alarm. “Have a look at that.”
The alarm sounded even louder in the alley, bouncing off the surrounding walls. Lights Ident had set up illuminated blood smeared up a wall to a broken second floor window. Allison swore bitterly. Somewhere inside they almost certainly had another mutilated human. Just as bad, how much longer would the human public keep buying this story of a mere homicidal maniac before someone started looking around for other villains?
Viapiana shook his head. “That blows me away. The killer had to leap up to the window, clear the glass from the frame--this is the Double D Candy Company, not a derelict building--and crawl in...while carrying the victim with him. He must’ve just gotten in when the responding officers arrived because they heard a man scream.”
He had been still alive when dragged up the wall and into the dark? Son of a bitch.
“They told me that rather than wait for the building to be unlocked, one officer had himself boosted to the window and pulled another up after him while the rest watched the exits.”
Allison kept swearing. “What officers?” Not humans, please! She hardly needed them running around a dark building after a killing machine.
“Justin Lamb, for one. Who’s the other?” he asked an officer adjusting a light so Dallas Sweet could photograph the blood smear.
“Winston Kim,” the officer said.
Well at least one was volke. Allison sighed in relief and saw it in Dallas, too. Justin would make sure the human stayed out of trouble.
“We’re waiting for a Mrs. Foster, the general manager, to come unlock the building and turn off the alarm,” Viapiana said. “Lamb shouted down from the roof that the perp escaped, so we have officers searching the area for him, and the area toward the bay for witnesses and that possible female victim.”
Cold shot through Allison. “Radio them to work in pairs! This is too dangerous an individual to take chances with.” Even, considering Travis, volke officers. She clicked her radio mike. “Thirty-three Arenosa. Have you heard anything from the chopper yet?”
“Air unit direct,” came a response. “I have a hot infrared source. Human. It’s moving south on Second, just crossing the railroad tracks .”
Another voice said, “One-oh-seven direct. That’s me. Check down along the bay.” Justin Lamb.
Viapiana and the officer assisting Dallas with the light both looked up toward the building roof. “How the hell did he get there?” the officer said. “He was on the roof five minutes ago. No one’s come down the fire escape and there’s two stories of blank brick wall to the roof of the next building.”
“I’d say however the killer got off, so did Lamb,” Zane said.
The fire door just inside the mouth of the alley banged open and a slim officer staggered out.
“Kim.” Kerr started toward him. “Are you all right?”
For reply, Kim doubled over and vomited violently.
Allison dug her fingers into the top of her shoulder bag. What the hell had that bitch left behind this time?
She propped her bag in the doorway to keep it from shutting and catching Kim’s arm, led him toward the closest patrol unit. “Come and sit down.”
He looked barely more than a boy and could not have been on the job long. Still inexperienced enough to be shocked by what he encountered. When she and Kerr sat him down sideways on the driver’s seat, he stared straight ahead, face bloodless, dark eyes haunted.
“What happened?” Allison asked.
He drew a ragged breath. “I don’t know how the guy did it, lugging the victim and running, and without a flashlight. He knows the building or he has eyes like a cat. It was fucking dark in there. Except for exit signs and all these red and green lights on the candy machines. They were like little eyes staring at us everywhere.” He shivered.
“Did you see what he looked like at all?” Kerr asked. “Maybe you caught him in the beam of your flashlight?”
Allison expected that Justin, given humans determined to go along, chose a rookie so he could control the chase and not give away their quarry’s appearance.
Still, she was relieved to see Kim shake his head. “Lamb was the only one using a light, and that in quick flashes on the floor just ahead of us. I guess he sees pretty well in the dark, too. He said he didn’t want to make us targets. I caught a glimpse once when the subject passed a window going into the stairwell, but I couldn’t tell much...just a big shape. I don’t know how much was him and how much the victim.”
“You followed him to the roof,” Allison said. “We have good moonlight tonight. What did you see up there?”
“Not him.” Kim licked his lips. “The last flight before the roof Lamb told me to stay back in case the subject got past him. He went up alone. At the door...” Kim sucked in another breath. “Something hit Lamb in the chest. It must have had force behind it because it knocked him backward and he started to fall down the steps. The door slammed shut. I grabbed my flashlight. First thing I saw was Lamb had caught himself and was all right, then I heard something coming down toward me, thumping on each step. It hit my legs. I pointed my flashlight...” He swallowed audibly. “It was a guy’s head.”
Above Kim, Kerr’s lips moved in a soundless curse.
Allison hoped the man had been dead before that happened to him. Fury hissed through her. Oh, the media was going to eat this up. But what about the city? How long before panic broke out? How long before the subconscious human memory remembered what had the power to mutilate like this?
“Lamb ran back up. The door wouldn’t open at first, and after we managed to move it enough to squeeze through we found the body pushed against it.”
Down at the Warehouse intersection a patrol unit backed up onto the sidewalk to let a car through. Other officers held off the Sentinel reporter and photographer attempting to reach the driver’s window. The new vehicle parked beside the patrol units and a woman climbed out. Despite her jeans and denim jacket, every self-assured line of her shouted: executive. The general manager had arrived.
In minutes the alarm had gone blessedly silent and the second floor blazed with light, revealing a trail of blood and footprints to the stairwell.
Mrs.
Foster exploded in outrage. “You find and kill that son of a bitch! The building across the alley is empty. Next door is a hardware warehouse. A little blood wouldn’t hurt either one of them. But nooo, he breaks in here! You know we’re going to have to sterilize this floor and be health inspected before we can resume production on this line?”
Allison left Viapiana making sympathetic sounds at Mrs. Foster while she climbed on toward the roof with Kerr at her heels. The trail of blood diminished with each step as the victim bled out. His head lay at the foot of the last flight. It looked oddly unreal, like a movie prop. Perhaps for lack of blood on the ragged stump of neck, perhaps because it stared at the concrete of the riser, giving her little more to see than sandy hair with scalp beginning to show through on top.
Kerr’s jaw tightened. “We’ve got to get this bastard off the street!” He crouched, peering at the head without touching it. “How did he do this, though? The neck looks too uneven to have been cut.”
Allison gave him a shrug. “Maybe the autopsy will tell us.”
They pulled on paper booties, and stepping over the head, picked their way up the edge of the stairs.
As Kim reported, the body lay against the bottom of the partially-opened door. What he had not told them was that it lay on its back with the top of the shoulders jammed against the door, forcing Lamb and Kim to push against the whole length of the victim in order to open the door. In that position the victim looked as if the door somehow hid his head, so he seemed to be missing only a hand. At least the quick response to Travis’s call had given the hunter no time to mutilate her victim further. Blood soaked his suit and shirt front, but the rest of the body remained intact. A cell phone lay beside the body.
Kerr glanced around the moonlit roof. “I wonder how Lamb and the killer left.” But after walking over to the wall of the adjoining warehouse and running his hands up it, he said, “This way. These bricks need repointing so bad I could climb this almost as fast as going up stairs.”
Her nose confirmed the route. Near the middle of the wall she smelled both Justin and the hunter. On her radio, the chopper pilot reported no luck spotting another hot infrared source. Justin announced he was returning to the scene.
She headed for the stair door. “I’m going to the hospital to talk to Travis. You handle things here.”
On the second floor, Dallas had moved inside to photograph the broken window and blood on the floor there. She gave him the situation upstairs, nodded when he swore, and by the time she reached the street, found Justin Lamb watching Phadatare as he pried the hand off Travis’s unit and bag it.
He muttered, “I’m sorry I couldn’t catch up with her...just glimpsed her ahead of me. I was ready in case she tried to ambush me but she just ran. Her scent went through Marais Park and into the water.”
Cutting off her trail and washing away the blood. The park screened the deep water piers of the Basin from the marshy shoreline of Arenosa Bay’s south wing, beloved of fishermen and birders. Between the fishing docks and vegetation, a fugitive could find plenty of cover. Allison grimaced. “Since the chopper didn’t spot her heat signature in the water, she must have ducked under one of the fishing docks or piers.”
When the chopper left, she could crawl out almost anywhere. In Shift she could even swim the intracoastal waterway channel and come ashore at one of the hotel beaches on Laguna Drive.
12.
At the Anson-Bauer Health Center Allison caught Travis between the MR scan of his skull and surgery to repair his fractured leg. He lay on a gurney in the corridor outside surgery, his mother Donna holding one hand and her sister Dorcas, the household alpha, holding the other.
The aide pointing him out to Allison shook her head. “I don’t know how much sense he’s going to make. He’s had his pre-op and is pretty groggy. We’re almost ready to take him in.”
“I’ll try anyway.” Allison made her way down to the gurney. “Trav? It’s Allison. How are you doing?”
Travis opened his eyes. It seemed to be a struggle. His voice dragged. “I’m alive.”
Nothing counted more than that.
His hands tightened on the women’s. “I can’t believe I missed her! She was right there! One fucking foot away!” His face twisted. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry.”
Donna stroked his forehead below the swelling and bruise reaching up into his hairline. “It’s all right. Allison doesn’t blame you.”
Allison rubbed his shoulder. “Of course not.”
“It all happened so fucking fast.”
Allison nodded. “Tell me about it.”
He grimaced. “I’m cruising down Third, hoping I’ll see some action...that the hunter is going to show up and I’ll have a piece of taking her down, right?” He grunted bitterly. “I hear screaming. This guy comes barreling out of the alley into the street. Almost runs in front of the unit. Then he sees me and runs up to the door shouting, ‘Help me, it’s after me! I think it killed her!’ That kind of terror I don’t have any trouble guessing what he’s talking about, but as I’m trying to open the door and get out, he’s hysterical...clutching the door and fucking pushing it... and with adrenaline pumping in him, he’s almost stronger than I am. Just as I’m fighting it open and have one leg out, I see her behind him. Wham!, the door slams on me and the lights go out.”
Donna and Dorcas’s faces hardened, the anger and fear in them the same as Allison had seen in mothers and wives of injured human officers. Volke were hard to kill, but not invincible. Her family worried about her, too.
Travis’s eyelids drooped. “That’s all I remember until the lights and sirens. They said I radioed for help but I don’t remember doing it.”
Allison smiled down at him. “Well you did, and you did good.”
An aide came up behind her. “Excuse me. We’re ready in surgery.”
They stepped back.
“She was ri’ there.” Travis’s voice slurred. “Ri’ there. Black bish.”
Watching the gurney disappear through the surgery doors, Dorcas put an arm around her sister. “Whatever you have to do to catch this creature, Allison, do it. Whatever you need, just call on our house.”
13.
At least this killer left identifiable victims, Zane reflected as he searched the dead man’s pockets. They yielded everything he could have asked for: billfold, keys, and the cell phone they found beside the body. Zane gave each only a cursory examination before adding it to the bag in which he was collecting the victim’s effects.
The victim wore no tie. Zane found it in one pocket of the suit coat. Possibly he met the killer while kicking back after some evening business meeting.
A wedding ring on the still-intact left hand proclaimed him married. Could his wife be the woman who might have been killed...though no second body had turned up so far? Zane thought not. The cell phone had rung repeatedly while Sweet and Hertzel worked around the body. Sweet dusted it for prints and finding only the smears of hasty wiping, let Zane have it. The call record showed all the calls came from the same number...suggesting a worried or irritated wife wondering where hubby was.
He pushed to his feet. “You can take him now.”
Hertzel’s stretcher attendants zipped the body into the body bag, which already held the bagged and tagged head, and worked down the stairs with it slung between them. Zane followed with the bag of effects.
He spread those out on a table in Double D’s second floor break room to examine, and propped a Polaroid of the head against the cell phone. “Now let’s see what we can learn about you.” The still-open eyes and framing that showed only the face, not the neck, gave the victim an appearance as much catatonic as dead. The glazed eyes stared indifferently through Zane as he opened the billfold. Along with cash and credit cards, it yielded a driver’s license for a Mr. Franklin Matthew Cromer, age 40, with an address in the Lost Creek addition, business cards for Entrepreneurial Enterprises, Inc., and three credit card receipts for the evening.
Zane swore. Th
e victim spent three hundred dollars on dinner at Hampton Court, ran up a tab of twenty-five dollars at Ice And Ivory, and parked from seven-thirty until eleven-oh-five in a parking lot at Orca and Avenue B. Cromer had been dining and drinking on the A at the same time he and Allison were there. And the killer had been there, too, and perhaps even walked past them. Laughing to himself at them.
They had someone who liked terrorizing and killing. The chances of finding the woman alive were slimmer by the moment. Unless she figured into the crime somehow.
The woman of Allison’s psychic vision?
Below a wall phone, a phone book lay chained to a shelf. Zane looked up the addresses for Hampton Court and Ice And Ivory. He remembered the piano bar from last night. Where did the restaurant sit in relation to it? Just across the street, according to the address. So...it appeared Cromer left the restaurant, then crossing the street on his way back to his car, stopped in the bar for a drink. It seemed unlikely he drank twenty-five dollars worth of liquor himself. The question was whether he bought a round for some of the group he had dinner with or several drinks for just one person...say the woman.
The cell phone trilled again.
Zane noted the time in his notebook with those of the other calls. The caller ID window gave the same number as the previous calls...the same number as that listed for Cromer’s home phone on the business card. They needed to talk to his wife as well as notify her of her husband’s death. She should know who he had dinner with.
The driver’s license caught his eye. They also needed to locate the victim’s car. Since Cromer drove it away from the North Bay, maybe he did so with the killer in it.
“Anything I can do?”
He looked up to find Justin Lamb in the doorway. “Find out what vehicles our victim owns.” Zane read off Cromer’s DL information to him. Then, remembering the chopper search, he asked, “Do you know why Allison was looking for a suspect with a high infrared output?”
