Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Lupo hated this part of the job. Most cops do. He wasn’t very good at it.

  As they reached the apartment door, DiSanto said: “This isn’t one of your high-end remodels, is it?” There was dust and grime on the steps, and the elevator was broken and stuck on the second floor.

  Lupo smirked. “Guess not. Seems like she didn’t have any money, really, so we can scratch that as a motive.” It was starting to look like a premeditated random killing, a weird hybrid. Like the killer just wanted to kill somebody, and Rosskov came along at the wrong time. Both premeditated and random – Lupo figured that kind of killer would be hardest to catch. Unless he continued his streak in the same general location.

  “Yes?”

  The woman who answered the door was average height, but somehow almost elfin, with short dark hair and pointy bangs. Wearing a Packers sweatshirt and tight jeans, she looked like a slightly too old college student. Maybe a grad student or doctoral candidate.

  Grimly, Lupo flashed his badge and introduced them, and her eyes widened. And then she started to cry.

  “What’s happened? What’s—” She took a breath and gasped as if it hadn’t helped. “Oh, God, Tanya, what’s happened to Tanya?”

  Was it as if she’d been expecting something, Lupo wondered, or was she just a worst-case scenario kind of person?

  “May we come in?” DiSanto normally took over at this point, because he tended to come across more sympathetic than Lupo, who was gruff by most people’s standards – at least on first impression.

  She nodded and stepped aside, shivering and sniffling.

  “Are you Laura Hastings? Tanya’s roommate?”

  “Yes.” Her lower lip trembled and the tears flowed down her cheeks. “And I’m her—we’re… we’re not just roommates, we’re partners. What happened?”

  Ah fuck. Lupo swallowed. “I’m afraid we have bad news,” he said, trying to whisper.

  “Something’s happened to Tanya,” DiSanto said. “I’m sorry to tell you she’s dead.”

  Laura stepped back once, twice, and half-fell onto a small wooden bench tucked into the apartment’s foyer. Lupo and DiSanto grabbed her before she could slip off. Her body had loosened into rubber, and her face contorted into one of intolerable pain. Her crying turned into a keen.

  She wasn’t involved, Lupo thought, giving DiSanto a shake of his head. Too hard to fake this kind of shock and pain.

  DiSanto nodded and went for a glass of water while Lupo kept an eye on her lest she faint.

  Fuck, I really hate this job today.

  They waited for her to regain her composure and stayed a half hour, but it was obvious Laura didn’t know anything. She had seen her lover off to work and that was the end of it. Laura said Tanya liked her job, rarely complained about coworkers or bosses, enjoyed dealing cards, and only occasionally had to shrug off a potential suitor. And no, as far as she knew, Tanya had no connections to the Russian mob. “She hated her heritage!” Laura said.

  All this came out in a rush whenever they asked a question, as if she could fill the void just opened in her life with more words about Tanya. Lupo thought Laura would collapse after they left.

  “Do you think we can look around, see if there might be an indication of some motive for what happened?” he said. There was no reason to think so, but it was worth a try. A bagful of cash, some kind of illicit information, a drug stash. A stash of any kind.

  Laura looked at him, wide-eyed. “Like if I had something to do with it? I would n-never—” She began to sniffle again.

  “No, no,” DiSanto jumped in. “In case she knew her killer, maybe had gotten some questionable correspondence from him, like a threat, or… just something – anything – out of the ordinary.”

  “Informally,” Lupo added, “so there’s no need for a warrant. If she lived alone, we’d be searching through her things.”

  “For clues?”

  DiSanto said, “Right.”

  “You don’t know of any threats?”

  Laura fixed Lupo with her puffy eyes, wiping moisture there. “No, never. Tanya was very quiet.”

  Lupo didn’t bother to point out that a threat didn’t have to be solicited. "So we’ll take a quick, informal look through her things, if you don’t mind."

  She nodded, and led them to a home office squeezed into a tiny den, then pointed at the connecting bedroom. She stood nearby as they gently flipped through papers and bills and credit card statements. They repeated the procedure in the bedroom, but there were no hidden caches of stacked bills or packets of drugs, or anything that pointed at anything out of the ordinary about Tanya Rosskov. No weird floorboards, or likely hiding places. DiSanto even checked for dummy outlets by plugging in a small lamp at random.

  Lupo pointed at a row of photographs framed over the desk. “This her family?”

  “Yes, back home. None of them are here. She was lonely… until we got together.”

  “She hated her heritage?” Lupo prodded. “You said hated?”

  “Yeah, the whole melodramatic Russian thing. But she loved her family, as far as I could tell. They talked on Skype all the time.”

  “I didn’t see a computer,” said DiSanto.

  “She used my laptop. Want to see it?”

  Lupo shrugged. DiSanto nodded. “Sure.”

  Laura retrieved it from a closet, fired it up. A three year old Dell, bare bones student model. They let her take them through some correspondence, both her own email account and even Tanya’s, and they just glanced at some random emails. Nothing jumped out at them.

  “We can always come back.” Lupo figured she’d been forthcoming enough that she didn’t know anything, and if there was any further reason they could always get the techies to check the laptop for hidden or deleted files. Since she’d worked at the casino, there was always the chance of theft, extortion, blackmail, embezzlement…

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  They’d been together two years, almost three, she said.

  “In that time, Tanya ever get into some kind of trouble?” Lupo already knew she had no record, because they had run her ID. But you never knew. Trouble comes in different packages.

  She barely thought about it. “No. She’s – was just a lonely immigrant, no friends other than me, no drama…” Then her voice hitched, and she started bawling.

  “We’re very sorry for your loss,” Lupo said as softly as he could, feeling like an asshole.

  They helped her gently to the sofa and left her there, a faraway look in her red-rimmed eyes.

  Downstairs, Lupo said: “No way is she acting.”

  DiSanto nodded, agreeing. “Nothing stuck out up there. No fancy stuff, recent purchases, anything to indicate she had any kind of a problem. Bank statements are bare bones.”

  “Which leaves us exactly nowhere. Maybe with a random killing.”

  “And probably more to come,” DiSanto nodded. “I’ll drive.”

  Lupo tossed him the keys.

  After leaving DiSanto at his own car, Lupo sat in his aging Maxima, sweating. The Creature sought a release. The smell of blood had awakened the monster inside – his monster – and Lupo had fought hard to keep him under control, not ever sure he could manage. It was a constant fight, especially when the Creature became insistent.

  He watched as patches of coarse hair sprouted and retreated from the backs of his hands as they rested on the wheel. The full moon was only a few days away, which made its call harder to ignore.

  After all these years, he could still feel the fucking silver disk and its inexplicable hold on him. He could still feel himself on the brink of losing all control. He forced himself to process his information, trying to distract the Creature. As a tactic, it was marginally successful, but always worth a try.

  He thought of Rosskov and the apparently senseless murder. Unless someone was jealous of her female lover? No, didn’t feel right. Another woman wouldn’t use a crossbow (his own experience aside – Jessie wasn't typical! An
d she was a dead-eye with the crossbow…). Would a jilted guy feel so hateful that he’d want such an unusual revenge? Maybe he’d run her down in his car, or beat her with a baseball bat. Neither was very endearing, but the crossbow spoke of a very specific purpose. Brutal, both less personal and more personal at the same time.

  Penetrating… He thought about it. Phallic?

  A knife was also invasive, a rape of flesh, and even a bullet could be considered to be of a similar nature, if you were thinking about the subconscious.

  Yet, a crossbow was so damned atypical.

  Specific purpose.

  The thought of specific purpose brought back Charlie Bear’s face. Lupo let his mind wander away from the murder weapon. Maybe the guy was just a typical hunter-type who'd put his hands on the nearest weapon and had no specific reason.

  But now Lupo wondered about Bear’s apparent interest in him. The security chief appeared curious and inquisitive, beyond what was necessary. Was it just a turf thing between the casino jurisdiction and the city? But that didn’t make sense, because Bear had seemed willing to cooperate, even share the duties.

  He shrugged, swallowed a growl, and rolled down his window. The fall evening was turning colder, and the scent of walking humans nearby – as well as smells from nearby restaurants – made his stomach rumble as much as that of the Creature. The pizza from earlier seemed to have curdled down there, too. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  He made his decision. There wasn’t anything more he could do tonight. Tomorrow there’d be a preliminary autopsy report if he applied some pressure at the ME’s. He doubted there would be anything new. Drug use, maybe. But even that wouldn’t mean much. There wouldn’t be DNA from the killer, unless he had been in contact earlier, and if he had, why not kill her in a more personal way? Was all this merely misdirection?

  He headed for the lake shore and turned north on Lake Drive.

  Driving the winding curves past mansions, both the visible and the tucked-away ones, he thought of Jessie. What she was doing right now. He would have given anything to be in Eagle River with her. He’d go out for a run, letting the Creature have his head, then come back to the cottage that had been hers but which they now shared, and the sex in front of the fireplace would have been both tender and primal, as he came down off the near-sexual high that was the Change.

  He felt his clothing begin to bind, his human skin begin to itch. It was the moon calling, though a few days from full. But it was also the blood scent still tickling his nostrils.

  By the time he reached Doctors Park, a square of 50 wooded acres blanketing the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan, he couldn’t wait to tear off his clothes and inhale the cold night air. As soon as he’d parked the car in a dark spot, he leaped out and stripped, cold at first but then his inner temperature was taking over and warming him from the inside, and he tossed his clothes in back, and slid his holstered Glock under the seat. He positioned a police card on the dash to avoid being towed by an over-eager patrol cop or robbed by some transient, locked the door and ditched the keys in the shadows behind the rear tire, then turned toward the woods.

  The cold lake breeze ruffled his longish hair and made his bare skin tingle.

  He felt the tingle inside, too.

  He turned his head and listened to the sound of the breeze in the trees. It was a passable facsimile of the same sound up in Eagle River. Except at the end of a couple mile run, there he would have had Jessie to welcome him home.

  Here he would have the ghost of Tanya Rosskov.

  He grunted. Could he live with her ghost?

  Could he live with any of his ghosts? The number was growing, wasn’t it?

  No, he had to find whoever had killed her. But before that, maybe the motive would help. There had to be a motive, even if it wasn’t obvious. Find the motive, then see who fit it best.

  He walked toward the trees, enveloped in their long shadows. The three-quarter moon peeked out from behind racing clouds. Then he started to run, a long-limbed jog that took him into the tree line and as he reached the canopy of branches he focused on visualizing the Change, feeling it arrive – ready! – altering his DNA in rapid steps that first gave him a quick spurt of fur growth along his back and spreading down.

  And as usual – it’s a fact, Jack! – he was over just like that and the Change took him.

  He landed on four legs, his huge black paws connecting with the ground and the pine needles instead of his two bare feet. The almost painful stab of multiple scents rushed into his flared nostrils like ammonia, but turning pleasant once his flesh became accustomed to the onrush.

  And so the Creature was set loose in this small pocket forest.

  Immediately the Creature which was Lupo began to make sense of all the different threads of scent, noting that the strongly rank smell of coyote was slathered all around. It made a small growling sound, dismissing the importance of those scavengers, and noting instead that the warm blood of a group of deer was calling and currently overriding everything else.

  Deer were constantly on the move between the various parks that dotted the lakeshore, many of them residing mainly in the nearby Schlitz Audubon wildlife center, where they were mostly safe. But they tended to roam, especially the young bucks, and it didn’t take them long to make their way from the Audubon Center to the sprawling acreage of Doctors Park, where the woods carried less scent of human visitors.

  The Creature loped along the invisible threads, separating their scents until it knew it was following one specific male deer, a young buck.

  Then the Creature slowed, came to a halt, and put its nose to the cold ground.

  It edged forward until it was close to a tiny cleared area in the wooded park, looked up, and there was the buck. Standing like a statue, head facing the spot occupied by the Creature, but unable to see it. The buck’s nose fluttered, attempting to identify the danger he sensed. His muscles tensed, ready to flee.

  The Creature crept forward, eyes on the buck, planning the route of its approach. Lupo gave over command and let the wolf’s instinct lead.

  When the buck turned his head slightly in the other direction, the Creature broke cover and leaped almost half the distance to its quarry.

  Lupo felt the thrill of his ride-along, a feeling that never failed to envelop him even after all the years he'd hated what he became. There was no denying the primal satisfaction of the hunt, the kill, the hot blood spurting between open jaws. He lusted for that feeling. If he were honest, sometimes he lusted for it as much as the Creature.

  The buck grasped his situation a fraction of a second too late and suddenly burst into a desperate run.

  With Lupo aboard and fully conscious of the bloodlust, the Creature gave chase, cutting through the buck’s zig-zags as if clairvoyant, predicting them with uncanny precision.

  In less than thirty seconds it was over. The Creature leapt, leading the buck by a couple feet, landing on its back and bringing him down with a bone-crunching crash, jaws closing on the exposed neck and tearing it open even as the beast buckled beneath the savage charge.

  The Creature feasted on the warm meat. It ripped into the carcass, the cooling blood staining its muzzle. Lupo’s control over the Creature faded further as it ate its fill, his connection faltering. Its instinctive bloodlust took precedence and jostled his awareness farther back. This was the beast’s moment, and Lupo’s perspective was unnecessary, even if he felt his own lust sated.

  After the Creature was finished with the mauled carcass, it allowed Lupo back in. Then the wolf howled its satisfaction.

  Moments after the long echo had faded, a series of ragged, mewling howls came as response.

  Coyotes.

  Wolves don’t normally frequent county parks, but coyotes were well-known and recognized. At his own pace, Lupo and the Creature sauntered away from the fresh kill, giving the pack of rangy coyotes the green light. The disliked scavengers, cowards that they were, waited for the wolf to cover some distance before
advancing on the ravaged remains, pushing and shoving and snapping at each other in preparation for their sloppy-seconds feasting.

  The coyotes would take the rap for the deer kill, if someone stumbled on it. Anyone who heard the Creature’s howling would reconsider, knowing there weren’t likely to be any wolves this far south. Up north in Wisconsin, wolves had made enough of a comeback that they were about to lose their protected status. The state assholes were talking about holding sanctioned hunts. But coyotes were everywhere, and Lupo’s Creature’s occasional kills in county parks would always be attributed to them.

  Back near the car, the Creature checked for encroachment by anyone, smelling the breeze. Then Lupo forced a reverse Change and stepped out of the trees on two feet. His metabolism was hot-wired by the fresh meat and blood, and so he barely noticed the deep chill that had set in. Once inside his car, he dressed in awkward, jerky movements and sat a few moments.

  Thinking of Jessie.

  If he’d been up in Eagle River, right about now he would be slipping under the covers, his hot skin and heightened desire waking her. They’d have fierce, animalistic sex by the light of the fire, then let their skin cool while they embraced, preparing for another longer, much more tender bout of lovemaking.

  He missed Jessie. She brought him back so easily from the primitive, instinct-driven mentality of the Creature. She reminded him that he was still, at core, human – despite the price the Change had exacted from him over the decades. He missed her point of view, too, knowing that if he explained this new strange murder to her, she would have some perspective he hadn’t yet considered.

  Tomorrow he and DiSanto would ramp up their efforts, because deep down he knew that this guy would strike again. It was stamped all over the first murder. The reason was important, yet somehow irrelevant. This was a guy at the start of his spree.

  Lupo groaned as he thought of Griff Killian, the Internal Affairs guru from New York who seemed to have developed a hard-on for him. Ever since the strange and damn near unexplainable killing of Julia Barrett, the police department’s psychologist who’d also begun to suspect that Lupo had a secret life, or at least a secret, Griff Killian – sounded like a beer ad! – had begun sniffing around Lupo’s friends and acquaintances. And he’d been at DiSanto, too, Lupo knew, even though Rich hadn’t mentioned it.