Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1)

by W. D. Gagliani

  “Shit!” He picked it up by one end and snapped it onto the edge of the desk. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Corinne had given it to him just three days ago. Could it have been that long? She had brought it over, wearing a crooked smile on her face.

  “Mr. Detective, find out who this guy is. He’s sending me a letter a week, okay? It’s getting kind of creepy.”

  She had mentioned the letters—three of them—once before, but had shrugged them off as hazards of her profession.

  “Some kook, probably a rich one I met at a party, who got my name from Eileen.”

  “She’s not supposed to give out names, is she?” he’d asked.

  “Nick, this is a people business! Twisted people, but still people. Occasionally, a name gets mentioned. Favors are done. Payments are made. You know what I mean. Maybe he, ah, requested my expertise.”

  “Yeah, and maybe he’s just some pervert,” Lupo had growled.

  “Honey, they’re all perverts.”

  But something about this fourth letter had spooked her, something that she had never been able to tell him about, because after giving him the envelope and asking him to check, she had been paged, and that had been the last time he’d seen her alive.

  “Duty calls,” she had said with a mock salute and a smirk.

  He looked at the envelope now. How could the letter have spooked her? She hadn’t opened it. If the other three hadn’t concerned her, why this one? Just because the sender was so persistent? Had he done more than send letters? Had he called?

  Why the hell didn’t I get on this earlier?

  He had already handled the outside of the envelope, so now it was likely too late to lift decent prints from its surface. But maybe the letter itself… It felt like a single sheet, folded in thirds. Very innocuous. The typing on the outside of the envelope was normal, with no unique characteristics. None of those detective story clues—no upraised or faded letters, or other distinguishing marks. The font was a boring Courier, neither output on laser nor ink-jet. Probably an old, low-cost electronic typewriter, one of millions sold in the eighties before the computer explosion. There would be no chance for a grandstand scene, in which he could dramatically match the incriminating letter with the quirky machine that had produced it. The postmark was from the central Milwaukee Post Office. No particular clue in that fact, either, as it was the busiest post office in the county. If the guy had mailed from inside, there would be videotapes from the security cameras. But it was most likely he’d used one of the half-dozen outdoor boxes.

  Lupo laid the envelope on the desk and went to fetch the latex gloves he needed to continue handling the envelope and check the inside sheet. Then he zipped the envelope open and read the vile words: Hello, Cunt. I’m not playing anymore. You’re about to die!

  Suddenly, his hands began to itch, then his feet.

  What the hell was this? He hadn’t done more than two changes in one day in years, and he was damned well too tired to let it happen. He stared at the envelope and held his hands just over it, hovering above it as if about to grab it off the surface of the desk. His fingertips tingled.

  Blink. Vision. The envelope has someone’s hands on it. They aren’t his hands or Corinne’s. Breathing faster, increasing. Panting. Nostrils itching, oozing. Wipes his nose, feels coarse hair on the back of his hand. Eyes begin to change, light changes, sound changes Smells intensify. Smells intoxicate.

  Lupo shakes his head. Lets the spell dissipate, and it does, retreating as if following his command. He looks at the envelope, and it’s as if he can see a trail leading from the desk to the door.

  Lupo shook his head again, harder. The door, where the blood streaks indicated a Creature eager to chase, to follow a scent. Maybe the Creature was trying to tell him something, something useful. But could he trust himself to open the door? Could he control the Creature?

  Lupo let his instincts take over this time, unsure as to what else to do. He stuffed the envelope into his pocket, grabbed his keys from the hall table and undid the locks. Then, before he could think too much, he was out in the hall. There was a single strip of yellow tape across her doorway: CRIME SCENE MPD, repeated in block letters. They hadn’t bothered to padlock the place since it was not actually where the murder had taken place, and everyone knew a cop lived just across the hall. Ben had probably figured Lupo would need access—for whatever reason—and had instructed them to leave it. Lupo turned the key, then ducked under the tape and closed the door behind him.

  Corinne’s scent was everywhere, and it might have overwhelmed him, if only there hadn’t been something else, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up as it had in the service tunnel at the mall.

  He had been there, in Corinne’s apartment. Or, maybe, not quite. But there was definitely a trace of the same scent Lupo remembered from the tunnel.

  It hit him for a second that he was remembering the scent awfully well. That he’d never recalled anything from a change state quite so easily. But he went with it, oh yeah, ’cause if he were picking this opportunity to learn more about himself and how to control his animal side, well, there was no better time. He made directly for Corinne’s kitchen, noting that now he could sense another scent—what he had thought of as the fourth thread back in the concrete tunnel. There had been Corinne’s blood scent, and the custodian whose clothes the guy had worn, and the guy’s own thread. And then that fourth thread. The one he couldn’t quite identify. And here it was again, in Corinne’s damned apartment. What the hell?

  I could have prevented her death if I’d moved quickly on the letters, and if I’d opened this one.

  He shoved the thought aside and tried to listen in as part of his brain monitored the creature’s.

  He picked up the trash basket, a tall beige cylinder with a hinged top and a black plastic liner neatly folded over the rim, and stuck his face in it. Yes, there it was. Weak, but definitely still strong enough to sense.

  He spread an old newspaper on the floor, and started pawing through the garbage. Not a pleasant experience, by any means, but he found nothing except the usual three- or four-day accumulation. Still, the scent tickled his nostrils. Ben and the lab boys would have gone over the apartment too quickly since it wasn’t the actual crime scene, and they would have found nothing because they didn’t know what to look for. No letters, or any other incriminating evidence.

  “I had a laugh and ripped them up, Nick,” she had said when he had asked to see the other letters. “I mean, it’s not the sort of thing one keeps to enjoy again and again, if you know what I mean.” He had complained that she might have saved them so he could have them tested, but she had shrugged. “I didn’t think of it. I figured they would stop. At least you have that one, right?”

  I sure let her down. Lupo scooped the loose trash back into the bin and looked around. I sure fucked up.

  Out the kitchen door, onto the back landing, and down the stairs. To the Dumpster, where all their refuse ended up before being taken by a private contractor to whatever recycling plant or dump they were currently using—Have to look into that!—but in the meantime, it was only the middle of the week, so her trash would still be there.

  He opened the four plastic panels that covered the double-size Dumpster, and the scents washed over him—not just the fragrance of decaying food and paper products, but also the guy’s scent and the mysterious fourth thread, stronger here than anywhere. He dug through with his hands, ignoring the wet slime that oozed out of some colorful container, reaching a neatly twist-tied black plastic trash can liner that looked like the one in Corinne’s basket. He pulled it carefully from the jumble of loose trash, but it was sagging and nearly empty.

  There was a long, jagged slit in the plastic.

  Someone had been through Corinne’s trash.

  Lupo looked up and saw a corner of his own trash bag from two days before; the stack of empty meat cartons at the top gave it away. On a whim—instinct, maybe, he thought—he worked it
out of the tight mass of paper and plastic bags until it was lying before him, where he could clearly see the same long, jagged slit that had let out most of his garbage.

  The son of a bitch had been here, and he had rummaged through both their trash, not a dozen yards from the back wall of their building. How many other people had touched the Dumpster, erasing prints?

  Lupo closed the Dumpster flaps with a loud snort of disgust. He looked around. How close was this guy right now? Was he even now watching Lupo through binoculars? A telescope? A camera?

  A rifle’s telescopic sight?

  Lupo felt eyes on his back all the way to the building.

  Chapter Eight

  Lupo

  1976

  Two weeks after Andy’s death, Nick Lupo’s destiny came crashing down on him.

  At dawn, Nick awoke shivering from a nightmare, bathed in cold sweat. He was curled in a tight ball, trying to keep skin on skin so he could stay warmer. Had his mother opened the window again? Sometimes she enraged his teenage sense of privacy by opening the door to his room and entering without his permission to perform some sort of task, put a blanket away in his double-size closet, take his used laundry for an unscheduled wash load, or alternately open and close a window, a shade or his curtains. These transgressions didn’t bother her in the least, and no amount of explanation on his part ever convinced her that a mother shouldn’t be able to walk in on her son whenever she wanted or needed to. Nick wondered how often he’d nearly been caught with a smuggled Penthouse or Playboy and a guilty hand.

  Now he became aware of three things with startling clarity. The cold wetness on his skin, and the tiny, hard points prickling his side could not be his cotton sheets. And his throat screamed for water, as if he had swallowed a bucketful of sand.

  He opened his eyes finally, sure that he wouldn’t like what he saw, and then he leaped up, shivering even more violently, shocked to see his backyard—there was the grapevine trellis, the old-fashioned garage, and over him the drooping branches of the neighbor’s weeping willow. Long, narrow leaves dotted his arms and chest. His naked arms and chest! Where was his t-shirt? Nick always wore a t-shirt to bed, despite the season, leaving several pairs of brand-new pajamas still in shrink-wrap. But the dark blue t-shirt he had worn to bed was gone, and so were his Jockey shorts.

  He hugged himself, trembling uncontrollably. Dew numbed his toes. His penis was shrunk to thimble size, he noted with near panic, and small twigs were knotted in his pubic hair.

  What the hell was going on?

  He tore his hand from under his left armpit, where he felt a semblance of warmth, and cupped his genitals instead. He brought his left hand close to his face until he could see it clearly, though it seemed blue in the faint light from the driveway spot his father had installed at the back of the house the previous year. The hand itched as if ants swarmed under his skin. He shook it, but the feeling didn’t stop.

  It was barely dawn, the sky dappled with patches of light. A cool wind swept across the grass. His feet squished in the wet grass and he started for the back door, hoping it was open and that he could sneak inside without awakening his parents. They would interrogate him like cops, and what could he say? He didn’t know what had happened to him. He stooped to swipe off some leaves and twigs and recoiled to see that his feet weren’t only wet with dew—there were splashes of what appeared to be blood.

  Nick’s breath caught in his throat. His blood? He checked calves and ankles quickly, but no, he had no wounds he could see. Then whose blood was it?

  He sidled toward the door, acutely aware that the approaching sunrise might well cause him to be seen. With a deep breath he abandoned his modesty and sprinted through the dew right to the door, which opened to his touch. He prayed a silent thanks, a habit born of parochial school, and slipped inside. His father’s snoring was audible through the wall, and he climbed the stairs carefully, keeping to those stairs he knew from long experience wouldn’t creak. Then he was opening the kitchen door and tiptoeing down the hall past his parents’ bedroom, its door slightly ajar. He stepped carefully past the darkened bedroom, timing his steps to coincide with the snores, figuring that a break in the pattern would be more likely to awaken his father. His mother made no sound, and Nick could not guess whether she could hear him or not. He didn’t worry about it. Worry would only slow him down. Within moments, he was stepping into his own room and closing the door silently. He would have to wait to wash, but in the meantime he could wipe his skin and put on some clothes. Try to figure out what the hell had happened to him.

  Nick was still shivering, now with fear as well as cold.

  The blood, the naked romp outside, and the lack of memory.

  There was no accounting for this, none at all.

  Unless.

  Nick looked at his left hand again, the hand that itched unbearably as if he had a rash or had gotten poison ivy. The wound where the dog—Andy, it was Andy and you know it! his brain screamed—had torn the skin was both throbbing and itching. He tried to scratch it with his other hand but it wasn’t enough, so he dragged his teeth across the scab and felt some relief immediately.

  Nick stopped. What the hell was he doing, nipping at his hand like a dog?

  What the fuck was he doing?

  He shook his head, listened for the comforting rasp of his father’s snoring, and found a pair of old underwear that he used to wipe the blood and bits of twigs and grass from his legs. He looked into his full-length mirror, remnant of a previous homeowner, and recoiled at the sight of bloody smears all around his lips and cheeks. He felt the urge to vomit suddenly and forced himself to swallow and breathe deeply. The taste of raw meat and bone and rancid blood seemed awash inside his mouth.

  He gurgled and just barely managed to spew once into the old briefs he still held.

  It looked like chunks of his lungs, Nick thought at first, as he wiped his mouth. The bloody taste was still on his tongue, but for a second it didn’t seem so foreign and he was able to avoid another spasm.

  What is wrong with me? Nick thought, a strangled sob escaping from his lips.

  The face in his mirror didn’t seem his own anymore. For a second he swore Andy Corrazza’s eyes looked back at him, and then it was someone else’s, and yet again another stranger’s, until it seemed as though dozens of pairs of eyes looked at him from his mirror.

  He turned away dizzy, afraid he would be sick again. He was thankful it was a Saturday, so he could hide from the world and try to sort things out. He climbed into a pair of cutoff jeans and a t-shirt, then curled up on the floor next to his stereo cart. He made sure his headphones were plugged in and dropped a record onto the spindle.

  He listened to “Dark Side of the Moon” for the hundredth time and thought he now truly understood madness. The shivers didn’t leave him for hours, and the madness was just beginning.

  Chapter Nine

  Lupo

  The phone’s shrill bleating woke him from muddled, dreamless sleep.

  It was someone from the Coroner’s Office, asking if he had any next of kin to add to the report, needed so they could file her paperwork and begin the process of removing Corinne’s remains from their premises.

  Lupo took so long thinking that the tinny voice squawked at him. “Are you still there, Detective?”

  No point taking it out on the bureaucrat.

  “No next of kin,” Lupo said. There was, he knew. Parents in Cincinnati or Cleveland, but they’d disowned Corinne years before. Had, in fact, requested she never return. She had been saddened, but iron hard about her intention to fulfill their request. She had made no contact for years, and neither had they.

  “What should we do with the body? I need someone to claim it and arrange services, or the City will go the other route and take over. I can mark that option if there’s no one.” The attendant’s voice faded out and died, and Lupo heard in the fade the hope for some sort of solution.

  He sighed and lay back down on the bed. “I’ll
claim her and arrange a funeral. Just put my name down and I’ll take care of it when I come in later today.”

  “Yes, Detective.” Relief.

  Lupo let a nasty retort die on his lips and quietly hung up. What was the point?

  He wondered, just for a moment, if he had maybe loved her more than just as a friend. Had he? Should he have? And why had it taken her death for him to question his feelings?

  He fell asleep again with images of Corinne fading in and out of his vision, which seemed black around the edges.

  Part Two

  Divertimento

  Chapter Ten

  Martin

  Rag’s Gunshop was a cramped storefront squashed between a Laundromat and a ma-and-pa hardware, perhaps the last of its kind in the city. It was long and narrow, filled with a dusty display case down one side and haphazard shelving on the other. Behind the counter, racks of rifles and shotguns stood like tree trunks in a grove. Nothing looked new. Rag’s was about as far as one could get from the freshly painted, brightly lit, suburban all-sports complexes that now sold most of the legal firearms. The floor tile was cracked and blackened with age. And the clientele, though loyal, was rarely to be seen until perhaps the month or so immediately before deer season.

  Which was why Martin Stewart had chosen to frequent it, having wandered in several times to ogle the Vietnam souvenirs and the Chinese-made AK-47s that rested proudly behind Rag’s counter. With some prodding, Rag had even showed Martin a trunkload of what he called “goodies,” which he kept under lock and key behind the counter. These were various illegal devices, any of which would have gained Rag a federal rap and some hefty fines, had ATF been alerted to their presence.

  Martin smiled. That would have been too easy. And not very smart.