“Just doing what I was hired to do by the families, returning their kids.”
“Before that, you got cursed by a midget circus freak, and one of my snitches feels compelled to give you a charm against demons.”
“He was a short gypsy knife thrower, and you were the one who dragged me to Madam Zebella to get rid of the curse,” Bishop said.
“Then there’s your ‘martial arts teacher. Smokin’ hot but scary, like she might be some kind of secret CIA assassin.”
“Actually, she’s a winged super hero who fights the forces of darkness to save humanity.” Bishop stabbed a piece of Snapper in Lobster sauce with one chopstick and stuck it into his mouth. He figured he’d better eat it now. If Rain was going to arrest him for the alleged body in his alleged rental car, the cops probably wouldn’t let him take leftovers into the jail.
“Very funny.” Rain obviously didn’t believe in super heroes.
Bishop sighed. It was time to get Rain to the point. “Are you asking me for my help or trying to make a case against me for associating with hotties and weirdoes?”
“I’m just sayin’ if something freaky is goin’ on in this town you probably know a lot more about it than I do. Or you know somebody who does.”
Bishop turned the bag the food had come in upside down. Two fortune cookies rolled out onto the desk, one landed right in front of him. He tore open the cellophane, cracked the cookie and pulled out a thin strip of paper. It had a lucky lottery number on one side. Bishop had never had much luck playing one of those. He turned it over to read the fortune. The words were in red ink. Probably some kind of edible food coloring in case you were idiot enough to eat the cookie. The fortune said: ‘You are about to start a dangerous adventure.’
He dropped the slip of paper and looked at Rain who said, “You really got a bottle of rye in your desk?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Bishop told him as he leaned over to pull open the bottom drawer.
* * *
“Billy Goat Malt Whiskey?” Rain read off the bottle. “That’s got to be swill.” Rain didn’t drink or smoke, he gambled and he was convinced that alcohol and cigarettes would interfere with his ability to calculate the odds.
“Actually, it’s more like irony,” Bishop said. He hadn’t forgotten the cursed goat head the little man had left on his desk during the hunt for Mouser and five-year-old Susan Elizabeth Morgan. He put one elbow on his desk and propped his chin in the palm of one hand. “So let me get this straight,” he poured himself a shot. “You’ve just discovered a forth adult male, killed in exactly the same way as three others: he was robbed, drained of blood and thrown in a city dumpster. You don’t know precisely where any of them were killed because there was no blood at the scene and no one knew they were in the dumpsters until the garbage trucks delivered their load to the landfill in Westport.”
“Right.”
“You obviously have either a serial killer,” Bishop tapped the newspaper, “or some kind of drug war execution thing on your hands. I can’t see why homicide would need my help on that.”
“Yeah, but see, what we’re tryin’ to keep quiet is that all the bodies were covered with bites.”
“The city is full of rats, dude. They chew on what’s thrown in dumpsters all the time, including dead bodies.”
“The bites weren’t caused by rats, Frank. The coroner said they were made by human teeth, or nearly human. The incisors were abnormally long and the bites were in places where the arterial blood supply was closest to the surface of the skin.”
Bishop felt a creepy feeling crawl up his spine. He poured himself another shot. “So,” he said. ”Four bodies. Most of Homicide is thinking ‘crazed serial killer’. But you came here to ask me about this because you think, based on my sordid history, I must know somebody who might know something about--let me guess--vampires?”
Rain looked uncomfortable. “Well, you seem to attract some pretty strange attention, and I have a responsibility to look at all the possibilities, even if one is pretty far out there. Call it a hunch.”
“You don’t play hunches, Rain. You play the odds. There must be more you’re not telling me and I can’t help if you won’t tell me all of it.”
“Okay then, here’s the kicker, but this is absolutely confidential. The teeth marks? They indicate there’s probably more than one biter involved.”
Bishop frowned. When he’d asked Ariel if vampires were real, she hadn’t said yes. But she hadn’t said no either. Were vampires just another species of demon he hadn’t met yet? Did they rob their prey then throw them in dumpsters after feeding? That’s not what happened on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“Based on the size of the wounds,” Rain continued, “the bites were made by four very small adults.”
* * *
The body in 12B had been dead at least three days. When he hadn’t shown up at work for two days or answered his cell phone or landline, his administrative assistant had called the manger of his building and then the police. An officer had been let into the apartment by the manager. He notified homicide as soon as he found the body. The manager, who’d followed the officer into the apartment after being expressly told to stay in the hall, barely made it out the door before losing his lunch on a plastic potted palm by the elevator.
Rain pulled paper booties over his shoes and fished a pair of blue latex gloves out of his jacket pocket. The apartment building was upscale redevelopment. The kind of place that required its tenants have an income in the mid six figures and quiet lives that didn’t entail visits by the police, bill collectors, hysterical ex-wives, or irate husbands.
The manager described the tenant, George LaForge, as quiet and polite in a rich and privileged sort of way. He had few visitors and no obvious bad habits. He seemed to entertain no female guests, but no male guests either. He was practically the invisible man.
Rain noticed immediately that LaForge’ pockets had been turned inside out and his clothing had been torn open. He took out a pen and moved some of the cloth aside. There were multiple bite wounds on the body but there was no blood in the bites. LaForge wore no watch, although his left wrist had a pale band around it and Rain could find no wallet near the body. The apartment had been tossed: drawers and cupboards hanging open, their contents scattered onto the floor. The large flat screen television in the living room was still on, tuned to a local news channel which would soon be reporting the victim’s death. The thieves had obviously decided not to take something that large out of the building, or maybe they were too small to try.
* * *
Bishop made the turn through the bent and broken gates that marked the entrance to The Gates of Eden, Zaki Kirienko’s estate. They gaped wide open on torn hinges. The metal figures on the gate were reaching out toward the apple and the snake. The tall stone pillars that had supported the gates were still wrapped in yellow police tape. Bishop was happy to see that gargoyles no longer perched on top of them, and he hoped they never would again. The guardhouse was a melted mass of steel and plastic, and Cassius Kale had an armed guard on duty, just in case rubberneckers or a stray demon showed up. Bishop rolled down his window.
“Mr. Bishop? Mr. Kale is waiting for you at the house. Just follow the driveway . . .”
Bishop raised a hand. “I know where it is,” he said.
The house was virtually untouched by the battle that had happened on the estate a little more than a month ago. Everything but the house had been laid to waste. The lab, office buildings, arena, the Zoo and Golarium were gone. Even the sub-basements had been reduced to holes in the ground. Bishop got out of his car and knocked on the half open door. Cassius himself pulled it open and invited him inside. The entry hall was spacious with a floor set in alternating squares of black and white marble. An oval, Louis XIV table sat in the exact center of the hall and still held a large Chinese vase filled with dead flowers. A double staircase wound upward from either side of the room to join a small balcony that jutted out o
ver the entry to a large living room. The furniture was dusty, but expensive. Bishop was no expert but even he could see there must be tens of thousands of dollars of antiques in the house.
“You must think it strange that I came back here,” Cassius said as he led Bishop through the living room toward the back of the house. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything in the way of refreshment, the lease on the house was just signed yesterday and I haven’t had a chance to stock it.”
“You’re renting Zaki’s estate?” Bishop was dumbfounded.
“Well, one of my companies is. It’s a shell corporation, many times removed from anything directly connected to me. It seemed like a good idea considering that there’s a tunnel connecting the property to the Tesslovich mansion and the Hauptmann Department Store.” Cassius waved a hand, his gesture seeming to encompass the house and all its contents. “It came furnished. I have an option to buy it and Tesslovich’s house as soon as all the legal bits are worked out. Zaki Enterprises has declared bankruptcy in the United States and is liquidating its assets.”
“I thought you sealed the tunnel after we took out the wounded.”
Bishop and Cassius were moving quickly through a large dining room containing an enormous Chippendale dining table and sideboard. “It was a quick job,” Cassius said, “and mostly cosmetic so the police wouldn’t track the tunnel back to the closed subway stations. Let’s go through the kitchen, it will be faster.”
“Where are you taking me?” Bishop asked uneasily.
“Outside.” Cassius grabbed a leather satchel sitting on the kitchen counter near the backdoor. “I need to collect a few more samples before the next storm hits.”
Bishop frowned, stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and followed.
* * *
It was a long walk from the house to the site of the lab and arena complex. As Bishop and Cassius moved further into the parking lot, Bishop could see that great drifts of ash covered the ground and filled the holes left by the building’s sub basements. The ash was deeper on the sloping lawn where the bodies of demons and Raptors had been set alight by cold, blue Angel Fire. The white ash puffed around their feet like clouds of fine dust. It didn’t cling to their shoes or trousers like Bishop would have expected. Instead, it fell back into place as soon as they’d passed. Cassius reached into his satchel and brought out a glass jar. He removed the lid and stooped to fill it with two inches of ash. He held the jar up for Bishop’s inspection.
“Weightless,” he said. “Odorless, tasteless, inert. It has no trace of what was burned, nor does it have any other discernable properties, animal, vegetable, mineral or synthetic.” He removed another jar filled with a colorless liquid and poured that into the jar with the ash. The ash immediately dissolved, leaving the liquid at the same original volume. “It dissolves in water, leaving the water the same volume as it was before the ash was added.” Cassius looked down the lawn at the sky. A dark, pregnant mass of clouds was moving in from across the lake. “A good deal of it is already gone, this storm should just about finish it off. It will vanish into the earth like it was never here.”
“Bishop looked around. “Is this why you asked me to come here?” So much death happened in this place; so many lost, before and after. And in the end, the head monster got clean away. “To watch the last bit of evidence, disappear?”
“No,” Cassius straightened up, put the last few bottles of ash into his satchel and looped the strap over his shoulder. “I asked you here to tell you that Ariel has disappeared.”
“What?!”
“She left the infirmary. No one saw her go. She hasn’t been to the Caf’. The Dogs haven’t seen her. Her apartment is still empty. There’s no word on the street about where she might have gone or been taken.”
“You think she may have been kidnapped?”
“No. I don’t think The Guardian has any idea she’s still alive, or Kiriyenko for that matter, otherwise he would have done more than just appoint Tomas the new Raptor of the City. She didn’t take that very well you know.”
“Understatement of the year, but she is supposed to be dead. If The Guardian found out Brother Gregory slipped her the antidote, God only knows what the consequences might be.”
“Well, obviously we can’t report her as a missing person. But I thought, you being a detective, maybe you could try and find her before she does something . . . impulsive.”
Bishop massaged his temples. An angry and impulsive Ariel on the loose was a migraine in the making. “And you had to tell me this in the middle of the killing fields because...”
“You never know who might be listening.” Cassius started back toward the house.
“Are you going to live here?” Bishop asked.
Cassius looked around. The first rain drops were hitting the ash creating small holes in its perfect surface causing more and more of it to dissolve. “No, I don’t think that would be wise. But I plan to put this place to good use.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Effigy of a Hawk Claw in mica courtesy of The Ohio History Connection. This effigy is one of several mica objects excavated from the Hopewell Indian Mounds near Chillicothe, Ohio. The Hopewell culture spanned the period between 200 BC and AD 500.
My thanks to Bosley, Diane, Don, Cari, Stacey, Michael and Carol. Your help and support was greatly appreciated.
Also, thanks to:
Tosh McIntosh: cover designer for print edition and design and format of interior for both print and digital editions.
Carol Terry: cover designer for digital edition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
B.A. Bostick is an enthusiastic fan and author of urban fantasy. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and her fractured fairytale Reptyle Dysfunction is available on Amazon: My Book
Bostick lives in Northern New Mexico, truly the Land of Enchantment.
Visit the author online
Website: www.babostick.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/baBostickAuthor/
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 40
