Kitty's Mix-Tape Page 21

  When he finally came within view of the gleaming, spotlit neoclassical façade of the Olympus, Ben stopped, sighed, and smiled. Never had cheesy, overhyped architecture looked so good. He moved a little faster.

  Then, ahead, just outside the driveway of the hotel, he saw her. He’d recognize that profile, that stance anywhere: slender body, legs up to there, floppy blond hair, tilt to her head like she was just about to say something funny.

  She was getting out of a car—was that Odysseus Grant in the driver’s seat? That thread of jealousy . . . worry . . . that was always there, that always asked what Kitty saw in a guy like him, flared, and Ben stilled it. Wait for the explanation. But he wondered: what kind of adventure had she been having? When she moved, she seemed as tired as he was.

  Finally, she looked up and saw him. He’d stopped. He didn’t remember stopping. He just had to, to take her all in.

  And he thought, Almost home. A few more steps and I’ll be home.

  Kitty and the Super Blue Blood

  or Whatever Moon Thing

  "YOU KNOW, IT'S EXHAUSTING,” Ben said, and took a long draw on his bottle of beer. “It’s like every other month there’s this new ‘Once every hundred years’ super special moon-related event we’re supposed to be paying attention to. How do we know? How do we really know if it’s important? Are we really letting Facebook decide this stuff for us?”

  We were naked, sitting next to each other, backs propped up against rock, part of a pile of boulders slumped up on the hillside. He offered the bottle. I took a drink and handed it back. The beer wasn’t cold anymore, but it was still bubbly and sent calm through my limbs as it went down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Before social media no one really paid attention to this stuff. But it’s not like it isn’t interesting.”

  “Interesting, sure, but is it relevant?”

  Across the clearing a wolf howled. The sky wasn’t full dark yet but had that rich deep-blue edging to twilight. Soon, the fat full moon would rise. Our werewolf pack had gathered, like we did every month—or every now and then, on a blue moon, twice a month. A few of us had already turned, and the wolves yipped and played. Others were still in human form, pacing, resisting the call of their other selves demanding to burst free.

  We were waiting to see what it meant, this super blood moon thing or whatever the hell they were calling it this time. What supernatural forces we’d be subjected to, out of our control and knowledge. Ben was right, it really was exhausting.

  He continued. “What if Earth had five moons, hm? What if we were on, like, Jupiter, with thirty moons? Then what would happen? What would it be like being a werewolf on Jupiter?”

  “We’d be crushed under the massive pressure of its atmosphere and tremendous gravitational forces,” I answered.

  “Oh. Yeah. I suppose so. So everyone who’s ever talked about a cure for lycanthropy—has anyone suggested just blowing up the moon?”

  I looked at him, his scruffy brown hair and his scrunched-up, thoughtful expression. He was awfully cute.

  “No, honey, I don’t think they have.”

  We were waiting for something—something else, apart from the usual full-moon madness, to happen. A few more of us shapeshifted. The clearing had more wolves than people now. Another howl burst out.

  “Are you really worried?” I said, turning so I was curled up next to him. Ben set down the bottle and put his arms around me.

  “I’m always worried.”

  Yeah. Couple of werewolves in this crazy world? A lot to worry about.

  I said, “Maybe . . . what if . . . just this once . . . we didn’t worry about it?”

  An oversized wolf raced up to us, yipped eagerly, and darted away again. The moon was rising. It was time to go.

  Ben bent his forehead to mine. “You know what? That’s so crazy it just might work.”

  And then we all howled at the moon, the inconstant moon, together.

  Defining Shadows

  THE WINDOWLESS OUTBUILDING near the property’s back fence wasn’t big enough to be a garage or even a shed. Painted the same pale green as the house twenty feet away, the mere closet was a place for garden tools and snow shovels, one of a thousand just like it in a neighborhood north of downtown Denver. But among the rakes and pruning shears, this one had a body.

  Half a body, rather. Detective Jessi Hardin stood at the open door, regarding the macabre remains. The victim had been cut off at the waist, and the legs were propped up vertically, as if she’d been standing there when she’d been sliced in half and forgotten to fall down. Even stranger, there didn’t seem to be any blood. The gaping wound in the trunk—vertebrae and a few stray organs were visible in a hollow body cavity from which the intestines had been scooped out—seemed almost cauterized, scorched, the edges of the flesh burned and bubbled. The thing stank of rotting meat, and flies buzzed everywhere. She could imagine the swarm that must have poured out when the closet door was first opened. By the tailored trousers and black pumps still in place, Hardin guessed the victim was female. No identification had been found. They were still checking ownership of the house.

  “Told you you’ve never seen anything like it,” Detective Patton said. He seemed downright giddy at stumping her.

  Well, she had seen something like it, once. A transient had fallen asleep on some train tracks, and the train had come by and cut the poor bastard in half. But he hadn’t been propped up in a closet later. No one had seen anything like this, and that was why Patton had called her. She got the weird ones these days. Frankly, if it meant she wasn’t on call for cases where the body was an infant with a dozen broken bones, with deadbeat parents insisting they never laid a hand on the kid, she was fine with that.

  “Those aren’t supported, are they?” she said. “They’re just standing upright.” She took a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her suit jacket and pulled them on. Pressing on the body’s right hip, she gave a little push—the legs swayed, but didn’t fall over.

  “That’s creepy,” Patton said, all humor gone. He’d turned a little green.

  “We have a time of death?” Hardin said.

  “We don’t have shit,” Patton answered. “A patrol officer found the body when a neighbor called in about the smell. It’s probably been here for days.”

  A pair of CSI techs were crawling all over the lawn, snapping photos and placing numbered yellow markers where they found evidence around the shed. There weren’t many of the markers, unfortunately. The coroner would be here soon to haul away the body. Maybe the ME would be able to figure out who the victim was and how she’d ended up like this.

  “Was there a padlock on the door?” Hardin said. “Did you have to cut it off to get inside?”

  “No, it’s kind of weird,” Patton said. “It had already been cut off, we found it right next to the door.” He pointed to one of the evidence markers and the generic padlock lying next to it.

  “So someone had to cut off the lock in order to stow the body in here?”

  “Looks like it. We’re looking for the bolt-cutters. Not to mention the top half of the body.”

  “Any sign of it at all?” Hardin asked.

  “None. It’s not in the house. We’ve got people checking dumpsters around the neighborhood.”

  Hardin stepped away from the closet, caught her breath, and tried to set the scene for herself. She couldn’t assume right away that the victim had lived in the house. But maybe she had. She was almost certain the murder had happened somewhere else, and the body moved to the utility closet later. The closet didn’t have enough room for someone to cut a body through the middle, did it? The murderer would have needed a saw. Maybe even a sword.

  Unless it had been done by magic.

  Her rational self shied away from that explanation. It was too easy. She had to remain skeptical or she’d start attributing everything to magic and miss the real evidence. This wasn’t necessarily magical, it was just odd and gruesome. She needed the ME to take a crack at the
body. Once they figured out exactly what had killed the victim—and found the rest of the body—they’d be able to start looking for a murder weapon, a murder location, and a murderer.

  The half a body looked slightly ridiculous laid out on a table at the morgue. The legs had been stripped, and a sheet laid over them. But that meant the whole body was under the sheet, leaving only the waist and wound visible. Half the stainless steel table remained empty and gleaming. The whole thing seemed way too clean. The morgue had a chill to it, and Hardin repressed a shiver.

  “I don’t know what made the cut,” Alice Dominguez, the ME on the case, said. “Even with the burning and corrosion on the wound, I should find some evidence of slicing, cutting movements, or even metal shards. But there’s nothing. The wound is symmetrical and even. I’d have said it was done by a guillotine, but there aren’t any metal traces. Maybe it was a laser?” She shrugged, to signal that she was reaching.

  “A laser—would that have cauterized the wound like that?” Hardin said.

  “Maybe. Except that it wasn’t cauterized. Those aren’t heat burns.”

  Now Hardin was really confused. “This isn’t helping me at all.” “Sorry. It gets worse. You want to sit down?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “It looks like acid burns,” Dominguez said. “But the analysis says salt. Plain old table salt.”

  “Salt can’t do that to an open wound, can it?”

  “In large enough quantities salt can be corrosive on an open wound. But we’re talking a lot of salt, and I didn’t find that much.”

  That didn’t answer any of Hardin’s questions. She needed a cigarette. After thanking the ME, she went outside.

  She kept meaning to quit smoking. She really ought to quit. But she valued these quiet moments. Standing outside, pacing a few feet back and forth with a cigarette in her hand and nothing to do but think, let her solve problems.

  In her reading and research—which had been pretty scant up to this point, granted—salt showed up over and over again in superstitions, in magical practices. In defensive magic. And there it was. Maybe someone thought the victim was magically dangerous. Someone thought the victim was going to come back from the dead and used the salt to prevent that.

  That information didn’t solve the murder, but it might provide a motive.

  Patton was waiting at her desk back at the station, just so he could present the folder to her in person. “The house belongs to Tom and Betty Arcuna. They were renting it out to a Dora Manuel. There’s your victim.”

  Hardin opened the folder. The photo on the first page looked like it had been blown up from a passport. The woman was brown skinned, with black hair and tasteful makeup on a round face. Middle-aged, she guessed, but healthy. Frowning and unhappy, for whatever reason. She might very well be the victim, but without a face or even fingerprints they’d probably have to resort to DNA testing. Unless they found the missing half. Still no luck with that.

  Ms. Manuel had immigrated from the Philippines three years ago. Tom and Betty Arcuna, her cousins, had sponsored her, but they hadn’t seemed to have much contact with her. They rented her the house, Manuel paid on time, and they didn’t even get together for holidays. The Arcunas lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and this house was one of several they owned in Denver and rented out, mostly to Filipinos. Patton had talked to them on the phone; they had expressed shock at Manuel’s demise, but had no other information to offer. “She kept to herself. We never got any complaints, and we know all the neighbors.”

  Hardin fired up the Internet browser on her computer and searched under “Philippines” and “magic.” And got a lot of hits that had nothing to do with what she was looking for. Magic shows, as in watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat, and Magic tournaments, as in the geek card game. She added “spell” and did a little better, spending a few minutes flipping through various pages discussing black magic and hexes and the like, in both dry academic rhetoric and the sensationalist tones of superstitious evangelists. She learned that many so-called spells were actually curses involving gastrointestinal distress and skin blemishes. But she could also buy a love spell online for a hundred pesos. She didn’t find anything about any magic that would slice a body clean through the middle.

  Official public acknowledgement—that meant government recognition—of the existence of magic and the supernatural was recent enough that no one had developed policies about how to deal with cases involving such matters. The medical examiner didn’t have a way to determine if the salt she found on the body had had a magical effect. There wasn’t an official process detailing how to investigate a magical crime. The Denver PD Paranatural Unit was one of the first in the country, and Hardin—the only officer currently assigned to the unit, because she was the only one with any experience—suspected she was going to end up writing the book on some of this stuff. She still spent a lot of her time trying to convince people that any of it was real.

  When she was saddled with the unit, she’d gotten a piece of advice: The real stuff stayed hidden, and had stayed hidden for a long time. Most of the information that was easy to find was a smoke screen. To find the truth, you had to keep digging. She went old school and searched the online catalog for the Denver Public Library, but didn’t find a whole lot on Filipino folklore.

  “What is it this time? Alligators in the sewer?”

  Hardin rolled her eyes without turning her chair to look at the comedian leaning on the end of her cubicle. It was Bailey, the senior homicide detective, and he’d given her shit ever since she’d first walked into the bureau and said the word “werewolf” with a straight face. It didn’t matter that she’d turned out to be right, and that she’d dug up a dozen previous deaths in Denver that had been attributed to dog and coyote maulings and gotten them reclassified as unsolved homicides, with werewolves as the suspected perpetrators—which ruined the bureau’s solve rate. She’d done battle with vampires, and Bailey didn’t have to believe it for it to be true. Hardin could at least hope that even if she couldn’t solve the bizarre crimes she faced, she’d at least get brownie points for taking the jobs no one else wanted.

  “How are you, Detective?” she said in monotone.

  “I hear you got a live one. So to speak. Patton says he was actually happy to hand this one over to you.”

  “It’s different, all right.” She turned away from the computer to face the gray-haired, softly overweight man. Three hundred and forty-nine days to retirement, he was, and kept telling them.

  He craned around a little further to look at her computer screen. “A tough-nut case and what are you doing, shopping for shoes?”

  She’d cultivated a smile just for situations like this. It had gotten her through the Academy, it had gotten her through every marksmanship test with a smart-ass instructor, it had gotten her through eight years as a cop. But one of these days, she was going to snap and take someone’s head off.

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Bailey,” she said. “Half the crooks these days knock over a liquor store and then brag about it on Myspace an hour later. You gotta keep on top of it.”

  He looked at her blankly. She wasn’t about to explain Myspace to him. Not that he’d even dare admit to her that he didn’t know or understand something. He was the big dick on campus, and she was just the girl detective.

  At least she had a pretty good chance of outliving the bastards.

  Donning a smile, he said, “Hey, maybe it’s a vampire!” He walked away, chuckling.

  If that was the worst ribbing she got today, she’d count herself lucky.

  Canvassing the neighborhood could be both her most and least favorite part of an investigation. She usually learned way more than she wanted to and came away not thinking very highly of people. She’d have to stand there not saying anything while listening to people tell her over and over again that no, they never suspected anything, the suspect was always very quiet, and no, they never saw anything, they didn’t know anything. All the while, t
hey wouldn’t meet her gaze. They didn’t want to get involved. She bet if she’d interviewed the Arcunas in person, they wouldn’t have looked her in the eyes.

  But this was often the very best way to track down leads, and a good witness could crack a whole case.

  Patton had already talked to the neighbor who called in the smell, a Hispanic woman who lived in the house behind Manuel’s. She hadn’t had any more useful information, so Hardin wanted to try the more immediate neighbors.

  She went out early in the evening, after work and around dinnertime, when people were more likely to be home. The neighborhood was older, a grid of narrow streets, eighty-year-old houses in various states of repair jammed in together. Towering ash and maple trees pushed up the slabs of the sidewalks with their roots. Narrow drives led to carports, or simply to the sides of the houses. Most cars parked along the curbs. A mix of lower-class residents lived here: kids living five or six to a house to save rent while they worked minimum-wage jobs; ethnic families, recent immigrants getting their starts; bluecollar families struggling at the poverty line.

  Dora Manuel’s house still had yellow tape around the property. When she couldn’t find parking on the street, Hardin broke the tape away and pulled into the narrow driveway, stopping in front of the fence to the back lot. She put the tape back up behind her car.

  Across the street, a guy was on his front porch taking pictures of the house, the police tape, her. Fine, she’d start with him.

  She crossed the street and walked to his porch with an easy, nonthreatening stride. His eyes went wide and a little panicked anyway.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t hurting anything, I’ll stop,” he said, hiding the camera behind his back.

  Hardin gave him a wry, annoyed smile and held up her badge. “My name’s Detective Hardin, Denver PD, and I just want to ask you a few questions. That okay?”

  He only relaxed a little. He was maybe in his early twenties. The house was obviously a rental, needing a good scrubbing and a coat of paint. Through the front windows she could see band posters on the living room walls. “Yeah . . . okay.”