God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (8 page)

No one could be told anything unless John and Chief Harris both had the highest confidence in their abilities and discretion. There was to be absolutely no press. Harris had said that if anyone leaked, he would have their badge and their balls or tits on his desk within the hour they spoke. This was understood and accepted.

All of this was bad enough for John, but there was still something worse. Not so much that a corpse had laughed at him, but what it had said.

Munroe.

AJ Munroe.

What was all that about? As far as he knew, the kid’s name was Lancaster, not Munroe. Had he heard right? Or was the kid a liar? John supposed it was possible, but he really didn’t believe it. Besides, what purpose could possibly be served by lying to the police about his last name? He had to know they’d find it out.

Could AJ’s involvement in all this be just a case of mistaken identity? He hoped so, for the kid’s sake.

Just then Terrance Wills, a young, black man who’d just turned detective about a year ago, came out of Harris’s office. John liked him, respected his abilities. “Hey, Wills.”

Terrance looked around, finally spotting John, who waved him over.

“This is some kind of shit, man,” Terrance said.

The chief had just filled Terrance in on what had really went down, upon John’s request. If he needed help on this, it was damn sure gonna be with whom he wanted to work. Wills didn’t look well, looked a lot like John felt, in fact, like his whole world had just been blown into some entirely different orbit.

“Yeah, it is. You willing to work with us on this?” John asked.

The young detective swallowed hard and a new gleam came into his eyes.“Watcha need?”

Wills pulled a leather-bound notebook from his back pocket and flipped it open.

“Good man. Okay, you know that kid involved in this, the one we brought in earlier?”

Terrance nodded and John continued. “Good. Dig up everything about him. Check his driver’s license, his Social, run a check on his prints, everything. And one other thing.”

“Yeah?” Wills asked, looking up from his notes.

“Find out the connection between him and the last name of Munroe, I’m not sure of the spelling, so check ’em all. If there’s a link, you find it.”

John watched as Terrance wrote the name MUNROE in his book, underlining it three times.

“Yes, sir,” Wills said. “I’m all over this one. I’ll have what you want before I go home, or I don’t go home.”

John slapped him on the back. “Thanks, T. This is why you were my number one pick.”

Terrance smiled at the compliment and hurried off. John watched him until he turned a corner and was gone and then leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, covering his face with his hands. He was shaking, and trying not to vomit, doing everything he could to hold it together just a little longer.

He thought of Jin Makoto and Todd Bowden. He thought of where Jin was now, exiled to some little house in the middle of nowhere. His name had been scrubbed from the Bowden case, which was
illegal
for one thing, and just fucking
wrong
for another, and all because he hadn’t been able to let things go. What bothered John Lubbock was that he was that same kind of cop. Until Jin, that tenaciousness had seemed like an asset. Now? After Jin, and with what had just happened?

More and more it was seeming like a fucking liability.

* * * * *

The phone rang. AJ sat up and looked around, still halfway asleep. The phone rang again. He rubbed his eyes and coughed to clear his throat, picked up the phone, and pressed the TALK button.

“Hello,” he said, hoping it was Clover.

“Is this AJ Lancaster?” It wasn’t Clover.

“Who wants to know?”

“Detective Quidman. I’ve been transferred to your case and I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me.”

“Oh. Well, yeah. What do you need?”

“The name Munroe mean anything to you?”

AJ hadn’t heard that name in a long time and was sort of stunned to hear it now. “Munroe? Uh, why?”

“Well, something came up and I wanted to check it out with you.”

“What came up?”

There was a brief pause. “The man from the gas station? That name, Munroe, was on a list in the attacker’s pocket, along with several others. All the rest had been crossed off, and that one was at the bottom.” This was a complete lie but AJ didn’t know that. Just as he had no idea that the voice on the other end of the phone was not a cop. Not even close.

“Well, it does mean something, actually. I’m adopted. That was my birth name, Munroe.”

“Have you had any contact with your birth parents lately?”

“Not fucking likely. They died when I was six months old.” AJ knew that all this was on record. He knew the police could look it up any time they wanted and was a little pissed at being woken up for this.

“Okay, I appreciate your time.”

“Wait a minute--” he started to say but the line went dead. He looked at the phone and hung it up. It seemed like an odd way for a cop to operate.

The clock on the wall read 2:30 in the afternoon. He decided that he might as well get up and shower, when there was a knock on the door.

“Hold up,” he called and put on a pair of pants and a shirt that didn’t stink. He walked back into the front room and opened the door.

“Detective Lubbock?”

“Yeah, so? Listen kid--”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this list?” AJ asked, a slow anger starting to build in his chest.

“List? What list?”

“The guy I just talked to on the phone said the guy that came after me at work was carrying a list with—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, kid.
Who’d
you just talk to?”

“Detective Quidman?”

“Quidman?” Didn’t ring a bell. John was getting a bad feeling but that seemed to be a trend lately. “What did he want?”

“Asked me about a name.”

“What name?” But John already knew.

“Munroe,” AJ said, and when he said it, Lubbock heard that dead woman’s voice echoing it in his ear.

“Sit down, kid. We gotta talk.”

“Lemme put some coffee on first. You want some?”

After he poured two mugs full and handed one to the detective, AJ sat down on the couch and recounted the phone conversation. He could sense the detective knew something big that he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Maybe something huge.

“First of all, kid, I’m positive there’s no Detective Quidman on the force and I know for a fact that the guy who attacked you wasn’t carrying around any such list. The name of the corpse is James Bradley. Ring a bell?”

AJ thought about the name for a second and then shook his head. “No. Who is he?”

“I didn’t think so, it’s not important. What uh, kid, what I really wanted to talk to you about was your neighbor.”

“Yeah?”

John watched as AJ’s hand crept toward the circle of bruises on his throat and he was certain AJ wasn’t even aware of what he was doing.

“Well, this ain’t gonna to be easy to tell you, and it’ll be a helluva lot harder for you to hear, but bear with me, all right?”

“Okay,” AJ said with a feeling like a rising tidal wave welling up inside him.

“Kid, she’s dead.”

The wave of anticipation broke, leaving nothing but the crusted seafoam of disappointment in its wake. “Yeah, I was here, remember?”

“Kid, stay with me here. We think, no, we
know
, we have forensic evidence, in fact, that before she came to your door, she’d cut her wrists in the tub—”

“Come on!” AJ said. “My fucking
finger
went
inside her arm
, remember? I
told
you that. I
know
she slit her wrist.”

“Okay,” John said, seizing on this. “I remember you telling me that. Remember what you said? How you told me it felt when your finger went in there?”

“Yeah.”

“You said it was cold, right? Like putting your hand in a turkey that’s been thawing a couple hours?”

“Right.”

“Okay,” John said. “Think about that. Now listen, kid, and holy fuck, do
not
interrupt me again, because I don’t know if I have the energy for this. I been up close to thirty-six hours now, and I still have a ton of shit to do, so just listen to me, okay?”

AJ nodded.

“Okay, kid, she slit her wrists and bled out. She had been dead for maybe six hours before coming to your door.”

“What is this?”

“I’m not done, kid.”

“What is this shit, detective? Some sick fucking joke down at the station?” In his heart, AJ knew otherwise.

“Oh I wish it was, son,” John said. Had he ever meant anything more? “But you better calm down and you better listen, because, well, just…just look.”

At that, John bared his neck, showing AJ the nasty red marks that hadn’t been there last night when they’d talked at the station about what had happened with Karen. John began the story, with the coroner telling him Karen Rosenthal had been dead for close to six hours, and ended with the shooting. He told AJ the name she had said just prior to being shot in the head.

AJ was taking it all surprisingly well. He sat there on his end of the couch, shell shocked and silent, staring blankly at a TV that wasn’t on, trying to let all this new and hideously twisted information be either accepted by his brain or rejected.

There was a loud knock on the door, startling AJ out of his daze and bringing John to his feet. The detective’s gun was out before he knew he was going to draw it, and he stepped to the door, peering through the peephole. He breathed a sigh of relief, putting his gun back in the holster. John unlocked the door and opened it, letting in a uniformed officer.

“What’s the word?” John asked.

“You’re supposed to come back to HQ,” the younger man said, then jerked a thumb at AJ. “Bring him, too.”

John nodded and closed the door as the other man left. The coffee AJ had given him seemed to be kicking in a little, pulling him out of the daze John’s news had left him in. The two of them walked outside and got in John’s Ford.

AJ wished he’d never woken up that morning, that he’d just slept through until all this crazy shit was over with. But no. Here he was, riding in an unmarked police car that stank of old fast food and cigar smoke.

No way. No way in hell,
AJ thought.
All this, it’s impossible.

Yet, John assured him it was true. John didn’t strike AJ as the sort of guy who ran around believing tabloid trash like this but he was apparently a very strong believer in…well, in whatever this was.

The overwhelming idea that he’d somehow been grossly misinformed about the natural order of things wouldn’t go away. People would change their religions over this, hell, they’d drop everything and invent new ones.

If it happened last night, would it happen again? And had it
happened before
?

I can’t believe I’m putting stock in this horseshit
, AJ thought. But there was a part of him that hadn’t been there before, a part that
wanted
it to be true. It was like a long-dormant instinct awakening, shaking the years of hibernation from its mane and getting ready for war.

AJ now sat in a room with three plainclothes detectives and the chief of police himself, Don Harris. The chief was a huge, square-jawed man with features that looked as though they’d been poorly carved from a block of granite. His black hair was shorn close, Marine style, and he had a case of serious cauliflower ear from his years as a corp wrestler.

Then there was Terrance Wills, and next to him was a redhead named Steve Nielsen.

John made the introductions.

“Why don’t we start, kid, by telling us about the name Munroe,” John said.

All the eyes swiveled to him and his mind threw up an image of a firing squad taking aim. AJ cleared his throat, not sure if he would be able to speak until he did. “My parents died when I was six months old.”

Of course, he remembered none of the story he began to tell, it was what he had gleaned from other sources, facts that people had told him and an old newspaper clipping he still carried in his wallet. It had been the middle of December, the family was going Christmas shopping. The three of them got into the car, AJ in a baby seat in the back, his parents in the front. The roads were icy and snow was falling.

Their station wagon had been hit head-on by a van less than a block and a half from home. The only survivors had been the man driving the van, who was piss-drunk at nine in the morning, and AJ. He was told his dad lived for two days in the hospital. Being so young, and having no other relatives to speak of, AJ was adopted quickly by Hal and Gina Lancaster, who had legally changed his last name to theirs.

Finally, Don Harris leaned back in his chair; it groaned briefly in protest of the man’s size. He was six-foot-six and built solid as a brick.