“I think she’s glad to be
alive. She really loves Luc.” She caught his expression in the mirror. “Lord
Lucan. Sorry. I gotta stop doing that. For a while there I was calling him
Skywalker, you know, just to make Sam laugh? Then he heard me one night, and
I had to explain, and then he borrowed all my Star Wars DVDs so he could see
who Luke Skywalker was.” She rolled her eyes. “Then he said if I was going
to make fun of him, he wanted to be called Lord Vader. You should hear him
do the breathing sounds. He cracks me up.”
Jamys tried to imagine
the deadliest Kyn ever to walk the night jesting with this young mortal.
Obviously Lucan had changed, perhaps for the better, as Alexandra had
insisted.
“Anyway,” Chris
continued, “we’re almost there.” She turned onto the coastal road that
paralleled the seashore, and drove south through a snarl of cars and
wandering pedestrians. “Listen, if you ever need to get away from the whole
jardin
thing while
you’re here, just ask for me. Lord Vader lets me drive this monster whenever
I
want, and
I have a gas card and a VISA with no credit limit, so I can take you to do
whatever you like.” She pulled into a private parking spot in front of a
nightclub, the doors of which were guarded by two large, dark Kyn warriors.
“Just keep it in mind, okay?”
Chris didn’t wait for an
answer, but got out of the car and came to open his door for him. Jamys took
her hand as he climbed out and held it for a moment.
Thank
you, Chris.
“Sam.” The voice belonged
to her supervisor, Captain Ernesto Garcia. “I need you and Rafael to head
downtown.” He gave her an address of a popular bistro. “Tenderson will meet
you there.”
A murder at a beach café
at the busiest time of night guaranteed the next eight hours would be
nonstop hell. “What happened?”
“It’s not clear yet,”
Garcia said. “A couple of college kids found the remains of a young adult
male in a men’s room stall. From the condition of the body, it may have been
stolen from a grave.”
“Did the kids see who
dumped the body in there?”
“No,” Garcia said. “They
both say the same crazy thing. They swear they saw the corpse walk into the
restroom ahead of them.”
Rafael drove as Samantha
went over the sketchy report made to Garcia, and by the time she finished
the call they had arrived at the bistro. After wading through a throng of
onlookers trying to see what was going on inside the club, Sam spotted two
FLPD bike patrolmen taking names and contact numbers from the small crowd of
patrons who had been herded away from the restrooms and headed their way.
“Hey, Andy. Josh.” Sam
waved them over. “Can you give me what you have so far?”
“We got the call an hour
ago. Those two” – Andy nodded at a pair of stiff, silent young men sitting
at the bar – “discovered the body and called in the manager. Lucky for us he
had the sense to lock up the john and keep everyone out of there.”
“Guy’s been dead for a
while,” Josh added, “but the patrons who saw him insist that he walked in
here alone.”
“Maybe he did.”
“Not this time, Sam.”
Andy gave her a strange look. “You’d better go look at the body.”
Sam verified that the
assistant medical examiner was en route before she went back to the restroom
and ducked under the band of yellow tape stretched across the open door way.
The smell of decomposition that hung over the thin, still form on the floor
was so strong that after her first breath she had to blink a few times to
clear her eyes. Fortunately she didn’t have to breathe now that she was Kyn,
or she suspected she would have puked on the spot.
The corpse lay on his
back, his body dressed in a strange-looking two piece rust orange suit with
contrasting white stitching around the cuffs and wide lapels. The victim’s
face appeared to be made of shriveled, gray wax, with the lips drawn back
from two rows of yellowed teeth and the clouded eyeballs sunk deep in their
sockets. Both hands were contracted into curled claws, and the shoes had
fallen off the man’s bony feet.
Whoever he was, he had
died long before his body had been placed here.
Sam crouched down to look
at the visible wounds. His throat had been cut sometime in the distant past,
judging by the appearance of the neck wound, as had the inside of both
wrists. There was not a speck of blood on the body, the clothes he wore or
the floor of the men’s room.
Before Lucan had changed
Samantha from human to Darkyn, she had been able to touch the blood of a
murder victim and see in her mind the last minutes of their life. Being made
a blood-dependent immortal hadn’t changed her ability, but had rather
enhanced it. She had become acutely sensitive to the presence of blood, even
in the tiniest amounts.
Her talent told her the
dead man did not have a single drop left in his collapsed veins.
Her partner came into the
restroom and closed the door. “The assistant medical examiner will be here
in a few minutes, my lady.” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he came
to stand on the other side of the body. “I have not seen a suit like this in
thirty years.”
“No one’s worn them since
the seventies.” Sam leaned in close to examine the jagged edges of the
laceration on the victim’s neck. “At least we know how he died, whenever
that was.” There should have been blood all over the victim’s clothing, but
the old suit was spotless. “They must have redressed the body.”
Rafael turned his head
and walked over to the trash can by the sinks. He moved it aside and picked
up a knife. “Perhaps not.” He handed it to her.
She examined the blade,
which had a black plastic handle and an oddly familiar grip. No blood
stained the steel, but bits of gray flesh clung to the serrated edge. “Why
cut the throat of a corpse? And why dump him here, in such a public place?”
“A ritual. Perhaps a
warning to the owners.” Rafael methodically searched through the suit until
he extracted an old, battered leather wallet and opened it. “He has a
Virginia driver’s license. It expired in nineteen seventy-four. His name is
Wilson Robert Carcher.”
She bagged the knife and
considered the victim’s perfectly-trimmed bowl-like hair style, which
resembled what the Beatles had worn when they had first invaded America.
“What’s his date of birth?”
“December third, nineteen
fifty-two.”
“He’s certainly not
fifty-six.” She studied the waxen features. “He had to have died young.” As
she said that, the door to the restroom swung open.
“Why don’t you open his
mouth and check his teeth?” a snide voice asked.
Sam looked up at Evan
Tenderson, who looked as if he’d slept in his clothes, smelled like a breath
mint, and sounded like a cow chewing it’s cud. The assistant medical
examiner had given up cigarettes over the summer and now compulsively
masticated nicotine gum. “He’s not a horse.”
“Watch and learn,
Detective Brown.” He pried open the victim’s mouth and aimed a penlight
inside. “See those lumps in the back of his jaw. Those are his wisdom teeth,
and they weren’t removed, and they haven’t erupted. That puts his age range
roughly somewhere between sixteen and twenty at TOD.” He picked up the right
hand and straightened the fingers before he removed a ring. “He was a high
school grad – class of seventy.”
Sam offered him an
evidence bag. “So he might have been eighteen when he died.”
“That’d be the safe
money.” Tenderson continued examining the body before he stood. “I’d like to
know what the hell he was kept in all this time.”
“You don’t think he was
buried?”
“Aside from the obvious
Ode de Necrophilia, I don’t see any incisions indicating that he was
embalmed,” he told her. “Without proper chemical treatment, bacteria would
have eaten him up back when Nixon was President.”
“He might have been
frozen,” Rafael said.
“If they put him on ice
in the seventies, by now the tissues would show signs of freezer burn.”
Tenderson stood. “I’ll know more once I finish the autopsy.”
“Fax a copy of the
driver’s license up to Virginia,” she told him. “See if they have any for us
on him.”
Samantha left the
restroom and went over to the pair of college boys who had found the body.
Both were staring the direction of the crime scene with haunted eyes.
“I’m Detective Brown,”
Sam said as she sat down with them and took out her PDA. “I know you’ve
already told the officers what happened, but I’d like to ask you some
questions, if that’s okay?”
The boys exchanged a look
before they nodded.
“What brought you here
tonight?” she asked.
“We always eat before we
go to down to the clubs,” the younger one said. “At the pizza place,
usually, but it was packed and we didn’t feel like waiting. We figured we’d
come in here and grab a burger.”
Sam jotted down some
notes. “Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
“No. And we didn’t have
anything to drink,” the older boy said, “and we’re not high.”
“She isn’t going to
believe us, either, Mark.” The younger one regarded Sam. “We saw the guy
come around the corner from the public parking lot on third street. He was
maybe half a block ahead of us when he came in here. But he was alive,
lady.”
Sam began to wonder if
the whole thing might be some sort of ghastly practical joke. “Why do you
believe that that the body you found in the restroom was the man you saw
walk into the restaurant?”
“He was the only one
wearing that weird retro suit and the helmet hair,” Mark said. “I even said
to Leo, that guy must think he’s Austin Powers or something. But he didn’t
look dead, the guy we saw come in. He was pale, but he wasn’t . . .” he
glanced at the men’s room. “Like that.”
Sam doubted the body or
the man the boys had seen could have fit through the restroom window. “Did
you see anyone else or look in any of the stalls in the men’s before you
came out to get the manager?”
“I don’t know.” Leo
frowned. “I don’t think anyone else was there. The smell was so bad, we got
out pretty fast. I think maybe all the doors to the stalls were hanging
open.”
“You think the guy we saw
pulled some kind of switch?” Mark demanded. “Like to freak us out?”
“We’re not sure what
happened. Are either of you in any trouble? Have a fight with a friend,
anything like that?” When the boy both shook their heads, Sam leaned closer
and shed some of her scent. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Mark’s expression turned
somewhat dazed. “I wish I could ask you for your number. You’re really
pretty for a cop.”
Leo shifted closer. “I
thought I smelled something right before I went in the john.”
“What did you smell?”
“Something hot and sweet.
It reminded me of the circus.” He swallowed. “It made me feel strange. Like
I needed to eat.”
“The chef was making spun
sugar in the kitchen for one of the desserts,” Rafael said as he joined Sam.
“The kitchen is on the other side of the restrooms. If anyone else asks what
you smelled, that is what you will say.”
Leo’s tense expression
relaxed. “Sugar. Desserts. Kitchen.”
“Excuse us, guys.” Sam
took her partner’s arm and led him out of earshot. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged. “The young
one may mention the scent to another mortal. He needed a reasonable
explanation for it.”
“So instead of finding
out what the source was, you planted a phony suggestion in his mind?”
“I already know the
source of the smell,” Rafael said, startling her. “What he describes is the
scent of a Kyn lord hunting. Someone unknown to us has come into our
territory.”
“Someone who hunts
thirty-year-old corpses? He must be pretty hard up for blood.” She rubbed
her eyes. “Look, I don’t want to stomp on your new theory, Rafe, but not
everything is about the Darkyn.”
“This is.”
“Then why didn’t we pick
up the scent?” she demanded. “I can smell Kyn a mile away, and so can you.
There should have been some trace left on the corpse.”
“I agree, but that is not
all. I took this off the body before the medical examiner could retrieve
it.” He handed her an old passport. “According to the stamps, the victim
left America to travel to Europe in nineteen seventy.”
“So Wilson took a trip
after graduation.” Sam felt impatient. “A lot of kids do. That doesn’t
prove—”
“The stamps indicate that
Wilson has been traveling all over eastern Europe for the last thirty-eight
years.” He opened the passport to the last page. “And that he returned to
the states a week ago.”
“He’s not Kyn.” She
stared at the restroom. “Is he?”
“I think he was hunted by
Kyn, who left him in that condition.” He took her arm