Prey (4 page)

Pacific Court was a cul-de-sac, and 815 was the second house from the end, a small prefab that looked exactly like its neighbors in shape and design, as if someone had erected all these three-bedroom, two-bathroom dwellings with a large cookie cutter. Even the lawns, almost perfectly weed-free and cut so short they seemed scalped, looked the same. The only way to tell the houses apart, that he could see, was by the color, and 815 was painted an oddly pale, dull green, like the owner had been shooting for Army drab and ended up with a faintly pastel Martha Stewart Infected: Prey

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version of the color. In spite of the color differences, all the houses were painted in pale shades, as if bright colors were against the law.

Damn, he hated this place already, and he’d just got here.

There was a black and white in the driveway, and an ambulance that doubled as a discreet meat wagon behind it, but there was also a very plain silver-gray sedan that he knew to be an unmarked car. Probably Sikorski’s, as he didn’t like to be too obvious, although every slightly disreputable person on the planet knew an unmarked cop car when they saw it. Who did he think he was fooling?

Yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the backyard from the front, and a bored-looking beat cop stood near the back gate, and moved to intercept as he approached. He held out his ID to the kid, who was so young he still had a smattering of angry red acne on his left cheek. “I’m Roan McKichan, Detective Sikorski asked for me.”

The boy—who couldn’t have been more than twenty three—

squinted at his identity card as if he expected a fraud. He was gangly, a string bean of a cop, with his hair cut so short it was as buzz-cut as the lawn he was standing on, making his head look oddly square. His almond-colored eyes were almost lost in the shadow of his prominent caveman brow. He smelled of cheap aftershave and gun oil. “Oh, you’re the…” he petered off as he backed up a step.

Roan briefly considered yelling “
Boo!
” while mock-lunging at him, but he figured Barney Fife here would draw his gun and shoot him. So he settled for a withering stare that had the desired effect: the kid seemed to squirm in his police-issue shoes. He looked down at the ground as he held up the police tape, moving a few steps farther away from him. Roan sighed and shook his head as he ducked under the tape and proceeded through the gate to the backyard.

He paused as the scent of freshly shed blood hit him like a fist. Death rode its current, a sickly sweet smell like rot on top of shit, a disgusting aftertaste to the meaty, metallic tang of blood. It was hard to explain to people who had never smelled it before and didn’t have his sensitive nose.

Breathing through his mouth—a terrible proposition, since he got to taste it even more vividly—he continued onward, into the backyard. It was a small, enclosed space, fenced on three sides with those thin slats of plywood that always looked like Popsicle sticks to him. Why did people get those? They could be kicked in by a toddler, so it couldn’t be for 12

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security purposes, and they were as ugly as sin, so it couldn’t be for aesthetic purposes either. What was left?

There were a few shrubs, an overgrown juniper, a wild butterfly bush as large as a small tree, a birch in the corner with white, peeling bark, and a knocked-over green plastic garbage can, although the garbage had either been picked up or had remained inside it in spite of the upset. There was no obvious ingress: the cat had jumped the fence, or the victim had left the gate open or unlocked.

There was still some of the forensic team here; a short, stocky woman and a taller but equally stocky man in disposable white suits and latex gloves crouched on the poured concrete patio, doing something undoubtedly skin-crawling to the large stain of blood that had discolored the majority of the concrete.

Standing on the back lawn, amidst puddles of gore, was Sikorski, who waved him over. “Careful where you step,” he said, with what seemed to be an inappropriate smile. He was a tall man, a little too solid to be called lanky, although much of his weight was starting to settle in his gut. His hair was now wire gray, with strands of his driftwood-colored hair lost among the silver. His face was open and avuncular, the crinkles in the corners of his pale blue eyes making them seem kindly, like you just knew that in a game of good cop/bad cop, he was always the good cop. He was in his late forties, although he could pass for older or younger depending on how much sleep he’d gotten and what kind of day he was having. He’d obviously had much sleep, and in spite of his day starting with a grisly homicide, it’d otherwise been dandy.

Avoiding the unmistakable puddles of blood on the ground, he noticed a change in the taste of the air. Glancing down, he asked, “It killed his dog?”

Sikorski chuckled, but it was humorless. “Damn, you’re good. Only it wasn’t his dog, Sherlock, it belonged to the neighbors. Its name was Amber, and it was a pretty sizable Rottweiler mix, according to the real owners. We only found about a quarter of it, mainly guts and a back leg.

We’re still looking for its head. The neighbors claimed they heard nothing, not even Amber barking.”

“No one ever hears anything. I don’t know why you bother asking.”

He turned toward the patio, now vacated by the last of the forensics team.

The blood splash on it was enormous, a wine-dark stain that relegated the Infected: Prey

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true color of the concrete to the outer edges. “Took out the carotid and the jugular, huh?”

“In a single chomp, as far as we can tell. This sucker must have been a big one, ’cause Hank wasn’t a small guy.”

Roan glanced over his shoulder at Sikorski, studying him curiously, assiduously keeping the fear off his face. Paris was moving up continually on the suspect list. What was he going to do when reasonable doubt became a certainty? “You sound familiar with the victim.”

“I was. Well, I knew
of
him. His name was Hank DeSilvo, an ex-cop.”

“I never heard of him.”

Sikorski just shrugged, the shoulders of his slightly rumpled and wholly stereotypical trench coat barely moving. “He worked uptown patrol; you probably never ran into him. He retired out about two months ago.”

“He that old?”

“No, it was due to health issues. He’d been hospitalized twice for bleeding ulcers within the past six months, so he just hung up the badge.”

“Should guys with bleeding ulcers be drinking so much beer? I’m smelling alcohol in the blood, and somehow I doubt it was the dog.”

Again that humorless chuckle, one just north of a snicker. “That’s creepy how you do that. I don’t think it’s wise for a man with a bleeding ulcer to be drinking, but you’re right, he was; we found two empties and a third can, half full, on a coffee table inside the house. The TV was still on ESPN.”

Roan nodded, catching the splattered drops of reddish-black blood on the house’s siding. The blood’s spatter pattern seemed to indicate a quick, violent kill, a single throat bite severing several arteries at once—

another possible check in the tiger column. “What’s the story, so far as you can tell?”

Sikorski cleared his throat, and his voice dropped into its “just the facts, ma’am” register. “Hank was watching the tube, having a few, when he heard or thought he saw something in his backyard. He decided to confront it, and pulled out an illegally sawed-off shotgun. He came out, but before he could fire a shot, he was pounced on and killed. That’s our 14

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best guess at this point.”

“A pretty straightforward narrative. But even with a sawed-off, why would he come out here to confront a big cat, even if it was killing the neighbor’s dog?”

Sikorski shrugged with his hands, a helpless gesture that encompassed the crime scene. “You’ll have to file that one under the ‘I have no fucking idea’ category. If he’d only had three domestic beers, there’s no way he was too drunk to know better.”

“Maybe something else brought him out here?”

He snorted, his eyes twinkling with dark mirth. “With a sawed-off?

How paranoid can one man be?”

Roan met his gaze flatly, wondering inwardly if he’d ever turn Paris in. If Paris found out about it, he’d probably turn himself in, but Roan couldn’t see handing him over to the authorities. Not for an ex-cop’s death especially; that was a good way to get to kitty heaven right quick. “I’m really not the one you should ask. And the cat wasn’t wounded and didn’t mark its territory; I smell nothing beyond blood, death, and dog here. Am I done?”

“Not quite.” Sikorski turned and motioned one of the forensics team over—the stocky woman in the disposable jumpsuit, whom he recognized, seeing her straight on. It was her dishwater-blonde hair and penchant for tortoiseshell glasses that gave her away as Lise Slavin, the forensic tech everyone called “Slab.” That was apparently what passed for humor among the forensics people.

She brought over a plaster mold sealed inside a clear plastic bag, already marked and labeled as part of the evidence chain. It was a partial paw print, he could see it as Sikorski took it from Slab and handed it to him. “We got a partial print, left in bloody mud, but our so-called paw print expert left scratching his head. Do you recognize it?”

It was just a side of the main pad, and one and a half “toes”, but there was something odd about it. Maybe it was the simple distortion from stepping in mud, from the cast being made, or both, but the toe pads seemed almost thin, too close together, while the main pad seemed to indicate an almost heart-shaped curve. Not tiger, not if it was correct… but this was too partial, too inconclusive. He couldn’t say it wasn’t a tiger, not one hundred percent. He couldn’t say what it was.

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He noticed Sikorski staring at his hand. “What?”

Sikorski seemed slightly startled to be caught staring. “I was just wondering what that tattoo was. Looks kinda weird.”

Roan had it on the underside of his right wrist. Done in thick black lines, Paris had described it as looking like a woman’s hairdo done in a flip—it was a sinuous curve, almost an inverted U shape, starting with a low curl at one end, the curve rising slightly, and ending in a less elaborate curl at the other end. “It’s the symbol for the astrological sign Leo,” he explained, studying the cast closer. He wanted so badly for genuine proof that cleared Paris, it seemed like a universal slap in the face that all he got was “maybes.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize you believed in that shit.”

“I don’t.” He handed him back the mold and repeated, slowly this time, “It’s the
symbol
for
Leo
.”

It took a moment, but the penny finally dropped. “
Oh!
That’s what you are, right, your strain? Lion? I get it now. Explains the hair, I suppose.”

Roan scowled, and considered punching him, but as a general rule he didn’t punch men who had the ability to arrest him unless they really asked for it. Whenever he mentioned it or someone figured out he was a lion, the jokes about his hair ensued. He had no idea if there was a correlation, but the hair on his head grew in thick and fast; a severely short haircut would last maybe two weeks, and then he’d be back to what he had now, a shoulder-length “mane” of reddish-brown hair. (For some reason the hair on his face didn’t grow in that fast, but he was glad, or he’d have to shave five times a day.) Roan couldn’t bring himself to tie it back in a ponytail, he didn’t want to look like a dick, so he just ended up hacking most of it off every two weeks or so like clockwork. It was always growing back thick and fast, like grass on a grave. “Your paw print expert had no guesses to the strain?”

Sikorski handed the mold back to Slab, who took it without comment, remaining grim-lipped throughout. “No. He thought maybe cougar, but I’ve never heard of a cougar quite as big as we’re speculating.”

“Neither have I.” There were five separate strains, in order of commonality: cougar, lion, leopard, panther, and tiger. Cougars were common, and while just as dangerous as every other cat, didn’t do much in 16

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the way of collateral damage; on the other end, tigers were exceptionally rare, one in three thousand infected, basically, and mostly that was due to the fact that only one in ten tigers survived their first transformation. It seemed to be the hardest on the body, although there were some who thought it was some kind of built-in safety, since tigers were the strongest, most deadly, and caused the most collateral damage. (Whether you believed the “safety” theory or not depended on whether or not you believed that the virus was engineered, like the conspiracy theorists who first floated the idea.) A tiger could have easily eaten a Rottweiler, chewing its head like an ice cube. “Sorry Gordo, I don’t think I can help either. Let me know if something more telling turns up in forensics.”

He’d started walking away, casting furtive glances around the yard in hopes of catching something they had missed (something that screamed

“not tiger”), when Sikorski said, in a deceptively casual way, “Where were you last night?”

He froze, then after a moment when he let the anger come and ebb away, he turned to face the older homicide detective. “On a case, actually.

I was snapping pics of a cheating husband nailing his best friend’s secretary. They’re all digitally time stamped, if you’d like to check.”

Sikorski kept his expression easy and guileless, but Roan knew better than to trust it. “I doubt that’d be necessary, Roan. What about that… friend of yours?”

“Can’t say boyfriend? Lover? Fuck buddy?” he spat, with more rage than he anticipated. The lingering beat cop and the stragglers of the forensics team all looked back at him in varying degrees of surprise. He didn’t know if they were shocked he was gay, or shocked that he was so damn angry about it. But Sikorski’s expression remained placid, the smallest of insincere smiles curving his lips. “He was with me,” Roan lied, not sure what he was doing but still unable to stop himself. “He was following the secretary while I was tailing the husband.”

“Sounds like quite a case.” In spite of his pleasant expression, he caught a faint whiff of derision.