Kiss Me Deadly

by R. Lee Moore

  The woman had been bitten, that much was obvious, but none of the marks looked like killing bites. Like whatever had done this hadn't been looking to kill her so much as it had been toying with her. Tearing her apart like a chew toy. The bites weren't what killed her, Tamina decided. It was the blood loss. The only release this woman had gotten was when she'd bled out, and it looked like she'd suffered for quite a while until she got there.

  “Excuse me!“ one of the uniformed officers snapped.

  Tamina waved him off and held up her badge without averting her gaze from the corpse.

  “Martinez. Supernatural Affairs,” she said. “What we got here?”

  The men and women around her muttered and grumbled amongst each other. Tamina was only able to pick up bits and pieces of the conversation as she really wasn't paying attention. What she did hear though confirmed the reaction she had expected. They weren't happy. Local PD never liked when people like her showed up. There was always some jurisdictional pissing contest going on. She had neither the time nor the interest to get involved anything like that.

  “We didn't call you,” a voice growled at her.

  Tamina looked up to the squat looking man in a rumpled suit glaring down at her and gave an attempt at a friendly smile.

  “Yet here I am,” she replied. “You the Lead here?”

  “Lieutenant Decker,” the man said shortly. The tones of his voice told her exactly how much he enjoyed finding her at his crime scene. “You mind telling me what you're doing here screwing around with my body?”

  Tamina turned her attention back to the body and tugged the sheet a little further down. Just enough to confirm that the woman was completely naked under the sheet. The odd thing was, the woman looked as if she'd been bleached clean. It wasn't just the lack of blood, which in and of itself was odd, it was the lack of anything. After what she'd likely gone through, and then being dumped into a dirty alleyway like the woman had been, she should have been covered in filth, yet she wasn't.

  “Just looking at the moment,” Tamina said over her shoulder. “You got anything yet? ID? Cause of death. Last should be pretty obvious, but you never know.”

  “No,” Lieutenant Decker snapped. “Nothing. She's been scrubbed clean. Can't you smell the bleach or whatever it was they used? Goddamn everywhere.”

  That was where that antiseptic smell was coming from, Tamina thought to herself. She looked back up to him with a weary yet slightly aggravated expression. He was one of those types, she realized. Territorial. She really hated people like that. She was going to have to squash whatever he thought was going on here before it got in the way of her getting anything useful.

  “Look,” she said. “I'm not here to step on your toes or steal your case away from you Decker. Got it? But this looks to me like a werewolf took a few bites out of her and that kinda makes this my business whether you like it or not. But I'm going to try to be nice, so I'm just gonna ask a few questions, take a look see, and then I'll get out of your way and let you do you. It's all yours. Deal?”

  “Fine,” Decker said crossing his arms over his chest.

  He looked like an angry goblin when he did that, Tamina thought, but at least he was willing to talk. It was a start.

  “So, werewolf,” she said. “Anything else? Vampire bites? Any other shapeshifter marks anywhere?”

  “Inner thigh,” Decker grouched.

  Tamina turned her eyes back to the corpse and tugged the sheet a little more down to expose the dead woman's legs. She carefully probed the area, parting the woman's legs just enough to see the faint scars running from her groin to just above the knee. There were small puncture marks all up and down the pale skin, but they weren't fresh. No, she thought to herself, these were old scars. She wasn't sure how old, but they weren't recent as far as she could tell. There were a lot of them though.

  “Wow,” she said under her breath. “Looks like this girl was into some freaky stuff. Doesn't look like it was a one time thing either. This girl was into being bitten.”

  “She was a vampire freak, so what,” Decker said with a distasteful curling of his lips. “See them all the time coming in and out of the Preserve whoring themselves out to the first bloodsucker that looks at them. Ain't nothing special.”

  “Don't doubt it,” Tamina said over her shoulder. “Good place to start looking though.”

  She never understood the attraction herself, but the Preserve tended to attract a lot of people who were into that sort of thing. Hell, a whole industry had sprung up to cater to not just the tourist crowd, but the darker more hardcore element of the population. The kind of people who willfully sought out the undead for all sorts of carnal pleasures.

  “What about this?” Tamina asked.

  She'd spotted a faint marking on the woman's wrist. She couldn't quite tell what it was though. It could have been a tattoo, a stamp from a nightclub, or even a brand for all she knew, but it looked interesting enough to take note of. It looked like a circle made from a pair of wolves chasing each other, but it was hard to be certain. The lines were jagged and looked almost bestial. Like they were made from claws instead of ink. It reminded Tamina of one of those tribal tattoos people were always getting. Interesting and worth taking note of even if it turned out to be nothing.

  “Probably something she picked up in the Preserve,” Decker snapped. “Are you done?”

  “Almost,” Tamina replied. She took her phone from her pocket and snapped a few quick pictures of the mark and the woman's face, wounds and all. “Anyone see anything?”

  Decker glanced over towards the crowd of onlookers at the edge of the perimeter, then gave an aggravated slow shake of his head.

  “No one's talking,” he said.

  Tamina glanced over in the direction he was indicating and nodded her head. Seemed like just a good of a place as any to start and get the ball rolling.

  “Right,” she said. “Well, I'm gonna call this in and put my name on it.”

  Decker's demeanor immediately shifted. He tensed up and his eyes turned cold and hard. Like he was barely able to suppress the explosion of rage that had just been set off inside him.

  “Relax,” Tamina said rising up to her feet. “I just want to be able to take a look at anything you find is all. I'll do a bit of looking around myself, but it's still your case. You call all the shots. Just let me know when you get an ID on the victim.”

  “You gonna share too or do you think this is all going to go one way only?” Decker demanded. She couldn't blame him for asking. He's probably had enough experience with the Department to know how things usually went. Better than she did in any case.

  “Gimme a contact card,” Tamina replied. “If I find anything I'll let you know.”

  Decker grumbled, but dug into the inside of his suit coat and fished out a business card and offered it to her. Tamina took it and stuffed it into her back pocket with a smile.

  “Not looking for credit,” she assured him as she turned and started walking back towards the edge of the taped off area. “Just looking to find out what happened is all. Keep a little problem from becoming a big problem.”

  Decker might have said something else, but Tamina wasn't listening. She was already laser focused on the crowd that was doing everything they could to see everything that was going on beyond the caution tape. There were always those kinds of people around any accident or crime scene. The same type of people who slowed down to gawk at a car crash. Annoying, but mostly harmless. Most of them had probably shown up after the fact, but Tamina was betting on some of them having been here before the cops had shown up. Someone had to have seen something.

  Most of the crowd didn't pay any attention as she marched right up on them. The ones that weren't interested in her weren't the ones she was after anyway. Decker had looked over this direction when he said no one was talking, so the people that saw her coming right at them and started to go the other way were the ones Tamina wanted to talk to.

  There were two men, Hi
spanic by the looks of them. Couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, but old enough and experienced enough to recognize what was coming at them. Good, Tamina thought, it'd make them easier to get information from.

  “Hey!“ she growled out after them. Both men bolted off into the crowd the moment she'd opened her mouth. Why did they always run? “Get back here! I just want to talk!“

  “No habla,” one of them shouted over his shoulder as both men picked up the pace to get away from her.

  So that was how it was going to be, Tamina thought. Awesome. An attitude like that opened up and gave her a whole lot of options that made her job a lot easier. It confirmed her suspicions about the two of them too. These two had seen something, and now all she had to do was get it out of them.

  Most people in the civilian world didn't deal much with Supernatural Affairs. Unless they were victims or were involved in various illegal activities involving the supernatural, most people had no reason to talk to anyone in the Department. Even the news tended to ignore their activities unless it was something out of the ordinary. It meant the public didn't really know how to deal with someone like Tamina when they met them.

  Because of that, most folks tended to make the same erroneous assumption that Supernatural Affairs officers were just like every other flavor of law enforcement with all the rules and restrictions that your everyday police officer had to follow. That might have been somewhat true in a general sense, but there were a few key differences that most people didn't expect and weren't prepared for. The use of force for example. Supernatural Affairs had a pretty wide latitude when it came to that.

  Tamina caught up quickly to the two men and didn't hesitate or waste time with any formalities. Playing nice wasn't going to get her anywhere, she reasoned. She grabbed the first by the back of his hair, jerked him back and drove a hard closed-fist strike into his exposed jaw that spun him down to the ground. The second guy froze the moment he saw what had just happened to his friend. That bit of hesitation gave Tamina all the time she needed to kick his legs out from under him and drop him where he stood. Before he could even react he was down on the pavement gasping for air. Tamina knelt down hard on the man's chest, putting all her weight onto her knee and leaning in close enough that she could stare directly into the man's face.

  “If you only knew how little coffee I've had this morning you wouldn't have tried pulling that crap on me,” Tamina said with a growl in her voice. “Let's try this again then shall we. I just want to talk to you, but I'm open to alternatives.”

  The young man began choking out a long string of rapid heavily accented words that Tamina couldn't understand. She recognized a word or two here and there, but for the most part it all sounded like a garbled mess to her. The frantic high-pitched tone of his voice told her however that she'd gotten his attention. That was a start.

  “Uh-uh,” she said with a glare. “I don't speak Spanish or Nahuatl. I do know all the bad words though, so you better watch it buddy. English, I know you speak it. Right?”

  To emphasize her point, she rapped her knuckles sharply into the man's skull right between his eyes. It wouldn't hurt him, but it would keep him focused.

  “Y-yeah,” he stuttered out.

  She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned just in time to see the other man slowly stumbling up to his feet. Before he could fully get up, he found himself staring down the barrel of a rapidly drawn heavy pistol that was aimed right between his eyes. The metallic click of the safety being removed widened his eyes and he hastily raised his hands in surrender.

  “You-you can't do that?” the other man complained.

  “Yeah, I kinda can,” Tamina replied. “And unless you want me to splatter you and your friend here all over the pavement, why don't you move over here to where I can see you without giving you my back. And don't try anything. Believe me, I can kill you both before you even make a move.”

  “Man, this is some bullshit,” the man whined.

  The look on the man's face almost made her laugh. In between winces of pain there was this outraged and highly offended look plastered all over his face. He'd expected her to be like Decker's people and just let him walk away without telling her what she wanted to know. Being kicked to the ground had thrown him a little, and he was having a hard time sorting the situation out in his mind. He was doing what she told him though, so that was at least something. Even if he didn't fully understand what was going on, he did understand the heavy .45 pointed at him. That was kinda hard to miss.

  “Yeah, yeah. Keep moving,” she said with visible impatience. She turned her attention back to the man on the ground and gave an unfriendly smile. “You saw who dumped the body didn't you?”

  The man gave her a defiant look. A look that lasted just long enough for Tamina to give him a light tap on the forehead with her pistol.

  “Ow ! Stop. I ain't telling you anything,” he said. “This is police brutality. You can't do this.”

  Tamina gave a short, dark laugh.

  “Problem with that is, I'm Supernatural Affairs not LAPD,” she said. “You see the woman over there that they're hauling away right now had werewolf bites all over her. That means that her death falls under those fancy new Mankiller laws they just passed. You know something, and you're going to tell me what that is, and if not, I have full legal authority to do whatever I think is necessary to change your mind. You're gonna talk, it's just a matter of what I get to do to you to make you talk.”

  The man beneath her took a deep gulp of air and his eyes widened considerably. He'd likely heard about the new laws and what they meant, so the realization of what was happening and what that meant for him was just starting to hit. The look in Tamina's eyes probably helped in that quite a bit.

  “Bullshit,” the man flailed. “We didn't do anything. We weren't a part of that! You can't do that!“

  Tamina smiled.

  “Supernatural investigation,” she said with a slow emphasis. “Means that withholding information from me legally puts you in the same category as whoever did do this.”

  She thumbed the hammer of her pistol back, and made a show out of locking it in place and letting that ominous metallic click echo in the air.

  “Makes you just the same as a werewolf, vampire, or whatever else there is out there in the eyes of the law. With the exact same consequences,” Tamina said.” No muss, no fuss. Just a straight up old school execution out here in the street. And that's just if I want to be nice about it. Are you feeling me?”

  The man's eyes widened and both of them began shaking and trembling. The full weight of what she had said dropping right down on their heads. Perfect, she thought. It was always so much easier when people understood the situation. She wouldn't actually shoot him, he still had information she needed after all, but he didn't know that.

  “Okay, Okay,” the man sputtered. “We saw it. Ease up man! We saw this van dump her in the alley then drive off. That's it.”

  “It's a start,” Tamina said. “You get a look at who was inside? Happen to catch the plate number?”

  “Nah man,” he replied shakily. “It was dark still. Couldn't see anything. You gotta ease up. Seriously. We're the ones who called it in.”

  “And yet you refused to talk to the nice officers over there,” Tamina said. “Kinda suspicious if you ask me. You two Cartel or something?”

  “Ah hell no. We ain't got anything to do with them. We just didn't want to get involved,” the guy spat out quickly. “We were the ones who called it in. Just didn't seem right to leave her there like that though you know.”

  “Dunno,” Tamina said gravely. “Still seems like you're holding back.”

  “Hey look, I might have gotten a little look at the plates,” the other man offered hopefully. “Not all of it, though. They were in and out of here fast. Didn't have much time.”

  Tamina smiled, let up a bit of the pressure of her knee on the man's chest, rode the hammer on her pistol forward and jammed the whole
thing back into her holster. Progress, she thought. That wasn't so hard.

  “Alright, you two are going to give me everything you have. Everything,” she said. “Then you're going to go over to the nice lieutenant over there and tell him the same thing, aren't you? All of it. Every word.”

  Both men vigorously nodded their heads in agreement.

  “Good,” Tamina said sweetly. “Now start at the top. Tell me what you saw. All of it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tamina had thought that Lieutenant Decker would have been more grateful for the information she'd managed to get from the two young men. He was, he just wasn't all too thrilled with the methods she used to obtain that information. The fact that Decker and his LAPD officers had to deal with and keep back the very unhappy crowd that suddenly gathered around to witness her interrogation techniques probably had a lot to do with that. It probably hadn't helped when Tamina had dismissed and brushed aside the Lieutenant's and the crowds obvious disapproval and anger at her hands-on approach. There were a lot of cell-phone cameras pointed in her direction the whole time. She made sure to smile and give them her good side. They didn't like it, and she didn't really care. Civilian law enforcement and Supernatural Affairs were two different animals. The sooner people realized that the better, she thought.

  She gave up on dealing with the whole situation when Decker had been forced to call for backup from the other officers in the area, and headed back to her car leaving him in mid-rant to deal with the crowd. It was his problem, not hers. She had more important things to do. Throwing open the door and dropping halfway into the driver's seat, she switched on the dashboard mounted radio and scooped up the Mic.

  “Dispatch, 220-Victor,” she said into the Mic. “Mendoza you there?”

  A few moments later Mendoza's cold disinterested voice came back over the radio.

  “Hey, I got some pictures on my phone,” Tamina continued. “I need someone to take a look at them and see if we can get an ID on the victim and this mark she had on her arm. Give me an address I can shoot them over too.”