Inhuman: Detective Chase hunts an animal who protects his own

by Nathan Senthil

  Tyrel looked menacing. Apart from being a serial killer who had murdered around thirty people, there was something else about this guy. Something alarming. Not just torturing his victims to death. There was something else. Something more profound than anger and sadism. Something primal, a rage so hot it didn’t burn red like a forest fire, but white like a broiling sun. Gabriel wouldn’t want to confront this guy alone.

  Why did Noah choose him?

  Tyrel was from a town called Apex, North Carolina. He didn’t finish high school, had no arrest records after juvie, and had no income except the two months’ pay from an insurance company in New York City. That was the only time he had ever been in New York, so that’s when he must have met Simmons. Tyrel killed Woo two months after he left New York. That might be why it was impossible to place him in South Korea. The bastard Noah had trained Tyrel by then.

  But how did Noah find out that Tyrel was a violent psychopath? The juvie record must have drawn his attention, but how could he have known for sure?

  On Madeline’s desktop, Gabriel researched Noah’s passport number. It had been stamped the same day Tyrel had gone to Berlin. Did Noah join up with Tyrel and kill Mila? No way. Noah would never risk anyone knowing his secret. He had somehow suspected that Tyrel was a potential serial killer, and he’d followed him to Germany to make sure. If Gabriel had reserved any doubt about Tyrel’s guilt, it was gone after learning this. Now all he needed to do was find Tyrel.

  But that’s where the real work began. Noah coached him after Mila. It wouldn’t be easy to find someone who had been taught how to escape the police by Mr. Bunny himself.

  “We’ve got him in Germany and Canada.” Emma took the last sip and put the cup on the table. “That makes him at least a person of interest.”

  “It does,” Gabriel said.

  “Now what? Are we going to hand it over to the FBI?”

  “They won’t bother. Even if Conor put aside our differences of opinion—”

  Emma scoffed. “Does feeding someone a knuckle sandwich count as a difference of opinion?”

  Bill giggled, but didn’t turn from the bookshelf.

  Gabriel bit his teeth. “The best Conor would do is make it public, and Tyrel will burrow himself even deeper.”

  “Even deeper?” Emma said. “What makes you say he’s hiding in the first place?”

  “Yes. One day he ups and changes his name? Why would he do that?”

  Emma frowned and shook her head.

  “He’s screwed up,” Gabriel said. “But it wasn’t him who found out where. Noah did. And he taught him how to not screw up again. Then he helped Tyrel change his name, got him a new ID and passport.”

  “So Tyrel started acting like a fugitive even before anyone went after him?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “But isn’t that great? We have his picture. The FBI could catch him if they went public.”

  “I wish it were that simple. Tyrel must have changed his name fifteen months ago. That’s when Woo was killed. He’s had enough time to have created many backup plans. That is, if his tutor hadn’t already given him a few watertight ones. But we all know how charitable Noah was. Tyrel would disappear from the face of the earth if we went public. We have a long list of things to do before catching him, and being sneaky is at the top.”

  “But we still need the FBI’s help, don’t we? I mean, to find the killer’s identity we were enough. But to find where he’s hiding…?”

  “I agree. But we need something strong before calling them in. A bargaining chip.”

  “Are we going to go after him on our own?” Bill said.

  Gabriel couldn’t say there was no we after what they had sacrificed for him.

  “What else do we know about Tyrel?” Emma said.

  “Born to Benjamin and Melinda Boone. High school dropout, unmarried, no trouble with the law after his release from juvie. Boring stuff. Things get interesting in the finances. Benjamin’s bank account had been depleting from six figures to low fours for the past twenty years.”

  “Spending on what?”

  “Animal care things, like food and supplies. At the end of 2017, around fifty thousand was deposited in his account. After a little digging around, I found that Tyrel had sold his father’s potato plantation. He’s withdrawn all the cash, and poof, gone. No trace of Tyrel after that.”

  “So… what now?” Bill said.

  “We gotta start looking where the trail’s gone cold. We’re headed to where it all began.” Gabriel walked to the bed, picked up a bag he had packed the night before, and slung it over his shoulder. “South.”

  “Shotgun!” Bill said.

  Chapter 30

  April 10, 2019. 11:24 A.M.

  Bill’s 1969 Camaro jerked as it ran over a bump, waking Gabriel, who lay on the backseat, using his forearms as pillows.

  The air scissoring by the car’s body, the engine’s reverberation, and the rumble of tires on tarmac sang a monotonous ballad. For some, it was nauseating. While for others, it was a white noise that drowned somber realities. For Gabriel, road trips were synonymous with fun. He believed the connection between long journeys, wanderlust, and hope was rooted deep in the minds of every living being capable of migration. It was calming to look out at landscapes scoot past, knowing one was heading to a new place. Maybe it had been hardwired into our systems.

  Beast, Emma’s pug, rested on Gabriel’s chest. Its soft, pulsating underbody was warm against his T-shirt. Sometimes the warmth felt so sudden it prompted Gabriel to lift the little dog and check if he had soiled himself. He never had. There was no one back at Emma’s house, and she didn’t trust her little dog with strangers. So he tagged along in their hunt for a hyper-violent serial killer. Gabriel hoped the tiny jaws could bite if it ever came to that.

  “Why did you have to bring that thing, Em?” Bill said. “He is small and ugly, and his head is all wrinkly.”

  “So? He sounds exactly like your pet, Mr. Useless.”

  “What? I have no pet.”

  “I thought men named their penises.”

  Bill took a few moments to grasp the joke. “Oh, fuck you.”

  Emma snickered. “Don’t fight it, Billy Boy. It’s easier to just accept that you’re stupid and live with it. Do us all a solid, okay? Don’t breed.”

  “I ain’t stupid,” Bill said to the windshield.

  “You sure about that? I mean, what kind of a dumbshit rides shotgun in his own car?”

  “I didn’t know yours was due in the workshop.” He grinded his teeth.

  “Gotta hand it to you, though. This ride is sweet. The spacey legroom, the smooth transmission, the velvet-like upholstery—it’s heavenly to drive. The steering wheel is like the softest thing I’ve ever touched.” With a sly smile, Emma looked at Bill from the corner of her eye. “Which I’m sure is what your ex must feel about Mister Use—”

  Bill hit Emma on her shoulder. “Get off my back, asshole!”

  Her mouth gaped, and then she raised one palm in defense while attacking with the other—forgetting that four lives counted on her not being a facetious douche. The car swayed, and Beast jolted awake, his little nails digging into Gabriel’s chest.

  “Where are we?” Gabriel said.

  “Passing Baltimore,” Emma said. “An hour out from the capital.”

  Gabriel hadn’t expected to sleep through two states when he let his eyelids close in Staten Island.

  “Hey, Detective Chase?” Bill swiveled around. His face lit up and eyes widened as he smiled. “Don’t you think it’s awesome that we’re on the trail of a dangerous criminal, just like our dads are going after Lolly right now?”

  Gabriel nodded, unwilling to think about Joshua and get depressed. Since he didn’t add to the conversation, Bill turned back with his head low and smile weak.

  Emma said, “I texted Kate that we’re going to North Carolina. She said there are some pretty scenic routes we can take from Virginia to North Carolina instead of the
worn-out highways. What do you say?”

  “Fine by me,” Gabriel said.

  As they exited Washington D.C., rather than continuing on I-95, which was the shorter route, she took a right on I-66.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, they entered a town the GPS labeled Front Royal. The Camaro’s bumper stopped in front of a boom barrier, the post of which was built into a small kiosk. Two trees flanked it on either side of the road, and their lush branches hung low and formed an arch over the checkpoint. A billboard between them read, WELCOME TO SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK.

  A lanky old ranger exited the lone booth and came towards the car, carrying a small notebook. He tipped his cowboy hat as he neared Bill.

  “Howdy?” Bill said.

  The ranger narrowed his eyes and gave Bill a look he must have reserved for a special kind of stupid.

  In an accent that was music to Gabriel’s ears, the ranger said, “I see y’all traveled a long way from home to get some nature in you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bill said.

  “We like to keep it that way.”

  “Okay…?”

  “We have a Leave No Trace policy. Some city folk are real irresponsible. So we humbly ask everyone who passes here not to discard plastic waste, light campfires, and to kindly bury your excrement.”

  “Sure, sure. Never forgot to dig a poop-hole smack-dab in the middle of Times Square.” Bill giggled and elbowed Emma, who jutted her lower jaw and blew air upward as she rolled her eyes.

  “I’d keep the smug and sarcasm out, too.” He tore a sheet from his notebook and handed it to Bill.

  “And why should we pay this? Isn’t nature free?” Bill passed the paper to Emma.

  “Nature is, but park maintenance ain’t. We’ve got to clean the—”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Emma said. “My kid brother is not well up there. He has a serious case of assholery, and unfortunately it isn’t curable. Best if you ignore him.” She leaned over and handed him a five-dollar bill. “Here. Thanks.”

  Skyline Drive was a breathtaking two-lane road ascending above the first of a chain of mountains that stretched down to Tennessee. Sharp bends, hairpin turns, and a few wild hopping deer unnerved Gabriel. Though he wouldn’t swear by Emma’s ability to concentrate and drive responsibly, which made him skittish on blind corners, he was, for the most part, mesmerized by the expanse of the forest on the other side of the guardrail.

  The sun receded behind the roiling ocean of green hills. Its light slowly pulled away, like it had fallen in love with the glistening treetops but the earth’s spin was tugging them separate. Gabriel read somewhere that it took thousands of years for the light to travel from the sun’s core to its surface, but only eight minutes from there to earth. For the quattuordecillion of photons to have gone through all those fiery obstacles to finally reach a place like this, Gabriel would say it was worth it.

  He caught himself before he continued any further with the obscure thoughts and concentrated on what was outside. Men and women in biking gear cycled along. Water bottles, beer cans, and burnt wood dotted the roadside.

  “You are a vegan, aren’t you?” Bill broke the long silence.

  “Vegetarian,” Emma replied. “I can’t give up cheese or ice cream.”

  “I can’t give up hamburgers and bacon.”

  “That’s your choice. I’m neither gonna judge or show some slaughter video and guilt-trip you into giving up your way of life.”

  It amazed Gabriel how easily they had fallen into a pattern within such a short span. They knew when one was joking and when one was serious.

  “You aren’t, but some crazy guy is killing innocent people for selling animal products.”

  “I can understand Tyrel’s side,” Gabriel said.

  He needed to contribute to the argument instead of being selfish and gazing at the awe-inspiring landscape outside.

  “But it’s not up to us,” he said. “It’s never been up to us.”

  “What isn’t?” Bill turned and faced Gabriel.

  “To act as judge and jury. Half the murders we deal with have motives we can all relate to, but we do our jobs—not unlike drones—to implement the law. Sometimes, even though you’ve made an ethical choice and served your purpose, you’re left with a bitter taste in your mouth.”

  “I guess I can understand his side, too,” Bill said.

  “You do?” Emma eyed him suspiciously.

  “Yeah. Tyrel is like a savior to animals, and he thinks he is showing us the error of our ways.”

  “If changing the world is his goal,” Gabriel said, “the way he chose to go about it is wrong, Bill.”

  “How come? Murdering people seems like a pretty good way to scare the public into following his principles.”

  “We humans are in the billions. That’s a lot. As a species, it’ll take time for us to grow. We’ve roamed the planet for the last two hundred thousand years. But racism was criminalized only recently, and it is a long way from being abolished. Take same-sex marriage. Only in the last decade or so did it become socially acceptable.”

  “True that,” Emma said. “My dad stopped talking to me when he learned I was unable to cure my disease. Fucking asshole.”

  “It’s not his fault that he’s heteronormative.” Gabriel shrugged. “It’s the nature of evolution. We take our time in righting our wrongs, because we are large in numbers, with diverse cultures, languages, and whatever schisms that make it difficult for us to progress at a uniform rate. Not everyone can change an outlook they’ve followed from infancy. If you are gay in Alabama or Mississippi, people just give you a bad look during Sunday service. But if you are gay in Syria, you get thrown off a roof.”

  “So we punish the people who don’t follow the new rules, obviously,” Emma said.

  “That’s not how it works. If you prohibit large portions of people from doing what they’d been doing forever, by shoving laws down their throats, like you said, war is what we get. As bitter a truth as it is, we can’t change everything wrong with us quickly. I eat bacon, I enjoy omelet, and I certainly prefer chicken nuggets over broccoli—”

  “I do, too,” Bill said.

  “But I could be wrong to do so. Maybe in five thousand years, no one will use animals for any reason. Not because it has been criminalized, but because people think it’s immoral. Those future generations will regard us like how we look at our witch-burning ancestors.”

  “That’s… harsh,” Emma said.

  “But also the truth. Take, for example, the Inquisitors. By torturing people in creative ways, they actually believed they were doing God’s work—bringing the heretics back to faith and saving them from hell. That it was justifiable. They wouldn’t have done it if they thought it was wrong, because we humans are good by heart.”

  “Most.” Emma lifted her hand from the wheel, and as fate would have it, at a dangerous-looking bend, which released a dozen butterflies in Gabriel’s stomach. “Don’t forget the crazy bitch that drowned her newborn in the bathtub, Gabe. You said it still gives you nightmares.”

  “Yeah, sorry. You’re correct. Most humans are good. Our morality wouldn’t let us do things it deems unjustifiable. So what we accept as justifiable is what really matters. You can never stop a man with laws when he believes in his heart that he is in the right. He would fight till death for it. It’s worse when most of society stands with him.”

  “So we just go with the flow?” Bill said. “Let injustice happen?”

  “Nope. You have to be the change. You protest, file petitions, and create awareness. In these times of blogging, YouTubing, and Tweeting, the world’s never been more accessible. You potentially have billions of people who would listen to your rant, and the like-minded individuals among them will be unified and actually do something.”

  “Hm. That sounds super-easy.”

  “And you should be ready to accept that change is slow, and you might not even live to see it. Hell, your great-great-grandchildren might not
live to see it. But you got to believe that one century or the next, the thing you fight against will finally go out of practice, and that you played a minor part in it.”

  “Hm. That sounds like a really long time,” Bill said.

  “But that is one of the solutions. Not torturing the alleged malefactors to their deaths. It’s what a radical element would do, and Tyrel is nothing but a very sick man. His mind is twisted, and he should be locked in a cage.”

  “See, Em?” Bill elbowed her. “This is why I love Detective Chase.”

  “This is why you guys should totally hook up.”

  Gabriel shook his head and looked back outside.

  * * *

  The foursome parked at a sandwich stall crowded by hikers at the Riprap Trailhead. Gabriel left Beast in the backseat and cracked a window before getting out. They stretched their legs and backs and used a wooden shack at the edge of the clearing that the hikers said was a toilet. Emma bought two corn sandwiches with fries, and a Mountain Dew. For the other three, Bill got chicken instead of corn. Emma went to the car and opened the door to feed Beast, but stopped and called out to Gabriel.

  “What?” He strode towards her, sensing the concern in her voice.

  “Where’s my dog?” She threw daggers at him with her gaze.

  He leaned into the backseat. Beast wasn’t there. And to be sure, he looked at the front seats and footwell. Nope. The small dog wasn’t in the car. He pulled out, bit the corner of his lower lip and shook his head.

  Had he lost Emma’s pet?

  He observed the crime scene, and within seconds, found how the sneaky pug broke out. The window, which he’d cracked for Beast was now halfway down.

  “I swear I rolled the window only a few inches down. Your dog must be powerful.”

  Beast barked and ran toward them. He was coming out of a bush beside the shack they had just used for a toilet. Oh, he needed to empty his bladder, too.

  “How did you get out?” Emma scooped the dog from the ground.

  He answered his worried mom with a lick.

  “I am sorry, Em,” Bill said. “The windows in the back don’t work well.”