Blood Born

by Matthew Warner

  Sprawled on the floor next to the overturned cart of computer equipment, Dr. Sharma kicked at Daddy’s shins and yelled, “Securiddy! Securiddy!”

  Val clutched her bleeding breast and hissed from the flaring pain. She looked up to see the baby claw open the backs of Dr. Bowen’s hands.

  Screaming, Bowen dropped the infant on the floor. It landed nimbly on its hands and feet, then scurried for the door.

  Nearly everyone was screaming and cursing by now: Daddy as he sat on the floor, clutching his bruised shins, Dr. Sharma as he bawled for security, Dr. Bowen from his lacerated hands.

  The midwife, her face as white as a doctor’s coat and shaking her head, retreated until her back was against the wall. Val followed her gaze to the doorway, where she saw who had entered and was now stooping to pick up the baby. At that point, she shrieked so loudly and so long that her throat tore.

  Cradling the baby, the man-cat creature cleaned the baby’s face with a sandpaper tongue.

  It hesitated, then returned the baby to Val’s bed to resume breastfeeding.

  Val’s sobs ended moments later.

  Chapter 9

  Detective Randall guzzled coffee from her travel mug as she commuted westward down I-66 toward work. Since it was the evening rush hour, the High-Occupancy Vehicle restrictions mandating at least two occupants per car were still in effect, but she had nothing to worry about. Cops didn’t give other cops tickets. Normally, she wouldn’t take advantage of that unwritten code—she secretly disliked it—but tonight she was too angry at herself to care.

  I might not be a cop much longer anyway, she thought.

  There was no excuse for her performance earlier. First of all, why had she been working at midday, busy getting her ass kicked at the Gensler house, when she should’ve been home asleep? She worked the night shift. Coming in was error number one.

  Number two, and more serious, was allowing Heager to get his throat ripped out. If he died, then that would be yet another dead cop on her conscience—not to mention her reputation. She wouldn’t have the “Randall Shamble” to worry about anymore. Men would be too scared to come near her.

  And number three, of course, was traipsing like an amateur through the Cassandra Elliott crime scene behind the hospital parking lot. That alone was enough to put her in some mighty deep shit with the brass.

  A silver Camaro Z28 with a low-hanging muffler sped past her at least twenty miles per hour over the speed limit. Randall resisted the impulse to chase it. Although she was a detective, she still enjoyed pulling over aggressive drivers. But not tonight. No energy.

  She tuned her radio to WTOP to catch more of the police press conference.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Sergeant Lively was saying. “This individual—or wild animal—is one of a pair suspected in a series of sexual assaults throughout the McLean district. . . .”

  Randall shook her head. Well, at least she wasn’t the only one in trouble. Press conferences were usually handled by the Public Information Office and/or the chief of police. But the chief, already under scrutiny for the county’s unbridled growth of MS-13 gang activity, was shielding himself with underlings. Randall had seen it before: position those directly responsible for an investigation front-and-center in the public eye, and you’ll have a scapegoat when things go bad.

  Bastard. At least shit-can somebody who deserves it. Like me.

  It didn’t matter that she might have cracked this case open, what with identifying the possibility of two creatures and her theory about the bites. Things were still spinning out of control, and her sloppiness was only going to—

  Randall swerved to stay in her lane. “Damn.”

  Her attention was wandering. She was too tired. Always tired.

  The press conference was being held in front of police headquarters, so she entered through the police-only entrance in the back and parked among the rows and rows of cruisers. Mindless of the racket they were making, cops going on duty tested the different settings of their sirens. Most were headed inside for the night shift’s roll call, however.

  “Randall,” a voice boomed as she stepped out of her car.

  She faced the burly form jogging toward her and couldn’t help smiling. “Tucker. Didn’t recognize you without your veil. How was the Dumpster last night?”

  “Smelly. And just for that, you’re getting a hug.”

  Randall laughed as the big man encircled her in linebacker arms.

  “I heard what happened today,” he said as he released her. “Glad you’re okay. How’s your partner?”

  “Heager’s not my partner, and I don’t know. Last I saw him, he was headed off in an ambulance.”

  They started walking together to the back entrance. Randall winced and rubbed her arm. Tucker’s bear hug had sent a bolt of pain through the area where the creature had bitten her.

  “So,” she said, “did they not need you at the lab tonight—or did your moustache finally grow big enough to qualify for days off?”

  Tucker grinned as he opened the door for her. “Detective Baker asked me to stop by here and talk shop.”

  Randall groaned. “Oh, no. That guy hates me.” She gestured at the door. “After you.”

  “Sorry, I forgot you don’t like chivalry.” Tucker led the way in and began to thread the way toward the office area set aside for detectives. “Now why oh why could Mr. Stick-Up-His-Butt ever hate you?”

  “You mean besides hating me because I remind him of his sexual insecurities? I may have messed up his crime scene today. No, I did mess it up. There was a woman found behind the hospital with her throat ripped out. I touched her while making a cursory exam for an I.D. and cause of—”

  Tucker turned around so suddenly that Randall bumped into him. “You what? Didn’t I teach you anything?”

  “I know, I know . . .”

  “Forensic rules one through five: don’t touch anything.”

  “I know. I just had to—”

  “So tell me you at least followed rules six through ten.”

  “‘Write everything down’? Well, by the time I got around to that, Detective Baker showed up, and—”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Tucker walked off.

  Randall stood there in the hallway and let her shoulders slump. Damn. She had expected rebukes for her conduct, and that was okay, because none of them could sting as badly as her own. But from Tucker . . .

  He faced her from the other end of the hall, causing a patrol officer to bump into him from behind. Tucker, standing a full head taller than the other man and as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar, didn’t seem to notice. The other officer glared at him and stepped around on the way to the roll-call room.

  “What are you doing? You’re not gonna cry, are you?”

  Randall swallowed. That’s exactly what she was about to do. “No.” The last thing she wanted was to play into the female stereotype.

  Tucker returned to her. He raised his hands as if to hug her again but let them drop before touching her. “Look, I don’t know the details of what happened, only what you told me just now. It’s probably not that bad.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it.”

  “You’ve always been hard on yourself.”

  “And you’ve always called my errors for what they are.”

  “All right. You fucked up.” He smiled. “Better now?”

  “No.” But she smiled back.

  “Now what are you going to do—quit? Or go out and find this perp?”

  “Perps. There’s more than one.” Randall quickly wiped her eyes and continued down the hall.

  “Oh?” Tucker fell into step beside her. “Bring me up to speed.”

  She did. By the time she was done, she felt better—about herself and the investigation. She wasn’t sure how, but that was simply Tucker’s effect on her. He’d been her first supervisor and friend on the force, and talking to him always made her feel everything would be okay.

  Which was good, because what followed battered her emotio
nal resources back down to zero.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  To begin with, Randall could have screamed at her inability to extract information from the hospital about Heager’s condition. Was he in intensive care? Dead? Was he even there? They wouldn’t tell her a goddamn thing, citing federal patient-privacy law. She would just have to come into the hospital, they said. Well, that was fine. She was planning to go there anyway to check on the rape victims.

  The next frustration was the e-mail—from the chief of detectives, no less. At least it wasn’t from the chief of police, who was still busy out front thrusting Sergeant Lively at the TV cameras. The message was addressed to her and to Detective Charles Baker, homicide squad, and contained only one line: “Both of you report to my office at 0600 tomorrow, re: cases 110702SC49 thru 54 and 110707H14 thru 15.”

  Randall knew instantly that Baker had complained about her and this was the chief’s way of investigating. She also knew if the problem wasn’t worked out before the 0700 roll call for the day shift that the chief might just give up and suspend her, then let Internal Affairs figure it out. Chiefs didn’t have time for petty squabbles when there were real monsters running amok.

  She felt an urge to cry upon reading the e-mail—and that pissed her off more than anything. Ducking into the corner of her cubicle so no one could see, she covered her face and wept as quietly as she could until it passed. Her hands were ice-cold, like a dead person’s.

  Stop it. What’s wrong with you? You’re not normally this emotional.

  It was like she had pre-menstrual syndrome. Again, she worried her cycle was hopelessly out of whack. That morning, she’d agonized over whether she was ovulating too early, and now she wondered if her period was beginning only days after her last one.

  She needed sleep. She’d only had four hours.

  No, what she needed was to defuse this situation with Detective Baker. Randall lurched away from her desk toward the other side of the office area. It wasn’t a large room—just a dozen cubicles that detectives shared on a shift-alternating basis—so she reached his desk within moments. He wasn’t there.

  Randall’s day-shift cubicle mate, also on the sex crimes squad, was prone to cover their desk with sticky coffee circles Randall had to clean each night before starting work. As annoying as that was, though, at least he didn’t clutter the tiny space like Baker apparently did his own.

  Randall stared at Baker’s cubicle. She shook her head at the ostentatious display of college track-and-field trophies and departmental citations. A certificate from a DC homeless shelter thanked him for his generous service and showed a picture of him serving soup. Next to the computer monitor hung an eight-by-ten photo of Baker wearing a medal around his neck. She couldn’t determine what it was for but sensed that wasn’t the point.

  An officer passing by said, “Looking for Baker?”

  “Yeah, is he on duty tonight?”

  “He and Sergeant Tucker went into an evidence room. He’ll be back.”

  Randall thanked him and returned to her desk. She spent the next half hour doing paperwork and worrying. An e-mail arrived from the State Forensic Lab containing the DNA analysis of the semen recovered from Valarie Thompson and Sandy Giddes. The report confirmed the samples were from the same person . . . only it didn’t call the rapist a person.

  “NOTE: Sample appears to be animal in origin.”

  Randall frowned. “No shit.”

  Eventually, on one of her trips to refill her coffee mug, she glanced at Baker’s cubicle and found him sitting at his desk. She immediately detoured over there.

  Five steps short of her destination, however, she sneezed. The motion caused coffee to slosh out of her mug onto her slacks.

  Glad I’m already wearing brown.

  Without looking away from the newspaper he was reading, Baker drawled in his irritating Southern accent, “Bad cold you got there.” It came out sounding like Bay-ad cold ya gawt they-ah. “Did ya also sneeze on the victim’s body after you finished moving it?”

  “It’s allergies, not a cold, and I didn’t sneeze on the body. Didn’t move it, either.”

  Baker folded his paper and swiveled to face her. “That wasn’t what you said this afternoon. You said—”

  “I said I checked if she had a pulse, and then I turned her nametag over to read it. That’s not moving the body.”

  “Don’t give me that, missy. Any fool could see she was dead, especially a former homicide detective like yourself. The point is you did all that ’fore you so much as took a photo or made a sketch, or—”

  “Excuse me, I know what the hell I did or didn’t do. And the head of the Crime Scene Section has already instructed me on procedure tonight, so I don’t need your help.”

  “Sergeant Tucker?” (Saw-gent Tuckuh?) “Yeah, he says you’re a real firecracker.”

  Randall folded her arms, cup balanced on her flexing bicep, and tried to stay calm. “Look, I just came over to see if there’s anything I can do. Our cases are overlapping. I know we have an appointment with the chief tomorrow morning, so we might as well start working together now, and not—”

  “The appointment with the chief is to have him tell you to mind your own fuckin’ business, Randall. This is a homicide, not a rape.”

  He swiveled away from her.

  Randall clenched her fists and controlled the impulse to turn him right back around. It would’ve looked great on a TV show—except this wasn’t make-believe, and she needed to be professional. No, this situation was actually a great big joke: Charlie Baker, the most self-centered detective since Dirty Harry Callahan, getting sniffy with her for breaking the rules.

  “Look,” she said to his back, “Cassandra Elliott was murdered by my rapist. Haven’t you been listening to the news? We need to share information and not—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, missy. Case load management is handled by the chief, so you can just bring it up with him tomorrow morning. Now if you don’t mind, I need to finish a few important things before my shift is over.”

  Randall glared at the back of his head. Baker’s bald spot left an afterimage when she turned away.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She found Tucker standing at the rear of the roll-call room. It was crowded with uniformed officers sitting in tiny school-style desks or leaning against the walls. The high number of people meant they were working double shifts until this was over.

  Sergeant Lively, who looked even more tired than Randall (if that was possible) stood in front of a large map of the county, recapping his press conference.

  “. . . And thanks to Detective Randall, who just walked in,” the whole room turned to regard her, “we know there’s a high likelihood of a second creature on the loose. So, this is how I want to handle patrol areas tonight. . . .”

  As Lively started pointing at the map, Tucker motioned for Randall to follow him into the hallway.

  “You drink too much coffee,” he said when she joined him there.

  Randall glanced at her stained—and now empty—mug. She’d forgotten she was carrying it. “I wouldn’t have to refill it so quickly if I could just keep it in my cup.”

  At Tucker’s questioning stare, she showed him the wet spot on her thigh. He laughed. Then he led her into a side hallway where they could speak more privately.

  “That guy Baker really has it in for you,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m a firecracker.”

  If he noticed her sarcasm, he didn’t show it. “Listen, I’ve known Sam a long time. I’ll talk to him.” Sam was the chief of detectives.

  Randall shook her head. “I appreciate it, but you’ve bailed me out enough in my career. I need to handle this on my own.”

  Tucker sighed. He pointed his chin at the faint sound of Sergeant Lively’s voice. “What about him? Is he still giving you trouble?”

  “No, he’s actually been nice lately. It’s a shame he’ll probably go down in flames with me before this is all over.”

&
nbsp; Tucker shrugged his massive shoulders. “Okay then, if you’re sure you don’t need me . . .”

  “Come on, of course I do. You’re like a f—” She shook her head and tried to control the tremor in her voice. God, her emotions were so out of whack. “If you want to help, then tell me what Mr. Stick-Up-His-Butt had to say to you. Was it about Cassandra Elliott, the girl behind the hospital?”

  “I didn’t work that scene, but I’ve been briefed on it. No, our meeting was about that Dumpster vic I did in Pimmit Hills last night after I left your scene at the movie theater.”

  “Baker’s assigned to that one, too?”

  “He is now. The woman we pulled out—age seventeen, Caucasian—has bite wounds like your Cassandra Elliott.”

  “That’s our monster’s handiwork, all right.”

  “And she was partially eaten.”

  “Say what?”

  “Eaten.”

  Randall reeled. What the fuck? “Dammit. Baker should be conferring with me on this.”

  “Baker only confers with people when there’s ass-kissing involved. You know that.”

  “So what were you today: the kisser or the kissee?”

  Smirking, Tucker patted his butt. “I have another cheek if you’re interested.”

  “Sorry, but I have to save up for the chief tomorrow.”

  “Well then, while you’re smooching, you might mention something. The medical examiner says the Dumpster vic gave birth just before she died.”

  Randall’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t breathe for a moment as what he said sank in. “Really.”

  “Yep, and you can quote me on that. Now, I’ve never told Sam how to do his job, but it seems to me the evidence makes this a sex crime as well. So if Mr. Stick-Up-His-Butt’s withholding information from you, then I think you have a grievance.”

  Feeling grim satisfaction, Randall looked past her friend toward the doors that led back into the detective work room. “I do indeed.” She began to walk off.

  “Just a minute,” Tucker said. “There’s more.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Sergeant Tucker went on to tell her Detective Baker had cross-referenced the Dumpster victim’s physical characteristics—which included a distinctive yin-yang tattoo above one breast—against the Virginia, Maryland, and DC missing persons lists. Out popped a record for Frederica Wolford, a temp worker from Montgomery County, Maryland, who was reported missing by her roommates over a month ago. Baker showed the missing-person record to Tucker.