Stake

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Halfway through the second martini, Lexi realized that Blair was excited about something, like a kid with a surprise. He was holding back some juicy information.

  ‘All right, what’s up, Blair? There’s no point in keeping it secret. I’m good at rooting out mysteries.’

  ‘Ha, you caught me.’ He picked up the TV remote and switched it on. ‘I recorded something on the local news while I was cooking us dinner.’ He scrolled down the menu of recorded programs and selected the one he wanted. ‘You would have found this on your own, but I’m so glad I get to be the one to share it with you.’

  Lexi savored the warm buzz of the martini as she watched the news story about a local man who was found murdered with a stake pounded through his heart. ‘Wow. That is right up my alley.’

  ‘What are friends for? I know you so well.’

  Death by wooden stake. Lexi knew she had to investigate this further. Vampires in Colorado Springs? The TV station’s website should have further information, and she had other back channels that would provide more details. She set down the half-finished martini. ‘Wait right here. I’ll get my laptop so I can stay halfway sociable.’

  Blair gave her a frown of disapproval. ‘I’d rather you were entirely sociable.’

  Not rising to the bait, she brought her laptop to the sofa and called up HideTruth. Before she could look into the discussion group, she found a delightful admin alert. ‘The tip jar runneth over!’

  ‘Your patron again?’ he asked.

  ‘Hugo Zelm. He really wants to believe – to the tune of a thousand dollars. Same as last month’s donation.’ Zelm was an eccentric local philanthropist who had been a fan of her site for more than a year now and offered regular contributions to keep HideTruth afloat.

  Blair raised his martini in salute. ‘If it keeps going like that, you’ll be able to pay your own expenses and won’t need a housemate anymore. Then where will I be?’

  ‘Don’t pout. I’ll always need a housemate so long as you cook dinner and make me martinis.’ She patted his hand.

  ‘You’d miss me the moment I was gone.’ He drained his drink. ‘But if Mr Zelm is going to subsidize us, then I’ll switch to that most excellent Breckenridge vodka instead. It’s the cost of business.’

  ‘You’re allowed.’ Lexi took another sip, distracted by her laptop. In the vampire thread several people had already posted about the stake murder. It was time to dig into the gruesome details.

  SIX

  In the autopsy room, Detective Carrow watched as the medical examiner went about her work. Bright lights illuminated the cold, pale body of Mark Stallings who lay on the stainless-steel table, his pajamas cut off with sharp clothing shears. Watson hummed as she approached the corpse like a gourmand about to tuck into a multi-course feast.

  A man on the table with a stake through his heart wasn’t the only thing strange about the situation. With the election coming up, Dr Orla Watson had commandeered part of the room as headquarters for her campaign to be re-elected as El Paso County Coroner. Lawn signs were stacked in a corner, and neat piles of bumper stickers covered part of her desk next to a brown sack lunch and bottle of iced tea.

  Watson noticed Carrow’s attention. ‘You can take a bumper sticker and a lawn sign if you like, Detective. You’re satisfied with my work as ME, right?’

  ‘Not sure your approach is the best way to get votes,’ he said. ‘But I’ll grant you points for originality.’

  ‘Oh, Walter gets all the credit for the jokes.’

  Dr Watson’s husband fancied himself a stand-up comedian and managed to book a few gigs at local clubs. Instead of a dry and straightforward Vote Orla Watson for County Coroner, Walter had decided to add a little humor. People are dying to vote Watson for County Coroner! And Don’t be a stiff! Vote Watson for County Coroner.

  ‘You know how hard it is to get anyone to put up lawn signs and show their support for this office?’ she grumbled. ‘Medical examiner isn’t one of those big publicity elections. I wish someone would tell me why I have to spend time on a campaign. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Power of democracy,’ Carrow said. ‘The people get to choose.’

  ‘It’s all rigged.’ Watson snorted as she paced around the autopsy table. ‘People are easily duped by a shiny new story or some scandal. Explain why it makes a difference whether the coroner is a Democrat or a Republican?’ She pressed a finger to the shoulder of the corpse, testing the pliability of the skin. She nodded down at the body. ‘He certainly doesn’t care.’

  ‘Better wrap this one up soon, in case you don’t get re-elected. I hate loose ends.’

  Watson had already filled out the victim’s vital statistics, as well as the core body temperature which determined the time of death at between one and three p.m. on Monday. CSPD officers were knocking on the doors of the Serenity Hedge apartments, asking if the residents had seen or heard anything suspicious in that timeframe. One harried Air Force mother with three kids thought she’d seen an electrician or cable TV guy around the complex, but couldn’t be sure. An old apartment building like Serenity Hedge had no security cameras.

  Dr Watson bent close to the dead man’s face as if she intended to kiss him. Still humming, she pried open his eyelids, looked at the lifeless eyes, then pulled up Stallings’ lips to show his teeth. ‘I wanted you to verify this, Detective.’

  Carrow looked down at the dead man’s mouth. ‘And I’m seeing … what exactly?’

  ‘Nothing, which is exactly the point. No fangs. I just thought we should make sure.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘My husband’s the comedian.’ She picked up the left hand, then the right, inspecting his fingertips. ‘Note also, no monster claws.’

  ‘I applaud your thoroughness. You’re sure to win the election.’

  Distracted, she looked up at the ceiling, considering. The fluorescents were bright, supplemented by movable floodlights above the table. With a long-legged stride, Watson went to the wall switch and flicked off the lights, plunging the room into shadows, leaving only glimmers of daylight through the closed blinds. She tugged on the cord to open the blinds, releasing a flood of bright sunshine.

  Carrow held a hand in front of his face. ‘What’s that for?’

  After looking at the body on the table, the coroner directed a long-suffering sigh at him. ‘Don’t you know anything, Detective? We needed to make sure he doesn’t crumble to ash under the purifying rays of the sun. More proof he’s not a vampire.’

  ‘Good thing it’s just me and you in here. You actually going to write that in the report? People will think we’re crazy.’ He didn’t mention the garlic he had found in the victim’s cupboard.

  ‘Could be, but I guarantee you somebody’s going to ask about vampires.’ Watson’s lips quirked in a smile. ‘Besides, it’s good to take precautions before I pull out the stake. What if he comes alive again?’

  ‘I’m more convinced about the gang angle. Still haven’t found the head of the drug dealer killed the other night. Seems like the same sort of message.’

  He felt tired, although the coroner seemed to be having a grand time. Watson’s good cheer weighed on him. He never thought anyone would brag they were ‘born to be a coroner’, but he knew Watson was fascinated by the human body.

  Watson wiggled the wooden stake like a child playing with a loose tooth. ‘It’s wedged in there good and solid.’ She rocked it harder, twisting the wood until it finally came loose with a wet pop. Dark, sticky blood clotted the end. ‘Nice, sharp point.’ She laid the stake aside for tagging and collection in an evidence bag. Again she paused, counting to ten. The sunlight covered the body’s chest and the gaping wound in the sternum. Stallings didn’t twitch. She let out a sigh. ‘Good. Wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to lunge up and attack me before I made my Y cut.’

  Carrow wasn’t particularly squeamish – not after seeing the mangled stumps and horribly tortured victims of Chop Chop early in his career. Wa
tson cut open the body, removed and weighed each internal organ. Her work was time consuming but thorough.

  ‘Not really any question about the cause of death is there?’ he asked.

  She looked up at him, distracted. ‘If I don’t perform and document every step, some conspiracy nut will claim we’re covering something up.’

  She removed the liver and the heart and made notations while she engaged in small talk. ‘Are you going back down to Pueblo for the Green Chile and Frijoles Festival? It’s that time of year. Get yourself a bushel of fresh, charred green chiles?’ She held up her blood-drenched gloves and smiled as if savoring an imaginary meal. ‘Walter and I shuck the skins off, then freeze the peppers in individual packages so we can make chile rellenos or green chile stew all winter long. You should take your daughters to the festival. They’d love it.’

  ‘I doubt that beans and chiles would be the most exciting activity for a parental visit. I don’t see the girls often enough as it is.’

  After the divorce, his ex-wife LeAnn had voluntarily moved back to Pueblo, which proved – in his mind, at least – that she was batshit crazy. He felt sorry for the girls, but with the dreary townhouse he lived in now, he couldn’t do better for them up here. It wasn’t as if he could charm them with stories about finding dead bodies with stakes through the heart. He visited his daughters whenever he could, but the forty-five-minute drive was just enough of a chore that it required actual planning instead of a spontaneous drop-by, a fact that LeAnn appreciated very much.

  When Watson finally finished the autopsy, she looked down at her notes, clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘It’s all perfectly routine, Detective. The blood work showed no obvious abnormalities. High cholesterol, remnants of statin drugs, ibuprofen. Basically normal.’

  ‘Except for the stake through his heart,’ Carrow said.

  ‘Sure, except for that.’ Watson bent close to the wooden stake in the metal tray beside the body. She turned it over to look at a feathery fringe of bright green paint just visible in one of the cracks. ‘This might be something, though.’

  Carrow had noticed it before. ‘Paint from a lumberyard. They all use it.’

  ‘Not bright green. Most use orange or red. I’m pretty sure D&R Lumberyard off West Fillmore uses green paint. I remember because Walter used them a few months ago when he tried to build a deck in the back.’ Her lips quirked in a smile. ‘That was funnier than any of his comedy routines. I told him he should work the material into his next set.’

  ‘D&R … I know the place.’ Carrow shrugged. ‘At least it’s a starting point.’

  ‘You should come and see my husband’s act sometime,’ Watson said. ‘He’s doing an open mic this Saturday.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t make it. If I’m going to the Green Chile and Frijoles Festival, I better keep the schedule open.’

  She clearly didn’t believe him. ‘Don’t forget to take a lawn sign when you go. Show your support for my campaign.’

  ‘A sign on a wooden stake? How about something a little smaller?’ He chose a Don’t be a stiff! bumper sticker and left before she could talk him into taking more.

  SEVEN

  Sitting on the sofa with her laptop, Lexi kept Blair company as he cooked dinner. He liked having her there.

  ‘Stir-fry tonight. Chicken and shrimp.’ His hands were a blur as he peeled carrots, chopped bok choy, celery, and green bell peppers. He threw minced ginger and garlic into the wok where it hissed and sizzled in hot peanut oil.

  If Lexi hadn’t already been sitting down, the delicious smell would have made her knees weak. ‘You take good care of me, Blair.’

  ‘Only because you don’t take care of yourself. If you don’t stay healthy, then I’ll have to move and find a far less appealing housemate.’

  ‘Let’s keep things as they are.’

  ‘Good. I’d prefer that.’

  She continued to dig for information on the stake murder. The Colorado Springs Police Department had been very cagey about releasing details on the victim, but Lexi had back doors and gray-area resources. Her followers on HideTruth had already plunged into a frenzy of speculation and theory-based conclusions, which generated a smattering of new donations. Although the exotic murder weapon was intriguing and carried a lot of cultural baggage, Lexi guessed that this was probably some sort of horrific revenge killing intended to send a message. Mess with me, and this is what you get. Or was the killer really suggesting the victim was a vampire?

  Remembering what Stoker1897 had posted in the HideTruth forum, she ran a search through national law-enforcement databases and found two other stake-through-the-heart murders, unsolved, both in the greater San Francisco Bay area more than five years ago. She didn’t see any obvious connection to the victim in Colorado Springs, but the stories were provocative gems and she posted them in the thread under the title ‘How Widespread Are Vampires?’ Because her followers could be both enthusiastic and gullible, she also obtained, and posted, the old autopsy reports of those victims to show that there was no biological evidence that any of the bodies had actually been vampires.

  When she widened the parameters in the national database, the number of potentially suspicious murders was overwhelming. The case reports demonstrated a wide range of writing skills among police detectives. In particularly sensational murders, such as a stake pounded through the heart, detectives often avoided adding gruesome detail. In fact, they often obscured the truth with bland language. She discovered one murder in Texas with the cause of death listed as ‘the insertion of a foreign wooden object through the sternum and into the chest cavity, resulting in a fatal puncture of the cardiac wall.’

  She searched more thoroughly, but knew it would be a challenge to clear away the obfuscation. Were other supposed vampire killers out there, or only one killer with a wide range? Were the victims connected in some way – San Francisco, Texas, and Colorado Springs?

  Building on the stake murder in Colorado Springs, Lexi reviewed other local deaths over the past year or two, but found no explicit instances of stakes as a murder weapon. She did come upon the case of an alleged meth dealer, Patric Ryan, who had been found decapitated in the watershed of Monument Creek in old downtown. That had been a few days ago, and the head hadn’t yet been recovered.

  Beheading was one of Stoker1897’s suggested vampire-killing methods.

  She read reports of three other bodies found badly decomposed in waste land around the city, unidentified and presumed homeless. Another corpse had been dumped and burned beyond recognition, again without identification. Burning was another effective way to deal with vampires. No detailed investigations had been conducted in those cases because the victims themselves were of no importance, and no loved ones were demanding answers. CSPD had labeled the deaths ‘gang- or drug-related’, although the headless man was the only one actually associated with the drug trade.

  Lexi collated the information and submitted her summary to the CSPD tip line, being a dutiful citizen. In her message she pointed out how the other suspicious deaths might be connected to vampires, at least peripherally. Being detailed, Lexi included Stoker1897’s list of effective ways to kill vampires. She flagged the decapitated meth dealer and sent a note. ‘If you ever do find the head, check for garlic in the mouth.’

  She submitted the tip, expecting no response.

  As he made the stir-fry, Blair was like an orchestra conductor at the wok. With the burner turned up high, he stirred with a long wooden spoon in each hand, adding the hard vegetables after the garlic and ginger had caramelized, then the soft meats – chicken and shrimp – and finally the mushrooms, snow peas, and bean sprouts. ‘Extra ginger and red pepper flakes give the stir-fry a good burn. You’ll like it.’

  She looked up from her laptop. ‘Are you asking me for permission?’

  ‘I’m informing you.’

  ‘And if I don’t like it, does that mean I don’t have to do the dishes?’

  He sniffed. ‘Doing dishes is part of our
bargain, my dear. Cleaning up is the least you can do to show your appreciation for a good meal.’

  She inhaled the divine smells. ‘No complaints.’ Blair called himself a nurturing person, and he called her driven, distracted, and obsessed. In other words, they made a good team.

  He paused in his stirring. ‘You’re far too interested in vampires.’ He added more garlic, as if to protect her, then turned the burner off and moved the wok aside. ‘Personally, I prefer the sparkly ones.’

  He dished up two plates and set them on the table, calling Lexi from the sofa. He placed chopsticks on folded cloth napkins – he was horrified by paper napkins as being too low class.

  She got herself a soda from the refrigerator. ‘Should I bring the soy sauce?’

  ‘Not if you want to keep me as a friend.’ He gave her a withering look. ‘I prepared it with exactly the right seasoning. Taste it first.’

  She closed the refrigerator door and sat beside him. ‘Lesson learned.’

  As they ate, Blair chatted about one of his coworkers at Rags to Riches, the vintage clothing shop, or oddball customers at the martini bar, including a handsome olive-skinned young man named Cesar who was obviously interested in him. They already had a date set up for the following night.

  When Blair ran out of his own anecdotes, he kept the conversation going with questions about Bigfoot and vampires. ‘You really want to believe, don’t you?’

  ‘I admit the stories and witness reports are more entertaining than convincing,’ she said. ‘But there’s always a chance. I leave the door open a crack. What if one of the stories actually turns out to be true?’

  He gave her a serious look. A few strands of his perfect hair had fallen out of place across his forehead. ‘I know you, Lex. You’re smart and intense, and I would never call you gullible, but I can’t figure out why you take all this stuff so seriously.’