by J. P. Rice
Her green eyes met mine and I looked down. The Soul Searcher could see anything inside me that she wanted. My thoughts, past events or fears.
I said, “You don’t want to see right now. I’m too angry. My father can really get me fired up.”
Satoku rubbed my cheek with her silky fingers. “I won’t gaze into your soul. I promise.” She laid her smooth lips on mine, gave me a quick kiss, and patted my backside.
“I hope so. It’s best for you. Let’s get back to Pittsburgh.”
We got into her Miata and my phone buzzed. I plucked it out of my pocket. Phone call from Lieutenant Gretchen Meyer of the Pittsburgh Police.
“It’s your mom.” I swiped to answer, prepared my Bogart accent, and put the earpiece to my ear. “Merlino here.” I raised my eyebrows at Satoku who got a nice chuckle out of me taking one from Gretchen’s book.
The Lieutenant didn’t seem to enjoy it. “Quit stealing my lines and ditch that terrible impersonation, you two-bit fact checker.”
“Detective, two-bit detective to you.”
“How’d it go with your father?” she asked. Satoku must’ve told her because I’d never mentioned this to my partner.
“As expected, much to my dismay.”
Her sharp German accent softened, “I’m sorry to hear that. I know we give each other a hard time, but you’re a good kid. You know how I know?”
“How’s that?”
I could hear a horn honking in the background. She screamed, “Get off the road, you jagoff. Yeah, that’s right. Just let me in that lane and nobody gets hurt. Uh huh, yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Gretchen paused for a moment and said, “I know you’re a good kid because I’m letting you date my daughter. That’s the highest compliment I can give you. However, you better not make her angry because when she gets angry, I get angry. Something’s come up that will take your mind away from your father. Where are you?”
“I’m still about an hour and a half from being in Pittsburgh. What’s going on?”
She shifted into officer mode. “Graveyard out on Saxonburg Boulevard. Jewish Cemetery. Gelman Cemetery. Apparently, someone dug up one of the coffins and stole the body.”
“Okay. Have you checked it out yet?”
She answered, “I’m on my way now. I’d still like to check it out with you considering this is more up your alley.”
Lieutenant Meyer had started taking her role as the head of the Pittsburgh Police Department of the Occult much more seriously after my public tussle with the Jersey Devil.
I told her, “I’ll hit you up when we get close to Pittsburgh. Any preliminary thoughts?”
“I don’t know. With all these packs of vampires popping up everywhere, maybe it has something to do with one of them. What is it, a revenant or something like that? Do you know a pack that would want to steal a body?”
I savored the thought for a moment. My fight with the Jersey Devil had also emboldened the vamps to come out of hiding. Some of the supernaturals had been among the people all along. Pittsburgh was a changing city, magic sweeping the streets, noble and dark, leaving nobody safe.
“First off, they’re called clans, not packs. Shifters run in packs. Uh, not off the top of my head. Could be any of them, really. What do you know about the body?”
She immediately responded, “Body’s gone. Repots said the casket appeared to have been cracked open.”
Satoku ran a red light, channeling her inner-Gretchen and veered onto the highway on ramp. I checked my seatbelt, and said, “No. I mean who was the person in the casket?”
She grumbled. “Don’t have that info yet. Call me when you get close.”
“Will do, buckaroo.”
I heard her mumble ‘stupid ass’ under her breath and hang up the phone so I did the same.
I turned to Satoku. “I have to meet up with your mom when we get back.”
“It’s fine. I was going to hang out with Felix this afternoon anyway.”
Ugh.
Felix was a nineteen-year-old Japanese mage and new to Pittsburgh. He was half-Japanese, half-American to be precise, and thought he was hot shit because he had fought and killed a horde of demonic beetles. His family lived in Seattle, but he was sent here by the Japanese Gods to protect the citizens, a situation similar to my own. I had to be careful how much I told Satoku because I didn’t want her to run off and tell wonder boy.
“Hanging out with Felix again,” I said in a mocking tone that I instantly regretted.
She peeked over, her moss green eyes showing anger. “Don’t be jealous.”
I snorted in derision. “Umm, definitely not jealous considering I could probably step on him and not even notice.”
Shaking her head, she didn’t seem to like that assessment and a short silence ensued. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay, first of all, he’s not that short. Second, don’t be rude. I still think you guys should team up together and kick some serious demon ass.”
I tried to quash that from the start. “Yeah, I kind of roll solo. A loner. You know that.”
She spoke fast and jittery, “Uh, I know you roll with my mom. That sounded much worse than intended. You’re basically partners with my mom and then what’s going on between the two of us?”
“Bad choice of words. I meant with my wizard stuff, I roll alone.”
She immediately called me out, “What about Alayna and Reginald?”
“What can I say that will make this conversation end?”
“Just talk to him again. I know it didn’t go well the first time.”
“That’s because he a pompous prick,” the words burst from my lips without warning from my brain.
She sighed audibly through her nose. “He’s not a pompous prick once you get to know him. He does come on strong, I’ll give you that, but if you get to know him, he’s totally different.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Someone once told me, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them.”
She held her right pinky finger toward me. “Will you do it for me?”
She went right for the kryptonite. I still hadn’t figured out if she was involved in a romantic relationship with the pipsqueak, which had me uneasy for the past few weeks. We had never put a classification or titles on our relationship, so I wasn’t sure. I grabbed her pinky with mine and squeezed.
I asked, unenthusiastically, “What do you want me to do?”
She pursed her lips in thought. “Hmm. Nothing really. Well something. Why don’t the three of us go out to dinner one night?”
“And you’ll be there the whole time. The whole time.”
“Promise.” She released the grip and put her hand back on the steering wheel.
We got back to Pittsburgh and I met up with Gretchen at the cemetery.
Chapter 2
We walked down a row of plots and found the resurrection area. Some police personnel were still combing the scene for clues. I immediately realized that the body hadn’t been dug up.
The hole wasn’t even or uniform in any way. If two men had dug down to get a body out of a casket, the hole should have been much wider around the casket.
I hovered over the hole and looked down at the silken interior of a casket through a small tunnel. The body appeared to have popped the lid to the coffin open somehow, and burrowed straight up to reach the earth’s surface. I turned to the headstone for a name.
Jacob Joshua Edmonson
Born 4-7-32
Died 6-23-77
So the body’s been buried for forty years and suddenly gets the urge to take a stroll down Main Street. It could only be a skeleton at this point.
“What do you think, Merlino?” Gretchen had settled on using my last name when we were on official business.
“Can you tell that the body wasn’t dug up?”
She craned her neck around for a few moments soaking in the entire picture. “I suppose I see it now. The dirt on the surface over there, looks pushed up, like a gol
f divot.”
“Exactly. I still can’t figure out how the man opened the casket with all that weight on top. The door is open, but he appears to have just stood up and pushed his way to the surface. Any reports of a zombie walking the streets yet?”
She pulled her cell phone out of her gun belt holder and looked at it. “Not yet, which is why we need to get this taken care of quickly.”
“I’m with you, but something tells me this isn’t going to be an easy one. For an entity to control a dead body and cause it to do that, is scary. Spirits would have had to seep into the ground, go through the casket, and permeate the bones, taking control. However, the thought of the skeleton doing it on its own has me pretty terrified too.”
She threw her hands up. “Great, so we’re screwed?”
“Not exactly. Is there a night watchman or anything? This seems like a pretty nice cemetery to where they might have a guard.”
“Just so happens they do. He has a little office attached to the main building over that hill.” She pointed south.
We went down and knocked on the door to the security office. A young man who appeared to be in his early twenties answered the door. He frowned when his eyes met Gretchen’s police uniform. “I’ve already answered all the questions. You need to talk to your associates.”
Gretchen said, “If we could just have a few minutes, please. I’m Lieutenant Meyer, Pittsburgh Police.”
He shook her hand. “Stephen Woolsly.”
“Mike Merlino,” I said, and extended my hand.
He reintroduced himself to me as we shook hands.
The short, dark man begrudgingly let us in to the relatively plain office. I took stock as we entered. A desk and a fake leather chair on wheels. An entire wall was filled with monitors showing security camera footage from around the cemetery. The cameras must’ve been in the trees that I hadn’t noticed outside. The other three walls were empty save for two plastic file holders that hung behind the watchman’s desk.
He gestured for us to sit in the two wooden chairs facing his desk.
I wasted no time. “I assume someone has already talked to you about the security footage?”
He nodded, standing behind his desk chair. “They have.”
I tried to be gentle with him. “Sorry to make you repeat yourself, but what did you find out?”
He pointed at one of the screens on the wall. “That camera stopped shooting around eleven o’clock last night. Came back on around four in the morning after the damage was done.”
Gretchen asked, “And you never turned off the camera for any reason?”
He pulled out the chair and sat down. “Nope. Considering someone rose a body from the dead, I’m thinking that someone used magic to shut down the cameras somehow.”
I sniffed a faint scent of marijuana on his breath and leaned closer to the desk. I said, “That’s always a possibility. We already visited the grave and this office is far enough away that you probably didn’t hear anything last night either.”
The young man’s face got red and he shifted around in his chair. “I didn’t hear anything. You gotta understand this job is boring beyond belief. Nothing ever happens.”
He felt guilty about something that I couldn’t figure out yet.
Gretchen asked, “Do your job responsibilities require you to manually check the grounds?”
He shifted around more and yanked at his tight collar. “I did. I went out last night at like ten thirty. So right before this all went down I guess.”
I caught a whiff of alcohol, not on his breath, but perhaps in one of his desk drawers. “I know if it were me working here and it was that boring, I’d probably do a little partying while I worked.” I gestured with my thumb and forefinger like I was smoking a joint.
Stephen sat up straight and his eyes widened. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Look, I do my job, all right? Let’s say I do go out there when some weirdo is digging up a dead body. What do you think they’re going to do to me?”
I held up my hands. “I’m not blaming you at all. I would have done the same exact thing. So you didn’t notice anything strange?”
“There were some sounds. And...” He turned his head to the side, contemplating something.
I tried to help him. “And you got scared.”
“Yeah, I mean I’ve heard some crazy sounds in my day, but nothing like that...that...that grunting and screaming. I can’t even explain it because it was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It was around midnight or a little after.”
Gretchen pressed him, “What did you do when you heard the sounds?”
He lowered his head and ran his fingers through his parted hair. “I locked the door and made sure my gun was loaded and ready to go. Then I noticed the one screen went blank. I thought about going out there, but with all the talk about vampires going around the city, I couldn’t do it.”
I tried to reassure him. “Smart thinking. If it was a vamp, even silver coated bullets wouldn’t kill them. So I’ve heard. You did the right thing by not going out there.”
The natural color started to return to his face. “I just don’t want to get in any trouble over this. The owner is pissed that this is all over the news, but what was I supposed to do?”
Gretchen asked, “How long is your shift?”
He looked at his shimmering silver watch. “Lasts nine to nine. I’m still here today so I can answer questions. Not getting paid for it, I can tell you that on the record.”
Gretchen leaned forward in her seat. “Call came into the police at eight thirty this morning. Why did it take you so long to call?”
The redness started to return in splotches on his neck and the crimson tide rolled upward over his face. “Because I was scared. I froze.”
I said, “Bullshit. If you froze, it would be for a few minutes and then you would be so scared that you couldn’t dial that number fast enough. If you feared for your life, you don’t wait eight hours to call for help. You were fucked up, weren’t you?”
A flash of concern danced in his dark eyes. “It was just enough to get me through the night. I told you how boring this job is most of the time. I thought if I called the cops and they noticed I’d been drinking, they would blame me for all this shit. Since I’m in control of the cameras, I didn’t think telling them that one suddenly went dead would go very well for me.”
Gretchen said, “You were trying to protect your own ass. I get it. What did you tell the other officers?”
He leaned back in the chair and looked at the fingernails on his left hand. “I told them that the camera was working fine and I noticed the disturbance on my end of shift walkaround. I guess I’m going to get in trouble for that.”
Gretchen warned him, “Not necessarily. Unless you were given your Miranda rights. We need you to be honest from here on out though. If we find out you are lying to us, you will be charged for withholding information from an officer, which usually rolls into a charge of conspiracy.”
“I didn’t conspire with anyone. I didn’t even know those guys.”
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. “What guys?”
He squirmed around in the chair and the capillaries in his temples were beating. “I can’t. They said they would kill me.”
Gretchen warned him, “You better talk to us, or you might be going to jail.”
Stephen debated his options for a few moments. “I think I should talk to a lawyer or something before I say anything else and everyone thinks I’m a crazy man. Right now, it’s go to jail or have them kill me.”
“Just give us a hint as to who they are?” I needed to know.
He looked around the room as if we were being watched. He whispered, “You ever heard of men in black?”
I took an educated guess. “The men who harass people that have had alien experiences?”
He nodded. “Think about that for the dark spirit world.”
It was becoming clearer. I said, “You destroyed the tapes, didn’t you?”
His voice squeaked, “They made me. They sat here and watched me do it or they were going to kill me. The one guy had a pistol that must’ve been almost two feet long with a barrel as wide as my fist. What was I supposed to do?”
Gretchen said, “You did what you had to do. I think you better start telling us a lot more that you know.”
Tears began running down his flushed cheeks. “I said I’m going to get a lawyer or something. I don’t know anything else than what I’ve already told you. You guys are going to make me say something that will get me killed. These guys or things or whatever they were, could be waiting at my apartment when I get home.”
I knew the feeling. “We could escort you home. I’m not just a detective, you see.”
He looked me in the eyes, and immediately turned away. “I know who you are. I’m kind of into magic. At least I used to be. Everyone’s heard the stories about you. The men in black warned me that you would show up.”
“Me?” I pointed two thumbs at my chest.
He nodded, and rubbed his face with his forearm. “Yep. He said you would poke your big nose around to get a sniff. They told me that you’ve pissed off a lot of people already and they are coming after you.”
I chuckled, hiding a bit of fear. “Unfortunately, it goes with the territory. I’ve been threatened by ghouls and demons so many times now I’ve lost count.”
Gretchen rolled her eyes, unwilling to accept my BS. “I’m willing to be a little lenient with you, Stephen, but I will get a warrant and drag you in for questioning if you mess around.”
He growled. “I thought you all were supposed to protect and serve. I just told you my life is in danger if I open my mouth, and you still want me to spill the beans, essentially committing suicide.”
Gretchen said, “You aren’t unlike someone who witnesses a murder. It takes courage for a witness to shove fear to the side and tell the honest truth. The longer you stay silent, you put more people’s lives in jeopardy. We can keep you safe, if need be.”
He snapped, “No. You. Can’t.” He pointed at me. “This guy, maybe, but they can’t be shot, so the cops are basically useless to me.”
My eyebrows moved down. “So it’s a group of vampires?”