Supernatural Heart of the Dragon

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “All right. You girls hit the books. See if you can find out what this ‘heart of the dragon’ is, and how it might relate. I’ll see if I can track down who summoned it.”

  Bartow sat up straighter in his chair.

  “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  “We can take it from here, son,” Samuel said a little dismissively.

  “Dad,” Mary said with a glare, “that’s not fair. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Jack.”

  Samuel was about to argue, but Deanna cut him off.

  “We can probably use his help on the research end,” she said.

  Her husband tossed her a look of irritation, but she just stared right back. Samuel didn’t like working with other hunters, she knew, but given that Jack had actually called them in on this, it didn’t seem right to cut him off now.

  “The three of us have our own way of doing things,” Samuel said in a tight voice. “I’m sure Jack understands that.”

  Taking a final drag on his cigarette, Bartow stamped it out in the ashtray just as the waitress brought their food. He waited until after she’d placed all four plates in front of them before speaking.

  “Look, I realize I can’t do much with my bum hoof, but I know my way around the public library, and I know this town. I can help.” Then he began cutting his veal parmigiana into neat rectangles with his knife and fork.

  Samuel ignored his own meal and stared at Jack.

  “It’s the bum hoof I’m concerned about, Jack. I’ll be honest with you—I’m not comfortable trusting my back to somebody who shot himself in the foot.”

  Jack’s mouth was full, and Mary—who was twirling her spaghetti pomodoro around her fork—spoke before he could swallow and defend himself.

  “Dad, what’s got into you,” she demanded. “Why are you being such a butthead?”

  “I’m not being a—”

  “He didn’t shoot himself in the foot!”

  “So he says.”

  “And so I say, because last time we were out here he showed me the wound. The angle’s wrong—it couldn’t possibly be self-inflicted.”

  Deanna couldn’t help but smile with pride. She also hoped her husband didn’t pick up on the fact that Mary and Jack had been in such an intimate situation without his knowledge.

  “Why didn’t you mention that before?” Samuel asked.

  “Why didn’t you just trust me?” Mary shot back.

  “Or me?” Jack asked, finally able to get a word in edgewise. “Look, I dig that you don’t like me, Mr. Campbell, but you knew both my parents. And I get the scene, believe me. I can help.”

  Samuel glanced at Deanna, which told her that he felt outnumbered.

  Deanna just dug into her pasta primavera, signaling to him that he was on his own.

  Samuel finally speared his osso bucco with a fork, which prompted her to smile again. He’d never admit to losing the argument, but not trying to claim the last word was usually enough.

  SIX

  Josh Friedrich loved working the overnight shift in the morgue.

  Sure, a lot of people thought that made him a loony, but Josh had long ago stopped caring what other people thought. It made it easier to sleep through the night.

  Or, rather, sleep through the day, since he spent his nights here, in “the frigidaire”—his nickname for the freezer where the bodies were kept—and in the lab doing his thing.

  The best part was that the cops usually didn’t bother him all that much. Josh loved his job as a coroner, but he hated dealing with the police. While they were impossible to avoid completely, they didn’t come to the morgue at night unless it was absolutely necessary.

  As a result, most of Josh’s reports were either delivered by messenger, or left for someone to pick up during the day.

  Which suited Josh fine. He got to investigate the human body at his leisure, he got to help solve crimes, and he rarely had to talk to the fuzz. Or to reporters.

  Reporters were worse, and every day of his life Josh was thankful he wasn’t part of the Zodiac killer nonsense. Anybody came to him to talk about it, he just said he wasn’t on the case, and ran away.

  One downside to working late was that he had to work on the Sabbath. That didn’t bother Josh all that much, but his mother suffered from serious diarrhea of the mouth whenever the subject came up. To silence her, he either told her that his job was important, or tried to get Friday nights off.

  But he’d never request the day shift. He liked it quiet.

  So it was kind of a drag when the FBI agent showed up. The guy just stormed in like it was his living room or something. Josh knew he was a Fed the minute he walked in the door, just by the way he carried himself. He was bald, so he didn’t have the trademark slicked-back hairdo, but the rest of him just screamed Bureau.

  As soon as he got into the morgue, he put his hands on his hips and stared straight at Josh.

  “You Dr. Friedrich?”

  “Uhm, yessir. What can I—”

  “You’re the coroner on the Wenzel case, right? And the other burnings?”

  Josh blinked. Rude sonuvabitch, isn’t he?

  “Uh, yes—yessir, I am. I didn’t realize this was a federal case.”

  “Why are you surprised at that, exactly, Doctor?” the Fed asked tersely.

  Swallowing nervously, Josh thought for a moment before he replied.

  “Well, uh—to be honest, the fuzz here don’t really like Feds, sir.”

  “Well, we’re not all that fond of them, either.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Josh said quickly. “Anyhow, I’m surprised they called you guys in.”

  “They didn’t—we called ourselves in.” Then he looked around the room. “I need to see the body.”

  “Sure,” Josh said. “Follow me.”

  Josh led the Fed—did he say his name?—back to the frigidaire.

  “Sorry about the cold,” he said, knowing that the fuzz always yammered about the temperature.

  “I’ve been in worse,” the man said with a shrug. He was definitely a cool cat.

  Walking over to the south wall—that was where the most recent cases were kept—Josh went immediately to the metal door behind which lay Marybeth Wenzel’s body.

  He didn’t even need to look at the file to find the right drawer, since he’d been fascinated by this case—or, rather, these cases, since this was the fourth body that had come in like this.

  “I’m glad you guys are here,” Josh admitted. “The fuzz ain’t gonna be with-it on this one, if you know what I mean.”

  Pulling back the sheet, he revealed a body that was badly charred and cut up. Josh wondered briefly if the Fed would be a puker, but the guy didn’t even blink.

  “That’s pretty bad,” he said flatly.

  “You said it, brother. We were only able to identify her from dental records. She had great teeth,” he added with a smile that showed his really bad ones. His mother was always bugging him to see a dentist. “Anyhow, she’s got third-degree burns all over her. And that’s the really weird part.”

  The Fed had bent over to peer at the cuts, but looked up at Josh’s last words.

  “What do you mean by ‘weird,’ Doctor?”

  “Well, the burns are even, all the way from head to toe. The only way for that to happen is for the body to be completely immersed in fire, all at once. But there’s too much left for it to have been an explosion, so it doesn’t make sense.”

  The Fed raised an eyebrow that made him look just like Mr. Spock on TV.

  “So?”

  “Well, she had to have been killed where she was found— the burns made the body too fragile, so if she’d been moved postmortem, there’d be signs, and there aren’t. But the place where she was found? No signs of fire at all. Now, with burns like this, that just isn’t possible.”

  “What’s your theory, then?”

  That threw Josh for a loop. He wasn’t used to law enforcement asking for his opinion—or, rather, hypotheses, since
that was all he usually had, even though the fuzz always misused the word “theory” that way. He would often volunteer one, and sometimes they’d even pay attention, but no one had ever asked before.

  He kind of liked it, though he’d have liked it more if he actually had a hypothesis.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted ruefully. “I’m sorry, but— well, I’m at the end of my rope with this one. It’s the same with two of the others—Hsu and Ding have the same burns, with the same lack of any kind of fire at the crime scene. Even with Verlander, the only other damage was to a small table. Isn’t that freaky?”

  “That’s one word for it.” The Fed took another look at the wounds. “Are these animal cuts?”

  Josh barked a laugh, which prompted a withering look. Again, Josh swallowed—this cat knew how to glare and mean it—and he hastily answered.

  “Uh, no, sir, no they aren’t. The cuts are clean and almost—uh, surgical. Looks like they were made with a long blade, like a big knife.”

  “Or a sword?”

  That resulted in another barked laugh—he couldn’t help himself.

  “What, Basil Rathbone killed him? Sorry,” he added quickly, “but who uses a sword anymore?”

  “You’d be surprised,” the Fed replied, his face an expressionless mask. “And you say that the other three are the same?”

  “Yup.”

  “Can I see Hsu and Ding’s files? And Verlander’s?”

  “Sure.” Josh went back out into the main office and stepped over to the file cabinet. The manila folders were all still in the wire-frame basket on top of the cabinet, since these were “hot” cases. Too soon to stuff them into a drawer.

  The Fed flipped through each folder like he’d been doing it all his life—which, Josh supposed, he had—then just handed them back.

  “Thanks.”

  He’d been trying to be good, but Josh found himself unable to resist asking.

  “Is this another serial killer, like the Zodiac?”

  The Fed just shook his head.

  “I’m not at liberty to say right now, son. And the FBI would appreciate if you kept this meeting to yourself, savvy?”

  Nodding quickly, Josh replied eagerly.

  “Oh, absolutely.” Besides, who was he gonna tell?

  The man took his leave, and Josh smiled. For once he had actually been treated like a person, instead of a loony who played with dead people all night.

  He wondered what kind of job options there were for coroners working with the Feds. And if they had a night-shift available.

  SEVEN

  One of the lessons Deanna Campbell tried very hard to instill in her daughter was that a hunter’s best weapon wasn’t a shotgun. Nor was it holy water. It wasn’t even a Claymore that killed a vampire, a demon, or a family of ghouls.

  It was a library card.

  But convincing her fifteen year-old skilled fighter of a daughter of this fact was an uphill battle in itself.

  Early in the morning on their second day in San Francisco, Deanna took Mary with her to the giant white edifice of the San Francisco Public Library. The main branch sat on the corner of Larkin and Grove Streets, part of the city’s Civic Center.

  It was a chilly day, and as they entered the building, there wasn’t much change in the temperature. Walking across the lobby, Mary spoke in a low voice.

  “Mom, you know, we could handle this ourselves—me and Jack, I mean,” she added hastily. “You could go with Dad.”

  “No thanks,” Deanna said. “You know how much I hate acting. Let your father play dress-up—he’s good at it.”

  “I guess,” Mary responded, a hint of disappointment in her voice.

  Samuel had been up late the previous night, posing as an FBI agent, so they had opted to let him sleep in. The visit with the coroner hadn’t yielded a lot of useful information, but once he caught up on his rest, he was going to do what he could with it and try to find a common denominator among the four victims.

  Deanna smiled. She could see right through her daughter—who just wanted to spend time alone with young Mr. Bartow. She couldn’t really blame her, all things considered, but there was no way she was leaving her fifteen year-old unchaperoned with an eighteen year-old boy. Sure he came from a family of hunters, but that didn’t stop them from being teenagers.

  Mary looked down, probably embarrassed at having been so transparent.

  Then she brightened when she saw Bartow waiting for them at the entrance to the research room, leaning on his cane.

  “We ready to go?”

  “Absolutely,” Mary replied, a grin replacing her frown.

  Deanna chuckled, and they made a beeline for the reference desk, where a young woman with long, straight dark hair, a large nose, and a bright smile sat on a tall chair. She was wearing a dark blue sundress and a light blue cardigan sweater.

  “How may I help you?”

  Putting on her brightest smile and over-emphasizing her midwestern accent, Deanna responded.

  “Hi, miss—I sure hope so! We all just had the most swell time in Chinatown, and we wanted to learn more about the people there. Can you recommend some good books for us to read?”

  The librarian nodded briskly.

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do. You see, most of our books on the Oriental culture are in Chinese, and they’re at our Chinatown annex. We have a few books on Chinese culture here, though, and several of them are in English. Is there any particular aspect you have in mind?”

  “It’s funny you should ask that, because everywhere we went, my daughter kept hearing people talking about something called ‘the heart of the dragon,’ and we’re just dying to find out what that might be.”

  “Okay, that gives us a start,” the librarian continued, stepping down from her perch. “Well, the dragon is a very important part of Chinese culture. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  She took them to a huge cabinet with dozens of narrow drawers—the card catalogue where the titles were filed by subject. She deftly chose specific drawers, labeled in a system of numbers and categories, starting with “180 – Oriental Philosophy,” and within moments she’d turned up several books with historical references to dragons.

  Ancient Chinese secrets, eh? Deanna noted with admiration. This woman really knows her business.

  Several hours of reading later, however—covering every category from “Paranormal Phenomena” to “Paleozoology”— turned up very little that seemed germane to this particular hunt. They found plenty on dragons, but nothing quite matched what the clues seemed to indicate.

  Closing the last of the books the young librarian had brought them, Mary looked up at her mother and Jack.

  “Lots of references to people fricasseed by a big lizard, but nothing that explains the way the bodies were cut up,” she said. “Maybe it’s not a dragon we’re looking for, but somebody who’s been possessed by one. Somebody with a sword?” she offered skeptically.

  Deanna shook her head to clear the cobwebs. Every depiction of dragons they had been able to find showed creatures with claws that were similar to those of an eagle, or a bear—none of them matched the precise cuts Samuel had described.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing like that in any of the books I read, but it makes about as much sense as anything else.”

  What was worse was that nothing they found made a single reference to a dragon’s heart, except in the vaguest possible sense. A person with the “heart of a dragon” was said to possess great strength of character—which didn’t exactly fit with running around ‘Frisco cutting people to shreds.

  Deanna closed her own tome with a thump, then she, Mary, and Jack brought their books to the wooden hand truck that rested under a sign marked “returns” in precise block letters.

  “Well, this was a waste of time,” Mary said with a sigh.

  “Hey, c’mon,” Jack protested. “Sometimes knowing what you’re not hunting helps you figure out what you should be.” But even he
didn’t look entirely convinced. Nevertheless, Mary clutched at the idea.

  “You think so?” she said.

  Deanna shot the young man a grateful look. She’d been saying the same thing for the last couple of hours, but Mary didn’t want to hear it, coming from her mother. So hearing it from someone closer to her own age helped a lot. It didn’t hurt that the source was a cute young boy.

  The woman in the blue cardigan sweater was gone, and an older lady with dark hair done up in a beehive now sat at the reference desk. She looked to be of Oriental descent and was, in fact, the third librarian to sit back there since they had arrived that morning. Unlike the first, younger librarian who’d helped them, this one was a bit more formally dressed: a white blouse, a gray sweater, and a long maroon skirt.

  “Did you find what you were looking for, ma’am?” the librarian asked.

  “Not everything, I’m afraid,” Deanna said, exaggerating the disappointment in her tone. She almost forgot to put her “Midwestern Mom” voice back on, but caught herself just in time. As she had said to Mary, character acting was Samuel’s scene. Deanna preferred to either read about something, or shoot it.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the librarian said, sounding like she meant it.

  “It’s all right, I suppose,” Deanna replied with a game smile. “We learned bunches about Chinese culture and about dragons, which was really swell. I just wish I knew what all those people meant when they talked about ‘the heart of the dragon.’”

  The librarian frowned.

  “What an interesting subject,” she said curiously. “Are you sure it’s Chinese culture you’re looking for?”

  The question brought Deanna up short.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, although there are many references to dragons in Chinese lore, the only reference I’ve ever heard to ‘the heart of the dragon’ was in relation to a Japanese warrior from one hundred years ago,” the woman explained. “In fact, he was called the Heart of the Dragon.”

  Her interest piqued, yet managing to stay in character, Deanna pressed for more information.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “This was something we heard them talking about in Chinatown, not Japantown.” Then she chuckled. “For that matter, is there even any such place as Japantown?”