by Mike Arsuaga
“Quick,” she commanded. “Some plastic ties.” Knowing he wouldn’t be slipping out of those, she turned to the pouch of dazed flesh squirming beneath her in a feeble escape attempt. She tightened her grip. “Lie still or I’ll turn you to hamburger.”
Eyes large, he declined further movement until two uniforms took him away.
A female officer slipped a blanket over Lorna’s shoulders.
A chill ran through her at the first touch of the coarse material. Pulling it close, she stood. “The party’s over. Everyone back to work. I better not see any cell phone pictures of my butt floating around the Internet. I know where all of you live.”
Lorna retreated to her office. Redrawing the blinds for privacy, she pulled out a spare outfit she kept handy for these situations. Morphing on the job rarely happened. This was the first time she’d had to do it in front of an audience.
The squad may have gotten an eyeful, but nobody got hurt. The bad guy’s cooling his heels in a cell, and that’s what counts most, doesn’t it?
The desk phone rang. While reaching for the receiver, she tried to pull a sweater into place over her head. It didn’t work well.
“Hello,” she snapped into the phone while wrestling the garment down her torso.
“Lieutenant Winters, this is Marta in Autopsy,” a young female voice replied. “You said to call you when I learned more about the Gomez murders.”
Lorna remembered the unreturned phone message. “Sorry about not getting back to you, but things were a little crazy here.” With a final tug, she winched the sweater into place. “What have you found?”
“Your detective was correct. The wounds were not all made by a blade or tool. A lycan most likely did it. I’ll know for sure after DNA results come back. You can come see for yourself.”
“I’ll be right there.” Lorna snatched up her purse. Stepping into the bull pen, she surveyed the scene for the detective who owned the case. “Geurin, you’re with me.”
At the far end of the room stood a worn scrap of a man—Mike Geurin, her first partner, as well as a former lover. In those days, he’d nicely filled a young, dedicated patrolman’s uniform while she, a rookie, occupied a position in the hierarchy lower than whale shit, which, as the veterans reminded her, sat on the bottom of the ocean.
He picked up a well-worn plaid jacket showing the after effects of several lunches. Strapping on shoulder holster and firearm, he pulled alongside her on the way to the elevator.
Passing his desk, she spied a pornographic CD partly covered by case files. “Don’t you think with anything besides your little head?” Not waiting for an answer, she pulled ahead, leading the way to the elevator. Lorna punched the button for the morgue basement. On the descent she thought back to a late morning six weeks earlier.
She was hard at work when a shadow fell across her. Looking up, she found a familiar face. “Mike Geurin! What are you doing here?”
“It took twenty years and going to the extreme of sobering up but I finally got my shield. The brass threw me in this shark tank.”
She nodded in agreement about the shark tank remark and motioned for him to sit. “It’ll be good to have somebody who has my back.”
Mike became reflective. “Always...” An instant later, he snapped out of it. “How long has it been? Must be at least five years.” He leaned toward her with the confidential posturing she remembered. “So how’s life at your end of the gene pool, Princess?”
She made the customary scowl at use of the “P” word. “Not much to tell. I’m dating a lawyer named Jerry Pease. How about you?”
“Well let’s see. Last month, I picked up my three year chip. Two Lents ago, I gave up smoking and started working out.” He stood to give her a better look. “And I lost twenty pounds.”
She took in his blowsy trousers and shirt with loosened neck tie covering the new and improved Mike. “I guess sobering up doesn’t include buying better fitting clothes.”
Mike acknowledged the payback for calling her “Princess”. “Tough neighborhood.”
She notched her head in the direction of the bull pen. “There’s a vacant desk near the entrance.”
“Good. From there I can watch your back.” The thought warmed her. Before she could react, he headed to his assigned station.
With a wistful gaze, she followed his path. Even though his impertinence and general bad manners irritated every nerve and their personal relationship might have failed, his loyalty never wavered.
“I hear you put on a little show and tell up here.” Mike’s wise-guy tone scattered her musings. “And me without a camera.” They stood together in silence for a moment before Mike continued. “It’s been a while.”
“Been a while? A while since what?”
“You know. Since I saw you do your thing.”
Lorna reflected for a moment. “You’d think the public would be used to it by now.”
“Trust me. A transformation in the flesh is nothing like what you see on the streams. The first time you did it in front of me, I had the “heebies” for a week.”
Lorna thought back. “I remember.”
“But considering a gaphead’s strength, you took a big chance changing back to human. Why did you do it?”
“Jeez Mike, you of all people should know. Until I turned back, it was all I could do not to rip off the gaphead’s arm and start gnawing on it.”
Watery blue eyes, showing the irreparable results of too much booze and late nights, gazed down at her with kindness. “Well anyway, it was a good job.”
She smiled. A professional compliment from him still meant something.
They finished the ride in silence. When they stepped out into the morgue, Lorna explained the reason for the trip. “Your victims out in Pine Hills were killed by one of The Others.”
Mike’s face lit up. “I knew it!” he said with an effusion of coffee breath, accompanied by a broad grin showcasing large, tobacco-stained teeth. Giving up cigarettes over a year ago, the nicotine refused to budge. “It had to be a bunch of feral woofers.”
The slur lingered between them like three-day old road kill. Several seconds passed before he tried to smooth it over. “What I mean to say is…”
“Can it, Mike.” She cut him off with the finality of a slammed door. Almost immediately, she regretted using the tone. No question he stepped out of line, but against that pressed the weight of their years together.
Mike broke the silence, as usual with an unrelated, often inappropriate subject. “Do you ever think about us?” Lorna glared at him. “Not the affair part. I mean the way we worked together on the job.” Back then, possessing one of the keenest investigative minds on the force, he shared his knowledge, holding nothing back.
The talk about their time as partners was a smokescreen. She figured out his designs to leverage into their personal relationship, and worked to put a quick stop to it. “Our time passed long ago.”
He dropped the pretense. “Did I get too old for you?”
“You know better. I couldn’t take the booze and bitterness.”
Mike batted his eyebrows. “I’m all better now.”
Lorna couldn’t help but smile. No question, he could be insensitive, even downright offensive, but he still occupied a soft warm spot in her memory - the irrepressible Mike. Over time, however, she outgrew him in the sad way one passes by and outgrows a mentally-challenged older sibling. “We’re both different people. There’s no going back.”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
An image of how he was in the early days flooded in…the ubiquitous cigarette wedged between tobacco-stained fingers emitting a blue spinner of smoke…the frosty blue eyes, a lot clearer back then…his voice, both comforting and enlightening. “The evidence, Princess. Let the evidence speak. And when it does, listen…”
Marta Brown met them at the door. Dressed in a tight medical jumpsuit, she caught Mike’s lascivious, roving eye—the probable reason why he’d been married and d
ivorced three times.
Marta stopped about halfway down a steel wall of slide trays. “They’re here,” she said, pulling out the first one out to reveal a sheet-covered bundle. Lorna shivered in the cold room, and pulled the cover back.
Death and mutilation never affect The Others, but even hard-boiled old shamuses such as Mike need a moment when confronted by what is spread before them. According to the photographs sitting on Lorna’s desk, the remains looked a lot better now than at the crime scene. It never ceased to amaze what a thorough wash down could do. Still, showing a tint of green, Mike swallowed hard.
Morgue personnel aren’t naturally impervious to gory death scenes, but those who don’t acclimate meet quick career ends. “This is the mother,” Marta explained with the tone of a library tour guide. “See here.” She placed a gloved finger at a nasty, jagged wound. “These are teeth marks. Old lycans and vampires have a word for this kind of kill, a Blooding. It’s how they killed before the drugs and Kutzu.”
Lorna’s brow knitted. “Isn’t there a missing child?”
“That’s right. A boy, about fifteen. The rest were butchered, but he simply disappeared.”
“Fifteen, did you say?” Lorna wondered aloud. “Is there anything to suggest they might be one of The Others? Or the boy, at least?”
“The quickest way to find out is to get records from Coven International. They have what we need, even on most of the ferals. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait until DNA comes back. It might take a month,” Mike said. Then he asked, “Detective Winters, do you have any pull with CI?”
Since the demonstration with the gaphead, Lorna figured there was no value in keeping her secret. “What Mike is trying to say is I’m a lycan.” She waited for Marta’s surprise to subside. “But in answer to his suggestion, I won’t be much help. My grandparents cashed in their shares just in time to lose it all in the Panic of 2045. The Winters clan has been on the outside ever since. It’s going to be up to a sympathetic judge to subpoena the records we need.” Then she remembered friend with benefits Jerry Pease. His law firm, Brown and Willis, did a lot of work for the corporation. “Wait, there is someone. He might be able to help cut through some of the red tape.”
“This is the second family attacked in a month,” Mike said on the way back to the squad room. Lorna’s heels made clear, authoritative clicks on the terrazzo, while Mike’s slow, arthritic slide just cleared the floor. “They took someone from that one, too, right?”
“Yes, the mother. She turned up a few days later in a field. They drained her and ate the liver and kidneys.” After a pause, she added, “They ate the lungs and uterus, too. There’s not much appetite for those.”
After a few seconds accompanied by twenty yards of silence, Mike turned his head to Lorna. “Marta mentioned something called Kutzu. I never heard of it. What is it?”
Lorna stopped, turning to face him. “Really? Where’ve you been for the past two hundred years?”
Mike’s jowls tightened, his voice taking on an edge. “Well, excuse the hell out of me, but I let my subscription to The Others Newsletter lapse.”
Lorna decided she had it coming. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s a fair question. Early in the twentieth century, a vampire named Anton Kutzu invented the Kutzu Method. It seems they, meaning vampires, produce small amounts of it in their saliva. It’s a powerful sedative. He developed compounds that stimulated production in useful quantities. It kept prey in a deep coma. Each feeding reinforces the Kutzu, maintaining the coma. A single prey lasted almost a year. The need to hunt, as well as the chances of discovery, dropped by ninety percent. The Kutzu Method became the preferred method, until the invention of supplements in the twenty-first century offered us a chance to abandon humans altogether, opening the way for the Coming Out.
“So Kutzu was the vampire equivalent to the drugs lycans used to immobilize prey?”
“Correcto, Mikey, me boy. The drugs, along with freezers, gave us a similar shelf life for prey. I remember Grandma’s stories about how they lured prey to the house and gave the drug in a cup of tea. Lycans recognized engaging them in sex as the quickest way to make it work. After a good screwing, the prey went to sleep and never woke up. An hour later, they had the victim cut up and in the freezer. This all happened before my time. I’ve never eaten human prey—nothing but treated mutton or beef.”
“Are your grandparents still alive?”
“Gran is. She has at least a century left. My parents are a different story. They were hybrids. They lived only human life spans.”
“In the thirty-odd years we’ve known each other, you’ve never spoken about your family.”
“I have my reasons.” She bit off each word and retreated inward. The abrupt change in her demeanor made both of them uneasy. They continued back to the squad room in silence. After a bit, she decided the checkered relationship with her mom and dad shouldn’t be put on Mike. He’d asked an innocent question, not knowing it would place him in the middle of her personal minefield. She gave him the shortest answer she could.
“My parents are gone. Gran lives on one of the Martian colonies.”
CHAPTER TWO
“That’s right. Pease—Jerry Pease.” Lorna spoke into the telephone receiver, enunciating each syllable for the benefit of the lard head on the other end. “He should be at Center Court. I must speak with him. It’s a police matter.”
At this time of the morning on a day off, if they weren’t together, it meant tennis at the recreation center in his development. After a pause, the receiver made a sound like someone breathing across it. Then a voice came on the line. “Jerry Pease.”
“Hi, Jerry, it’s Lorna. I need to see you right away.”
“Mmm, it’s the best offer I’ve had all day. Your place or mine?”
His apartment, larger than hers, occupied a better part of town. It also rated better Utility Allowances. “I’m serious. It’s police work. Can you come to my office?”
“Give me an hour.”
Almost exactly one hour later, the elevator door opened, and Jerry, escorted by a volunteer auxiliary, presented himself to the squad room. The two of them walked between the rows of desks under the appraising stares of every stripe of cop. When it became apparent they were headed to Lorna’s office, Mike rendered his opinion of the natty guest. From his place near the elevator, he sat erect so she couldn’t miss him sticking a finger down his throat, adding with appropriate melodramatic touches a cross-eyed impression of inducing a vomit. Lorna scowled, discreetly flipping him the finger.
No one ignored Jerry’s arrival. The men frowned while the women admired. At a well-constructed five-ten, he glided between the desk rows with an easy, confident stride. Corporate law paid well enough for him to afford a tailored suit let out and drawn in at all the right places. Wide shoulders, narrow waist, round, malleable butt. She alone possessed firsthand knowledge about the malleable part.
When the volunteer escorted him down the aisle, she wore the rapt expression of a bride who’s just said, “I do,” poised in anticipation of the fun part of the marriage business. A couple of female detectives cocked their heads into the aisle to get a better view, jerking back when Lorna’s baleful countenance stared back.
“Thank you,” she said, dismissing the escort and offering Jerry a seat.
Across the room, Mike fidgeted in his chair, as if itching to be invited to the meeting. Lorna decided putting together a current with a former lover would create too much distraction from the task at hand. Add Mike’s predilection for making what could charitably be called inappropriate remarks, and the situation elevated to the volatility of mixing sulphuric acid and gunpowder. No. For now, Mike stayed out. She closed the door, flashing him a sweet smile.
Now the sandy-haired Jerry sat in her office, under her pleasant, level gaze, presenting a face of sculpted features, as if for her inspection. From his personal aromas, she sensed a moderate state of sexual arousal. The gray suit made his eyes seem as dark-blue
as deep ocean water. Lorna’s breath came in quick pulls of air, and her nipples hardened. For an insane moment, she debated drawing the blinds so she could have him on the desk top.
“So, Lorna, you called the meeting. What’s up,” he asked, breaking the spell.
Relaxing, she returned full weight to the chair, feeling uncomfortable moisture down below. Taking a breath, she asked, “How much work does your firm do with Coven International?”
“CI is one of our largest clients. We help them with damage suits, property recovery, tracking members. That sort of thing. Why?”
“Do you know anyone important there?”
“Because their corporate headquarters are located in Orlando, I’ve had the honor of meeting several of the board members.”
“Are you on familiar enough terms to get me and in to speak with one of them?”
“Lorna, I trust and love you, but there are issues of confidentiality involved. I can’t give you a blanket answer without knowing something about what you’re after.”
To buy time, she fiddled with the case file on her desk top while deciding what she could share with him. After a moment, she asked, “Are you familiar with the term ferals?”
“Yes, they’re vampires and lycans who still hunt humans. They were common fifty years ago, but they’re practically nonexistent now. A few hang on in remote places. You know, like the Upper Amazon or Tibet.”
“What does the corporation do when one’s found?”
Jerry took a breath, taking his turn to organize an answer. “Well, keeping in mind they’re outlawed, when one pops up, we work with local authorities, providing information about the individual to facilitate capture. Coven International is as interested in removing ferals from society as humanity is.”