by Mark Henwick
At the first dumpster, I gave them the photo I’d taken before opening the hoodie, then we finally moved to the body in the second dumpster. I handed over my latex gloves, which I’d turned inside out, and explained clearing the trash and the pulse check I’d done on the body.
They didn’t let me get anywhere near it, and the garbage smell was still killing anything else, so I ended up back outside the tape, still unsure of what had killed the man, but a little happier about Knight.
When the sergeant had first handed out the schedule and I saw I was assigned to partner Knight, about the only thing I’d known about him was that his nickname was ‘Silent.’ As in huge joke. As in ceaseless patter while I drove.
But he was a decent guy. He didn’t smell and he hadn’t hit on me. At least, not yet. It’s not that I expect it. At five-ten, I’m too tall for a lot of guys. I run a lot, I practice martial arts and I spent years in the army. I don’t do simpering. Most guys don’t look beyond that, at the auburn hair and green eyes, a product of mixed Celtic and Arapaho blood. I was nothing to write home about, but I’d heard that long hours sharing a cruiser made anyone attractive.
Anyone? I glanced back at Knight and hid a smile.
No. Not gonna work for me.
It wasn’t that I needed him specifically as a partner, but I needed a partner, and I needed one who would vouch for me. There were no official forms for that kind of evaluation. But one evening at the bar, someone would ask Knight how the rookie was shaping up, and it was amazing how much a career depended on the answer to that question.
I’d expected hazing and grunt work while I was a rookie, and I could deal with both. But I’d thought all my Ops experience would be an asset. If it turned out to be a liability, I was so screwed.
There was much more at stake for me here than just a job with the police. After the ‘incident,’ as the army referred to it, they had discharged me and gotten me this job, but they had a price. I was still reporting to them. If I stayed sane, employed, and didn’t turn into anything that went bump in the night, I got to stay in Denver. If I failed in any of those areas, they’d reach out and pull me back in.
The city started to wake up, and one of the other uniform guys spelled me so I could fetch coffees.
When I came back, miracles had happened. Buchanan was talking to uniform. Crap.
He swung around as I approached. “Good of you to join us. I hope it’s not inconvenient for us to talk during your break.”
“Of course not, Detective.” I shut myself up before I added –glad you could make the time for us.
Even so, Buchanan’s jaw worked.
Way to go, Farrell.
I hadn’t learned that attitude in the army and it really wouldn’t do me any favors here. He was being an asshole, but I couldn’t afford to piss him off enough that the others wouldn’t back me up. They didn’t need to create enemies in their jobs over some smartass rookie who might talk her way out of hers.
“You were first to the body?” he asked.
“Yes. The vehicle over there hit the dumpsters—”
“I’m aware of the background,” he cut me off. “You checked he was dead?”
“Yes. No pulse in the throat.”
“Did you inform CSI you contaminated their scene?”
Yet another cop who thought I was wet behind the ears. “No, Detective. But I handed them the gloves I wore and explained what I’d done.”
Buchanan’s eyes narrowed. I looked back innocently.
The Medical Examiner and CSI teams came over and Buchanan turned his back on us. A couple of the ME’s assistants wheeled the body into their van. I looked wistfully after it, but I was pretty sure that if I tried to sneak in the van and get a sniff of the corpse, I’d be fired on the spot.
The woman from CSI seemed almost as excluded from Buchanan’s conversation as the rest of us. What was her name? Melissa something. Melissa Owen?
I edged over to her. We hadn’t been dismissed by Buchanan, but he hadn’t told us we had to stand there like dummies.
“Hi, er…Melissa.” We had been introduced before, and Owen sounded wrong.
“Amber,” she said, turning toward me, her face neutral but open.
“Strange neck wounds on that body.”
“Yes.”
“Were they the cause of death?”
“Possibly.”
“I didn’t see any blood in the trash or on the ground nearby.”
“Hmmm.”
I’d have more luck squeezing stones. I tried a different approach. “Would it be possible for me to have another look?”
“Are you being serious? Along with everything else, you have crime scene investigation experience?” Buchanan’s tone dripped sarcasm, cutting across any response that Melissa might have made.
No, I didn’t. But I had plenty of experience with dead bodies, and some experience with vampire bites. If that’s what these were, then the army was going to want to know about it. Looking out for vampires was the reason I was here and not back where the army could keep a better eye on me. The trouble was, when you spent half your time looking for things that most people thought didn’t exist, there was always the chance that you’d start seeing things that weren’t there.
A body was bled out. It had a pattern of wounds to the throat. There was no blood around. That wasn’t conclusive evidence of vampires, or anything else.
“If we’re all finished,” said Buchanan, staring at me. “First estimate puts this guy being killed between 10 and 12 last night. He wasn’t killed here in the alley or in the apartment building, so the body had to have been brought in from somewhere. I need you to do a house to house within a block to check if anyone saw something between 10 p.m. and the time you got here. Any questions?”
“There’s a HALO camera across the way,” I said. Denver’s HALO surveillance network was intended to reduce crime. If the camera was on and if it was pointed in this direction, we could have a lead.
“If there’re no questions, then I suggest you get on with your task,” Buchanan said and walked away. The other two uniforms headed up to where the alley joined 11th Avenue without a word. Even the CSI and ME crew looked suspiciously at me as they left.
“Oh, nice work, Detective Farrell.” Knight jerked his head and we walked back past our patrol car. “I thought you wanted to try for Homicide eventually.”
“I do.” I looked to the heavens. “Don’t try and tell me that asshole is responsible for admission.”
“No.” Knight shook his head. “He’s not responsible. But he goes to ball games with the guy who is.”
I groaned. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, on top of a graveyard shift patrol and the promise of a long extra stretch of getting told nothing by the people living nearby. We split up and started knocking on doors.
A time of death of 11 p.m., give or take. Of course, I didn’t know it then, but that was when the clock had started ticking.
Chapter 2
A couple of hours later, and with nothing to show for it, I pushed open the door to a shoe shop of some kind, the last place on my section.
There were racks of shoes and a workbench on the left, where a large man with a bushy beard was carefully packing some beautiful cowboy boots into a box. An intoxicating smell of fresh brewed coffee wafted from the back of the shop, fighting against the scent of freshly treated leather.
The man looked up at me over little, half-glass spectacles. “Welcome. Welcome,” he boomed, with a heavy German accent. “And for you, I think, these.” He put the box aside and brought up another pair of boots onto the worktop.
“Oh, God, I wish,” I said. At his nod, I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. It was the kind of quality you can’t find in the shopping mall. A handmade boot, the sole arched like a cat stretching and with a silky soft shaft.
I wanted them. My head gave my heart a major talking-to and I put the boot back down on the counter, my fingers reluctant to stop stroking it.
> I sighed. “I’m afraid I’m here to ask questions, not to look at boots.” I flipped the page of my notebook and wrote the shop name at the top—Schumacher’s. The name made me grin.
“Sit, sit. I will answer all your questions. I have nothing to hide.” He came out from behind his bench, chuckling and holding his beefy hands up in surrender.
I sat and he put his head through the door to the back.
“Klara. Some coffee please, for this young woman. Are there still cookies?”
I closed my eyes. “Coffee and cookies. If Klara’s not your wife, then I’ll marry you as soon as I’m off duty.”
He laughed, put his glasses aside and sat opposite me.
“I’m Officer Farrell.” I smiled. “Amber. Remember, you’ll need that for the marriage certificate. And you are?”
“My name is Werner Schumacher. While we talk, I must do this. Please. Your foot, without the shoe.”
Bemused, and a little hesitantly, I pulled my right shoe off, rolled up the pant leg and let him guide my foot into a machine sitting on the floor between us. I was pretty sure there was some police regulation against this, but if it got him to talk freely…
“Do you live in this building?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we live upstairs, the three of us. Hold still.” He pressed a button and peered down at the machine, which whirred and clicked.
“Were any of you awake between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. last night?”
He looked up and blinked. “Last night, after dinner, I worked. Here, behind the bench. Until, oh, eleven.”
Klara came in. She was a tiny, energetic woman. The important thing was she was carrying coffee. Real coffee.
“Werner!” she said. “This woman is busy and you are testing your toy on her.”
I smiled and waved off her concern, and her offers of creamer and sugar. I let her leave the cookies, though.
“This is important, Mr. Schumacher. Did you see anyone suspicious on the road outside at any time between 10 p.m. and the time you stopped? Any suspicious activity?”
The shop was at the far end of the block from the alley. If the murderer had brought the victim here by car he wouldn’t have seen anything, and I was reasonably sure the corpse hadn’t been dragged along the sidewalk. In LA maybe, but, hey, this was Denver.
“The other foot, please.” He hummed a bit. “Yes. I saw some people that I did not like.”
I swapped feet.
“People you know?”
He shook his head and looked down at the machine. I took a sip of Mrs. Schumacher’s coffee and got a glorious jolt of pure caffeine.
“Could you describe them?”
“It was dark. I just finish and turn off the lights. Maybe five minutes before eleven.” He waggled his hand uncertainly. “ I look across the road. One very tall, six foot six inches, perhaps, fair hair. Two shorter men, your height, darker, maybe Mexican. One with a mustache. All with coats to here.” He chopped his hand against his thigh. “All collars up.” He flicked the collar of his shirt.
I snuck another cookie. “And what was it about them you didn’t like?”
He stole one of my cookies and sat back in his seat, thinking and chewing.
“Moving,” he said. “The way they are moving. Down the street in the city, but looking like hunters, yes? Looking for someone. Or following someone. Not looking to the side. Not talking. Not pleasant people.” He shook his head.
I jotted it down and put my shoes back on. It would just finish my day to have Buchanan walk in here now and see me in my stocking feet. I didn’t think this information was relevant, but at least there was someone who had been looking outside at the right time. Maybe he’d seen something else that he would remember later.
“It could also be, I have seen too much of your TV.” He shrugged, and spun the little screen on the machine around to show me. “Now look, your feet, here.”
The machine had scanned my feet in, and was now displaying them as 3D models, slowly turning around.
“When I make you your boots, I have exact measurements. The fit will be perfect.”
“I’m a policewoman, Mr. Schumacher, and I can hardly afford store boots, let alone handmade.”
“Store boots!” He snorted. “Rubbish. A waste of money. My boots,” he leaned forward, “my boots are an investment.”
I laughed. “I need to invest in my car first, but I’m tempted, really I am.”
Note to self, go buy a lottery ticket.
“You said there’s three of you,” I went on. “Who’s the third?”
“Our daughter, Emily.”
Something in his voice made me glance up from my notes. This had nothing to do with my job here, but the shop was the last one on the block and I needed an excuse to sip some more coffee and nibble the last sweet ginger cookie. “Problem?”
“No, no. Not really.” He smiled a little. “Every year, you look back and think the problems from last year weren’t so bad, not so?”
“What’s this year’s problem?”
“Oh, such a little thing really,” Klara said, coming back in with the pot. “She and her friends, they dress in black and do the makeup.” She indicated around her eyes. “You know, the dark eyes. They call it Goth or Emo. They listen to the ugly music.”
She’d brought over a photograph from behind the counter, a young girl with black hair and wide eyes. She had an innocent look I never quite managed at that age, no matter how hard I’d practiced in the mirror.
Back then, I thought I’d get away with things if I looked like that. Now, it just made me wonder what she’d been up to.
“Kids experiment with styles,” I said, handing the photo back.
“Did you?” Klara asked.
Actually, I hadn’t. When I was not much older than Emily, my dad got sick and died. The insurance company wouldn’t pay. Bad things happened. I dropped out of school to help support the family. I joined the army and got expert in ways of killing people.
“No, I was kinda too busy.”
I left the Schumachers’ shop a short while later, with an invitation to stop in when I was passing and an assurance that there was always coffee and sometimes there were cookies too. I did not look at the boots as I went out. I have a will of iron.
And I needed it, to keep from biting Buchanan’s idiot head off when we reported back. He took it as an affront that all we’d collected between us was one shoemaker who might have seen three people heading down the street, looking mean.
I tuned him out as he vented, using the time to scan the activity in the alley. The body was long gone—bagged, tagged and on its way to the morgue. I really wished I’d gotten a better look at it.
I was seeing Colonel Laine today—my liaison with the army. The man who I was supposed to report to if I found any credible sign of vampire presence or activity here in Denver. Operative word—credible. I’d seen an unusual pattern of neck wounds and a suspicious lack of blood at the scene, but so far that was inconclusive. I needed solid proof before making any reports; the only thing worse than being the only known person who could identify vampires would be turning into a person who saw vampires when they weren’t there.
I’d already managed to piss off my partner, and made an ass of myself in front of the other uniforms here. On top of that, I’d probably persuaded the CSI team I was a morbid lunatic. Buchanan had clearly written me off already. If I brought the army in now and it turned out I was wrong, the whole house of cards would come down.
Strictly speaking, I should have been back at the base right now, under close observation. I’m sure that’s what the scientists had recommended. Their version of close observation included restraints and a soundproof cell with no windows.
I’d spent time in that cell. My vocal cords ached with memories; my wrists itched with phantom burns.
I still couldn’t quite believe that I’d been let out, even though it had been a year now. Not just let out—I’d been set up with a job. T
wo, in fact, since I’d blown the first job. Working in the police was my second chance, and common sense said it was also my last chance.
None of it’s my goddamn fault!
I stomped on that. I couldn’t waste time bitching. This was my reality. Just to keeping standing still, I had to succeed at my police job and I had to meet my obligations to the army. The problem was when they overlapped like this, I could screw up both of them with one false move. And the minute I was no more use to the army out here, I would end up back in that cell. Sweat chilled my forehead. Anything but that.
Knight was herding me back to our patrol car. I wanted to check out the alley and the dumpster again, sniff around for a hint of vampires, but there were still techs crawling around, making notes and bagging garbage. As far as Knight was concerned, I was just rubbernecking, and I’d caused enough problems with him for one day. I drove us back to the station and we clocked out.
I thought about trying to get into the morgue and have a look at that body, but figured I’d already rocked the boat enough for the moment. I could check the reports once the coroner had determined cause of death. Then, if further investigation was warranted, I could make a decision about what to do.
There were more mundane problems as well. I needed to leave some extra time in case I had trouble with my car, and I really needed to get some rest before my meeting with the colonel. These meetings weren’t ever easy, and this time I had to hide today’s suspicious murder from him until I confirmed it one way or the other.
I had plenty of time to regret those decisions over the next few days.
Chapter 3
I’d set my alarm for an hour’s sleep, and it jerked me awake, sending another nightmare slithering back into the pit of my subconscious.
I didn’t linger over it. I took a shower, tied my hair back and got dressed. Breakfast was coffee and some fruit to go. I glanced around out of habit to see if there was anything I’d forgotten. Laundry was bagged and ready for a spare moment. My spare police uniform was hanging, ready for my next shift. My handguns were in the safe underneath the bed.