by Rick Wayne
I spent the next few days on a murder. Not all of them are difficult and lengthy, just like not all petty theft is quick and easy. The difference is that we let the petty shit go if there isn’t an obvious culprit. This particular murder happened in broad daylight and in full view of a convenience store security camera. The shooter, an accountant and mother of two, not only had no criminal record, she claimed not to know the victim and to be completely unaware of her actions. But despite the oddity, she wasn’t the reason the case found its way to me. It was the victim. Almost nothing about the body made any sense. For one, he was dressed like he’d just missed his berth on the Titanic. Then there were the “runes,” vaguely like currency symbols, burned into his chest and back, almost like he’d been branded. And he was shot in the head with a solid gold slug.
You might conclude from my acquisition of the case that certain folks in the NYPD had suspicions about how the world really is and were handling it as best they could. You might conclude that, but you’d be wrong. I wasn’t the NYPD’s secret weapon. I was their secret embarrassment. Not that anyone was out to get me. Giant interminable bureaucracies aren’t spontaneously goal-directed like that. That takes leadership. What bureaucracy is spontaneously good at is protecting itself. And reacting to things. I survived because I hadn’t given it any reason to react to me. My clearance rate was shit, but all that really did was keep me from getting a raise. Or a promotion. I never bothered to apply for either, and that meant as long as I didn’t call attention to myself, keeping me on the payroll was always easier than going through the effort of firing me. But then, as long as I was still on the payroll, my colleagues would keep asking their lieutenants to send me the weird cases, the ones that looked damned likely to eat up time and bring a precinct’s numbers down, as this case was likely to. No one asked why I kept taking them. That only rocked the boat.
In my experience, people don’t walk up to strangers and shoot them in the head for no reason, especially in broad daylight. But then, a close-range shot is somewhat necessary with gold bullets. Silver and lead have similar density, but gold is nearly twice as dense, which means to avoid bullet drop you have to get up close and personal. That fact implied premeditation, especially since you can’t just hop on down to the local sporting goods store and pick up 24-karat rounds. That meant the DA wanted a motive before trial. (The fact that the insanity defense almost never works doesn’t keep people from trying.) Our shooter was an accountant. The victim, a banker. Was there a hidden connection? Did she have an accomplice? If not, who made the bullets? If she was just plain homicidal, then why hadn’t she killed before? Or had she, perhaps even in another state? In other words, despite the incontrovertible evidence against her—or rather precisely because of it—someone would have to turn this woman’s life upside down and shake loose some answers.
So I did. For any of it to make sense, though, you need to understand something first. You need to understand that lycanthropy is hell, and not just on the person who contracts it. On their family as well. On their friends. There’s no cure, but there are methods of suppression. Technically, it’s transmitted by bite. In reality, transmission is sexual, since that’s when most biting occurs. The typical course starts in a bar, where some innocent guy or gal will feel a certain animal attraction to a stranger in the crowd—someone seemingly magnetic, if a little skittish. Like a wild animal. After drinks loosen inhibitions, contact is made. It’s hard to say no to someone whose body is throwing off palpable heat and who clearly wants you so bad they can barely contain it, especially if you’re not used to getting that kind of attention.
Words spoken in advance of a life-altering bad decision include: “I’ve never done this before” and “I can’t believe this is happening” and “I never thought something like this would happen to me.” Maybe the couple makes it to a bed. Maybe they do it in the bathroom or a back seat in the parking lot. Either way, it ends suddenly with that innocent guy or gal holding their hand to their neck and screaming “What the hell?” while the biter cowers in a corner, apologizing over and over and saying they thought they could handle it, that they’d had their injection that month, that things just got out of hand. At that point, an explanation may or may not be forthcoming—such as what will happen at the next full moon. To be fair, it’s a tough call. Dumping the full truth out of the blue is the surest way to scare the victim off. Once you’ve already bitten someone, it doesn’t take much to convince them that you’re a complete wacko and they should never talk to you again, and that’s a problem since the best help at transition always comes from someone who’s gone through it before.
There used to be support groups. Used to be. People learned the hard way that it was a bad idea to put lycanthropes into packs.
Anyway, some weeks later, after recovering from what seems like a bout of flu, the bitten wakes up in a strange place, naked, with pigeon feathers caked to the blood on their cheeks, or rat meat stuck between their teeth. They become quick to anger—but equally quick to forgive. In fact, they become intensely loyal to friends and family and lash out at anyone who offends someone close to them. Every few weeks, their temperature spikes and they suffer uncontrollable bouts of sexual desire. A couple days after that, they black out completely. Sooner or later, someone in their life makes the connection between all of that and the phases of the moon—usually as a joke—and wheels start turning.
The transformation isn’t nearly as dramatic as you’ve been led to believe. It’s more psychological than anything, but there are a handful of physical manifestations. Catching the disease early makes it easier to contain, of course, but that almost never happens. Victims feel too good about themselves at first. The changes in diet give them more energy. The temperature spikes and nocturnal activities burn a lot of calories. It’s a helluva weight loss plan. Victims get lean, quick. They like the new them. Slimmer. Confident. People react to them differently. Positive things start happening at work or with the opposite sex, and so warnings from friends and family that “You’re different” are ignored, maybe even angrily, and the disease progresses. It’s not until later, when they experience the full effect on their loved ones, that victims begin to despise themselves.
Suicide attempts are common, but attacks on people are actually rare, just like with bears and sharks. It usually only happens when the lycanthrope is desperate—if they end up ostracized from their “pack,” for example: abandoned by their friends and family for their despicable behavior. Such attacks, when they occur, are frenzied and violent and the victims rarely survive, which is sometimes better than the alternative. It’s a terrible fate to suffer the disease confined to a wheelchair.
Watching your loved one go through all that, month after month, year after year, gradually getting worse, waiting for the inevitable but seemingly powerless to prevent it, is torture. You’d do anything to help. Of course, you treat it rationally at first. You spend a fortune on doctors. On therapy. You get diagnoses ranging from food poisoning (common with lycanthropes) to dissociative disorder. But nothing seems to work. In fact, the pills and treatments only seem to make the outbursts worse. Sooner or later, convinced you can’t be the only ones going through this, you start poking around online. The things you’ve witnessed maybe make you a little more open-minded than the average person, so you scroll through obscure internet forums and crackpot websites that you never would’ve considered before.
One day, someone suggests a witch.
You blow it off at first, but after the next episode you figure, what can it hurt? Maybe it takes you a while, but when you find one, she’s only too happy to help. She can make it all stop, she says. She can help your loved one. All you need to do is lease your soul to her. Sounds crazy, right? But then, you’re not sure you believe any of that crap anyway. And she’s such a nice old lady. It’s only for a few months, maybe a little longer, so you sign the papers and the witch seals a silly old clay pot with wax and you walk away with a bag full of vials—rare herb brew, silv
er nitrate cocktail—and each new moon, at the ebb of their condition, when the effect is weakest, you make sure your loved one gets their injections: one into the neck, one into the gum line. And yeah, maybe life seems a little duller, maybe your friends tell you that you’re working too hard lately and you seem like a zombie, but there are no more episodes. Your family is safe. So it’s worth it.
Then the deal runs out. You get your soul back, but you also run out of injections. You realize how dead you’ve felt—so numb you didn’t even realize it. So you try to get by on your own. One month goes by and things aren’t so bad. Two months, it gets a little worse. Three months, you’re back to the witch. Only now the terms are worse than before. You have to lease your soul for longer. Maybe you sign right away, maybe you don’t. Maybe you go home and try to tough it out. Maybe you lock your loved one in the basement at that time of the month. Maybe they snap at you—literally. Maybe they get rough with one of the kids. Maybe in an inexplicable fury over a chew toy, they attack and kill the family pet. Maybe, as you’re scrubbing the blood off the kitchen floor, wondering what you’re going to tell your daughter when she gets home from school, you finally decide that you don’t have a choice. It’s just a year. You can do a year. And that will give you time to figure something out.
So you sign the paper, this time with a dot of your own blood, and the witch seals the urn and the light goes out of your eyes and you walk home in a daze with another bag full of vials. Another year goes by, and you never do find a different solution. Only now you know what’s coming, so you sign up again without any debate. You don’t even wait for the last contract to lapse. You’re numb and don’t want to suffer another transition, to experience again what you’ll have to sacrifice, so you go to the witch a few weeks early, and just as you expected, the terms have nearly doubled. Like a payday loan, she gets a better deal the longer interest accrues.
Then one day, out of the blue, you wake up holding a smoking gun. People are screaming and running from you on the street. There’s a dead man at your feet, bleeding on the sidewalk. You don’t recognize him. You’ve never seen him before. The police arrive and order you to put the weapon down. You comply, shaking, and are arrested. You’re told there’s video footage of yourself standing perfectly still for hours in front of a convenience store before suddenly walking up to the man and shooting him in the head at point blank range. You’re asked if you want a lawyer and you say yes, and while you’re waiting there alone in the interview room, you realize you can feel your hands and the color is back in your cheeks. You got your soul back. And the real terms of the deal you made become clear.
Of course, it took me a couple days to piece all that together. Any other detective armed with a warrant to search the family’s financial and medical history for hints of a motive certainly wouldn’t have recognized the signs—like a 32-year-old previously healthy man who suffers repeated bouts of food poisoning and who asks his doctor out of the blue for tetanus and rabies shots.
The shooter was one Elise Landry. Divorced. Her brother, the infected, was the youngest of four siblings. The disease was hard on him and he was unable to hold a steady job. With the family savings spent on doctors and the rest, Ms. Landry incurred a large debt. After being arrested for assault and battery, her brother lost his job and then his apartment. He moved in, ostensibly to help with child care. Life for the unusual family wasn’t easy, or so I inferred, but they were making it work. Until the shooting.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the victim was a right genuine asshole, a banker at a private capital investment firm who got rich short-selling the insurance business—by all accounts, a real shark: greedy, intractable, and unloved. Still, on the video evidence alone, Ms. Landry’s conviction would’ve been all but guaranteed . . . that is, if the warrant hadn’t been improperly handled. It was a technical oversight, definitely—the video was seized a few hours before the paperwork was issued by the court clerk—but it was enough. Any halfway decent defense attorney would get it thrown out. And with no discernible motive, no prior record, no mention of the tape, and no eyewitnesses—thanks again to the bumbling of the investigating officer, who might’ve discouraged any of them from coming forward—Ms. Landry will likely end up pleading to probation and be home in a few weeks.
I’ll get my ass chewed over the procedural “mishaps,” not just from my boss but the DA as well, who I’m sure will make a special trip to see me. I’ll also get a formal reprimand that will make promotion to lieutenant all but impossible. But as long as no one in the media adds to the stink, it’ll wash off in a couple months—after I clear a few more cases that no one else could.
Meanwhile, I put the brother in touch with a certain guy I know. Well, that’s not exactly true. I know of him. Man named Lucas. Walks with crutches. Works as a trauma counselor. He’s a fellow victim who teaches folks like himself how to keep their conditions in check: brewing herbs, preparing silver nitrate, avoiding others of their kind. Every so often, one of them will find their way to the door of the community center where Lucas works. He can always tell. The hunting eyes. The skittish demeanor. But then, lycanthropes can smell each other from across the room. They come and he pulls them aside and tells each the same thing.
“I don’t wanna know your name. I don’t wanna know where you live. I don’t care about your troubles or how you got here. I’ll show you what you need to know, and after that, I don’t ever wanna see you again. Is that clear?”
He tells them to refrain from having sex until they’re in a committed relationship with someone who knows the truth and understands the risk. Hardly any of them do. Oh, they do good for a while, especially at first, but as the years drag on, sooner or later they get an itch they can’t scratch and the whole thing starts over with someone new. I hope the brother does better, for his sister’s sake at least.
I only met her once. We were waiting for her lawyer to arrive. I walked over and sat next to her and when no one was listening, asked who held her contract. She seemed surprised—you know, that anyone in a position of authority knew about that kind of stuff. She wouldn’t say the witch’s name of course. She wouldn’t say anything, which was smart. After the criminal settlement, she’d be facing a battle in family court. She wanted to keep custody of her kids. No better way to lose them than by shooting a man on the street and then raving about werewolves and witches.
She wouldn’t say the name, but I caught her eyes when I did a moment later.
“It was Granny, wasn’t it?”
The runoff reservoir where Bobbi Jo was found was undoubtedly man-made. Its sides sloped at a steady angle and three of its lengths were ruler-straight. The fourth curved evenly around the border of a small neighborhood park. Most of the water from the storm had gone, leaving only a marshy carpet of weeds spotted in puddles, which reflected the sun like oval mirrors. The sky was clear but the air had turned quite a bit cooler than it had been yet that season.
I grabbed my backpack of supplies from the back seat and walked into the park, past a jungle gym, swing set, and metal merry-go-round that rested in a moist sand pit, and stopped on the small open lawn, half of which had been scuffed to dirt by running children. It was early then, and the place was empty. A handful of old trees were dotted about, dropping their leaves in the breeze. A tall chain-link fence kept pedestrians from the reservoir. Along it ran a jogging path. Restrooms were near the street corner. A stretch of yellow caution tape had been wrapped back and forth between the orange barrels that flanked the door to the men’s room, indicating it was out of order, but the tape had since sagged to the ground, which suggested it had been that way for some time. Deep in the bowels of the city, I was sure, a work order had waited months to be taken seriously.
A convergence. That’s what I was looking for. I was told it was sort of like a nexus of ley lines, the natural alignments of the sun, moon, and rivers upon which the ancients built their megaliths, like Stonehenge. The intersections of such lines were said
to be imbued with spiritual or magical power—boundaries between here and somewhere else—although the lines I was looking for would be considerably less grand.
You are the one, the old witch doctor had said. You need to find the line of two and the line of three and stand in the circle where they meet.
“Line of two . . .” I repeated to myself.
No sooner had I said it than I noticed the orange barrels standing parallel to one another. Across the street was a small grocery store that looked like it dated to about 1970. In the parking lot, two tall posts marked the opening of the cart return. I stepped sideways until the barrels and posts were roughly aligned. I had to guess because the restroom hut was between them. Then I turned around. Sure enough, an imaginary line running between them almost exactly intersected the posts of the gate in the fence that led to the reservoir.
“Huh.” A line of two.
I looked for a line of three. It took me a minute.
Don’t forget to look up and down, the old man had said. Not everything runs along the ground.
A set of three power lines ran along the park, strung between distant poles. I turned and noticed the merry-go-round behind me, which was rimmed in three metal bars. While the sets of two faced each other, vertical and static, the sets of three were horizontal and moved: the power lines carried a flow of electricity, the merry-go-round spun. It matched.
“Sonuvabitch . . .” I breathed.
I drew an imaginary line that followed the power lines and walked to where that line intersected the line running between the posts. Standing there, I noticed I was inside a set of four trees which made a rough diamond shape around my position.
I removed a tube of navy blue lipstick from my bag. I opened the cap and twisted.