by Chloe Garner
“There’s a big bad up in Detroit,” he said. “Simon wants to know if we’re ready to get back to work again.”
“Up to you,” Jason said. “I’d tell him to book us a place to stay and send us the details.”
Sam nodded and looked at Samantha. He was still internally exhausted, but both of them were getting stir crazy. Something to take their minds off of their personal issues would be welcome. She nodded and he went into the living room to send an answer to Simon.
“So I’m going to have an empty house, then,” Doris said, smoothing her hands down her skirt. Samantha looked at her compassionately.
“It takes time to get used to,” she said. Doris nodded.
“I knew it was coming. I need the time. Don’t worry about me.”
Jason hugged her.
“I’m going to go get the Cruiser loaded,” he said. “If we leave now, we can be there in time to check in tonight.”
Samantha packed the small number of things she had left out of her bags, then did the same for Sam, loading up the car and returning to the living room where he was finishing up on the laptop.
“Are we ready?” he asked. She nodded.
“What has he got?”
“Something demonic,” Sam said. “People going missing, turning up gutted with pieces missing.”
“Could be people, still,” Samantha said. He nodded, tucking the laptop under his arm.
“Still demonic, even if it is people,” he said. She nodded.
They bade Doris a quick goodbye, then they were on the road.
“It’s good to be heading out again, the three of us,” Jason said. Sam and Samantha both silently agreed. Samantha lay down in the back seat, curling up in her blanket and closing her eyes against the sun.
“You know what? I feel sorry for whatever we come up against next,” Jason said. “I’m so ready to kill something. No more being flung into walls. Just a regular job with something I can put a bullet into, I hope.”
Samantha smiled. She had slept well the night before; Sam’s nightmares had only woken her twice, and they hadn’t been that severe that night, but the familiarity of her space in the back seat of the Cruiser as they started a long trip, with Sam just in front of her and Jason driving, lulled her into a quiet, sleepy state that was too nice to avoid. She drifted off, listening to the grumbling of the roadway under the wheels and the whoosh of the air as it sped past the car.
<><><>
Simon booked them a room at a motel well west of town and Sam and Samantha sat up for a few hours with the police reports that Simon had pulled. They agreed that they wouldn’t get into any of the real legwork until daylight.
“Forty-three murders and a hundred sixteen missing persons?” Samantha asked. “How has this not come up before now?”
“It’s Detroit,” Sam said. “Have you not worked here before?”
She shook her head.
“Lindsey’s territory,” she said.
“Who is Lindsey?”
“Just another one of us,” Samantha said. “Hates Carter. Carter hates her.”
“Does anyone not hate Carter?”
Samantha considered.
“No one worth mentioning.”
Sam looked at the records for another minute.
“What is Carter’s territory?”
“New York City.”
“Just… New York.”
Samantha nodded.
“City limits. Outside of that, Lindsay has most of New England.”
“New York.”
Samantha grinned, grabbing another report.
“Highest per-capita demon population in the world,” she said. “There’s been talk of pulling Staten Island into Lindsay’s territory, but Carter won’t consider it.”
“You never worked outside of New York City with Carter?”
She put the report down, remembering.
“A couple of times. I told you that avenging family falls to the family member, regardless of jurisdiction?” she asked. He nodded. “When one of us gets killed, we all get together. Carter is in charge, success is his responsibility, but he summons everyone and we all go to kill the demon who killed one of us. Then he chases them through hell and destroys them to splash. No mercy.”
“Splash?”
“Is what it sounds like,” Samantha said.
“Wow.”
She nodded.
“When a demon knowingly kills one of us, splash is sort of an eye-for-an-eye response.”
Carter had been the one to find Garrett. Samantha had been with him. She often hunted demons in her dreams. High-amplitude emotions, as characterized all of her dreams, made her wake up with her heart pounding and her adrenaline pushing her senses to high alert, but her instinctive mental response was to try to push herself back into the dream to get the job done. Garrett was the stuff of nightmares.
Sam didn’t have to ask. The details he could pull from what she felt were enough. He handed her another page.
“What about this one?” he asked.
Simon had done his best to filter out the missing persons who had turned up, later, in the city or elsewhere, but that left a disproportionate number of extremely poor people who wouldn’t have created an electronic record of themselves if they simply left town. There was no pattern to them at all, that Samantha could see, but Simon had picked them out of a much deeper pool of police reports as interesting. There was too much data. She needed more space.
“You mind if I take these and spread them all out where I can look at them?” she asked.
“What does that mean?”
“Pull them across with me. It’s kind of unsocial, but it helps me think when I have all the space I need to put everything where I can see it.”
“I wish you’d take me with you,” he said. She shook her head and he sighed.
“Do what you need to do. If you can figure this out tonight, we can head back south. Maybe stay with Darin and Cathy tomorrow.” Samantha raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t like Detroit. Too many Rangers come here and never turn up again.”
Samantha nodded, then gently took the page he was looking at and stacked up everything else, holding it to her chest and closing her eyes.
She crossed, and her brain fell into its scholar state. She was well enough conditioned that crossing with a stack of papers or a book was enough to make her feel sharp. She started laying out pages on the thick grass one after another, reading them carefully then putting them in a line and then a grid. There was no breath of wind to disturb them.
All of the murders had unusual characteristics. Unexpected levels of blood loss, body parts missing, no obvious cause of death - a few marked ‘heart attack’, but a number that were simply unknown - or extreme levels of trauma. Even without looking at the missing people, there were too many differences about the murders to start looking for patterns. Sam had said that there were more than two hundred a year, and less than a quarter ended up with a human conviction. She pulled the ones Simon had marked as most suspicious and put them in a line at her feet.
Body dumps with major organs missing, five of them, and the sixth had been completely exsanguinated. Looking at some of the others, though, she could see why he hadn’t called Sam and Jason in five months ago, when the first one had happened. It was only weeks apart from a body that had been found in an abandoned parking lot, obviously hit by a car, with not enough detail to be sure whether everything was still there or not. He’d been shot in the head, too. Three weeks after that, a woman had turned up at a hospital, beaten unconscious, her ear missing. She had died before they had ever figured out who she was.
The earliest file was from two years before, a teenage boy who looked like he had gotten in a knife fight. Samantha laid out the files chronologically, slowly filling in missing persons reports on the timeline.
It could be a demon gorging itself.
It could be a family of demons building a power structure.
It could be a sorcerer harve
sting magical power.
It could be a random human whack-a-doo.
It could be multiple human whack-a-doos.
The only thing she could rule out with the evidence she had was zombies. Everyone had been perfectly alive when they died, and none of them had human tissue in their stomachs. The missing persons, not so much, but people missing, in and of itself, wasn’t suspicious. A woman drained of blood…
She returned to the main six. All six had been identified. They came from various places around downtown, save one, who was visiting from Lansing. Two women, four men, aged 21 to 53.
She started pulling out subgroups of the missing.
Racially.
Gender.
Health.
Employment.
Nothing jumped.
She looked up at the hillside where the wrinkled man watched her, his face sad. She reminded herself that these were people, renewing her efforts.
Considerable hours later, she gave up. She needed more data. She picked up the papers out of a simple sense of neatness - there was no other point - and dropped back across the boundary.
“I can’t find anything here,” she said.
“That’s why Simon sent us,” Jason said from bed. “And that’s why I’m trying to get some sleep. We’ll go figure out what’s going on in person tomorrow.”
Sam yawned.
“I’m going to call it a night, too,” he said. She nodded, still staring at the stack of papers.
“So many people,” she said.
“Can’t save them all,” Jason said. “Get some sleep. We’ll need you in the morning.”
“Can’t empty hell,” she murmured, pulling her shoes off.
<><><>
Jason dropped them off at the coroner’s office.
“I can’t believe you agreed to this,” Samantha said.
“He’ll be fine,” Sam told her, opening the door. “He was right. He’ll be better off without us with him. We stand out.”
“I walk the worst of the demon-infested streets in New York without thinking twice about it,” Samantha said, “and I wouldn’t drive the area he’s going to. We have a stack of forty-three unsolved murders. Seriously.”
Sam wasn’t the slightest bit concerned, and it made her angry. He ducked his head slightly.
“Good thing he’s walking then, huh?”
“He’s what?”
“Hi. Our mutual friend set up an appointment for us?” Sam said at the desk. The clerk nodded.
“Right on time. Please.”
He buzzed them in and they followed him through a short maze of hallways to a refrigerated room. Samantha rubbed her hands together.
“I couldn’t get you into one of the exam rooms,” the clerk told her. “Sorry. How long are you going to need?”
“Can you give us an hour?” Sam asked. The kid nodded and left. Samantha looked at the wall of tables and body bags.
“Which one is it?” she asked, looking at the writing on the bags. None of them had names.
“Dunno,” Sam said, starting to unzip them one at a time. Samantha found her first.
She was a black woman in her late thirties; she had worked at a doctor’s office as a receptionist. Her hair was professionally styled and she wore dark lipstick and eyeshadow that suited her complexion. Samantha frowned and pulled the slate out.
“I’ve got her,” she said. She paused. With just her head and neck visible, she looked like she had died peacefully. Sam touched Samantha’s arm.
“We need to look at her,” he said. She was missing a lung. Samantha still felt a little like she was invading a place she didn’t belong. He took the zipper from her fingers and pulled it down to the woman’s feet.
Her chest was a gaping hole. It had been cleaned for the ME’s exam and the incision down her chest had been stitched shut, but there was nothing they could do to fix the grapefruit-sized hole in her chest. The ribs were missing, the skin had been ripped away all around it, and most of her chest bore marks of someone using a knife in long, careless swipes to lay her ribs bare.
“Was she alive?” Sam asked. Samantha glanced at the report on her clipboard, knowing the answer.
“Yes.”
Sam shuddered. Her organs were visible in plastic bags in her chest, and Samantha put on a plastic glove to pull out her heart, holding it up and looking at it from all sides.
“There’s nothing clearly wrong with it,” she said.
“You can tell?”
“Hearts I know. Lungs, kidneys, stomachs… not so much, but hearts I know.”
“That’s gross.”
She blinked.
“Probably.”
“So,” Sam said. “One lung.”
“Her right,” Samantha said. The hole was exactly where you would have expected to find a lung. She frowned.
“What?”
“There,” she said. He stepped back.
“What?”
She walked around the slate and looked at the woman’s hip, pulling the far side of the bag up over her after a second, unhappy leaving her completely uncovered.
“What is it?”
“It’s a tattoo,” Samantha said.
“Yeah,” Sam said, taking the clipboard from her. “Butterfly tattoo on left hip,” he read.
“It didn’t occur to me until just now,” she said. “To a particularly sensitive demon, that would be a life symbol.”
“Okay.”
“That’s why the right lung. It took the organ furthest from the mark.”
“Why?”
Samantha straightened, zipping the bag.
“I need to look at the rest of the files again.”
“That soon?” Sam asked.
“I don’t want to keep looking at her. Do you?”
Sam spread his hands as she slid the slate back to the wall.
“What if there’s something important you missed?”
“Angry. Sadistic. It bashed her chest in to get her lung out, even after she passed out. Now I know why it didn’t take everything else. I expect there will be tattoos mentioned in at least a couple of the other autopsies. That’s how we find our real pool of victims. No tattoo, it would have consumed them completely. Splash. Tattoo, I start putting together patterns on the meaning of the marks to this particular demon, I find out who it is.”
“And if it isn’t a demon?”
“Why would a sorcerer only take the lung?”
“Maybe that’s all he needed,” Sam said.
“Why ditch the body?”
“Why would a demon ditch the body?”
“Because of the life symbol. There are clans that are trained to hate all life passionately enough that a symbol like that could make them insane. Sorcerers aren’t as irrational as demons, sometimes.” Samantha considered. “Sometimes they are.”
“So you think you can identify a demon based on a few tattoos?”
“The key is the man who was blood-drained. If he had a tattoo, yeah. I can tell you most of what you need to know about the demon.”
Sam looked at the body bag again.
“Cool. You want to get breakfast?”
Jason would still be off doing his thing. She shrugged.
“Sure.”
<><><>
They were through with breakfast and drinking coffee when Jason called.
“Oh, good. He isn’t dead,” Samantha said. Sam grinned and answered the phone, telling Jason where they were. Thirty minutes later, Jason turned up and ordered breakfast.
“So what did you get?” he asked.
“I think I can tell you what kind of demon we’re hunting,” Samantha said.
“Demon, huh?” Jason asked.
“Woman in the morgue had a butterfly tattoo,” Sam said.
“Where?”
Sam pointed as Samantha smacked him.
“And that’s all it takes, huh?” Jason asked.
“I’m that good,” Samantha said, sipping her coffee. “I’ve got some more w
ork to do, but it’s possible I can ID it.”
“Her,” Jason said. Sam raised an eyebrow. “They call her the angel of death.”
Samantha snorted into her coffee.
“Who?” Sam asked.
“There’s a woman. The kids see her, mostly. Out at night. Blue dress. White. Green. Gray. Long jacket. Lots of variation. They say she comes for you.”
“You think it’s a real thing?” Sam asked.
“Oh, it’s a thing, all right,” Jason said, taking his coffee from the waitress with a nod. “Real fear on these guys. Guys who have killed people in cold blood.”
“Doesn’t make her real,” Samantha said.
“With these guys, it does,” Jason said.
“And how exactly did you get to be such friends with them?” Samantha asked.
“I bought drugs from them,” Jason said, reaching into his jacket pocket and tossing a handful of little plastic bags on the table. Sam looked away, grinning. “Want some?”
“You are…” Samantha said, sweeping the bags off the table. “Biggest idiot I’ve ever seen.”
“Please,” Jason said. “Two of those are baby formula, one is baking soda. The other three are real. That’s where I got my info.”
“So you just asked?” Samantha asked.
“And I cold-clocked some unfortunate in a suit for being in my way,” Jason said, then shrugged. “Whatever.”
“You wanted to know why we weren’t going with him,” Sam said.
“You’d have helped the dude up,” Jason said. Samantha rolled her eyes and returned to her coffee.
“So where do they see her?” Sam asked.
“All over, in the ring between downtown proper and the suburbs.”
“So that’s a lot of help.”
“A woman in a blue dress,” Samantha said. Jason nodded. “Or white or green or gray, or maybe it’s a jacket.”
“Could be a ghost,” Sam said.
“You have ghosts that bleed people out?” Samantha asked.
“Sure,” Jason said.
“How about ones that are afraid of butterflies?” she asked. Sam and Jason glanced at each other.
“What’s up with her?” Jason asked.
“She thinks splitting up is a dumb move,” Sam said.
“It is,” Jason said, picking his elbows up off the table to make space for a plate of food. “Thank you, darlin’,” he said.