Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  He swallowed visibly. “I don’t think they’ll take your call.”

  “Good point,” I said, and swiped his phone right from out of his grasp before he could do anything about it. I peered over the bar and grabbed the list of names, which probably wasn’t done but was good enough to make a start on. “You just hang out right there while I go to work on this, all right?”

  He visibly gulped, and it was adorable in the way that a rescue animal with a missing limb trying to hobble would be. Well, no, actually, it wasn’t nearly that cute. He flushed and said, “I know my rights! You can’t take my mobile phone like that!”

  “Know your rights?” I snorted, picking out the third contact on the list to start with. “You probably don’t even know how to make a Blue Hawaiian.”

  He almost took a step back, his honor visibly affronted. “Rum, pineapple juice, Curacao, sweet and sour mix—maybe a dash of vodka if you’re feeling adventurous.”

  “Great,” I said, “make two of those in the non-adventurous variant.” I glanced at Rose for confirmation, and she shrugged, then nodded. “Ladies’ night is about to begin early with a two-for-none special.”

  His shoulders sank and he got sullen, but he sprang into motion. I nodded at him, and Rose nodded back at me, getting the message, which was to watch him so he didn’t try to hock a loogie in our drinks or something even more revolting, while I made some calls checking up on his story.

  The phone rang and then gave way to a male voice saying, “Whassup, bruvnor?” in a gangsta Scottish accent.

  “I don’t know what that bruvnor thing is,” I said, “and I’m not your bartender buddy, but he’s standing right here. My name is Sarah Nelson, I’m with Scotland Yard, and your pal is facing a long stretch of jail time.”

  “Whaaaaaaat?” The voice on the other end of the line wasn’t quite picking up what I was laying down.

  “Do you know who Adam Perry is?” I asked, figuring that plunging ahead would eventually enable me to drag this idiot along when his brain started to catch up.

  “Yeah. Lurch-looking motha. Who is this?”

  “I told you, Scotland Yard. Adam Perry is dead.”

  “Whot? Lurch?”

  “Yes. He was found in the Old Calton Burial Ground this morning.”

  There was a faint snickering on the other end of the line. “Dead in a graveyard. Who’d have thunk it?”

  “Focus, imbecile. Your bartender pal? He’s in hot water for this. Where was he last night?”

  “Well, he was with me at the bar—me and a bunch of others. We were there almost until dawn.”

  “Do you remember what time you left?” I asked.

  “Hang on, yeah. I think I checked my phone when I did. 5:10. Somewhere around there. It was a late night.” He chuckled.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, and hung up on him and plunged back into the directory, picking another name from the list at random.

  They answered on the third ring. “Yo, what going on, barman?”

  I went through my schpiel again, this time my subject picking it up a lot more quickly. I guess I’d inadvertently dialed the brains of the operation. It took me a few seconds to get to the question at hand: “Where were you last night?”

  “At the bar, until late, with the person whose cell phone you’re calling me on. He didn’t do it; he was partying with us all night.”

  I was starting to get that feeling, but then, I’d had a suspicion the bartender was no more than a run-of-the-mill lech all along. “Remember what time you left the bar?”

  “Sometime around five, I reckon, because I collapsed at home about five-thirty and the bar’s about twenty minutes away from there.”

  Thanking him for his time, I hung up and made my way to the bar. “Your story checks out,” I said, as the bartender set two icy, blue-filled glasses down on the polished oak.

  He wavered a little at the end, spilling just slightly out of mine as he let out a rather obvious breath of relief. “Told you,” he said.

  “Great,” I said, taking a sip. It was pretty good. Nice and sweet too, probably because he was used to getting high school girls drunk by hiding the liquor flavor until they were too smashed to resist his charms.

  “Fantastic,” he said, clearly relieved to be done with that. “Now drink up, ladies, and be on your way.”

  “Ready to be rid of us so soon?” Rose asked, sipping from the straw in a faux-seductive manner that was exactly the kind of thing I would have done if I’d been feeling less lethal and more playful with this jackass.

  “Quite,” he said simply.

  “Yeah, we’re nowhere near done,” I said, and his shoulders slumped as he realized we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. “Now, maybe now you can tell me about Adam Perry…and what you know about what happened to him last night.”

  24.

  “Look,” the bartender said, and I could see the beads of perspiration strung across his forehead, which I suspected was not so high about five years ago, “Perry is a bit of an odd fellow, okay?”

  “Define ‘odd’ for me in the Edinburgh sense,” I said, taking another sip of my drink.

  “I don’t know,” the bartender said, making his misery at our mere presence obvious. He looked like he wanted to tuck his non-vestigial reptile tail between his legs and slink off somewhere, like we’d become a completely intolerable burden he couldn’t wait to escape.

  I have that effect on people, I’m told.

  “He’s just strange,” the bartender went on. “Watches oddball TV programs and blathers on about them endlessly. Doctor Who. Battlestar Galaxy—”

  “Galactica,” I corrected. Rose and the bartender both looked at me and I felt myself redden. “What? My brother’s really into that show.”

  He didn’t look like he believed me, but he didn’t challenge me about it either. “Anyway, he’s just—strange. Who comes to a place like this to talk about Battlestar…” He looked at me, prompting.

  “Galactica.”

  “Right, who does that?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t make much of an effort with the ladies, you know. I don’t get it. All this prime tail and he’s trying to talk up the blokes about stupid spaceship shows. What’s wrong wif a man who does that?” He frowned, like a thought was occurring to him for the first time. “I wonder if he was…ohhh. Yeah. Probably wasn’t interested in the ladies, now I give it a think. He had this little sixteen-year-old, draping herself all over him, and he couldn’t be arsed.” The bartender made a face of pure disgust. “It’s just wrong, unless he’s—you know. Then it all makes sense.”

  I rolled my eyes, not bothering to hide my own disgust, because that little factoid only concerned me insofar as it gave a possible additional reason why an incubus might have been able to target Adam Perry. “Maybe he just wasn’t into underaged girls.”

  “Whatchoo talking about, ‘underage’?” The bartender leaned forward. “Sixteen ain’t underage.” He paled rapidly, and looked to Rose for confirmation, like he’d just woken from a bad dream. “It’s not underage, is it?” Without waiting for an answer: “I always heard the age of consent was sixteen, I swear it!”

  I worked hard to control my blush, which was good, because this was one of those little things that might have outed me as an American, where the overall age of consent was more or less eighteen, with a few exceptions for people in an age bracket near to eighteen—something our bartender friend hadn’t been for at least two decades. “You’re a classy guy, ace.” His eyes were still flitting around left to right, hard, trying to suss out whether he was in trouble. He wasn’t, at least with the law, but I started to get the feeling that those sixteen-year-olds succumbing to his charms weren’t doing so naturally. “I was talking about how you ply those sixteen-year-olds with liquor and maybe worse in order to get them into bed. Because we all know they’re not here for your shining good looks and sparkling personality.”

  He gulped. It was the most beautiful thing he’d done since we arrived. �
�Look…I helped you with this Adam Perry thing. I’m not guilty of that—”

  “No, you’re guilty of other stuff,” I said, standing up. “Maybe worse stuff, depending on how you look at it.” I was starting to get really mad, because he’d just tacitly confirmed that he was getting sixteen-year-old girls drunk in order to sleep with them, and the expression on his face made it blazingly obvious he was guilty as hell.

  “Hey,” Rose said, and her hand was resting on my arm. Her lush green eyes were mischievous, but also warning. She could probably sense I was about a half-second from taking up the honor of those poor, unfortunate sixteen-year-olds that this sleazebag had taken advantage of by lighting the bar on fire behind him and then tossing him into the shattered glass just to watch him try to crawl through it and the flames. It would be sweet.

  I backed off a notch. Not because Rose could touch my emotions, but because I was here on a job, and getting revenge for the girls this douche had done wrong would, by necessity, need to include as little property damage as possible. For all I knew, he didn’t even own this place. Besides, Rose seemed to have something in mind, so I paused and let her lean forward.

  She concentrated intently on the bartender, squinting at him like she was pushing into his mind—or feelings, more accurately. “Whenever you look at a sixteen-year-old girl, you know what you feel?” The bartender shuddered, jerking his hips back like he was protecting his nuts from attack, even though Rose was only leaning over the bar. “Yeah, that’s it…unbridled lust. Well…” She smiled, and it was the most malicious thing I’d seen from the sweet Scot thus far. “Let’s put a bridle on that, shall we? From now on, when you see a sixteen-year-old girl that’s lovely to your eyes, you’re going to experience a different emotional reaction. Something more akin to…how you feel when someone has kicked you right in the bollocks.”

  He flinched back again, harder this time, dropping both hands to his groin and gasping like one of us had struck him. I raised an eyebrow and he came back up, horrorstruck. “What’d you just do to me?”

  “Not a thing,” Rose said sweetly. “I didnae even touch ye. And whenever a sixteen-year-old girl gets close enough to do so in the future—” She reached out for him as if to illustrate the point and he leapt back, jarring against the shelf behind him and knocking off a couple bottles of whiskey. They shattered to the floor and he flinched. “Well,” she went on, “you’ll have a similar reaction to what happens any time I get close enough to ye.”

  “That was the Macallan eighteen-year-aged!” He was still clutching himself for protection. “Do you have any idea how much that costs? The owner is going to take that breakage out of me arse!”

  “Is he now?” Rose leaned forward and reached out for him again, on her tippy toes over the bar. At her mere motion, he flinched back again, involuntarily, and hit the shelves again, this time dislodging a vodka bottle and two of gin. They all came crashing to the floor and he was powerless to stop them, still cupping his privates like they were about to be assaulted by the Luftwaffe or something. “I bet he’ll be really mad when he sees you’ve broken those as well.”

  “Please stop!” He shifted down the bar, trying to escape her, and by extension, me. He retreated toward a door to a backroom, lingering there for a moment, almost in tears. “You can’t do this to me!”

  “Oh, but I just did, luv,” Rose said with a smile, settling back on her stool. “Consider yourself lucky I didn’t mess with your reactions in other areas as well. Say, dial up your interest in other activities, ones you might find repellent just now.” She waggled her fingers at him.

  He swallowed visibly and without further comment darted into the back room, slamming the door behind him. I let out the cronish cackle I’d been holding in all this time and Rose gave a solid chuckle, then cringed at the pain it caused her.

  “That was well done,” I said. “Did you really mean it? That he wouldn’t be able to react—uhhh—how he reacts—to sixteen-year-old girls in the future?”

  “He’ll jump back from them like that every time,” she said, taking up her Blue Hawaiian and pondering the contents suspiciously. “So long as I’m alive, anyway.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “How’d you do that?”

  She shrugged, taking a sip before answering. “Lust is an emotion. Fear is an emotion. All I did was plant a little block that killed his lust at that stimulus and replaced it with a dead fear that any comely young lass he meets is going to kick him right in the boys.” She took another sip, long and cool. “Which, honestly, should be their reaction, if they knew him for the snake he is.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, and started to raise my glass.

  “Och,” she said, almost choking on hers. “We should have toasted.” She brought up her drink, the liquid sloshing gently within. “Shall we raise our glasses in the usual Scottish way?”

  I stared at her blankly and raised my glass. “Uhh…’To the boy who lived’?”

  She almost snorted her drink. “No…something a bit more appropriate to the moment, and a bit more traditionally Scottish…Alba gu brath—it means, ‘Scotland forever.’”

  I thought about it, then raised my drink once more. “I can get behind that.” And we clinked glasses.

  25.

  We took a cab to the Edinburgh PD, which was called Police Scotland, probably in an effort to provide some kind of national police force. It sounded a little funky to an American used to dealing with local PDs and sheriffs’ departments, but it probably made sense given how many jurisdictional nightmares I’d seen, with all the interdepartmental pissing matches.

  I’d decided to make an effort to swoop in and take whatever file they might have assembled on Graham and see if they had anything new on Adam Perry, though I doubted the coroner would have done much with him yet. Or that there was much to be found, really. What were they going to say? “He got eaten by an incubus, and also had an addiction to pe-jazzling.” If that was the case, I didn’t need to know about it.

  The Police Scotland building was a strange brick thing, bisected with a glass facade couched right in its middle, like some sort of church mixed with an architectural experiment involving lots of masons. Walking through the main entrance, we were confronted immediately by a waiting area, which I ignored, and stepped up to the window where a desk sergeant waited to direct visitors. She was a very librarian-esque woman, stern, serious, someone’s pissed-off, maiden aunt, and the primness of her expression was like a ten-thousand-watt sign letting the world know that the level of nonsense she would brook was somewhere between zero and none.

  “Can I help you?” she asked with the light Scottish brogue I’d come to expect in this town.

  “Sarah Nelson, Scotland Yard,” I said, flashing my ID. “I’m working on the murder investigation and I need to check up on another victim that may be related.”

  She kept pretty buttoned down. “Do you know who you’re here to see?”

  “Well, I was told I’m actually in charge of the investigation, and I’m not here to see myself because I could do that with the aid of any mirror in town, so…” I held up my notebook. “The victim, Adam Perry, had a roommate, Graham Selkirk, who died recently. I’m here to talk to whoever is in charge of that investigation, if there is one.”

  If the discussing of possible multiple homicides discomfited the maiden aunt desk clerk, she showed not a whit of it to me. “You’ll probably want to talk to Detective Inspector Clements. Let me ring him up and see if he’s available.”

  “Or if he can make himself available,” I said. “Urgently.” She raised an eyebrow at this. “You know, before more people die,” I added calmly.

  She took this in stride, or, since she was sitting, in utter stillness.

  I turned to Rose as the clerk spoke into the phone in hushed tones. I could have listened in—and did—but I didn’t really care what was said provided I didn’t catch a whiff of someone giving me the runaround. To Rose, I said, “I’m wondering about the connection bet
ween these vics. That’s cop slang for victim,” I added, trying to give it a conspiratorial air.

  “I kinda worked that one out for meself,” she said, leaning in to my little conspiracy of two. Rose was a good sport. “If one roommate dies after the other, d’ye think that means they were in league in some way with this…incubus fellow? That maybe he was using them for some purpose the way he turned loose those blokes at the cafe on you? Or were they just innocent victims?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, waiting for Maiden Aunt to hang up with Detective Inspector Clements, who was quietly cursing this interruption to his afternoon nap or something. “I know he drained Adam Perry, and given Graham’s cause of death being suggested as a heart attack, probably him, too. Maybe this incubus did it for fun, maybe to cover up something once he was done with them, like you said. It’ll be tough to know until we can establish a working relationship, if any, between them and the killer.”

  “The bartender seemed to think Adam Perry was interested in men—”

  “Possibly,” I said. “His opinion was filtered through the lens of his own, nasty pedo experience, which makes him unreliable in this department. Perry could have just been really shy and introverted toward the opposite sex.” I dipped back into my head for a second.

  “That’s a fair point,” Rose said. “How will we figure out which it is?”

  “Well, first we have to find out if it matters,” I said. “Meaning, I need to look at the pattern of victims. Serial killers often choose victims for a reason—either because they’re part of a pattern than they can see, or because, hell, they’re convenient and won’t necessarily be missed. Our incubus has had less reason to worry about raising suspicion until now, because every one of the deaths he’s caused have been ruled natural up until Dr. Logan’s research turned the tables around on it. That might have emboldened him to worry less about the convenience factor, or he might have been paranoid enough to stick to working in relative safety. It’s hard to say from what we’ve seen of this puzzle so far.” I lifted a hand and rubbed my temples and then the bridge of my nose, my go-to move for stress relief. “I hate to sound like a computer, but I need more data.”