“Sure.” Lupo shrugged.
“All right.” Bakke nodded as if to convince himself, then made his way unsteadily down the steps.
“What was that all about?” DiSanto said from behind him, standing in the doorway.
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “But I bet it’ll end up bad news for us.”
Chapter Two
Mordred
He was watching when Lupo squealed out of the parking lot.
He was named Mordred, but he didn’t know who had given him the name.
One of his earliest memories was of being stung by a stick he would one day learn to call a cattle prod.
He hadn’t cared who had given him the strange name, nor what the stick was called, but he had cared about avoiding its tip when one of the men came to roust him from his sleep or his play.
Now he shook the memory with a physical shrug.
Always in the middle of the night.
No wonder he rarely slept. That twilight time between wakefulness and sleep always attacked his thoughts and ate at him like a disease devouring him from the inside out, leaving him wrung and sodden and unrested.
His body’s need for very little sleep coincided with the majority of his assignments. The only reaction he felt was a spell of violent, cold shivers for a time in the morning, but compared to the cattle prod days, the sensation was merely an inconvenience.
He swung in a few cars behind Lupo’s junker but without much hurry. He knew where the cop was headed. The minivan was well-equipped for surveillance, and he himself had not been visible even though he could have read the label on Lupo’s briefs. But now he didn’t have to keep him in sight, because his scrambled anonymous call had summoned the cocky homicide cop right to where he had prepared things.
He flicked a button on his all-purpose remote, and the screen on the dash switched from GPS display to a rather sharp camera image of the hallway of a building in the Third Ward. A uniformed cop stood outside. Mordred enjoyed imagining how pale he must be after the vomiting. Broad, dark-clothed bodies obscured the picture for a few seconds. More cops arriving as the word spread. One more made his way back onto the landing and stumbled downward out of view. Another walked out slowly and sank out of sight, probably sitting on the steps below the hidden camera’s field of view.
Mordred chuckled.
Probably sitting and hyperventilating, trying to keep his throat muscles from contracting and erupting his stomach’s contents up and into his mouth.
Lupo would not be so affected. He experienced worse crime scenes fairly regularly, and he himself had caused similar damage to a human body, so there was no chance he would be impressed, except perhaps with the brutality of the murder, which was not typical in this particular metro area. Here a 9mm fusillade in the inner city was king of the crime scene sweepstakes.
Mordred let Lupo’s Maxima lose him and tooled along the cold lake coastline, occasionally eying the display. There, that was Richard DiSanto, Lupo’s younger partner. Mordred licked his lips unconsciously. He had no specific instructions regarding Detective DiSanto, but as far as he was concerned that meant he could do as he wished. When the switch was flicked, he would take some pleasure in dropping this cop, too.
He half-whistled something he had learned in the lab years ago, though he had no idea what the song or composition might have been. The melody was horribly mangled by his whistle, but it sounded perfect to his ears.
Jessie
Frustrated, she started chewing her nails again.
The meeting was over and she was grateful for that, but the itch was starting already. She sat in her car, the same old Pathfinder she’d driven for almost fifteen years, and turned the heat way up for a few seconds. It wasn’t cold yet, not really, but she still felt the same shiver that usually engulfed her after a meeting, when she seemed more vulnerable, more likely to break her discipline and head for the Valley, where the huge Milwaukee Indian casino rose out of the industrial neighborhood like a pyramid on the plain of Giza.
Almost robotically, she chewed the corners of one thumbnail, then the other. She heard them crack under her teeth and it made her hesitate.
Her move here would have been more effective if there hadn’t been such a good establishment so near, such a temptation that made it hard for her to ignore the itch. The big casino seemed to be calling to her. She willed herself to visualize Nick and his disapproving face, but it wasn’t enough to beat the itch.
Jessie Hawkins couldn’t quite place her finger on when the gambling became a problem. As far as she was concerned, it had just happened. She’d never been much of a gambler, but then the tribe had voted to build a casino near Eagle River. After some rather incredible opposition—which eventually included multiple murders and the revelation that Nick Lupo wasn’t the only human-wolf hybrid in the woods—the casino was erected in record time, just across from her new hospital.
Her visits had started as mere boredom relief. She pulled her fair share of late shifts in the small ER and the free clinic, and occasionally she was just bored and trying to stay awake at two or three in the morning. The cafeteria was shut down, the vending machines disgusted her, and those blazing lights she saw from her office window promised food in four themed restaurants, including a diner and sports bar, as well as the gambling itself. She’d taken to crossing the street and the parking lots just to grab a bite to eat during the doldrums of her shift.
At least, that was how it started. Then at some point the continuous C Major chord played interminably by the hundreds of slot machines in the barn-like building had drawn her attention. During the day they were crowded with retirees and poor reservation folks looking for a payoff, and of course whites from all over the county who hoped to make their fortune with a few dollars’ investment. But at night, traffic was lighter, and she could have her pick of dozens of bright and noisy attention-getting slots emblazoned with a variety of thematic images.
Jessie was a doctor and being analytical was second nature. She knew the gambling was bad, especially financially. The casinos had learned to reduce people’s hard-earned money to a simple number, credits, to nudge them toward forgetting those credits could also pay the rent and buy groceries. She knew her situation was like the long-time smoker who knows smoking is harming him, but does it anyway without too much thought as to why.
She sat in the Pathfinder a while longer, letting the warm air from the vents cascade over her and chase away the worst of the shivers. She chewed and ripped her thumbnails until she tasted blood.
Then she put the truck in gear and headed for the casino.
She just wasn’t ready to stop.
A passing thought suggested that maybe she was looking for Nick to rescue her, pull her out of the casino and back into his heart.
She dismissed the passing thought.
“Keep passing,” she said, feeling wetness in her eyes.
In a few minutes, she entered the industrial valley southwest of the downtown area and made for the casino, a gargantuan building with seemingly a new wing or addition always under construction. It was like an octopus, reaching out its tentacles to snag unwary passersby.
She fixed her eyes and spruced up a little so as to not appear like one of the lifeless slot machine zombies she had once ridiculed.
There but for the grace of God, wasn’t that what they said? She chose not to finish the familiar phrase.
The parking structure was almost full already. She parked on the skywalk level, and a few minutes’ walk had her inside, where something seemed to inject itself directly into her bloodstream.
No, she wasn’t ready to stop.
Not by herself.
Lupo
After they’d closed down the crime scene and watched the body rolled into the meatwagon, Lupo and DiSanto waited for the uniforms to finish the canvass. But there wasn’t all that much to do—there were few tenants around, for the most part.
Lupo had given orders for the canvass to be completed by s
plitting the remainder so half would be done that night by the late shift cops, and the other the next day by the early shift.
“We’ll need lists of everybody your people talked to,” Lupo told a veteran sergeant named Golinski. “Get as many as you can on them.”
Golinski nodded. He was a good one to work crime scenes. If he had been younger, he might look good for a gold detective’s badge, Lupo thought. He watched Golinski talk to each of his men in turn.
DiSanto mimed washing his hands. “Done here, Nick?”
Lupo didn’t answer right away. He still felt the tingle of someone watching, but it seemed ridiculous—a trite and trivial cliché at best. He scanned the cavernous room and ticked off everything they had done. It was all covered. Vic’s hands had been bagged in special paper, hundreds of digital photographs shot from every angle, every possible surface dusted. The dusting had yielded hundreds of prints—good luck with that!—and every aspect of the gruesome crime had been recorded.
“Nick?”
“Uh, yeah, sorry.” Lupo sighed. “I think we got it covered.”
“What makes people do this shit?” DiSanto asked, probably not expecting an answer.
They had wondered the same thing earlier, as soon as they’d seen the victim’s head, removed—torn off—and propped up on a corner shelf where its dull staring eyes could survey the room. Below it was a spreading triangle of gore too terrible to contemplate, oozing down the wood shelf to the wall and making like molasses as it reached for the floor like a ghostly talon.
“And why?” DiSanto said.
Lupo wasn’t in a philosophical mood. He grunted a noncommittal answer followed by a half shrug. Bakke’s expression as he’d stepped out the door had said it all.
“I mean, fuckin’ decapitation. It’s like a Tarantino movie in here.”
The blood had spread from the pyramid and pooled like a shag carpet throughout the room, a half-inch thick lake of darkening crimson. The first cop on the scene had slipped and gone sliding into it face-first. He would never forget this one.
“Shit, I don’t know,” Lupo said.
But he did know.
This reminded him of what those Wolfpaw assholes had done to Tom Arnow’s family. Lupo thought if he Changed right now, let the Creature out and let him get a deep sniff, he was convinced he would catch the scent of yet another fucking shapeshifter.
Goddamn it.
“Have to face it, Nick,” said Ghost Sam from right beside a clueless DiSanto, “the genie is out of the bottle. And the only way is for you to kill the genie and smash the bottle.”
Lupo turned away so fast he figured DiSanto had to think it was an intentional slight. Then he turned back, slowly, regaining his composure while DiSanto eyed him curiously.
Ghost Sam had gone again. Left the air around them slightly skewed.
Awry, he thought. Different.
Lupo shrugged. Let that be DiSanto’s answer.
“Meet you back in the shop in an hour,” Lupo said. “Keep Bakke busy.”
Jessie
She slid the gaming card into a charging machine and only caught herself after she’d fed three twenties into its hungry slit mouth.
The doctor part of her wanted to step back and study the reason she had become so weak. She realized, maybe for the first time, that she weakened as soon as she entered the casino. Was it the flashing lights? The continuous C-Major chord that seemed capable of hypnotizing its victims? The lure of easy money?
But she’d never lusted for money before. Never craved it, or obsessed about it. And, in fact, money was reduced to benign numbers when using a card—you forgot the “credits” were quarters, or dollars, or fives, or tens, or hundreds. Which was intelligent psychology practiced by the casinos, like the “free” drinks and the lack of windows.
So why this irresistible urge to flush her money down the toilet?
She realized that she’d moved from the cash machine to a nearby slot machine without being aware of the walk. This sudden realization shocked her, though it didn’t keep her from pressing the big red Play button after she’d inserted her card and watching the numbers on the panel display decrease as the dials spun.
Then the dials stopped on the same stylized icon, a king’s head, and her numbers ticked upward rapidly, light flashing as the machine played a rousing little tune of victory. A minor win.
About seventy-five dollars, she thought as she did the math in her head. Good enough to cash out ahead. Good enough to take Nick out to dinner, someplace fancier than they usually managed.
She pressed the red button and watched the numbers start their downward trek again.
Simonson
He watched.
Watching had become his mission. That was how he perceived it.
The thing with the house up north was an exception he was forced to make, in order to cover up certain aspects he couldn’t have local cops bumbling over.
That had been a surprise. He had himself stumbled over it in the course of a recon, but it had to fit in somewhere.
So besides that wipe action, watching had become his mission, and sometimes that mission included watching other watchers.
That’s what he was doing now, watching a watcher.
It could make your head spin.
There was a chess game in progress. Everywhere he looked was a chess game. Occasionally a few pawns and a bishop or rook were eliminated, but for the most part there were many moves the result of which you couldn’t see for a while. And his place on the chessboard—that he couldn’t see either. He considered himself invisible but he wasn’t, not really. He made himself visible now and then, pulling up into radar range and doing something to affect the outcome of the game without being blamed. Or noticed.
Playing God.
Why choose to handle things this way? Maybe because he’d been damned good at it in the military, where he’d gotten his training, and then in the so-called private sector, where his eyes had been opened. And it had all gone bad.
Not really playing God, he mused. But casting about for ways to affect the chess game without becoming too much a piece himself that he could be scooped off the board. Occasionally he lent a hand, but those days were few and very far between.
So Simonson watched.
He had been watching when the scientist decided to play God for his family. That location—it had to have been connected to the cop in some way. He’d only found it by watching and paying attention. But now that he’d stuck his hand in, maybe they’d come after him.
Maybe not. He could never predict what They would do.
No matter how he tried, he could never out-think them, and that was why he had given himself over to watching.
Watching and waiting.
For the moment.
He put his eyes to the eyepieces and watched as his subject disappeared into the building. He expected a meet, maybe a walk and talk, but as he adjusted the eyepiece he held tightly on the right window, he saw a flash of quick movement followed by a sudden spurt of blood…
It couldn’t be anything else.
Blood spattered one of the loft-size windows.
He watched as his subject committed the very same depravity Simonson had pledged to stop.
But as was so often the case he was too far away, in a precarious position, and if he interfered he would most certainly be too late to save the victim while at the same time making himself too visible on the chessboard. Becoming a target ruined a piece’s chances of survival.
He bit his tongue, clenched his teeth, felt his muscles tighten and relax over and over as if they were being jolted by a torturer’s electric prod, and in the end all he could do was watch.
He purposely kept his eyes open, absorbing the details of what he saw.
His breathing had slowed to a pace more akin to death, and he realized he had simply forgotten to breathe.
Time passed almost quicker than his watch could catch. He watched, but his subject had disappeared after the dee
d was done. He hadn’t expected it, but he should have predicted it, and it bothered him that once again he had been unable to out-think one of Them.
The damned headaches were affecting his thought patterns, his logic, his critical thinking.
He swallowed a half dozen aspirin.
So then he watched as the cops came and did their thing, amazed at how quickly they came. He watched as they ran the crime scene about as well as they could, knowing some of what they’d find would make them shake their heads and doubt their collection abilities or their instruments. He watched as the one specific cop he wanted to see stayed back. He used his equipment to assure himself of what was happening with that cop.
Simonson already knew about him. But he didn’t only watch the cop, he also watched the Watcher.
The Watcher had killed the innocent victim. Slaughtered him, more like. Then he had settled back to watch from afar.
Simonson watched him, too.
And the cop.
This was very interesting. Interesting how they were both watching.
He kept watching.
Chapter Three
Lupo
He checked for stragglers. The lieutenant had bugged out quick, the crime scene techs had left, the useless EMTs had sidled out, the coroner’s staff had booked it with the vic’s body, and the last uniform now stood in front of the sealed door.
“Pull this duty, Officer?” Lupo asked him. The guy was young, barely a rookie. It was almost like hazing—make the new kid haunt the sealed door.
The kid sighed. He knew it. “Yes, sir. Orders.”
At least he was smart about it.
Lupo nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Baranski, sir.”
“Okay, then, Baranski. I’m heading up to check out the rest of this stairwell. Don’t mind any noise I make, all right?”
The kid looked at him with a funny expression crossing his baby-fat features. “I think that’s already been done, sir.”
Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4) Page 3