The officer gave him a blank stare, eyes switching from Rocke’s face, to the badge, to my face, and then back to Rocke. I had to give Rocke credit. Flashing his NSAU badge was a surefire way to get us onto the scene, but it also meant that Rocke had just switched his presence from “passive” to “active.” The whole case was now going in the NSAU’s official record books.
And that meant paperwork—mountains of it—for local law enforcement, for Rocke, and for myself. It also meant an NSAU inquiry if things didn’t pan out satisfactorily.
On the other hand, we were going to have access to a crime scene that otherwise could have been denied to us. Rocke appeared to be willing to risk the paperwork for that chance.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the officer said, still looking somewhat perplexed, “but I don’t think—”
“That’s fine,” Rocke said, sliding his badge back into his coat as he stepped past the cop. “You won’t need to.” For a moment the officer’s eyes widened in surprise, and I followed Rocke’s example, striding past the officer and heading straight for the crime scene, passing the two squad cars blocking the road.
“Hey!” the officer yelled from behind us, his boots scraping against the pavement as he turned around. “You can’t go in there!” Rocke ducked under the police tape, and a couple of officers looked up in surprise, their expressions quickly becoming less friendly looks as they saw us. Several of them stopped what they were doing and started towards us, stepping away from the abandoned car.
My stomach twisted slightly as I looked at it. The driver’s door was open and the interior light on, as if the driver had just stepped out for a moment to look at something. Not that there was much to look at. The street was a back alley, the kind that ran behind businesses for service vehicles or employee parking. There was nothing around us but the bland backsides of businesses we’d have seen on the other side of the block.
“Jacob Rocke, NSAU spook,” Rocke said, pulling out his badge again as the first officer approached him. “We’re here on behalf of the NSAU to inspect the crime scene and render any necessary assistance.”
“NSAU?” The first officer slowed, but his face was still heavy with suspicion. “Look, I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t—”
“We have reason to believe that the scene you’re looking at here is related to Unusual activity,” Rocke replied without missing a beat, though he did come to a stop this time. “Which means that by federal ruling, we are required to render assistance to you, as you are to us, until such a time as we either determine no Unusual activity or declare the matter under the jurisdiction of the NSAU.”
“But you can’t—” I could already see that the officer was wavering. Rocke was right, though that fact wouldn’t win us any favors with the police department.
“We have full authority to be here until we’re satisfied that this crime is not Unusual in nature,” Rocke continued. “But if it is, Unusual activity beyond misdemeanors falls under the jurisdiction of the NSAU.” The badge vanished back into his coat pocket as the officers looked on—one skeptical, the other two annoyed. “And I have a feeling that this is about to be very, very, Unusual.” He glanced at the lead officer. “So, I would like to take a look.”
“Uh, Mr. … Rocke?” the first officer said, glancing back at his two fellows. “I don’t know how you heard about this or what you’ve been told, but this is just an abandoned vehicle—”
“With a dead dog in the passenger seat?” Rocke asked, cocking his head to the side and giving a pointed nod toward the abandoned vehicle. “One that’s had its blood drained?” He shook his head. “Look, I’m not here to steal away anything or mess up your investigation. But the fact is, if this is an Unusual-related event, you guys are only going to have to call for us anyway. We’re already here, so why don’t you let us take a look at it? Then we can know for sure.”
I ignored the officer’s response as my stomach gave a faint twist, and I was suddenly glad I hadn’t had time to eat breakfast on the way out. Apparently something I’d eaten the night before—maybe the donut I’d grabbed at the station—wasn’t agreeing with me. Although it was annoying that it was acting up now, of all times, right when I couldn’t do anything about it.
Rocke shook his head again as one of the officers said something. “I know about that, and that’s not why I’m here,” he replied. “We’re going to look, all right? Your alternative is to arrest us, and when that goes south, it’s not our problem. If there’s no sign that this is Unusual, we’ll walk away. But we’re allowed to investigate if we have probable cause. And right now, we do.”
For a moment, I worried that the officer was going to arrest us both—or at least escort us off the scene—but then he nodded and waved Rocke toward the car. “All right,” he said with a nod. “You can take a look. There isn’t much to go off of though, and I doubt you’re going to like what you see. And if we end up with some crazy paperwork, we’re calling you.”
“Fair enough,” Rocke said. I followed him to the car at a distance, since this was his show. Still, as I stepped to the side, my stomach still shuddering, I could see right into the interior of the car. Just as Eve had said, there was a dog, a golden retriever, lying in the passenger seat, its back towards me. Rocke stepped in front of me, blocking my view, and I shook my head.
Poor pup, I thought. Did it even know what happened? Rocke walked around to the other side of the car as one of the officers made a quick call on his radio, probably to make sure that Rocke was within his rights to be on the scene. He nodded a moment later, apparently satisfied with whatever response he’d been given. My eyes were drawn back towards the dog, and I stepped forward, my stomach giving a little lurch at the movement. It must have shown in my face, because Rocke glanced up at me.
“You all right?” he asked.
I nodded. “Just something I ate last night disagreeing with me,” I said. He frowned, and I waved it off. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” he said, looking back down through the window. “Come take a look at this.”
I stepped around the front of the car, noticing that the headlights had been left on. “Were the lights on when you found the car?” I asked.
“And the engine,” one officer said. “We shut it off, though.”
“Alright, Hawke,” Rocke said as I stepped up next to the passenger window, my stomach still twisting. It was odd, I didn’t feel ill. It was more like my stomach was convinced that I’d just been on roller coaster. “What do you make of this?”
“Poor pup,” I said, as I stared down through the glass. The dog lay askew on the seat, its head near the floor and its hind legs against the seat back. It was twisted, in and unnatural position. It looked like it had been—
“He’s been tossed there,” I said, bending down slightly to get a better look. “Or placed there.”
“Yeah,” Rocke said, nodding. “You see the cut on his neck?”
I nodded. It was hard to miss, the large bloodless gash stretching from one side of the dog’s neck to the other. It was disturbingly similar to the two others I’d seen recently.
“Excuse me,” I said, catching an officer’s attention. “What do you think happened here?”
The officer shrugged. “We’re not sure. She was on the way home from the mine—”
“The mine?” Rocke interrupted.
“Yeah, she worked there. Anyway, she cut through here for whatever reason, saw something, got out of her car, and …” He shrugged. “Someone probably grabbed her and slit the dog’s throat. We’re not exactly sure, but that’s what we’ve got so far.”
I shook my head. “That’s not all,” I said jerking my thumb at the glass. “Notice something about the inside of the car?” The officer bent over and took a quick look, then shook his head.
“It’s clean,” Rocke said, his clear voice catching the attention of some of the other officers. “Where’s the dog’s blood?”
The officer looking inside the car frowned and glanced up a
t the other two, one of whom shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure, either,” Rocke said, shaking his head. “I mean, this looks like one of the chupacabra attacks we’ve been looking into, but if that’s the case, where’s the dog’s owner? Why’d the dog stay here? Or if someone else found it, why’d they toss it in the car?” He glanced up at the officers. “And you have no idea where the missing woman is?”
The officer started to respond, but my attention was snatched away by my phone buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out, glancing at the caller ID and raising my eyebrows in surprise.
“Felix?” I asked as soon as I answered. “What’s going—”
“It’s here!” I almost pulled the phone away from my ear as his shout exploded out of my phone. “It’s here right now!”
“What?” I asked, my cloudy mind trying to keep up. “What’s there?”
“The chupacabra!” Felix said, his voice almost frantic. I could hear Mercury howling in the background. “It’s out with my cows right now! I saw it! Damn thing’s huge!”
“Got it!” I said. “Don’t leave the house! We’ll be right there! Rocke!” He and half the officers looked up as I shouted his name. “It’s at Felix’s place, in his pens. We need to move. Give them your theory and let’s go!”
I didn’t wait for him to respond. I was already turning and moving towards my Rover, my long strides carrying me forward at a speed just shy of a run. Images of Mrs. Fimmlewit flashed through my mind mixed with the images of the dog we’d just seen. A feeling was eating into me, an emotion eerily similar to the one that had coated Felix’s voice in his call. An emotion that I didn’t like.
Fear.
Chapter 16
Felix was waiting for us by his front door when we pulled up, a double-barreled twelve-gauge clenched in his hands. I could see Mercury through the open door, sitting just past the doorjamb, glancing up at Felix and then at us with wide eyes. I didn’t need to use my senses to know that she was terrified.
“What’s going on?” Rocke called as he ran up the front steps. I was right behind him, my staff clenched tightly in my hands.
“I don’t know at the moment,” Felix said, shaking his head. “I stayed inside like ya told me. About twenty minutes ago Mercury woke me up with her barking, and that’s when I heard it. The whole herd was going mad. All sorts of noises. I stepped out back to take a look, but Mercury wouldn’t follow me. Grabbed my binoculars, and hell if I didn’t see something big take down one of my cows. It had to be that chupacabra—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It had to be something else. It’s always been something else.”
“What ‘n the hell are ya talkin’ about?” Felix asked, glaring at me. “I thought ya both said it was a chupacabra!?”
“It was a chupacabra, Felix,” Rocke said. He was giving me a strange look. “But after what we just saw, I think he’s got a point, don’t you, Hawke?”
“Felix,” I said, ignoring Rocke’s question, “do you have the number of that vet you called? Can you reach her at her home?”
“The vet? Well, yeah, but—”
“Call her,” I said. He pulled a cell from his pocket, resting his shotgun in one hand and dialing. “Keep calling her until she answers. I need to ask her something.” Felix nodded and flipped the phone up to his ear.
“Hawke, you have an idea of what’s going on here?” Rocke asked.
I shook my head. “No. I’m just pretty certain we’re not dealing with a chupacabra.”
“The footprints we found yesterday.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That and a few other things. No chupacabra takes down a full-grown cow. Not even a pack of chupacabras could do that. And then there’s the disappearances, Mrs. Fimmlewit’s death—”
“My disappearance?” he asked. I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure how that fit into the equation just yet. Rocke still had a better chance of figuring that one out than I did, even if his memory of it was a little hazy.
“Uh, someone wanted to talk to you,” Felix said, cupping the phone in one hand. “One sec.” He tossed me the phone, and I snatched it out of the air, bringing it to the side of my head in one smooth motion.
“Hello?”
“Who is this?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded groggy and irate.
“Hawke Decroux,” I said, glancing towards Rocke and Felix. “You’re the veterinarian who did the autopsy on Felix’s cow, right?”
“If you mean the dissection, then ye—”
“Good!” I said, pacing across the porch, “I need to know. Was there anything strange about it?”
“Besides the near complete lack of blood, no.”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head as I spun on one heel. “Tell me about that. When you say ‘complete,’ what do you mean? Do you mean missing a lot?”
“No, I mean complete. There was no blood in the muscle tissues, in the lungs, in—” A yawn. “In everything. It was like someone had hooked the poor thing up to a super-vacuum and let it go to work.”
“What about other fluids? Were they missing as well?”
“No. No they weren’t. It was only the blood. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the meat was clean.”
“Have you looked at any of the animals that the chupacabras have killed?”
“I’m sorry, but is this important? It’s very early—”
“Yes,” I said. “Very important. Did you look at any of the animals that were attacked by chupacabras?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “One. A goat.”
“Did it have the same problem?”
“You mean was it missing all of its blood? No. Of course not.”
“What about the wounds on the neck? Where the blood was removed?” Rocke’s face grew grimmer with every question I asked, Felix just looked perplexed.
“Well, on the calf, it was actually two separate cuts rather than a single one, and it was a lot cleaner. Whatever cut that calf was a lot sharper than whatever cut the goat I looked at, but both were pretty clean. Aside from that, you’d need someone who knew more about what they were looking for.”
“Could it have been a knife wound?” I asked. “Or something else sharp, like a scalpel?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“All right,” I said, shaking my head. “Thanks.” I flipped the phone shut before she could respond and tossed it to Felix. “Rocke, we’ve got a serious problem. So do you, Felix. I don’t know what’s been killing your cows, but it isn’t a chupacabra. Chupacabras don’t suck the blood from their victims, much less pump the body completely dry. They make a cut and lick the blood up as the heart pumps.”
“So what would pull the blood out?” Felix asked.
I glanced at Rocke, and he shrugged, a worried look on his face. “I have no idea,” he said. “I have a hunch, but this … I can’t say yet for certain.”
“Whatever it is, the chupacabra attacks are real,” I said. “So it must be using them to cover its tracks.”
“For what?” Felix asked. “From who?”
“People like us?” I suggested, immediately hating the concept. “What if someone or something needed all this blood, so they waited until the chupacabra started?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rocke said, shaking his head. “Besides,” he said, glancing at Felix. “You said you saw it. What did it look like? Like a person?”
“No,” Felix said, shaking his head. “I didn’t get a good look, but that sure as hell weren’t no person I saw. It was too low.”
“Unless someone was crouching—”
“No,” I said, cutting Rocke off. “The footprints we found last night. They weren’t human, either.”
“Look, this is all very interesting,” Felix said, tapping his hand against the butt of his shotgun, “but what about my cows! Are we goin’ to go see how many I have left or what? ‘Cause I’m going! I only had five left, and it’s probably four now!”
“Fin
e,” Rocke said, nodding and reaching into his jacket for his pistol. The black barrel gleamed under the light from the open door. “Let’s go. You got any lights out there?”
“No,” Felix said, as he turned and lead the way through his house, Mercury on his heels. “But I know the way.”
I followed him, opening my senses as I did. Mercury was whimpering faintly from somewhere inside, but I could still make out “Bad smell!” as she repeated the phrase over and over. I opened myself further, searching the area as we moved out the back door and across the ground towards the large pen that held Felix’s animals. At first, everything felt fine, but then my stomach gave another twinge as something brushed against the edges of my awareness, something wrong. I came to a stop, my blood burning cold with sudden adrenaline as I recognized the feeling.
“Hey, Hawke? You okay?” I didn’t answer, instead pushing my awareness out, my skin growing clammy as a sick feeling pushed its way through me. It was like tar was being dragged across my soul, an oily slick that sent waves of revulsion through me. Rocke jumped back as I doubled over, my stomach heaving up whatever contents it had held. I pulled my awareness back, the oil fading to a faint memory in my mind, but the nausea persisted, my stomach clenching again as I dry-heaved onto the ground.
“Hawke?” Rocke grabbed my shoulder, but I waved him off.
“My mistake,” I said, my voice quivering as I pushed myself back to my feet. My mouth tasted sour, and I fought the urge to scrape my tongue across my teeth. “I stretched myself out, and I felt it.”
“Felt what?” Felix asked, but Rocke was silent, his pistol raised as he looked towards the pen. He’d already guessed. He wasn’t sensitive to the same things I was, but he knew his job. And he’d known something was up, even if he hadn’t vocalized it. His “hunch.”
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