The Black Knight Chronicles (Book 4): Paint it Black

by John G. Hartness

  “Something in the report is wrong.” I said, standing back up. “This can’t be Teresa Chapin’s jaw. No way was this jaw attached to a living person two weeks ago.”

  “That’s what all our evidence says, too. We’ve even drilled a small sample and sent it to the FBI lab for Carbon-14 dating, but those results will take several weeks.” Sabrina agreed. “We’ve sampled the dirt, the bits of tissue that were still attached to the bone, and even a microscopic bit of food that was stuck behind a molar. Everything indicates that this jawbone belongs to someone who was killed roughly ten months ago.”

  “Okay, then. You’ve got a forensic mystery. Not my specialty.” I mimed dusting off my hands. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a snack.” I reached over toward one of the upper drawers where Bobby kept his blood supply.

  “Not so fast, Jimmy.” Bobby reached out with a very big hand and slammed the drawer shut. I snatched my fingers back quickly and fondly remembered the good ol’ days. When he used to be afraid of vampires.

  “What?” I protested. “The solution is obvious. You need a new dental forensic guy. Or the records are wrong. Look, I hate to be the smart one for a change, and trust me, I’m not used to the role, but if I’m the only one applying Occam’s Razor to this situation, we’ve got a serious logic deficiency running around.”

  “Dude, don’t use big words. You’ll hurt yourself,” Greg said from Bobby’s desk. He spun around in the chair and waved me over to the monitor. I looked over his shoulder as he pointed. “I thought the same thing, and apparently so did Sabrina before she called us in. But here’s how we know the dental records aren’t wrong.” He pointed to the screen, where an X-ray of a set of teeth was displayed.

  “This is a set of Teresa Chapin’s dental X-rays. See this area here? That’s a crown.” He stretched over to the table and pointed to the same spot on the jawbone. “Just like this crown.”

  “Dude, I’m not saying the X-rays don’t match, I’m saying these X-rays don’t really belong to Teresa Chapin.”

  “And I’m saying they do. Because these aren’t her last set of dental X-rays. These are her X-rays from her previous dentist. Three years ago.” He leaned back in the chair, looking smug. I hate it when he looks all smug at me—it usually means he’s right.

  “That’s a lot of trouble to go to for a bartender,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I could see somebody faking one set of X-rays. Maybe even two if we’re living in an episode of Dexter or something. But I’ve gone back to four different dentists, ever since she got this crown put in, and they all match.”

  “Which begs the question, why does one woman change dentists the way some people change shoes?” I mused. Greg chuckled and put the jawbone back on the table. I took another look. Everything still said the same thing to me—no way was this woman alive two weeks ago. “All right, I give up. How did a bartender from a meat market nightclub invent time travel? Or was she just the latest Dr. Who companion?”

  Sabrina sighed. “I was hoping you’d have a completely outside-the-box idea that turned out to be right or at least worth investigating. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that, and I didn’t have a snappy comeback, so I let it go. “So what about Kellie Inman? What’s wrong with her jawbone? Is this the part where you tell me she was actually a Civil War veteran masquerading as a Georgia woman in the nineties?”

  “No,” Bobby replied. “From all we can see, she died in 1991. The age of the bone indicates it has been buried for approximately twenty years. Nothing indicates that it is anything other than the remains of an unfortunate young woman who died two decades ago.”

  “Okay, so we have one garden-variety cold case murder, and one Syfy-channel murder. Dibs on the Syfy case,” I called.

  “No. You’ll work both, until we know there isn’t a connection, and at least one missing persons case as well,” Sabrina said, her face going even more grim.

  “Who’s missing?”

  “Teresa Chapin’s co-worker, Veronica Moore. She was last seen leaving the bar with Teresa the night she disappeared.”

  “Two weeks ago,” I said. I had the feeling that keeping the timeline straight in my head might be a challenge on this one.

  “Exactly. And until today there’s been no sign of either of them. No ransom demand, no charges on their credit cards, no access to their email or Facebook pages—nothing.”

  I looked over at Greg. “You’ve confirmed this?”

  He was already back on Bobby’s computer. “Working on that now.”

  Sabrina looked a little taken aback. “You don’t think my guys can do their job?”

  “I think they’re just fine, babe. But ‘just fine’ is useless when we’ve got the All-Star Dork Squad on our side.” I waved at Greg’s hunched shoulders. “You know as well as I do what he can do with a computer. Can you honestly tell me that you’ve got anybody on the force with geek-fu like this?”

  “Good point. Greg, do you need passwords? I can get those for you.” She started to flip through a little notebook, but Greg just waved her off.

  “Passwords? We don’t need no steenking passwords!” He tap-tapped furiously on the keyboard, muttering under his breath about the substandard equipment and how Bobby’s machine wasn’t fit to play Minesweeper on. I ignored him.

  “What do we have for suspects?” I asked. “Boyfriends? Girlfriends? Roommates? Parents?”

  “Teresa had a boyfriend, and he’s been frantic since she disappeared. He calls the station every day right before my shift ends, looking for a progress report. He’s clean.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I won’t tell you how to eat people and turn into a bat. You don’t tell me how to judge a suspect.”

  “Fair enough, but if you know how to turn into a bat, I’d love to learn that trick.” She gave me the look. “Okay, then. Moving on. We don’t have any real suspects?”

  “Nothing to speak of.”

  “Then I’m guessing we’ll have to get to work? That’ll require topping the tank. Bobby, I’m gonna need a couple bags of B-pos. Put it on my tab.”

  “We’re cool. You still have a couple on credit after the nursery thing.” A while back a demon had gotten loose in the hospital. Greg and I convinced it to go away. With extreme prejudice. Bobby was appreciative, so he hooked me up with a six-month supply of free blood. That charity was about to run out, though, and I was cool with it. The man had a business to run, after all. I drained two pints of relatively fresh blood and felt much better about life. I dumped them in a hazmat container and looked back at Sabrina.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what, fangboy?”

  “Are we going to see where you found the bones or what?”

  Chapter 3

  SABRINA AND I turned for the door, and Greg got up to follow. I tried to wave him off, but my partner, never the best at picking up non-verbal cues, was more oblivious than normal.

  “Stay here,” I whispered. I pitched my voice well below the human range of hearing, but Greg stopped cold and looked at me, brows knit.

  “I need to talk to Sabrina. Alone.”

  “You guys go ahead. I need to work on a couple of things here. On the computer. Without you. While you go to the crime scene. Alone . . . bye.” My subtle buddy sat back down at the keyboard and resumed tapping away.

  Of course, once I got Sabrina alone in her car I couldn’t think of anything to actually say to her, so we rode along without speaking for the first fifteen minutes or so before she broke the silence. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “Which part? The getting drunk part, the anniversary of my death part, the Greg hating my guts part, the dead bartender part, or the newly-made girl vamp I’m responsible for might be a bad vampire part?”

  “You know, you don’t have to be the father figure to Abby. That’s what you’ve got Mike for.”

  Mike—my best living friend and the only one in my lif
e these days who knew me and Greg from when we were on the other side of the grave. Mike was a Catholic priest and a huge help on some of our earlier jobs.

  “Mike’s got his own stuff going on right now.” Like terminal cancer.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Not good. I haven’t seen him in a couple weeks. He doesn’t want us to come by, and I’m thinking that’s not a good sign.”

  “Since when have you let someone else’s wishes interfere with what you want to do?”

  “Remember that whole ‘invitation-only’ thing we have to deal with? Well, the front parts of the church don’t count, because it’s a public building. But Mike’s spending most of his time in the residential parts nowadays, and he revoked our invitation. We literally can’t go see him.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. And without any of the inherent puns I attribute to that word.”

  “What about the Greg thing?”

  “We’re getting there. He kicks my ass every few years for turning him into an unholy blood-sucking monster. I drink a lot until he decides he’s over being pissed at me for the next few years, and then we play Halo. It’s a vicious cycle.”

  “I will never understand men. We’re here.” I got out of the car and stepped into mud up to my ankle. Since I am not the partner with the fetish for New Rock boots and leather coats (okay, maybe leather coats), my sneaker made a gross sucking sound as I pulled my foot out of the foul-smelling muck.

  “That was nasty,” I said, trying to pick more solid ground as I made my way around to the front of the car. “I was hoping for a high-class crime scene for once.”

  We were on the western side of the county, near a string of connected rivers and lakes that form the border of the county. This part of town didn’t get much traffic in the best of times, and the middle of the night was no time to try and navigate the mud and the weeds.

  “Crime scenes are never classy,” Sabrina reminded me. “I ruined one pair of shoes already tonight, so I parked where I didn’t have to wade through that crap again. Besides, think of it as your punishment for drinking too much.”

  “I thought that was the car ride to the morgue with Dale III?”

  “I’m a woman. We reserve the right to punish the men in our lives forever for the smallest transgression.” She walked off into the woods, following a trail of plywood that someone had helpfully laid down.

  I stood there for a minute scraping muck off my shoes and shaking my head at the idea of being the man in someone’s life. I’d never been the man in anyone’s life, and it made parts of me feel warm and tingly that hadn’t felt anything in some number of years. Sabrina had a way of making parts of me feel tingly, but these parts were a little higher up, more in the chest region. Sabrina’s flashlight was almost out of sight when I finally shook myself into motion and dragged my butt after her.

  I intentionally hung back as we walked through the woods. Even on the plywood runway, I moved silently through the woods and smelled nothing but ordinary North Carolina river smells. We were on the undeveloped side of the river, and the only light for yards in any direction was Sabrina’s flashlight and the glow of portable worklights that the CMPD had set up around their crime scene.

  Standing close together in the pool of light were two uniforms, one toting a department-issued twelve-gauge, and the other with his service weapon drawn and pointed down the trail at us. They looked a little jumpy, so I faded off into the woods while Sabrina identified herself.

  “It’s Detective Sabrina Law. Put those things away, boys. It’s just me,” she said as she walked into the light. I noticed her hand never moved far from the butt of her forty-caliber Smith & Wesson even while she was holstering her flashlight and giving the other cops her most disarming smile/hair-flip combo.

  “Detective Law? Nobody told us you were coming back. Lieutenant McDaniel just told us to keep the crime scene secure.” The taller of the two stammered a little, but he holstered his gun. The other one shouldered his shotgun, but I stayed out of sight. It’s pretty easy to avoid notice when you don’t have to breathe. That whole “unnaturally still” thing vampires have going for us makes it easy to duck behind a tree and not draw any attention. It helps that I have a wardrobe mostly limited to black clothing.

  “Well, I am back. This is my case, and I get to work it whenever I want to, no matter what McDaniel says. And I brought a consultant, so don’t shoot him, either. Mr. Black, you can join us now.” I stepped out from behind the tree and into light, giving the two startled cops a wave as I did so.

  “Well, Detective. You’ve successfully dragged me out into a swamp in the middle of the night. What did you expect me to see that couldn’t wait until morning?” I took a quick lap around the crime scene, getting the lay of the land and keeping an eye on the patrolmen. I didn’t need any witnesses around if I had to play bloodhound.

  Sabrina waved one of the uniforms over and said, “Why don’t you guys go get a cup of coffee? There’s a thermos in my car, and it should still be nice and hot. Give us about fifteen minutes here, and if he finds anything, I’ll make sure it gets to McDaniel.”

  The cop looked at her for a minute, and I could almost see the reasons to object running across his forehead, until Sabrina tapped the gold shield on her belt. The subtle reminder of rank was all he needed, and he waved his buddy over. The two patrolmen clumped through the woods on their way back to Sabrina’s car, and I could really get to work.

  “Anything?” she asked, moving closer to me.

  “Nothing from the ground, but that’s a new deodorant you’re wearing, isn’t it?” She nodded, and I nodded back at her. “Then move back, you’re confusing the scene, and trust me, I’m way more interested in smelling you than this mud.” I got all the way down on my hands and knees and put my face almost level with the ground to get a good scent. There was Carolina red clay, of course, and the fresh scent of crushed grass. I smelled cigarette smoke, but it was stale, like one or more of the cops today were smokers and the smell was stuck to their pants. There was a rich, damp smell of the river, fresh water teeming with life and fish poop. I moved my head back and forth, trying to catch a scent that was just outside my periphery—there—a hint of decomposition and just the faintest tinge of the living rot smell I picked up in the morgue.

  I crawled along in the direction of the stench, not caring about ruining another pair of jeans. The department would reimburse me, and this time I might actually buy new jeans instead of shopping at the all-night thrift store. The scent grew stronger as I neared the water, and I had to get up into a crouch as the wet ground softened further beneath me. I lost it at the edge of the water, but was still smiling when I stood up and turned back to Sabrina.

  “Success!” I said.

  “Gross,” she replied.

  I wiped the worst of the muck off my hands and knees, onto my jeans. “Whatever brought the bones here came ashore right there. I can get just a touch of the scent on the wind when I stand here, so I think it came from the island.” I pointed out into the darkness where I knew a small island, maybe fifty yards across and a hundred yards long, sat in the middle of the river. “If there are more remains, that’s where they’ll be.”

  “We’ve thought that as well. We should have a warrant tomorrow morning. Anything else?”

  “There’s something familiar about this smell. I can’t place it, but it’s like I’ve smelled it before, or smelled its cousin, or something.”

  “Smells have cousins?”

  “Don’t be a smartass. That’s my gig.”

  “Are there any other remains around?”

  “None that I could sense. Didn’t you cover this part of the world with dogs?”

  “Yeah, but I wanted to see if you could find anything they missed.”

  We started back toward the car. I stopped for a moment and looked across to the island, just a dim outline across fifty feet of river. I tried to imagine what was over there that had left only the jawbone of thes
e two women, twenty years apart. Was it human, magical, or just monster? I turned and followed Sabrina back to the car. I wanted another drink—this one felt like it was going to get worse long before it got better.

  Chapter 4

  SABRINA DROVE ME back to my place and went inside as I took off my ruined shoes, socks, and jeans. I stood on the porch in just my boxers and a battered Spider-Man T-shirt and just looked around for a minute. “My place” was an old two-story frat house that Greg and I had taken over once we slaughtered the last inhabitants, a coven of collegiate vampires and their “Professor” master, a few months ago. It was a great lair, with two floors aboveground and a full basement that was light-tight and had Fort Knox–level security. I shook my head at the absurdity of living in an undead fraternity house and went inside.

  I headed straight for the fridge and grabbed two beers, handed them to Sabrina, and ran upstairs to put on cleaner clothes. As I went down the hall to wash up, I saw the door to Abby’s room standing open. The lights were on, but our young vampire coed was obviously not home. “Not home” was fast becoming her favorite place to be, and it had me a little worried. Then my super-hearing picked up Greg trying to coax Sabrina into a marathon video-game session with him, and I pushed Abby out of my mind. A couple of minutes later I was back on the main floor in a clean T-shirt and clean-ish jeans, at least jeans without evident mud- or bloodstains.

  I turned to head downstairs when Greg’s voice floated up to me. “Dude, you’re gonna want another beer. I might have drank yours.” I flipped off the air in his general direction and went back to the fridge. A minute later I was loaded down with the remnants of a six-pack of Miller Lite plus two bags of O-positive, and headed down into our new lair. To most observers the place appeared to be a normal two-story house, Craftsman style, with a dining room, kitchen, office, and library on the main floor. Upstairs was laid out like a dorm, with three bedrooms on either side of the hallway, and a big shared bathroom at the end of the hall. Cohabitating with an impressionable girl vampire led to a few embarrassing moments with Abby until I got used to wearing a towel after I showered.