Colonel Ransom, on the other hand, enjoys their pain far too much and does nothing to mask it. He’s a proud monster. Keaton suppresses a shiver.
“This came in through the wire.” She hands the colonel a sheaf of papers. The girls have been missing for three weeks. Keaton has good reason to fear for her life bringing Colonel Ransom this news: Ripper has shot more than his share of messengers. Keaton’s Kevlar undershirt will help her, but not if he takes a headshot, as is his MO.
Colonel Ransom tears his eyes from the screen and grabs the pages. A moment while he reads. Keaton braces herself. Fight or flight, baby.
“The fuck is this?” Rage transforms Ransom’s already disfigured face into something even more monstrous. As if that were even possible.
“DNA from our specimens NRG, Chamelia, and Secrete was run through CODIS and—”
“You think I can’t read, bitch! Ever heard of a rhetorical question?” Spit flies from between Ransom’s thick lips, broken by a scar that turns bloody. He’s bit the inside of his mouth.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Keaton’s heart palpitates.
Colonel Ransom’s hand itches, index finger flexing, edging its way toward the emergency gun he tapes underneath his desk. He gets away with it too. The Roswell Institute is that kind of place. Goddamn it, he thinks. Those three fucking cunts who escaped not once, but for a second goddamn time! And now they’re on the motherfucking police radar!
Ransom’s job is on the line. A breach of this magnitude is not one The Institute overlooks. Retrieving every scrap of evidence is the only recourse to avoid a firing squad. Or worse. Gotta handle this one like Goldilocks: just right.
Keaton watches a black stain flush over the colonel’s face. Fuck fuck shit. She debates making a run for it.
“What the hell are you standing there for like a wart on my ass? Get the fuck OUT of here!” Ripper Ransom slams his hands on the desk.
Don’t need to ask her twice. Keaton turns tail, fighting the urge to run.
“Goddamn those three,” Ransom mutters, seeing red. This is the kind of fury that’s gotten him in trouble before. He drops to the floor doing pushups, needing to blow of steam until he can do his best thinking. Fifty pushups later, the colonel has a plan. And he hasn’t even broken a sweat.
Randall “Ripper” Ransom
You run your hand over the scar that bisects the left side of your face, framing your opaque eye. My Lai, Vietnam. March 16, 1968. Charlie Company. Walking was a special agony after the foot-rot set in. Goddamn ‘Nam and its constant rain, nothing stayed dry.
You can’t remember the last time you slept. Fucking mosquitos and fuck knows what else buzzing in your ear all the live long night. You’ve had the shits for days.
Farted yesterday—or was it the day before?—and dammit if you didn’t crap yourself. The humiliation of asking for new skivvies is not one you’d ever care to repeat. And to make matters worse, you’re not entirely sure why any of you are even here. These people live like savages, thatched huts, no electricity, no water, no fucking antibiotics. What does America care what these backward motherfuckers do, anyway? They might as well be on another planet for all you care. These doubts worry away at the small piece of your mind not occupied with the basic necessities of survival.
Finally in the village and Brewster goes apeshit, brains a villager for looking at him. Grabs the screaming wife and rapes her with his gun. Pulls the trigger.
The horror is incomprehensible. You think you’re going to pass out. The blood pooling from between her legs like a period gone wrong. You start laughing. The expression on her face, gook eyes all contorted and the shock of it. You laugh until you throw up.
You look up and a group of the guys are taking turns with a girl. She can’t be more than fourteen. She stopped screaming after the first one. Martin’s got a gun in each hand, playing John Wayne, shooting them off one after the other, villagers falling in his wake. Red. Everything is red. The world has turned upside down. The screams make you want to tear your ears off. Every way you turn something else to assault your eyes. Charlie Company has lost it.
All you can think about is your mother and her fried chicken recipe, and Elizabeth, your highschool sweetheart. She let you go all the way as a goodbye present. You just want to get back to that safe place. Please, let me get back to that safe place, you find yourself saying aloud.
Platoon leader Carlisle sees you standing there. “Get your thumb out of your ass, corporal, and join the party!” He pushes a teenage girl your way, she collapses at your feet, begging in her language for mercy. You stare at her. This is not you. This is not you.
“What’re you? A faggot?” Carlisle screams in your face.
“No. Sir!”
“Then fuck the bitch!”
“Sir…!”
“That’s an order! DO IT!” Carlisle is apoplectic.
You can’t do it out here. You take her inside a hut. You count three dead bodies. Old women. The girl screams and weeps. You wonder if these screams will satiate Carlisle. Your dick has never felt less like fucking in your entire life. In fact, you might never fuck again. The image of Brewster and the gun makes the gorge rise in your throat. You try to calm the girl. You look out the door and see Carlisle is otherwise occupied: spearing children with his bayonet, wailing like a cat in heat every time. You turn and the girl plants a dull machete right into your face. You’re not angry. You hope she’s killed you. You’re dead inside already.
You stumble from the hut and yank the blade from your face. The blood hot down your cheeks, chin, soaking the top of your shirt. You fall to the ground, praying for forgiveness. The world fades from red to black.
You wake up back in America.
Randall Ransom died in My Lai.
Ripper Ransom was resurrected in the Roswell Institute.
When the doctors asked if they should plastic surgery the scar away, you told them no.
That scar is the only thing that reminds you of the innocent boy you once were before you they made you into this monster of a man.
8:20 AM The Wreckage
Just four miles from where Ripper Ransom sits in the Roswell Institute, the sun has risen over Charles Wallace Crane’s now-flattened Hollywood hill. It’s clear to the crime scene investigators that nothing else remains but dirt and ash. That there were thousands on this very site just hours before is almost impossible to believe. There is no more to be done, nothing left to find in the swirls of dust that rise from barren earth.
As the CSI techs leave the scene, the police detail follow, needed at the Beverly Center DNA collection lab where a riot brews, fueled by sleep-deprived parents and clashing socio-economic backgrounds. Patrolmen pass dozens on foot headed to the site, carrying votive candles, flowers, photos and the crosses people put by the road at scenes of drunk driving deaths.
The crime tape ringing the site makes a slapping sound against the trees as it starts to come undone. Whatever Los Angeles decides to do with the wreckage, for now it will serve as a cenotaph. A living memorial.
8:30 AM Spruce-Musa Hospital
The security detail’s unlike anything the staff has ever seen. The fourth floor is now the exclusive property of the LAPD, with policemen stationed at every entrance and exit, emergency or otherwise. Likewise, the floors above and below, as well as the lobby are locked down. The back hospital entrances are locked, with specific orders that nobody is to come and go from anywhere but the designated spots. Anyone who’s not LAPD or hospital must all but offer up their firstborn to get in; they’re asking for so much paperwork, it’s not even worth trying.
Still, the paparazzi flock every which way, a neverending horde of photo-hungry zombies, rather than the flesh-eating variety.
Clearing the fourth floor in anticipation of the twelve new patients was a feat itself. Some of those patients,
like Mr. Barryman, whose triple bypass led to a stroke and then some, existed on only the most tenuous of links to life, and moving them is a dangerous business. Spruce-Musa is doing LAPD a favor, they don’t need a lawsuit for their trouble.
Today ages Nurse Pratchett a decade, and all because Chrissie Klein got herself knocked up and has her morning sickness all day long. I should have taken that early retirement when they offered it last year. Twenty-twenty hindsight. Pratchett sighs as a policeman knocks into her again. Next time she’s going to stick him with a needle just because. Not a china shop. A hospital, dammit.
Red Feather is on the phone with CSI Mazzotti. Hangs up, turns to Günn. “Stacey Chang’s on her way over with the lab results on survivors’ DNA. She should be here any minute.”
“Let’s see what she says and then figure out who to start interviewing.” Günn flashes Red Feather the second smile he’s seen in weeks. He’s taken aback, but accepts it.
“Sounds like a plan.” Red Feather closes his eyes and has a flash of the vision that overcame him during The Event: the stone circle of beings, chanting in a language that seemed older than sound, the unreal blue that must have been heaven. He’ll never look at the sky the same way again. He opens his eyes and Günn is staring at him with a raised eyebrow. Red Feather shakes his head. It’s nothing.
Günn shrugs in response. I could care less, weirdo.
Behind the detectives, a stack of VHS tapes and camera on a tripod wait for them to begin, free space for answers. The elevator opens. Stacey Chang flashes her laminate and tries to walk past the cop on duty. He puts out his arm, holding her back and grabs the ID, studies it like it’s a lost teaching of Jesus.
Detective Red Feather walks over. “Bruce, man, chill. She’s LAPD, here to see us.”
“She’s not a badge, sir. Just doing my job.” Patrolman Bruce resumes the position, arms crossed over his sizable chest, scowl fixed back in place. He’s missing his kid’s baseball game for this bullshit. Bunch of rich white kids get themselves killed and everyone jumps.
Chang walks into the nurse’s station, the satchel at her side banging against her left thigh. “There a quiet place we can talk?”
Günn looks over at Nurse Pratchett, who nods and gestures for them to follow. “The waiting room is empty now that all the patients have been moved. It’s soundproof.”
As they move toward the room Stacey Chang starts taking out sheaves of papers from her bag, leaving it deflated in the process. Nurse Pratchett shows them to the door and turns to leave.
“Nurse,” Red Feather asks once his partner and Chang enter the room and sit down. “How’s the bird girl?”
Pratchett smiles. “She’s writing away in there. I had to bring her a second legal pad.”
Red Feather returns the smile. “Did she eat?”
Pratchett nods. “She asked for thirds.” Pause. “Don’t wait too long to go see her. She won’t ‘talk’ to anyone else but you. So she said in one of the notes she passed me for more gummy worms.”
Red Feather pats Nurse Pratchett on the hand and nods a goodbye; Nurse Pratchett goes to call her son’s caregiver to check in.
Red Feather sits opposite Günn and Chang, leaning forward. “So, Chang. Hit us.”
“This is some nutty stuff I’ve got here.” Chang looks embarrassed. She clears her throat and begins. “One of the survivor’s DNA sample led to a Karma Devi, person of interest in the death of Kevin Danville.”
Günn frowns. Chang continues, “He went to the ER where it turned out he’d been castrated, they estimated about six to seven days before. Too embarrassed to call the police. He died shortly after of sepsis. Karma Devi’s was one of fifteen samples found in his apartment, including blood. You could have seen that apartment from space after we Luminoled, a whole hell of a lot of blood and semen. Danville had a history of sexual assault priors, but no convictions. The women in question withdrew their charges and a good number of them left LA after reporting the assaults.”
“Okay,” Red Feather says, making some notes in his black pad. “What else?”
“We got another hit on family members of a Lily Green, the—” Chang coughs, “one-eyed girl. Mother Rosemary Green deceased of cancer, father in San Quentin for the rape and battery of the mother along with dozens of others. Xavier Marsh. The Parking Lot Rapist. He waited for her by her car, knocked her out, raped her inside her own vehicle, and left her preggers.”
“Jesus,” Red Feather breathes, his old partner was the one who’d closed that case a dozen years ago, collaring the guy as he attempted to assault an undercover police officer in the parking lot of the Glendale Galleria. Red Feather remembers it well; he was dating that undercover officer at the time. She was a mess after. Got off the beat, happier behind a desk pushing paper. Last he heard she was married and had a couple kids.
“With the damage he did to Lily’s mother, it’s amazing she was able to conceive at all. The rape kit details are brutal, man.” Chang hates these kinds of cases. She often delegates them to others. The kind of things that make her wish she’d never gotten into forensics at all. Men who hate women. Makes her sick.
“What a way to come into the world,” Red Feather winces.
“To end up with one eye to boot. Strange.” Günn shakes her head.
“As Mazzotti mentioned,” Chang continues, “either the mom was into herbalism or she was poisoned during her pregnancy. This isn’t a naturally occurring birth defect. And it doesn’t end there: Lily Green is also a person of interest in a murder.”
“No shit. But she’s just a kid. How old, fifteen?”
Chang nods. “She was at an orphanage and they say that she killed the night-shift supervisor.” Chang clears her throat. “They say she, um, turned him to stone.”
Günn laughs, an awkward barking sound. “Nice one, Chang. One point for you. Now what really happened?”
“Look, ma’am, that’s what they told me. Analysis of his, um, cremains indicate that they were the supervisor. Teeth and bone fragments. She escaped from the orphanage right after and nobody had seen her since. They had an APB out on her but no hits.”
“So what, she killed him with her magic ray gun? What kind of freakshow are they running over there? And don’t ever call me ma’am.” Günn and her temper.
“Look Detective, I don’t conduct the events, I analyze the evidence, ok, and the evidence is solid. We just don’t know how she managed it.”
“Fucking hell.” Günn runs her hands through her pixie hair, mussing it totally and then smoothing it back down. “What else?”
“Three of the samples, the lizard woman with the tail, the cyborg chick with the metal bones, and the girl with poison skin who smells like oleander came up as classified files but I have never seen or heard of the department before.” Chang hands over the screenshot of the logo, a pyramid with one eye adorning the top.
“This pyramid is on dollar bills.”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s gotta be some government agency because they are linked to our database. But when I had the tech guys try trace it, we came up with nothing.”
“Send copies of this to Pete and have him disseminate up the ranks.” Red Feather hands back the printout.
“Already taken care of, sir.”
“Any other hits?”
“The middle-aged lady, the screaming one we found whole at the scene? She was also a person of interest in a murder.”
“Are you shitting me?” Günn wants this day to be over. Now.
Chang shakes her head. “She is one Teresa Chalmers.” Pause as she shakes her again, feeling like a bobbly-head doll. “So weird. Okay, so her husband, Bob Chalmers, was molesting her seventeen-year-old daughter, Lara, for what seems to be a long time. The girl had evidence of two abortions—we don’t know if they were the father’s or not—but file
says she was wild, promiscuous.”
The detectives look on, eyebrows raised.
“One night apparently the husband drugged Teresa Chalmers. Sedative in her milk. She slept through the whole thing. Her husband had some kind of stroke, possibly while raping his daughter, and died. Daughter killed herself in the bathtub shortly after. Razorblades.”
“Oh my God.” Günn pauses. “Why was she considered a person of interest?”
“Bob Chalmers had no health problems, local PD found it strange that she slept through the whole thing. No idea why those yokels found that strange: Teresa Chalmers’s tox screen came back with ten times the suggested dosage of Valium. It’s a wonder she didn’t go into heart failure from that alone. They thought maybe she killed them both once she found out about the, um, sexual relationship. Set it up to look like his accidental death and daughter’s suicide.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Red Feather muses.
Günn’s nose for lies smells absolutely nothing. It can’t be. It just can’t. Her own desperation, now that she can smell.
“I always wanted to write a book. I think I’ve got everything I need for a bestseller.” Chang smiles, a sad smile that tells Red Feather she’s had some bad sex in her past too.
“Any other bombshells?”
“We IDed the DJ, but not from the DNA. He’s got no record. Visual ID, his poster is all over the city that he was headlining the party. Key slot right at midnight.”
“No ‘person of interest’ in his file?”
“Not exactly, but his girlfriend Liria Fairchild did go missing last year. In his statement on file he said she broke up with him and took off with another guy. Didn’t know who. Her parents are convinced he’s lying, but no evidence to back anything up.”
Crime Rave Page 9