Shifters: A Samantha Reece Mystery Book 1

by Jaime Johnesee

  "He's staying with a witness."

  "There’s a witness?" James took a swallow of coffee and gave a disgusted grimace. "Ugh, this coffee is horrible."

  "Welcome to my world. Now you know why we all love you so much back at the Bureau. As to the witness, someone saw Grisly leaving the last murder. We have him in protective custody." I took a coffee that a young uniformed officer handed me and gave him a nod of thanks.

  I took a sip and immediately regretted it. However, it was warm, it was coffee, and I needed the caffeine. I took another sip and am sure I gave my own grimace that mirrored James’s. I took a deep breath, steadied myself for what I knew would be awaiting me inside the room, and then stepped in.

  The smells of death and bodily secretions hung heavy in the air. No doubt it would linger for weeks afterward. I crossed the worn brown shag carpet to the bathroom door. There was three men and a woman standing around the bathtub debating who was going to be the poor soul that had to take the drain apart.

  "Hey, guys. How bad is it?"

  "Hey, Sam, it's the worst one yet. I'm thinking we lost a lot of our vic down the drain. We were just debating who would be the one to actually pull the pipe." Grace gave me a halfhearted smile.

  I loved the forensic techs, but I couldn't tell them apart in their Tyvek suits and respirators. Except for Grace. She was easy to spot. She was more terrifying and obviously the one in charge.

  I peeked over their shoulders and saw what amounted to little more than hamburger. The violence was getting worse. Grace held up a dismembered toe that had been sitting near an evidence tag. Everything had been photographed, and tagged, it just needed collecting.

  "I'm not a coroner, but I'm fairly sure this one wasn't sedated when she was shredded." Grace's halfhearted smile disappeared completely.

  "How do you figure?"

  "There is far more blood at the cut ends than in any of the other bodies."

  "Hey, put that down!" The coroner had arrived.

  "Excuse me?" Grace raised an eyebrow at the man.

  "It's part of the remains which means that is my toe. I'd prefer it if you didn't screw everything up by touching it all and moving it out of place." The young man was dead, he just didn't know it yet.

  Law enforcement is still mostly a man's world. Grace had earned her position as head of forensics for our office and I knew she wouldn't let anyone give her any disrespect.

  "I think you had better consider who you are talking to very carefully, son. Do you understand me?" She had a bit of a growl to her words.

  I only spotted it because I tend to growl myself from time to time.

  "It doesn't matter who the hell you are, lady, what matters is that you don't contaminate evidence, or did they not teach you that at charm school?"

  Oh, boy. This poor kid wouldn't be able to sit right for a week when Grace, and then his SA, got through with him. Supervisory Agents really didn't like dealing with petty bullshit like this.

  "My name is Dr. Grace Fujishima. I am the Director of the ERT." Her words hung in the air along with the stench of death.

  The other cops and agents stopped talking and stared at the coroner who’d dared to piss Grace off. Upsetting the Evidence Response Team head was a really bad idea. There is so much evidence being logged in on a daily basis that they'll be happy to drop you to the bottom of their list and you can wait for your results for days, weeks even.

  "Oh, I didn't think—”

  "No, I can very clearly see you didn't bother to think. Let me guess, you simply saw a woman and assumed I was an idiot. Let me tell you one thing here and now, you little miscreant, if you ever speak to me, or any of my people, like that again I will make sure Franklin fires your ass." She had been in a crouch to better look over the evidence in the tub. She stood and handed him the toe.

  "I'm sorry." He was bright red with embarrassment.

  "Good start. Since you are so protective over the remains, we will leave you here to bag and tag all this yourself. Enjoy." Grace called her team away from the bathroom and I walked out with them.

  Normally the ERT would have stuck around to help the coroner deal with the bits and pieces Grisly left behind. This time Grace was going to make the kid learn a lesson the hard way.

  She turned around, looked at the kid with a mean hard stare and said, "By the way, you're going to need to cut the drain out of the shower. Enjoy that, too. Next time, I damn well hope you’ll have some respect for others on the job."

  "Dang, Grace, way to lay down the law!" one of her two suited employees said.

  "I sure as hell hope neither of you ever treated anyone like that,” Grace said sternly.

  "No way, you'd kill us." The other fellow nodded his head and pulled off his respirator.

  They were away from the body and there was no need to wear a breather out here, aside from the horrible stench of death and decay.

  "Damn straight. Nobody should be talked to like that, unless they aren't showing the proper respect to the deceased or other victims. Then, have at them." Grace was angrier than I had ever seen her.

  Well, almost. There was this time a woman ran over Grace's cat and had the gall to blame Grace for allowing her cat outside. Grace came in to work red-faced and ready to shoot someone.

  Gerry took her down to the firing range and requalified her to carry. He said it would be a great time to do that. She agreed. Three hours later she came up from the range in the basement with her hands coated in gunpowder residue and a faint smile on her face.

  "So, Grisly is losing it. There is no evidence he drugged her to make the cutting easier. But how did he keep her quiet? There is a very big difference between happy sex yells and the screams of someone being torn into pieces." I couldn't figure out how Grisly kept the neighbors from complaining.

  "We found a small bit of duct tape. It's possible he had her mouth taped shut," one of the two lab guys offered.

  "If he did, then he has really gone off book. These killings started because he felt like he was saving the world from the evil shifters. What if he has begun to enjoy the killing?" I was worried.

  If he started to relish murder then things were going to get a whole lot messier. He'd probably stop leaving clues because he would decide he didn't want to be caught. My heart sank. We needed to find this guy before he killed someone else.

  "I hope we find the answers you need, Sam. Speaking of which, back to the grid, boys. I know you've walked it three times already, but you never know what you might find on the fourth go around. See you later, Sam." They raised the respirators onto their heads and continued sweeping the room for evidence.

  The problem was they'd get a ton of it. Grace and her crew would spend weeks narrowing down what they pulled from that place. So many cheating spouses and prostitutes would be pulled down to the station and interviewed, and somewhere in that list, marked as an unknown, would be Grisly. He will have left something else behind aside from the bloody handprint, he always did.

  This murder had been even more frenzied than the last. There was blood spatter on the ceiling on one side of the bed. I was guessing he had hit the victim, knocked her unconscious, and dragged her to the tub where he proceeded to tear her into bits.

  I took a deep breath to track his scent around the room while staying out of the way of Grace's team and the coroner's. He'd been in human form in the bedroom area and shifted once he had her in the tub. The scent of shifter was strong in there. Almost as strong as the smell of blood and viscera. The spicy tang wafted through the sour smells of death and violence and painted a picture for me I could have lived without.

  Based on the smells, I would say he knocked her silly, dragged her to the tub, and then started in on her. There was a second scent of shifter, but it was faint. I think she’d tried to shift, so she could fight him. It probably only fueled his rage. I looked at the pile of ground meat, bone fragments, and hair that had once been a person and shuddered.

  That could be me. I'm a shifter, and I'm a wo
man, and he could come after me that way. The only thing I had going for me that his other vics didn't was simply that I wasn't a whore. This case was hitting home and making me feel very uncomfortable.

  I also found it bizarre that Ben had just shown up out of the blue while all this was going on. The scent I attributed as Grisly's wasn't like Ben's or even the vics Grisly had offed. It was Grisly's alone and I'd know him the second I smelled him. It wasn't much, but it was something.

  I decided to speak with the motel manager to see if there was anything he could tell me about the guy who had rented the room. I figured that James and Josh had probably already questioned him, but decided it was now my turn to give it a go. Maybe I could come up with something they hadn't. Maybe I could shake a memory loose that would help us.

  I had to.

  We were losing ground and now that he'd killed two in a week there'd be no going back for him. He was officially escalating. This was bad news. Horrible news for shifter prostitutes and the shifter community, at large. At any time he could decide that hookers weren’t enough and start going after high risk victims like soccer moms and little kids.

  I'm not trying to insinuate that a soccer mom's life is worth more than a prostitute's, I'm just saying that hookers are living life in a danger zone, professionally speaking, while most soccer moms don't. It's just a sad fact. I was angry that Grisly had chosen these women to shred; they’d had a hard enough life.

  Most of them had been handed a bum rap from the get go. Add in a drug or alcohol addiction (or worse, a child they couldn't afford) and these women were stuck living a life where they were used and tossed away. It was heartbreaking when you saw the big picture. When you looked to the future and saw how those children would probably grow up to be drug-addicted hookers like their mom, it was downright grievous.

  If someone had given these people a better start in life, any one of Grisly's victims could have been a soccer mom, instead of a whore. I shook the melancholy from my mind and continued to the manager's office.

  Sheila and a couple uniforms were in there when I walked in. They were talking to a little bald fellow with a scruffy sandy blonde beard. His face looked tired and worn.

  He wasn't happy to have so many cops at his motel, that much was obvious. He was a little jumpy and kept running his hand over his bare scalp. I thought perhaps he knew something he wasn't saying, but then I caught sight of a hash pipe on the desk, slightly covered by a newspaper.

  I'm guessing he found the remains, called the cops, and then took a hit or two off whatever was in the pipe to calm himself down. It must've been a while ago as he was looking awful twitchy. I decided I would use that to my advantage. I noted the name on the plaque next to the pipe.

  "Mr. Caldon? Hello, I'm Special Agent Samantha Reece."

  "I already talked to these agents. Don't need to talk to any others. Y'all need to vacate my motel soon's ya can. I got customers what won't come here with the fuzz all over this place." He squinted hard at me as if I were a magical genie who would grant his wish.

  "Hi, Sam." Sheila mustered up a smile for me.

  "Sheila, nice to see you." I smiled back.

  "Mr. Caldon here is being a mite uncooperative."

  "Uncooperative? Uncooperative! You can get right to hell, missy!" He looked at me hard. "I told ’em everything I know. I swear."

  "Well, how about you tell me everything you know? I'll even let you step outside and take your meds when we’re done."

  "How'd you...?" His face was a mix of puzzlement and terror. I pointed to the not so well hidden pipe on his desk. "Oh."

  "I'm assuming you know Carly's law won't cover that?"

  Carly’s law was recently signed into being and allowed products with THC oil to be used as medicine. It didn’t cover marijuana itself.

  "Look, I need it for my anxiety. You've got to understand!" He looked at me with a mix of fear and anger.

  "I do. And I’m not here for a little bit of weed. I am here because a woman was torn to pieces in one of your rooms.” I smiled kindly at him. “Just tell me everything you remember about the guy who rented that room—please.”

  I wanted to smack him and tell him to stop being so damned selfish; he may get charged for pot, but there was a woman turned inside out in his motel and that should have been the bigger attention grabber. I was so tired of these people who didn't care about anyone but themselves. Sadly, in my line of work, that was the sort of person I saw the most.

  "Well, he were a big boy. Can’t say he were a boy in looks, but in the way he talked and stuff."

  "So he was tall?"

  "Yes'm. And husky."

  "Tall and a little fat?"

  "Yes'm. Smelled funny, too. He smiled a lot; it's why I thought he were alright. If'n I didn't think he were okay I wouldn't’ve given him no room." He crossed his arms over his rail thin chest with its protruding ribs.

  "Good! So he smiled a lot? Was it like this?" I smiled a big beaming grin at him, "or like this?" I opened my mouth and began flehmening, pulling in all the scents from the room and rolling them across my palate to get a better sense of things.

  "The second one."

  "Excellent! Can I see the sign in sheet?"

  "Ain't got one."

  "Do you keep any records of the rooms or who has rented them?" I was trying not to sound as frustrated as I was.

  "Not really records, ma'am. I just write down what's been paid and for how long."

  "Can I see that?"

  "Sure." He produced an envelope from his desk. On the back of it were room numbers, dollar amounts, and times. I followed the one for the room the vic was in. Grisly had paid cash for two days of lodging.

  "It says he paid for two days, how long was he here?"

  "Dunno. I find spying on the guests a bad idea."

  "Oh, come on, Mr. Caldon, I know you're far too savvy a businessman to not keep an eye out on your investment."

  "Eddie."

  "Huh?" I was puzzled.

  Was he telling me what Grisly's name was?

  "My name, it's Eddie. You don't have to call me Mr. Caldon no more. I know I ain't quite worth that respect, girly."

  "I think it'd be best if I kept calling you Mr. Caldon and you called me Agent Reece." I smiled at him as politely as I could, considering he had just called me girly.

  "Oh. Okay. Look, all I can tell ya is that this fellow gave me the willies, even with all his smiling, and I didn't want to deal with him anymore than I had to."

  "Can you tell me what sort of car he was driving, or anything he ate, movies he ordered, anything he asked for help on?"

  "Sure thing. He came here in a gold Taurus. It had a Mississippi plate on it, but otherwise it was a nice car." The man cracked a grin and chuckled a bit.

  "You don't like Mississippi?"

  "No, ma'am. I grew up on the border and my high school team used to have to play a ’sippi team. Ain't nothing good over that line, I tell you that." He winked at me.

  "Okay, so aside from the gold car what else can you tell me?"

  "That fella was asking about pancakes."

  "Pancakes?"

  "Yes'm. He asked me where the nearest Waffle House was. Said he was hungry for some pancakes."

  "Where did you direct him?"

  "I told him The Diner was the only place to get him some real good pancakes, since Waffle House ain’t got any."

  "You sent him to The Diner?" I squeaked.

  I hoped Genie would be off today, I didn't like the idea of her serving pancakes to this homicidal creep.

  "Yes'm. Don't know if'n he went or not. Last time I saw him leave it didn't look like he were coming back. He loaded up everything he had brought with him."

  "Thanks, Eddie." I smiled at him. "Go ahead and step out back. I'll come with you." I was hoping the pot might help him talk more.

  "Say, thanks, kid. You're alright, for a copper."

  "Sam?" Sheila was going to read me the whole pot isn't legal you're an officer of t
he law riot act.

  I could just feel it in her disapproving glare.

  "It's okay, Sheila. You guys just stay right here; we will leave the door open and be right out the back. If I need you, I'll yell."

  She looked as if she were about to say something and closed her mouth, then nodded at me, instead.

  "Thanks." I patted her arm and walked out with Caldon.

  He stood about five feet from me in a cement alley behind the manager's office. It ran the full length behind the motel. As he put lighter to pipe I poked my head in his office to talk to Sheila.

  "Something wrong?"

  "Do you know if ERT has been out in this back alley at all?"

  "I don't know, I don't believe so but I'll check. Why, is there something out there?"

  "No, I just have a funny feeling our guy may have gone out the back way today. Caldon said he didn't see him. So I was thinking maybe he went out the back to avoid being seen covered in blood. If he did—”

  "Gotcha." She turned to the cop next to her. "Hey can you run down to the murder room and ask ERT to check the back alley?"

  The young man nodded and hustled off.

  "Thanks!" I hope he heard me.

  I nodded at Sheila and stepped back out with Eddie. He was looking far more relaxed.

  "Hey, that guy, is he that Grisly Adams killer?"

  "Yes, Eddie, he is."

  "No shit!"

  "None whatsoever."

  "Damn."

  "That about sums it up."

  "He said something when he was checking in. I didn't pay it no mind 'til now."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said he was a soldier from God's Army … and that he was here to kill demons. He said these demons look like people but can change into animals. I thought he was crazy, but he ain't fully crazy, is he? My sister is a wolf shifter. Do I got to worry 'bout her?" He took another deep drag on the pipe and held it in.

  "If she isn't a prostitute then she should be okay."

  "For how long?" He squeaked and then, with a big cough, he exhaled pure white smoke.

  It lingered in the air in front of him for a moment until it danced away on the breeze.