Blood Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation

by M. R. Sellars

  “Why?”

  “Remember asking me if I had a hinky feeling earlier? Well, guess what? I’ve definitely got one now.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  He let out a heavy sigh and threw his hands up. “Look, just drop it. It ain’t important.”

  “So there is something,” I replied, my tone sharp.

  “Yeah, okay. There is, but I’m tellin’ ya’ it ain’t important,” he replied, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. “And right now you’re just blowin’ shit outta proportion.”

  “You aren’t helping with the double talk.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m kinda stuck in the middle here.”

  “Unstick yourself. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “Listen, a wise man once said, what ya’ don’t know won’t hurt ya’. I highly suggest you listen to the wise man.”

  “Uh-huh, well it just so happens another one said, when in doubt, do nothing,” I shot back. “And I’m having more than my share of doubts right now.”

  “Well do us all a favor and get over ‘em is all I got ta’ say.”

  “I will when you tell me what’s really going on.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t believe me if I told ya’.”

  “Very funny.” I wasn’t laughing when I made the comment. “This isn’t the time to beat me over the head with irony. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Irony? What… Oh, yeah, I did kinda sound just like you right then, didn’t I?” he harrumphed and then gave me a sidelong glance. “Frustratin’ as fuck, ain’t it?”

  “Yes it is, but you also know exactly why I say that.”

  “Yeah, and I know ‘zactly why I’m sayin’ it too,” he countered. “Just leave it alone, Row. Seriously. It ain’t important.”

  “Is the FBI involved in this?”

  “Well hell, sure they are. I already told ya’ that.”

  “No, Ben, I mean me being here now.” I wasn’t yelling, but my voice had definitely risen in concert with my darkening mood.

  “Calm down. The Feebs got nothin’ to do with you bein’ here.”

  “Who then?”

  “Me, who else,” he spat. “Now like I said, just calm down.”

  “And your brass?”

  “Yeah, some of them too. Jeezus, you oughta be happy you got a few friends in high places for a change.”

  Felicity, who had remained conspicuously silent as the discussion turned to an argument, now spoke up. “Aye, Ben, I have to agree with Rowan. Something doesn’t feel right about this. We’ve had our fill of hidden agenda’s today. What aren’t you telling us?”

  “Dammit, where the hell’s the doc?” he muttered as a response.

  “Okay, if you aren’t going to tell me what’s going on, then I’m done,” I announced. “Come on, Felicity, I think we can probably still catch that movie.”

  “Jeezus, Row, give it a rest. Nobody’s out ta’ get ya’.”

  I took my wife’s arm, and we headed toward the exit. We made it to the door before my friend gave in.

  “Okay, stop! Just stop right there,” he barked, struggling to keep his voice at a reasonable volume. “Sonofabitch… I told ‘em somethin’ like this would happen.”

  “Are you going to quit jerking us around?” I asked as I glanced back toward him.

  He huffed out a heavy sigh then reached up and smoothed back his hair. He closed his eyes and hung his head for a moment as his hand slid down to his neck and came to a rest.

  “Goddammit…” he muttered before bringing his gaze to meet mine. “Fine… Okay… You win… Ya’ happy?”

  “I will be when I know what’s really going on here,” I appealed.

  “Maybe… Maybe not,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. Truth is I know it won’t make any difference as far as you helpin’ goes.”

  “So someone thought it would?” I asked, confusion wrinkling my face.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Which is exactly why I’m under orders not to tell ya’.”

  “What the hell is it?” Now I was thoroughly perplexed.

  Finally, he simply blurted out, “The missin’ woman’s name is, Judith Albright.”

  “Albright,” I repeated the name back to him. “As in…”

  “Yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “Albright as in she’s Bible Barb’s niece.”

  The revelation definitely gave me pause.

  I stared back at my friend and he at me, neither of us uttering a word. Even Felicity remained silent, which was a shock because I was fairly certain she despised the woman even more than me. Still, Ben was correct. I wasn’t about to withhold my help on this case because of a grudge against a victim’s relative, although I was fairly certain the same would not be true if the tables were turned.

  To say Captain Barbara Albright and I had a turbulent history was the understatement of the century. I was a Witch and she was a fundamentalist Christian with a badge—obviously not a good mix. Still, it shouldn’t have been an issue, and to be honest it wasn’t, at least not for me. However, she decided otherwise before we’d even met, and the rest was downhill from there.

  Live and let live simply wasn’t a part of her credo. If you didn’t share her beliefs you were damned to hell. To that end, she was more than happy to use her position within the department to cram Christianity down your throat and then find a way to legally harass you if you dared to gag and spit it back out.

  Behind her back the majority of the police force simply called her Bible Barb, or BeeBee for short. She definitely had her share of lackeys and supporters interspersed throughout the ranks, but among the cops on the street they were few and far between. Still, you had to watch what you said if you weren’t sure where someone else’s loyalties might lay because it would definitely make its way back to her ears.

  If ever I’d had a nemesis who just happened to be on the correct side of the law, she was it. Our first run in had come when she was a lieutenant and had unceremoniously taken charge of an investigation with which I was involved. From that point forward she’d been on a mission to sever my ties with local law enforcement as a consultant. While she had eventually been promoted out of any direct contact where I was concerned, I never felt as though I was fully out of her sights. Even as recently as the debacle with Felicity’s false arrest, Albright’s fingerprints were all over some of the harassment and bureaucratic stumbling blocks we had faced.

  And now, here she was again.

  “So that’s what you were all nervous about?” I finally asked.

  “I told ya’ I wasn’t nervous. What I was, was pissed off about havin’ ta’ lie to you.”

  “That seems to have become a theme lately,” I agreed. “The lying thing I mean.”

  “Tell me about it,” he huffed. “It’s been givin’ me a friggin’ ulcer. But, like I said, you’re the one who blew this all out of proportion.”

  “You’re right,” I said with a nod. “Sorry… It’s been a bad couple of days. And then the whole thing with the FBI… I know that’s not much of an excuse, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  “Yeah, well I probably shoulda just blown off the orders and told ya’ anyway.”

  I pondered the situation for a moment then let out a bemused snort. “So your brass actually thought I was so shallow that I’d refuse to help because of Albright?”

  “Actually, no. She’s the one who thought you would say no.”

  “She knows I’m helping?” I could hear the incredulity woven through my own voice.

  “Yeah, she knows all right,” Ben told me as if he was having trouble believing his own words. “Believe it or not, as soon as her niece went missin’ she started demandin’ you be brought in to consult, even if Major Case had to arrest you ta’ make it happen.”

  “Not exactly subtle, is she?”

  “Listen, Row,” Ben continued. “You won’t have to deal with ‘er. After she threw that fit, the chief put ‘er on administrative leave.
”

  “Like that’s going to stop her?” I replied.

  “Yeah, I know, but I’m tellin’ ya’ you won’t have to deal with ‘er. I’ll make sure of it.”

  I waved him off. “It doesn’t matter. You can tell your higher ups I’m not a complete ass. I’m not going to walk away from this just because of my history with Albright.”

  “Yeah, I told ‘em that already, but they wanted to play it safe.”

  “Well be sure to let them know that playing it safe almost did cause me to walk out.”

  “Oh yeah. Believe me, that’s right at the top of the list.”

  “And, do me another favor, okay?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can we try remembering that we’re friends and stop with the tiptoeing around the truth? I think we’ve established that it’s not helping either of us.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, definitely. I don’t need the stomach problems.”

  “Good. Now that we have that settled why don’t we see if we can find out what’s keeping Doctor Sanders. I’m ready to get this over with…”

  CHAPTER 21:

  “How was lunch?” Ben asked the medical examiner when she finally arrived in the autopsy suite. The acerbic aura surrounding his words was anything but subtle.

  “A little rushed,” she replied, no less caustic in her tone.

  “Yeah, don’t ya’ just hate that?” my friend quipped.

  “How was your wait?” she returned her own verbal stab.

  “Long. And a bit chilly.”

  She nodded and shot him a wry grin. “Really? Don’t you just hate that?”

  “Havin’ a bad day, Doc?”

  “I wasn’t until about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Well then you’re already doin’ better’n me because mine started yesterday.”

  She ignored him and gave me a quick nod. “Mister Gant, Miz…ummm…O’Brien, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Felicity replied.

  “Doctor Sanders,” I said, returning the nod. “Sorry we interrupted your lunch.”

  “No need for you to apologize,” she replied with a quick smile. “Detective Storm, however, is a different story.” Making a half turn, she peered over the top of her glasses at Ben. “You know, we’re still waiting on the labs. Neither of the postmortems is finished yet, so I don’t know exactly what it is you want from me. I already gave you the preliminary findings.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he told her. “I was thinkin’ maybe you could just fill us in on the high points so far to get Row here up ta’ speed, and we’ll take it from there.”

  “Which victim would you like to start with?”

  “Either one is fine. You pick.”

  She shook her head then repositioned her glasses while shuffling a pair of file folders. Flipping open the first one, she turned and started walking toward the far wall. As we followed her across the room she began to recite, “Foster, Emily. Caucasian female, approximately twenty-three years of age. Height one hundred sixty-five centimeters, weight fifty-nine kilograms. As you already know, the apparent mode of death was desanguination. In layman’s terms, she bled to death.”

  The doctor stopped at the bank of stainless steel doors and quietly perused the file in silence, lifting a page, then another, with her free hand. After a moment she closed the folder and tucked it under her arm before quickly donning a pair of latex gloves and inspecting the tags on the doors. Finding the one she sought, she reached out and yanked the shiny rectangle open.

  Before continuing, Doctor Sanders turned to me with a questioning look. “Since you are here, Mister Gant, I assume you intend to do whatever it is you do by way of…”

  As her voice trailed off uncertainly, Ben offered, “Just call it Twilight Zone, Doc.”

  “I was thinking more along the line of unconventional forensics,” she replied.

  I gave her a nod. “I think that’s pretty much why they asked me here.”

  Doctor Sanders was no stranger to my facility. She had witnessed me channeling victims on more than one occasion—in this very autopsy suite, in fact. While she was far more inclined to stick with tangible scientific data as opposed to the supernatural riddles that often came of such episodes, she also wasn’t one to completely dismiss me out of hand.

  “Will you need to touch the body?” she asked.

  “That’s hard to say,” I shrugged. “But, yes, it could happen.”

  She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and withdrew another set of gloves. “Then you’d better put these on.”

  “I might need skin to skin contact for what I do.”

  “Even so, I’m going to have to insist that you put them on.”

  Rather than argue the point, I accepted the gloves and complied, stretching the latex over my chilled skin with much less expert dexterity than she had earlier displayed.

  We stood to the side in a loose semicircle as Doctor Sanders took hold of the handle that was formed into the end of the metal drawer. Before she could start to pull, however, Felicity spoke up.

  “Aye, just a second.” Without offering a single word of explanation, my wife reached into her jacket then withdrew a handful of the salt packets Ben had given her, which she then stuffed into my pocket. Once she was finished with that task, she took my left hand into hers and stripped off the latex glove. “I’ll watch after this one, then,” she told the doctor as she interlaced her fingers with mine and tightly locked her grasp. Then she nodded and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Whoa…” Ben interrupted. “Just a sec… That’s just the salt. Don’tcha need to dance around and say a poem or something?”

  My wife shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?” he pressed. “Isn’t that what ya’ did last time? I know it’s been a few years but, remember? Didn’t you do that thing where…”

  My wife cut him off with her sharp appeal. “Let me worry about the WitchCraft, then. Okay?”

  “Jeez, yeah, okay,” he surrendered. “I’m just makin’ sure.”

  “And your concern is appreciated,” I told him.

  “Aye, it is,” Felicity added, her tone somewhat softer. “But this situation is different. Trust me.”

  “Yeah, okay. You’re the Witches,” he said with a shrug. “Go ahead, Doc.”

  A few seconds later, the full suspension drawer came outward with a metallic rattle as the doctor held tight and slowly stepped backward. Underscoring the louder noise was the soft ball-bearing hiss of the rollers beneath. The combination of the sharp and dull sounds joined together in a disharmonious clatter that tried its best to glance from the tile walls but was quickly swallowed by the chilled air as if it had never existed.

  Emily Foster’s corpse lay naked and prone in the shallow, tray-like drawer before us. Her skin was pallid in a way I had never recalled seeing in the past. The hooked loops of the sutures that stitched her torso shut formed stark dotted lines along the oversized Y incision. Subcutaneous ink outlined a stylized black swan tattoo on her upper arm that stood out like a surreal cartoon against the ashen color of her cold flesh. Dark hair framed her expressionless face, supplying yet another harsh contrast for the overall comparison.

  Corpses were always pale. I’d seen more than my share of them, so I knew that. Still, there was something peculiar about Emily Foster’s ghostly complexion. After a long moment of staring, it dawned on me that she was missing the normal markings of lividity I had grown accustomed to seeing on dead bodies—the dark postmortem “stains” left where blood would begin to pool in response to gravity soon after the heart stopped beating. Of course, since she was all but devoid of blood, it only stood to reason they wouldn’t be prevalent.

  “You okay, Row?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah…” I replied. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Felicity gripped my hand tighter, and I gave her a quick glance. Whether or not I succeeded in reassuring her I couldn’t really tell.

  “Okay, Doc. Give us the rundown,” Ben instructed.


  Doctor Sanders stepped around to the far side of the drawer then drew her index finger along an impression in the dead woman’s ultra-pale flesh. “As you can see there are obvious ligature marks around her ankles.” The medical examiner traced her finger farther down the top of the foot, continuing her recitation. “They bear across the lower ankle and upper foot at an inward slant, continuing into the arch. The depth and angle of the indentations would seem to indicate significant additional stress being applied to whatever was used as a binding. There are also both antemortem and postmortem abrasions as you would expect.”

  An eerie sort of calm had settled over me immediately after the body had been rolled into view. While I still had the makings of a headache taking random shots at the back of my skull, they were nowhere near the intensity to which I had become used to coping with at times like this. Over the years, excruciating pain and deafening screams had become the norms associated with my curse, especially whenever in close proximity to a victim. But, for some reason, such was not the case today.

  I certainly didn’t want for either of those plagues to befall me again. However, the fact that they were strangely AWOL had me more than just a bit unsettled. I actually began to wonder if I had finally been granted my wish to be rid of this bane. But, if that was the case, even I had to admit the universe had certainly picked an inopportune time to smile upon me.

  Doctor Sanders continued, moving up along the body as she spoke. “Examination showed no evidence of vaginal or anal tearing, and the rape kit came back negative. In fact there was no evidence whatsoever of sexual activity either consensual or non-consensual.”

  “That’s because this wasn’t about sex,” I blurted.

  “You gettin’ somethin’?” Ben asked, perking up at my sudden pronouncement.

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “Whaddaya mean you’re not sure? Either ya’ are or ya’ aren’t.”

  “You know better than that,” I explained. “Things don’t seem to be happening for me like they usually do, but I just know this wasn’t about sex.”

  “Do ya’ know, like hinky hocus-pocus know, or are ya’ just speculatin’?”

  “All I can say is that my gut feeling is the killer had no sexual interest in the victims.”