"I cannot believe," Thorwald said, "that you would be so unprofessional as to reveal the very existence of these videos, let alone the contents of one, without clearing it with us first."
"I would have," I said, "but you two haven't been around the last two nights. And I understand that you refused to give your contact information to our PA."
McGuire looked at me, then at Thorwald. "You haven't given us any way to contact you?"
"That information is released on a 'need to know' basis," Thorwald said.
"And you don't think that these officers," McGuire said, "who are working on the case that you brought to us, might have a need to know how to get in touch with you?"
"Messages left at the local FBI field office will be forwarded to us," Thorwald said primly. "And right now I don't wish to be distracted from the issue of Sergeant Markowski's carelessness in revealing what is essentially confidential information."
"I didn't give it to the New York Times," I said, "or even to the Times-Tribune. I told a veteran detective who knows how to keep her mouth shut."
"A veteran detective who's now got an emotional involvement in the case," Greer said.
"Some people are funny that way," I said. "When you tell them that one of their close relatives has been tortured to death, they get all upset."
"I still say you shouldn't have told her," Thorwald said. "She could have been shown one of those screen caps you were talking about earlier, and asked to make an identification of the woman in the photo."
"Yeah, that would work," I said. "You show Lacey Brennan a photo of a woman's face and ask, 'Is this your sister?' And when she wants to know why you're asking, you say 'Sorry, that's classified information.' I'm ninety-nine percent certain she'd tell you to–" I turned to Karl. "What's that expression she uses?"
"You mean 'Go fuck yourself'?"
"That's the one." I turned back to the Feebies. "She'd tell you to go fuck yourself. And you know what – she'd be right."
The two FBI agents looked at each other for a couple of seconds, then Thorwald gave a long-suffering sigh. "Well, since the cat's out of the bag, we may as well make use of it. I'll need contact information for this Detective Brennan."
I gave her a tight smile. "Sorry. That's classified."
She glared at me, then turned to McGuire. "Lieutenant, would you please tell your officer to–"
"All right," I said. "All right. What I meant was, it would be a bad idea to try to talk to Lacey about this today."
Instead of asking the question, Thorwald just gave me raised eyebrows.
"Because she's still in the initial hours of grieving," I said, "and because right now she is either a) drunk, or b) viciously hung over. You shouldn't try to talk to her in either condition."
"Unless you enjoy being told to go fuck yourself," Karl said. "And if that's your kink, we can save you the ride to Wilkes-Barre and do it for you right here."
"Let me talk to her," I told Thorwald. I tried for a reasonable tone of voice. "Tomorrow. If you'll give me a screen cap of the victim's face, I'll show it to her. If she IDs it as her sister, then I'll get all the information I can from Lacey about her."
"I thought you said the two women weren't close," Thorwald said, but she sounded like she was trying for reasonable, too.
"I did, but Lacey also told me that they exchange Christmas cards, so she'll have the address, at least. I'll get that, along with the sister's current last name and anything else that Lacey knows. Just give me twenty-four hours, fortyeight at the most. What do you say?"
"I say you ought to–" Greer began, but Thorwald made a sharp gesture and cut him off like a guillotine. "Very well, Sergeant," she said calmly. "If you'll give me your email address, I'll have some screen caps made, showing only the victim's face, and send them to you. When you have some information about said victim, I'd like to know about it. Fair enough?"
I gave her a nod. "Fair enough."
Her voice was mild, but the message in her eyes was the same one you'd get from a high school bully whose torments have been interrupted by a teacher: "We'll finish this later."
As I got behind the wheel I said to Karl, "Still think Thorwald likes me?"
Karl fastened his seatbelt and pretended to ponder it. "Well, maybe the same way that Cain liked Abel, something like that."
"Yeah, I was thinking along those lines myself."
"Where we going?" he asked.
"Let's pay another call on the rug merchant," I said. "I wanna ask Castle how it is that a few hours after we're talking to him about Helter Skelter, I've got a bunch of goblins in my garage, wanting a close-up look at my liver."
"You think Castle's on the same side as people who are killing supes and making snuff films? Those guys oughta be Castle's worst enemy, man."
"Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But if we're working off the assumption that the gobs were sent after me because we're on the trail of those Charlie Manson wannabes, how many people know that? Castle sure did."
"That's true," Karl said. "Plus whoever Castle told about it. Maybe he put the word out to the local supe community – 'Anybody heard anything about Helter Skelter? A couple of cops think someone's trying to make it happen here in Scranton'."
"If he did that, wouldn't you have heard something?"
"Not necessarily," Karl said. I caught his grin out of the corner of my eye. "I haven't been going to the meetings."
"We'll see if we can get Castle to tell us who he's been talking to."
"You know who else could've put out the word that we're looking into Helter Skelter?" Karl asked.
"Who?"
"Pettigrew. Our favorite human supremacist."
"Why would he do that?" I said. "He doesn't want Helter Skelter to start – he isn't sure his side would win."
"Maybe he didn't do it deliberately," Karl said. "Could be he told somebody he trusted, who told somebody else, who told the bad guys – whoever they are."
"Yeah, that's not exactly impossible, is it? Guess we better add Pettigrew to our list of people to see."
"We? You mean I get to go along this time?" To his credit, there wasn't a lot of sarcasm in Karl's voice. A little, maybe – but not a lot.
"Sure," I said. "Maybe your fangs'll scare him."
"They didn't work real well with Thorwald."
"Shit, Pettigrew's not nearly as tough as Thorwald."
Karl snorted laughter. "You know, it occurs to me, Pettigrew's little Nazi playpen is closer than the rug shop from here. Save us from doubling back if we go there first."
"Sounds like a plan, man," I said, and turned right at the next corner.
About five minutes later, we pulled into the parking area of Born to Be Wilding. The only other vehicle there was a customized Harley that I was pretty sure belonged to Pettigrew. Good – he was still here. I would've figured that anyway, since all the lights in the place were on.
As I turned the engine off, I said to Karl, "Look, I don't expect you to put up with any shit from Pettigrew, but try not to start something, OK?"
Karl unlatched his seatbelt. "I seek peace, and pursue it," he said, the way you do when quoting somebody.
I looked at him. "Where's that from?"
"Psalm 34."
"You've been reading something besides James Bond," I said.
"No Bibles for me anymore. I just remember it from school."
We were walking toward the open service bay when Karl suddenly stopped. "Uh-oh."
"What?"
"Blood, close by," he said. "Fresh, and lots of it."
"Human?"
"I think so."
As we started forward again, I drew my weapon and saw Karl do the same. That turned out to be unnecessary – the only one in there was Pettigrew, and he wasn't going to be dangerous to anybody ever again.
The human supremacist lay on his back near one of the big workbenches, splayed out like an abandoned rag doll – except you never find Raggedy Andy in a pool of his own blood. Pettigrew's l
ips were drawn back in a snarl, as if he were defying what had recently killed him. Most of his throat seemed to be missing.
After a quick look around to be sure that nobody was lurking, we walked toward Pettigrew, stopping at the edge of the blood pool.
"Pardon the stupid question," I said to Karl, "but is he dead?" If by some fluke Pettigrew was still alive, I'd be legally and morally obligated to try CPR and call an ambulance. Otherwise, I planned to stay out of the blood and not mess up the crime scene.
"No heartbeat at all," Karl said. "He's gone."
"Can you tell how long?"
"Uh-uh. But it's a fresh kill."
Karl's voice sounded a little shaky. It couldn't be because he was grieving for Pettigrew – if anything, he'd probably have a drink of plasma to celebrate. That's when it hit me. My vampire partner was in the presence of an awful lot of the stuff that constituted his diet. His training as a detective was probably warring with a strong impulse to start drinking the evidence.
"Listen, Karl, you wanna wait in the car? It's cool."
"No, I'm all right." His voice didn't completely support his words.
"Are you sure? Because I–"
"I said I'm all right."
"OK, then. OK."
I knelt down and touched a finger to the blood on the floor. It was only slightly tacky, which supported Karl's conclusion that the attack had been fairly recent – probably within the last couple of hours.
We were supposed to call this in, but I figured there was no hurry. And I wanted to have a look around before every cop and forensics tech in town started traipsing through the place.
As I stood up, I said to Karl, "You're the one with the super-acute vision. See anything that I'm missing?"
He didn't answer for a couple of seconds, and I wondered if he had zoned out on me. But then he said, "There are some hairs in the blood. See there?" He pointed, and I could just make out three or four hairs, a couple of inches long. "There's more over there," Karl said, and pointed again. "And some more, over near the body."
"Nice of the killer to leave us with so much evidence," I said.
"Yeah, I was just thinking that myself," Karl said. "And get this – I'm pretty sure it's not human."
"What, then? Dog?" I was pretty sure that Pettigrew didn't keep a dog here. And if he had, it would probably be howling over his body – that, or lapping up the blood.
"Close," Karl said. "I'd say wolf."
"Well, fuck me," I said. "You saying our perp's a werewolf?"
"I'm saying that's what somebody wants us to think."
I turned and looked at him. "And where did that come from?"
"Main reason is, there's no wolf smell," Karl said. "I got a good whiff of it the other night at Nay Aug, so the scent's fresh in my memory. And I'm getting – nothing. There's probably some on the hairs, or fur, but the blood is masking it."
"Anything else you've noticed?"
"Yeah, no blood spatter or trail of blood drops."
I glanced around the garage, "Yeah, it is pretty clean, isn't it – apart from the pool he's lying in."
"And it makes no fucking sense," Karl said. "Think about it, Stan. We're supposed to believe that a great big wolf attacked Pettigrew and tore his throat out. But there's no defensive wounds, no claw marks, nothing like that. Guy like Pettigrew, he'd fight."
"Yeah, I'm with you."
"And, shit, you've seen animal attacks before – we both have," Karl said. "Tearing somebody's throat out, even if you've strong jaws and a good set of sharp teeth, is gonna be messy. Blood flying all over, arterial spray, the whole nine yards."
"In contrast, what we got here is almost… surgical."
"Fuckin' A. And if our hypothetical werewolf did kill the guy, he couldn't help but get blood on him – all over himself, probably. And yet he ran off without getting a drop of it on the floor, all the way to the door and beyond."
"So somebody set up a fake werewolf attack for us to find." I nodded slowly. "You wanna say it this time?"
"What – Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"
"Uh-uh. Helter Skelter, man. Helter fucking Skelter."
We called Homicide, which was a nice change from them always calling us. Scanlon arrived with a couple of his guys shortly after a couple of black-and-whites pulled in, lights flashing and sirens wailing. They didn't have to hurry – Pettigrew wasn't going anywhere.
Karl and I had just started to explain to the uniforms how we'd come to discover Pettigrew when Scanlon walked over and said to them, "I'll take care of interviewing these officers. You two secure the scene – the media jackals have police radios, and they'll probably be here any minute. I don't want them fucking up my crime scene by walking all over it."
My crime scene. Scanlon was taking over – good. That's exactly what I wanted.
"Something I wanted to ask you, Lieutenant," I said. "How come you still show up at these things, while my boss stays back at the office instead of coming to ours?"
"It's his choice," Scanlon said. "We all have our own ways of doing things. I like to be on the street, and fortunately, I've got a sergeant who stays in the squad room and runs things pretty well when I'm not there." He gave me a quick grin. "From what I hear, McGuire doesn't have that luxury. Now – you wanna tell me about this?"
Karl and I took turns filling him in on what we knew, and what we suspected. As we were finishing up, an ambulance arrived with the guy from the ME's office. Actually, it wasn't a guy, but a painfully thin woman named Cecelia Reynolds, one of the three pathologists who work for the ME and the only one that I never joke around with. A very serious lady, is our Doctor Reynolds. But then, I hear she grew up in the South Bronx and proceeded to work and study her way out – all the way to a full scholarship at Columbia University's med school. I guess serious is her default setting.
I asked Scanlon to excuse us, and Karl and I drifted over to where Cecelia was pulling on a pair of latex gloves. "Good evening, Cecelia," I said.
She looked up. "Hi, Stan. Karl."
She looked at Karl a second or two longer than necessary, something I'd only noticed her doing a few months ago. Maybe she found Karl's new state intriguing. I sometimes wondered if she was a vamp vixen – a human woman who's into the undead – but any vampire who put the bite on Cecelia had better not be looking for a big meal.
"So," she said, "looks like we have us a nice, messy homicide here."
"At first glance," I said, "it looks like a werewolf killing."
"Do tell. I never worked one of those."
"Well, I hope you didn't have your heart set on it, because this probably isn't your lucky night."
"What are you talking about, Stan?"
"There's a good chance that whoever killed the dude over there tried to make it look like a werewolf is responsible."
She frowned. "Why on Earth would someone do that?"
"The answer to that's long and complicated, and I'm sure you've got better uses for your time tonight. I'll tell you all about it some night over a beer."
Cecelia looked at me, her head tilted a little to one side. "That promise is based on the assumption that I would consent to the behavior in question, Stan – an assumption that has yet to be tested."
"Could I have that in English, please?"
"You're assuming that I'd be willing to have a beer with you sometime."
"Does that mean you won't?"
"No, it merely means you should be careful about your assumptions."
"Duly noted," I said. "Now, about the deceased over there…"
"Yes?"
"When you're doing the post, you might want to check the ratio of serotonin to free histamines, to see if he was alive, or at least conscious, when he was killed. And while you're looking at his blood, it might be worthwhile to check for poison or some sort of tranquilizing agent."
The smile she gave me was as bright as it was false. "Goodness me, Sergeant, if I didn't know better, I'd have sworn that you were just telling me how to do my
job."
"Not at all," I said. "And I apologize if I gave offense. But tell me something: would you have checked the serotonin-free histamine ratio as part of your regular procedure?"
One of the things I like about Cecelia is her utter honesty. After a couple of seconds she said, "No, Stan, I probably wouldn't have. The snarky comment is hereby withdrawn."
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