Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

  Brucker thought Arturo should be in soon from collecting material for his collages, i.e., dumpster diving. So while Zane waited, he leafed through Allison’s reports in the case book... envying her handwriting. Every page, apparently filled out as she finished each interview, looked as clean and precise as if computer generated. The reports he wrote up in his patrol unit always looked like shit, encrusted with layers of correcting tape as he fussed over wording. That month in law school had been enough to impress him with the importance of precise language and he had been wearing out batteries in his electronic dictionary/thesaurus ever since.

  Was it luck or skill that parlayed a few contacts at the murder scene into all these interviews? The on-lookers included one Francis Church, a guest at the misnamed Grand Plaza Hotel while Hilst’s repaired the sloop he had been sailing around the Gulf. None of the people Church spotted or talked with while entertaining himself by exploring the area on foot last night fit Demry’s description, and none wore bloody clothes, but Allison had used what he told her to locate other individuals and interview them, too. Like a chain, one contact led her to another...more people out on West Bayside than he would have expected at that time of night. Then again, he had never patrolled the area at night, only when he worked Watch Two. No one saw Demry.

  He stared at the case book. No one saw Demry, but she talked to them before he visited the jazz club so she never asked about anyone fitting Blondie’s description.

  Zane flipped back to the interview with the guy at the Grand Plaza. He had a non-local number...a cell phone, probably. Zane called it.

  A languid female voice answered after three rings. “A & C Security.”

  Zane stared at the phone. Had he dialed wrong? “May I speak to Mr. Francis Church, please.”

  After a pause, the woman at the other end said, “May I ask what this concerns?”

  An interesting response...fishing for information and admitting nothing. A strange response to find at a number for someone apparently bumming around the Gulf. Zane identified himself. “I need to speak with Mr. Church regarding the statement he gave Detective Goodnight earlier today. May I ask who I’m speaking to?”

  The woman said smoothly, “I’m afraid Mr. Church isn’t available.”

  Ducking his question. “But this is the correct phone number for Mr. Church?”

  “May I take a message for him?”

  Ducking that question, too. He could almost imagine he had reached some covert government organization. Zane left his number. “If you reach him, have him call me.”

  He borrowed a phone book from the bartender to look up the Grand Plaza’s number, to try Church there. But the Grand Plaza had no Francis or Frank Church registered. According to the desk clerk, the only guest who came close to Church’s descriptors--twenty-five years old, five-eleven, 170 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes--was a good fifteen to twenty years older and not named Church. The desk clerk was unaware of any guest having a boat being repaired at the Basin.

  Zane disconnected. Well, well. Church appeared to have lied to Allison. And, incredibly, fooled her. Now Zane had to wonder just who Church really was and how much he lied about. The descriptors sounded close to Lionel Manning. Could they be the same man?

  He called the Hilst offices to check the existence of the boat, but they had closed for the day and the security guard knew nothing about the boats in the wet and dry docks. So Zane punched in Allison’s number.

  12.

  Listening to Kerr talk, Allison felt her gut knot. She had barely finished talking to Fiona Church, answering her questions on what this Francis Church business was all about. Being forewarned about Kerr’s activities did nothing, however, to diminish the dismay on hearing his version of the conversation with Fiona. She cleared her throat. “This is embarrassing. It’s been a long time since anyone successfully lied to me. Despite evidence of deception, I think we need more evidence before saying Church and Manning are the same person.” At the edge of her vision, Drew’s eyebrows climbed. “His description probably fits hundreds of men in town.” Exactly what she had intended when she made it up. “Have you requested an Attempt To Locate on Church?”

  “Not yet.”

  Good. No sense wasting officer time watching for someone nonexistent and stopping innocent citizens because they fit “Church’s” descriptors. “I’ll do it, and if I don’t see you at the office before then, I’ll see you in the North Bay at seventeen hundred hours.” Disconnecting, she grimaced. “There are officers who spend their whole careers without an original thought, who never put out an ounce more effort than necessary...but I end up with Detective Gung-ho! I don’t suppose you’d do me the favor of taking him back.”

  Drew bumped sideways into her shoulder. “Come on! He’s a bright boy and a good cop. And it isn’t like you’re stuck with him just because you always worked with Garroway before. Next time take along Bass or Ng. Problem solved.”

  She slammed him back. “It’s this case I have to worry about. If Church hadn’t been so cautious, Kerr would have discovered I falsified that report! And every report with a volke subject is the same...fabricated interview, then partially genuine names and real phone numbers because half lies seemed safer than total fiction. Maybe I was wrong...but cooking the books isn’t exactly something I’m used to doing. If Kerr calls the subjects of the other interviews–“

  “The wicked flee where no man pursueth, to quote their Christian Bible.” Drew’s phone buzzed like an angry insect. He checked the number on the screen. “So what if he calls? They’re real numbers. He’ll reach real people. All you need to do is warn them so they can give him a good story.” He punched on his own phone. “Yeah, what do you need?”

  Warning everyone she had talked to would not stop her from worrying. There was too much at stake. Allison dug into her jacket pocket but found she had finished up the cashews. Instead of the usual murder with the case comfortably under control--just match the scent at the crime scene against those of family and friends, then secure a confession or dig up physical evidence of the killer’s guilt to corroborate what her nose already told her--she juggled greased grenades. Let one drop and there would be more innocents slaughtered. Drop another and the blood shed could be the clan’s. The one with Kerr’s name on it might do anything...even collide with the others in midair and explode them all. Unlike with Garroway, she had no idea what went on in his head, no way to anticipate his moves.

  Drew hung up his phone. “I’ll call Honora and coordinate things with her, and we’ll blanket the warehouse area...assuming you don’t notify me during the evening that you have the bitch. At rollcall, for the benefit of the human officers I said that our suspect is a male probably six feet or taller and dangerously psychotic. Now I can broadcast a supplement adding that he might be cross-dressed and to watch for unusually tall females but approach them with extreme caution.” He opened the door. “Anything else you’d like me to add?”

  “Tell them not to approach...to wait for backup first...and if it’s a human officer, you make sure it’s several of us doing the backup.”

  His grim smile said: Count on it.

  13.

  Zane punched the elevator button for the third floor, then sorted through his notes from The Station on the ride up. When he finally showed up, Arturo had a candidate for Blondie. “It might be Babs.” Arturo had met Babs only in that persona, however, and knew neither her real name nor what she looked like out of drag. He had also never known her to try picking up a man, just seen her play sexy chanteuse, sitting on or at the piano at the Twilight Lounge or Ice And Ivory. That made Babs an outside candidate, but Zane still had both bars on his list for special attention.

  Upstairs, he waved his ID for admission to the A & I floor and started to circle the bank of interview rooms in the center toward the Crimes Against Persons office. Someone called his name. Looking around, he spotted the division secretary Willa Bertelli at her desk outside Captain Estevez and Lieutenant Garroway’s offices on the fa
r end of the Admin side of the floor.

  She waved papers. “Detective Goodnight has been asking about a fax from Austin. It’s come in now.”

  Austin? He threaded his way through the Admin waiting area behind the interview rooms to look over the fax sheets. They included mug shots and the rap sheet on Manning. Allison had everything covered.

  In the office he nodded a greeting at Hugh Bass, the only other member of the squad there–even Carillo’s office was empty–and sat down at his desk. After reading through Manning’s record, however, Zane found himself frowning. In all the times he had been cited for harassing performance artists, even when he turned verbally abusive, Manning never physically attacked anyone. It was hard to imagine just the lawsuit pushing him over the edge into the berserker frenzy of Demry’s murder...especially two months after the settlement.

  In any case, they needed to look elsewhere for Blondie. Manning could never pass as a gorgeous female, even without the scowl in the mug shot. He had the wrong bone structure.

  Zane used the hole punch chained to the table by the printer to punch holes in the fax sheets, then added them to the case book. His earlier thought about Blondie luring Demry to Manning came back. She need not even have understood the purpose of what she did, just acted innocently, coming on to Demry because she thought it was part of a joke. They definitely needed to check out Babs.

  14.

  Allison made sure she reached the parking lot well ahead of Kerr. That gave her time to buy a copy of the Sentinel and try to see the area through Blondie’s eyes. Though Blondie’s viewpoint baffled her...killing not for food, not for protection or other necessity, but for recreation...just to kill, to terrorize.

  Human scents swirled around her along with the cooking odors wafting from the restaurants and varying music from them and the bars: elevator bland, piano bar standards, country, mariachi, rock. Although hardly comparable to the club district of a big city–maybe two and a half blocks max if the bars were set side by side instead of spread out over eight--Arenosa offered a variety of drinking establishments. Why had Blondie ended up at the jazz club rather than, say, a rock club? While she personally avoided the killer decibels in Neverneverland and The Electric Warehouse, a number of the clan’s younger members frequented the clubs and the females reported a smorgasbord of over-sexed human males there. Good hunting for Blondie.

  Perhaps it depended on what Blondie wanted in her prey. Demry had been young, attractive, and physically fit. Perhaps fitness mattered most...to make the chase last longer. Though if she wanted challenging prey, why not pick a fight with the bikers at Sancho’s over in the West Bay.

  She and Gene Meadows from the Houston clan pulled something similar. Puffed up and cocky for mastering control of Shifting, they thought it would be fun one midnight to taunt an outlaw group there into chasing them. A prime example of juvenile stupidity. Because the bikers quickly decided that while these kids might outrun the choppers, bullets should catch them.

  So maybe for all her blood-thirsty viciousness, Blondie had better sense than they had.

  Staring in through the window of Mamacita’s Tacaria, Allison saw a pig and young goat roasting over a mesquite fire. A glance at her watch told her she still had a few minutes before meeting up with Kerr. If they ran across not just Blondie’s tracks but Blondie herself, she needed to be ready for action.

  After hurrying back to the parking lot, she left a note on her windshield for Kerr, then returned to the tacaria. The scents of cooking meat and burning mesquite enveloped her inside the door along with the music of a mariachi band playing over the sound system. Sliding into a booth she waved away the menu the little Asian waitress started to bring her. “I’ll have a dozen of your jumbo cabrito tacos and a pitcher of beer.”

  Then she sat back to read the paper and listen to the music. The discipline for learning a musical instrument was too tedious for most of her people to stick with, but even the most anti-human of them enjoyed human music...the stuff with life in it, anyway. This, Cossack music, the skirling wail of bagpipes, Irish jigs played on penny whistles. She always heard in it the laughter and camaraderie of the clan, and in moonlit runs with game-scented wind in her face...freed of human form limitations, the Shift’s boundless power and energy pouring through her. Maybe the flute music brought the hunter into Five To Midnight.

  Arenosa had few enough murders that Demry’s made the front page, but as a side column, not the main headline. Dan Browning in the Public Information Office had released a minimum of information, just that Demry was the subject of an attack whose ferocity suggested a mentally disturbed perpetrator.

  The waitress brought the heaped platter. “Your friends have not come? I forget to ask how many glasses you need.”

  “No friends, just me.” As the waitress turned away wide-eyed, Allison discarded the paper and attacked the tacos.

  One remained on the platter and she had emptied the last of the pitcher into her glass when she spotted Kerr coming in...coatless, a Polaroid camera slung from one shoulder, a laptop from the other. Before she opened her mouth to ask him why he had them, she realized why. Shit. “I assume you’ve brought the Faces program to make up a composite picture of Blondie?”

  Unfortunately, the failings of witness memory rarely resulted in a true likeness, just a general one. And in this case “general” probably meant generic volke. But she could hardly tell him why a composite was useless in identifying Blondie.

  Kerr slid into the other side of the booth. “The bartender and sax player at Five To Midnight both had a good look at her. There should be waitresses on duty now who saw her, too. Since I don’t have a printer handy, I’ll take Polaroids with the enhancer connected and we’ll have pictures to show while we canvass.” He blinked at the pitcher. “Was that beer?”

  His undertone of disapproval amused her, coming from an officer who blithely ignored the limits of a search warrant. She could not resist needling him. “I’ve never developed the taste for tequila.”

  He realized she was teasing him. His ears went pink. “A fax came for you from Austin with info on Manning.” He dug photocopies from a side pocket of the computer case and laid them on the table. “This is his mug shot. We can forget about him being Blondie...but does that look like Church?”

  “No.” She studied the photo. If Manning had charms that inspired someone to murder for him, he hid them well. Then she abruptly refocused her attention on Kerr. “What did you say?”

  “That he and Blondie might have worked together. She lured Demry somewhere so Manning could kill him.”

  That came entirely too close for comfort. “It’s a possibility. I’ll see what I can turn up about cross-dressing friends when I interview Manning in Austin tomorrow.”

  He eyed her. “I don’t suppose I’m going, too.”

  She spread her hands. “Someone has to keep working on things here.”

  Disappointment flashed in his eyes but never reached his face or voice. “I queried Austin and NCIC for assaults or murders involving male suspects with Blondie’s descriptors.”

  Of course he would. Allison downed the last of her beer. “Any hits?”

  “One from Austin. A few more from NCIC.” He passed over the teletype.

  Since he asked for males, the Coral Gables case had not made the list. She passed it back. “The subject in Austin looks too husky to be Blondie, doesn’t he. Nothing else very close to here, but hang on to everything. Let’s saddle up. I’ll start showing Manning’s picture around.”

  She tried the bars closest to the jazz club first, checking whether Blondie had worked her way toward Five To Midnight. Manning’s photo rang no bells with bar personnel or customers, however, and when she described Blondie in the first bar, the bartender looked her up and down. “Have you tried checking a mirror?”

  Just the reaction she feared. Allison had no way to judge whether the bartenders and waitresses who found Blondie’s description familiar had seen Blondie or one of the clan.
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br />   After covering two blocks–four bars–she leaned against a post supporting the balcony above to wait for Kerr, eyeing the passing pedestrians. They appeared typical for this time of day, locals catching a drink after work before going home, visitors with children hunting someplace for an early dinner.

  When Kerr left the jazz club, his frown registered even a block away.

  Allison had little doubt about the cause, but when he crossed the street and caught up to her, she played innocent. “Was there a problem putting together the composite?”

  “No.” He fussed with the snap of the Polaroid case. “They remember her very clearly. One of the waitresses, by the way, disagrees with the bartender. She thinks Blondie was female.”

  “So?”

  He handed her Polaroid. “This is what the bartender, waitresses, and sax player all agree Blondie looks like.”

  The image was indeed generic volke. If the media published the composite as the face of a suspect, the humans in Arenosa would see the likeness in too many fellow citizens. Her great-grandmother’s clan screamed in her head. “I still don’t understand the problem.”

  His expression asked how she could fail to. “Doesn’t it look familiar? Like one of your cousins? Can you think of any of your family who might--”