Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

She made for her car, and once in it, gunned for the parking lot entrance.

  8.

  Hilst had not been dead long enough to smell of decay, but the odor of blood and the pungent reek of abdominal gas and bowel contents filled the room. It would have been worse if Allison had not left the windows onto the balcony partially open. In the bathroom behind Zane a camera shutter snapped as Janice Tran recorded the state of the room. Zane stared at Hilst’s head. When Allison opened the door the scene shocked him enough that the significance of the head’s location had escaped him. Impaled on a post...the medieval treatment of criminals and traitors. They used to draw and quarter traitors, too.

  He glanced from the blood smears down the corners to the arms, lying by the door, each in its own bag, waiting to be joined by the remainder of the body when processing of the scene reached those pieces. The bedpost had more blood on it than the corners. She jammed the head up there immediately after decapitation. The body had finished bleeding before she ripped off Hilst’s pajamas--lying, still unreached, on the floor on the window side of the bed--and dismembered him. Why did the Diana personality consider Hilst a traitor, though?

  Zane frowned. The longer he looked at the crime scene, the more questions it raised. Between the bed and door, blood splattered the beige carpet in a rough half circle. A blood-free strip down the center turned it into two quarters. The blood had smeared in the section closest to the foot of the bed, and between it and the door lay two patches of stain roughly the dimension of footprints. As though someone had leaped over the bed and started for the door. Then changed her mind? But why leap the bed in the first place? A large patch of blood stained the carpet beyond the foot of the bed, and more bloody tracks led around that and the window side of the bed. Turning into definite footprints on the marble tile of the bathroom, leading into the shower.

  Tran and Castenado had begun at the bedroom door and moved around the edge of the room, working from the outside in. So far processing included the front corners of the room, and along the wall opposite the bed...and from there into the bathroom and the closet, where a man’s black suit and several men’s slacks and polo shirts hung, but only one woman’s black dress. Judging by the four hangers lying on the floor, though, there had been other clothes. They also found a billfold on the floor with credit cards and a driver’s license for Hilst...but no cash. Deirdre had apparently grabbed that along with the clothes before leaving.

  After she showered. Zane turned around, the carpet pile catching at the paper booties on his feet. Even though he remained in the doorway, out of the techs’ way, he had no trouble seeing everything. In one corner of the glass-walled shower a puddle of black material spread out just enough to identify it as a dress. Blondie’s little black number? Pink stains ran from it toward the drain. More pink splashed the lower edges of the glass and tile walls, darkening to red in the corners of the shower floor. The sprayer head dangled down on a heap of towels. The temperature control had been set as cold as it would go. Did Shifting make the werewolf feel hot as well as blast everyone else with heat? On her way into the shower, it appeared Blondie/Diana had dragged one bloody hand across the outside of the glass. More blood smeared the edge of the door.

  Castenado bagged the leg in the corner beyond the arm chair. “Man...I’ve worked crime scenes for over twenty years and seen my share of dismemberments, but never one like this before.” He shook his head. “How do you just tear off an arm or leg? This wilding dude’s gotta be superhuman.”

  A perfect opening for saying something about the killer not being human at all, but Zane let it pass. Catching Deirdre came before anything else.

  In the bathroom Janice Tran picked up the top towel. Rather, half a towel. It had been ripped apart lengthwise. She glanced around at Zane, brows rising. “What do you suppose this is about? Bandaging a wound the victim managed to inflict?”

  Not a wound. Something electric ran up Zane’s spine. The torn towel suddenly made sense of the state of the shower, the smeared hand print, and the blood splatter on the carpet. And of Deirdre and Diana’s different scents. But...shit, damn, and son of a bitch. If true, it shot Diana’s identification all to hell.

  He turned to catch Castenado’s eye. “What’s your best guess on how many people were in this room at the time of the murder?”

  “Based on the physical evidence I can see right now?” Castenado peered around the room while he stacked the bagged leg with the arms. “I’d say...three.”

  What Zane was afraid he would say. “The physical evidence being what, aside from the bed obviously having two people in it at some time?”

  “Well...” Castenado pursed his lips. “...the blood splatter says your victim was either sitting on the edge of the bed or standing up when he got decapitated, but something directly behind and in front of him blocked part of the blood. The killer had to be one. I’m assuming the bedmate was the other.”

  Deirdre. Who made a break for the door, but was caught. Zane said goodbye to his multiple personality theory.

  “Both of them must’ve been soaked with his blood.” Castenado stared toward the crimson pillows and headboard. “Did you ever stop to think what a mess those executions in the French Revolutions had to be? The condemned’s heart is pounding. Down comes the blade. Off comes the head but the heart doesn’t stop pumping right away so the blood pours out everywhere.” He grimaced.

  So of course Diana had to wash both of them down before she hauled Deirdre away. The torn towel said Deirdre must have been tied up, and maybe gagged as well. Only...why abduct Deirdre rather than kill her?

  Unless Diana had other plans for Deirdre? Unpleasant ones, if hosing her down with cold water was any example of Diana’s attitude. Now they had two urgent reasons to catch Diana.

  He headed for the hall and peeled off his booties. Time for another chat with Julie.

  9.

  He spotted her through the dining room French doors, standing out at the balustrade of the gallery.

  Zane started through the dining room, but stopped short by a sideboard. In front of other bottles of liquor and wine on a tray on top stood a bottle of Grand Marnier. His pulse jumped, a mental image of the receipt from Rick’s flashing in his head. He might not have Allison’s sense of smell to tell him whether Surrette and Diana handled the bottle, but he saw the Rick’s sticker on it...with a price matching the bottle Surrette bought.

  Anger flashed in him. Julie knew Diana! And said nothing. Another woman lying by omission! The game was over now, though. He knew who Diana had to be. Two women looking and smelling so much alike, and both known here, had to be related. An orphan could have only one kind of known blood relative. Bliss must be wrong about not interbreeding with humans.

  Walking across the gallery he tried to imitate Allison and move silently. They had a stiffening north wind, he noticed. The American and Hilst flags on the pole in the courtyard snapped in the breeze. Watching them, Julie seemed unaware of him, even when he came up close behind her.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about Deirdre’s daughter?”

  Julie’s start whipped her around, gasping. “Oh my god! I didn’t hear you come out. I was just taking a break from my thank-you’s. I think we have a storm--”

  “Deirdre’s daughter, Julie. Talk. Now.” He chopped every syllable. “You’re neck deep in shit for withholding evidence.”

  She caught her breath. Then her chin jutted. “What evidence? Sunny isn’t involved.”

  Sunny? Ironic name. “I’m afraid she probably is.”

  The dark eyes flashed. “I knew it. I knew you’d jump to conclusions because of the fight and her psychological history. You always blame spouses and relatives. But she wasn’t anywhere near the house last night.”

  The electric charge Zane felt in the bedroom shot through him again. “What fight? What psychological history?”

  Julie scowled. “Shit. You mean you didn’t know about that?”

  “You’re going to tell me now.” Zane pointed at a
chair beside a wrought iron table. “We’ve had four men brutally murdered in this city, plus a police officer on stakeout here last night...”

  “Stakeout here?” Julie gaped at him. “Why--”

  “... is missing,” Zane continued. “And you are in possession of a bottle of Grand Marnier that one of the victims bought Tuesday night.”

  Julie went white. “That isn’t possible. Sunny’s never been violent. And...how could she--how could she do what the news says this killer did?”

  “Julie!” He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “She butchered her father, then abducted her mother with who knows what intentions. Don’t worry about Sunny...worry about Deirdre. We have to find her. Now stop shitting around and answer my questions!”

  “And mine, Mrs. Hilst.”

  10.

  The sound of her voice startled them both, but as Allison stepped through the French doors from the dining room, she saw--could it be welcome?--in Kerr’s face. He began, “I’ve learned--”

  “I heard.” A daughter explained everything and fit with the security tapes. Little Deirdre had not been as solidly under Hilst’s thumb as she seemed. But hooking up with a male volke meant Deirdre knew, or learned then, what she was. So why had she continued to put up with Hilst? Surely the male invited her to join his clan. And why had she said nothing to her daughter about what they were? They had more important questions to answer first, however. “Mrs. Hilst...talk.”

  Julie slunk to the chair and sank into it. “The fight wasn’t anything. Nothing to kill Len over. He didn’t like the outfit she wore to the funeral and she argued that Charlie would have approved because he thought she had great legs and solemn mourning was stupid. She and Len fought all the time about things like that...her clothes, the hours she kept, the way she’d upset Deirdre by threatening to change her name to Lilith or Satana. Picky stuff...and it was all yelling...him snarling at her, her cursing back. Loud...but never physical.”

  “And this particular fight took place when?” Allison asked.

  “Here.” Julie picked up a pen lying between the funeral book and pile of notecards and envelopes on the table and began toying with it...clicking the point out and in. “After the guests that came over after the funeral had left.”

  “Then she moved to the boat?”

  Julie nodded. “She asked to...and of course I said yes. God knows in her place I’d want to get away from Len, too.”

  Could Sunny have engineered the fight with just that result in mind? Allison imagined that would be easy enough to do. Living on the boat ensured Sunny freedom to come and go as she wanted.

  “We still saw plenty of her,” Julie said. “She always had dinner here.”

  So she would have been stuck here for the big family fight Tuesday night.

  “How is she getting back and forth?” Kerr asked. “Rental car?”

  Good boy, Allison reflected. Good question.

  “No need for that. I let Len use our Lincoln.” Julie grimaced. “So I loaned her my MG.”

  “What’s the tag number?”

  Julie shrugged. “I can never remember. I should get one of those vanity plates. It’s butterscotch colored.”

  Allison called Dispatch for a registration check, and when it came back, asked for an Attempt To Locate on the vehicle, then passed the information on to Drew. They could only hope the vehicle’s location gave some indication where Sunny went to ground.

  “Now tell us about the psychological history,” Kerr said.

  Allison came alert. Psychological history? That sounded disturbingly clinical.

  Julie clicked the pen...point out, point in, point out. “It started with nightmares when she was three...like the ones Deirdre used to have, I guess. I know Deirdre was frantic to cure her. I think that’s when she, Deirdre, went overboard on religion. She’d always been a little fanatic. The story I heard was she wanted to name the baby Sabbath, to protect her from evil, but Len said people might think they were Jewish...so she settled on Sabrina Maristella. Anyway, after the nightmares started, she went to mass every day, and prayed over Sunny all the time. Stuff like that. Len told Charlie she asked to have Sunny exorcized. He refused, thank God. Instead he called in a child psychologist.”

  Allison choked in disbelief. Another exorcism? What the hell did Deirdre think she was doing? Not that a psychologist was any better.

  “They tried therapist after therapist,” Julie said, “but nothing helped.”

  Not trusting the control of her expression, Allison spun away toward the parapet. From the alarm in Kerr’s quick glance, she was right to do so. The earlier anger at Rikki did not begin to compare with what she felt now. She jammed her hands into her jacket pockets to hide their white-knuckled clench. That cretinous, unspeakably stupid female!

  She could have temporarily soothed the child by playing out the dreams in games and roughhousing...finished off with some raw meat warmed to blood temperature. But no. Not only had Deirdre chosen Len over her lover’s clan, and then failed to properly parent her daughter or tell her what they were, she deliberately consigned the girl to torture. She let the normal frustrations of childhood be turned into living hell.

  Allison shuddered to imagine it...all those therapists determined to “cure” Sunny...a new set of tests with each therapist, drugs to “calm” her fierce desire for physical activity by day and make her sleep at night, psychoanalysis of her dreams to root out the cause of her “psychosis”, and probably constant reprimands for playing so rough. Everyone pounding into her over and over that everything she felt and did was bad...abnormal. No wonder Sunny had come to the house in a fury after talking to Matt. Only it should have been Deirdre torn apart, not Hilst! He only acted in arrogance and ignorance. Deirdre’s trauma was nothing compared to Sunny’s!

  From the corner of her eye she saw Kerr rub his neck and send her an alarmed glance. That jolted her. Was she showing a Shift halo?

  Julie appeared to notice nothing, playing with her pen while she continued her story.

  Still, Allison grabbed for control of her fury...forcing herself to think of something else. The cry of gulls wheeling overhead. The clouds growing darker and thicker while the wind stiffened. Thunder booming to the north. A barge making its way down the intracoastal waterway channel through the bay.

  “Deirdre wanted to send Sunny to convent schools but Len sent her to ones with a reputation for handling difficult children,” Julie said. “The best one was in England. She went there from age ten until ready for college.”

  Which explained the British accent...and why the Palm Beach clan chief was unaware of the girl’s existence. If only they had known...they could have arranged contact with her...and helped her.

  “Swansdown Hall was heavily into sports, and she liked that. Deirdre and Len thought maybe she was cured. Visiting here one summer, though, she told me, and swore me to secrecy, that she tried hard to act the way they wanted her to so she could stay in that school, because she’d found a way to sneak out of the dorm at night and run around the countryside. ” Julie sighed. “So when she came back to this country, trouble started all over again. She won an athletic scholarship but lost it because she didn’t want to go to class, just run. She broke curfew at the freshman dorm over and over so she got kicked out. Her running ability got her corporate sponsorship for an Olympic bid, but that went south, too, when her coaches quit because she insisted on running when and how she wanted. And she lost jobs on Windjammer ships and river raft cruises for being caught fraternizing with male passengers.

  “They were at their wit’s end with her,” Julie said. “Len was about ready to just chuck her out of the house and disown her, when suddenly, right after our visit down there last summer, she changed. She was working for Len, piloting his charter fishing boats, and overnight, Len told Charlie, she suddenly seemed contented. She still stayed out all night, but she didn’t fly off the handle any more and quit vamping male customers.”

  So she learned to
Shift on her own...and being unsupervised, played out the hunting dreams with humans instead of appropriate quarry. Though obviously she had not killed her victims there as openly as she did here. Allison guessed her MO followed the Coral Gables disappearance...dumping bodies at sea, possibly from boats at Leonard Hilst’s marina, so if they washed ashore, they would be mistaken for shark victims.

  Julie tossed down the pen. “I just can’t believe Sunny would kill Len. She’s always been very sweet with me.”

  “Brought you that expensive bottle of Grand Marnier,” Kerr said.

  Julie’s forehead wrinkled. “She wouldn’t give me something that’s stolen. It’s a thank you gift for the use of the Narcissus and car.”

  “I’m sorry, Julie.”

  Allison’s phone rang. Dispatch. “Your ATL MGB has been located in the parking area of Marais Park.”

  If the car were there, she must be hiding in the vicinity of the Basin. If not on the recreational boats, though, then...where?

  Allison called Drew. “Any sign of the hunter on the other recreational boats?”

  “No,” he came back, “and we’ve checked them all. We’re trying a couple of idle boats on the commercial side now, before the rain hits.”

  “Damn it, she has to be some--just a minute.” Kerr’s eyes had suddenly lit up. “Did you think of something?” she asked him.

  “The Fyodora Kuzetcheva. Julie, does Sunny know there’s only one man aboard the Russian freighter?”

  Julie’s eyes widened. “I’d think so. Charlie tells--told the story often enough.”

  “Drew,” Allison said into the phone, “check the Russian freighter. I’m on my way back there.”

  Julie frowned up at her. “Am I going to be arrested?”

  “I haven’t decided.” Let her stew for a while. “We’ll see how severely your obstruction compromises apprehending Sunny and rescuing Deirdre.” She headed into the house.

  Kerr followed. “I’m coming along. I know the ship’s layout.”