Daemon: Night of the Daemon

by Harry Shannon

  The bartender cracked his neck, scooped up some ice cubes into a glass and poured brown fluid from the hissing bar sphritzer. He parked the drink on a napkin covered with cartoon tits and yawned.

  "Okay, now what do you really want?"

  "I'm looking to talk to a PO, by the name of Walt Meeks," Lehane said, quietly. "He's expecting me."

  One chubby thumb, over the shoulder toward the back of the room: "His second office is in that booth."

  Lehane squinted into the gloom and saw hulking shoulders hunched over a half-empty pitcher of beer. He took his drink, left the change on the bar, walked across the room without looking around. When he parked opposite Meeks, the chatter in the room rose in volume, as if the patrons were relieved. Walter Meeks was a barrel-chested, balding man with a thick, black moustache flecked with white. His eyes were large, blue and gave him a weird air of innocence at odds with his deeply lined, burned-out face. He wore a cheap blue suit and a decent tie marred by food stains. Meeks lazily drawled a greeting.

  "You the guy called me?"

  "Yes."

  "Damn, you sure got pull," Meeks said. "You must be government or something." He pronounced it 'gummint,' like someone originally from the south. "My supervisor paged me I should mow your lawn and wash your car."

  Lehane leaned forward. "Did he tell you who I'm asking after?"

  "One of my cons, name of Grainger, right?"

  "What can you tell me?"

  Meeks shrugged those massive shoulders. "Guy is a real prick, okay? Did two stretches, one for felony assault and the other for armed robbery. That last was because he got strung out on meth for a few years when he lived over in San Bernardino County, state of California. Cops thought he was manufacturing and dealing but never managed to prove it."

  "Grainger was living with a Hispanic woman and her brother, right?"

  "Yeah, she's a paramedic. Met her once and she seemed okay to me, although her brother Santiago is a real stoner. He sits around all day smoking bowls while she works her ass off. Anyway, I couldn't get why she'd be screwing, much less supporting, a prick like Lou Grainger, especially since he was a racist motherfucker to boot. No accounting for taste."

  "What else can you tell me about him?"

  Meeks reached inside his suit, produced a small note pad. "Like all the dregs of society, Lou was probably once just a poor, misunderstood lad. He was born in Arizona, near a town called Mesa. Our gentle Lou was an only child. His junkie mother Julie Grainger was a trailer-park hooker, so needless to say, dear daddy was just passing through."

  "She have a sheet?"

  "Several arrests for soliciting, naturally, and a couple for possession."

  "Alive or dead?"

  "The lady is dead as my aging dick. She got nailed head on in a car accident, maybe ten years ago."

  "Okay, go on."

  "Grainger got himself a juvenile record, but it was nothing exceptional, just nickel and dime stuff. Dropped out of high school, joined the Army."

  "What did he do there?"

  "A military career distinguished by a lack of distinction. Grainger drank and brawled and fucked his way through it. Nearly got tossed out a couple of times." Another check of the notes. "He was pretty lame in every way, but apparently he was a pretty good shot."

  Frustrated, Lehane started looking for connections of any kind. "Did he see combat in the Middle East?"

  Meeks studied his notes. "Nope. Never left the states."

  "Damn."

  "What, that have something to do with your problem?"

  "Maybe, maybe not." Lehane sighed. "Where did he do his time for the felonies?"

  Meeks told him the two prisons. "For what it's worth, he got into one of those delightful white supremacist groups. That was up at Humboldt, the second stretch." He frowned as if unable to read his own notes. "AWG, I think it was. Stands for Aryan White Gods or some such bullshit."

  "Never heard of them."

  "Neither has anybody else," Meeks replied, dryly. He sipped some beer. "Flash in the pan kind of thing, mostly in response to a small riot took place between the brown and black brothers that summer. Guess the white boys got scared enough to figure they'd best start their own club."

  "Outnumbered?"

  "You could say that. They had this thing about staying together in small groups all the time, acting all tragic. Their leader claimed they carried the sadness of the whole white race for having lost its rightful place as the rulers of the world."

  "Well, that is disconcerting."

  Meeks sipped. "Yeah, sometimes it fucking keeps me up at night."

  "Can you get me a picture of Grainger?"

  "Already sent one," Meeks said. "Your guy Ligotti asked for it. I scan my assignments into my computer, so I sent him a jpg file instead of a fax. It should be waiting at your office."

  "And all the physical details, right?"

  "Right. For the record, he's about five nine with short cut red hair and brown eyes. Got two tattoos, one a silly GO ARMY thing on his left bicep, the other a row of blue teardrops on his right knuckles. That last one is from the Aryan group."

  "Blue teardrops." Lehane felt his neck hairs bristle. "I think I've seen that tattoo."

  "Crying for the poor white man, remember?"

  "Thanks for meeting me off the clock." Lehane got out of the booth and offered his hand. "You've been a great help, Meeks. Let me know if there's ever something I can do to pay you back."

  Meeks shook limply, went back to drinking his warm beer. "Hey, I can think of something right now."

  "Yeah?"

  "Sure. Just have the bartender send me some Wild Turkey out of that crisp fifty you slipped him."

  Outside, the air was turning chill and the night sky was speckled with flickering stars. Lehane hurried past some drunks arguing about the Raiders and got into his parked car. He locked the doors, started the engine and flipped open his cell phone.

  "Guri? It's me. I have something interesting."

  "So do I. You go first."

  "That biker bastard who jumped me up in the desert for no reason had some teardrops tattooed onto his knuckles. It turns out he was in the same jailhouse gang as this Lou Grainger we're looking for, and that seems like a bit too much of a coincidence for my taste."

  "Mine, too. But why would Grainger have wanted you whacked, and what does he have to do with the late Mr. Roger Gordon of Jet Blue in Fort Worth?"

  "Beats the hell out of me."

  "Me too, but this Grainger gets more interesting by the minute, Jeff."

  "Why's that?"

  "Meet me at our friendly neighborhood morgue and you'll see."

  Lehane eased out of the parking lot and back into evening traffic. "I'm on my way. Who bought it?"

  Guri stretched, moaned. He sounded tired. "About an hour ago a squad car got notified by OnStar and chased some gang kids in a stolen BMW out past the dump. The kids ditched the car and ran off, and one of the officers pursued. The other stayed put, just to make sure they didn't try and double back to the vehicle."

  "And?"

  "So this cop is standing there bored and he notices a large rug at the foot of some garbage. He looks away at first but then looks back and sees a human foot sticking out of the bottom of it."

  "Just the foot?"

  Another yawn. "Just the foot."

  Lehane sped down Colton, heading for the morgue. "Okay, go on."

  "He calls it in to the guys catching for Homicide. When they open up the rug, they find a mess. One female Jane Doe who was chopped to pieces."

  "A woman."

  "Affirmative. The perp rolled her up into the rug when he was done and dumped it, but the foot must have slipped out."

  "Got an ID yet?" A burst of static.

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you, man. It's our missing paramedic. Juanita Cortez, late of 5623 Sagebrush."

  Lehane floored it, started weaving in and out of traffic. "You get somebody over at LVPD to issue a warrant for Grainger's a
rrest?"

  "Already went out on the air. Listen, boss…"

  But Lehane closed his phone to think. By the time he hit the nearly empty parking lot, Pops Keltner was just outside the locked lobby doors, smoking a cigarette with Sandy Hammer, who was now perfectly decked out as a somewhat butch member of the Highway Patrol. Pops wore a plain dark suit and glasses. He looked exactly like the underpaid plainclothes LAPD detective whose fake ID he'd been carrying. Sandy gave Lehane a kiss on the cheek that last a bit too long, but Pops discreetly pretended not to notice.

  "Where's Guri?"

  Pops flipped the cigarette out onto the pavement where it shattered into orange sparks. "Guri is really wrecked, Jeff. He told me to tell you he was going back to the hotel to grab some shut eye." He yawned, wearily. "If you need any backup tonight, I'll hang with you."

  "Me, too," Sandy said, eagerly. She inhaled and expelled a plume of dry smoke. Unlike Pops, she looked reasonably well rested. "I'm wide open. I've pretty much caught up on everything and gotten copies of everybody's statements." She touched his arm. "How are you holding up?"

  "Okay," Lehane said. His eyes warmed. "Let's see what develops as the night wears on."

  "Cool. If you want to talk to the young cop who found that woman's foot, he's inside throwing up." Sandy motioned to the portly uniformed guard behind the security desk. The man put down his coffee and strolled over, keys jangling. "I can even get us back in so you can take a quick look at the body."

  Lehane tilted his head, examined Pops for a moment. "I may be going out into the field again tonight. You sure you're okay if I need you?"

  Pops nodded. "There's a brand new Peete's Coffee right down the block that sells tall red-eyes, and you could use that stuff to lube your car. I'll get a cup and wait in the lobby."

  Lehane followed Sandy, who found the young black officer standing near the door to the men's room and asked him to repeat his report. The cop was still a bit bug-eyed from having his virginity taken. He went over the same ground Guri had summarized over the telephone, pausing from time to time to rub his stomach or emit a soft belch.

  "Think carefully," Lehane asked, finally. "Is there anything else we need to know right now? Did you see any tattoos or scars on the body parts that jumped out at you? Any marks at all?"

  "Not really." The cop winced, as if the memory physically hurt him. "Well, there was one strange thing, maybe."

  "What was that?"

  "It was probably junkyard dogs or something. The Coroner's people will tell you more tomorrow."

  Prickly skin, more shifting hairs. "What was probably just dogs?"

  "She was all in pieces, right?" The cop swallowed bile. "Well, it looked like some of those pieces had bite marks."

  "Human teeth?"

  "Yeah. Like she'd been eaten."

  THIRTEEN

  Those fully alive are soft and yielding;

  those who are dead are rigid and stiff.

  Living plants are flexible and tender;

  the dead are brittle and dry.

  Those who are stiff and rigid

  are at heart the disciples of death.

  Those who are soft and yielding

  are the precious disciples of life.

  Fear not…

  Because the rigid and stiff will be broken.

  The soft and yielding will overcome.

  "Okay, let me go over this again." Pops sighed and closed the hotel room door with a clunk. He followed Lehane into the nearly darkened room, the furniture lit only by one table lamp and the flickering of muted images from the television. "So Roger Gordon shoots Heather, and we don't have a clue why, except he seems to know who you are. You ventilate him and he croaks. Then some other bastard messes with her body and chews her up bad. We also lose a nurse and a garage attendant."

  "Keep going." Lehane opened the laptop on his dresser and booted it up, took it to the bed and set it beside him.

  "We dig and figure out the lady paramedic who helped the killer ain't showing up for work. Add to that, her ex-con boyfriend Grainger maybe belongs to the same gang as the biker who recently tried to kick your ass out in the desert."

  "Yeah."

  "Now Grainger and the paramedic both go missing, but we just found her whacked, and somebody chewed her body up, too. Is that about it?"

  "So far."

  "Jesus, are you making any sense out of this?"

  "Not yet, Pops."

  "The way I see it, all we got for sure is that everybody but this Lou Grainger is dead. Maybe he's the one that connects them all."

  "The teardrop tattoos, the fact that Heather was black, the white supremacist biker would all seem to suggest that."

  "There's only one problem."

  "Yeah, and that's Roger Gordon from Fort Worth, the man who killed Heather and tried to kill me, the one who started the ball rolling."

  "Exactly. Where the hell does he fit?"

  "I have Whiz on that now, Pops," Lehane said as he finished preparing the laptop. He signed on with his cell phone and leaned back on the headboard of the hotel bed. "We're running searches for anything that would tie Gordon or Jet Blue to Grainger. Whiz will be in touch pretty soon."

  "If he comes up with something solid, I think we can safely say Grainger is our man." Pops started rummaging around the mini-bar, looking for snacks and drinks, found some peanuts. He tossed a sack to Lehane.

  "Right now, it certainly looks that way."

  "You want some soda or something?"

  "Give me a bottle of water."

  Pops tossed a cold bottle of water to Lehane, opened a cola for himself and parked in the easy chair. The two men sat quietly, waiting for the telephone to ring. The television was tuned to CNN, but muted. Two political pundits were arguing back and forth. Pops closed his eyes. "The spitting make any sense to you yet? That blood thing?"

  "Something. Nothing." Lehane grimaced. "But I sure as hell don't believe in coincidence."

  "Jeff, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "What are you going to do when this is all over, still retire?"

  "I don't know, man. Probably have enough money now that I have the ranch. I don't spend much."

  "Wouldn't you get bored?"

  "Peace and quiet isn't boring any more, Pops. It's just peace and quiet."

  "I'm a lot older than you, and I get bored. I need to have something going on all the time, I guess."

  "That's you, not me."

  "True enough. Hey, Sandy keeps looking at you like she wants to hook up again. She's a damned good lady."

  "I know that."

  "Quite a catch. Just thought I'd remind you."

  "Gee, thanks."

  "Hey, you get bored, maybe you can get a gig with Enrique doing security. He called from somewhere on the road, asking for you today."

  "That so? What did he want?"

  "He didn't say, or leave a number. He said he'll call again tomorrow."

  "Oh." Lehane sipped some water, splashed some onto his hands and wiped his face with it. "I can hardly wait."

  Pops seemed tense. He couldn't shut up. "Jeff, do you think you'd ever get married again?"

  Lehane rubbed his dry eyes. "I doubt it."

  "Why not?"

  "I had a wife."

  The laptop whispered "you've got mail" and seconds later the telephone shrieked. Even though they'd been expecting the sound, both men jumped and whispered profanity. Lehane grabbed it.

  "This in an unsecured land line, so I'll make it quick," Whiz said. "Download the file I just sent you and check it out."

  "Already doing that."

  "We finally got something back on the prints of the biker who attacked you a few days ago. His name is Kevin Lyman, age thirty-three, former body builder and personal trainer turned biker and crystal meth dealer. Mr. Lyman did a bit at Humboldt where he became a member of the AWG, same white supremacist group as Lou Grainger."

  "Just like we thought," Pops smiled. "Bingo."

  "T
hey were there at the same time?"

  "Same cell block," Whiz said, "and same militant group."

  Lehane nodded to himself. "So it looks more and more like the connecting point is Lou Grainger."

  "Check out the guy and his photo just to make sure it's the same dude, boss."

  Lehane opened the file and saw the rough-hewn face of his attacker. "That's him, Whiz. It's a match."

  "Okay. Now open the second file. I've got to jump off for a while but I'll be back in a few minutes."

  Whiz put them on hold. Pops finished his soda, bent the can and tossed it into the trash. He moved around the bed to look past Lehane to the computer screen. The file contained a travel itinerary for Kevin Lyman from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas to Las Vegas, Nevada.

  "He was in the same town as Roger Gordon," Pops muttered.

  Lehane clicked on the next page. "Whiz found a bit more than that."

  "I'll be damned."

  The next travel itinerary was for Roger Gordon. Lehane scanned the page a couple of times. He whistled once and clicked back to the Lyman document to be absolutely certain.

  "I'll be damned, Pops. They came out on the same flight to Vegas less than a week ago."

  "Could be a coincidence," Pops offered, jokingly.

  "Yeah, right." Lehane shook his head. "As of now, everything comes back to Lou Grainger."

  "We're closing in. That should make you happy, boss."

  "It does, but…Damn it, Pops, there's still a couple of pieces missing. I can smell it. This is all too easy."

  Whiz came back on the line. "You take a look?"

  "We got it. Has LVPD seen this yet?"

  "Detective Gleason has a tip that Grainger may be still hanging around Vegas, just laying low. He wanted you to know that."

  "Okay."

  "He also said to tell you that he is pulling a warrant so he can enter and search Lou Grainger's house tomorrow morning as part of their ongoing homicide investigation."

  "He did?" For a moment, Lehane was honestly confused. Then Pops and Lehane exchanged glances. "Oh, that's tomorrow, in the morning?"

  "Yes. Finally, he said to officially tell you that you need to stay away from Grainger's place tonight, because he doesn't have men to spare to guard it. In fact, he said 'tell Lehane I said don't go fucking around with what might be a crime scene.'"