Grimm: The Chopping Block

by John Passarella

  And Monroe had offered to lead the way.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Long before her world had been turned upside down by her newfound knowledge of Wesen and the Grimms who hunted them—one of the latter, smaller group included her boyfriend, Nick Burkhardt—Juliette Silverton found comfort in the familiar setting of the Roseway Veterinary Hospital where she spent her days.

  Sipping coffee and chatting with Zoe and Roger in the reception area, before office hours officially started, helped ease her into the workday. Checking on any animal patients who’d needed to spend the night in one of the many crates in back provided comfort to the pets while they were separated from their homes. Meeting with loving pet owners and treating their four-legged friends preemptively was the most rewarding part of her day. Even treating those with maladies or accident victims gave her a sense of satisfaction, knowing she made a difference by helping pets and their owners get back to the stress-free enjoyment of each other’s company. But some maladies had no prescribed treatment. Sometimes the conversation was about ending the life to end the pain. Some days were hell.

  Juliette sat forward in her office chair and closed the folder that contained the printout of Roxy Bremmer’s test results. When the Bremmers brought in their six-year-old yellow lab, she’d exhibited discouraging symptoms: vomiting, loss of appetite and lethargy. Now Juliette’s fears had been confirmed. The blood work indicated Roxy was azotemic, with moderately elevated BUN and creatinine values, consistent with renal failure due to pyelonephritis—kidney infection—or a toxin. Consequently, she had to break the worst possible news to the family.

  She sighed and pressed her fingertips to her forehead.

  After a few moments to compose herself, she stood up and attempted to brush the creases out of her white lab coat. She stared down for a moment at the folder with the damning test results, then snatched it off the desk and strode from her office, down the short hallway to the examination room where the Bremmers awaited her.

  When she opened the door, they stood on either side of the stainless steel examination table, Balding Barry on the left, pale Melinda on the right, both of them with a hand on Roxy, who looked miserable. She managed a solitary tail thump in greeting—and another when Juliette patted her head—but the effort seemed to drain her. Juliette had expected to see Logan, their teenage son. A small relief. Kids and teens took this kind of news the hardest. Or maybe they were less conflicted about expressing their emotions in public over the death of a pet. Roxy had been a companion for Logan for a third of the boy’s life. At least he’d be spared this one detail of the painful ordeal.

  Before she opened her mouth to deliver the news, Juliette felt her professional mask slip into place. A clinical detachment necessary when a doctor must tell a patient—or, in this case, a patient’s owners—that she was out of answers.

  “Melinda, Barry… I’m sorry,” she began.

  Melinda Bremmer clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry of dismay.

  So much for the professional mask, Juliette thought. Unlike my emotions, I can’t disguise the sting of my words.

  “What—what is it?” Barry asked, after clearing his throat.

  “The test results,” Juliette said. “I’m afraid they indicate kidney failure.”

  “But—how?” Melinda asked. “What does that mean?”

  “The likely cause is a kidney infection,” Juliette informed them. “Or a toxin—”

  “Toxin?” Barry said, frowning. “Poison? Somebody poisoned our dog?”

  “No,” Juliette said. “I’m not saying that. It could have been anything. For example, ethylene glycol—antifreeze—if ingested. It’s sweet and it only takes a small amount.”

  “Oh…” Barry turned away from them, gripping his jaw in his free hand.

  Melinda stared at him, confused, glanced at Juliette to see if she understood, and then returned her attention to her husband.

  “Barry…? What is it?”

  “Ah, Christ,” Barry said. “Logan.”

  “What about Logan?”

  “That damned clunker of his,” Barry said. “He’s been fixing it up, tinkering…”

  “I—yes, but how?”

  “When it started raining the other day, he drove it into the garage,” Barry said. “And… I’m not positive, but I think the radiator was leaking.”

  “But the dog—how—?”

  “When I went out to check on him—” Barry’s voice grew tight with suppressed emotion “—Roxy was in the garage with him.”

  “So Logan… he’s—it’s his…” Melinda pressed her hand to her mouth again, fingers clamped over her trembling lips. “Oh, no. Oh, God, we can’t tell him. If Roxy—this will crush him.”

  Juliette pursed her lips and blew out a breath she’d been holding. She hadn’t thought the day could possibly get worse. She’d been wrong. If—realistically, when—the dog passed, their son would blame himself. He would always blame himself.

  If only they’d brought the dog in within eight hours of ingestion, Juliette could have treated the antifreeze toxicity with Fomepizole or 4-MP. Too late for that now that kidney failure had set in…

  Melinda directed her tear-filled eyes to Juliette.

  “How can we fix this, Dr. Silverton? What can we do?”

  “If Roxy drank antifreeze,” Juliette began, then started over again. No easy way to say what she had to tell them. “With kidney failure, I’m afraid the prognosis is poor. Very poor.”

  “What do you recommend?” Barry asked.

  “Normally, for cases like this, I would recommend… euthanasia.”

  “Oh, my God!” Melinda cried. “Logan will…”

  “There’s nothing else?” Barry asked. “No treatment…? Nothing?”

  Juliette took a deep breath. Something. Maybe.

  “I can’t guarantee… And I don’t want to give you false hope.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere, Doctor,” Barry said, quirking a hopeful smile. “Tell us. Please. We’ll take any chance. Whatever the odds.”

  “We can try supportive treatment for a day or so,” Juliette offered. “See if her condition improves. Treat it aggressively with IV fluids, anti-nausea meds, and—”

  “Do it,” Barry said. “Whatever it takes. Roxy—she’s a part of our family.”

  “Okay. I’ll need you to sign a few papers.”

  “Anything.”

  Juliette mentally ticked off the indicated IV protocol: Lactated Ringer’s Solution; metoclopramide, H2 blocker for nausea; antibiotics to treat the infection. Still, it was a longshot and they needed to know that.

  “You should prepare yourselves, in case—”

  “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” Barry said, clinging to a buoyant optimism that the treatment would work. He’d circled the table and wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We’ll get through this, Lin.”

  His wife nodded silently and wiped away a tear, unable to find enough hope to give it voice. Or perhaps unwilling to disturb its fragility.

  * * *

  After the Bremmers had gone and Juliette had started Roxy on the supportive treatment, she returned to her office and collapsed in her chair, exhausted.

  Poor Roxy, she thought. Poked her snout into something sweet, unaware of the mortal danger it represented. Even now, with her life hanging in the balance, she’s too confused and miserable to understand the cause of her pain.

  Juliette worried that, despite her cautions, she’d given the Bremmers unrealistic expectations. When they returned tomorrow, the news would be bad, if not worse, because they had allowed themselves to believe Roxy would get better.

  And yet, who was Juliette to deny them their hope?

  Not too long ago, she had all but given up hope that she would find her way back to Nick. She caught herself rubbing her hand where Majique—Adalind Schade’s cat—had scratched her. That memory was always a jolt to her consciousness. She’d fallen into a coma and had awakene
d with all her memories of Nick and their life together excised. For a long time, she’d tried in vain to remember him. Eventually, the memories had returned, but in an incomprehensible flood, as if a dam had burst in her subconscious. And for a while, that had been almost as bad as having no recollection of their time together.

  She’d fought her way out of the darkness, reclaiming the memories one by one, until she felt whole again. Then Nick had finally told her he was a Grimm and what that entailed. No sooner had that revelation come, than Nick’s friends and acquaintances revealed their true nature to her as Wesen. Suddenly her reclaimed world included Blutbaden, Fuchsbaus and Eisbibers and many more Wesen she had yet to see.

  For a while, every time she looked at a stranger, or even people she had known for years, she wondered, “Is she Wesen? What about him?” She was afraid she’d drive Nick crazy with all the questions. For now, her questions represented a light that kept the overwhelming darkness at bay, stopped the strangeness from closing in on all sides of her. The world she’d known her whole life had basically woged in front of her. She wouldn’t tell Nick, but that scared her and thrilled her and made her want to call a time out so she could take a deep breath, absorb it all and exhale.

  I need a big red “Pause” button.

  “No,” she said softly, chiding herself. “That’s not what I want.”

  Hadn’t her life already been paused long enough? Sure the changes were scary and challenging, but it felt wonderful to have her life back, memories intact, and to understand why Nick had kept certain things from her.

  The first time Nick tried to tell her what he was, she thought he’d gone crazy, suffered some sort of delusion or psychotic break. But no more. No more doubting the truth of Nick’s words. The facts were undeniable. Part of her relief came from knowing they could finally move forward again emotionally, after having their relationship stall and subsequently derail.

  And yet, she occasionally worried that something could happen to sabotage their progress. Not another cat-scratch-borne illness, but something else unexpected from Nick’s dangerous world. At those times, her recovered memories of her life with Nick seemed like a jigsaw puzzle suspended in the air by a slender thread, swaying precariously, in danger of falling with the next gust of wind into hundreds of jumbled and lost pieces.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After the bones had been collected from the Claremont Park crime scene, Nick and Hank headed back to the precinct to await test results on the bones. On the car ride back, Hank asked Nick for his preliminary impressions.

  “Strange one,” Nick said. “Dismembered body without a body.”

  “Cold case?” Hank wondered.

  “Maybe,” Nick conceded. “Need to wait on the ME’s report.”

  “Bones chopped up like that,” Hank said. “Think this could be Wesen?”

  “Wesen with an axe,” Nick said. “Can’t rule out a human monster.”

  “Yet,” Hank said and smiled.

  The ME would need time to determine cause of death and estimate how long the bones had been buried. If dental records gave them an ID for the victim, they could see where that trail led them. So far the canvass had provided no leads. No footprints or tire tracks to cast. If the killer had been accommodating enough to leave such evidence behind, the recent rain had washed it away. And the only fingerprints lifted from the geocache tin matched those of Brian and Tyler Mathis.

  Back at his desk, while hoping for a more substantial lead, Nick copied the names and aliases from the geocaching logbook onto a legal pad and split the list with Hank.

  With a little online digging, they tracked down some of the geocachers, along with the woman who had originally placed the cache eighteen months ago for others to find. The most recent “find” listed on the geocache page was three months old. To the surprise of neither detective, not one of the scavenger hunters they contacted had noticed a pile of bones at the site.

  Nick suspected the bones had been left between the last find and the Mathis’ visit to the site. Nevertheless, they started to check alibis—enough to nail down addresses and proximity to the crime scene—and faced the prospect of needing a warrant to get the IDs of the remaining geocachers. If a fellow hunter had left the bones at the site, Nick doubted he or she would have recorded the visit in the handy little logbook.

  With nothing solid to go on, Nick found his mind switching gears to their other big case. They had a Cracher-Mortel in a top hat, running around Portland creating zombies for some unknown reason. Another unresolved case, and that one definitely Wesen. As a homicide detective and a Grimm, Nick had one foot in each world, and at times he felt himself pulled in conflicting directions. At the moment, however, he had nothing pulling him at all.

  Frustrated, he tapped a ballpoint pen on the legal pad. He’d reached the point where he’d convinced himself to march down to the Medical Examiner’s Office and camp out there until Doctor Harper gave him some answers, when the telephone rang.

  Nick snatched the receiver off the cradle. Wu.

  “You want to get down here.”

  “Find something?”

  “Quarter-mile from the site,” Wu said. “Found a couple bones near a dilapidated wooden shack. McCormack spotted a squatter. Large guy. Called him Bigfoot.”

  “You think he’s dangerous?”

  “Getting a flesh-mask-with-chainsaw vibe out here.”

  “On our way,” Nick said, grabbing his jacket and signaling Hank. Hank scrambled for his crutches and swung after Nick.

  “Suspect?” Hank asked as he drew up alongside his partner.

  “Might be Wesen after all.”

  * * *

  The two-story house set back in the woods had seen better days but had probably never been up to code in any sense of the word. Devoid of color, the weather-beaten planks shaping the unimaginatively rectangular dwelling clung together with the bare minimum of structural integrity, dependent upon a dwindling number of crumbling, rusted nails. The sagging roof maintained barely enough incline to shed rainwater. Two round columns supported a first-floor roof extension over a porch large enough to accommodate two rocking chairs or a porch swing, but the owner had left that space unfurnished. Along the exterior walls, irregular sections of tar paper and plywood patched long cracks and gaps with no eye for aesthetics or symmetry. More scraps of plywood obscured the small windows on the first floor, while dark cloth blocked the view through two visible second-story windows.

  Fortunately, the terrain surrounding the house provided a level surface for Hank to navigate on crutches. Sergeant Wu and two other uniforms—McCormack and Harris—had approached the house from opposite directions to cover front and back doors. Wu monitored the front approach; the patrol officers waited around back. Now and then, the suspect could be seen striding through the house, his bulk shifting past one crack in the walls after another. And even if they hadn’t caught regular glimpses of him, the creak and groan of floorboards protesting under his weight were a dead giveaway that the structure was occupied.

  Nick moved into position beside Sergeant Wu.

  “We got one suspect,” Wu said. “Super-sized.”

  “Name?”

  “No address on this charming little cottage,” Wu said. “Legally, this residence doesn’t exist. Mountain man DIY special.”

  “Where are the bones?”

  Wu nodded toward a slight depression ten feet away, a repository for what looked like a couple broken rib bones and, possibly, a human femur.

  “Only those?”

  “That’s not enough?” Wu asked.

  “Maybe,” Nick said, but he had his doubts. He walked over and peered more closely at the bones. The breaks on the ribs were jagged, as if snapped in half, not cleanly cut like those of the first victim. The presence of a human skull would have removed some doubt about the find.

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Radio your guys. Hank and I are going in.”

  As Wu pressed the transmit button on his shoulder microphone
to advise the uniforms, Nick strode toward the small porch, the heel of his palm resting on the butt of his Glock 17. Hank stayed back one pace, giving himself room to maneuver on his crutches. When Nick glanced over his shoulder, Wu moved away from the tree line, hand close to his holstered firearm as well.

  The floorboards of the covered porch groaned in protest, sagging beneath Nick’s weight as he crossed to the front door. Before knocking, he stood to the side and waited for Hank to clear the line of fire. Nick’s imagination worked overtime. Too easy to picture the behemoth sitting in the house, facing the rickety door with a loaded shotgun across his knees, waiting for the first knock to blast them where they stood.

  Nick exchanged a look with Hank, who nodded, hand poised over his own gun as he rested on the crutches. Taking a deep breath, Nick rapped his knuckles on the door.

  “Go away!” a voice boomed inside, unnervingly close to the door.

  Had he been standing there the whole time Nick approached?

  “Detective Burkhardt, Portland Police,” Nick said. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Don’t talk to cops,” the deep voice said. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

  “This will only take a few minutes of your time.”

  Silence.

  “Or I could take you down to the station for questioning.”

  Rusty hinges squealed in protest as the suspect yanked the door open.

  The man stood a foot taller than Nick. Unruly hair and a thick beard spilled over a faded red flannel shirt and suspenders holding up tattered and grease-stained jeans. Technically, he was unarmed but that hardly seemed to matter. The man looked as if he could bench-press compact cars without needing a spotter.

  And he was fast.

  “Go away!” he roared, and charged Nick, head lowered, but not before Nick saw him woge into the bullish form of a Mordstier, complete with horns.

  Nick’s hands rose to catch the lowered horns before they could gore him, but the inertia of the charging Wesen drove him back into one of the porch’s support posts. The wood split in half against Nick’s back and head, momentarily stunning him.