By mutual agreement, Hank and Nick left the crime scene to the techs who specialized in collecting what little evidence they could find there. Hank headed home. But Nick had another stop to make.
* * *
When Nick arrived at Monroe’s house—its distinctive front door featured a stained-glass coat of arms with an upright red wolf—he found the Blutbad peering at his work table as if to examine his handiwork. On a square of green felt, he’d disassembled an antique gold pocket watch, its tiny wheels and springs and screws laid out like an art project. A careful arrangement of watchmaker’s tools bracketed the antique watch parts, including a head-worn magnifier, a series of precision screwdrivers, tweezers and a few tools Nick couldn’t identify.
“Oh, hey, Nick,” Monroe said, distracted.
“One of yours?” Nick asked.
“What? No. Bud dropped this off for me to repair. 1887 Elgin hunter case pocket watch, fourteen-karat gold. Family heirloom. Finally decided to have it fixed.” He looked up, eyes widening. “You’re having dinner with Juliette tonight, right? Because Rosalee and I are—unless something happened with your—?”
“No change of plans,” Nick said. “Shower. Fresh set of clothes.”
“Good,” Monroe said. “So things are still on the upswing? No complications?”
“We’re taking it one step at a time,” Nick said. “No new complications.” Changing the topic, he said, “I wanted to get your opinion on something.”
“By ‘something,’ I’m guessing not related to watch repair?”
“Not remotely.”
With the death of Nick’s Aunt Marie, he’d been thrown into the deep end of the Grimm pool. She’d left behind her trailer filled with an arsenal of medieval weapons, potions and remedies, and books of Grimm lore—a lot of material to review, but not all the answers Nick needed could be found in the trailer. Monroe had proven a valuable resource on various Grimm-related subjects and often helped Nick solve cases involving Wesen.
Monroe had once referred to himself grudgingly as Nick’s “personal Grimmopedia.” While Nick couldn’t find fault with that assessment, he couldn’t justify bypassing a valuable resource when lives were at stake. At the same time, he was confident his friendship with Monroe had progressed to the point where the Blutbad no longer felt as if Nick took him for granted. For evidence of that change, Nick needed to look no further than Monroe’s invitation to Nick to stay at his house after Juliette’s Nick-specific memory loss made living together awkward and uncomfortable.
Nick wanted to give her time and, more importantly, space to remember him, and he couldn’t do that living under the same roof. They were through the worst of it now. Yet even though Juliette had her memories back and had started to understand the Grimm and Wesen side of Nick’s life, he was still crashing at Monroe’s. But not, he hoped, for too much longer.
“Didn’t think so.”
Nick described the two sets of bones the police had recovered along with Guerra, the Mordstier, who denied any involvement in the murder and whose viability as a suspect had diminished since his arrest.
“Lone bull, huh?” Monroe mused. “Odd behavior for a Mordstier. Those guys usually travel in packs.”
“He could be our guy,” Nick said. “Rage issues. Root cellar stocked with nasty gear. But, so far, no match for the murder weapon.”
“Maybe he tossed it off a bridge.”
“Maybe.”
“Sorry I can’t help, man.”
“I left out one thing about the bones,” Nick said. “ME believes they were boiled.”
Monroe’s eyebrows rose. He exhaled and sat down at his work table chair.
“Chopped and cooked. That’s what you think?” he asked.
“Why else boil the bones?”
“Right,” Monroe said, nodding. “I’m sure you know—of course you know, you’re a Grimm—that some Wesen have been known to partake in, let’s say, non-FDA approved meats. There’s the Schakal, of course.”
“The baby eaters.”
Monroe nodded. “You got your Wendigos, Mauvais Dentes, Coyotl—they strip their victims down to the bone. Geiers harvest human blood and organs. A Rissfleich tends to go for the abdomen. Then there’s the Lowen and Lausenchlangen and—”
Nick interrupted Monroe’s disturbing litany with a question.
“Any with this particular MO?”
“Dude, they don’t follow rule books,” Monroe said. “Let me just say, it’s usually an impulse. A nasty impulse. But what you’ve got here is way beyond nasty, man. That’s some seriously sick premeditation.”
* * *
After a shower and change of clothes, Nick drove to Juliette’s house for a home-cooked meal. Just as well, since the topics of their conversations lately might raise more than a few eyebrows at the local restaurants. Nick tried to leave his work at the precinct, but some cases proved harder to shake off than others. That, coupled with Juliette’s newfound curiosity about all things Grimm and Wesen, dictated that they should keep private conversations as isolated as possible.
Juliette kissed him the moment he walked through the door, which somehow still came as a pleasant surprise after dealing with the alienation caused by her memory loss. Adalind Schade’s spell—delivered via Majique’s claws after she’d fed the cat a potion—had literally wiped Nick from Juliette’s memories. Nothing else gone. Just Nick. Even memories where Nick had been part of a group were altered so that Nick was no longer there. Overnight, he’d become a stranger to her. The road back had been long and difficult and fraught with complications, but they were better than ever now, because Nick no longer had to keep Grimm and Wesen secrets from her. She had recovered and was adapting to his bizarre world. Even so, they remained cautious as they resumed the intimate part of their relationship.
For dinner, they enjoyed a chicken risotto Juliette had whipped up. She talked a bit about a difficult case she was treating, a labrador suffering kidney failure with a grim prognosis. But he sensed her unwillingness to darken the mood and wasn’t surprised when she batted the conversational ball over to his side of the net. Unfortunately, a homicide detective’s topics of conversation also veered into doom and gloom or frustrations with bureaucracy and paperwork. When you investigated murders for a living, you had to look elsewhere for source material for light-hearted banter.
Juliette, naturally, wanted details about the Wesen aspects of the case. There remained a chance the killer was not Wesen, as unlikely as that seemed to Nick at the moment. And he had his doubts about the Mordstier’s involvement, although the Wesen’s rage, combined with hunger and opportunity, provided sufficient motives to make the case against him. And yet, without a murder weapon or an approximate time of death, the case might prove difficult to prosecute.
That’s when Juliette suggested they visit Aunt Marie’s trailer.
“The trailer?” Nick asked. “Really?
“Yes. Why not?”
“Not exactly my idea of a romantic evening.”
“This stuff is fascinating,” she said, smiling across the table.
“Fascinating?” he said. “That’s all?”
“Okay. A little scary,” she admitted. “But we fear what we don’t understand, right? So, I want to… understand.”
* * *
A short while later they sat in the trailer, Juliette leafing through some of Aunt Marie’s journals, tracing her index finger over some of the sketches, while Nick’s gaze mostly lingered on Juliette’s face. She had asked him to show her some of the Wesen he’d encountered in person. She’d paused to read the notes on those—at least the ones that weren’t in German. And she’d spent several minutes scanning entries for the Wesen she’d seen woge: Blutbad, Fuchsbau and Eisbiber.
“It’s strange,” she said.
“Other than the obvious?”
“Other than that, yes,” she said with a wry smile. “These Wesen were here all along, walking among us, and nobody knew.” Off Nick’s look, she added, “Well, almost nobody.”
Nick leaned forward. “And you’re all right with”—he spread his arms to encompass everything in the trailer and everything it represented—“with all of this?”
She closed the book and stood, and Nick stood with her, facing her.
“It’s definitely a lot to absorb.”
“It is,” he agreed.
“But…” She took his face in her hands. “This is a part of your life now, Nick. Part of who you are. It’s a package deal. And I want to be in your life too.”
More hopeful than he’d been in a while, Nick slipped his arms around her waist and said, “You do?”
His life seemed almost… normal again. Well, the new normal, considering he was a Grimm. He’d had to make a lot of adjustments to cope with his own nature and his role as a balancing force between Wesen and humans. His only option was to face challenges head on, to forge ahead and hope his mistakes, byproducts of trial and error and learning on the fly, were recoverable. And Juliette had had to overcome a lot of collateral damage because of her relationship with him, but she was back to normal and adjusting admirably herself. It felt as if they’d torn down a flawed structure and were now in the process of building something stronger on a solid foundation.
“Yes,” she said, flashing an inviting smile. “I do.”
This time, he kissed her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Padlocked around his neck, a crude iron collar chained Gino Parisi to the basement wall. The short length of chain from collar to wall plate allowed him to kneel, sit or lie down on the hard cement floor, but not stand. He hadn’t stood in at least two days.
Two pairs of equally crude shackles bound his wrists and ankles together, and they had rubbed his flesh raw. He squirmed atop the clumps of matted straw scattered across the floor, his focus entirely on dislodging the saliva-damp gag that muffled his voice. So far, he’d managed to bite into his tongue and bottom lip until they bled. Over the past two days—had it really been that long since his abduction; so easy to lose track of time in the dark—his eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to distinguish at least ten other huddled and frightened abductees. A few remained blindfolded. He’d shed his by rubbing the side of his face against the rough stone wall. Since Gino’s arrival, two of his fellow prisoners had been taken away by their jailer. None of those remaining knew how much time they had left.
A woman at the far end of the basement, her features unreadable in darkness, occasionally whimpered in pain and, apparently, she’d been a prisoner longer than any of them. But she had no fight left in her. When she was coherent enough to speak, she told each new arrival—almost by rote, in a voice raspy from discomfort—what had transpired in the days since her capture. Her name was Alice. She said she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. And that statement triggered a recurring dry chuckle tinged with madness.
Though she’d been there the longest of the survivors, she had trouble keeping track of the days. She thought weeks might have passed since they’d slipped the collar around her neck. But she couldn’t say much about those taken in the days that followed.
“We all look the same in the dark,” she said, again with that dry chuckle.
Many days before Gino arrived, she’d rid herself of her gag and screamed her voice raw. But no help came. Wherever they were, the location was isolated, beyond hope of rescue. Unless they found a way to escape, they were doomed. Gino didn’t want to believe the woman, but feared the truth in her words.
Eventually, her screams had an unintended consequence. Annoyed by her insubordination, their jailer returned to the communal cell to mete out punishment. He’d kicked her into quiet submission, leaving her with several broken ribs. By the time Gino arrived, her spirit was as broken as her bones.
Though she no longer screamed, she could not remain silent. She told them the man would kill them all. No ransom demands. No bargaining. No reasoning with the madman. When their time came, he would drag them away, one by one. Sometimes he took two in one night. Each time, she’d heard bloodcurdling screams—and then silence.
Hours after he took one of the prisoners away, sounds of a party would drift down from the upper reaches of the house. A party every night. And Alice wondered: How could these partygoers celebrate in such close proximity to the monster tormenting and killing them and yet remain unaware of what was happening right under their noses?
For two nights, Gino had heard those sounds of merriment. But rather than presuming ignorance, he assigned them guilt, not by association, but by participation. Whatever was happening to the prisoners in the basement, the party people upstairs were part of it. If he’d been able to speak in more than a mumble, he might have revealed his suspicions to Alice and the others. Then again, he might have kept silent on that count. For some of them, terrified in the dark, their last shred of hope might cling to the idea that the partygoers would somehow find out about them and call the police or rush to their aid.
No, Gino didn’t want to believe Alice’s hopeless prediction, but he couldn’t shake it. Unless they escaped, they really were doomed, picked off one by one until they were all dead—or worse.
Clumps of straw shifted beneath him, host to a foul mixture of blood and urine, along with dollops of gruel that had slopped over the wooden buckets with which their jailer fed them every two or three days. He’d eaten once—less than a ladleful of the cold, lumpy gruel that tasted like wet cardboard—hours after he’d been shackled, still dazed from the blow that had rendered him unconscious, and shortly before he’d been gagged. Even if they hadn’t been chained to the wall, most of them would have been too weak to put up much of a fight.
Finally, he tore his gag loose, spitting the lump of bloodied cloth from his mouth. His body streaked with dried sweat and fresh blood. Gino’s muscles trembled with exhaustion. But he had one small victory, his first since the nightmarish ordeal had begun.
“What—what time is it?” he croaked, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. How long had he been awake? Too long, he thought, time’s running out. Soon their jailer would come to collect one of them.
At first nobody answered his question. Maybe they couldn’t. Hours on a clock had become meaningless. Only one time of the day mattered to them.
Finally, Alice spoke. “Too late.”
That’s when he heard the heavy footfalls.
The click of the deadbolt lock in the steel door.
More creaking footfalls on each of the four wooden steps that led down to the long basement room.
Gino found himself afraid to look at the hulking figure who peered at his hostages through dark holes cut in the cloth hood he wore to hide his identity. At first, Gino thought the hood was a good sign. If the man hid his face from them, he must believe they would be freed—at least some of them—and they wouldn’t be able to identify him as their captor. But then Gino came to understand the man wore the hood to instill fear into his prisoners. Looking at the man’s eyes was like staring into an abyss. They were the eyes of a soulless demon who basked in their misery and torment.
Slowly his inhuman gaze traveled from one side of the basement to the other, examining each of them in turn before making his selection. Nobody knew how he made the decision. And if some secret existed to avoid selection, nobody had shared it with Gino.
Some of the prisoners froze, almost as if playing possum. If he enjoyed their screams, then death offered one form of escape. Maybe feigned death would work as well. Others whimpered. Were the pitiful unworthy of consideration? Some huddled in a fetal position, withdrawing into their own minds. Ignore the danger at all costs and maybe it would pass. Several squirmed as if the weight of his attention were physically painful and, if endured, would eventually release them from its grip. A final few prayed, hurried voices in hushed tones, even those still gagged. Gino could tell which ones continued to believe in salvation, even if he couldn’t make out the details of their faces in the darkness.
Silent, but not a possum, Gino found he fit none of these cate
gories. Though weakened by his ordeal, rage and defiance fueled him. Though religious, prayer eluded him. And even with his mouth finally unencumbered, he could not find his voice. More than anything, he wanted to lash out at the hooded man, but the collar chain and manacles made rebellion impossible. So he knelt on the concrete floor, muscles taut and trembling, and directed his hate-filled glare downward, submissively, avoiding the abyss of the eyes.
“Which little piggy is next?” their hooded jailer asked in amusement, his voice a basso profundo that had already crept into Gino’s nightmares and refused to leave.
The man took two steps away from Gino and grabbed the jaw of a young woman with long wavy hair, a light color that caught and reflected the wan light cast down the stairs from the hallway above. Gino remembered Alice calling her Cherise once.
Cherise had been a possum, but now she began to whimper, “Please don’t, please, no, please don’t, don’t…” She tried unsuccessfully to pull her face free of his cruel grip.
“Leave her alone!”
Gino had finally found his voice.
His reaction had been a reflex—a paternal impulse—and horribly dangerous, considering his circumstances. The young woman reminded him of his daughter, a twenty-year-old sophomore in college, living in a dorm on the other side of the country. A fleeting thought of her—chained in this basement, awaiting torture and death—had overwhelmed him.
The hooded man shoved the young woman’s face aside and turned toward Gino. Soulless eyes hidden within the darkness of the cloth hood seemed to stare at him, as if noticing him for the first time.
“This piggy squeals.”
“Go to hell, you sick bastard,” Gino shouted, grimacing as bile rose in the back of his throat. “The quicker the better.”
He couldn’t undo his outburst. His fifteen-year-old son played video games all the time and most of those games had save points, places in the game located right before a difficult challenge where you could save your progress. If you died facing the big bad menace, you could restart the game from your last save point without losing everything you had worked so hard for. Unfortunately, real life had no save points. What was done, was done, for better or worse. And sometimes forever. Some choices had fatal consequences.
Grimm: The Chopping Block Page 5