by E. A. Copen
I raised an eyebrow and forgot to be disturbed by dancing zombies for a moment. “You're in here, dancing with a bunch of actual zombies, and I scared you?”
He turned and waved a hand across the room. “Dormite,” he commanded.
His zombies shambled off to lean their foreheads against the wall, and he went to draw a curtain over them.
He walked a fine line with the existing law, keeping zombies. There wasn't a law against it, I supposed, except for all the old abuse of a corpse laws. Whether zombies qualified as corpses was a matter still being decided in the courts. off-topic everything regarding zombies was still being argued in the courts. Unlike vampires, werewolves and most varieties of the fae, they weren't yet afforded any rights at all. I could have double-tapped each one of them and walked away clean.
“Isn't it a little redundant?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Teaching a bunch of zombies to dance to that particular song?”
He gave me a deer in the headlights look. “Why?”
“Never mind.”
“Sorry I'm not ready. There's this show coming up, and it has us all in a bother. I've got less than a month to get them ready. If we win...” He stopped bumbling around with the gurney that held the body bag to smile to himself. “Think of the difference we can make, the attention they can draw to their own cause.”
“Dancing zombie activists,” I muttered. “What'll they think of next?”
“Make light if you want, but it won't change the fact that their rights are still limited. They might be undead, but they're capable of doing a lot of things and deserve the same rights as every other supernatural out there. If it's legal for vampires to buy blood, then why can't we legalize tissue donation for zombies?”
He put on a pair of latex gloves and held another pair out to me. “I know what you're thinking. Why dance? Well, they can't very well speak. They'd been too long without a proper feeding for the language center of the brain to be salvaged. The poor idiot that had them kept them in a cage and used them for target practice. Target practice.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how far they've come.”
I cleared my throat, eager to redirect him to my purpose so I could get out of there. “Eugene? Doctor Ramis?”
“Doctor Ramis was my father,” he said with a snort. “And I hate my first name. Doc will do.” I started to introduce myself, but he cut me off. “You're Judah Black with BSI. Tindall told me to expect you.”
“You do a lot of autopsies out here, Doc?”
“Not really. I mean, I did a few in medical school. You have to in order to get your license. Here, I do maybe one or two a year, mostly exsanguination. You know, vampire kills? They get a little overzealous sometimes.”
I wasn't sure I would call drinking a person's blood to the point of death overzealousness. The casual attitude with which Doc approached death was more than a little unsettling, and it made me wonder how many crimes had slipped by without ever making it to the state authorities.
He pulled and tugged at the body bag until it was free of the body, then tossed it to the floor. “This is going to be a fun one. The change makes their organs go all screwy until they balance out on the other side. Going to have to do some digging.” He started poking at the body.
My stomach twisted.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied and tried to ignore the cold sweat I'd broken into. “Do you recognize him?”
Doc took the corpse's chin in his hand and turned his head stiffly from one side to the other. “Nope. Of course, being half changed, making a positive ID is going to be hard. He won't even have the same prints.”
He went to a filing cabinet on the other side of the room and pulled out a digital camera, a small produce scale, a tool belt full of sharp things, and a zippered pouch that was labeled Phlebotomy Kit. He tossed the last item to me, then retrieved a pen and paper that he also passed to me. “I'll do the fun part. You take the notes. That is unless you want to help?”
I swallowed the bile that had decided to creep up my throat. “No. I'm good with notes.”
Doc shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said before he walked over to press the button on his CD player and flipped through a few songs before he found one he liked. I don't know what was more unnerving, standing by while he cut open a dead werewolf or the fact that he was doing it while listening to Olivia Newton-John.
“All righty, then,” he said, cracking his knuckles.
He walked around the body, snapping a few pictures. Occasionally, he would stop to measure something with a tape measure or turn over the appropriate body part as he spoke. “Subject is an uncircumcised male, approximately five feet eight inches in height and one hundred twenty to one hundred thirty pounds. Body temperature taken rectally upon arrival places death sometime between four and five this morning. Presence of secondary molars and physical development suggests the age of the subject somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, probably on the younger side of that scale. Looks to be of Hispanic origin, a werewolf. No obvious identification with the body. We'll skip the prints due to the presence of phalangeal deformity.”
I was really fighting to keep up with the pace at which he was talking, especially since he was using jargon. “What was that?”
He picked up the half-formed left hand and waved it stiffly at me. “Phalangeal deformity. Let's see. Where was I? Um...distinguishing marks. Subject has a black tribal tattoo band on the upper bicep of the left arm. Evidence of piercings in both ears, likely silver and removed to allow for the change, since werewolves can't change while wearing silver.” He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Can they?”
“Some,” I confirmed, reaching back in my memory for the early days of my training with BSI. “But not easily.”
“Right. Well, he's not wearing any silver. You'll probably find it at the scene somewhere if you look hard enough. There are some markings here in the bend of the left arm. They look like track marks. None of them look fresh, but it's hard to tell with the way they heal.”
Doc took several pictures of the track marks. When he was satisfied, he dropped the camera and held his hand out to me expectantly. When I didn't move, he looked up and demanded in an irritated tone, “Phlebotomy kit.”
I handed it to him and watched as he tried to poke at the inside of the werewolf's femoral artery without success. Doc muttered a mild curse to himself and then wandered off to search through a drawer before coming back with another needle. “Silver needles. Should've thought of that the first time, Doc.” He tried it again with the new needle and finally managed to get what he wanted. Doc collected five vials of blood and placed them on a little plate before labeling them and passing the plate to me. “Put this in the fridge, will you?”
I looked around. The only fridge I saw was next to the curtain he'd drawn over his zombies. They probably weren't any threat, sleeping as they were, but that didn't change the fact that I was uneasy about going over there.
Come on, Judah, I thought. Woman up. They're only zombies. I walked over to the fridge. One of his zombies was leaning against the side of it, snoring. Carefully, I opened the door and set the plate on the middle shelf next to a brown paper sack and returned to continue jotting down more notes.
“No obvious defensive wounds, though the rate of accelerated healing and deformities due to shifting makes a visual inspection inconclusive. I'll swab under the fingernails momentarily. Several large pieces of glass are protruding from the superior regions of the skull, though I doubt any of them are large enough to have penetrated the skull itself. The absence of a petechial rash suggests rapid healing accounts for the lack of bruising, so if any injury to the cranium contributed to the cause of death, I won't know that until I open up the cranial cavity. However, the location of the wound on the right side of his neck and lack of quick healing, combined with advanced tissue necrosis, suggests that the severing of the right internal jugular vein may be the cause of death.”
I lowered the paper, knowi
ng it was hopeless to try and keep up with him. “In layman's terms, Doc. What does all that mean?”
“There was a fight. I can't tell if he resisted or not. Your killer acted with near-medical precision using a sharp instrument. Your victim bled out in two minutes or less but likely lost consciousness after about thirty seconds. It was fast and relatively painless.” Doc watched my face for a reaction.
I swallowed and nodded. “Silver lining, I guess.”
“A poor choice of words, Black, considering the attacker's weapon of choice was likely a silver knife given the level of decay at the wound site.” He sorted through his tool belt, coming up with a nice, sharp-looking knife. “I'm going to open him up.” Doc lowered a face mask over his nose and mouth as if he were about to do some welding instead of making an incision and pressed the blade against the werewolf's shoulder.
The door behind us swung open, and an inhuman growl echoed through the room. Doc shrieked for the second time in an hour as a big Latino guy wearing a cowboy hat stepped into the room with Tindall on his heels. The Latino guy growled at us again, then pointed at Doc and said, “Get the hell away from my brother.”
Chapter Four
Defeated, worn, and disgusted, I trudged back out to the waiting room as a big black pickup tore out of the parking lot. Doc fidgeted with a hanging skeleton in one corner while Tindall polished the barrel of his gun. Boys and their toys.
Both looked up expectantly when I stopped and put my hands on my hips. “Elias Garcia,” I reported.
Doc adjusted the skeleton's clavicle. “Well, you got a name. That's a start.”
“Can you handle it from here if I sign off on everything, Doc?”
He stared blankly at me. “Why? You going somewhere?”
I walked over and put a hand on Tindall's shoulder. “Let's go for a drive.”
Tindall snorted, blew on his gun, and continued to polish. “Where to?”
“Anywhere but here.”
He looked up at me, eyebrows pinched together. He spread his lips upward into a grin. “What's the matter, Agent Black? No stomach for an autopsy?”
I frowned as I looked out into the cloud of dirt Valentino's truck had stirred up. “How well do you know the Garcias?”
“Well enough, I suppose. Valentino's got a record for some small-time crap. Disorderlies, mostly, and an old domestic charge, but the wife gives as good as she gets, really. Fucking werewolves. Why?”
“I need internet access.”
“Got a sheet to pull, eh?” He pushed himself up and dropped the gun back into his shoulder holster before canting his hat to one side. “Well, come on then. I'll show you the way.”
I climbed into my rickety hunk-of-junk car and coaxed it to life. By the time it was at a steady enough idle that I could take my foot off the gas to shift into drive, Tindall's car was already long gone. Lucky for me, I knew where the station was because I'd eyeballed it on our way into town. That didn't stop me from cussing him up one side and down the other all the way there.
In case you missed it the first time, Paint Rock was a small town. Ten years ago, the place wasn't much bigger, though it was more of a town than it was on my arrival. There were streets with houses, little general stores, and even a gas station, school, and a library.
All those things were still there, but not in the same place they used to be. When they turned the place into a reservation, the first thing the new inhabitants did was tear down most of the existing structures and remake the town in their own image. All the streets had been renamed according to the self-imposed segregation standards—things like Fae Boulevard, Werewolf Way, Vampire Avenue, and, my personal favorite, the intersection where That Road meets This Road. Gotta hand it to the people of Paint Rock and their overbearing sense of humor and creativity.
The station was at the corner of Main and West streets near the center of town. All Paint Rock's official buildings were there, lined up in a row. Next door to the station was the post office, which was only separated from the school by a small parking lot. The reservation’s singular bank stood across the street, right next to the red-roofed courthouse. I pulled into the tiny parking lot next to the station and jogged up the walk.
Inside, the station was deader than a graveyard at midnight. There were a few cops, but most of them were sitting behind desks, sipping coffee and staring at the newspaper. A few gathered around a television screen, chattering over the replay of a baseball game. All of that didn't keep them from looking up from whatever it was they were doing to stare at me as I passed by. The weight of their stares and their silence hung on my shoulders and made my feet drag.
The duty sergeant looked up from her computer screen as I approached. She was a plump, dark-skinned lady with close-cropped hair and a skeptical glint in her eye. I produced my BSI badge and introduced myself briefly. In response, she cocked an eyebrow upward. “So?”
“So,” I continued, trying to ignore the obvious hostility in her voice, “Detective Tindall told me to meet him here.”
“Tindall,” she grumbled. “Yeah. He's here somewhere. Why?”
I was about to ask if she was hard of hearing when I realized all the activity in the station had stopped and everyone was staring at me. They didn't look too pleased either. I had that uneasy feeling that I was about to be lynched if I said the wrong thing. “I've heard of small-town, southern friendliness, but this is ridiculous. You guys always this nice?”
The duty sergeant stood and leaned forward, her palms flat against the desk. She was at least four inches taller than me and could probably bench press a whole tray of McDonald's hamburgers in her sleep. She pointed to a door on the right with tinted glass and worn off lettering. “Your office is in there. Tindall's waiting on you.”
“Thanks. You’re a doll,” I said shortly and turned to go.
“Don't bother getting comfortable,” she called after me. “You won't last the week.”
The baseball watching cops snickered.
The door complained loudly when I pushed it open. On the other side was either the biggest broom closet or the smallest office I'd ever seen. Based on its current condition, I couldn't tell which. There were boxes piled in one corner behind an ugly little desk with three legs. The fourth corner was held up by a stack of phone books. A metal folding chair sat on the other side. On the side toward the door, there was a stool. Tindall had pulled it over to the single naked window. The paint that wasn't chipped or peeling was a shade of yellow that hasn't been popular since LBJ was president.
Tindall had pulled the window open and was leaning out it, smoking a cigarette. I walked over and pulled it from between his lips. “Hey,” he protested as I crushed it out on an empty picture frame that rested on the desk. “I was smoking that.”
“My office. My rules. Rule number one: No smoking in my office.” He opened his mouth, and I raised a finger to interrupt him. “Rule number two? No whining about not smoking in my office.”
His jaw muscles flexed as if he'd physically had to swallow his complaint. “I was going to quit anyway,” he mumbled and then added, “You got a lot of nerve walking in here like that. It's a good way to make enemies in this town, Black.”
I started pulling drawers out of the desk. The last tenant of the office had left behind a roll of blue duct tape, a paperback romance, and a wad of tissues in the bottom drawer. Lovely. “I'm here to bring the crime rate down to something tolerable, detective. Not to make friends.”
“Do yourself a favor and knock the chip off your shoulder, Black. This shit-hole town will eat you alive if you let it. Do you know how many people have sat where you're sitting and said something similar since I started my tenure here? Six. Six BSI agents in three years. Not one of them lasted a week in this office before they either quit, died, or bribed their way out of here.”
“Come on, Tindall,” I said, using one of the tissues to dust off my chair. “There's less than a thousand people living here. It can't be that bad.”
He li
fted a foot onto the stool and leaned his weight onto it. “Ever toss a can of spray paint onto a fire? Well, the rez is a bonfire, and every occupant is contents under pressure. The only thing keeping them from raising a revolt is the fact that they can't get along long enough to do any damn thing but rob, murder, and steal from each other. Vagrants, miscreants, and low lives, every single one of them. If they were respectable folk, they sure as hell wouldn't be here.”
“The same can be said for any of us,” I said and finished wiping dust and paint chips off my desk. I sat down and sighed when I realized the chair was too short for the desk and someone of my height. “Now, tell me there's a working internet connection in this joint?”
Tindall went to sort through the boxes behind my desk, eventually hauling out a laptop computer and placing it in front of me. The keyboard was missing a few keys and one corner of the LCD screen had a small crack, but it wasn't anything I couldn't work around. Over the course of the next hour or so, Tindall walked me through how to get a reliable connection to the station's Wi-Fi. The process involved moving all around the room and, at one point, standing on my chair. Eventually, we got the connection to work, and I fumbled through setting up access points with the local police server and with the BSI database I wanted.
It was almost noon by the time we'd done all of that. Tindall rolled up his sleeves, glanced around, and said, “You like diner food?”
I hadn't realized how hungry I was until he asked, especially since I'd skipped breakfast in favor of assisting the doctor. “Sure. I guess.”
“There's a place down the street. Quincy's probably hanging out there. What do you say we go over these files over lunch and then hit the road for a ride-along? We're going to need to talk to the local alpha about Elias before going much further. I imagine you want to search the Garcia residence. Valentino's pretty partial to his privacy, but if we lean on the alpha, he'll jump through flaming hoops if we tell him to.”