I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce)

by Michael Angel

  It got into his chest wound because someone planted it there.

  Fair enough. Why would someone do that? Knowing even the basics of forensic examinations meant that whoever put the thing in the most obvious wound expected it to be found. In other words, someone planted it there for a single reason.

  Whoever it is wanted me to find it.

  With that happy thought dancing in my head, I pulled in and parked in my assigned garage slot. My police escort parked nearby, in a spot where they could watch the entrance.

  The Office of the Medical Examiner was a long, low-slung trapezoid of smoky black glass and long corridors lined with gray carpet. Compared to the ‘well tended junkyard’ look of a lot of labs I’d worked for, the high-tech look of the place was a welcome change.

  I clipped my badge identity card to my belt, pushed through the lobby’s king-sized revolving glass door, went through the security checkpoint’s metal detector, and then set off down the long gray-shaded corridor for my office at a pace just under a run.

  “Dayna!” a familiar voice called, “Wait up!”

  A matronly woman with a frizz of hair the color of weak tea and pince-nez glasses that would’ve warned a librarian to keep quiet half-walked, half-ran to catch up with me.

  “I’m sorry, Shelly,” I said, as she puffed her way over to my side. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Figured that as soon as I saw you break the new land-speed record through the door. Any faster, and you’d set the carpet on fire,” she said. Her soft Texas drawl spun out her last word into ‘fahr’.

  Shelly Richardson and I had started out together as junior medical examiners. I’d swapped the M.E.’s green gown to move over to Crime Scene Analysis, but Shelly had stayed and prospered over the last couple of years. Like me, she loved pulling the bizarre and puzzling cases, the ones that could give you a bad case of the shivers, or make you stay up late chewing on your split ends in frustration.

  “Maybe if I keep moving, I’ll be a more difficult target.”

  She made a disapproving tsk. We were friends, but she didn’t always appreciate my dark sense of humor. Shelly’s tastes ran more to reruns of The Brady Bunch and comic strips involving cats who hated Mondays and loved lasagna.

  “News spreads quick,” she said. “Someone gunning for you? Or was it just some punk who up-n-decided to take a couple pot-shots at the cops?”

  “It sure seemed like someone was aiming for me,” I replied, as we started walking again. “But I can’t think of anyone who’d want me dead.”

  “No jealous ex-lovers? Boyfriends?”

  I sighed and shook my head ‘no’. It’d been a while since I’d been out with a man on an honest-to-goodness real live date, but that didn’t stop Shelly from trying to get me married off. We turned up a second corridor, one which bore a white plaque with an arrow: Forensics Department. Some joker had taken a marker and written Labs n’ Slabs on the plaque’s bottom edge. Well, it was graffiti, but at least it was accurate graffiti.

  “I haven’t heard from McClatchy about an arrest,” I added.

  “Because there wasn’t one. I asked Esteban. They swarmed the building the shots were fired from. The boys are swearing on the Good Book that nobody could’ve slipped past, but all they found was four spent rifle casings on the roof.”

  “More good news,” I grumbled. “Well, I mostly came to see what’s up with the John Doe we picked up downtown.”

  “Oh, Connor McCloud? I worked it with the tox-box folks last night. Hector sent me his photos, too.”

  “Connor McCloud? We actually got a hit on that goofball name?”

  Shelly rolled her eyes. “That’s ‘McCloud’ as in Highlander, dear. We’re calling him that ‘cause of that little metal fragment you gave us.”

  “You’re kidding me!” I exclaimed, as we reached the glorified broom closet they’d repurposed as my office.

  “Read the reports for yourself. You’ll find it right peculiar, I think.”

  I turned the worn brass doorknob and pushed my way inside. Dusty teak bookshelves fairly groaned under the textbooks that took up the bulk of two walls, while the window on the remaining one looked out over the grassy expanse of the building’s rear lawn. The mess of paper on my desk was bad enough so that a hamster would’ve considered the place in prime move-in condition. But I kept a spot on the front left corner for a bright red cookie jar that I always kept stuffed with fresh brown-sugar ginger snaps. The picture on the front of the jar came from one of my favorite Disney flicks. It showed the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit at a tea party, holding up a wooden sign that proclaimed: Have One!

  I slid into my office chair with a creak of dry springs and opened the first of the folders that lay atop the pile of paper I’d been meaning to properly organize someday. Shelly took the visitor’s chair, lifted the top of my jar, and grabbed one of the cookies. I suppressed a grin. I didn’t actually like ginger snaps that much, but their sweet-spicy scent gave me a nice tingle in the nostrils. Not coincidentally, it also told me who’d been visiting my office on any given day.

  The reports were terse but clearly laid out. No immediate hits on the fingerprints, but the FBI was checking their database as well. ‘Connor’ had been in excellent health before his death, about six hours before we’d found him. Clean living, too. Zero hits for drugs from cocaine, heroin, aspirin, or even aspartame in his body fluids, stomach contents, hair follicles, and subcutaneous fat.

  Findings like that are unusual. But Hector Reyes’ photos moved the case from unusual to head-scratching. He hadn’t found any shoe prints at all. But he’d seen the same curious thing that I had—multiple blood trails leading to the body. He’d systematically put together a montage of pictures from 360 degrees around the body and then spliced it into a combined image. The blood trails radiated out from the body in a perfectly symmetrical pattern.

  There were no traces of someone dragging or carrying a body across the jumbled terrain of broken concrete to leave him in the middle of the lot. None. That had to be wrong. Connor would’ve been more than two hundred pounds of dead weight. Hard for even a bodybuilder to handle. But Hector’s photos showed that we weren’t looking at blood trails. We were looking at a splatter pattern.

  It was as if someone had simply dumped poor, dead Connor from a platform ten feet in the air, let him fall straight down, and then vanished. Taking the platform with them as well, I might add.

  Effing im-poss-i-ble.

  And then the report got really interesting.

  Chapter 5

  My office chair squeaked in protest as I leaned forward. Shelly looked up expectantly as she popped the last of the ginger snap in her mouth with a spicy-smelling crunch. I closed the report she’d done on the metal fragment.

  “Are you serious about what you found?” I asked.

  “As serious as a Baptist in church, hon.”

  The metal chip from the massive shoulder wound was a piece of medium-grade iron called ‘blister steel’. But the tox guys had run the metal’s impurities against hundreds of possible metal implements. Their conclusion: Connor had been wounded by a genuine antique. The steel shard came from a sword that could only have been manufactured during Europe’s High Middle Ages.

  “Okay,” I acknowledged, “at least I’m getting the Highlander joke now, sort of. So our guy got attacked by a nut with a medieval sword. Any recent thefts from museums, private collections?”

  “Nope.” Shelly leaned back in her chair to give the hallway a long look in both directions. When she was sure it was clear, she continued. “Let’s head on over to the slab, take a gander at Mister McCloud. We need to talk. Private-like.”

  I started to ask a question. Then shut my mouth with a snap. I’d only seen Shelly get serious about stuff like this once or twice, and when she said ‘we need to talk’, she meant business.

  We walked down to the chiller rooms, where we actually kept the bodies. The cold chambers were windowless rooms coated with cheery yellow-br
ick tiles that looked like they belonged in Oz, not a morgue. The light came from a combination of harsh fluorescent bulbs and a special kind of skylight that bounced the sun down to us indirectly from a reflection panel on the roof. Different kinds of light helped throw different kinds of dyes or marks into sharper relief for us.

  Shelly and I didn’t chit-chat as we did the surgical hand-wash routine and gowned up in a matching pair of pale green scrubs. A couple pieces of paperwork later, we rolled the body out of the cold chamber. The gamy smell of rotting flesh was muted here—the low temperature slowed decomposition—and there was a background scent of formaldehyde that curled up in the nostrils and plastered the back of the throat.

  The man I now thought of as Connor—funny, how easily we can attach names, even to dead things—didn’t appear to be much worse for wear. Shelly had performed a modified Y-shaped incision for the autopsy. Normally, we started the cut at the top of each shoulder and ran down to the front of the chest, switching over to shears or bone saws when we reached the sternum. Since our boy’s sternum had been powdered, the cut continued around the wound and down to the pubic bone. But Shelly didn’t pull the flaps back. Instead, she directed me to Connor’s hands as she spoke.

  “I’m wondering if our friend really was attacked by a medieval knight, or someone pretending to be one. Because he might have been into the same game himself.” She touched the man’s bare left hand with her gloved one, and then looked questioningly at me.

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged, looking at the wound there and above, on his arm. “Classic defensive wounds. Probably against the same weapon that cut his ear, his shoulder.”

  Shelly nodded. Next, she grasped Connor’s right palm and turned it over. The inner side of the thumb, fingers, and the palm itself showed callus buildup.

  “Exactly where someone would hold a sword by the handle,” I noted. “This ties up with what I’ve been thinking about. The guy’s weird skin pattern comes from wearing chain mail. Maybe this is some kind of dueling club? One that’s into, I don’t know…medievalism? Live-action role play?”

  “If so, they ain’t doing it right. You want to know what caused that awful wound on John Doe’s chest?”

  I nodded. Shelly smiled as she spoke again.

  “So would I. The boys in the lab have no clue.”

  No clue? What the hell blew open this guy’s chest?

  “I read your notes, Dayna. Your nose is pretty darn good. The lab backs up your findings of sulfur, potassium nitrate, and wood ash. And get this—the wound was almost completely cauterized. High heat, charring of surface tissues. No way was this done with a conventional firearm.”

  “No way it could’ve been…” I mused. My voice trailed off as Shelly’s voice dropped a full octave lower and became deadly serious.

  “There is one more thing,” she said coolly. “It’s why I wanted to talk to you in private down here. Detective Esteban said that you found a small artifact on the body. Something made of gold. But you didn’t list it on the exhibits turned in to us. Care to fill me in, before department security gets involved?”

  I looked at her helplessly and wrung my hands for a moment. I still wasn’t sure what was going on with that damned medallion. But Shelly was my friend, my ally. If anyone could help me save my job over this snafu, this bit of black magic, it was her. I drew the medallion out of my pocket and held it up. It glittered warmly in the bright rays that streamed in through the skylight.

  Then the medallion did more than glitter.

  A delicate ringing filled the air, echoing off the walls of the morgue. It began to get brighter in the room, much brighter. In a few seconds, the medallion blazed with a white-yellow radiance like I was holding a miniature sun in my hand.

  “Oh my lord!” Shelly exclaimed. “Dayna, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

  “I’m not doing this!” I shouted back, but my voice seemed swallowed up by the ringing, by the radiance of the star in my palm. The light wasn’t hot, not really, but I could feel pulses of energy coming off the medallion like the heavy swells of an incoming ocean tide. I didn’t dare move—I was worried that if I tried to get rid of the medallion, that I’d end up putting it into my pocket, and right now I didn’t want the effing thing anywhere near my crotch.

  I squeezed my eyes to slits, but the brightness penetrated right through my lids. Right then, a horrible, ticklish sensation crawled up and down my skin. I let out a scream that would’ve done credit to a Hollywood B-movie actress who’s found herself in a horror movie. One with a scene where she gets a boatload of spiders dumped on her.

  And then it was as if the floor itself melted away under me. Like it turned into a bottomless void of white light. I fell into the void as I continued to scream, tumbling end over end into a nothingness that seemed to stretch on forever.

  * * *

  Laundry taken off the clothesline.

  That’s the first scent I encountered as I swam back to consciousness.

  I lay on something that was feather-soft. A mattress, I guessed. I felt the slick coolness of sheets covering my body. I didn’t open my eyes. I remembered falling, that I must’ve taken a tumble. What’s more, I was a week behind on my wash, so the fresh linen smell meant I wasn’t in my bed. I listened for the tell-tale electronic beeps and hums of a hospital room. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Someone nearby coughed gently. I froze. A sigh, and then a voice spoke from somewhere above and to my right. The voice sounded deep, chesty, and yet surprisingly gentle.

  “Are you awake yet, perchance?”

  That got my curiosity going.

  Perchance? Did I hit my head and end up in a Jane Austin three-act play? I half-expected to see a brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with wild locks of hair and a stylish nineteenth-century jacket.

  I opened my eyes.

  I lay under a set of satin sheets the color of fresh cream. The sheets were neatly tucked into the sides of a four-poster bed. The room was an elegantly done up affair, with a vaulted ceiling, eggshell-white stone floor, and a pair of ornately carved wooden tables that squatted on either side of the bed. Tapestries made of brightly colored fabrics done up in whorls and stripes draped each of the walls, save the one closest to my bed. Instead, a triple set of bay windows let in bright wedges of sunlight. The edges of the windows, like the furniture and the tips of the four bed posters were marked with gilded fleur-de-lis accents.

  Let’s just say that Louis XIV would’ve found it homey.

  The man standing next to my bed—looming over it, to be precise—was a brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with wild locks of hair. He wore a stylish cloth jacket the color of sangria wine, punctuated with bell-shaped silver buttons.

  That was from the waist up. From the waist down, he had the body of a well-built chestnut draft horse.

  I squeezed my eyes shut again.

  “Whoever you are, you’re not going to believe this,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “but I think I must’ve hit my head. Like, bad.”

  “I’m certain that I would believe you,” the man said.

  Man? Or would that be ‘stallion’? No, a centaur? A centaur stallion?

  “I somehow doubt that.”

  “Relinquish your doubts,” he said. “My name is Galen, of the House of Friesain. I was tasked with summoning you.”

  “Yes, you certainly did a good job, I am most definitely summoned.”

  I cautiously opened my eyes. Yup, Galen still looked like a centaur.

  My gaze flicked down low. Very low. Not ladylike, I know, but see where you look the next time you wake up with a centaur standing next to your bed.

  Whoo. Galen really was a stallion.

  “I swear,” I said, as I sat up and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, “Galen, if I find out that someone laced one of my ginger snaps with lysergic acid, I won’t rest until I’ve hunted them down and…I don’t know, keyed their car, shaved their cat. This is really wild.”

  “Surely you’d think so,
” Galen said agreeably, “but you’re not under the influence of any substance, fair or foul. This is reality. One should accept it.”

  I looked down at myself. Someone had thoughtfully removed my scrubs, but I still had on the violet top and open cardigan I’d started the day wearing. That probably convinced me more than anything else that I wasn’t tripping on acid or having any sort of nervous breakdown.

  To triple-check that I wasn’t dreaming, I pinched myself on my arm. Hard. Yeah, it hurt. I blinked again, shuddered, and then rubbed my arms as I looked at the rest of Galen, House of Freeze-Sane a little more closely.

  His equine body and tail matched the dark brown color of the hair on his human head. Muscles bulged under the skin of the horse body like bunches of the kind of rope they use to keep ocean liners tied firmly to the dock. Interestingly, all four of his legs were fringed with long, silky black hair below what I think they called the ‘knee’ on a horse.

  “Okay,” I said cautiously, “I’ve really got no choice but to accept what I’m seeing here. I’m…well, I’m sure as hell not in Kansas anymore, I guess.”

  I threw the covers back and got shakily to my feet. Galen reached out to steady my shoulder, and I accepted his help. I placed my hand on his for a moment. His skin felt warm, dry, and completely human. Though the clip-clop sound of his hoofs on the stone floor as he took a step back was utterly alien. It was a real mind-bender.

  “No, you are not in ‘Kan Sass’ anymore, Dayna Chrissie,” Galen said with a smile. He gestured towards the windows at the far end of the room. “You’ve been summoned to Good King Benedict’s palace, the capitol of the land of Andeluvia. For the moment, you’re the honored guest of Grand Duke Kajari.”

  For the moment. I pushed that thought aside and asked the more pressing questions on my mind.

  “How’d you know my name, Galen?”