Wilding Nights Read online

  WILDING NIGHTS

  By

  Lee Killough

  ISBN: 978-0-986-74333-7

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Books We Love Ltd.

  (Electronic Book Publishers)

  192 Lakeside Greens Drive

  Chestermere, Alberta, T1X 1C2

  Canada

  http://bookswelove.net

  Copyright 2010 by Lee Killough

  Cover art by Michelle Lee Copyright 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Tuesday, April 3

  1.

  The victim had been a young man with thick dark hair and brown eyes, possibly good looking, once well dressed. His death changed all of that. The mauling of his face left just one eye intact, and dislocated his jaw so that it gaped open as though in a last desperate scream. Below it, from neck to groin, his polo shirt, leather blazer, and trousers had been shredded on the way to ripping open his belly. Beneath the blind stare of empty windows he lay in the rubbish, weeds, and charred fragments of beams littering the gutted warehouse...draped with the bloody tatters of cloth, flesh, and half-eaten loops of entrails.

  Standing well back from the body to let the Criminal Identification techs examine the area around it, Allison Goodnight eyed the carnage. Sergeant Bob Carillo’s comment when the call came in to Crimes Against Persons–“Hannibal the Cannibal must be in town; we have a chewed-up corpse on Lavaca with only human footprints around it.”--warned her what to expect, but seeing it still felt like a kick in the gut and left her both chilled to the bone by the possible repercussions and filled with cold fury for the victim’s suffering.

  “A hell of a way to start the day,” Janice Tran said as she photographed coins scattered off to the side of the body. “It’s hard to believe a human could do this.”

  Unfortunately, Allison reflected grimly, none probably had...despite the wholly human appearance of the barefoot prints intermittently visible amid the trash and weeds, overlying the victim’s shod tracks. Clearer prints, long and narrow, with long toes, overlaid each other in the sandy soil around the body, but those leading to a rear doorway had been mostly obliterated by the vagrant who came in that way to investigate what he said looked like a pile of clothes. Allison frowned at the hunter’s tracks. Why go barefooted?

  “Tall dude, judging by the size and the length of the stride,” Janice said.

  Guaranteed to be six feet or over. Allison closed her eyes and drew in a long breath, sorting through the stew of odors around her: Arenosa Bay’s fishy and diesel scents, brine on the sea breeze coming over the barrier island from the Gulf, smoke that still lingered in the blackened bricks around her, the peppery smell of plants that had taken root in the building, the pungent odors of the body’s blood and intestinal contents. Even the Ident techs contributed the odors of their skin, soap, deodorant...the powdered latex of their gloves. So many scents. She opened her eyes, grimacing. Too many scents.

  Outside, footsteps scuffed away up the street. The vagrant who found the body leaving, his verbal statement taken down. Allison noted the sound, as she did the cries of the gulls wheeling above the bay, without letting it break her concentration.

  Nor did the male voice that snorted, “Not a hell of a lot a help there.” Officer Lindsay, the uniformed officer securing the crime scene perimeter.

  But the flat Midwestern vowels that answered him--“At least he reported the crime instead of walking all over the scene and picking the victim clean.”--did break in. Zane Kerr’s voice jarred after so many years of John Garroway’s mellow drawl.

  Allison forced her attention back to odors. A deeper and slower second breath proved no more helpful than the first. She needed to be closer to the footprints for any hope of identifying the hunter’s scent.

  Lindsay’s voice rattled on. “And speaking of clean, Zane my man...you’re lookin’ fine this mornin’. You wear a suit pretty good for a white boy. I guess I can quit worryin’ that you desertin’ Patrol for Investigations is gonna disgrace Arenosa’s Finest sartorially. But I got to ask whose desk you assed on to get stuck with the Iron Maiden first off.”

  She headed for the footprints at the building entrance. Ident had finished with that area.

  “There’s nothing like jumping in with both feet and learning homicide investigation from the best.”

  In over his head, if he only knew.

  Hitching up her slacks, Allison crouched beside a barefoot print not overlying the victim’s. She touched one edge lightly. The soil felt gritty under her fingers, too loose and sandy to pick up. Her nose would have to go down to the print.

  Red and the light blue of a uniform shirt moving into her peripheral vision made her look up. Lindsay and Kerr stared at her from the sidewalk outside, Kerr all shoulders and flaming hair. With his expression that mixture of curiosity and fascination she caught on his face every time they worked out at the same time in the gym at the Police Training Center, or he served as uniformed assistance at her crime scenes.

  Allison swore at herself. The long partnership that blinded John Garroway to her quirks had made her careless. She needed to watch herself...and focus Kerr’s attention elsewhere. She lifted her brows at him. “Haven’t you started canvassing for witnesses yet?”

  Only when he turned away and headed for the yellow barrier tape did she return her attention to the footprints.

  2.

  Lindsay followed Zane under the tape, grinning. “You got your marching orders straight now?”

  Much as he liked Lindsay, Zane felt a flash of irritation. “Well, she is the lead investigator and me the detective trainee.”

  And of course he should have starting looking for witnesses as soon as Preacher John left. He wished he could watch Allison work, though, to see how she and Garroway racked up their astonishing record of solved cases.

  He still hardly believed his luck in working with her. Aside from her investigative reputation, she had intrigued him from the first time he saw her in the police gym after joining the department. Even discovering that half the officers in the department came from the same family and shared her build and coloring had not lessened his fascination. A pale blonde sylph over six feet tall would have caught his eye in any case, but a curious sense of recognition and a kind of electricity crackling around her had transfixed him. Even twenty feet away from her, waiting his turn at the climbing wall, the hair on his body prickled. Sweat soaked her cropped hair, but the way she ran effortlessly while male officers on adjoining treadmills strained to keep pace with her, Zane found himself with the crazy notion she sweated from the effort of restraining herself.

  After working with other officers in her family, he always wondered about that. In contrast to her, they all seemed such adrenaline junkies...opting for Watch Three or One on steady shifts rather than periodically work days, charging headlong into dark alleys and buildings without drawing their weapons, avid for hard foot chases and other physically demanding effort. T-shirts some wore at the gym epitomized their attitude: If you’re not living on the edge...you’re taking up too much room.

  The first encounter with Allison, however, all that lay in the future and he spent the rest of his workout and drive home searching his memory for a clue why she seemed familiar.

  Recognition came in the middle of the night, jerking him upright in bed. Of course. Tall, willow slim, fair, almost-silver eyes...she looked the way he always pictured Tolkien’s Elves in Lord of the Rings
.

  Now he worked with her. Working, she looked twice as elegant in those grey or ice blue silk slack suits she always wore. But he wished he knew what she expected to see in that footprint. Or was sight the sense she used? As a uniformed officer at a crime scene, he once heard Garroway joke that the way she knew a guilty suspect as soon as she walked up to him, she must be psychic. Maybe very intuitive, Zane reflected. She was left-handed and he remembered his psychology class in college discussing the high correlation between left handedness and pattern recognition. She took notes the way he read Leonardo DaVinci--another left-hander--had, writing backwards and right to left. Or maybe, considering the way she touched that footprint, her talent was--what was the term for sensing details about people through touching things they had...psychometry. It sounded fantastic, of course, but that line from Hamlet echoed in his head: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than you have dreamed in your philosophy. And Mr. Spock said that the universe would always be bigger and stranger than they could imagine.

  Lindsay’s grunt recaptured his attention. “She’s a senior investigator, too...been in Crimes Against Persons the ten years I’ve been on the job. But she don’t look any older than you. It’s like she went straight to Investigations from the academy.” His brows arched. “I wonder how.”

  The implication sharpened Zane’s irritation. “I’m more concerned with learning what someone dressed like our victim was doing in this neighborhood.”

  As Lindsay returned to his post at the barrier tape, Zane crossed the street, eyeing the building facing him. Like many others along this side of the bay, it had probably been a cotton or grain warehouse in the days Arenosa aspired to become a major port. Then whoever took it over when the cotton, grain, and sulphur shipping went north to Galveston subsequently went bust, too, and like so many in the area, now the building sat abandoned.

  Abandoned but not empty. All kinds of human driftwood washed up in the West Bay: the jobless and destitute, illegals in search of the promised land, runaways who equated Gulf Coast with an easy life in the sun...and individuals who had just checked out of society, or sunk under the weight of drug and alcohol addiction. Some squatted in this building, he knew. He just needed to find one willing to admit to seeing or hearing anything last night.

  A face peered between the boards nailed across a ground floor window. It ducked down almost immediately...not fast enough to avoid being recognized, however.

  “Blue! Blue, come here!”

  Footsteps pounded away inside. Grinning, Zane sprinted up the street and around the corner to the alley. Sometimes the flight impulse could be useful...certainly preferable to Blue holding up inside, where even a squad of searchers might never find him. Zane ducked into the cover of a chained door under a fire escape. When a scrawny figure in grimy, outsized desert camos dropped off the fire escape, Zane sprang for the shirt collar. “Stick around, bro.”

  Blue squealed as Zane’s grip jerked him to a halt, then went instantly into a whine, cringing inside the shirt. “I ain’t done nothin’.”

  Zane ticked his tongue. “Easy, partner. Today I don’t care about that crack pipe in your pocket. I just want to know what went down in the street and that building opposite last night.”

  “I didn’t see or hear nothin’.” But Blue’s eyes twitched sideways behind the greasy hair falling over them, and he shivered.

  Zane prodded him toward the end of the alley. “Tell it to Detective Goodnight.”

  3.

  Crouched over the tracks again and leaning down within inches of them, Allison drew in a breath. There. Now she had it. After another breath, she pushed to her feet, swearing silently. Despite the body’s injuries, she had clung to the hope that she might smell a human. But the feet that left these tracks and this scent had branched off the hominid root before Cro-Magnon ever emerged. A volke was responsible for this atrocity. One of her people.

  Or as historical humans and modern mythology called them...werewolves.

  To her relief, the scent belonged to no one in the Arenosa clan, and the lack of trace elements from the local environment also ruled out anyone in the surrounding area. Still, little as she wanted someone she knew responsible for this carnage, it would have closed the case blessedly fast. But all she could identify was a lingering trace of sex pheromones that established the hunter as female, in estrus.

  But who isn’t? Allison reflected wryly. Full moon coming on Sunday...the clan’s Spring Gathering this week end...four days at the hill country ranch without a human for miles.

  She shook off the surge of anticipatory heat. The hunter must be young for the pheromones to linger this long, maybe twenty or twenty-one, in one of her early cycles. That or she had repressed her sex drive for a long period and built up its intensity.

  “It is creepy, isn’t it?”

  She glanced over at Phil Castenado spooning plaster into one of the hunter’s footprints. “Excuse me?”

  He pointed to the tracks. “Weren’t you looking at those? Only toe prints of the victim’s shoes--he’s running for his life--but the killer’s almost flat footed.”

  Just loping along behind him, taking her time...enjoying herself while she terrorized her victim. Who the hell are you, cousin...butchering innocents in my territory and jeopardizing the safety of my clan!

  Immediate awareness of the volke might have faded from humans, but they had not been forgotten.

  “Humans have racial memory, too,” her grandmother Honora warned her years ago. “Only, where ours prepare our children for what Shifting will be, humans carry fear and hatred of us. Look at their antipathy toward left-handedness. Somewhere deep they remember that we couldn’t be driven to extinction, and although they own the planet because they breed like rabbits, we’re still around.”

  The image of Great-grandmother Thérèse flashed in Allison’s head, sole survivor of a clan slaughtered after a killing like this betrayed their presence to the human villagers. Her jaw tightened. Damn if she would let that happen here! “How soon before we have access to the body?”

  “Any minute now. Call the wagon.”

  Returning her cell phone to her jacket pocket after contacting the morgue, she heard Lindsay laugh outside. “Good hunting. I hope you don’t have to put him on the stand, though.”

  “I didn’t see nothin’,” another voice whined.

  He sounded like a prize. She stepped out onto the sidewalk to see for herself, and sighed. A prize indeed. He stank of unwashed skin, soiled clothing, and rotting teeth. “And this is...?”

  Kerr said, “He’s called Blue.”

  “Sometimes Tweaker Blue,” Lindsay added.

  A crackhead. Probably no use. “Blue, what can you tell us about last night?”

  He shrank inside his shirt. “Nothin’!”

  A lie. Feral eyes avoided hers and she smelled his anxiety.

  Kerr pulled his billfold from a hip pocket and fished out a twenty dollar bill.

  Blue came on point.

  “There’s a dead man in this building.” Kerr pulled the bill between his fingers, making it crackle. “You didn’t hear him screaming, or see the guy chasing him?”

  Blue stared hungrily at the twenty, watching every movement. “Okay...yeah...I heard him. And I seen him. But it wasn’t no dude chasing him.”

  Allison forced herself to remain relaxed despite a shot of icy fire through her. “Who was chasing him?” It would be nice to question Blue alone, except doing that might arouse unwelcome curiosity in Kerr and Lindsay.

  “Wasn’t a who.” Blue hunched his shoulders. “I thought at first it was one of those fucking monster dogs you run through here at night...but there wasn’t no cop with it and...” He licked his lips. “I seen this movie once about this giant dog running around in England killing people. This was like that...coal black, huge fangs, eyes like fire.” The acid reek of his fear assaulted Allison. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Straight outa fucking Hell.”

  Beyond him, Lindsa
y’s eyes rolled.

  Good. She wanted the others in a state of disbelief. “What time was this?”

  Blue scowled. “Hell, how do I know. I don’t have no watch. It was dark.”

  Lindsay shook his head. Wasting your time, the gesture said.

  Kerr, though, eyed Blue thoughtfully. He toyed with the bill. “Did you notice if the police watch had changed?”

  Good question to ask, Allison reflected.

  Blue’s gaze followed the twenty. “Yeah, it had. Officer Gary-fucking-Golden drove by a while before.”

  After eleven, then, since her fellow volke came on duty then, working Watch One. “Was the trolley still running?”

  A sneer flickered in the feral eyes. “It don’t never run this side of the bay.”

  Not for decades, though the tracks remained from the days it carried passengers to the train depot and deep water piers. Now it just looped down North Bayside Boulevard and up Avenue A. “You can still hear the bells from here.”

  The bill crackled between Kerr’s fingers.

  Blue almost salivated. “Yeah, okay...I guess I remember hearing them.”

  After eleven and before two-thirty, then. The one car operating this time of year made its last run half an hour after the bars closed. If Gary remembered what time he drove down Lavaca, that would narrow the time even more.

  Blue’s voice returned to a whine. “That’s all I know. Can I go?”

  Kerr glanced at Allison. She tried to think of another time indicator, and remembered the fire sirens she heard around one while running in the park with her family. “Do you remember fire sirens last night?”

  Kerr waggled the bill. Blue’s eyes squinted with the effort to think. After a minute he nodded.

  “Did you hear them before or after you saw the Hellhound?”

  “After.”