Authors: A.J. Aalto
Chapel smiled to disarm. “I'm sure we can cooperate while Declan finishes his preternatural anthropology project, at least for the next few months.”
“Anthropology, my ass, he's just writing some glossy tabloid-caliber tell-all.” I thumped the iPad with my finger, hard. “I won't even get into the glaring error in the title. This is an unauthorized biography.”
“No, Dr. Baranuik,” Dr. Edgar said calmly, moving his iPad to safety, “I assure you, this is to be a respectful and detailed record of history, with no salacious rumors or hearsay. Surely you can see the value in interviewing a man who's been around since the late—”
“No, clearly you don't see the
danger
in interviewing a man who's been around since the sixteenth century. Unless you're Anne Rice in disguise, Dr. Edgar, this interview isn't going to go well.”
“Let's focus on the case for the time being, please. We have three missing people, and now there's this.” Chapel opened a file folder and presented us with a wide spread of color photographs. The first few were animals: a wolverine, something that might have been a dog or a wolf, each missing their reproductive organs bits, some with their skulls cracked open, nothing too unusual. Probably they had died weeks ago, exposed to the elements, and together insects, weather, and other wildlife had reduced them to ugly carcasses. I crooked my head sideways and noticed that each of them were only partly skeletonized; fur remained intact, flesh also in most places; it was like someone or something gouged out the midsection.
The next was a picture of a man, face down on the pebbles at the edge of a clear lake in full sun, half-in and half-out of the water. His longish brown hair was curled by moisture and fell forward over his face. His skin tone was pale, no livor mortis and no slippage. In this photo, he looked like a tired swimmer taking a nap clad in nothing but the upper half of a shredded fursuit,
sans
helmet.
The next picture showed the ME's people taking the body, still face down, out of the water, and with the other men present for scale, I could suddenly tell the startling size of the corpse. The dead guy had to be over six-six, probably closer to six-eight, and if he rolled-in at under three hundred pounds I'd have been surprised. Beneath the hem of the top half of the costume, his bare buttocks were pale and round, like two plump balls of rising dough. It seemed to me that no one should ever have to see his butt like that without his permission, naked and exposed in the harsh glare of daylight.
“Guess this guy didn't make the party at Count Creepy's Fortress of Doom?” Dr. Edgar leaned toward me as if he was going to get an explanation, and I ignored him. “We have an ID?”
“Nineteen-year-old liberal arts student from Michigan. Cosmo Winkle.”
My lips clamped down harder than they'd done in a long time and frantically I self-scolded:
No laughing at the vic's name!
while my brain chanted
Cosmo Winkle, Cosmo Winkle!
like the seven-year-old delinquent it so often is.
“He's one of our missing,” Chapel confirmed, when I couldn't trust myself to ask. “According to his friends, he wasn't heavily invested in the lifestyle. It was his first Fur Con.”
Cautious of my wavering voice, I read aloud, “Says best friend Jerry Cook: ‘Cosmo was only attending LoDo FurCon because of a girl they'd met at a heavy metal bar called Maurette's.’ The bar is a known hangout for revenants. Really?” I looked up from the file. “There are only a handful of real revenants in Colorado. It's not exactly the best climate for them. They have their own bar?”
Chapel's answer was a nod. “A bar catering to the lifestyle, I'm assuming.”
The lifestyle. Dressing up, playing make-believe, feeding real revenants?
“The girl is another one of our missing persons?” I asked.
“Anne Bennett-Dixon, twenty-three,” Chapel confirmed.
The last photograph showed the young man on his back, and gorge rose enough that both Dr. Edgar's little pet project and the victim's amusing name lurched right out of my mind. Between the costume's top and a neatly groomed patch of pubic hair, his abdomen yawned open, empty of guts, the surrounding tissue shredded. I could all too easily imagine clawed hands, rotten teeth, and probing tongues slurping out the victim's innards.
Tongues, plural? I thought about this. No, just one tongue. One disgusting, dried-up tongue, wizened like a prune.
Why are we going there?
But the answer to that was simple:
Malas. Malas and that old
,
grey thing in his mouth.
My voice came out a lot calmer than I felt; thanks to Harry's persistent training, I was getting good at hiding the willies.
“Man, I hope she was worth it.”
Chapel paused to raise an eyebrow at me questioningly, and I nodded for him to continue. “Before winding up on the shoreline, Mr. Winkle was couch surfing at friends’ homes, including Mr. Cook's apartment, so he could do some whitewater rafting at Shoshone rapids, near Glenwood Springs. He and Mr. Cook were planning to do Gore Canyon next.”
“That system links up with Shaw's Fist,” I said, mostly to myself. “Eventually. Were they experienced rafters? Was this an accident? Take on more than they could –” I stopped before the word
swallow
because my tongue rolled up in my throat.
Rafting at night to show off for a girl?
Some of those technical rapids were pretty brutal and quite possibly fatal if you took them wrong. Rocks and water don't
usually disembowel and deglove a body like that. Whatever Cosmo had suffered, it was more than just a bumpy ride.
“We've managed to put together most of his activity over his last few days. He and his friends did a series of advanced rapid runs, including Clear Creek's lower end,” Chapel said.
“Not beginners,” I noted. “Daring guys, to face Hell's Corner and Double Knife.”
“You sound like a rafter yourself, Dr. Baranuik,” Dr. Edgar said. “Do you participate in the sport?”
“That's not relevant. They did this more than once?”
“Twice last week,” Chapel confirmed, consulting his laptop.
“Sounding more and more like extreme sports gone wrong,” I said.
Not seeing the ripped-out guts, not seeing the ripped-out guts
. “Any head trauma?”
Chapel shook his. “No head trauma, no bumps, bruises or defensive wounds.”
“None at all?” I sat back, not liking the sound of that.
“He just stood there while someone or something emptied his viscera? That doesn't sound right,” Dr. Edgar agreed.
Chapel continued, “Wednesday night he joined Anne at Fur Con's opening ceremonies. He was last seen at a house party on this lake, when he went outside to relieve himself. He placed a call to Mr. Cook, drunk and excited.”
“Drunk dialing isn't exactly reliable evidence,” I said. “Drunk people say all kinds of things.”
And they don't tear their own livers out, either
.
“Winkle told his friend he had found ‘a wicked dark spot’ in the shallows, and told Mr. Cook to come immediately. He started giving driving directions. Mr. Cook was playing Halo and told Mr. Winkle to, quote, ‘go fuck himself.’ at which point Winkle's phone went dead. Cook assumed he'd hung up.”
The report by the police detective who interviewed Cook stated this was when Mr. Cook broke down and began to sob, followed by dry heaves, blaming himself in that way that makes no logical sense but happens nevertheless. “Did Winkle take any pics with his cell phone?”
“We didn't find any photos of the lake on his phone,” he said carefully, making me wonder what other pictures they had recovered. “We've found a witness that can place the other two missing persons,
Anne Bennett-Dixon, exotic dancer, and Roger Kelly, thirty-eight, dentist, were both at the same party. It's believed that they left together some time after midnight. Mr. Kelly's wife reported him missing when he didn't come home that night.”
Declan said softly, as though thinking aloud, “Something in this lake is feeding indiscriminately.”
“Hold on,” I said, frowning at the remarkable lack of science in the office. “I don't think you can jump to that conclusion, just because some drunk guy saw a ‘dark spot’? It could have been a piece of plastic or a sunken log, or who knows what. He didn't even describe this ‘wicked’ something to Cook.”
“And the dead animals?”
I gave him a long blink. “They're just that. Dead animals.”
“Devoured.”
“A lot of perfectly natural conditions and organisms can de-flesh, desiccate, or disarticulate a corpse, Dr. Edgar, you know this.”
Chapel said, “Assuming it is something preternatural, what could be in the lake, feeding?”
I fought not to glare at Chapel; we
never
assumed it was something preternatural. Was he testing the new guy?
Declan shook his head. “I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that, but we have several interesting clues.” He scooted forward in his chair to point across the desk at the close-up of some wounds high in the crook of Winkle's thigh with seeming satisfaction. “Do those look like fang marks to you, Dr. Baranuik?”
“They do not,” I said firmly. “For one thing, there's only one; generally speaking, fangs come in pairs. For another, it's not a penetrating wound, it's a surface scratch.”
“You can tell it's not a puncture wound by a photograph?”
“Can't you? Just because you want this to be something paranormal doesn't mean it is. Could be a serial killer with a thing for organ meat. Oh…” I pressed my spine into the chair. “I think I just grossed myself out. I need a second.”
My cell phone vibrated. Praying it wasn't the French dude choking on his tongue again, I checked it while I moved Chapel's file folder closer. The cottage was described as the location of a suspected homicide on the initial call-in.
A text message from Batten:
You're in the building
. Did Agent Long Legs rat me out to Jerkface? Great. I'd made an enemy at the PCU within my first official hour; I'm smooth like that. I sucked my teeth, and thumbed,
How'd you know
?
There was no reply right away, so I started to scan the initial report: no ms-lipotropin, V-telomerase or signs of necrosis that would indicate a revenant bite. I thought to mention this to Dr. Edgar when Batten's answer buzzed me.
My dick got hard
.
With a surprised cough, I fumbled the phone and the file folder up into the air, sending a cascade of papers to the floor. Declan shot out of his seat to help me pick them up while I stuffed the offending phone deep into my back pocket. Not someone who usually blushes easily, I was hot in the cheeks because of Batten for the second time today. It was suddenly eight thousand degrees in Chapel's air-conditioned office and my shoes weren't the only thing that was wet.
“Is everything all right?” Declan asked from one knee. His peculiar emerald gaze, privately hidden from Chapel by the blocky body of the desk, said he knew differently. I frowned.
“Perfectly,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Standing with my pile of papers crammed under my arm, I asked Chapel, “Results from the autopsy?”
“Samples from the tissue surrounding the excise wounds and the marks on the thigh are being sent for further analysis, though initial toxicology reports didn't show any indication of revenant activity.”
“Until they get here, I'll study these in my office, Agent Chapel. Where are we going? When do we leave? I have a go-bag packed, I'm ready to jet.”
Chapel said, “We're not going anywhere, Marnie; that lake is Shaw's Fist.”
I blinked as though he'd casually flicked me between the eyebrows. “That's not possible. There's nothing in that lake but fish. I swim in it almost every day.”
“The address is on the other side of the lake, number 14D.”
“One of those decrepit old fish shack rentals at the camp with the fake sandy beach?”
His nod confirmed it.
“I've got to get home.”
“Stay out of the water, Marnie. The team will be about an hour behind you.”
“Let me join you, Dr. Baranuik.” Declan gathered his things in a tidy stack, laying his coat over his arm and hooking his umbrella on his forearm. He touched a blackthorn walking staff that had been leaning in the corner. I didn't wait for him.
He caught up with my small-legged stride easily near the elevator and his hand shot out more quickly than mine to press for ground floor. Standing beside me, I noticed that he was somewhat short for a man, barely four inches taller than me. He was solid as opposed to lean, but carried it well, like he'd been heavier in the past and his current state was a marked improvement. He had a bit of a belly, but he tucked his shirt tightly in around it, smoothed flat against his flesh, not trying to hide anything. He had fine, small hands and wore two rings, both white gold, one with a knotted snake design and the other a small, discreet sigil.
My phone buzzed, indicating another text. I studiously ignored it while my genitals wondered what Batten had in mind: a covert quickie in his office, up against the back of his door, hands fumbling, mouths hungry, panting, driving, moaning?
Humina humina hell yes.
The phone chirped again, and I looked up to watch the elevator lights.
Declan cleared his throat. “I think that's your phone, doctor.”
“You can stop calling me doctor,” I sighed. “People only ever say it to me sarcastically. Grates on my nerves.”
“I had no idea,” he said. “What should I call you?”
I lowered my voice. “Look, I'm not going to put up with your so-called record of history, Declan Edgar, and I'm not going to tell you a goddamned thing about Harry or the other Dreppenstedts. Also: change your dim-witted title. Dreppenstedt is not the oldest bloodline, not even close.”
“Now that you've gone and opened a book on that, could you explain?”
“No.” I jammed a finger at his chest. “Don't be fooled by all this nicey-nice bullshit I'm forced to spew at work. I run my lab like you have sex —
alone
. As a boss, I'll be about as much fun as a piggyback on a buzz saw.”
“Should I just call you Dr. Buzz, then?”
“Soul-sucking megabitch, that's what you should call me.”
I didn't expect a sly grin, but that's what he showed me. “That'd be grand, but I don't think Agent Chapel would approve.”