Bare Bones (15 page)

“I haven’t seen Brian since he came here,” Lisa Huang stated, her voice flat and emotionless. “He’s been strange since the day the body was found in the museum, though. It’s like that morning he woke up a completely different person.”

Tremelay glanced at the children, then back at the wife. “How was he different?”

She swallowed a few times, reaching out to touch her son’s shoulder. “He didn’t like his favorite foods anymore. His taste in music changed from classic rock to rap. He stopped spending time with the children. He used to love to go to Jack’s soccer games, but I had to drag him to the one this week.”

“He was sneaking out at night,” the girl spoke up, eyes glistening with tears. “I was up late texting some friends, and I saw him. I stayed up waiting for him, and he didn’t come home until close to dawn. Same thing the next night, too.”

“I saw him with this young guy,” the boy added. “College-age white guy. Backpack, baggy jeans, T-shirt from some local band. Twice I saw Dad with him, and once they were with a girl. She looked younger, high school maybe. Caucasian with pink and blue in her hair. Lots of make-up.”

Lisa put her head in her hands. “The Brian I married would never cheat on me, and especially not with a teenage girl, but the last few days he hasn’t been the Brian I married. When he came home and said they found a body at the museum, he seemed panicked. I mean, it’s got to be unsettling to have a murder at your workplace, but Brian was scared. I got the feeling he knew the dead man. Or maybe knew the man who killed him.”

The father spoke rapidly in Chinese, ending with an emphatic slam of his fist on the table.

Lisa winced. “Maybe these other two got him involved with the murderer. Maybe the murderer is a friend of his, and it’s got nothing to do with whether he’s having an affair or not. Either way, I’m sure Brian knows something.”

“What did his father say?” I asked.

The wife’s eyes met mine. “That Brian is not his son. He said that a monster has taken Brian’s body, because that man is not his son.”

A chill ran through me and I turned my attention to the father. Had he meant that metaphorically? Maybe the supernatural events last month were clouding my judgement, but I thought he meant that literally.

What monster takes over a person’s body? Immediately I thought of demons, then remembered the failed exorcism of Bradley Lewis. Amanda had been convinced of the same. She’d been sure that whoever had been walking around in her brother’s skin wasn’t actually her brother. But if not demons, then what?

Skin. I remembered the odd coincidence of the implant, the skinned corpse in the museum. The guy’s skin in the backpack. Had the college-guy been Bradley Lewis? Were all three killers? Three non-human killers who took a person’s skin and walked around in their bodies?

Norwicki stepped to the table and placed a sheet with a grid of photos in front of the boy. “Can you identify the guy you saw your Dad with? Are any of these photos that man?”

The boy scanned down the list, placing a finger on one picture. “This one. Only his hair’s a little shorter now.”

Bradley Lewis. The detective had him put his initials next to the photo, then swapped the sheet for another, this one with rows of female head shots. “Are any of these the girl he was with?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I pulled out my cell phone, scrolling through the pictures. “How about her?”

Jack winced at the photo of his dad hugging the teenage girl. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Where’d you take that?” Norwicki demanded.

“Outside the police station,” I told him smugly. “She was waiting for him.” I saw the pained look on Lisa Huang’s face and quickly added, It wasn’t a passionate embrace. They were both crying.”

I don’t think that made the woman feel any better about the situation. I ached for her, really I did, but there was a connection between Bradley Lewis, Brian Huang, and this girl. I thought back to when I first saw her at the Inner Harbor and wondered what happened to the boy she’d been with, the one who I’d assumed was a verbally abusive brother.

“Do you have a photo of, um, of the contents of Bradley Lewis’s backpack?” I asked Tremelay. I spoke in hushed tones, but didn’t want to risk letting the Huang family know that the murders involved skinned bodies.

An expression of revulsion crossed the detective’s face. “No. I have a picture from when the kid went missing at six years of age, but not his…um, his current situation.”

Not that it would have helped. I doubted I could have recognized anyone from an oddly tanned skin. Still, I wondered if the boy at the Harbor had been a victim. If not, where was he in all of this? He’d called the girl Becca or something, and the missing friend had an odd name—Lawson?

Lawton. And the skin in the backpack had belonged to Lawton King, a sixteen-year-old boy from South Carolina. Like Tremelay, I was beginning to think there was no such thing as a coincidence. The girl was involved, the missing friend was found dead. I had no idea how Bradley Lewis tied in to this, or who the rude brother from the Inner Harbor was, but somehow all five of these people were involved.

Tremelay turned back toward Lisa Huang, asking her further questions about her husband’s behavior and associations. I tuned them out, thinking about the three, possibly four or even five individuals involved.

Putting aside the teen girl, her friend/brother from the Inner Harbor, and the mysterious Lawton kid, we had two suspects. Brian Huang and Bradley Lewis, both of whom had experienced sudden personality changes last week. Both of whom family members described as being a sort of doppelganger, an imposter in their son or brother’s body. If I hadn’t witnessed a failed exorcism, I’d be thinking demonic possession.

As it stood, I was just as baffled as the police. More baffled, actually, since they were looking for a team of serial killers and I…well, I wasn’t sure
what
I was thinking at this point. The police could be right, but I was beginning to wonder if this killing spree was at the hand of a non-human murderer. Or murderers. If I was right, then Tremelay was really going to need my help. And fast, because any paranormal creature that killed and assumed their victim’s identity, who tore the skins off their prey was not going to be stopped by the Baltimore PD

Which was why I needed to get my butt back home and do some research.

T
HE PETERSON BOOK
was open on the couch, but it was what I saw in the kitchen that had me shaking my head. Flour covered the counter tops, spilling in a heap of white powder on the floor. The broken bag lay in the sink. It looked like someone had yanked it from the cabinet, ripped the bag open, and shook it all over my kitchen.

I shouldn’t even
own
flour. I couldn’t cook anything beyond heat-and-serve. When I’d moved in, I’d stupidly bought what everyone told me were kitchen staples—flour, sugar, spices, baking soda, yeast. I wasn’t sure the yeast was still good by this point. The flour certainly wasn’t, now that it was mostly on my floor.

Grumbling to myself, I got the dustpan and broom. Dario was north of the city, and it was daytime. Even if it
were
night, I couldn’t imagine him sneaking into my apartment and having a field day with baking supplies. My apartment was warded against entry by anyone else. Obviously this was an inside job, which meant my fox named “V” was the culprit.

Why would “V” do this? Was he trying to tell me something? Something to do with kitchens or flour, or baking? Maybe ghosts? In cartoons, people dumped flour over themselves and were mistaken for ghosts.

I realized what was going on when I went to throw my first dust pan full of flour away. By the trash can was another mess of white powder, the fox figurine on its side at the edge. He’d drawn a “V”, but once I got a good look at it I realized the mark in the flour wasn’t truly a “V” after all. It was a checkmark with the extensions at each end jutting outward at a perpendicular angle.

The equivalent of a stick figure bird.

“Raven?” My voice shook as I picked up the fox and cleaned it off. The eyes glittered at me, but there was no confirmation of my theory. “Raven, is that you?”

It had to be her. I didn’t know anyone named “V”. Raven had died violently with unfinished business. She’d vowed to help me with the demon mark. My friend was so stubborn, so strong-willed, that I could completely see her sticking around this world, forgoing the afterlife to help me as she’d promised.

But how could she help me when she couldn’t do much more than roll around, knock books over, and write a checkmark in flour? How the heck were we going to communicate if she couldn’t speak? Or even write.

I placed Raven on the kitchen counter and ran to my room, digging into a box of miscellaneous stuff that I’d brought with me when I’d moved from my parents’ house. Yarn. A photo album. One of those adult coloring books with crayons. Slippers. And a white board. Sadly only two of the dry-erase markers were still working, but it should do. I brought them out and placed them on the dining room table.

“At night I’ll put you next to this and hopefully you can leave me messages. I’ll even uncap the markers each night to make it easier for you.”

Even then, she might not be able to do much. The fox figurine had no movable parts, no opposable thumbs. How Raven was going to hold a marker steady enough to write, was beyond me. Although there had to be some way she could manipulate her surroundings. Poltergeists could write, could pick up and throw objects. If those spirits could do it without corporeal form, Raven should be able to. Then Russell’s words came back to me. It might take her time. It might take her longer than my lifetime.

I refused to believe that, so I grabbed the fox and plopped down on the sofa, Peterson’s
Monsters of the New World
on my lap. “Okay, I know you’ve been insistent about this book. Does it have to do with the skinning murders? Because the Huang family gave me the idea that this might not be a serial killer who has a sick thing for taxidermy, but something else entirely. What type of creature skins their victims and then assumes their identity?”

I flipped through the book, stopping at Native American Skinwalkers. They were a type of magic user who used animal skins to assume that form and gain the powers of that particular animal, as well as cross the veil. More than just the normal animal abilities of the wolf, panther, or bear, the mage would gain the symbolic powers that the animal held in the spirit world.

Wow. I wondered how long it took them to be able to do that. If they mastered one animal, were they able to master another or only remain proficient in transformation to the one? I looked further, noting that the majority of documented practitioners were of Navaho descent, although others had claimed to have achieved this level of skill over the past few centuries. There were also conflicting claims as to whether the person who performed this was evil or not. Navaho legend said the magic user had to kill a close family member in order to gain the ability, and then used the animal skins to go around killing other humans.

I closed my eyes and envisioned two or three Native Americans running around Baltimore and killing people to assume their identity. A museum employee. The deadbeat brother of an investment guru. A high school girl.

I couldn’t see it. Assuming an animal form like an owl? Yes. Assuming the identities and forms of
those
three humans? No. Well, maybe the investment guru if they hadn’t been interrupted and Amanda Lewis had been skinned. One of them might have wanted to play the market and win, but why her jobless brother?

And all that was assuming the technique even
worked
with human skins. Things weren’t interchangeable in the magical world. Plus some accounts claimed these people were practicing their magic for a higher purpose. Murdering people and assuming their identity wasn’t in keeping with that higher purpose.

So, theory one was that the murderers were the evil version of the Native American skinwalkers.

I picked up another book, determined to explore all options. Selkie. Nope, they were human with a seal skin. A Chinese fox-spirit was said to be able to assume human form, but there was nothing I could find about them wearing their victim’s skin. In fact, the fox-spirit seemed to use its victim’s heart to maintain its human appearance.

I wasn’t willing to rule out demons, although that would mean that Father Bernard’s exorcism wasn’t correctly done. It
was
a possibility.

Theory two: demonic possession.

Shapeshifters? But they shouldn’t need a skin to assume a human form. Still, I glanced through
Transformative Beasts
. Most shapeshifters, including werewolves, changed back and forth between their primary human form and their animal one without any external aid. These creatures weren’t able to shift into other animals or humans—just the two. But there
were
several types of shapeshifters who could shift into a variety of animals as well as humans. One reportedly killed and took the victim’s identity, but there was no mention of it needing the skin for this.

I wasn’t going to rule that out either. Maybe the shapeshifter was just using the skinned body as a way to delay identification and the skin was a sort of focus in transforming into that appearance.

Theory three: shapeshifters.

Perhaps aliens? Like in that pod-people movie? Oh sheesh, I just couldn’t go there. So basically I was looking at shapeshifters, demons, or evil skinwalkers who had crossed the line and started wearing human instead of animal skins.

“What do you think? I asked Raven. There was no reply, but I could swear I saw the figurine wobble. “I think I better call Dad and see what he has to say about this.”

I picked up my phone and nearly jumped from my seat as it rang in my hands. It wasn’t my father with some psychic awareness that I needed him, it was Dario.

“Hey! Better night tonight?” It was just after sunset, so I doubted there had been enough time for things to go south yet. He was probably just calling in response to my cheesy text.