Bare Bones (20 page)

The guy sounded pretty safety-conscious so far. Well, as safety conscious as a man picking up three hitchhikers could be. I waited for the gruesome part of the story, and wasn’t disappointed.

“We stopped for gas in Roanoke. They got out and stretched, said they wanted to keep going with me. I felt kinda bad for them back there in the bed of the truck for hours, wet as they were, so I bought them some coffee and snacks at the quick mart. We didn’t stop again until that rest stop on 70 between Hagerstown and Frederick. I had a few phone calls to make and the three of them went into the rest stop. It had been a while, so I went in to check on them, tell them I needed to get going. That’s when I saw it.”

Squeak, squeak, squeak. I held my breath, waiting for dead, skinned teenagers at the rest stop.

“They had some guy on the floor of the handicapped stall, naked with his clothes in the sink. I could see the blood on the floor, hear cutting noises, like they were slicing them up. I looked around the corner, just to see what was going on. The one boy had this long curved knife that looked like it came right out of his finger. He was using it to peel the skin from the man and was yelling at the others, telling them that they needed to get with the program, that they needed to grow up and start getting their own skins because he wasn’t going to do it for them like Grandmother did. The other boy was crying and gagging like he was going to puke. The girl kept saying she didn’t want this guy, arguing that the one boy didn’t have any reason to kill the man or need for his skin when he had a perfectly good one he was wearing right now. That’s when I ran.”

“You got in your car and drove off.” I added. It’s what I would have done.

Stu shook his head. “I ran into the bushes and threw up. Then I hid there for a while. My phone was in the car, and I was scared that they’d seen me, that they were after me. After half an hour or so, I got up my nerve and bolted to my car. They were in the bed like nothing happened, chatting with each other, sharing a soda. None of them had a spot of blood on them, and I wondered if I was crazy, if I’d imagined it all. I didn’t know what to do so I got in and kept going. Parked the car on Charles Street, took the knives to the museum. The kids weren’t in the truck when I got back, so I got the heck out of there and went home.”

“You drove an hour with three murderers in the back of your truck?” Tremelay’s voice was as squeaky as the bench, his eyes huge as he leaned closer toward Stu.

The man nodded. “I’d been driving for twelve hours, hadn’t slept in days. I’d been living on Slim Jims and Red Bull. There was other people at that rest stop. Nobody screamed. I was the only one who seemed to have seen anything. And when I got back to the truck, there them kids sat, chatting away like nothing happened, not a spot of blood anywhere… I thought maybe I imagined it. Then I read that there’s this crazy running around the city skinning people and I thought maybe I
hadn’t
imagined it.”

Tremelay sighed. “Can you come down to the station and describe them enough for a sketch artist?”

“I took pictures.” Stu pulled out his cell phone and handed it to Tremelay. I looked over his shoulder at the blurry photos, taken through the back glass of a pick-up window.

They might have been blurry, but between the five snapshots, I had enough to make out their faces. Becca with her thick eyeliner and colorfully accented hair. The Goth-looking boy that was with her at the Inner Harbor. And a third boy with dark brown skin and wide, terrified eyes.

There was something in those eyes that reminded me of Huang.

“I’ll bet that’s Lawton King,” Tremelay told me, pointing to the picture of the frightened boy. “I’m not positive. The only picture we’ve got was from when he was six. That and…you, know. The backpack.”

The skin in the backpack. But where was Lawton King’s body? Or maybe Lawton King hadn’t always been Lawton King.

“The girl and possibly King, but that’s it. None of these three are Bradley Lewis,” Tremelay said, disappointed. Still, he forwarded the pictures to both his and my cell phones.

“I think Bradley might be a victim,” I told him. “This boy took his identity, and this other boy, maybe-Lawton, took Huang’s.”

“They called him Gary,” Stu pointed to the Goth-looking boy. “He was clearly in charge. I think maybe he was older or something. He was the one doing the skinning in the bathroom.”

Gary. Becca. Maybe-Lawton. “Did this boy have a name?” I pointed to the one with the haunted eyes.

“Landon or Lawson or something. Felt bad for that kid. Seemed like they’d dragged him along and he was in over his head.”

I squirmed with excitement. Although we had a long way to go to catch these guys, at least we had a clue where they’d come from and who they were. Gary, the jerk from the Harbor, the one who’d said he needed to “change” and get some money from his bitch of a sister. He had become Bradley Lewis. Lawton, the one who’d missed the meeting because of his kid’s soccer game—the one his wife had forced him to go to, he’d become Brian Huang. And Becca, the vampire obsessed girl. Well, she’d gotten her vampire. Whether she was still alive or had caught a ray of sunlight and burned to death was still unknown.

“So, where do you think they put the skin from the rest stop?” I asked Stu.

“Probably a backpack. They each had one. They were dark green, so I couldn’t tell if there was blood on the packs or not. I didn’t see any blood in the back of my truck when I was unloading. That’s why I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing.”

“Was this guy working at the museum the night you dropped off the knives?” Tremelay asked, sliding a picture of Brian Huang in front of Stu.

“Yeah, he was there. There was the woman who signed for them. She’s in charge of the armory and weapons exhibits. Elsa Cartwright. There was another guy who was a security guard. I think this guy in the picture was cataloging something. I remember as Ms. Cartwright and I were leaving, he called out that he’d probably be another hour before he could go home. She reminded him that he needed to be in early the next morning for some special function. Calligraphy or something.”

“And the kids weren’t in the truck when you came out of the museum?” the detective asked.

Stu shook his head. Tremelay thanked the man, handing him his card as he stood and motioned for me to follow him.

“I don’t know what to think,” the detective grumbled. “Three kids. Do you think they hooked up with Brian Huang and later with Bradley Lewis? Are we looking for five instead of two killers?”

“No, we’re looking for three.” I told him about my suspicions.

“Huang was pathetic.” Tremelay leaned against my car as we spoke, flicking through his notebook. “Think that Gary guy killed him and made Lawton wear his skin?”

“I don’t know. I want to believe Lawton/Huang when he said he hadn’t killed anybody, but skinwalkers need to kill in order to gain the power. Plus I don’t think that one can wear a skin they haven’t taken themselves.”

The detective shook his head. “Either way, he’s killed
someone
. And this Gary kid killed Bradley and Amanda Lewis. Although where Bradley Lewis’s body went to is anybody’s guess. We’ve got Huang’s body and skin accounted for. Lawton’s skin but no body. And an as-yet unidentified body from the cooler.”

“That could be Bradley Lewis,” I told him.

“Maybe. It takes forever for the damned DNA lab. Wish we had a quicker way of doing this.”

Another thing I’d need to research. If Chuck could identify the owner of an object by killing a few chickens, I should be able to figure out a non-death magic spell to do the same with skins and bodies. Kind of a magical DNA test.

“Walk with me,” Tremelay pushed away from the car. “Let’s get coffee and go over all this.”

I followed him. “It’s looking like skinwalkers, even though that leaves a few loose ends. It’s the most logical conclusion to all this.”

“Then what’s the girl doing?” The detective asked. “No one saw or mentioned her since she was hugging Huang in the station parking lot, then she’s suddenly in Hampton killing vampires?”

“She’s got a fixation with them and Gary wouldn’t help her,” I told Tremelay. “He was making fun of her. I saw the pair of them at the Inner Harbor the morning after the Walters murder and eavesdropped because she was talking about vampires and he was being such a jerk. I recognized her when she was with Huang at the station and started connecting the dots. But I think they’ve split for good. At least, Becca and the two boys have. Lawton is obviously trying to get back to South Carolina, and who knows what’s on Gary’s mind.”

“Lawton will probably go back to Gary. He’s scared and he doesn’t have any money or way to get home. Gary is all he knows. Wait. There really
are
vampires?” Tremelay stopped so quickly I almost ran into the back of him. “And that black guy who was in your apartment when we arrested the mages last month,
he’s
a vampire?”

“Yeah. But these skinwalkers are more important right now.” I’d purposely kept this from Tremelay, not wanting to overwhelm him. Demons, angels, and mages who sacrificed other humans was enough to digest in the course of a month. I’d hoped to wait a bit more before revealing all this to him.

And I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with questions about the vampires either. Tremelay had to have watched the movies, read the books, heard the legends. He’d want to know how they fed, how humans played into their lives.

“This is all starting to come together,” I told him. “If these three kids that Stu picked up in South Carolina are skinwalkers, then in addition to their regular teenage identities, they’ve got Bradley Lewis, and a vampire north of the city. I don’t know if they’ve taken any other skins, so we’ll need to act fast.”

“If they keep changing their identities, we’ll never catch them,” the detective mused, stopping at a food truck and ordering two coffees.

“Exactly. Luckily the vampire one will probably be the easiest to catch. She can only go out at night, and she’ll be easily picked up if she comes close to any of the other vampires.”

“If they catch her, then she might be able to lead us to the other two,” Tremelay said.

I nodded. “The catch is I’m not one hundred percent positive what sort of monster these three are. Most likely, they’re skinwalkers, but they
might
be shapeshifters. Also, it’s a long shot, but I don’t want to rule out the Aztec god thing too soon.”

“A god?” Tremelay handed me a coffee. “Seriously? And I thought demons were bad. Why couldn’t we just have a crazy serial killer? Why an Aztec god?”

“Probably not the Aztec god,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m leaning toward skinwalker, but I need more information to narrow it down. That’s why I wanted to go up to Jessup.”

“Charles Kennedy Jones.” Tremelay nodded. “You’ve got it, Ainsworth. Be at Jessup at two this afternoon, and I’ll make sure he’s ready and waiting.”

T
HERE WAS NO
note from Raven when I got home, either on my laptop or on the dry erase board. I tried hard to hide my disappointment and worry, chatting cheerfully with her about the Stu interview and my pending visit to Jessup as I got ready to go. The little fox figurine hadn’t moved from the table, its eyes still dull. Had breaking the coffee cup taken that much out of her? Raven never was able to manage her temper, and she was a bit of a control freak. Her current state had to have been driving her nuts.

Setting her closer to the laptop, I set my wards and headed out. My phone rang just as I was pulling out of my parking lot. I grimaced when I saw it was Janice and reluctantly answered her call.

“Did you
see
that article? Did you see it?”

I imagined her wild-eyed, froth flying from her mouth like a rabid animal. What surprised me wasn’t her anger, but the fact that the article had been out for twenty-four hours before she’d seen it.

“I never read that rag.
Never
, “she ranted. “Someone at work handed it to me, wondering why I wasn’t up to speed on this, why we’d been scooped by the damned
City Paper
.”

I winced. “Is he still alive? The guy who handed you the paper, I mean. Will your next article be about how a reporter snapped and killed one of her coworkers?”

“It’s
not
funny, Aria. This is my job. I held back on it and now I look incompetent. Do you know how that makes me feel? He even stole the name I came up with for the killer.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you when you’re upset.” Although, to be honest,
I
was the one who came up with the name Psychotic Skinner, not Janice.

“Did he get his information from you?” Janice accused.

“No! I don’t even know the guy. The only reason I know about the article is Tremelay showed me a copy this morning.” Janice had to have been really upset to even think such a thing of me.

“Sorry.” She seemed to be calming down. “I just hate to get scooped, then to have Tony rub my nose in it like that…”

Teasing aside, I was honestly surprised Tony was still among the living. “Besides, if the reporter had gotten his information from me, then he would have known that there are three serial killers, not just one. He also would have known that they’re not human.”

“Woohoo!” And now Janice was excited. “Demons? Please say it’s demons so I can work in the exorcism in Canton. Lay it on me girl. I’ve got to get something in to redeem myself, here.”

“I’m not positive what it is yet, but it seems that three something-or-others posing as two teenage boys and one teenage girl hitchhiked their way to Baltimore from South Carolina. They kill their victims, take their skin and assume the victim’s identity. One of them seems to have a vampire fetish because she attacked several north of the city and managed to kill and skin at least one of them.”

Silence met my words. I heard Janice suck in a huge breath and let it out. “That’s probably the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard. More frightening than occult mages sacrificing humans.”

“Makes it hard to catch them when they could be anybody,” I complained. “Unless we find the skinned body and can quickly identify it, we’ve got no idea who they’re impersonating.”