Stormrage (20 page)

Raven looked confused.
"Knew? Knew what?"

Marie looked away.
"I have said too much, child. It isn't my place."

Raven wanted to press the issue
, but knew the mambo would answer no further questions relating to her childhood. When Marie's mind was set her mind was set. She may as well try asking the sky why it was blue.

She slid off the worktop.
"Thank you, Marie. I appreciate your help. I'd better get home, I've got bad guys to catch tomorrow."

"Goodnight, Ravenel my child,"
Marie replied.

Raven kissed Marie's forehead and left the back room, pausing only to leave two hundred dollars in the cash-register.
She knew Marie would never ask for or expect payment for her assistance, but she also knew times were hard.

Outside, the fog had
thickened and all the sounds of the city were muffled. Still, she thought she heard an odd scraping noise somewhere on the wrought iron fence that surrounded Old Town. It was a noise that made her blood run cold and sent chills down her spine. Visions of Freddie Krueger danced through her head and she turned to try and locate the sound, using her ears like radar. She thought she had the noise pinpointed, but the sound stopped as suddenly as it had started. She waited in the fog, holding her breath and listening, but the strange noise was not repeated.

With a shrug she started the bike and drove back to the
estate, popping wheelies and thoroughly enjoying the borrowed Ninja on the city's now deserted streets.

When she reached the estate s
he tried to pull into her regular parking space, but a vehicle sat there, covered with a black car cover. With no other choice she parked nearby and went to stare at the new arrival, wondering who had bought yet another car. After a few seconds she pulled the cover off and what was underneath made her laugh. Another Equus, nearly identical to the bullet-riddled one she had sent home with Levac, sat in her space. The license plate read 'STORM'.

Raven giggled about it all the way back to the house.

* * *

Chapter Seven

The following morning found Raven standing in the garage dressed in a pair of leather leggings, a red sweater that matched her hair and hugged her curves, a black motorcycle jacket she'd found in her closet
, but didn't remember buying and a pair of over knee boots with heels that would have made her mother proud. She was trying to decide between the borrowed Ninja and the new Equus and having a difficult time choosing between them. She loved the bike. It was the first time she'd ridden one any distance and there was a feeling to the bike she couldn't really describe. On the other hand it was about as practical for Chicago in winter as a bikini. Though the fog had lifted, the wind was still cold with a hint of snow blowing in from the lake. If the snow fell, the bike was going to be useless.

With a small amount of reluctance she slid behind the wheel of the 770.
A note was stuck to the steering wheel:

Ray,

Try to take better care of this one. The other is going back to the shop.

T

Raven tossed the note out the window, fired up the 380 engine and drifted the Equus out of the garage and down the driveway, just because she could. She then cruised sedately toward the precinct, butterflies dancing in her stomach about seeing Levac. She was nearly to her office when the phone rang playing Doctor Zhu's ringtone. She answered on the third ring.

"Hey Ming, what's up?"

"Raven? I got your messages about the Stryker case," Doctor Zhu said. "You were indeed correct, Sphinx found a tiny puncture wound just below her right ear along with a massive dose of Thirst in her carotid artery. That was likely the cause of her death. How did you know?"

Raven smiled and accelerated around a slow-moving truck.
"Check their temperatures. The other three have a body temperature about ten degrees colder than Cassidy. That made me start looking for a different cause of death."

"Very well done,"
Zhu said.

"Thank you,"
Raven said. "And thank you for running all those tests."

"You're quite welcome,"
Zhu replied before ending the call.

Raven was sitting at a traffic light pondering the new information when the phone rang again.
She knew it was Levac. The butterflies went berserk in her stomach, but she answered anyway. "Good morning, Rupert."

"Hi Ray,"
Levac replied. "We've got another body."

"We?"
Raven asked in surprise.

"Of course we,"
Levac replied. "Where are you?"

"Sitting behind a delivery van about twenty blocks from the precinct,"
Raven replied. "Where's the victim?"

"
Old Town. Aspen is getting a team together. I will meet you there."

Raven nodded to herself and flicked on her police lights.
"Gotcha, see you there."

She ended the call and activated the siren to go with her police lights.
The delivery van lurched out of the way and Raven squeezed the Bass between the van and a yellow cab. She skidded around the corner and accelerated, heading north and west.

Old Town
always looked sad and freakishly abandoned by the light of day. None of the businesses opened until late afternoon unless it was a holiday and without the shadows cast by the gas lamps the area simply looked like a lot of old buildings in the middle of the city.

Raven was the first detective to arrive and her car was allowed through the crime scene barricade by a thin patrolman who nodded at her like he recognized her.
Raven had no idea who he was, but she returned the nod like they were old acquaintances.

The victim was impaled on the wrought iron fence less
than thirty yards from Marie's, his nude body nearly shredded by sharp blades. Like the others, a message had been left for Raven. It simply said, 'You're next, Storm'.

Raven pulled on a pair of gloves from her purse and began examining the body.
The wounds and mutilation were similar to those of the first two beheaded men, though she got the impression that the work was done with greater force and anger. For one the wounds looked deeper, for another there were many more of them, crisscrossing themselves across his chest and thighs, many with little or no blood trails meaning they were inflicted after the victim had been killed. From the amount of blood on and around the victim it was clear his wounds had been inflicted at the scene and not at some other location as they had been with the first two.

Standing on her toes Raven confirmed that the blow that removed the victim's head was a single powerful chop from right to left.
The white bone of the man's spine shown in the morning light, the cut was so smooth.

Raven followed the direction of the impact and spotted the head lying face down in the gutter nearby.
She fished it out of the ice and snow and turned it so she could see the face. Milky white eyes stared at her out of a heavily scarred face.

She put the head in an evidence bag and carried it back to the rest of the body.
She placed it on the ground and turned to the patrolman. "Were you the first officer on scene?"

The officer nodded.
"Yes, Ma'am, though Angus MacLeod, proprietor of Isle of Night actually found the body and called 911."

"I'm guessing you took a statement, did he see anything?"
Raven continued.

"No
, Ma'am," the officer replied. "He was heading home and just happened across our friend here."

Raven looked away as Aspen's crime scene van pulled to a stop nearby.
She and Levac approached with their crime scene kits in hand. Aspen went straight to the body and began processing it for evidence. Levac was walking toward Raven, but he stopped to look at something he'd spotted on the fence. Raven thanked the patrolman and joined Levac.

"What did you find?" she asked.

"Scrapes on the fence leading toward our victim," he said, rubbing at a gray gouge on the iron, a place where the paint and rust had been cut through.

Raven
leaned against the railing and picked at something with her fingers. After a few seconds she was rewarded with a sliver of sharp metal about half an inch long. She held the metal up to the light; it was dull grey on one side with a sharp, silver edge like that of an old steel sword or hatchet. She dropped it into an evidence bag and looked at Levac. She could tell from his beard and baggy eyes that he hadn't slept. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, but she didn't know what to say. Lost, she looked away again.

"What did you find?"
Levac asked.

"I think it might be a part of th
e murder weapon," Raven said. "And I think I almost saw this happen last night."

"What
do you mean?" Levac asked, the pitch of his voice change from smoke-tinged curiosity to concern.

"I had been
showing those photos I took at DeGrey's to Marie," she said. "I was on my way out when I heard a scraping noise somewhere nearby. I couldn't locate the noise and it stopped so I headed home. If I had looked more carefully maybe this man would still be alive."

"Or
you could have been the victim," Levac said. "The messages are getting more personal, Ray."

Raven didn't answer.
Instead she returned to where Aspen was processing the victim for any trace evidence. "Anything?" she asked the purple-haired woman.

"Depends," she replied.
"There are definitely more wounds, some even inflicted after he was dead. The powder we found on the others is present on his chest and in his hair and his head was removed with a single blow from a large weapon. Other than that, he's another Bob Doe."

"His clothes have to be around here,"
Raven said. "That's part of this nutjob's MO."

"No one has seen them,"
Aspen replied. "I have my guys searching the area."

Raven looked around herself and saw the other techs doing a grid search of the area.
She also spotted a snow-covered Honda sitting at the curb not thirty feet away. She handed the piece of metal she'd found to Aspen and continued over to the car. She wiped some snow from the windshield and gasped when she saw a woman slumped in the driver's seat, her eyes milky and white. The man's clothes, a suit and silk shirt, were balled up and stuffed in her lap.

* * *

An hour later they had the woman out of the car and placed on a gurney. The woman, dressed for a night out in black leather pants, heels and a gold sweater, was tall and slender with waist-length black hair. She would have been pretty of it weren't for the white-eyed blank stare. Her body was ice cold, understandable after a night spent in a car during Chicago winter, but to Raven it felt different, like the three victims already in the morgue.

Her identification said her name had been Isabelle Giotti and it only took Raven a few minutes to release who the headless man was.

"Armino Giotti," she said to Aspen.

The forensic specialist gave her a blank look.
"Who?"

"The other victim.
His name is Armino Giotti," Raven said. "I guarantee you he did three years for Thirst possession and was recently paroled. This is his wife. They were married just before he got sent away."

"How do you know that?"
Levac asked, watching the team go through the car for any clues.

Raven looked at the corpse
now lying on a gurney and being prepared for transport. "Because I was the detective that put him there. All of the male victims were people I made deals with to get at bigger fish in the DiFronzo outfit. I wanted the ones behind the operation, not these guys."

"That explains the connection to Riscassi and DeGrey,"
Levac said. "Maybe the outfit is after you and going about it in a particularly gruesome way."

Raven shook her head.
"No. If he wanted to take me out he wouldn't do all this. He'd send someone after me to put a bullet in my brainpan. Besides, it doesn't explain why we have their relatives in the freezer along with the victims. That's a strict no-no unless the Outfit wants to send you a message. This message is meant for me…so killing the relatives of these guys makes no sense."

"The Outfit wouldn't use two different methods, either,"
Aspen chimed in. "I've worked a few suspected hits. All the victims were killed the same way, usually a subsonic 22 behind the left ear."

"Aspen, let me know if you find anything else," Raven said.
"Check Isabelle for any injury or blood under her right ear. I don't think you'll find any, but run the test anyway."

"You got it
, Ray," Aspen replied.

She and her team took what evidence and potential evidence they'd found and began to leave the scene.
Raven watched them go and felt the subtle change once again as Old Town went from busy to deathly quiet. She didn't think she would ever get used to that. The supernatural creatures that lived and worked in the area just seemed to suck the life out of everything; the district only came back to life when it was crowded with people.

"Raven?"
Levac asked, leaning against the fence.

"Yeah?"
Raven answered, not turning her head.

"Ray, look at me."

Raven turned, her eyes finding Levac's. "What, Levac?"

Levac looked hurt.
He stepped forward and hesitantly put his hands on Raven's shoulders. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I didn't mean to upset or insult you. It took me by surprise. You said you weren't a vampire. I thought that meant…no blood."

Raven shook her head and looked down, but didn't pull away.
"No, Rupe. It means most of the time I can survive without feeding on fresh blood. Vampires must feed the same way humans need to eat. If they don't, they wither and go into something they call torpor, or the dead sleep. I can live day to day on normal food, but when I use my abilities my body starts to feed on itself. To keep from dying I need to drink claret…blood. It isn't something I enjoy or want to do, but it's better than dying."

Levac raised her chin and Raven looked into his eyes.
"I'm sorry, Raven. I didn't understand and I'm sorry about the way I reacted."

Raven swallowed and said words she rarely let past her lips.
"I'm sorry too, Rupe. I shouldn't have taken off like that. I should have talked to you, explained…"

She was cut off as Levac lowered his mouth to hers in the most loving, tender kiss she'd ever experienced.
She returned the kiss, gently at first and then with more eagerness, her lips and tongue devouring his, her body pressed close. When she came up for air, she gasped, "You're forgiven," in perfect unison with Levac. They both burst out laughing and sagged against the fence in a tight hug.

"So now what?"
Levac asked when they'd caught their breath.

Raven let go of Levac and put her sunglasses on against the rising glare.
"We find out who started a grudge match against me and make them tap out."