Stormwind (The Storm Chronicles Book 3) (7 page)

“’sup Detective Storm?” Pocock asked, extending a hand.

“Hi, Harvey,” Raven said, ignoring the sweaty palm offered her. “I want the whole apartment processed with a focus on any latent prints that don’t belong to the victim. Otherwise, it looks like the action happened in the bedroom.”

Harvey withdrew his hand and opened his mouth. Raven just knew he was about to make a sarcastic quip about ‘action’.

Before she could stop him Levac said, “Don’t say it.”

Pocock stopped and almost coughed on the sentence before stammering, “What?”

“Your joke about action in the bedroom,” Levac said. “If you want to leave here with your dignity in one piece, just keep it to yourself.”

Pocock glanced again at Raven and hurried away with his crew in tow.

“Am I really that bad?” Raven asked, watching the team go to work.

Levac smiled. “I just know you. Harvey is a good kid, I don’t want to see you snark him to death before he even gets started.”

“He’s good, but he’s not Aspen. Our girl could run rings around that guy,” Raven replied. “Anyway, what did you find out?”

Levac chewed on a piece of gum and flipped backwards through his notebook. “Going with a nighttime assault, the folks at the end of the hall near the elevator didn’t hear anything. One Mrs. Wynona Tucker says she fell asleep with her knitting sometime after watching an old Martha Stewart episode. She lives alone unless you count the eight cats. Across the hall from her are Mr. and Mrs. Jaden Wilburn. Mister Wilburn was at work and the missus was asleep. I double checked and confirmed Mr. Wilburn was at work at the hospital where he’s a night shift nurse. I also asked about anything strange during the day in case our victim is a late sleeper. Mrs. Tucker says she saw a tall blonde man in the hallway earlier in the day, but assumed he was visiting the young lady across the hall, Danika Ray.”

Raven folded her arms. “So tell me about Miss Ray.”

Levac laughed and flipped to another page. “Miss Ray reported hearing noises when she came home from work. She didn’t notice anything and just figured Wade had brought home another girl for the night. He apparently likes it rough.”

“She didn’t see anyone? What about the blonde guy Mrs. Tucker saw?” Raven asked.

“Danika said she didn’t know him and was asleep. She works evenings at Club Purgatory,” Levac replied. “She got home a little before midnight and heard the noise.”

“What day was this?” Raven asked.

“Last night,” Levac said. “And the patrolman found Franks outside Isle of Night at about six a.m.”

Raven whistled between her teeth. “So he was snatched, killed, skinned and displayed in seven hours or less. It’s about forty minutes to the old bottling plant, another ten or twenty to Old Town bringing this whole thing to six hours. How long does it take to skin and salt a human being?”

“I have no idea but it would think you would have to have some practice to do it in such a short time,” Levac replied.

Raven’s next statement was cut off by the shrill ring of her telephone. “She pulled it out and answered, “Yes, Doctor Frankenstein?”

“Very funny, Ms. Storm,” Ming Zhu, director of the city Forensic Lab replied in his thick Indian accent. “I’ve got information for you on your two corpses and it isn’t of the type I want to share over the phone. Can you and Rupert get down here right away?”

Raven glanced at her watch and moved toward the door. “We can be there in about half an hour. What’s wrong?”

“Just get down here, you have to see this!” Zhu said. The line then went dead.

Raven slid her phone in her pocket and grabbed Levac. “Time to leave, Zhu’s in a tizzy to show us something. He probably found a pubic hair where it didn’t belong and thinks it’s the holy grail.”

MING ZHU, NOW DIRECTOR OF the state forensic laboratory, still preferred to keep his office in the place where he’d started; the city morgue. It was a long-standing joke that Raven couldn’t keep her stomach during autopsies and had once been sick all over Lieutenant Frost’s brand new shoes. She had a hard time explaining it wasn’t the autopsies that bothered her, but the smell. The old building had once been a slaughterhouse and not even decades of cleaning could remove the smell of blood and offal that, to Raven’s sensitive nose, wafted from every crack, drain and tile in the building. Raven was convinced that part of the reason Zhu kept his office in the morgue was because it annoyed her. She and Levac had the highest number of stiffs by far and were frequent visitors.

Raven drove behind the Victorian building and parked in a spot marked ‘Police only’.  Some clown had scratched the word ‘LeStorm’ across the sign as a joke. Raven didn’t find it funny.

She slipped out of the car and swallowed a handful of nausea pills while she looked up at the building. It hadn’t changed over the years; orange bricks, mortar stained by old age, barred windows and an iron gutter Alfred Hitchcock would have loved. Above the building hung the blood red moon, now visible even in the day. Raven frowned at it.

“What’s wrong? Feeling sick already?” Levac asked.

“That damn moon,” Raven replied. “It’s giving me the creeps.”

Levac offered an arm. “Come on, partner, let’s go see what we can see.”

Raven linked her arm with Levac’s and followed him toward the doors. They signed in at the guard station, passed through the lobby and headed down the stairs to where Zhu kept his office. The pastel colored walls and plastic plants intended to make the morgue more appealing didn’t do much for Raven’s mood. It was a morgue and no amount of decoration or disinfecting spray was going to hide the fact. A morgue was a morgue.

For once the fluorescent light outside Zhu’s office wasn’t flickering on and off like a bad special effect, a definite improvement.  But his office was also empty which meant he was back in his lab deep in someone’s guts. Raven sighed and led the way down the green and white tiled hallway. At the end of the hall were four exam rooms, but the lights were on in only one. Through the glass she could see the bright chrome exam light, white ceiling tiles and safety lamps that lit the room. She knew the floor was green and white tile with a single brass floor drain she despised and the walls were white tile like an old bathroom. She had every inch of Ming’s lab memorized and still she hated it.

Holding her breath she pushed through the doors and found the small Indian man, his face hidden by a surgical mask, leaning over Franks’ body. The salt had been cleaned from the corpse and he now looked like a display of musculature from a museum, complete with semi-gloss preservative. Ming looked up when they entered and lowered his mask. His black goatee and mustache were as shiny as ever and his perfect teeth showed beneath the black lip fur when he smiled.

“Detectives! It is so good to see you!” he said, his arms wide like he was hugging them. “I have much to show you. Let us start with this poor man here.”

Raven exhaled and tried to keep the ancient smell of blood and rotten flesh out of her nose. “Whatever you say, Ming.”

Ming Zhu straightened and looked at Raven with concern in his eyes. “Detective, are we going to have another incident?”

“Not if you hurry up!” Raven growled.

Zhu motioned for the detectives to come closer. When they were next to him he tilted the victim’s head to the side revealing three jagged wounds that ran below his skull from back to front, tearing the artery.

“This is the wound that killed Mr. Franks. Based on the tearing I would say it was done very swiftly and with three very sharp bone instruments.”

“Bone?” Levac asked.

Zhu nodded. “Bone. I found bone fragments in the wounds when I cleaned them. They match bone weapons found in the ruins of Native American settlements across the country, but most especially the bone claws used by renegades in the 1860s. Based on the wounds, body temperature when found and ambient temperature, I am putting his death at two a.m.”

Raven looked more closely at the wounds, swallowing the bile trying to rise in the back of her throat. “So you’re telling me this guy was killed by a hundred and fifty year old Native American who thinks he’s a comic book character.”

Ming frowned. “I doubt that. Harvey made a mold of the wounds and we’re trying to match the patterns up to any known modern weapon. Meanwhile…”

Zhu moved down the body and pointed out a variety of discolorations. “These bruises suggest this man was beaten. And I mean beaten badly before he died.”

The doctor raised a pectoral muscle out of the way making Raven gag at the stench. “He has three broken ribs on this side, two more on the other. Detective, don’t you dare throw up on my cadaver!”

Raven held up a hand and shook her head. She felt Zhu’s eyes on her and forced herself to meet them. His eyes were filled with concern, but he proceeded down the corpse to the victim’s feet.

“The victim also had his hamstrings cut at some point, based on the condition of the tendons I would say it was shortly before he died,” he said. “Damage to the surrounding soft tissue of the ankle indicates a similar bone weapon was used.”

Levac made notes in his pad. “Our victim was beaten, hamstrung and finally killed before being salted down and left for us to find, is that about right?”

“Approximately, Detective, approximately,” Zhu said. “I cannot stress, however, the trauma this man went through before his death. Were his skin intact I have no doubt he would be missing fingernails and look like he’d gone ten rounds with George Forman while blindfolded. Many of his smaller bones are broken, muscles are torn…he didn’t take his fate easily.”

Raven uncovered her mouth and pointed at several deep lacerations in the muscle and bone. “What are these? Part of the fight or torture or whatever?”

“I would definitely say he was in a fight not torture, based on the tissue damage. But those, my dear Raven were made by one of the tools used to skin Mr. Franks. The Native Americans had a special knife that scraped along the inside of large game, removing the skin and upper layer of fat while leaving everything else relatively unscathed. A similar tool is still used today. No one cares if their steak has a couple scratches.”

“Can you get me a picture of this thing?” Raven asked.

Zhu grinned. “I don’t have to, you collected one of the tools yesterday.”

“I thought so,” Raven said. “Is there anything else or can I go get fresh air?”

Zhu smiled, his eyes crinkling with a sort of mad excitement. “Detective, this isn’t what was so urgent. You must see this, please come to the next room.”

He stripped off his gloves and pulled on a fresh pair while he led the two detectives across the hall to another exam room. He snapped on the light and walked into the room. This lab was virtually identical to the first save that there were two floor drains drooling the noisome smell of blood and offal. Raven gagged and turned away, leaning against the door frame. She felt Levac’s hands on her shoulders and she drew strength from him. When she felt better she turned and smiled her thanks.

“I’m okay. Let’s look at whatever Zhu has and get the hell out of here.”

Levac smiled and made an ‘after you’ motion. Raven turned and led Levac into the next lab where Zhu was waiting next to the grey-skinned giant.

“Are you all right, Raven?” Zhu asked, his brow furrowed with concern.

“I’m fine, Ming. What’s up with the jolly grey giant?”

Zhu looked down at the body and pulled apart the skin over the chest cavity revealing a ribcage built like armor. He lifted that off to expose the organs beneath. Raven recognized the heart and lungs, but not much else, especially since it was all covered in what, to her, looked like lace cheese.

“Heart, lungs, cheese, what’s the big deal?” she asked as seriously as she could.

Zhu threw up his hands in disgust. “How does a detective fail basic anatomy? Detective, that ‘cheese’ as you call it is some kind of connective tissue I have never seen before. This man is also missing several important organs including a liver, gallbladder and kidneys. In short, he shouldn’t have been alive.”

“Could he be some kind of mutant? Birth defects or something?” Levac asked.

Raven rolled her eyes. “Can we get away from super hero theories please?”

“No, no!” Zhu said excitedly. “I believe Detective Levac is correct. I found a related case in the files. A similar man was found on October 9
th
, 1871 during the great fire. He was largely dismissed due to the ongoing insanity at the time however the physical description fits this man perfectly.”

Raven frowned. “You’re saying this guy is a member of a family that has bizarre birth defects?”

Zhu grinned again. “Exactly, yes. I am not done dissecting him, that will have to wait until after your investigation, but I am excited about the possibilities. This could be a whole new species!”

“Do you think our perp is a member of the same family as the one from the fire?” Levac asked.

“If you mean do I think he or she looks similar, I doubt it,” Zhu replied. “Based on the size of this man’s brain, which is a rival for perhaps an intelligent dog, he couldn’t do much more than follow instructions. An entire family like that would never be able to remain hidden in the city.”

“Any other weirdness you want to lay on me?” Raven asked.

“Just one more thing,” Zhu said, winking at Levac. 

With some effort, he rolled the large man onto one side and showed the detectives a symbol burned into the man’s shoulder: A circle with a cross through the middle.

“This was burned into his flesh years ago,” Zhu said.

Levac ran a hand over it then took a photo with his phone. “Any idea what it means?”

Zhu let the cadaver down and shook his head. “There was nothing mentioned in the old file. The closest Harvey has found so far is a gang sign from the twenties. We will keep digging and let you know if we find anything useful.”

“Thanks, Ming,” Raven said. “We’ll catch you later.”

Raven turned to leave, followed by Levac who also thanked the doctor.

“You’re quite welcome, Detectives,” Zhu called after them. “Raven, good job not tossing your cookies!”

Raven covered her mouth with one hand and hurried outside where she gulped air in great lung-fulls, trying to get the scent of blood out of her nose. Levac put his hand on her back stood beside her until she stopped panting.

“Are you going to make it, Ray?” he asked.

Raven nodded and straightened, cracking her back. “Yeah. It’s just the smell of all that old blood. You’re lucky you can’t smell it.”

Levac grinned. “Just admit you hate autopsies.”

“Anyone who doesn’t hate autopsies needs to see a therapist. Let’s get back on the road, I need to clear my head,” Raven replied.

Levac walked around the Shelby and grabbed the door handle. “Where are we going?”

Raven looked at him over the roof of the car. “To get a burger. Then I thought we’d head to Club Black and see if anyone there noticed anything unusual with Franks. They should be open for tea by then.”

Levac blinked at Raven. “A burger? After seeing that?”

Raven swallowed hard. “Seeing what?”

Without another word she slid behind the wheel and brought the behemoth to life. Levac joined her, his eyes on Raven, his hand on his stomach. Raven glanced at him then nosed the Shelby toward a burger stand she knew and loved.

A SHORT TIME LATER, RAVEN parked the Shelby in an almost empty lot on the edge of The Dark, a part of the city that had been abandoned several years previously. Scientists had given up trying to figure out why electricity, especially lights, failed to work within the zone. Almost everyone had moved out of the Dark after Xavier’s coup a few months before; only the criminal and the desperate ventured there now.

The lot was surrounded by a chain link fence lined with wrecked and burned out cars. Anyone trying to enter by any way other than the gate was going to find themselves standing on razor sharp steel, melted glass and anything else Hartwin Ainsworth could find.