The Spoil of Beasts, page 5
part #3 of Iron on Iron Series
6
North drove through the night, and as they left Wahredua’s lights behind them, the darkness became a canvas for his nightmares. Shaw in the hospital after the West End Slasher had almost gutted him. Shaw lying at the bottom of the parking garage stairs, the night Marvin Hanson had almost killed him. Those horrible moments when North had been incapacitated after a bad car accident, and all he could do was stare as Tucker pushed Shaw down the stairs. He remembered, the moment frozen for an eternity inside his mind, the way Shaw’s stupid slippers had seemed to float in the air.
He dragged himself back to the GTO, to the drive, to the darkness of old trees and the route between them—like driving through a tunnel, he thought. Like everything is leaning in, bending over you, bearing down. When they cleared the trees, they followed the swells and dips of rolling hills, passed faces of stone where they’d been blasted and cut to make way for modern roads. Those bare stretches were yellowish white in the moonlight. Like dirty teeth, he thought.
They had to stop twice to check the license plate tracking system. They got another hit in Lincoln, which wasn’t too far north of Auburn, and so they kept driving. When they stopped the second time, they got a hit to the southeast—technically inside the city limits of Auburn, North thought, which wasn’t what he’d expected at all. He’d expected the trail to go dark; there weren’t any traffic cameras near the Cottonmouth Club itself. Instead, they’d gotten a hit on the outskirts of town.
When they reached the city limits, North kept a close eye on the speedometer, made sure to signal every turn, and sent up a silent prayer. He had no desire to get pulled over, not in this town. Running into Chief Cassidy again was at the bottom of his list—and only partially because it would give Shaw a reason to launch into that Cassidy bullshit all over again.
They found the traffic camera where the sheriff’s license plate had been spotted most recently, and North eased the GTO onto the shoulder. Then he said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Yes,” Shaw said with an enthusiastic nod. “Very good, North.”
North chose to ignore that and stared at the massive building with the words EPIPHANY OF LIGHT CHURCH on its side. A fence marked the limit of the property, and another sign at the entrance—which was gated and shut—said EPIPHANY OF LIGHT CENTRAL CAMPUS.
“Which means what?” North asked.
“Campus is another word for—ow, ow, ow!”
The megachurch itself looked dark—a few windows suggested emergency lights, but the parking lot was empty. North considered the road they’d followed; technically, it was a divided highway, with two lanes in each direction. It was empty too, and he figured it was some sort of state road meant to serve an even smaller satellite community.
“Ok,” North finally said. “All it means is that whoever has the sheriff’s plates, he drove past this intersection.” He indicated the stoplight and traffic camera whose sole purpose was clearly to let the faithful masses turn out of the church parking lot on a busy Sunday morning. “Maybe he drove straight through.”
“Maybe.”
Still no cars coming. North eased the GTO back onto the road. They rolled through the light. He checked the position of the traffic camera, but it didn’t tell him anything useful. “Let’s follow this road,” North said, “and you check the database to see if the plate’s been tagged anywhere else—”
“Or there’s that,” Shaw said.
That in this instance referred to a section of the Epiphany of Light fencing that had been torn from the support posts and now lay at an angle, half-fallen across the opening where it had originally hung. The spindles at the lower right corner were bent, some of them even popped out of the railing.
North swore.
“It’s ok,” Shaw said. “I’m a trained detective. That’s probably why I noticed it.”
“I would have seen it.”
Shaw’s silence lasted a beat too long. “Oh. Of course! Of course you would have seen it!”
“I would have! Someone crashed into the fucking fence, Shaw, it’s not like it was some microscopic detail—you know what? I’m not going to do this.”
Shaw nodded with the kind of patience that explained why so many murders were domestic. “Of course, of course. Nothing microscopic. Your vision is completely fine.”
“My vision is—” North cut off with a strangled noise and cut the wheel to the right harder than he needed to. They bumped off the pavement and onto the gravel shoulder again, and North killed the engine.
He didn’t slam the door. He didn’t need to. But he did kick Shaw’s door shut a few times to keep him from getting out of the car. Shaw still managed to ruin the whole thing, of course, by giggling as he yanked on the handle and tried to force the door open over and over again.
North finally gave up and got a high-powered flashlight from the trunk. He made his way across the drainage ditch and over to the damaged fence panel. Up close, with better light, he could see where tires had torn up the perfect lawn. When he played the flashlight over the wrought-iron fence, especially those damaged spindles in the corner, he caught traces of red. Like you might expect, North thought, if a red Subaru Outback hit the fence hard enough to knock the railings out of the support posts.
“So, where’s the Subaru Outback?”
“Maybe if you squint,” Shaw suggested. “Squinting isn’t a replacement for glasses, but the properly trained squinter—”
North got him a good one in the ankle, and Shaw yelped and hopped on one foot as North slipped under the half-fallen section of fencing. He shone the light on the grass, taking his time, ignoring Shaw’s whimpers and groans and mewling. The grass was thick—fertilized and watered and probably softer than the carpeting in the Borealis office. And that meant it took footprints surprisingly well, especially when they were less than a couple of hours old. Several sets milled around, which was interesting all by itself, but one set led across the lawn and toward the Epiphany of Light church.
“Ready to do some exploring?” North asked.
“No,” Shaw moaned. “You shattered my ankle. I can’t walk. I’ll probably never walk again, not even after multiple reconstructive surgeries, and you’ll have to carry me everywhere out of guilt—”
“You know what? I’m feeling surprisingly guilt free.”
“—and when I have to go to the bathroom I’ll scream, ‘Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,’ and that’ll be code for a bathroom emergency—”
“Race you to the church.”
“What do I get—”
But North took off before Shaw had time to finish the question. There was no squawk of outrage or protest, and that was a bad sign; for the first hundred yards, charging across the lawn, North focused on breathing, on finding his stride. But the Red Wings—although amazingly well made and incredibly tough and excellent protection for his feet under basically every possible circumstance—were heavy. Worse, as the first hundred yards began to close, North discovered he was having a difficult time catching his breath, and he resolved for the thousandth time…to do more cardio. Fewer resistance days. More days hitting the streets. Sprints. High-intensity interval training. And then his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, so he had to stop planning and start focusing on not running like the Bride of Frankenstein. He pumped his arms. He pistoned his legs. He had the vague idea that he was supposed to engage his core, but that seemed like a fuckery of an expectation for someone whose entire body was shutting down under duress.
Shaw, of course, breezed past him and reached the small plaza in front of the church with seconds to spare.
Heaving for breath—and straddling that line between a stitch in his ribs and the need to puke—North finally reached him.
“What do I—”
North swatted him, or tried to, and then had to gasp for air, hands on knees.
“That bad?” Shaw asked with what might have been real sympathy. North needed more oxygen before he could decide. “You know, you might consider the fact that along with all the other terrible things it does to your body—”
North looked up. He was drooling, he realized. Only a tiny bit. He knuckled it away and sucked in some more air and, because God occasionally still performed miracles, managed to stand up straight.
“Er—” Shaw said. “That thing, you know. The one we don’t talk about.”
“Cardio,” North said flatly.
Shaw looked like he might argue, but he must have read something on North’s face because he nodded and said, “Yup. Cardio.”
“It’s the altitude,” North finally said, shuffling in a circle as he continued to catch his breath. “The altitude must be different here.”
“Yeah,” Shaw muttered, “we’re at sea level.” But when North stopped and turned, he began nodding enthusiastically. “Yes, the altitude. That’s got to be it.”
He was wearing one of those looks of overenthusiastic agreement, the way he did right after North finished explaining that there was nothing wrong with a well-rounded diet that included the occasional snack, treat, and/or indulgence, and right before he was about to purge their fridge of everything delicious. North scowled.
“What do I win?” Shaw asked.
“A fiver.”
“A fiver? I already get fivers—I mean that’s wonderful! And so romantic! I can’t wait!”
“God damn it,” North muttered and started toward the church’s main entrance.
From the street, the church had appeared dark and unoccupied, and nothing North saw now changed his opinion. When he tried the doors, they were locked. On the other side of the glass, an emergency light illuminated enough of the space for North to make out the shape of the lobby. But no one moved—no one responding to the sound of North trying the doors, and equally annoyingly, no one running away because two intrepid detectives had finally tracked him down.
North followed the perimeter of the building, but the rattle of machinery made him stop and look. The gate at the road was slowly opening, and a car was waiting to turn in. North motioned for Shaw to hunker down behind some of the bushes along the side of the church, and they crouched there and waited.
A minute later, tires hummed toward them, and in the distance, the gate rattled back into place. The car—a Ford Focus, dark—drove past them, and North snapped a picture of the license plate. North assumed that the vehicle was headed toward a private parking lot behind the church, but instead, it turned down what North had assumed, until now, was a service road. The car disappeared from view a moment later, and North realized that some sort of privacy fence or windscreen was there, blocking whatever was on the other side from view.
North took off at a jog—a light jog, what Shaw, when he wanted to be an asshole, might have called a lope, or even a brisk walk. Shaw kept pace with him, which was easy when you were skin and bird bones and had your underwear ventilated by an air elemental, or whatever the fuck Shaw had paid fifty dollars for. Not that Shaw even wore underwear. Not often. Not unless North ordered it on the grounds of not getting arrested.
The smell of pine sap and exhaust grew stronger as they approached the privacy barrier, and now North could make out the deeper darkness of a windscreen against the night. The road that the Focus had taken cut behind the windscreen, and as North came around the turn, he let out another string of swears. A hundred yards down the road was a house—a mansion, technically—with lights blazing.
It was hard to get all the details in the interplay of light and shadow, but North could tell enough: the house was stucco, with a mansard roof and lots of windows, all of them glowing. It crouched behind a second fence, which told North something about the people who lived here. Carriage house lanterns, manicured flower beds, copper accents—details, but details that became more and more suggestive as North considered the house. He summed it up as ten thousand square feet of a lot of naïve people’s money.
Ahead of them, the gate was sliding shut behind the Focus.
“That’s a big house,” Shaw said.
“You know all that money that sits in your stupid trust fund, and we don’t get to use it for anything, not even buying groceries?”
“Well, it’s not my money; it’s family money—”
“Why don’t you use it to buy me a house like that?”
“Why would you want a house like that?”
“Because.” North gestured. “It’s fucking enormous.”
“It’s too big.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Who would do all the cleaning?”
“Not you, that’s for fucking certain.”
“You see? You’re mean to me. This is why I never bought you a mansion. Plus it really is too big. You’d get lost. Or I’d get lost. Or we’d both get lost, and I’d never be able to find you.”
“Jeez,” North said as he started forward again. “Imagine that.”
The fence wasn’t topped by anything substantial—no C-wire, not even any decorative broken glass—so North made a saddle of his hands and gave Shaw a lift. Shaw dropped to the other side, reached between the wrought-iron spindles, and repeated North’s movements. He added in a lot of grunting, a lot of noises like he was straining.
“I am going to kick your ass,” North said when he fell-landed on the other side. “You know how long it’s been since I kicked your ass? You are on a fucking tear tonight, you know that? You are seriously asking for it.”
“When you keep repeating yourself like that, you start to sound a little excited.”
North gave him a glare.
“Plus, it might be the carriage house lights, but I’m pretty sure you have a semi.”
North took one threatening step, and Shaw danced backward, laughing.
“We’re working, you jackass,” North said. “Could you try to be a professional? Could you try for one night to be a professional fucking detective?”
“Do you hear it? You say the same thing over and over again, and your voice gets a little higher, you talk a little faster—”
North stalked off because it was either that or beat Shaw up, right then, right there, and North had professional standards to uphold. Plus, he’d kind of jinked up his foot when he’d come down hard on the landing, and he wondered if maybe some of Shaw’s grunting and straining noises hadn’t been entirely made up.
There were a lot of ways to go about approaching people you wanted to interview. Sometimes, it was helpful to have a story prepared. Sometimes, it was essential to get them talking before they realized who you were. Sometimes, in a way that left North mildly but perpetually astonished, telling the truth was the best way to get people to help you. But always, forever, exclusively, the absolute best thing to do was catch people by surprise.
He started toward the front of the house. He thought tonight, he’d start by knocking and announcing himself. He needed one of those wallets for his PI license so he could flip it open, right in their faces, so close maybe they had to take a step back. Then he thought of what Shaw would say about that—something about seeing it in a movie—and, of course, as with everything Shaw touched, it blackened and curdled and was absolutely ruined even before North could consider going on Amazon to buy one of those flip-openable wallets.
He was working on a way to order the wallet but have it delivered to their neighbors, then tell the neighbors it must have been a mistake, and no, nobody had to tell Shaw, when his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing, and North stopped. Shaw was still walking, so he put his arm out, and Shaw bumped into him.
“What—”
North pointed to the bloody shoe print on the pavement in front of them. It hadn’t dried, not completely, and the pavement was light-colored, which meant the shoe print was crisp even in the glow from the carriage house lanterns. North had seen Dalton Weber’s cell. He remembered the pools of blood on the floor. He thought of the canvas slip-ons that were part of the inmate uniform. The blood would have dried, his brain said. But then he thought about the wet grass, the long walk across the lawn. By the time Philip Welch had reached this house, the blood could have been liquid enough to leave a print like this one.
Shaw drew in his breath like he might say something, but another sound registered at the periphery of North’s consciousness, and he spun around.
The man was close to North’s height but stockier, and he was dressed in what North thought of as church clothes—not nice stuff, but growing up in Lindenwood Park, North had seen a lot of working-class families in shirts and trousers from the Walmart collection. This guy had a round face and thinning blond hair so fair that at first, in the unsteady glimmer of the carriage house lanterns, North thought he was bald, and something about him looked familiar.
He was also holding a gun.
7
“Show me your hands,” the man said, the gun pointed at Shaw.
It was a big gun, a Glock, what North would have called a doofus, baby-dick purchase, which Shaw knew was sexist and body-shaming but also, unfortunately, a little true. Under normal circumstances, Shaw would have suggested that the man undergo a thorough chakra cleansing, perhaps reach out to a sex surrogate, maybe even buy what North disparagingly—and unnecessarily—referred to as wang crystals. Citrine, maybe. Or carnelian.
Then North shifted his weight, and the man turned the gun on North, and a Sahara wind went through Shaw’s mind, scouring everything else away.
“Hands!” the man barked.
North lifted his hands. Shaw copied him.
The man studied them. His pupils were wide, his cheeks flushed, and now that Shaw knew what to look for, he could see the faint tremor in the man’s hand.
“You’re doing a very good job,” Shaw told him.
North made one of those quiet noises that was mostly in his throat.
“No talking,” the man said.
Shaw nodded. He even mimed zipping his lips. North made that noise again.
