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Authors: Margaret Weis;David Baldwin

Tags: #Fantasy

Dark Heart (4 page)

BOOK: Dark Heart
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He kept telling himself his feelings were irrational, but that didn’t stop him from shooting frequent glances over his shoulder and listening to the hollow sound of his heels echoing in the drafty concrete chamber. Like a tomb…

He thought about going back to his car and returning to the precinct house, even though his shift was long over, just so he wouldn’t have to be alone. But that was crazy, too. Wasn’t it?

He walked through the lobby, checked his mailbox, and exchanged a few words with the doorman, ignoring the way the man looked at the bundle of scaly skin under his arm. Looked at it and wrinkled his nose. Well, fuck him…

He pushed the button to call the elevator, and waited. The elevator took its own sweet-ass time, and another eternity passed before he finally got to his floor. The skin was cumbersome, bulky, and slippery, and he kept having to shift it to keep it from sliding out of his arms.

His keys clinked as he fumbled with them at the lock. Keys always got themselves tangled up whenever you least needed that kind of crap. He nearly slammed them to the floor in frustration before he got a grip on himself.

Blame it on fatigue, maybe, but he’d just be lying to himself. His hands were still twitching. Crashing off the adrenaline overload. He couldn’t seem to shake the sludgy fear that oozed through his veins. Finally he was able to get the right key in the lock and turn it. He pushed into his apartment, shut and locked the door behind himself, and stood there breathing hard, clutching the skin.

Beside the door, the green light of the small alarm control box changed to red and began to blink. He flipped it open and reset it, then turned back toward the living room beyond the small entry foyer.

The only light was the weak city glow that leaked through the dingy picture window and created dim white squares on his faded green carpet, vaguely illuminating a week’s worth of newspapers, crumpled Budweiser cans, and empty pizza boxes.

He wiped the sweat and rain from his forehead, walked into the kitchenette, and dropped the skin on the tile floor. That stink that Madrone couldn’t place was strong now. It smelled as if someone had been cooking Chinese food. He reached for the light switch—

Something blotted out the light in front of the picture window.

Madrone’s heart bulged straight up into his throat. Somebody here?
Here?

But this was the fourteenth floor. Whatever it was, it had to come in through the window. The dead bolt had been locked in the door. The alarm had still been on and functioning. Nobody had come through that door.

So how could anything—anything at all—be here? It couldn’t. It was plain and simple. Impossible.

“Huhnng…” he said. A low, choking sound of pure terror. He fumbled out his pistol, his fingers quivering so badly he nearly dropped it.

The shadows before the window shifted again, and a sudden blast of that now familiar stink filled his nose. But not cold and weak, like the skin on the kitchen floor. This was hot, fetid, boiling with life. And in that swirl of shadowed motion he saw the shape of it as it turned toward him.

It wasn’t a second-story man, or some kind of genius lock-cracker.

It wasn’t the Egg Foo Young guy, somehow miraculously returned for round two.

It was worse, far worse.

It wasn’t even human.

Pointed wings rose above its low, squat head. Tightly packed muscles bulged on its massive frame. A thin, pointed tail whipped through the air behind it. As it stepped toward him, its great weight made even the concrete floor beneath the frayed carpet vibrate. Its red eyes glowed at Madrone, burning him somehow, turning his fear into stark terror.

“Oh, sweet Jesus save us,” Madrone moaned, raising his revolver.

The shadowy thing launched itself at Madrone too fast for anything living to see.

Madrone pulled the trigger.

The monster barreled into him and slammed him against the wall so hard the plaster cracked. His vision blurred from the shock of the blow. He fell to his knees, tried to suck in a breath, tried to bring his gun to bear on it again.

He screamed as he distinctly heard his fingers snap with a sound like crunching celery stalks. Suddenly his arm was numb below the elbow, and he knew he wasn’t holding the gun any more.

He thought it should hurt as he fell backward to the floor, but he couldn’t seem to feel anything. Not his hands, his legs, or his face. Nothing.

He tried to gasp for breath, and couldn’t. In the split second since he’d seen the creature, he had somehow lost everything, his gun, his footing, even the ability to breathe and feel. A rocking shudder ran through his body. He finally managed to focus his eyes on the thing that stood over him. As a gesture of resistance, his glare was pitiful, but it was all that was left to him. And he was Sicilian enough to feel some shred of defiant pride in being able to do it. If only he could spit in its face before it killed him…

What the hell was it? He couldn’t see it clearly, even though it was right in front of him, looming over him. He could only see its silhouette, as if the room’s shadows conspired to hide it.

He tried to reach out and touch it, but his arms wouldn’t move. Something was horribly…wrong. When the creature had overpowered him, it had somehow shorted out his voluntary nervous system. Now he lay there, sprawling and crumpled, completely at its mercy. The stench of his own urine assaulted his nostrils.

Wide-eyed and trembling, he looked up at the figure standing over him, as dark and hidden as some nightmare behind storm clouds. Only its red eyes burned.

Why couldn’t he see what it was? His own hands, his bruised and bloody body, were visible in the dim light flowing through the window. Why not this…
thing?

Then, slowly the shadows seemed to fall away from it. It stood with its massive, scaled arms folded across its chest. Its clawed fingers dug into the swollen muscles of its own flesh, as though it was contemplating its next action. Green wings rose above its head. It was staring right at him. Madrone couldn’t seem to move his head to look anywhere else but straight into its red eyes.

Then the thing spoke. Its voice was deep, rumbling from its chest like choked thunder, but its words were slow and quiet, softened with regret.

“I am afraid it is necessary that you die.”

It was the last thing Madrone ever heard. The monster reached down and rammed one taloned fist deep into Madrone’s chest, smashing aside ribs and cartilage to tear his heart from the bleeding cavity.

Detective Jack Madrone gave one violent, convulsive shudder. Then, before the pain even had time to register in his brain, everything faded to black.

 

 

 

The creature knelt beside the body. Madrone hadn’t felt a thing, not at the end. That was good.

For himself, he could still feel the insane rush—the way that the rib cage bent beneath the force of his blow, the moist crunch as Madrone’s ribs broke and separated to admit his clenched fist. The warmth of the blood and the fluttery, dying movement of the still-beating heart in his claws. And then the power, the incredible power of ending a life in a single motion—the memory sang through his arm as he stood there. Wet, warm blood streamed from his talons and dripped onto the carpet. He tossed the heart, now limp and still, to the floor.

He found the skin on the kitchen floor. He pulled the stolen time cards from the cop’s pocket. Then he picked stray scales from the sleeve of the detective’s coat and from his fingers. The creature searched for scales on the carpet and poured his finds into the skin. He wavered over the bullet casing from the cop’s gun, gleaming on the carpet, and finally decided to leave it where it was.

The bullet had passed through him—unblessed weapons were useless against him—and was wedged in the far wall. He dug it out of the plaster, wondering where the mystery would lead investigators, sure it would confuse them, if nothing else.

Finally he wrapped the whole mess into a loose bundle and tucked it under one inhumanly large arm. He cloaked himself in darkness again. Invisible to all eyes but those of others like him, he walked to the door. The tips of his claws closed on the doorknob and turned it.

Had anyone been watching, the door would have appeared to open and close as if by magic.

His mission completed, the creature who had once been—and would be again—Justin Sterling found the stairway to the roof. After a time he stood alone beneath the storm, breathing in death and rain. Then, in utter silence, he merged once again with the night.

 

I
t was well after midnight when Detective Sandra McCormick stepped out of the elevator onto the fourteenth floor and headed toward Jack Madrone’s apartment.

“Whoever’s doing this has a lotta balls. Gotta give ’em that.” Her partner, a veteran cop named Lawdon McKenzie, kept his comments in a low undertone clearly meant for her alone. He’d pushed his way through the crowd of pajama- and robe-clad rubberneckers clogging the hall between the elevator and Madrone’s apartment to meet her. “Or maybe he’s just stupid. You don’t kill cops in this city.”

Sandra nodded. “You don’t kill cops in any city. Not unless you’re nuts…” She paused. “You got a time of death yet?”

“The uniforms are telling me just after ten o’clock,” McKenzie replied. “The lady next door called 911 at ten-fifteen. She says she heard a big thump and a gunshot. When she got her nerves back together enough to crawl out from under the table, she called.” He thought about it. “It took her like maybe an hour to get her nerve back…”

The police had already cordoned off the door. Sandra and McKenzie worked their way through the throng toward the apartment doorway, which was guarded by one uniform, a young woman with a flat blue stare. At the door, McKenzie paused, irritation plain on his beefy features. He turned and faced the gawkers, who stared back at him with barely suppressed excitement.

Blood lust,
McKenzie thought, disgusted.

“Show’s over, folks!” he shouted. “Get back to your apartments. We have everything under control out here, so go on home. Please!” He lowered his voice and aimed a quick aside at the uniformed officer. “Get them outta here. Escort them to their doors if you have to. This is ridiculous.”

“Yes, sir.” The beat cop began pushing people away from Madrone’s apartment door.

Sandra ducked under the yellow tape, crossed the threshold, and looked around. Something immediately struck her as familiar, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.

She was still a little groggy. It was always a pain to wake up, get dressed, and leave a warm bed to come look at a dead body at this god-awful hour. But the captain had called her personally. It looked, he told her, like her man had struck again. One glance at the corpse confirmed why he thought so. Hole in the chest, heart on the floor. That pretty much said it all. Same as her prime-time case of the moment, the campus security guard, Baxter.

Crouching down, she examined the wound. She pulled a pen out of her purse and used it to peel back the bloody edges of the dead man’s torn shirt. The edge of the wound was marked by several sharp incisions. Where the marks intersected there was a hole about five inches in diameter, straight through the rib cage. Fragments of Madrone’s shattered ribs were visible below the skin and in the pool of congealing blood at the bottom of the hole, like bits of white teeth peeping from diseased gums.

Same thing as Baxter,
she thought,
same exact thing
. She could only hope they could keep the circumstances of this murder as quiet as they’d kept Baxter’s death. She could imagine the headlines if the story got out. Not one, but two now. A serial killer with a taste for blunt heart surgery. The media would go nuts.

But Jack Madrone had been a cop. That made it hot, hot and juicy, and somebody would drop a dime to a tame news hound. Somebody, somewhere. There wasn’t a prayer of keeping it under wraps, even though the department would keep the actual details as confidential as it could. But stuff like this was so sensational, sooner or later somebody would leak even the most intimate trivia, let alone a hole the size of a baseball in a dead homicide cop’s chest. And his heart like a lump of liver ten feet from the body…

She sighed and stood up. The crime scene forensics guys were still crawling all over the place like nearsighted, intense cockroaches. Most stuff was bagged and tagged, though the evidence was still in place. A flicker of light from the direction of the kitchen told her the shutterbugs were still hard at work, taking digital pictures of everything even remotely interesting.

Madrone’s gun was lying some distance from the body, as though it had been thrown there by Madrone or the killer. Madrone’s right hand was bruised, several of the fingers broken and swollen. It appeared there had been a struggle for control of the weapon.

And Madrone lost,
she thought, an ugly quiver growing in her belly. She saw a lot of death, but a cop was different. Part of the clan. It could have been her.

A single bullet casing gleamed on the floor a few feet from Jack’s body.

“It looks like Jack got a shot off. Anybody find the bullet?” Sandra raised her head, looking for blood spatter patterns or anything else to indicate the killer had been hit.

One of the forensics techs glanced up. “We think it was buried in the wall by the window. There’s a hole there consistent with the angle of fire from where Madrone was standing. It looks like someone gouged something out of there.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any idea what kind of tool was used. Not yet.”

McKenzie pointed at an ugly hole in the plaster wall, a very recent one, judging by the lack of dust and dirt in it.

“Somebody took the bullet? The killer? Damn, that’s weird.”

If the bullet was embedded in the wall, it had most likely missed its intended target. Why would a killer take it? What would he think the cops could learn from an expended bullet? Unless he knew about DNA, and he’d been hit…But the blood on the carpet, judging by its position, all appeared to be Jack’s.

“Speaking of weirdness,” McKenzie replied, “the heart’s over here.” He pointed at a plastic bag resting on the carpet. The inside of the bag was smeared with dark, congealed blood. “At least the nut case didn’t eat it.”

He grinned, his expression cynical. “Nice way to start the week, huh, Bruce? You just gotta love Mondays…”

Because Sandra had trained to black belt level in two different martial arts, McKenzie had taken to calling her Bruce, in mockery of Bruce Lee. “What’cha think?”

She shrugged. “Don’t think much, yet. We got two now, and that’s a real problem. One of them a cop, and that’s a bigger problem.”

“I can hear it now. Hole-in-the-chest cop killer stalks Chicago. Pictures at eleven.”

McKenzie’s many-lined brow wrinkled under his receding hairline as he paused, thoughtful. “I know it’s a stupid question, but what the hell. It’s the same killer, right?”

She nodded and stood up, though she never took her eyes from the gaping wound on Jack Madrone’s body. “Yeah. It’s the same.”

“Chicago. That toddling town…”

“All over the place, Mac.” She walked out into the living room. Old pizza boxes, wrinkled
Tribunes,
crumpled Bud cans, and a few dishes crusted with old food littered the coffee table and the floor. Some of the stuff was bagged. All of it had been dusted.

Sandra removed a cloth-covered elastic loop from her pocket, scooped her long hair into a controlled handful, and bound her mass of curls out of the way. She hadn’t known Jack Madrone that well. She’d seen him around the Twenty-third District station on Halstead from time to time, talked to him once or twice. He always had a five o’clock shadow, always smelled of stale sweat, and always seemed to be mentally undressing her when she spoke with him. From what she gathered, he hadn’t been very popular, but he had been a good detective. And nobody ever said you had to be a saint to be a good cop.

“You seen his jackets yet?” she asked McKenzie, who had followed her into the room.

“I called Twenty-three Homicide. He wasn’t working nothing real big or nasty. But he did have one high profile. The Carlton Wheeler thing,” McKenzie said.

“That lawyer. The rich crusader.”

“That’s the one.” McKenzie squinched his eyes, trying to remember. “And another weird one, though not like—” He waved vaguely in the general direction of Madrone’s corpse. “—Like ours,” he finished. “Guy got scragged behind all the locked doors in the world, twenty-one floors up a ritzy Lincoln Park high-rise.”

She nodded. “Yeah, now I remember. I heard Wheeler was actually a decent guy. Probably the only lawyer with a conscience in the entire city and somebody clips him.”

“You gettin’ philosophical, Bruce?”

Her lips curved in a small smile. “Not yet, Mac.”

He grinned. “Just checking.”

“Any similarities between Wheeler’s case and this?”

“Yeah. They were both murdered.”

She frowned at him. “Not funny.”

He shrugged, ran a hand through the thin strands of what was left of his salt-and-pepper hair. “No similarities that I know of. Wheeler took a bullet in the brain. Nothing Hollywood—not like this.”

“Was Madrone close to the killer?”

“Who, Wheeler’s? What’s the connection? Wheeler got his ass shot. Our guys get partly disemboweled.”

She turned and stared thoughtfully at the doorway. “Maybe one similarity. There’s an alarm on that door there. And we’re fourteen stories up. You think Madrone was stupid enough to bring somebody home to rip his heart out?”

“Vampyra the hooker, maybe?” McKenzie asked. “Naw. He was an old hand.”

“So how did the killer get past the doorman downstairs, past all these security cameras, through a dead-bolted door with an alarm system? Wasn’t it something like that with Wheeler?”

McKenzie looked as if he’d suddenly developed a bad case of gas. “Don’t say that, Bruce. Isn’t it bad enough already without crap like that?”

She wandered toward the picture window, paused, peered out and down.

“Was Madrone getting anywhere with the Wheeler thing?”

McKenzie pawed at his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it was lookin’ like one of those jackets that was going to stay open until the next Ice Age. I remember hearing something about it. Real smooth shoot. Ya never know, though. Maybe Madrone knew different. Maybe he
was
on to something.”

“Maybe he uncovered something that made somebody nervous,” Sandra said.

“I don’t know, Bruce. Hell of a stretch. We’ll have to go through his entire caseload. But we already got our gold-plated, Sherlock Holmes clue, right? That mini bomb crater in his chest. We seen that before already, and not with Carlton frigging Wheeler.”

Sandra nodded. “So how
did
he get in?”

McKenzie got that pained look again. “There’s no sign of forced entry on the door, but he went out that way. There’s blood on the inside knob.”

Sandra leaned over to examine the inside of the windowsill. The picture window was one of the old-fashioned kind that opened by sliding on a pivot. She saw water on the inside of the windowsill, reached into her bag, wrapped a hanky around her fingertips, and pushed the window. It slid open easily, and the space was more than enough to admit a man.

Baxter’s murderer had also come in by an upper-story window.

“Mac?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s check on the Wheeler thing, see where the killer gained entrance. If they know.”

“It’s still a reach, Bruce.”

“So, humor me. Woman’s intuition, right?”

Mac grinned. “You believe in that like I believe in hitting the lottery, Bruce. Woman’s intuition. Sure…”

“I think we got an acrobat, Mac,” she said slowly. “Baxter was kinda like this, too. Hard to get at. What floor was that museum archive window on at U of C? Four, right? High enough, anyway.”

“Not fourteen, though. Or twenty-one.” McKenzie glanced around, his expression discomfited. He went to the window and looked out for himself. A gust of dank, cool air blew into the room. He pulled back in and shook his head.

“Had to come in the door, Bruce. There ain’t no other way.”

“There wasn’t one with Wheeler, either,” she replied. Wheeler, Baxter, now Madrone. And a killer or killers who specialized in impossible, invisible entry and exit.

“The S.W.A.T. guys said something about maybe a ninja. Spiderman right up the wall. Like in the movies.” She rolled her eyes.

McKenzie snorted. “Those S.W.A.T. guys eat too many vitamins.”

There was a piece missing from the archive room Baxter was guarding, but it had no great financial value, and the thief had left other nearly priceless pieces behind, including many that would be easier to fence.

She sighed. None of it made any sense. And neither did this. Madrone was a street guy, knew how to handle himself. He might have been an old timer, but his alarm system looked up-to-date. So did he know his killer? Did he open the door? Or was the killer waiting for him when he got home?

She didn’t know which was harder to believe, Madrone letting down his guard so completely, or the killer wiggling through a window fourteen stories up.

“Madrone was a cop,” Mac said slowly. “And Baxter was a security guard. Kind of a cop…”

Sandra rubbed her neck. “Yeah. That, too. So we got what, three similarities now? MO of the actual murders, problems with entry and exit, and maybe cops.”

“Something like that,” Mac agreed.

“Our Baxter guy snagged himself a souvenir,” she said, moving out of the living room toward the kitchen.

“And maybe something like that happened here?”

“It’s a thought.”

“Let it pass, Bruce. Look at this place. You could probably move the fridge out and it would be hard to tell. Well, not the fridge, but—” Mac gestured toward the debris littering the living room. “I don’t think Madrone was the kinda guy who kept an inventory of his empty beer cans and used newspapers. And that’s about all there is in this dump.”

Sandra wandered back to the window. Something about it was stuck in the back of her mind, like a tiny burr. She pushed her head out and looked down. Squinted.

Turned back into the room. “Hey! Anybody got a flashlight?”

A tech grunted, reached into his bag, and handed her one. A long-handled Maglite.

“Thanks.” She adjusted the focus of the lens for wide-angle, then leaned out and aimed the beam at the brick skin of the building beneath the window frame.

There they were, just like the ones on the college building where Baxter had been killed. Those strange marks on the windowsill, the scratches in the brick.

BOOK: Dark Heart
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