Dark Moonlighting (15 page)

The flawless skin that she had spent so much
time artificially tanning was pale by the time I was done with her.
I let Lindsay’s body fall to the floor as I stumbled back and
struggled to unzip my fly. I prayed that no one was walking the
basement’s hallways to hear the groan of relief I let out as the
urine splashed onto the floor of my laboratory. When it was fully
expelled, I came to my senses and was overwhelmed with regret.

I had no problem killing the corporate whore,
but I knew it had been a mistake. I had been stressed from the
particularly chaotic day and angry because of the conversation with
the pharmaceutical representative. The kill had been impulsive, and
I berated myself both for a lack of self-control and for the
unnecessary risk of exposure. I moved to the door, careful to avoid
the gigantic urine puddle as best I could.

I locked the door to my laboratory behind me
before moving down the hall to the morgue. Thankfully, I found the
morgue to be empty. The staff was likely taking their lunch break,
but I had no idea how long it would be until they returned. I
decided to move as quickly as possible and hope that they were not
back before my task was complete. I removed a gurney and a body bag
before dashing back to my laboratory.

It took ten minutes to wheel Lindsay’s corpse
back to the morgue and begin the cremation process. It would take
at least two hours to completely destroy her body, but I was not
worried. I knew that the morgue workers, ever fearful of a
reprimand, would not report the extra set of remains. They would
assume it was a clerical error made by one of their own, which had
happened surprisingly often in the past, and dispose of the ashes
along with the other cremated remains.

I heard the morose shuffling of those
employees coming out of the elevator as I made it back to my
laboratory. It had been a very close call. Ironically the mess in
my lab took longer to clean up than the body. I used four stacks of
paper towels, which I had retrieved from the basement’s bathroom,
to clean up the large amount of urine and small amount of blood on
the floor of the laboratory. Confident that I had covered my
tracks, and exhausted by the day’s activities, I left the
laboratory without giving a second thought to the potential
breakthrough I had made that morning. I was in no condition to
continue my research towards a cure for the vampire virus.

As I entered my office across the hall to
retrieve my coat, I was treated to my last shock of the day. Robert
Little was face down on the floor of my office. An empty bag
attached to an IV pole sat next to him. I knelt on the ground and
put two fingers to his neck in order to check his pulse. He was
alive, but his skin looked almost as pale as Lindsay’s had after I
had drained her of her blood.

“Told you,” I scolded the unconscious man.
“You should have let me get you up to a bed.”

I carefully removed the needle from his arm
before picking him up and throwing him over my shoulder. I was
halfway to the elevator before I thought better of the action. My
colleagues had already seen me display superhuman strength once
that day. I leaned Robert against the wall while I retrieved the
same gurney I had used to transport Lindsay’s corpse from the
morgue. The morgue workers were more than happy to assist me in
lifting the Chief of Medicine onto the gurney. They all assumed I
was far too frail to do it myself.

Chapter Seven: Skeletons

“She’s prettier than a hunk of cornbread
after a hard day of work,” Jasmine commented in her Mammy
voice.

“Yeah,” I answered as I glanced at the piece
of paper. “She was.”

“Hey, Mr. Debbie Downer,” my partner started
in her normal voice. “It says right at the top of the page here in
bold print that she’s missing. There’s no need for that depressing
past tense. Maybe we’ll find her alive.”

“Do we ever find them alive?” I asked
sorrowfully.

“No,” Jasmine answered more seriously. She
handed me the sheet of paper so that she could put both of her
hands on the steering wheel. “No, we never do. But we’re good
little soldiers, and The Chief wants us to keep an eye out for this
scrumptious little pharmaceutical rep.”

“Sure he does. Now that the media has started
to cover the search he can’t afford to look bad. Thank God she was
a pretty, young white girl or this alert would be lost in a stack
of missing persons. If she had been black The Chief wouldn’t have
given her a second thought,” I said.

I crumpled the sheet of paper with Lindsay’s
biographical information and picture on it into a ball. I threw it
over my shoulder towards the backseat to emphasize my disgust. It
bounced off the cage that separated the front and back of our
police cruiser and landed at Jasmine’s feet. She slowed the car to
a crawl as she bent down to retrieve the wad of paper. She handed
it to me with a look of concern rather than annoyance.

“You’re still young and don’t really
understand how the world works,” Jasmine started to lecture. “But
it’s standard operating procedure for the black chick to play the
race card. I mean, you don’t see me quoting Monty Python or golfing
or doing whatever else you white folks do. I’d appreciate it if you
didn’t steal my thunder,” she joked.

“Sorry,” I said without cracking a smile.
“I’m just having a bad day.”

I did care about the disproportionate media
coverage of missing people, but only because it negatively affected
me in this particular instance. Lindsay Shepard’s mysterious
disappearance had been the top story for the evening news that
night, and I knew the coverage was only going to get worse. I was
kicking myself for such a monumental error in judgment. Killing
young, attractive white women is the worst possible way to stay
inconspicuous. Worse than that though, I had killed Lindsay
impulsively without any thought as to how I was going to cover my
tracks. I had disposed of the body and was probably safe for the
time being. However, had anyone at the hospital noticed me walking
with her during our short trip down to my laboratory? The emergency
room had still been chaotic at the time, but Lindsay had the looks
that tended to attract male attention. If the investigators figured
out that the hospital had been the last place anyone saw her alive,
how long would it be until they started looking at me as a
suspect?

I had let stress and anger get the better of
me, and because of that character flaw I knew I might have to flee
Starside soon and start over again in a new city. I enjoyed my
life, my careers and my colleagues. Leaving it all behind was an
unpleasant prospect. When I contemplated everything I would miss,
Lara was the one person I kept thinking about. After a dry spell
that had lasted centuries I had finally found a woman who I… loved?
I was not sure how I felt about her, but I was sure I wanted to
stick around and figure it out.

“I know what will make you feel better,”
Jasmine said excitedly as she looked out her window.

I had to grab onto the dashboard as my
partner jerked the steering wheel to the left. She drove about
fifteen feet down an alley that separated a library and an old
apartment complex. Jasmine slammed on the brakes, and our police
cruiser stopped mere inches from the closest of four teenage boys.
A small, cylindrical white object dropped from one of the boys’
hands before they all bolted towards the opposite end of the alley.
Jasmine leapt out of her door, but I left the vehicle with much
less enthusiasm. I picked the joint off the ground, sniffed it and
then put it to my lips. I took a long drag, held the smoke in my
lungs and then exhaled in disappointment.

“You got ripped off,” I yelled at the fleeing
teenagers. “This grass is weak.”

“Eat me, piggy!” one of the young men shouted
back

I took another drag before offering the joint
to my partner.

Jasmine declined the offer with a wave of her
hand. “I’m driving,” she answered with a smile. “You want to chase
these little punks down? Give them a good scare?”

“Nah,” I answered dismissively.

“Aw, come on. They called us pigs. It’ll be
fun.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Nick, you’re really starting to worry me,”
Jasmine said with genuine concern. “Seriously, what’s going on with
you? I’ve been your partner for a long time now. You can tell me
anything.”

“Not this time,” I said. I flicked the joint
against the side of the building. “It’s just something I have to
deal with myself. I don’t want to get you involved.”

“Shit,” Jasmine said as she lowered her
voice. “You haven’t gone dirty have you? Is internal affairs after
you?”

“No,” I said. As an afterthought I asked,
“Why? Has anyone been asking about me?”

“No,” Jasmine responded suspiciously. “If
you’ve gotten into something you need to tell me—”

“1-Adam-12,” the dispatcher interrupted via
the radio in our police cruiser. “Proceed to 1451 Hamilton
Boulevard. There’s a report of a body found in a drainage
pipe.”

“Duty calls,” I said to Jasmine as I shrugged
my shoulders.

Jasmine looked like she wanted to continue
the conversation, but she knew we had a job to perform. She hopped
back into the police cruiser and started driving down the alley as
I sent a quick acknowledgment to the dispatcher. The address was
only a few blocks away, and we spent the short amount of time in
complete silence. An elderly man flagged our car down as we
approached the scene.

“Oh, God. It’s terrible,” the old man said to
us before we were even fully out of the car. He had pulled the
t-shirt he was wearing up over his nose, and he was clearly
struggling to hold back tears. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever
seen. Over there.”

Jasmine and I cautiously walked in the
direction the old man had indicated. We each had a hand on the guns
in our holsters even though there was no obvious threat. When we
reached the drainage pipe, it became clear why the man looked so
frazzled. Half of a human body, from the head to the torso, was
sticking out of the metal pipe. At least, it had probably once
resembled a human body. Now it was mostly a skeleton with a few
fragments of flesh clinging tenaciously to it. Jasmine turned away
immediately and threw her hand over her nose. She walked back to
where the old man was standing as she tried to breathe through her
mouth. I, having seen and been the cause of plenty of bodies in my
time, was not affected by the disgusting sight. I did a quick
visual inspection of the corpse before joining my partner.

“What do you think?” Jasmine asked me between
fits of gagging.

“It warmed up a bit the last few days,” I
started to speculate. “All the snow melted pretty quickly. My guess
is the water flushed the body out towards the street.”

“Do I have to stick around for this?” the old
man asked.

“No, sir,” Jasmine responded. “Just let me
ask you a few questions, and then I’ll let you get out of
here.”

Jasmine began to take the man’s witness
statement as I returned to the cruiser to remove a roll of police
tape. The statement did not take long, and I was only halfway done
marking off the area when my partner thanked the old man for his
report and released him. She walked towards my position, but she
was careful to keep her eyes averted away from the corpse. Jasmine
seemed elated when another car pulled up next to our cruiser and
came to a stop.

“Good,” she said relieved. “The detectives
are here.”

I finished taping off the area and stood next
to my partner. “I don’t know,” I said suspiciously. “That’s a
pretty big ride for any of our detectives.”

A man in his early thirties was the first to
emerge from the vehicle. He climbed out of the SUV in an
inexpensive suit and wearing sunglasses despite the fact that it
was nighttime. The woman who emerged from the passenger seat was an
undeniable beauty. She wore a flowing green sundress and high
heels. I was confident that they were not members of the Starside
Police Department as I knew most of the detectives on the force.
Besides, the woman’s attire was hardly fitting for field work. I
raised my hand to stop them as the duo started moving towards my
position.

“Folks this is a crime scene. I’m going to
have to ask you to—.”

“I’m Special Agent Table with the F.B.I.,”
the man said as he pulled a badge from the breast pocket of his
coat. “This here is Dr. Prudence Kenner.”

“Who are you?” I asked Dr. Kenner.

“I’m a socially inept forensic
anthropologist, and this is the man I’ve been flirting with for the
better part of a decade,” she answered while motioning towards
Agent Table.

“Well,” I said, taken aback. “Kind of odd
that you would announce those facts so brazenly to complete
strangers.”

“You’ll have to forgive my partner,” Agent
Table said with a smile. “She tends to take questions very
literally. Actually, she used to be a lot better. She seems to be
getting much worse as the years go by. It’s almost to the point
that her inability to understand basic human interaction seems
inexcusable given her supposedly high level of intelligence…”

“Do you like our brand new Toyota
Highlander
?” Dr. Kenner interjected awkwardly.

“What?” Jasmine asked. “The car? Yeah, it’s
okay I guess.”

“It has amazing features. I’m going to drive
it later to see
Avatar 3
. It’s a visually stunning movie
that employs the latest in digital technology,” the forensic
anthropologist added.

“That’s nice,” Jasmine said with a forced
smile. “So… why are you two here?”

“We’re here to investigate your body,” Agent
Table clarified.

“How’d you get here so fast?” Jasmine
questioned. “Starside doesn’t have an F.B.I. field office, and you
two don’t seem like locals anyway. We just got the call a few
minutes ago. And why does the F.B.I. have jurisdiction here anyway?
It’s just a local murder.”