Night Shifters (88 page)

Hello, suspect number . . . well, many.

He reached for the control on his door handle with a sugary hand and lowered the window. She smiled at him. “Officer Trall,” she said. “I just came in for a coffee, and I saw you parked here. Nothing wrong in the doughnut shop, is there?”

He shook his head. “No. Just having breakfast. I’m afraid I was up all night and was starting to flag. But I am about to head back to the aquarium, to look at a few things.”

“Oh, good. May I go to the aquarium now? I won’t come near the crime scene. I know you guys have it all taped up and everything. I just want to go to the office and pick up some reports on shark health that I’ve been looking at which are urgent.” Suddenly, her happy expression dimmed. “Well . . . if we don’t end up having to kill half of them because we need to recover parts of people, and have the others shipped to parts unknown. I mean, who’s going to come and look at our sharks, if they know they’ve eaten people?”

Rafiel shrugged. A tingle ran up and down his neck. His dad, now retired from the Goldport force had first told him about these
feelings
. The sense that
something
was wrong.

There was something to Lei Lani, to her talk, that made him suspect she knew something.

He doubted she could be
the
shark shifter, if there was one, because how did she convince her victims to go swimming in there? She didn’t look strong enough to
push
men over. Unless she got them to lean over the tank somehow.

But she knew something, and she was trying to get him not to notice.

“Lots of people will come, probably,” he said. “People do.” He reassured her. “Why do you think they like sharks? Because they’re fascinating marine creatures? No. Because they eat people. And this is their best chance at seeing them confined and safe, you know . . .”

She looked at him a moment, with huge, incredulous eyes, then blinked. “Perhaps. I guess being a shark expert, I have a soft spot for them. I don’t think of them as . . . man-eaters.”

And right there, Rafiel decided he needed to talk to Ms. Lani. Everyone thought of sharks as predators! And being, as they were, on semi-informal terms right now, it would probably be easier. But he’d like to reconcile what he’d heard from John Wagner about her with her comment that the male employees often had sex by the shark tank, and that, again, with the fact that the condoms found had vaginal secretions.

“Why don’t you hop in?” he said. “If you’re going to the aquarium, I might as well give you a ride.” And because he had no intention of letting her go near the aquarium alone.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, suddenly acting shy. “I could walk, you know? It’s only a few blocks.” She gestured vaguely across the way. “I live just over there. Normally I walk.”

“Judging from the pedestrians I saw on the way here,” Rafiel said, “there’s quite a bit of ice on the sidewalks. I might as well give you a ride.”

She got in, gingerly, and put her coffee cup on the dashboard as she sat down and buckled herself in, before picking the cup up again. “Thank you, really.”

Rafiel backed out of the parking space and into the flow of traffic, while his passenger remained absolutely quiet. It wasn’t till they were a block away that she said, still in that oddly shy tone, “So, I suppose I shouldn’t ask you if you have made any progress? You said you don’t discuss your investigations.”

He answered with a shrug. “Well,” he said, “we have made some progress. As you told us, there were some condoms discarded in the planters by the water.” He watched carefully for her reactions, while seeming to ignore her.

“Oh?” she said, and raised an eyebrow. “I told you, I heard the guys at the aquarium talk, and that John Wagner? He’s the worst. He has this . . . imaginary friend or whatever that he calls ‘the drool’—you know, like it’s a part of him, or a mobile, sentient weapon. If people displease him, he’ll say ‘fear the drool, I am basset,’ and everyone laughs and all, and you know, he talks about how he used to own a basset and how much they drooled. But . . . it feels creepy somehow. And he keeps saying things like ‘I’d never say anything impolite. Now the drool, he’s a brazen bastard.’ Like . . . like he’s schizophrenic or something.”

Rafiel was so horrified by the vision the words conjured, of the ebullient John Wagner turning into—of all things—a basset hound, that he could barely trust himself to speak. While silence lengthened, he caught himself thinking,
But . . . he can’t be a shifter basset, can he? I mean I can imagine dog shifters, but would they be a particular breed?

His limited knowledge of dog fancy told him that the current breeds favored as pets in the U.S. must all be of fairly recent creation. Recent, at least in evolutionary terms. And surely, surely, being relatively recent they couldn’t have gotten enmeshed with human genes, could they? It seemed to him all the shifters he’d seen so far changed shapes into species and breeds that had been very long on the Earth. Some longer than humans. But then again, they had no idea how the shifting mechanism worked. Was it truly genetic? Or was there some other mechanism at work? Rafiel was hesitant to say it was magic, but then, wasn’t magic just a name for a process no one understood yet? And after all, as far as they knew, dragons had never even existed.

“I’m sorry,” Lei said, sounding distant, and somehow worried. “I didn’t mean to cast aspersions on John. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all. A little . . . extroverted, you’d call it, and he makes some jokes that could border on sexual harassment, but I’m sure he means well.”

Oh, I wouldn’t be sure of any such thing,
Rafiel thought. Much as he’d liked the guy—and he realized with surprise that he had liked the guy, which was odd, considering that John Wagner appeared to consider him a dumb ass—he was quite sure it was part of Wagner’s fundamental approach to the world to put the cat among the pigeons as much as humanly possible.

Which was why Rafiel was loath to think of what he’d said about Lei as meaning anything at all. For all he knew, Lei had simply made that sort of prissy comment about John Wagner being sexist, and John had it in for her. Oh, not consciously. He didn’t seem like the sort of guy who—fully aware of what he was doing—would be either vengeful or petty. But he might very well view casting doubt on her credentials and sending the police to look into her background as just a bit of fun and mischief. “No,” he said, speaking to Lei. “That isn’t it, you know. I didn’t think you were particularly paranoid about John Wagner. I met him while we were processing the scene. He said he dropped by to see if we needed any help.” Which, of course, was also the typical behavior of mass murderers, as Rafiel well knew. “He seems like a nice guy. Ebullient. But . . . but he didn’t threaten me with the drool.”

He was rewarded with a ladylike giggle and a small headshake. “I’m sure he only does that to his friends or people he works with and knows. I’m wondering if it was him . . . I mean, by the pool.”

“No,” Rafiel said decisively. “It couldn’t be any of the men at the aquarium.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I mean, did you—?”

“DNA test them? No. The semen in the condoms belonged to the last two victims, so you see, it couldn’t be—”

“But, Officer!” she said and seemed within a breath of pointing out to him that they, after all, lived in the twenty-first century.

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “You see, the outside of the condom had vaginal secretions.” Now she looked surprised, staring at him. “And something else. Our analyst says that the outside of the condom also had minute fragments of sharkskin.”

“Shark?” she asked, now looking truly surprised. “How do they know it’s shark and not some other fish? I mean, I know there are preparations”—she blushed—“people use, to facilitate sex or heighten pleasure or . . .”

“No,” Rafiel said.
Curiouser and curiouser. What does she know that requires this much enthusiasm to hide?
“This was shark. There is something in sharkskin called denticles. Our examiner says that they were on the outside of this condom. And please, don’t ask me how. I wouldn’t begin to be able to explain it.” Which was true, he thought.
Not because I can’t begin to explain, but because I wouldn’t. If these shark particles are like the bits of hair and fluff I find on my bed after a shifted night, or the scales that Tom is forever shaking out of his stuff, then it would indicate that the shark itself is a shifter. Herself, presumably, given the vaginal secretions. But how would a small woman get her victim in before she shifted?

“Uh,” Lei said. She unzipped her ski jacket to reveal that underneath she wore a semitransparent white blouse. Not semitransparent in a way that would necessarily look racy or provocative, but just as though a nice business blouse had been made out of too thin a material and therefore allowed a vague translucence to let forth the golden hues of her skin, the whiter tones of her bra, and a pinkish spot in the middle, between her breasts which was probably one of those rosettes with which bra manufacturers adorned bras, for reasons Rafiel—who usually concerned himself far more with the removal of their product than its purchase—couldn’t understand. He glanced sideways and into her black eyes, as she said, “I think it is possible, isn’t it, that they could have . . .” She shifted uncomfortably in the seat. “You know . . . put stuff on the condom to throw people off?”

Rafiel shrugged. He wasn’t going to laugh the hypothesis off. Mostly because once you got shifters involved in a crime scene, the improbable was not only, often enough, possible, but it was, strangely, often the most likely solution. After all, if you started with the impossibility of someone changing shapes into an animal, then wouldn’t it follow that every other impossibility would be true?
My disbelief was suspended from the neck until dead,
he thought. But still, he spoke as if he were a normal policeman, and as if he didn’t very well know that all this involved shifters. “If that were the case,” he said, “wouldn’t it have made much more sense to have tossed the condoms away, out of the vicinity of the aquarium? And which of the . . . stuff, do you suggest they put on the condom? The vaginal secretions or the sharkskin?”

She seemed surprised, and squirmed some more, as he pulled into a parking spot at the aquarium—which was still closed to visitors and whose parking lot therefore remained empty. “I . . . I guess both?” she said, at last, hesitantly.

“Um . . . okay. I could grant you both, at least if there were no woman involved . . .” He neglected to say that unless it was manual sex there would have been other traces. “Throwing in vaginal secretions might change our perception of the crime. But why the sharkskin? They can’t have meant to throw suspicion on a shark. Unless,” he said, as an idea occurred to him, “some woman at the aquarium is a craftswoman specializing in sword and knife handles made of sharkskin. They do those, don’t they? I don’t remember what they call it . . . Oh, yes, I do. Shagreen, isn’t it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are so many ways in which humans exploit the beautiful creatures.” And then, as though catching sight of his shocked expression, she added, “Well, they are, you know, truly. Though my professor at college said that the natural historian always identifies with their subjects. Or at least, there is no other way to account for otherwise rational beings suddenly becoming misty-eyed over monitor lizards.”

It might be true. “So, you went to college in Hawaii?” Or perhaps her lover was a were shark and she fed him . . . who knew? Perhaps all that stuff about John Wagner was because they were accomplices?

“University of Hawaii,” she said. “Easiest thing, you know . . . I mean . . . it was my native state.”

“You were born there?”

She laughed lightly. “Born and raised. I don’t know when my first ancestors came to the isle. But since I’m a bit of a mix, I guess they all came at various times, over the course of history.”

“Well . . .” he said, wondering if he too would get tagged with sexual harassment. “It’s a very pleasant mix.” There was something wrong here, something off to Lei’s approaching him like this. What game
was
she playing? In these circumstances Rafiel often found it useful to give someone enough rope.

She seemed startled and blushed. “Thank you.”

“Go and deal with your paperwork, or whatever you’re going to do,” Rafiel said. “I have to look at some things here on the grounds.” The “some things” mostly applied to Old Joe. But he didn’t want to tell her that. He doubted he could get much of rational value out of Old Joe. If anyone could do that, it would be Tom, and Tom was, alas, not around just now. But Rafiel was hoping to get . . . something. “I’ll come and see if you’re ready afterwards.”

He was sure Lei was up to something too. It would be easier to play along till he found what it was. He could check on old Joe, then drop in on Lei, suddenly. Perhaps he would catch her kissing a shark or something. He repressed a chuckle at the idea.

First, he hoped Old Joe could give him some inkling of whether Dire was likely to be afraid of anyone. And second, some idea of whether Old Joe knew the crab shifter at the aquarium. For neither of those conversations did he wish to have the curvaceous Lei around, particularly since Old Joe was probably going to be in his shifted form.

He knew his colleagues on the force had locked and sealed the shark chamber the night before after it became obvious that they were in fact dealing with murder. She wouldn’t have the key to that, surely. McKnight was supposed to come in with the employees later on and supervise them while they fed the sharks and the other fish, so that no fish in those rooms would starve. But he didn’t see anything wrong with letting Lei go and do whatever paperwork she needed to do. At least not if he could drop in on her unannounced.

He watched her go towards the aquarium and only as he saw her go in, did it occur to him that she’d never told him she had a key. Did she have a key? Surely interns wouldn’t. Or did someone come to open the restaurant or aquarium at a designated time? Well, he’d find out. If she couldn’t get in, she couldn’t do much.