Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (13 page)

Then again, this sort of shit—hit and runs—happened in Chattanooga a little more frequently than they did in Midian. Still, two in one day? Weird. Beyond weird, really. Or beyond coincidence, at least.

“Hello, doctor,” Sheriff Reeve said as she approached. There was another deputy there, a blond girl who really did look like a girl. Early twenties at best, Lauren figured. Maybe younger. She had that look, too, watching everything Lauren did as she approached. Cop look. She’d seen it in the ER more than a few times.

“Sheriff,” Lauren said, not bothering to conceal her irritation. If he noticed it, he didn’t respond. Which sort of made sense; the man looked a little out of sorts to her eyes, and she didn’t even know him all that well.

“We’ve got another one,” he said, sparing not a moment in informing her of not only the obvious, but of something he’d already told her before.

“So I see.” Lauren held herself to civility. She still wanted to rail at his ass for getting her out of bed to come down here like this, but she really had no one to blame but herself for agreeing to it. One good “fuck off,” and he’d never trouble her again, she suspected.

But he wasn’t on the list. Damn him.

The female deputy illuminated the body for her with one of those big Maglites. Lauren didn’t like ’em, thought they looked like the sort of thing a Cro-Magnon would use to knock a woman over the skull with before dragging her back to his cave. “Over here,” the deputy said.

The light skittered along the ground just briefly, enough to catch a couple of dark red reflections that might have been water if one didn’t look too closely. Lauren suspected they weren’t, though, and she tried to take care in stepping over to the body. “Am I destroying a crime scene or something just by trampling here?”

The sheriff’s hesitation was damning in and of itself. “I don’t know how much of a crime scene we’ve got here,” he said. Not exactly the vote of confidence she was looking for. But then again, why would the sheriff of Calhoun County know how to set up a crime scene anyway? At least for something like this, he wouldn’t.

The deputy brought the beam around so Lauren could see where she was stepping. A few isolated drops of blood were scattered along the path and she avoided landing her shoes in them—for more than one reason. “Thanks,” she told the short, blond lady. Did she know the deputy? Probably not; even if they had gone to the same school, they had to easily be ten years apart. She did look a little familiar, though.

“Not a problem,” the deputy said. “You’re Lauren Darlington, aren’t you?”

Lauren felt a brush of irritation and looked over at the face hidden behind the flashlight’s beam. The deputy lowered it so she could see a little more of the shadowed features. The deputy had soft ones, a little nose, blond hair that didn’t make it far past her neck, and she wasn’t all that tall, either. “Yeah. And you are?”

“Erin Harris,” the deputy said.

That triggered a little bit of a revelation for Lauren. “Rick Harris’s little sister?”

“Yeah,” Erin said, and not much more.

Lauren had known her brother, had gone to school with him. He was all right; he hadn’t made the list, either, him or his other two brothers that she knew of. She vaguely recalled Erin now, but only barely. When she graduated high school, this Erin must have been something like eight years old. “How is Rick?”

“Good,” Erin said. “He’s in management up near Cleveland—Ohio, not Tennessee. Helps run a factory up there.”

“Made it out, huh?” Lauren idly mused, leaning over the body. “Good for him. So few of our class did.”

“Made it out of where?” The deputy—Erin—asked her. Lauren didn’t even look up or bother to answer, because the blond girl clearly got it a second later. “Oh.” Yeah. Out of Midian. So few of their class got out of Midian. It was like the world’s largest flytrap, and once it got you caught, you never got out.

Like this poor bastard, whoever he was. She stared at the body, and it took her a second to realize it might—maybe—have been female. There was a lot of stuff wrong with it, but she could see the long hair now. It was hard to tell, what with swaths of the scalp torn loose and folded over themselves.

“Well?” Sheriff Reeve asked. “What do you think?”

Lauren didn’t even bother to stop herself, assuming she even would have had the willpower to if she wasn’t half-asleep. “This man is dead, Jim.” She paused. “Or … this woman is. Hard to say.”

“If they’re dead?” Deputy Harris asked.

“No, that’s for sure. I was talking about the victim’s gender, though I suppose it’d be easy to tell if I were motivated to disturb the body enough to try and remove the pants,” Lauren said. “I assume you probably don’t want to know badly enough to do that, though.”

“I suppose not,” Reeve said. “Good Lord, though, identifying this poor bastard—”

“I’m not sorry I don’t have to deal with it,” Lauren said, a little more bluntly than she might have if this were taking place at midday. She sighed and realized that she should probably throttle back a little on the bitchiness. It’s not like Reeve wanted to be here, either. She glanced at him. Hell, he didn’t even look like he fully realized where he was.

It wasn’t that warm, yet Reeve had sweat running down his forehead that glinted in the moonlight. She might have assumed it was tears if it had been below the eyes, but it wasn’t. If she had his job, with the body count piling up lately, she would almost certainly have shed a few tears, even absent the fact that she knew indirectly or directly every person who’d died in the shitty events of the last week. She’d already had to take time off work to go to Kim Hauser’s funeral.

“Any idea—any clue—what might have done this?” Lauren heard Erin Harris ask her, but she wasn’t turned where she could see the female deputy. Still, there was something about the way she asked, a tremor of something in her voice, that was different than the sheriff’s state of shock. It wasn’t something Lauren could quite put her finger on, but she’d dealt with enough fake smiles and feigned “Oh, bless your hearts” over the years to be able to detect a little bullshit when it was being applied directly.

This wasn’t quite that, but it had the faint ring of it. She glanced at Reeve, but he was far beyond noticing. Hell, maybe she really was just a little put off by the whole thing. She was … what? Nineteen? Probably hadn’t seen a whole lot of dead bodies.

“I don’t know,” Lauren said, a little guarded. “This isn’t exactly my specialty. My gut says trauma did it. Blood loss or cardiac arrest in the aftermath of being smashed. As for what hit them? Not a clue.” She stood, putting her hands by her side. She hadn’t brought any gloves, which didn’t matter because she didn’t want to disturb the corpse in any case.

Lauren stared down at the body and then shook her head. Stuff like this happened at her work, not her home, and she’d been very careful to keep a bubble separating those two things. It was for Molly, she’d always said, and having the added benefit of the drive meant she could work farther away. But really, it was for Molly in the sense that things like she saw in the ER in Chattanooga didn’t happen here in Midian. Murders, rapes, hit-and-runs … they
didn’t
happen here. Minor mischief, sure. Some assholes that beat their wives or girlfriends, yes. Drug use, for certain, and tons of it lately.

But this? This happened in her other world. Not in Midian. Not until now.

Lauren turned away from the body, feeling a certain rush to her head from the thoughts surrounding it. She turned and caught movement coming up the path. It took her only a moment to see the shadow emerging from the dark.

Archibald Stan.

“Looks like I didn’t miss much yet,” Stan said as he came up the path, looking smug and irritating in his deputy uniform. He always looked smug and irritating to her, though. Always had. Even before the uniform. “Miss Darlington,” he said, and she could tell how much effort he was putting into making it sound polite.

“Doctor,” she said. “
Doctor
Darlington, thanks.”

You bastard
, she didn’t say.

Lerner was chugging down the trail, Duncan behind him. They couldn’t hear it anymore, the sound of the thing—whatever the hell it was—somewhere far ahead. This wasn’t all that surprising to Lerner, because they’d given the killer a hell of a head start, and demons weren’t renowned for standing still when they’d murdered a human. Unless they were planning to make a stand, or planning to eat it, or just generally be a complete and total nuisance.

No, that didn’t happen all that often. Flagrant violations like that would tend to bring the Office of Occultic Concordance down pretty hard, and no demon stood still for that. None.

“Get any sense of how much farther we’re going to have to run?” Lerner asked. It wasn’t like he was winded, though he could hear his body and it sure sounded like he was. “I only ask because this shell of mine gets wheezier the farther we go.”

“You can control that if you put your mind to it,” Duncan said, not even breaking a sweat. Not that he broke a real sweat, ever. He wasn’t wheezing, either.

“Yeah, but that’d require me to actually put my mind to it,” Lerner said, hiding his irritation with Duncan and his total lack of exertion, “and I have other things on it at the moment.”

“Such as?” Duncan asked coolly. Lerner was a little surprised; Duncan wasn’t the type to ask.

“Such as what’s doing this shit for one,” Lerner said. “Such as what we’re going to do when we catch it. Such as how sweet it would be to find the essence behind that fucking screen Spellman and crack them open slow, after forcing them to drink some marstap solution—” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling at that. Marstap solution burned the shit out of an essence. No demon wanted to go anywhere near it, but he’d gladly procure a few dozen bottles if he could turn some loose on the bastard that was making his life a hell of its own lately.

“Not exactly your deepest thoughts,” Duncan said.

“But some damned fun ones,” Lerner said. Especially the last one.

The moon was hanging high overhead, and the steady sound of their feet along the asphalt path was starting to grate on Lerner. Running was not fun, not for him, and he had a hard time imagining any human could enjoy it either, what with their muscles and joints and all the other stuff that got to experience the jarring pain of the up and down leg motions. Why did humans enjoy exerting themselves? he wondered. Was it all down to those curious endorphins they got afterward? He’d read they got those after sex, too, which sounded a lot more interesting than running to him.

“You’ve got that look on your face again,” Duncan warned him.

“I’m keeping my thoughts to myself,” Lerner said. Duncan just griped about everything fun. “You’re what the humans call a mother hen about this shit. Or a wet rag.”

If Duncan had a reply, he kept it to himself. “I’m still not sensing anything.”

“So they’re just gone? Or
it
is. I guess it could be an it.”

“Seems like.” Duncan slowed and Lerner adjusted his speed along with his partner. The breeze shifted the trees above, making a rattling noise that Lerner did not care for. Not in this situation, anyway. “The path forks up ahead, too.”

Lerner looked and found it did, indeed, fork. One way looked like it was a dirt path, the other the continuation of the asphalt one, winding right to follow the path of the river. What did they call it? The Caledonia, that’s right. Like Scotland. Lerner had been to Scotland before, a long time ago. Which probably meant it was due for a hotspot at some point in the next twenty years or so. That’d be nice. He’d kind of liked the taste of haggis last time he’d been there.

“Look at this,” Duncan said, and Lerner finally came to a stop just where the path forked. He smiled. Something was forked, all right. He wandered up to Duncan, feeling the quiet singing of his essence inside his shell. A run like that would have put some humans in the hospital. Lerner had done some study on body types, and it was always interesting to him—

“Focus,” Duncan said, interrupting his thought.

“What am I looking for?” Lerner gazed into the dark but didn’t see anything save for a trail.

“I don’t know,” Duncan said. “We don’t even know if the—the whatever—if it came this way.”

Lerner sighed. This town was such a bust for him. Where was an easier assignment when he needed one? There were eighteen hotspots, and almost certainly every single one of them was in less peril than this town. Why couldn’t the office have sent him to one of those? Somewhere pleasant, maybe. Like Ecuador. Or barren, like the one in the Atacama Desert in Chile. That one was probably a nice, easy ride, just keeping an eye on some chu’tuaka to make sure they didn’t burrow too deep into the earth and cause quakes. “I don’t see anything but tire tracks. Little ones.” He snorted. “So unless you think our demons were riding on bicycles …”

Duncan stared into the darkness, and he did it for long enough that Lerner took notice. “No, I don’t think they’re bicyclists,” Duncan finally said, and then lapsed into another uncomfortable silence. When he spoke again, Lerner could almost hear the misery. “This town’s really going to fall, isn’t it?”

“It’s just a few isolated incidents,” Lerner said, brushing it off. He realized on some level he was really just telling Duncan what he needed to hear, but still, he did it. “Nothing big enough and bad enough to wipe it off the map has shown up yet. Just a bunch of small-timers with big damned ambitions. Bugs with plans to take over the world can’t be taken too seriously.”

Duncan glanced back at him. “That last one got pretty close.”

“To taking over the world, nah,” Lerner said, brushing him off. “A Sygraath gone crazy is not exactly the doom of mankind, and it’s not the herald of anything other than a town experiencing a hotspot. Demons do crazy things at hotspots. It’s a law of nature, like coeds taking their tops off at spring break.” He paused and stared straight at Duncan, concentrated on speaking to the essence within the shell. “It’ll be all right.” He said it. He tried to send exactly that feeling, in exactly that way, directly to Duncan—the real Duncan, inside the shell.