Sacrifice (3 page)

He can remember her anger when white men would stare at them and scowl as if they were disgusted to see her with a black man. She’d been appalled to discover just how much prejudice truly existed in the world, and since then she’d been distrustful of every white person she saw. She had so much in common with Mohammed’s father it was almost scary. Mohammed wasn’t ignorant of the realities of racial politics in America. He just didn’t condemn the entire race for the ignorance of a few.

His partner, for one, was different. Mohammed just didn’t want to argue the point. He knew his partner was a good man. They’d been watching each other’s backs since before he was married, and if Mohammed had it his way, John Malloy would be right there beside him until the day he left the force.

“Just give me a second to let everyone know I won’t be in today and I’ll be right back.”

Emily smiled. “Thank you, baby. Hurry up and crawl into bed with me.”

Mohammed smiled back, wondering which would degenerate first, his marriage or his career.

Chapter 5

Detective John Malloy had never seen anything like the carnage that lay strewn in steaming, half-eaten piles all over the sidewalk. Something had torn the guy apart. A thick, pulpy stew of body parts lay puddled at his feet in a gruesome collage of bones and half-eaten flesh. The lone witness sat on a police cruiser across the street, shivering and drinking coffee despite the oppressive heat. She said she’d heard the victim’s agonized cries and ran out of her house to find a pack of dogs, including the victim’s own Great Dane, several cats, birds, and a riot of rats and various insects eating her neighbor’s remains. The scattered remains still seethed with activity as legions of insects and vermin swarmed the brutalized carcass.

Damn, Mohammed would pick today to call in sick. This is the kind of case he’d love. I hate this type of shit,
Detective Malloy thought as he surveyed the bloodshed, trying to decide where exactly to begin.

“Shit!” Malloy said, slapping a hand to his forehead and fishing in his front pocket for a stick of sugarless gum. He walked slowly over to the corpse, staring from one pile of shredded meat to the next.

The body was a mess. What hadn’t already been consumed crawled with scavengers. A fresh body with so many parasites feeding on it wasn’t just odd, it was unheard of. When the call came in only twenty minutes ago, the victim had still been alive. His screams could be heard in the background as the 911 operator took the witness’s frantic phone call.

“Oh my God! They’re all over him! They’re tearing him apart! Send someone now! They’re killing him!”

Malloy scratched his head. He’d never seen maggots on a fresh corpse. There were scavengers on the body that shouldn’t have been there for another two or three days.

The detective ground his teeth and shook his head. His nostrils flared and his hands squeezed into tight fists, anticipating a long, drawn-out investigation that would get weirder and weirder every step of the way. He’d been doing this long enough that he could anticipate the really bad ones. He liked to think he had a sixth sense about these things. Of course any moron could’ve walked up to this scene and recognized that this would not be your normal forty-eight-hour case. This wasn’t some drunken idiot standing over the corpse with the gun still in his hand or some guy murdering his wife and trying to blame it on some generic black assailant.

From the moment they had to chase away the first rat trying to run off with the victim’s foot or the crows fighting over his intestines, anyone would’ve gotten the clue that this case was not going to be easy.

“Fuck me.”

After that mess last year, John had no stomach for another weird case. He still didn’t know what the hell he had walked in on back then. Detective Torres was just now beginning to reveal bits and pieces of what he and his partner had gone through at the hands of that little prick Dale McCarthy, and John wasn’t sure he even believed the few vague details Torres had told him. Except he couldn’t deny what he’d seen. That little geek had brought the detectives back to life, and Malloy had helped Torres cover it up and keep it a secret from Detective Lassiter and Harry, Malloy’s long-time friend and mentor on the force. He hardly believed any of it. He wished he could convince himself none of it had happened.

Malloy stood over the mangled remains, fighting off flashbacks of standing over Trina Lassiter’s body less than a year ago after Dale McCarthy tortured and mutilated her and somehow brought her back to life. This was much worse than what had been done to her.

I’d like to see that twisted fuck bring this one back to life,
John thought with a grim smirk. He covered his nose and leaned over the corpse. Muscle and fat had been torn away, and the white bone beneath was covered in teeth marks. In some spots the bone had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out. Bile rose in Malloy’s throat and he sucked it down. His stomach felt queasy. He closed his eyes and stood, turning away from the corpse.

What the fuck is going on?

Malloy looked across the street at the neighbor who witnessed the attack. She was leaning against a patrol car being interviewed by none other than Detective Lassiter. Malloy watched Trina Lassiter in amazement. It was still hard for him to believe she was alive. He wondered how much she remembered. He wondered if Torres would ever tell her the truth - how she was murdered and resurrected by that psychotic piece of shit - and if he should tell her. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it a secret from her and Harry.

He tried to put it out of his head and focus, but something about this case was dredging up the horrible memories.

He walked up behind Detective Lassiter as she interviewed the witness. She stiffened and quickly turned toward him. The pen she’d been writing with was now gripped tightly in her fist, and Malloy was almost certain she would have stabbed him in the throat with it if she hadn’t recognized him. She smiled at him, but her eyes looked haunted and tired. She may not remember what happened to her, but she still had signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. He wondered what her dreams were like.

“When did you get here?”

“Same time you did. The captain thought you might need some help since Mohammed didn’t make it in, so I volunteered. I haven’t worked a homicide in a while though. I saw you were already heading toward the body, so I thought I’d interview the witness.”

“Anything?”

Trina shook her head. “She’s in bad shape.”

Malloy stepped beside her as she turned back to the witness.

“Detective Malloy, this is Mona Miller. Mona, this is Detective John Malloy. Mona was just telling me what she saw when she came to her door after she heard the screams. Do you want to tell Detective Malloy what you told me?”

Mona Miller was unhealthily skinny. She looked like a drug addict or chemo patient. John suspected the former, though he wouldn’t have ruled out HIV. The way she was dressed in men’s boxers and a baby-doll T-shirt that revealed her midriff suggested she was a stripper or a hooker. Both of which were common professions for a girl her age and body type in Las Vegas. She had huge black eyes that stared out from her gaunt face, like the sketches of aliens drawn by alleged abductees. Her pupils were dilated, staring at something far away, as if she were still witnessing her neighbor’s destruction. She was shivering despite the heat. Goose bumps rose on her arms while she repeated her story. The coffee in her rainbow-colored mug splashed as she raised it to her quivering lips. She was scared senseless.

“They were eating him alive. They were all over him! He was covered with animals, and they were just ripping into him, tearing him apart. He was screaming. Horrible, terrible screams. There was so much blood. Pete, his Great Dane, had Bruce’s head in his jaws, crushing it. Bruce was so terrified. He was in so much pain. You-you should have heard the way he was screaming. I’ve never heard anything so-so agonized. They were all over him. They were all over him! And-and I wanted to kill him too! I don’t know why. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone before in my life. I mean, Bruce and I got along just fine. But at that moment I-I hated him. I wanted him dead.”

“She’s in shock. Let’s get her a blanket.” John called to a nearby EMT. Soon they loaded her into an ambulance. Trina ordered a uniform to ride along with her. There was a possibility she was more than just a witness; she very well may have killed him herself. Hacked him up and fed him to his own dog. He’d seen stranger things - much stranger things.

“So are you going to be joining me on this case full-time? You leaving sex crimes and coming over to robbery/homicide?”

“No, I think I’m going back to riding a desk for a few more months until I can get everything figured out, you know? I’m just here to help until Mohammed’s back.”

“Trina?” Dark violent shadows swirled in her eyes. It was like he could almost see her nightmares. “Is everything okay with you? I mean, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I wish I knew what happened to me though. I wish somebody would just tell me the truth. Maybe then these nightmares would go away and I could sleep. Maybe even get back to being a real fucking detective.”

Malloy thought about it.
How do you tell someone she was tortured and murdered by a serial killer who has the power to bring people back to life and that her friends have to keep the killer alive or else she’ll die? How do you tell someone that? And how would she deal with it if you did?

“Some things are just better remaining mysteries, you know? There are some truths that help and some that hurt. Just let this one go.”

Trina stared at Malloy for a long moment. Her body was tense, muscles flexed. Veins stood out in her neck as her jaw muscles worked. John could see the pain, fear, and confusion inside her through her eyes. He thought she was either going to scream, slap him, break down in tears, or stab him with that pen she still clutched in a death grip. Instead, she turned and walked away.

“You have a good day, John. Good luck with your case,” she said in a strained voice, not turning to look at him as she hurried off.

He watched her walk back to her car and drive away, following the ambulance. He wondered if he had done the right thing. But he remembered how Detective Torres had told him Trina had snatched the gun from Harry after Dale resurrected her and then walked over and blew Dale’s head off.

He knew he’d made the right call just now. There were some things we just should not know.

Detective Malloy looked from Detective Lassiter’s car to across the street at the victim’s house, where a huge black Great Dane sat on the porch contentedly licking blood from its paws. John’s stomach lurched, bile scalded the back of his throat, and he had to suck his lunch back down into his stomach.

Then he got angry. “What the fuck are you idiots doing?”

The skull that lay beside the huge dog had half the flesh eaten from its face and the scalp was peeled back like a bad toupee. It had holes in the top of the cranium from where the Great Dane had bitten into it. Several officers were crowded around the porch inching closer to the dog with guns drawn, trying to decide whether or not to shoot it to retrieve the evidence.

“Jesus! Get that thing away from that dog! He’s eating the evidence!”

The three nearest officers looked at each other and then over at the tremendous canine. Ropes of blood and viscera coated its fur.

“We’re trying! What if he’s rabid or something?”

“Shoot him if you have to!”

The officers crept hesitantly up the walkway, nervously preparing to confront a mad dog the size of a pony. But the dog turned out to be somewhat less than mad. The massive Great Dane rolled around on the porch waving its tail excitedly, bathing in its master’s blood, batting the skull around with its huge paws like a cat with a chew-toy filled with catnip.

The first officer, a young, clean-shaven Latino named Miguel Cruz who seemed more amused than wary, drew closer to the porch, and the dog trotted over to him, wagging its tail. It licked his hand, smearing it with blood. Cruz leapt back as if he’d been bitten. He smiled self-consciously when he realized the dog had only licked him.

Instinctively, the young officer reached down to pet the dog while its tail waved frantically. The other two officers lowered their weapons and looked at each other in amazement.

Detective Malloy shook his head. “What the fuck are you doing?” He took a deep breath and slowly unclenched his fists. He ran his palm down his face and looked heavenward, hoping for some sort of heavenly assistance as he watched the man-eating Great Dane with a face encrusted with gore roll on its back like a lap dog while the young officer scratched its belly. Finally, the other two officers walked up onto the porch and plopped the victim’s head into a trash bag, noting with revulsion that its tongue had been torn out and eaten, no doubt by the very animal now happily playing with their fellow officer.

Detective Malloy wasn’t taking any chances. “Cruz! Stop petting the suspect and get a leash or something on that thing! Tie it to a tree and call animal control before it gets hungry again.”

“But I don’t have a leash,” officer Cruz answered. The dog had licked his face, and now the officer was covered in the victim’s blood.

“Jesus Christ. Will you look at yourself! Go check inside the victim’s house for a leash or use your belt. And clean yourself up while you’re in there before the media arrives. Bag anything you get off your face! It’s still evidence. Who called the meat wagon?”

“I called them the minute I called you,” Officer Patrick said, a young Irish cop Malloy recognized from the precinct. He was sitting on the hood of his car with his eyes glazed in shock. He’d been the first officer on the scene, and although he had the benefit of having no one around to see him throw up, he had not had the benefit of a warning before walking headlong into the most gruesome murder scene he’d ever seen or heard of. He tried to pretend he was okay, but every time he stood, his legs would shake so badly he couldn’t walk and had to sit back down again.