Sink In Your Claws

  He had no idea how to respond.

  Einar told him to go with it.

  They flummoxed him. He didn’t take their trust for granted. He did, however, think they were crazy. He was frail, with dark circles under his eyes. His face betrayed how much his wounds ached. He wasn’t playing persona games, wasn’t pretending. Would have taken too much effort.

  Cresson, Layton and Einar looked up at the same time.

  Cresson stared. “How? Jesus Christ. Detective Lewis. Junior. You’re dead—”

  “Fuck? Where did you go? You saved my life. I . . .” Layton said.

  “Einar didn’t need another dead partner,” Michael said. “He has his share.”

  Layton spun to Cresson. “What’d you say? Who is it?”

  “Keep your damn mouth shut, Robert,” Einar said.

  “I don’t understand. What’s going on?” Cresson looked like his world had been skewered.

  “I’m bringing Iceland's clearance rate back to perfect,” Michael said. “Too bad for you.”

  Layton stared at Kait. His eyes narrowed. “Wait, you’re his lawyer—”

  She shook her head. “I’m an anthropologist.”

  Einar headed straight for them. He hugged Kait and leaned in to Michael, voice lowered. “Mikey. What are you doing? You look like hell. Marta said at least a week—”

  “No.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking around—”

  He pulled a shaking hand out his pocket and grasped Einar’s arm to quiet him. They both stared at it, longer than a human hand, fingers curled, nail beds deeper. Michael winced. Stuck it back in his pocket.

  Claws? Undead? He was struggling to process it.

  Einar slung an arm around him and led them into the hall. “What’re you thinking, Mikey? You need rest.”

  Michael took a slow breath. “I want to give a statement. Families of the murdered children deserve closure. They spent three years not knowing, wondering. I know. I can identify the killer. And what those maniacs were trying to do.”

  Einar eyed Kait.

  “I tried. Told him he could do this later.”

  He glanced at them. “I’ll only talk about it once—I’ll warn you, it’s bad. Worse than any nightmare. But the cases should be closed. Their parents should know.”

  “Now?” Einar looked at him. “You’re not ready. Have enough to deal with. Need time to . . . adjust. It can’t wait?”

  “They’ve waited too long.” He was tired but determined.

  “And you couldn’t sleep thinking about it, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Couldn’t convince him to rest,” Kait said. “I tried. Stubbornness has returned full-force.”

  “Shit, Mikey.” Einar eyed him. “You ever going to learn?”

  “Probably not . . .”

  “What if it gets out? What if someone recognizes you? Evie's out there and she reamed Phil for his lack of exposure on the case. Christ, she'll pounce. You saw the vulture mob. They remember the hero cop who saved the boy two years ago. They’re looking for the homeless man who decapitated the monster. Hello? Both you.”

  Michael closed his eyes. “I know.” He swayed and Kait held him.

  “Relax,” she said.

  He opened his eyes, shook his head.

  “Crap,” Einar said. “Press’ll have a field day. They’re insane about the monsters. They’ve hounded lock-up to interview Litsos.” He looked Michael in the eye. “It worries me. Seriously worries me, for your sake. You up to it?”

  “No. I’ll hide at your house. With K and black beast. Away from people.”

  “Right.” Einar shook his head. “Okay. You’re crazy. Let’s go. I’ll start writing.” He moved and then halted. “Wait. I have something.” He returned to the office, took five long steps to his desk, grabbed two books and a tall beverage can and returned. Led them to the interview room, closed the door and sat beside them.

  “I was going to drop these off this afternoon. But, since you don’t need rest despite being shot twice and clawed in the chest, I’ll present them before we get started.” He set the books—The Mysteries of Bigfoot and Fundamentals of Meditation—and a can of Monster energy drink in front of Michael.

  Michael looked at him. No, he was not normal. Thank God.

  Kait shook her head. She smiled.

  “Common sense. You need energy for recovery and fuel for the mind. Label says it’s for monsters. Truth in advertising, I’m sure.”

  What planet had he come from?

  Einar tapped the books with a finger. “Mediation will help with anger issues, which you might want to avoid. And . . . can I read you that story about Bigfoot?”

  “Can’t say no, can I?” Despite his fractured mind, mangled body, and the unpleasant recent discovery that he was, in fact, a monster, Michael smiled, remembering the conversation in the bookstore.

  Einar raised an eyebrow. “I suspect now you believe me.”

  The End

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Bring Up the Bones

  By S. E. Chase

  Seward City and the Adirondack region aren't done with monsters. Long buried secrets begin to rise to the surface and the police search for a killer.

  But it begs remembering: you never know what lurks in the wilderness.

  Forthcoming in summer 2015

  CHAPTER 1

  April 16, 2014

  She drove east on the thruway from Utica, three boxed skeletons on her Mazda’s back seat.

  “Don’t slam on the brakes. Bones will fly,” Kait Jenret said aloud—despite being the only living passenger.

  A guy in a rusted beater passed on the left, turned his head and snarled an insult.

  She stared back but didn't respond. Usually she would have blown his doors off. Kait loved gunning the engine but eased her foot off the gas when the speedometer hit seventy—how would she explain her cargo to the cops?

  She imagined the skulls, upright on bones in cardboard cartons, surrounded by darkness, sensing the motion. Did they know what was happening? Worry about being lost again?

  If only her dark mood would pass.

  At least the sun was shining, rare for Upstate New York in mud season. The first signs of spring—pink-tinged buds on trees and snowdrops peaking through the ground—brightened yards and hills along the Mohawk River. She rolled down the window to half and took a deep breath, wind hitting her face and blowing her dark hair in waves. Bracing but needed. Summer was coming at last. A few snow patches lay on the ground, but they’d soon be gone—and good riddance to everything they signified. It’d been a terrible winter. That she’d remained in New York State and hadn’t returned to Texas seemed surreal.

  She pondered her passengers’ strange fate. Who tosses human skeletons? After thirty years in a small upstate museum, they’d been thrown away but saved by an intern appalled they’d been discarded. He snuck them to a larger institution in Utica where they were relegated to storage. They sat unstudied until a new curator found them in March and requested they leave the building immediately.

  The small museum refused to take them back. Utica staff discovered they'd had been unearthed in Seward City and contacted Seward City Police, who referred them to the Medical Examiner’s Office, where Kait, on leave from Baylor University’s Forensic Anthropology Department, was consulting. It was a lot of bureaucratic shuffling for boxes of bones. But they deserved better than abandonment.

  She pulled through the security kiosk, relieved her drive with the dead was over, and parked near a squat modernist building she and colleagues derided as ‘the brick tank,’ an urban renewal relic displaying the character of dull cinder blocks. Even a rare sunny day couldn’t improve its blot on the municipal landscape.

  Marta Lantanna, Seward City Medical Examiner and Robbie “RJ” Junkowski, a white-coated forensic tech, met her in the entry bay.

  Kait stepped from the car and threw her sunglasses on the seat.

  “Door-
to-door service.” RJ said. “Think your passengers appreciate it?”

  Kait laughed. “Not likely.”

  Marta smiled and shook her head. “Even the live ones often don't.”

  RJ gave her a quizzical look.

  “You're young.” Marta opened the back door. “You'll learn. Courtesy and gratitude aren't common responses to our presence.”

  “Yeah. Grim Reaper's clean up crew.” Kait circled to Martha and took a box from her. “People cringe when they see us coming.”

  RJ smiled. “Hey, we get a reaction.”

  Marta shook her head.

  They carried the boxes to the forensic laboratory and set them on stainless steel examination tables. Kait and Marta slipped on blue nitrile gloves and opened the first box, unwrapping bones, inventorying them and placing them in rough position on the table, the disconnected semblance of a person.

  “OCD alert, coming through. . .” RJ zipped around them. He held a small finger bone in a gloved hand, rotated so a catalogue number was visible. “Each is numbered. Black ink, neat penmanship.” He set it down, reached for his digital camera and photographed it twice, once next to a ruler and once without, then repeated the process for each bone. He worked with precision and soon completed the first skeleton.

  Marta looked perplexed. “Wrapped and numbered but no paperwork?”

  Kait sighed. “No. Just a brief statement about unearthing them in Seward City in the 1960s.” She moved the empty box to the counter. “Intern grabbed the bones. Didn’t take the records. That’s the story from Utica.” She fired up her laptop and typed information about size, condition, wear marks and number system into a database.

  RJ furrowed his brow. “Catalogue numbers—done by manic neat freak, I gotta add—suggest someone unearthed them at an archaeological dig.”

  “I agree. But the situation’s weird. Site isn’t identified or documented? Doesn’t make sense.” Marta finished unpacking the second skeleton then discarded her gloves and hung her lab coat on a hook. She smoothed her dress jacket, straightened her skirt and slipped a lanyard with identification badge around her neck. “I'd love to stay and help. This puzzle’s more intriguing than budget meetings. But administrative duties beckon.” She headed for the door but paused. “No information at all?”

  “No,” Kait said. “None in Utica—I asked, believe me. Intern was long gone. Staff had no idea how to find him. After he hoisted the skeletons to the top shelf, no one touched them. Not once.” She shook her head. “They’ve shuttled through museums gathering dust since 1966.”

  “Cold.” RJ pantomimed a shiver. “Your mortal remains forgotten in a cardboard box.”

  “Someone threw catalogued human skeletons away.” Marta shook her head. “A first for me.”

  Kait nodded. “Me too. Thought I’d had my share of strange.” When she worked in museums—before the unpleasant kidnapping pushed her back to forensic anthropology—she’d joke about her weird radar, tuned to the same frequency as a wide assortment of crazies who gravitated to her with odd requests. On the return from Utica, she decided her radar was still sending signals.

  “Early 1990s, director at the small museum discarded them.” She glanced at Marta. “Apparently the founding director authorized a dig in ’66.” She reviewed her notes. “Otisco Museum, that’s the name, in Auburn. The later director dumped them by a rear door where the intern found them. I’ll go talk to staff, track down information.”

  “Shit.” RJ said. “Dude should be prosecuted. Ditching the dead. Nasty.”

  “Lots of things are nasty.” Kait paused, fingers over the laptop keyboard. ‘The world is nasty.”

  “There are a few bright spots,” countered Martha.

  RJ laughed. “That’s the truth. But lots of bad air in the world, man.”

  “New York State has laws against disposal of human remains,” Marta halted in the doorway. “But historic skeletons in museum collections wouldn’t fall under those guidelines.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand—Auburn isn’t near Seward City. Why come here? Why transport the remains three hours west? Sounds unethical.”

  Kait nodded. “Something’s off.” She looked from one table to another and brushed a gloved hand along the counter edge. Their nonidentity was disconcerting, especially for the way in which they’d been discovered and hauled away. At first glance, the bones looked clean. But they’d been in museum storage. No erosion, staining, or wear. Hadn’t been gnawed by rodents or disarticulated and broken apart. Had to belong to someone, right? Perhaps native cultures, long-lost settlers or relics of a more ominous past. She wanted to soothe their anonymous souls. Recent experience had made her more tuned to the dead. “If only they could talk.”

  RJ snorted. “They’d be screaming.”

  “Hmm . . . something to be said for the silence of the deceased—but I suspect there’s more to this story.” Marta sighed. “Good luck. Let me know what you find out.” She turned to leave, then stopped. “Any outside tests needed to identify them, consider approvals given. The least we can do.” She smiled and with a wave of her hand headed to her senior administration meeting.

  “They aren’t prehistoric.” Kait stepped back from the table with the smallest skeleton.

  “Historic? Colonial soldiers, immigrant settlers, or wandering minstrels?” RJ set the skull from the second box on the table and snapped a digital image.

  Kait smiled. “None of the above. More contemporary—they don’t appear to have been in the ground long before they were unearthed. We’ll test to verify, but I estimate they’re twentieth century.” She set a jawbone by a skull that still held a few teeth. Stroke of luck. They might yield DNA in remaining pulp or provide dental records. She and RJ stepped back, glancing at the two whole skeletons and almost completed third—forlorn on shining tables, alien in the florescent antiseptic glare.

  RJ whistled and ran a hand through his hair. “Wow. Twentieth? Not cool. Could be my grandparents. How’d they end up in a museum?”

  “Good question. An archaeological dig gone haywire? Fraud? Don’t have an answer. If they were my relatives, I’d be pissed.”

  “Can you imagine? Your dead loved one reappearing years later?”

  Kait glanced at him, began to speak but stopped.

  I don't have to imagine it.

  RJ, oblivious to her hesitation, had moved on, photographing more bones.

  “Wait a minute . . . ” Kait paced, walked again past each, leaning in for a closer look. “Shit.”

  “What?” RJ looked up.

  “They aren’t complete.”

  “Huh?”

  “Missing a left hand. All of them.”

  RJ scrambled to her side. “Creepy,” he said. “Just not right.”

  “Funny.” She raised an eyebrow.

  He broke into a sheepish grin. “Know what I mean. Sinister as in bizarro land. Maybe someone believed that ‘left is evil’ thing. Grandma used to slap me when I ate with my left hand. Said I’d go to hell. We didn’t visit her much.” His eyes jerked between the tables. “Someone didn’t like lefties.”

  “Great.” Kait looked at RJ. “I’m left-handed.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  “Hope it isn’t a bad omen.” Kait moved the other empty boxes to the counter. She’d had enough of myths and omens to last a lifetime. Or several.

  “Isn’t it always?” RJ shrugged. “All bad karma sinks down here. Rats, moles and the dead.”

  “Don’t say that too loud.”

  “Why?”

  “Mole gods might hear you and make it so.”

  He laughed.

  “People listen to that crap,” she said. “Think you’re accusing them of dismissing you, or whining about not being with the big dogs in shiny offices. You know, the upstairs downstairs thing.”

  RJ laughed. “Yeah. I volunteer at the blood bank and hear ’em fight about it. Admin staff honchos have big glass-windowed offices over the river. Program people have a basement co
rner.”

  “Some things never change.” She shrugged and returned to work. Gentle hands rotated the largest skull. Shattered edges with radiating hairline fractures led to a jagged hole in the occipital bone below the lambdoid suture. A knot tightened in her stomach. They didn’t die of natural causes. She walked the aisle a third time, reexamining the other two skulls. Identical trauma. She swore. “Shit. Bad omen, worse karma—they were murdered.”

  RJ raised an eyebrow. “Murdered.”

  “Death by sharp object to the base of the skull.”

  “Damn. Serious bad karma.”

  “Our day just got more complicated.” Kait pulled out her cell and called the Seward City Investigative Division.

  Detective First Class Einar Hannesson and Detective Second Class Robert Layton walked through the door, escorted by a young tech with curly hair and red glasses. The girl eyed them, her nonstop chatter and jerky movements betraying nervousness in their presence. Einar seemed amused but Layton was annoyed. Kait made a mental note to speak with her later—first day jitters were normal, but she had to get used to dealing with cops. Came with the territory. The tech pointed, wished the detectives good afternoon and scurried away.

  “We don't bite,” Einar turned and yelled as she left. “Honest.”

  RJ looked up, surprised.

  Layton shook his head.

  Einar caught his partner's reaction. He smiled at Kait.

  “Ever the people person,” she said.

  Tall and dressed as usual in suit and tie, he stepped forward and ducked a low hanging light fixture that’d been rotated to get closer to an exam table. He came to Kait’s side and peered at the skeletons through wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Hvað er að frétta,” he said in Icelandic. “What’s new?”

  “The dead,” she said.

  His fingers brushed her arm.

  Kait smiled. Interesting didn’t do him justice. He’d lived in the states for years but had never lost the otherness that coming from the land of glaciers, geysers and volcanoes conveyed. That, and like some Icelanders, he believed (or claimed he believed) in ghosts, elves and other unworldly beings. He lauded Bigfoot sightings and cryptozoology news. Sometimes he did it for effect as an odd force field against bureaucracy and the crap of his job. At other times . . .

  Whatever his secret rationale, he didn’t hide his weird views. It drove other detectives, including his partner, crazy. He was a good cop but not an unthinking team player and his stubborn independence didn’t sit well with Seward City’s small parochial force.