Kitty's Greatest Hits

  He had to remind himself that the outlook was paranoid. Cops were just doing their jobs like anyone else. They weren’t the bad guys—usually. He had to work to not think of Detective Hardin as an enemy. But she wouldn’t be here unless she wanted something from him, and he remained suspicious. What his family had taught him: Cops weren’t your friends, they weren’t going to help you, they’d take you down the minute you did something wrong—the way they defined wrong. He learned to avoid the cops; he definitely never learned to respect them. Especially not after they sent Uncle David to prison. He didn’t go to prison because he was wrong, but because he got caught. Same as Cormac.

  Hardin didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Cormac, either, to be fair. She’d have locked him up herself if she’d had the chance. She came from the overworked and driven mold of detective, her suit jacket worn and comfortable rather than fashionable, her dark hair pulled back in a functional ponytail. She didn’t wear makeup, and the frown lines around her mouth were more prominent than the laugh lines around her eyes. The nicotine from cigarettes stained her fingers. She always seemed to be leaning forward, like she was listening hard.

  “Not sure I can help you,” he said.

  “You mean you’re not sure you will. Maybe you should let me know right now if I’m wasting my time. Save us both the trouble.”

  “Did Kitty tell you to talk to me?”

  “She said you might know things.”

  “Kitty’s got a real big mouth,” Cormac said.

  Hardin was still studying him, glaring through the glass in a way that was almost challenging. Maybe because she felt safe, because she knew he couldn’t get to her here. Except she’d looked at him like that outside the prison, the first time he’d run into her.

  “How did you two even end up friends?” Hardin said. “You wanted to kill her.”

  “It wasn’t personal.”

  “Then, what? It got personal?”

  He considered a moment, then said, “Kitty has a way of growing on you.”

  That got Hardin to smile. At least, one corner of her lips turned up. “I have a body. Well, half a body. It’s pretty spectacular and it’s not in any of the books.” She pulled a manila folder out of an attaché case, and from there drew out a pair of eight-by-ten photo sheets. She held them up to the glass, and he leaned forward to see.

  The first showed a crime scene, lots of yellow tape, numbered tent tags laid out on the ground, a ruler set out for scale. The place looked to be a small, unassuming backyard, maybe one of the older neighborhoods in Denver. The focus of the photo was a small toolshed, inside of which stood a set of human legs, standing upright. Just the legs, dressed in a pair of tailored feminine slacks and black pumps. He might have guessed that this was part of a mannequin, set up as a practical joke. But then there was the second photo.

  This showed the top of the legs—which had clearly been separated from their owner. A wet vertebra emerged from a mass of red flesh, fat, and organs. The tissue all seemed scorched, blackened around the edges, bubbling toward the middle, as if someone had started cauterizing the epic wound and stopped when the job was half done. The wound, as wide as the body’s pelvis, was red and boiled.

  He’d seen a lot of gory, horrific stuff in his time, but this made his stomach turn over. In spite of himself, he was intrigued. “What the hell? How are they even still standing? Are they attached to something?”

  “No,” she said. “I have a set of free-standing legs attached to a pelvis, detached cleanly at the fifth lumbar vertebra. The wound is covered with a layer of table salt that appears to have caused the flesh to scorch. Try explaining that one to my captain.”

  “No thanks,” he said. “That’s your job. I’m just the criminal reprobate.”

  “So you’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this?”

  “No.” She’d set the photos on the desk in front of her. He found himself leaning forward to get another, closer look at the body. The half a body. “You have any leads at all?”

  “No. We’ve ID’d the body. She was Filipina, a recent immigrant. We’re still trying to find the other half of the body. There has to be another half somewhere, right?”

  He sat back, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “You’re sure you don’t know anything? You’re not just yanking my chain out of spite?”

  “I get nothing out of yanking your chain. Not here.”

  Wearing a disappointed scowl, she put the photos back in her attaché. “Well, this was worth a try. Sorry for wasting your time.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time.”

  “If you think of anything, if you get any bright ideas, call me.” She looked up at the guard who had arrived to escort Cormac back to his cell. Hardin had a parting shot. “And get some sleep. You look awful.”

  It was almost nice that she cared.

  * * *

  He could have sworn he heard banging on the bars of the cell, as if someone was hanging on the door, rattling it, trying to get his attention.

  You have to let me in! You have to trust me!

  Not even bothering to tell her no, he put his hands over his ears, squeezed shut his eyes, ignoring her. That didn’t stop the noise.

  I know what it is! Listen to me! I’ll prove it to you. Those photographs—I know what did it!

  He woke up, covered in sweat, a foreign word on his lips and knowledge he didn’t know he had flitting at the edge of his mind. He’d had a nightmare—another one, but this one was different. Images of a tropical country full of brown-skinned people. A village wailing in despair because so many women had suffered miscarriages over the last few months, losing babies before they were even born. The vampire has taken them, the vampire has drunk them. Which didn’t make sense to Cormac. Vampires drank blood, not babies.

  This one takes babies. It travels by separating from its legs and can be destroyed by salt.

  He knew what it was. She’d told him. The word was on the tip of his tongue.

  * * *

  When he asked for an extra phone call that week in order to talk to a cop in Denver, the warden gave it to him. Apparently Hardin had left the request in advance, like she had a hunch that he’d get a sudden attack of memory. But this wasn’t memory, it was—

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  He called collect and waited for the operator to put him through. She answered, sounding surly and frustrated, then rushed to accept the charges when she heard his name.

  “Hello? Bennett?”

  “Manananggal,” he said. “Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

  “Okay, but what is it?”

  “Filipino version of the vampire.”

  “Hot damn,” she said, as happy as he’d ever heard her. “The victim was from the Philippines. It fits. So the suspect was Filipino, too? Do Filipino vampires eat entire torsos or what?”

  “No. That body is the vampire, the manananggal. You’re looking for a vampire hunter.”

  “Excuse me?” she said flatly.

  “These creatures, these vampires—they detach the top halves of their bodies to hunt. They’re killed when someone sprinkles salt on the bottom half. They can’t return to reattach to their legs, and they die at sunrise. If they’re anything like European vampires, the top half disintegrates. You’re never going to find the rest of the body.”

  She stayed silent for a long time, so he prompted her. “Detective?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. This fits all the pieces we have. Looks like I have some reading to do to figure out what really happened.”

  She was really not going to like the next part. “Detective, you might check to see if there’ve been a higher than usual number of miscarriages in the neighborhood.”

  “Why?”

  “I used the term ‘vampire’ kind of loosely. This thing eats fetuses. Sucks them through the mother’s navel while she sleeps.”


  “You’re kidding.” She sighed, because he clearly wasn’t. “So, what—this may have been a revenge killing? Who’s the victim here?”

  “You’ll have to figure that one out yourself.” He could hear a pen scratching on paper, making notes.

  “Isn’t that always the way? Hey—now that we know you really were holding out on me, what made you decide to remember?”

  “Look, I got my own shit going on and I’m not going to try to explain it to you.”

  “Fine, okay. But thanks for the tip, anyway.”

  “Maybe you could put in a good word for me,” he said.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Maybe she even would.

  * * *

  He was curious. Itchingly curious. But if he let her in, he’d never get her out again. She already had her foot in the door, and now she was pushing. The bars of the cage rattled, claws scraped the inside his skull, worse than ever, a coarse rasp working on him, over and over. He could beat his head against a wall to make it stop.

  * * *

  Kitty came through. He could tell by the smug, triumphant look on her face when she put a manila folder on the desk in front of her, before she and Ben even sat down on their next visit.

  “You found something,” he said.

  “I did.” She grinned.

  He tried not to laugh; it would annoy her. “Which means, I assume, that the demon problem is all fixed and everything’s okay.”

  “Would I be smiling if it weren’t?” she said.

  “Sorry,” Ben said. His cousin leaned back in his chair, smirking at Kitty just as much as Cormac was. “We forgot to tell you. The genie is bottled and everything’s okay.”

  Cormac pointed. “See, I know when the problems are solved even when you don’t tell me, because you just stop talking about them. And did you say genie?”

  “Can I tell you about your executions now?” Kitty said quickly, clearly not wanting to explain the adventures they’d been having without him. She opened the folder, and he leaned forward, trying to see. “If you take in the twenty or so years before and after 1900, there were about a half-dozen women executed. There was only one woman executed in 1900.”

  “What was her name?” Cormac said.

  “Amelia Parker. Her story’s a little different.” The pages looked like photocopies, text from books, a couple of old newspaper articles. She lectured. “Lady Amelia Parker. British, born 1877, the daughter of a minor nobleman. By all accounts, she was a bit of a firebrand. Traveled the world by herself, which just wasn’t done in those days. She was a self-taught archeologist, linguist, folklorist. She collected knowledge, everything from local folk cures to lost languages. She has her own page in a book about Victorian women adventurers. She came to Colorado to follow an interest in Native American culture and lore but was convicted of murdering a young woman in Manitou Springs. The newspaper report was pretty sensationalist, even for 1900. Said something about blood sacrifice. There were patterns on the floor, candles, incense, the works. Like something out of Faust. The newspaper’s words, not mine. She was convicted of murder and hanged. Right here, in fact. Or at least, in this area, at the prison that was standing here at the time.”

  Bingo. He hadn’t expected Kitty to hit the jackpot like this. The fuzzy, old-fashioned photo of the young woman on one of the photocopies even looked like his ghost—black hair, serious frown. Everything fit. Cormac leaned forward. “The victim. How did she die? Did it say what happened to her?”

  “Her throat was cut.”

  They were connected. The murders and his ghost were connected. It was a revelation, she’d been a murderer in life, and kept murdering in death—but no. Hunted. He remembered the words, the thoughts she’d flung at him. She was hunting. And she’d been wrongly executed. No wonder she was still around.

  “What is it?” Kitty asked, probably seeing the stark shock on his face. The wonder in his eyes. “You know something. This all makes sense to you. Why? How?”

  Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not sure. May be nothing. But she’s got a name. It’s not all in my head.”

  “What isn’t?”

  He met her gaze. “She didn’t kill that girl. She was trying to find who did. What did.”

  She blinked back at him. “What do you mean ‘what’?” Ben’s lips were pursed, his gaze studious. So much for not making the two of them worry about him.

  “Never mind,” he said, leaning back and looking away. “I’ll tell you when I know more.”

  “Why is she important?” Kitty said. “She’s been dead for over a hundred years.”

  His smile quirked. “And you really think that’s the end of it? You’ve been telling ghost stories for years. Are you going to sit here now and tell me it isn’t possible?”

  Ben leaned forward. “She just doesn’t like the idea that someone else is having adventures without her.”

  Kitty pouted. “I’ll have you know I’m looking forward to a good long adventure-free streak from here out.”

  As long as he’d known Kitty, she’d been getting in trouble. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut, or she had to swoop to the rescue like some kind of superhero. She was a lightning rod for trouble. She’d been the werewolf caught shape-shifting on live TV. Cormac and Ben had been there to clean up after that mess.

  “A month,” Cormac said finally. “I bet you don’t go a month without getting into trouble.”

  “How are we defining ‘trouble’?” she said. “Are we talking life-or-death trouble or pissing-off-the-boss trouble? Hey, stop laughing at me!”

  Ben said, “I’m not taking that bet.”

  Kitty straightened the papers and closed the folder. “I could try to mail this to you, but I’m not sure it would get past the censors.”

  “Just hang on to it for me,” he said. Like the rest of his life. Just hold on.

  They said their farewells, and they both wore that pained and pitying look on their faces, the one he’d put there because they could walk out and he couldn’t. At the door they hesitated—they usually did—glancing back one more time. He almost stopped them, standing and reaching, calling back. He’d have to shout through the glass because they’d put the phone down. He could feel the guard at his back, but he had the urge to do it anyway. Press his hands to the glass and tell Kitty everything: I have to tell you what’s going on, the murders, the ghost, my meadow and what it means and why I can’t go back, I want to tell you everything—

  But he didn’t say anything. Just like he always didn’t say anything. Without a word, without a flicker in his expression, he stood when the guard told him to and allowed himself to be marched back to his cell.

  * * *

  It sounded like claws scraping on concrete, an insect mash of legs running straight up the wall without rhythm. Like a million other nightmare noises that anyone’s imagination might trigger, that would freeze the gut.

  But Cormac hadn’t been asleep. He was on his back, staring at the gray ceiling, refusing to sleep, refusing to let her in when the noise rattled by outside the cell. He remained still, wondering what would make a noise like that. The sound of a thousand souls that didn’t know where to go.

  Cormac rolled to his stomach, propping himself up just enough to look out, letting his eyes take in the patterns of light and shadow that made up the prison’s weird internal twilight. Resting on his pillow, his hands itched for the feel of a weapon. This was like hunting; he could lie still for hours waiting for the prey to come to him. But here, when he was weaponless, behind bars, which one of them was prey? Did he think he could just stare it down?

  He kept his gaze soft, not letting himself stare at any one thing, which would reduce his peripheral vision. So he saw it, when a clawed black hand reached across the ceiling, brushed his throat …

  He half jumped, half fell from the top bunk, stumbling to the floor in a crouch. Pressing himself to the bars, he looked in the direction the thing must have gone

  “Hey! Dude!??
? Frank hollered. “What did I tell you about your fucking nightmares?”

  “Quiet!” hissed the guy in the next cell over. Not Moe’s old cell but the one on the other side.

  Cormac had his face up to the bars, but he couldn’t see anything to the sides. He couldn’t see a damn thing from here, though he could still hear claws on concrete, maybe even a voice, growling. He didn’t know where it was coming from. If he could just get out of here—

  A light shone, the deep orange glow of coals in a forge, across the prison block, inside one of the cells. It flared, turned black—like an eclipse of the sun, a moment of dark terror—then collapsed. All of it without a sound.

  He could see it, a demon’s claw scraping across a man’s throat, and in his mind he heard a voiceless, inhuman laugh of triumph. Another inmate dead.

  “No!” he screamed at the block, the sound echoing.

  Hands grabbed the back of his T-shirt, twisted, and yanked him back. Cormac led with his elbow, striking hard, hitting flesh and bone—a man’s chest. Frank wheezed, falling back, and Cormac followed through, swinging his body into a punch. Frank’s head whipped back, but he stayed on his feet and came right back. Deceptively powerful, his blows pounded in like rocks, hitting Cormac’s cheek and chest. He was dazed, but he shook it off. He should have explained, but it was too late, and this was more his speed anyway.

  Ducking another blow, Cormac delivered his own, tackling Frank in the middle, shoving him against the bunk frame.

  Lights came on in the cell block, an alarm siren started, and the door to the cell rolled open. Guards came in, swinging batons. Cormac didn’t have a chance against them. They dragged him away, though he kept lunging forward, into the fight. Blows landed on his shoulders, kidneys, gut. He fell, then was hauled up again by his arms.

  Waking from his fog, he saw the guards surrounding him. He was totally screwed.

  Frank was yelling. “I don’t know, man, he’s gone crazy! It’s not my fault, he jumped out of bed screamin’ and he just went crazy!”

  Frank’s protests didn’t matter; the guards dragged both of them out, hauling them in different directions. Cormac tried to get his feet under him—they were keeping him off balance on purpose. Again, his instinct was to lash out. He locked it down, tried to keep still, tried to speak.