(Fiction) A murder in broad daylight

29Sep

I recorded his instructions on my phone. I’d intended to transcribe them, if only for handy reference later, but work intervened and I spent the next few days on a murder. Not all of them are difficult and lengthy, just like not all petty theft is quick and easy. The difference is that we tend to let the petty shit go if there isn’t an easy culprit, whereas we generally try to solve a murder no matter how thorny it gets. In theory, anyway.

This particular murder happened in broad daylight and in full view of a convenience store security camera. The shooter, an accountant and mother of two, not only had no prior criminal record, she claimed not to know the man and to be completely unaware of her actions, and superficially, that appeared to be the case. But the reason the case came to me, the reason no one else wanted it, wasn’t the apparent lack of motive. It was because the victim had “runes,” vaguely like currency symbols, ritually burned into his chest and back, and because the slugs in the gun were made of several thousand dollars’ worth of solid gold—which is nearly twice as dense as lead and so has to be used at relatively close range.

You might assume that meant certain folks in the NYPD had an understanding of how the world really is and were handling it appropriately—by assigning the right people to the right cases. But you’d be wrong. Those in power don’t have a secret understanding of the world, although they’d prefer you to think that over the truth, which is that they don’t have any more of a clue than the rest of us. I wasn’t the NYPD’s secret resource. I was their secret embarrassment. Not that they were out to get me. A bureaucracy isn’t spontaneously goal-directed in that way. That takes leadership. What a bureaucracy is good at is reacting to things. I survived because I’d not given them any reason to react to me. My clearance rate was shit, but all that really does is keep you from getting a raise. Or a promotion. I never bothered to apply for either, which meant that as long as I didn’t call too much attention to myself, my colleagues would keep asking their lieutenants to send me the weird cases, the ones that looked damned likely to eat up time and bring a precinct’s numbers down, as this case was likely to.

For one, people don’t walk up to strangers and shoot them in the head for no reason, especially in broad daylight. The DA would want a motive. The fact that the insanity defense almost never works doesn’t stop people from trying. Our shooter was an accountant, for example, and the victim a banker. Was there a hidden connection, something she didn’t want us to know? And even if not, if she was just plain homicidal, everyone would want to know whether or not she’d killed before, which meant that despite the evidence—or rather because of it—someone would have to turn this woman’s life upside down and shake loose some answers.

Which is what I did. But for any of it to make sense, you need to understand something first. You need to understand that lycanthropy is hell, and not just to the person who contracts it. To their families as well. There’s no cure, but there are methods of suppression. Technically, it’s transmitted by bite. In reality, however, transmission is almost always sexual, since that’s when most biting occurs. The typical course starts when some guy or gal—it affects both equally—walks into a bar one night and feels a certain animal attraction to a stranger in the crowd, someone who seems nice, if a little skittish, like a shy animal. Later that evening, after a few drinks to loosen the inhibitions, the two of them end up having the best sex of their lives, or thereabouts. It’s wild and physical and ends suddenly with that guy or gal holding their hand to their neck and screaming “What the hell?” And the biter will be naked and huddled in the corner, apologizing over and over and saying they thought they could handle it, that they’d had their injection that month, that things just got out of hand.

At that point, an explanation may or may not be forthcoming—such as what will happen to them at the next full moon. To be fair, it’s a tough call. Dumping the full truth out of the blue is the surest way to scare someone off. Having already been bitten, it doesn’t take much to convince someone you’re just plain crazy and that they should never talk to you again, which is a risk since the best help at transition always comes from someone who’s gone through it before.

There used to be support groups, by the way. Used to be. People learned the hard way that it was a bad idea to put lycanthropes into packs.

Anyway, within a month, the bitten will wake up in a strange place, naked, with pigeon feathers caked to the blood on their cheeks, or rat meat stuck in their teeth. They’ll become quick to anger—but equally quick to forgive. In fact, they become intensely loyal to friends and family and lash out at anyone who offends someone close to them, sometimes physically. Every few weeks, they suffer uncontrollable bouts of sexual desire. A couple days after that, they black out completely. Sooner or later, someone in their life makes the connection between all of that and the phases of the moon—usually as a joke—and wheels begin turning.

The transformation isn’t nearly as dramatic as you’ve been led to believe, by the way. It’s more psychological than anything, but there are a handful of physical manifestations that are handy to know. Also, attacks on humans are relatively rare, same as with any wild animal, and usually only happen when the lycanthrope is desperate—if they’ve been ostracized from their “pack,” for example, which is to say abandoned their friends and family. Such attacks, when they happen, are frenzied and violent and the victim rarely survives.

It’s a helluva thing to watch your loved one go though that, month after month, year after year, gradually getting worse, waiting for the inevitable. You’d do anything to help them. Of course, you treat it rationally at first. You spend a fortune on doctors. On therapy. You get diagnoses ranging from food poisoning (common with lycanthropes) to dissociative disorder. But nothing seems to work. In fact, the pills and treatments only seem to make things worse. Only now you’re broke. Sooner or later, convinced you can’t be the only ones going through this, you start poking around online. The things you’ve witnessed maybe make you a little more open-minded than the average person, so you scroll through obscure internet forums and crackpot websites you never would’ve considered before. Someone suggests a witch.

It takes you a while, but you find one—maybe she even advertises—and she’s only too happy to help. She can make it all stop, she says. All you need to do is lease your soul to her. Sounds crazy, but you figure what the hell, how bad can it be? You’re not sure you believe any of that crap anyway. And she’s such a nice old lady. It’s only for a few months, maybe a little longer depending on the terms. So you sign the papers and the witch seals a silly old clay pot with wax and you walk away with a bag full of vials, a cocktail of rare herbs brewed with silver nitrate, and each new moon, at the ebb of their condition, when the effect is weakest, you make sure your loved one gets their injection, and yeah, maybe life seems a little duller, maybe your friends all tell you that you’re working too hard lately and you seem like a zombie, but there are no more episodes, your family is safe, so it’s worth it.

Then the deal runs out. You get your soul back, but you also run out of injections. You realize how dead you’ve felt—so numb that you didn’t even realize it. You try to get by on your own. One month goes by and things aren’t so bad. Two months, it gets a little worse. Three months, you’re back to the witch. Only now the terms are different. Now you have to lease your soul for longer. Maybe you sign right away, maybe you don’t. Maybe you go home and try to tough it out. Maybe you lock your loved one in the basement. Maybe they snap at you, literally. Maybe they get rough with one of the kids. Maybe in an inexplicable fury over a chew toy, they attack and kill the family pet. Maybe, as you’re scrubbing the blood off the kitchen floor, wondering what you’re going to tell your daughter when she gets home from school, you finally decide that you don’t have a choice. It’s just a year. You can do a year. And that will give you time to figure something out.

So you sign the paper, this time with a dot of your own blood, and the witch seals the urn and the light goes out of your eyes and you walk home in a daze with another bag full of vials. Another year goes by, and you never do find a different solution. Only now you know what’s coming, so you sign up again without any debate. You don’t even wait for the last contract to lapse. You’re numb and don’t want to remember what it felt like to be really alive, to experience again what you’ll have to sacrifice, so you go to the witch a few weeks early, and just as you expected, the terms of the deal have doubled. Like a payday loan, she gets a better deal the longer interest accrues.

Then one day, out of the blue, you wake up holding a smoking gun. People are screaming and running from you on the street. There’s a dead man at your feet, bleeding on the sidewalk. You don’t recognize him. You’ve never seen him before. The police arrive and order you to put the weapon down. You comply, shaking, and are arrested. You’re told there’s security video footage of yourself standing perfectly still for hours in front of that convenience store before suddenly walking up to the man and shooting him in the head at point blank range. You’re asked if you want a lawyer and you say yes, and while you’re waiting there alone in the interview room, you realize the color is back in your cheeks. You got your soul back. And the real terms of the deal you made become clear.

Of course, it took me a couple days to piece all that together. Any other detective armed with a warrant to search the family’ financial and medical history for hints of a motive certainly wouldn’t have recognized the signs—like a 32-year-old previously healthy man who suffers repeated bouts of food poisoning and who asks his doctor for tetanus and rabies shots.

The shooter was one Elise Landry. Divorced. Mother of two. Lives with her brother, who’s been sick for months and unable to hold a steady job. With the family savings spent on doctors and the rest, Ms. Landry had incurred a large debt. Her brother moved in, ostensibly to help with child care, around the same time as the booster shots. Life for the unusual family wasn’t easy, or so I gathered, but they were making it work. That is, until the shooting.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the victim was a right genuine asshole, a banker at Goldman Sachs who got rich short-selling the insurance business—by all accounts, a real shark: greedy, intractable, and unloved. Still, on the video evidence alone, Ms. Landry’s conviction was all but guaranteed . . . that is, if the warrant hadn’t been improperly handled. It was a technical oversight, definitely—the video was seized a few hours before the warrant was actually issued—but it was enough. Any halfway decent defense attorney would get it thrown out. And with no motive, no prior record, no mention of the tape, and no eyewitnesses—thanks to the bumbling of the investigating officer, who failed to find any—Ms. Landry will likely end up pleading to probation and be home in a few weeks.

I’ll get my ass chewed over the procedural “mishaps,” not just from my boss but the DA as well, who I’m sure will make a special trip to see me, but as long as no one in the papers makes a stink about the case, it’ll wash off in a couple months—after I clear a few more cases that no one else could.

Meanwhile, I put the brother in touch with a certain good witch I know. Well, that’s not exactly true. I don’t really know her. I know of her. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t approve of me—or my methods. But she helps folks. Pretty young Haitian girl with rosebud dimples. Has a corner apartment in Harlem positively bursting with greenery. She’ll teach him how to mix his own cocktail and keep his condition in check by avoiding others of his kind. He might even be able to hold down a job. I hear many of them do. She’ll tell him to refrain from having sex until he’s in a committed relationship with someone who knows the truth and understands the risk. But he won’t. He’ll do good for a while, maybe even a year or two, but sooner or later he’ll get an itch he can’t scratch and the whole thing will start over with someone new.

I only saw Ms. Landry once. There was a meeting with the prosecutor, and we were waiting for her lawyer to arrive. I walked over and sat next to her and asked about her “contract.” We were within earshot of others, so I didn’t specify further. I didn’t need to. She seemed surprised—that anyone knew about that kind of thing, especially someone with the police. She wouldn’t say the witch’s name of course. She wouldn’t say anything actually, which was smart. She wanted to keep custody of her kids. No better way to lose them than by shooting a man and raving about werewolves and witches.

She wouldn’t say the name. But I saw her eyes when I did a moment later.

“Was it Granny?”

snippet from the third course of my forthcoming five-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

death card by Molly Rose Purcell