Shadows Fall (5 page)

The first time she’d appeared to me, she’d had gruesome wounds. Now I was seeing her presumably how she was before she died. She had honey-blonde hair that fell to her chin in soft waves and wide, expressive brown eyes. They pleaded with me—to
know
, to
understand
.

I took note of her pale, alabaster skin. It was unblemished with the glow of youth, with the exception of a patch along the right side of her face, down her neck, and over her right shoulder where it disappeared into her shirt. Those patches were likewise untarnished, but they appeared a much darker shade than the rest of her. It was almost as if she had some sort of skin discoloration disease, like vitiligo or melanoma—but she didn’t look diseased. She looked beautiful.

Suddenly, she began twitching and jerking her head, and the smooth, youthful skin transformed into an oozing, exposed wound where it seemed to have been scraped away from her face and neck. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t bear the sight any longer.

She wasn’t going to allow that. My face prickled as ghostly hands gripped my cheeks and a high-pitched hissing sound filled my ears. It didn’t stop until I opened my eyes again. A breeze from some otherworldly source blew her hair away from her neck, and I saw it again, those hash marks and ovals carved into her delicate skin.

This time when she gripped my face, she pushed her way into my mind. I saw her at a playground, playing tag with her sister; her twin. I don’t know how I knew they were twins, because they didn’t look alike. The other girl was taller with brown hair and a slightly darker complexion—fraternal twins. The spirit must have planted the knowledge in my mind.

The image twitched, flickered. She saw something on the street… a cat. She followed the cat even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to. It darted off into a deserted side street with her right on its heels. She never caught the cat. Something came from behind, a dark, looming shape. It grabbed her, smothered her.

I was pretty sure I yelped at that point, because I was feeling her fear and her pain. She felt a sharp pinch in the side of her neck and she collapsed. Laying there, staring up at the tops of the buildings, she was unable to move. I screamed when the shadow engulfed her. It came so close, I was almost able to make it out, to see what it was—
who
it was.

“Dude, what is your problem?” Riot demanded as he burst into my room.

I was so startled, I sprang off the bed and swung into a defensive crouch, my fists at the ready. The girl had disappeared—or maybe she was never there, maybe I’d dreamt her—and I was alone. Well, except for Riot.

“What?” I asked, rubbing my face where I could still feel the icy fingers of death. “What are you doing in here?”

Riot rolled his eyes and eyed the contents of my bed. “I don’t know what kind of Weird Science you seem to have going on in here, but you’ve got to stop with the screaming. I’m trying to work.”

I shook my head, trying to get my wits about me. My mind still felt foggy, like it had been touched, used, by something abnormal, and I had a metallic taste in my mouth. The sensations made my skin crawl.

“Um, sorry. I had a bad dream, I guess.” I looked back at my bed; at the pile of crystals, the alter, and the device. “That’s just some crap I had in a box from my grandmother. Must have fallen asleep while I was going through it. I’ll keep it down.”

Riot cast me a dubious look, then shrugged. “Whatever. Hope you sleep better next go round. I’m going back in the cave.”

The cave was what Riot called his studio. Throwing one more concerned look my way, he backed out of the room and shut the door. I cleaned up the remnants of my little impromptu conjuring and stowed the stuff in a box under my bed. I couldn’t help but think I might need it again soon.

I’d spent so much time trying to ignore the voices of the dead, but I had the strange feeling that these few—the ones with the cuts on their necks—were connected to me somehow, and trying to tell me something. The impulse to dig, to piece together what had happened to them and why it was important, was intense. I didn’t feel like I would be able to rest easy until I figured it out.

I knew the only way I’d be able to find out more about these spirits was to isolate them and mute the rest of the voices. The upside would be that, beyond these four spirits, I would be able to go out into the world without being bombarded—they’d still follow me, but I could tune out the voices at will. Sure, it sounds like a win-win, but the downside was a heavy price to pay. I’d have to surrender to the old ways of the
chovihani
—witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism.

That was something I’d avoided since I was old enough to realize how much it would isolate me. I was already gay—I’d go through life being hated by many just because of who I was—so why would I want to be any
more
different, to be feared by my peers.

But it appeared as if, in this case, the end would have to justify the means. By the time dawn was peeking through the drapes, I had made a decision that wasn’t an easy one. I would call on the one person who could teach me to control my abilities—the
Phuri Dai
of my tribe, the high
Chovihani
… my grandmother.

I wasn’t sure if she would help me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to. In order to learn to control my extra senses, I would have to fully embrace them—and that scared the hell out of me. However, my mind was made up. As the room lightened with the sunrise, I shuffled to my desk and sat down to write a letter.

Chapter Four

It all started with Talika Ross. She was the first. Detective Charlie Hale stood in the Mecklenburg County medical examiner’s office, staring at three bodies laid out on metal exam tables. He’d left his partner, Sonny DeRossi, back at the office. Sonny didn’t think there was any more information to be found from the bodies, but Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something important.

“Are you sure they’re related?” Dr. Karen Johanssen, the county’s resident forensic pathologist, eyed him with a look of disbelief on her pretty face. Contrary to what the television shows taught, it wasn’t that common for detectives to attend autopsies, but Karen made concessions for him because of their… history.

Charlie and Karen had gone out a couple of times. It never went anywhere—and they certainly weren’t close enough for Charlie to confide in her as to why it didn’t—but they’d maintained a professional friendship. Despite that, Charlie knew that if he touched anything on her table, she’d chop his hand off.

When he didn’t answer, Karen continued. “A copycat could have easily made those marks.”

The marks—a network of uneven circles and hash marks carved deep into the tissue of each victim’s neck—were the only thing Charlie and Sonny had to connect the three victims. Charlie thought they had a serial killer on their hands. They hadn’t seen one in Charlotte since the Henry Louis Wallace murders in the early nineties.

But he couldn’t prove it, not yet. The three victims had no known connection. The police had delved as far into their personal histories as they could, but the three lives never intersected in any way. That begged the question, how was the killer, already dubbed the ‘Queen City Slayer’ by the vultures in the news media, choosing his victims?

He never used the same M.O.—the weapon, the mechanism of death, was never the same. The victims had virtually nothing in common; the only unifying factor was that they were all female—anywhere from age twelve to thirty-five.

He still said nothing; Karen was visibly annoyed. “Where’s Sonny?”

Charlie raised a brow at her. “Think I need a babysitter, Dr. Johanssen?”

“Well, it’s hard not to notice Sonny’s not here obsessing.”

“I’m not obsessing, I’m doing my job. There’s a common thread here, I know it. Walk me through it again.”

Karen crossed her arms over her chest, bunching her white lab coat. She was a tall, leggy blonde with long hair and almost dainty features—except for her plump lips that practically screamed sin. Many a man in the department had tried to get her into bed and she’d have none of them. She would’ve had Charlie though, if it weren’t for one small detail, his dirty little secret—he liked men.

Still, she was nice to look at even when she was glaring, which was most of the time. “You read my report.”

“Cover to cover. Let’s go over it again.”

“You’re an asshole, Charlie.”

“This guy’s out there mutilating and killing women, little girls, and we have
nothing
to go on.”

She sighed heavily, and he knew he had her. That was the kicker, the sisterhood.

Picking up a clipboard, she walked over to the exam table closest to Charlie and pulled back the disposable blue paper sheet. Even though the autopsy had been done already, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves so as not to contaminate the body.

“Victim number one came to us as a Jane Doe. She had no identification and there were no hits with missing persons.”

The young woman had been found in the dumpster cage in back of Club Red, tucked away in a dimly lit corner. When they found her, she was lying in a pool of blood, large pieces of her skin had been cut away from her body and she’d been almost entirely scalped. Her left eye had been removed and was never found. Unofficially, Charlie thought the killer might have kept it as a trophy.

“Two days ago, we were able to confirm positive identification using her fingerprints,” Karen continued. “Talika Ross, female, twenty-six years old, one hundred twenty-five pounds, sixty-two inches long. Eye color appears to be brown, based on the eye that is still intact. The body is well-nourished and was in good condition prior to her death.”

Miss Ross seemed to have lived a very hermitic lifestyle. There was no next of kin, no friends to speak of, and she lived alone. She worked as a traveling nurse, so she hadn’t built any lasting relationships with coworkers.

Charlie had done a lot of the digging into Talika’s life—or lack thereof—himself. Her apartment had been Spartan, almost sterile; no pictures, no pets, devoid of any kind of personal touch. He’d interviewed some of the coworkers as well. Hell, most of them didn’t even remember her. What kind of person lived a life that was barely on the radar?

“Yeah, she was apparently adopted from Nairobi when she was just a baby by a young couple by the name of John and Vicky Ross. They were killed in a car accident when she was in her early teens.”

Karen nodded, flipping through the papers on her clipboard. “She appears to suffer from some sort of hyperpigmentation, giving her a pale complexion inconsistent with her African descent, and she seems to be a natural blonde.

“No diseases were indicated in the serology or the microscopic evidence that would cause the hyperpigmentation. Could be something genetic—a form of albinism or mosaicism, maybe. Regardless, she was overall a healthy girl.

“Upon physical examination, the body showed a complete lack of defensive wounds and no trace evidence was found, either on her clothes or her person.”

“That’s the thing,” Charlie said suddenly, pushing himself off the counter to pace alongside the exam table. “How does he get to them? How is he able to do these things without them fighting back at all? They’ve got to know him somehow—but that’s nearly impossible without at least some of them knowing each other. It’s like six-degrees-of-
fucking
-Kevin-Bacon here.”

Karen coolly observed his outburst, brows raised, waiting for him to finish.

He waved his hands angrily. “Well, go on.”

“I’m assuming you want me to skip the weights and measurements of all of the organs, and my examination of the brain, as it was all normal.”

“Please. Tell me about the mutilation.”

“The dermis has been separated from the skull from the occipital portion all the way to the coronal suture. The scalp and hair were then detached at the coronal suture and removed. It was not found at the scene.

“Next, her left eye was extracted with what looks to be a dull instrument, then the central retinal artery and the optic nerve were severed with near surgical precision. The eye was completely removed and also not found at the scene.”

Charlie cursed. He was letting this case get to him, He knew it was a bad idea, but it seemed to be unavoidable. There was a psychopath mutilating women in his city. “Cause of death?”

“Well, judging from the amount of blood loss, Miss Ross was likely alive when she was disfigured.” Karen took a deep breath and seemed to gather herself. It made Charlie feel slightly better that she wasn’t unaffected. “That being said, I believe the cause of death to be hypovolemia. The mechanism of death, exsanguination.”

“She bled to death from her injuries,” Charlie supplied.

“Essentially, yes. Rigor and livor mortis put her time of death on Saturday, the fifth, between three and six a.m.

“Then we have the mark on her neck, carved with a sharp tool of some kind, possibly a scalpel. While not life-threatening, it also most likely occurred while she was still alive.”

“So how does our killer subdue his victims and subsequently mutilate them alive, without them fighting back? If he tied them up, surely there would be some ligature marks.”