Predators

I did as best I could, but within a blinding flash I started to cum. And cum. And cum some more.

"Jesus, Woody! How long has it been?"

I couldn't answer. I was biting my lower lip, holding on to the edge of the table with one hand and the glass with the other...I was still cuming...and it felt like it lasted forever...

"Hand me the glass now, Woody."

I brought it up from under the table and put it on the table.

"Woody?"

"Yeah?"

"No, Woody. Not yeah. It's 'Yes, Mistress.'" She squeezed my prick with her fingernails to drive home the point. "Woody, I said hand me the glass."

I picked it up and put it in her hand, then she released my cock and I groaned.

A couple at the table across from ours was looking at us, they were leaning close and whispering something to one another. Mary-Jo held the glass up to the dim light like she was examining a fine wine, then she drank the cum -- all of it -- in one smooth motion. The man across from us squirmed in his seat, the woman with him was directing all her attention to his lap, and soon he held up his own glass, as if toasting us, and then he handed his glass of cum to the woman.

I guess it really hit me then; the couple across from us were our minders, here to keep an eye on us. Just part of the club, I guess, but I felt cold dread as I looked at the smiling couple across from us, as I watched the woman drink down the milky contents of her glass.

I felt my phone go off in my coat pocket and excused myself, went up on the front desk and called dispatch, trying to conceal the contradictory alarms I felt going off in my head. The only way anyone could have found out about our dinner plans was through Mary-Jo -- or Tate, and the latter just wasn't possible -- was it?

"Woodward."

"Detective, we have officers at the scene of a homicide; they want to talk to you directly. Can you take a number?"

"Go ahead," I said as I fumbled for my pad. I scribbled as she spoke, then hung-up and dialed the new number.

"Woodward."

"Detective Woodward?"

"Yeah. Go ahead."

"Ah, yessir, we're going to need you to come out here."

"What's going on?"

"Can't say sir. Not on an unsecured line."

"Well okay, where the hell are you?" I wrote down the address of a hotel out north off the Interstate. "I'll be there in about an hour," I said as I closed the phone, then: "Fuck!" I walked back to the table, sat down beside Mary-Jo, avoided looking at her.

"You okay?" she asked. The couple across from us had departed, I noted.

"A call." I couldn't even look her in the eye.

"You have to take it?"

"Apparently so." Fuck! What had I just let happen, and just who the fuck was this girl?

Our waiter had brought our dinner while I was out; I had a beautiful King Salmon and some steamed broccoli Hollandaise and I was damned if I was going to walk away from it, so I lit into it as fast as I politely could.

"Goddamn, someone back there sure knows how to cook fish!" I said as I finished up. I flagged our waiter, got the bill and paid up. "Sorry," I said as I stood.

"I understand. Will you call me later? Let me know you're alright?"

"Yeah."

"Ed? I liked this. I like you. Could we do it again sometime. Maybe soon?"

I leaned over, kissed her once, then leaned closer and kissed her again, for a long time -- then I turned and left, clouds of confusion and uncertainty hanging over me as I fled. I walked out to the Ford, saw a note tucked under the windshield wiper and plucked it up while I opened the door.

'Watch your six, and they're close...T'

Goddamn! Tate hadn't gone home after all, and he'd seen something. I closed the door and my phone went off again.

"It's me," he said. "Did you get the note?"

"Four."

"Need to twenty-five with you," he said. "Betty Lincoln west?"

"Four." I started the Ford and drove three blocks to the visitor's parking lot by the locks; Tate winked his lights and I drove over and parked next to him.

"There's a shitload of traffic on the scanner. I mean, even the Chief's on the air, en-route to a Signal One."

"Tottenham?"

"No, no, not an A/C... I mean THE Chief."

"Fuck."

"Nice night to dawdle over dinner, Dickhead!"

"I just got the call, I think. That girl...something's not right."

"Your face is flushed. You alright?"

I shook my head. "Not sure yet. I know she's out there, though."

"What did she do to you?"

I told him.

"Shit. Nobody ever done that to me, Amigo. How come you get all the fun calls?"

"I dunno. Not sure that was fun, ya know?"

"Want me to tag along?"

"If you're not too tired, sure. The Silver Cloud, in Mukilteo."

"Wow, out of jurisdiction, no less. Oh well, I'll follow you."

We made our way over to I-5 and blended with northbound traffic, and I didn't even bother to look for a tail; we probably would have looked like a freight train if I had. Twenty minutes later I exited and we wound our way west between huge Boeing assembly buildings, then down to the waterfront. More patrol cars -- local ones, more flashing lights, a couple of ambulances. I could see Chief Anders waiting in the lobby, looking at his watch. Then looking at my car.

"Great! Just fucking Great!"

I grabbed my stuff and walked in, looked for the Chief and walked over to him. He was on his phone talking in hushed tones: "Okay, he's here now. I'll call you in a half hour."

"Chief Anders," I said as I walked up.

"Where the hell have you been? And wipe that shit off your shirt!"

I looked down, saw a nice, shiny glob of salmon on my shirt and groaned.

"Who's that with you? Richard Tate?"

"Yessir."

"He's retired, isn't he? What's he doing here?"

"Chief, I'm still active in the reserves; just putting in my hours."

"You were homicide, weren't you?"

"Yessir."

"Oh, well, come on, then." We walked up a flight of stairs and down a hall that stretched off into infinity to an area cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. We walked past two local patrolmen into the room.

Mark Tottenham lay face-up on the bed, his penis had been cut off and was dangling from his mouth. The tattoo on his chest had been cut out of his flesh, and it looked like he'd been stabbed about a hundred times in the chest, belly and thighs.

And now I didn't know what to think.

My prime suspect was dead, afloat in a sea of blood.

I looked at the Chief. There was a tear running down his cheek and his teeth were clenched so hard the side of face was trembling. Tate walked over to Tottenham's body while I walked around to the other side of the bed. There was a glass there, the rim smeared with red lipstick, and obviously, whoever she was, she'd drunk a shitload of cum from the glass.

I groaned inside, thought of MJ, and I just knew her little performance hadn't been coincidence. Tate knew it too, as soon as he saw the glass. I heard her say "Call me Mistress" and wanted -- no, I needed -- to turn and run away.

Some nights are worse than others, I guess. Nature of the beast; no two nights are ever the same -- yet somehow they all are. After a while you learn to put up The Wall. How to compartmentalize your feelings. Things that would make a combat vet flinch and turn away don't get through the wall. If they did, even a patrolman wouldn't last on the streets for more than a few years. After a while, The Wall becomes automatic, a self-defense mechanism. When you run into a cop on the street, that hard, faraway stare is The Wall, ready to come up and shut you off.

But this wasn't just déjà vu all over again. Even with more than a decade of looking at wrecked and mutilated bodies, this one got to me. I don't care what you have to say about it, or even what you think about cops: when you look at one of your own, a brother officer, your feelings are...well, they're different. The Wall can't get up fast enough. you're left wide open and vulnerable -- and just like every other Joe on the street you feel a big, cold slap on the face as reality breaks over you like a wave of black hate. There's no other way to look at it: without The Wall you feel everything in the scene around you, and it fuckin' hurts. It hurts because you don't get to play the objective observer anymore, you're not just a cop. It hurts because the pain hits you where you live -- and there's no place to hide. And you can't run from your feelings, either. They come for you hard and fast, grab you by the throat, like a leopard grabs a goat by the throat, and you know that cat won't let go until you stop breathing.

Chief Anders was shook up bad, too. He was standing at the foot of this perverted hotel bed looking down at Tottenham's body and I couldn't even begin to guess what was running through the old man's head. They'd gone to Academy together, been close friends for just a little longer than forever -- and now this. This wasn't a random drive-by or another officer run-down by a drunk driver; this wasn't a pissed-off veteran blowing his brains out after a bitter divorce or a forced retirement. No, this one was different...because everything in that room was so goddamn dark and twisted -- so evil -- and what was left of The Wall came tumbling down.

Because it looked like the body on the bed had gotten there on its own, so this was a consensual encounter. So -- what happened? Had Tottenham been betrayed, or set up? Still, as I looked around the room it hurt most of all because it hinted that something immeasurably dark and vicious -- was on the inside, prowling within our ranks.

Whoever it was had not bothered to untie the wrist and ankle restraints this time, and Tottenham's body was obscenely splayed; he looked like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man -- drawn in blood on bleached white sheets. There were deep impressions all over his body, too, marks not easily explained.

Only Tate seemed relatively unaffected. He'd never really cared for Tottenham, thought he was a martinet and had done sloppy work in Internal Affairs, yet Tate seemed to be the first to grab hold of the implications of having the head of IAD compromised; I didn't get it yet because none of us had grasped the depth of departmental penetration this murder implied.

+++++

This was another city's jurisdiction, but after learning the identity of the victim we'd been asked to join their investigation; given the FBIs tertiary interest I wasn't surprised when Brennan walked through the door. Tate and I helped the local detectives, a crusty old veteran named Spiros Pantazis, and a new detective, a four year veteran -- who also happened to be a woman.

Her name was Susan Eklund, and my first impression of her was that she might make a good cop -- when she got out of high school. To my eye she looked like a teenager, but then again I've been a little slow to admit that just about everyone under the age of forty looks like a teenager to me these days. Eklund had a cute, round face and wavy red hair, sort of reddish-blond, but not quite, and there was a zit on her chin that looked like it was about to go Vesuvius on us. She was wearing a dress. A very sexy dress, like she'd been called away from a family dinner. She was putting on a good show, too. Miss Know-it-all, and her partner, Pantazis, regarded her knowingly, yet we could tell he was embarrassed by her show. I would have thrown her off my crime scene, but that's just me. I like it quiet, I like to think, and showboats are a distraction. They come and go, and usually leave a mess in their wake, but I had to admit...her legs were cuter than hell, and I had a hard time not looking at them.

Their photographer was moving around as directed, taking photos then standing back, waiting for orders; Eklund seemed intent on ignoring Tate and myself but was deferential to Chief Anders, but neither of them, it seemed to me, knew what the fuck what they were doing...and that bothered me. It became apparent to both Tate and myself that we would have to teach these yahoos how to work a crime scene, around the Chief, and that made me uneasy.

I went over to the bed's headboard and looked at the grain of the wood. "Prints here, I think," I said; Pantazis came close and looked too, held up a little UV lamp and looked again.

"Good call," he said. "Missed that one."

That had been Eklund's first mistake and he wanted her to know it, too. She glowered at me and came over with her kit and began taking the print.

I walked over to the sliding glass door; it was unlocked. "Anyone been here yet? Dusted the door?"

No one had. "And don't let anyone in the bathroom!" I said. The carpet, I could tell, was already useless.

Pantazis came over and looked with me. There was dozens of prints on the glass, and we wouldn't be able to tell about the door-handle and lock-lever until Eklund tried to lift prints from them, but I was guessing there'd be a relevant one or two -- at least -- on both.

Pantazis groaned.

"You're gonna have to ride her ass," I whispered. "She's sloppy, and a know it all. Bad in the line of work."

"I know, but she's a councilman's daughter."

"Ah." I shook my head, knew he wouldn't have made it in our department. "You shootin' film?" I asked their photographer.

He looked like he was -- maybe -- fourteen, then shook his head.

"No, sir. We haven't in years. Canon 1Dx Mark II, with data verification."

"Can you shoot IR?"

"What's IR?"

"Never-mind," I grumbled as I took out my phone. I called dispatch, had them transfer me to the lab.

"Woodward here. Is Harker on tonight?"

"Yeah, hang on." I heard some hollering in the background, banging sounds of stools falling over onto the floor, then the always and ever diminutive: "Jonathan Harker here."

"Jon? Woody. You got any high speed infrared loaded?"

"Yeah, sure. Tons. What's up?"

I filled him in; he got excited and loaded up his stuff and was headed our way in a flash, he got to the room about a half hour later -- somehow keeping his velocity just under the speed of light. I had managed to keep everyone away from the patio door, and the bathroom, until he arrived, then told him what I needed. I moved off and let him do his thing. He knew what I was after, and I didn't have to ride herd on him.

We finished the crime scene about five hours later, and only then did we let the M.E.'s people move the body. I had Harker shoot some IR where Tottenham's body had been, then pulled down the comforter and had him shoot the blanket, then each sheet underneath. Pantazis and Eklund looked on like I was nuts.

"You need a new photographer, too," I told Pantazis after their useless teenager left.

Anders and Tate were down in the lobby when I got off the elevator, and there were a couple dozen reporters outside on the sidewalk -- too late for the morning editions, I told myself as I walked over to the Chief -- and Tate handed me a cup of coffee when I got there.

"Thanks. That was rough..."

"Woodward, I want a total black-out on this for now. Strictly 'no comment' -- got it?"

"Yessir."

"Of course that goes for you, too," Anders said as he looked at Tate.

"I know."

"Did you get what you needed?" Anders asked.

"Think so, Chief. If the locals cooperate, anyway."

"They will."

The way Anders spoke left no doubt in my mind: he would turn up the heat when and if needed. Even Brennan had taken one look at Anders and moved off.

The elevator dinged; Pantazis and Eklund walked out; a photographer pointed and all the gathered reporters got ready. Obviously they didn't know who I was, maybe not even Anders, so it was a cinch Tate was totally off their radar.

"There a way out of here?" I asked the girl behind the reception counter. "To avoid that?" I added, pointing at the press.

She pointed to a hallway: "Down there, door at the end of the hall. Leads right into the parking garage."

"Thanks." I turned to Anders and grinned. "You sure you don't want me to talk the reporters?"

"Get out of here, you bum," he half-snarled, half grinned at me, "and keep on Harker and the lab until you know something."

"Right." I turned to Tate, motioned with my head and we walked-off down the hall to the covert exit. I opened the door and recognized her immediately: Liza Mullins, crime reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She'd staked us out, been waiting for us.

Ambushed...

"Got anything for me, Woody?"

"Well, does 'No comment' count?"

"Heard it's a cop. Any truth to that?"

"I heard there's a shuttle headed up to the mother-ship. It's already on the roof and they're holding a place, just for you."

"Can I quote you on that? 'Seattle PD claims alien Mother Ship wants Ace Reporter?'"

"So, you're an Ace Reporter?" We laughed, then: "You never give up, do you?"

"Never."

"You ever been married, Liza?" That seemed to shut her up...

"I'm not now. Why?"

"Well then, would you marry me?"

Her left eyebrow shot up: "Sure, Woody, right after the aliens get through probing your asshole."

"That's just about what I thought you'd say. Always the same story with us, isn't it." We all laughed -- even as Tate and I turned and walked off, leaving her standing there. Then I heard her high heels clattering along behind us and we stopped when I got to the back of my Ford. "You still here?" I pointed at the ceiling: "They ain't gonna wait forever, ya know?"

"Knock it off, Woodward. Gimme something!? Please?"

"Sorry. No can do."

"How 'bout coffee later? Or some breakfast?"

I looked at her; cute kid, maybe a pest -- but cute. I could handle some cute after a night like this. "I don't know how long I'll be?"

She handed me her card. "Call me. Whenever."

I looked her in the eye. "Cute," I said, and that eyebrow shot up again.

"What?"

"I said, cute. As in, you-are-cute."

She started to blush as I opened the door and got in, started the engine and let it warm up. She moved closer, until she was blocking my open door, then she knelt down beside me.

"Do you mean that?" she said.

"What? About the mother ship?"

She didn't have a come-back ready, or maybe she was being serious, but she just looked at me.

"Yeah, Liza, I think you're cute. Maybe 99 percent gorgeous. Why?"

"Just didn't expect you to say that, that's all." She was looking all kinds of serious now, but it was kind of odd because for some reason I didn't regret saying it. I'd know her for years, we'd bantered back and forth over cases -- the normal back and forth between cops and reporters -- and yet for any number of reasons nothing had ever developed. We'd certainly never exchanged Christmas cards or birthday greetings, let alone met for coffee, so I considered this a most unusual, and interesting development.

"Well, maybe I should have told you years ago, but there it is."

"Will you call me?"

"For coffee? Sure, why not?"

She looked at me. She got it. "Okay. I've got to get some sleep, but I'll answer."

"Right."

She shut my door and I backed out and drove out from under the building; Tate fell in behind me and called as soon as we were clear:

"What did she want?" he asked.

"Anal sex. With me and a goat."

"You wish, Dickhead. Seriously, Woody, what's she after."

"A warm shoulder, I think. Who knows?"

"Aren't we all. What else."

"Coffee. Chit-chat."

"No shit? You need a chaperone or anything, you let me know."

"Right."

"I'm wasted, Woody, gonna head to the barn and crash for a while."

"Yeah, you old farts! Gotta get your rest or you..."

"Woody?"

"Yeah, Tate?"

"Suck my dick."

"No thanks. Tryin' to quit."

"Well, then, be careful..."

The line went dead.

+++++

Forensics was in an annex to the original Central Precinct building; it had been cobbled together over the years to make room for new gadgets and ever newer technologies, but somehow digital had yet to replace film completely in our lab, and I for one was grateful. Digital is good, don't get me wrong, but a fine grained film in the hands of a good photographer with a Leica can reveal all kinds of things better than digital, particularly in the infrared spectrum, and that's why I'd called Harker.