Homicide for the Holidays Read online

  I kept my gaze on his face until the dripping sweat stung my eyes. My head grew heavy and I dropped my chin to my chest. Time slowed as Rogers running monologue of profanity and hatred became more heated. A sharp tug forced my head up.

  I cringed, anticipating the burning pain of a bullet.

  I opened my eyes. Mac’s lips moved, but no sound came as he advanced toward us, his hands up in a submissive position, and his steps slow and measured. Apparently, Rogers had finished whatever he wanted to say, because Mac freed Rogers’ finger from the trigger, then wiggled the gun away from my neck.

  Officers charged, duty belts crackling, and shoes whispering across the sand, before they slammed Rogers to the ground.

  Mac handed off the shotgun and lifted me away from the swing. My legs wouldn’t support my weight, and I stumbled. He wheeled me into his arms and carried me toward an ambulance waiting near the pulsating throng of news crews. As we passed, they called out, begging for a highlight.

  “What was your role with the Santa Slayer?”

  “How long were you held hostage?”

  “Cassandra! Over here, Cassandra!”

  Being in Mac’s arms again was more satisfying than a ratings hike.

  I buried my face in the crook of his neck and turned my back on the cameras.

  Santa’s Eggnog

  3 eggs, slightly beaten

  1/2 cup granulated sugar

  2 1/2 cups whole milk

  1 teaspoon plus 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

  1 cup heavy whipping cream

  2 tablespoons powdered sugar

  1/2 cup light rum (or for non-alcohol version, 2 tablespoons rum extract mixed with 1/3 cup milk)

  Ground nutmeg for garnish

  In 2-quart heavy saucepan, stir eggs and granulated sugar until well mixed. Gradually stir in milk. Cook over medium heat 10 to 15 minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens slightly. Remove from heat. Stir in 1 teaspoon vanilla. Let cool, then cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours. Overnight is acceptable.

  Just before serving, beat heavy whipping cream, powdered sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla with electric mixer on high speed until stiff peaks form. Gently stir 1 cup of the whipped cream, the rum, and food color into custard.

  Pour custard mixture into small punch bowl. Drop remaining whipped cream in mounds onto custard mixture. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Serve immediately. Store in refrigerator up to 2 days.

  Makes 10 half-cup servings

  Qraven

  By B. K. Hart

  December 22, 2073 18:36

  Death’s varied bouquet, familiar places in time, reaching through one’s memory. The very long dead…old, dank, mothball farts. The not-so-long dead, partially still in the throes of decay. Its carcass rotting away. A high stench garbage, slightly sweet like vomit. And, the fresh dead and bloody, with high metallic discharges. A clean, almost culinary butchered scent unless bodily fluids were included, in which case, not so culinary.

  This guy had a clean, nearly antiseptic odor with a green, squashed, frog-from-the-pond smell.

  Crouched next to the corpse, Denver McNulty III used a pen tip and eased the shoulder back so he could get a look at the front side of the victim. A small military tattoo imprint on the neck just below the left ear. Denver felt the presence of watchers, eyes in the shadows, some of them human.

  “I know damn well you are not screwing with my crime scene.”

  Denver slid his gaze toward the wide-open mouth of the repurposed warehouse, now storage unit. The cobblestone alley disappearing in the darkness behind her backlit form. It was always dark in the undercity. SkyIndy tended to block all natural sunlight to the ground, with the exception of old Military Park where they still let the sunshine through, and some of the rural garden and farm lots. The undercity streets were shiny, wet. Topside still snowed, Thanksgiving through Easter. Undercity held in too much heat, melting any flakes that made it past the upper city limits.

  “Lieutenant,” he acknowledged.

  Aurora Elliott, long-legged, high-heeled, short-skirted in black, silver-sequined on top, long straight silver wig. Holiday lights flashed, green then red, reflecting off her glittery top and shimmering hair.

  “Undercover tonight?” he asked.

  “Day off,” she said with a sulk. The tip flared red as she sucked her cigarette, then she turned and flicked it into the cluttered alleyway behind her. “Where the hell’s my forensics? And why are you here?”

  “It was on the way home. This is my neighborhood.”

  He allowed himself an appreciative and leisurely perusal of her bare, fit legs. It had been a long time since he’d last seen that much of her thighs.

  “See anything interesting?” she said with a smirk. She walked over to stand near the victim’s head, squatted and dropped a knee to the concrete floor, flashing a swatch of pink panty.

  He wanted to say, nothing he hadn’t seen before. But, he’d always found her quite interesting and didn’t want to offend. One never knew, did one?

  “How much longer is this shit going to take?” Another woman’s voice. Becca or Becky, Denver couldn’t remember for sure.

  “When did you say you bought this unit?” he inquired.

  “Three days ago. You know how the auction paperwork goes. You place your bid. They take your money then spend the next two days determining whether you are good enough to buy the crap some loser left behind.”

  “You discovered the body?” Aurora stood.

  “Yeah, City Services finally cleared the unit at the last damn minute today. I barely had time to set up a light crew to get in here.” She tapped her watch. “They’re supposed to be here by seven, and they ain’t cheap. I need to unload this shit within 24 hours or City Services starts charging me for the unit.”

  “You’re not unloading anything over my dead body,” Aurora said.

  “She means, that dead body,” Denver qualified, pointing at the corpse.

  “Jesus, he’s already attracting rats,” Becca said. “Looks like they started working on his eyes. That’s disgusting.”

  She didn’t move away though. In fact, she moved a little closer.

  “You know this guy?” Aurora asked.

  “No, I told him already. I opened up the storage unit. Saw the stiff and had to walk halfway up the block to find a red phone that worked.”

  Denver was looking at the rat-gnawed eye socket. Only the wound looked too precise to be the results of a rodent buffet. Using his penlight, he scanned the immediate area coming to rest on a concave piece of transparent, barely green glass.

  “He wasn’t killed here,” he stated.

  Denver reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an evidence bag and a glove, then he carefully picked up the piece of glass and put it inside. He held it out for Aurora who took it and held it up as if there were some other light she could see better by. “This is just a dumping ground. Not enough blood for one thing. And they appear to have dumped all his things with him.”

  “It’s a Qraven?” Aurora asked.

  “Looks that way,” Denver stood, knees popping as he rose. “That glass looks to be about what you might find around the eye socket.”

  “You think?” she said shaking the bag then flipping it over to get a different angle.

  Becca said, “Shit always gets real around Christmas time. SkyIndy sends down harvesters. Walking around with a Qraven is practically an advertisement to come get your shit.”

  Denver studied Becca. She said shit a lot. She didn’t seem nervous, not really. Agitated, more like.

  He was aware of the fad. Like skin stretching, tattoos, piercings. Qraven was the youth of today’s rebellion, removing a section of their skin, sometimes bone, so you could see the organs behind it. Eyes weren’t uncommon. He’d seen parts of a jaw, exposing the teeth inside. Over the ribs, or ribs removed, exposing the liver or the heart, the kidneys. He didn’t understand it. What were the kids thinking, leaving a window to their interiors like that? But,
there you were. Qraven. The latest and greatest way for the new generation to tell their parents to screw off.

  “I just take out the trash around here, but it looks to me like you need some extra bags,” called a new voice.

  He was a big guy. Big nose, big hands.

  Denver eyed the man warily. “Moose, what brings you to our humble crime scene?”

  Every time the trash department was involved with City Services, they had to double check the invoicing. The more you tried to take the trash out of the mob, the more the mob seemed to take out the trash. Denver could think of no good reason for Moose to be on hand.

  “I was following these bozos,” Moose said pointing over his shoulder. The crime scene techs appeared toting field kits. Along with the techs were the light crew. “Looked like the party was this way. My cousin, Joey, just started with the team, and I thought he might be with ‘em. I guess not though, huh?”

  “Fall off of your cloud, Mr. Connors?” Aurora asked with an outstretched hand. “We don’t see much of your department down here. At least, not anyone above supervisor level.”

  “You got to watch the little people all the time,” Moose said shaking Aurora’s hand. He fired up a cigar and proceeded to stink up the small space, even with the big bay door open.

  Aurora turned to her crew and began barking out instructions.

  One of the new techs came over to the body and took out a piece of chalk. “Whoa, buddy, what are you doing?” Denver asked, raising his hand to halt him.

  “I’m just…the outline…”

  Aurora spun, took in the new guy with the chalk, and glared at her tech team. “I don’t want any of this bullshit happening on my watch, clear?”

  Tough to be the new kid.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant, it was a joke.” Her supervisor dropped his eyes and whispered to the new kid, “Put that away, and get some pictures with the digital camera. You remember angles, right?”

  “Scan this guy and tell us who we got,” Denver said.

  And, they did.

  “Dead guy’s name is Jason Rice. Works for the trash department.”

  Every head turned to look at Moose.

  December 23, 2073 02:35

  Denver’s apartment was on the seventh floor of a gold-glass converted office building, located three blocks from the storage site where the body had been found. Nine blocks from City Services, where the station house was located, near the old glass and steel bus station which had been built around the turn of the century. Downtown Indianapolis, once a thriving metropolis, was now the seedy underbelly of SkyIndy. Denver, like most city police officers, lived in the center of his district where he could walk, bike, or hoof. The county and state departments had vehicles, but most of the municipalities relied on good old pedestrian transportation. Districts were small. He worked the old mall region, from the station house west across Washington Street to the government center dump yard, and up to just inside of the north/south I65 split.

  Exhausted, he tossed his keys in the catchall next to the front door and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Rough night?”

  He turned. Clad in a pair of bikini briefs and nothing else, Kati was eating from a container that looked suspiciously like his leftover Chinese from last night.

  “Put some clothes on.”

  She huffed, slammed the oyster pail down on the table and put her hands on her hips. “You know its people like you, with your outdated, prudish ideas of the human body who continue to sexualize women and make our society a cesspool of depravity for rapists and abusers.”

  Teens.

  “Kati, can we not do this today?”

  “What would be a good day, Denver? Should I have you pencil me in?”

  “I’m beat. I had a long night. And, you know you can live with your mother if you don’t like my uptight rules about putting clothes on in the house. Call me old-fashioned. If you were still a toddler, it would be a different story. As an adult, I am asking you to put some damn clothes on.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m your father, and I said so!”

  She gave him the squinty eye, shook her head, and stormed off in the direction of her bedroom. “You could say thank you for the Christmas tree.”

  He fingered a branch on the pitiful looking stubby pine. She had wrapped a thin gauzy gold ribbon in a spiral around the sparse needles. Crystals hung from a few of the branches. Denver appreciated the effort.

  He went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the fridge and went back to the dining table. He sat, swigged half of the beer and picked up the chopsticks. It was his damn leftovers after all. He took a bite of the cold Moo Shu Pork. Kati had left papers scattered across the table. She had obviously been in the middle of something before he interrupted her.

  Lease Your Body Marketing Rent your Forehead for $5000 The body billboard, how you too can make $50,000 by leasing your…

  “Hey,” he yelled. “What the hell is this stuff on the table?”

  He heard her grumbling but couldn’t make out the words. He flipped through a catalogue on tattooing, and then one on Qraven art. What was she thinking? All he could see was the dead guy in the alley missing his glass piece, along with the eyeball that used to be behind it.

  “Get your half-clad fanny back in here!”

  “Coming!” She half skipped, half ran back then slid into a chair across from him, t-shirt hanging just barely past the crotch line of her panties. She frowned at his chopsticks. “Hey, I was eating that.”

  He pushed the container over to her. One finger tapped the high-gloss brochures.

  “Talk to me.”

  “I was looking at skin art. There’s nothing to it.” She shrugged.

  “You know how dangerous this Qraven stuff is right now?” He opened the pages to a head shot and pushed it across the table at her. “My case tonight was a guy with this one right here.”

  “And?” she sulked.

  “And they killed him for his eye.”

  “That’s like urban legend, Dad.”

  He slapped his hand against the table, the updraft causing some of the pages to scoot across the surface. Kati jumped in her chair. “Try to pretend I know a little from my job. It’s not a myth. Kids are losing their lives to this stuff.”

  “Look,” she hesitated. “It might have been true at one time but this guy,” she pointed to the one with the socket exposed, “you wouldn’t kill this guy for his eye for two reasons. One, he’d sell it to you, very likely replacing it with a glass eye. It’s still a novelty, and that’s the point. Two, he has two eyes so you don’t just take one, you take both, and losing your eyes doesn’t kill you. It just leaves you blind. It makes no sense.”

  Denver leaned back in his chair and stared at his daughter. She was right. He had been looking at the obvious. All of them had been looking at the obvious. He needed to run through some additional search criteria when he returned to the office. He needed some serious sleep first. He was wiped out. Denver ran a hand across his face. He was missing connections.

  “So, you aren’t planning to have this done?” he asked.

  Kati jumped up and disappeared into the kitchen. “Want another beer?”

  “No. I need a bed. Are you not answering my question?”

  “I am answering. Beer doesn’t go well with cookies anyway,” she said, and she slid back into a chair a bit closer to him this time. She set a plate of gingerbread cookies in front of him, then handed him a martini glass of Christmas cheer. She gave him a sly look, sliding her eyes over the pamphlets. “I knew you’d hate those if you saw them.”

  She slid another glossy pamphlet toward him. He took a sip of the cinnamon enhanced martini. “So you resort to bribery? Liquor me up, fill me with sugar. Figure to soften me up then spring the degeneracy you really wanted?”

  “Is it working?”

  “What is it you want, a piercing?”

  “No, it’s light.”

  He looked at the cover.
A man with florescent stripes from cheekbone to forehead. A box section with a woman’s hand, the back of each finger lit up with a rainbow of color…pinky in red, thumb in purple. He opened the booklet to another full page of pictures, each showing skin that glowed with a multitude of patterns.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s bioluminescence. It’s leading edge technology using plant and animal life, natural fluorescence. Like what they have been working on with street lighting. Only now you can program certain cells to mimic the technology.”

  “So you want your body parts lighting up?”

  “I was actually thinking about my hair!” Kati cried. “I haven’t seen it on hair, and Danita says the real problem is the hair grows so fast, as soon as you get it glowing, it’s going to fade away an inch every few weeks. Whereas there is a CRISPR technique which has been used for editing genomes in plants which can adhere plant to human DNA and alter the actual hair follicle. That’s kind of a lame explanation, it’s actually more like an RNA transplant, but I am getting way over your head.”

  Denver held up his hand. “Find me more information to read. I’ll talk to Danita. And, let me get some sleep so I can have a rational conversation about it? I suppose you wanted this for your Christmas present. I’m not saying yes…”

  She squealed and wrapped her arms around his neck. “You’re the best! I don’t care what Mom says.”

  December 23, 2073 10:13

  The rhythmic thud of the tennis ball, as it bounced off the wall, helped him think. Denver spent a restless night mentally reviewing the crime scene, the conversations, trying to put his finger on what felt off. It was Kati’s comment more than anything. You don’t kill a guy for his eyes. His chair was twisted to the side so he could prop his feet on the gray desktop and still hit the wall.

  She doesn’t care what her mom says. Did he actually let her get away with that? Man, I must have been tired.

  He tossed the ball again. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “Yo, McNulty.”

  “Yeah, Carmichael, what do you want? I’m trying to think here.”