Bare Bones (22 page)

I went into the club he’d indicated, finding it packed with a plethora of people wearing black clothing.

“Where are you?” I texted him, looking around. I couldn’t imagine Tremelay in this sort of place, but who knows what the guy did for kicks in his spare time.

“Bathroom. Meet me here.”

I stared, open-mouthed, at my phone. He was in the
bathroom
? What the heck did he expect me to do, give it a shake when he was done?

I pushed my way through the crowd, fairly certain that people were fondling not only my rear end, but my sword as well. Finally I arrived at the very back of the bar where the bathrooms were located only to find myself refused entrance by a stern, uniformed police officer. A few texts to Tremelay and I saw him pop out of the silver-painted metal door and wave at the officer to let me through.

“What’s going on?” I asked the detective. The burly officer had been smack outside the men’s room. Whatever was going on, it had to be big to shut down the only place for guys to pee in a bar at full occupancy. Was there a celebrity in there doing number two? Because I couldn’t imagine any other reason for the cops to be guarding a bathroom.

Guarding a
stinky
bathroom. I wrinkled my nose as Tremelay opened the door. And I quickly realized that the stench wasn’t from someone who’d suffered burrito-induced food poisoning, but from a body which had been dead long before the band took the stage.

“Bodies.” I’d never seen Tremelay look so pissed. “Two skinned bodies in one of the stalls. Fuck knows how long they’ve been there. People have been complaining about the smell since the place opened, but no one thought to check in the stall until just now. And these ones were posed. They look like they’re having sex. And yes, they’re both skinned.”

I peeked in the doorway of the stall and wished I hadn’t. The bodies were posed in a position that held sexual innuendo. I thought back on Chuck’s and my conversation about teenage pranks. The dead body falling out of the closet on top of me fit with that theme, too. Perhaps the one in the cooler had been destined for a prank along with Amanda Lewis’s corpse, if only her boyfriend hadn’t interrupted.

But two bodies meant two more skins. Assuming the one was only hunting vampires at this point, I was looking at two murderers who could assume any one of five identities—six if I counted the teenager’s Gary was in when they arrived.

And we’d never find them. Not when we had no idea who these bodies were. My only chance was to catch them in Gary’s or Bradley Lewis’s skins. Although murderers with any sense would have ditched those by now.

But I wasn’t dealing with adults. I was dealing with teenagers—teenagers who’d argued in a rest-stop bathroom and at the Inner Harbor. They’d not give them up. Not unless they had to run for it and leave a backpack behind.

Whoever these teens were, they needed to be prosecuted as adults. It wasn’t just the multiple murders, it was the absolutely psychotic desecration of these two bodies in the bathroom stall. It was vomit-inducing. Red bodies, tendons and muscles all on display like in an anatomy textbook, eyes bulging, teeth bared. The whole thing was like a scene from a slasher horror flick.

“Now you can see why we have the bathroom cordoned off,” Tremelay commented. “We didn’t want to clear the bar and alarm the public. We’re hoping to sneak these two out the back on stretchers, like overdose victims.”

“Who found them? And how the heck did the killers get them in here? You’d think someone would have seen them.”

“This place is locked down tight until the band arrives to set up. No one saw them. No one saw anything. The roadies did tell management the bathroom stunk something horrible, but nobody thought to look until they’d been open for almost an hour.”

I looked over at the stalls. If this had been the women’s bathroom, it would have been found right away, but with a line of urinals and two other open stalls, nobody would have thought to pry open the locked one and see what was going on in there.

I scrunched up my nose. “You can sneak out the back door, but this is gonna leak out, Tremelay. Like it or not, it’s gonna hit the morning paper.”

Mainly because I was going to call Janice. I owed her, and the woman needed to get a decent story after being scooped by the
City Paper
.

“I know it’s gonna leak out,” Tremelay snapped. “No news crews have shown up yet. I’m sure some asshole with a cell phone has gotten pictures, though. More skinned bodies. Everyone just got settled down from the occult sacrifices, and now we’ve got three teenage skinwalkers killing people.”

“Skinwalker is better than an Aztec god,” I reassured him. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to stop an Aztec god. Not that I have any idea how to stop a skinwalker, but that at least I can find that out in a timely fashion. I’ve got research material on them and so does my Dad. Aztec gods…not so much.”

“What have you found out so far? What do I need to know about these kids?” Tremelay asked.

“They’re a sort of Native American witch, an evil person who gains the powers, skills, and memories of whatever skin he is wearing. It’s usually animals, but I’m thinking if I dig a bit I can find incidents where skinwalkers have taken human skins. They transform into whoever they’re wearing at the time.”

“So these people are draping skins of their victims over themselves and walking around? Is that how Huang escaped? He shed his skin and turned into…I don’t know, a rat or something?”

“That’s what I believe. It’s a kind of magic,” I tried to explain. “They put on the skin and they actually become whatever. Coyote, owl, bear, Brian Huang.”

“Why? I’ll admit it might be kind of cool to be a bear for a day or two, at least until they darted me and stuck me in a zoo, but not other humans. At least not a lazy kid and a museum employee with a huge family crammed into a four bedroom rancher in Glen Burnie. If I was going to assume another person’s identity it would be the Mayor, or Bill Gates, or Brad Pitt.”

I wrinkled my nose, thinking that Tremelay should aspire to be a younger movie star than Brad Pitt, but who was I to judge?

“I really don’t know. They’re kids, like Stu Moreland said. Maybe they’re skinwalkers-in-training and out on a sort of lark. An evil joy ride.”

Tremelay shook his head. “The name Moreland mentioned matched up with the name of the skin in the backpack—the kid who’d gone missing at age six from South Carolina. Do you think a skinwalker stole these kids and trained them?”

It was a chilling thought, but one I’d had in the back of my mind. They had to have learned the magic somewhere, and given that Lawton had vanished from his home when he was only six years old, only to turn up a skin in a backpack ten years later…. Was that six-year-old boy trained along with the others, or had another trained skinwalker come upon Lawton King recently and taken his life?

“All I know is we’ve got a possibility of five identities to look for if we rule out the girl up north and her vampire skin. Five, including these two.” I waved a hand at the corpses as a tech loaded them carefully onto gurneys and covered them with sheets.

“Gary, that we have pictures of, these two unknowns, a rest-stop guy, and Lewis.” Tremelay’s mouth set in a grim line. “I’m gonna try to fast track the DNA on the cooler body and these two. With this many murders, we’ve got a crisis. We’re also going to probably have the feds knocking at our door the next day or two. This kind of thing is right up their alley, and we’ve got four dead including Amanda Lewis and body and skin from her house.”

Feds. Crap. If this had been a human serial killer, I would have welcomed their presence, but with a supernatural element…

If only there really was a branch of the FBI that dealt with supernatural phenomenon. What I wouldn’t give for Scully and Mulder right now. I’d team with those two in a heartbeat. But unfortunately I’d wind up with a bunch of suits who shuffled me aside and put every officer to work looking for three human psychos.

Skinwalkers. I watched the bodies being wheeled from the bathroom and out the emergency exit at the back of the building and knew this was going to be up to me. If the feds arrived, they’ve grab Tremelay as their lead detective on the case, tying up all of his time.

Me. Again I felt a wash of loneliness. I liked working with Tremelay. I liked working with Raven. And I liked working with Dario.

I needed to cut the self-pity crap. Feds or not, Tremelay would always find a way to make time for what might become our side investigation. Raven would help once she regained her strength. And Dario—he would find that vampire imposter, I just knew it.

“What are you thinking, Ainsworth?” Tremelay asked. And I knew then that he was with me, no matter what his job demanded of him.

“I’m thinking I need to research skinwalkers more—how to detect them, how to catch them.”

How to kill them? Admittedly these three had done their share of murder. I’d killed Dark Iron but I didn’t want to kill again. These were kids, even though they were murderers on a spree. This was different. There was plenty of evidence to put these kids away for life. There was no need for me to take justice into my own hands.

But the skinwalker who’d posed as Brian Huang had escaped prison in a matter of hours. Like Dark Iron, I wondered if human justice would possibly be enough for kids with this level of magical ability. My soul was smudged already. It was about to become even darker.

“So you’re nose-deep in books tonight while I’m filling out reports.” Tremelay sighed and ran a hand through his already messy hair. “Do you have a sec before you go home? I’ve got something I wanted to give you, but it’s at my apartment.”

I blinked in surprise. Not that I thought Tremelay would try anything sleezy, or that I had anything to fear being alone with him in his apartment, I’d just never thought about where the detective lived. He seemed to be either out investigating a case or at the station.

“Sure. I’ve got time.”

We stood for a moment, as if both of us was waiting for the other to do something, then Tremelay finally turned, gesturing for me to follow him. “It’s not all that. My place. I mean it’s kinda cheap and small. And I just moved in a few months back and have been too busy to unpack much. I haven’t even put the bed together yet. I’m sleeping on the mattress on the floor.”

We walked through the same emergency exit as the bodies had gone and toward his unmarked car, double parked next to the ambulance. Being a detective had its privileges. Parking was evidently one of them. “Well, hopefully I won’t be seeing your mattress,” I teased.

“Hardly,” he shot back, tempering his word with a quick grin. “I’m just warning you that the place is a mess.”

“You’ve been in my apartment. People who live in glass houses and all that.” He unlocked the unmarked car and I slid into the passenger seat, waiting for him to come around and get in. “Besides, I’m eager to see where you live. Do you actually own an iron? Are your clean clothes twisted up in a heap in a laundry basket in the living room? Are there dishes stacked up in your sink with dried food crusted on them?”

“Now you’re describing your place.” The smile stayed on his face as he pulled away from the curb. “It’s not that bad. Mostly unpacked boxes. And yes, I tend to live out of a laundry basket. Hanging and folding clothes has got to be a torture technique. I’d rather be suspended by my toes than try to match socks.”

His socks didn’t match? I tried to sneak a peek, but his pants came down too far and the floor of the car was too dim to tell. Even so, I got the feeling he had on one navy and one black.

Chuckling, I sat back in my seat and relaxed. I was so glad I’d met Detective Justin Tremelay, glad he’d trusted me, believed me, glad he was my friend. My quirky friend with his rumpled shirts, rumpled hair, and mismatched socks. What a character. And what a Templar-at-heart this man was.

“What are you grinning about, Ainsworth?”

I couldn’t help it. Skinwalkers, dead people. I shouldn’t be happy, but somehow I was. I had friends. I had good friends. And Raven might be dead, but she wasn’t lost to me.

“Your socks,” I told the detective. “I swear sometimes you look like a toddler dressed you.”

He grinned back. “I’m a toddler at heart, Ainsworth.”

Tremelay pulled along the curb and parked on a street full of brick row houses, putting the car in park and unlocking the doors.

“Here we are.”

We were two blocks from the MLK. It wasn’t the best section of town, but it wasn’t the worst. I looked over at the line of houses, identical except for window treatments and front-door ornamentation.

“I thought you said apartment?”

He nodded, swinging his legs out of the car. “Two one bedroom apartments in the house. I’ve got the downstairs, and a single mother of three has the upstairs. She’s thrilled to have a cop living in her building.”

I’ll bet. I shook my head at the thought of four people in a one bedroom apartment, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge. After this month’s rent, I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay the next. In a few months, it might be me living with three other people in a one bedroom apartment.

I followed Tremelay up the steps through a door. The lock squeaked, and when the detective flicked on the light I saw boxes. A lamp sat on a tower of three. Others were lined against the wall, black marker on the sides proclaiming them to be “living room” or “misc.” I milled about the room while Tremelay disappeared into what I assumed was the bedroom. Sofa, recliner, a couple of end tables, and a shelving unit against the wall.

“Three months and you haven’t unpacked all of this?” I asked.

Tremelay gave an affirmative grunt from the bedroom. I immediately jumped to the usual conclusions as I looked around the apartment. Divorced middle-aged guy, kicked out by his wife. Cops were stereotypically cheaters, so my mind wandered to the worst. I browsed the living room and kitchen, hearing the sound of ripping boxes and thumping from the back room as I tried to get a better idea of the man who’d become my friend.

The shelf by the window housed a pile of books, mostly classics and a few military thrillers. Next to them was a stack of framed photos. A woman about my age, stylish dark hair, her smile nearly engulfing her heart-shaped face. A group of people I couldn’t make out in kayaks going down a small rapid. The girl again in a graduation gown.