Grimm: The Chopping Block (4 page)

“What do you recommend?” Barry asked.

“Normally, for cases like this, I would recommend… euthanasia.”

“Oh, my God!” Melinda cried. “Logan will…”

“There’s nothing else?” Barry asked. “No treatment…? Nothing?”

Juliette took a deep breath.
Something. Maybe
.

“I can’t guarantee… And I don’t want to give you false hope.”

“There’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere, Doctor,” Barry said, quirking a hopeful smile. “Tell us. Please. We’ll take any chance. Whatever the odds.”

“We can try supportive treatment for a day or so,” Juliette offered. “See if her condition improves. Treat it aggressively with IV fluids, anti-nausea meds, and—”

“Do it,” Barry said. “Whatever it takes. Roxy—she’s a part of our family.”

“Okay. I’ll need you to sign a few papers.”

“Anything.”

Juliette mentally ticked off the indicated IV protocol: Lactated Ringer’s Solution; metoclopramide, H2 blocker for nausea; antibiotics to treat the infection. Still, it was a longshot and they needed to know that.

“You should prepare yourselves, in case—”

“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” Barry said, clinging to a buoyant optimism that the treatment would work. He’d circled the table and wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We’ll get through this, Lin.”

His wife nodded silently and wiped away a tear, unable to find enough hope to give it voice. Or perhaps unwilling to disturb its fragility.

* * *

After the Bremmers had gone and Juliette had started Roxy on the supportive treatment, she returned to her office and collapsed in her chair, exhausted.

Poor Roxy
, she thought.
Poked her snout into something sweet, unaware of the mortal danger it represented. Even now, with her life hanging in the balance, she’s too confused and miserable to understand the cause of her pain
.

Juliette worried that, despite her cautions, she’d given the Bremmers unrealistic expectations. When they returned tomorrow, the news would be bad, if not worse, because they had allowed themselves to believe Roxy would get better.

And yet, who was Juliette to deny them their hope?

Not too long ago, she had all but given up hope that she would find her way back to Nick. She caught herself rubbing her hand where Majique—Adalind Schade’s cat—had scratched her. That memory was always a jolt to her consciousness. She’d fallen into a coma and had awakened with all her memories of Nick and their life together excised. For a long time, she’d tried in vain to remember him. Eventually, the memories had returned, but in an incomprehensible flood, as if a dam had burst in her subconscious. And for a while, that had been almost as bad as having no recollection of their time together.

She’d fought her way out of the darkness, reclaiming the memories one by one, until she felt whole again. Then Nick had finally told her he was a Grimm and what that entailed. No sooner had that revelation come, than Nick’s friends and acquaintances revealed their true nature to her as Wesen. Suddenly her reclaimed world included Blutbaden, Fuchsbaus and Eisbibers and many more Wesen she had yet to see.

For a while, every time she looked at a stranger, or even people she had known for years, she wondered, “Is she Wesen? What about him?” She was afraid she’d drive Nick crazy with all the questions. For now, her questions represented a light that kept the overwhelming darkness at bay, stopped the strangeness from closing in on all sides of her. The world she’d known her whole life had basically woged in front of her. She wouldn’t tell Nick, but that scared her and thrilled her and made her want to call a time out so she could take a deep breath, absorb it all and exhale.

I need a big red “Pause” button
.

“No,” she said softly, chiding herself. “That’s not what I want.”

Hadn’t her life already been paused long enough? Sure the changes were scary and challenging, but it felt wonderful to have her life back, memories intact, and to understand why Nick had kept certain things from her.

The first time Nick tried to tell her what he was, she thought he’d gone crazy, suffered some sort of delusion or psychotic break. But no more. No more doubting the truth of Nick’s words. The facts were undeniable. Part of her relief came from knowing they could finally move forward again emotionally, after having their relationship stall and subsequently derail.

And yet, she occasionally worried that something could happen to sabotage their progress. Not another cat-scratch-borne illness, but something else unexpected from Nick’s dangerous world. At those times, her recovered memories of her life with Nick seemed like a jigsaw puzzle suspended in the air by a slender thread, swaying precariously, in danger of falling with the next gust of wind into hundreds of jumbled and lost pieces.

After the bones had been collected from the Claremont Park crime scene, Nick and Hank headed back to the precinct to await test results on the bones. On the car ride back, Hank asked Nick for his preliminary impressions.

“Strange one,” Nick said. “Dismembered body without a body.”

“Cold case?” Hank wondered.

“Maybe,” Nick conceded. “Need to wait on the ME’s report.”

“Bones chopped up like that,” Hank said. “Think this could be Wesen?”

“Wesen with an axe,” Nick said. “Can’t rule out a human monster.”

“Yet,” Hank said and smiled.

The ME would need time to determine cause of death and estimate how long the bones had been buried. If dental records gave them an ID for the victim, they could see where that trail led them. So far the canvass had provided no leads. No footprints or tire tracks to cast. If the killer had been accommodating enough to leave such evidence behind, the recent rain had washed it away. And the only fingerprints lifted from the geocache tin matched those of Brian and Tyler Mathis.

Back at his desk, while hoping for a more substantial lead, Nick copied the names and aliases from the geocaching logbook onto a legal pad and split the list with Hank.

With a little online digging, they tracked down some of the geocachers, along with the woman who had originally placed the cache eighteen months ago for others to find. The most recent “find” listed on the geocache page was three months old. To the surprise of neither detective, not one of the scavenger hunters they contacted had noticed a pile of bones at the site.

Nick suspected the bones had been left between the last find and the Mathis’ visit to the site. Nevertheless, they started to check alibis—enough to nail down addresses and proximity to the crime scene—and faced the prospect of needing a warrant to get the IDs of the remaining geocachers. If a fellow hunter had left the bones at the site, Nick doubted he or she would have recorded the visit in the handy little logbook.

With nothing solid to go on, Nick found his mind switching gears to their other big case. They had a Cracher-Mortel in a top hat, running around Portland creating zombies for some unknown reason. Another unresolved case, and that one definitely Wesen. As a homicide detective and a Grimm, Nick had one foot in each world, and at times he felt himself pulled in conflicting directions. At the moment, however, he had nothing pulling him at all.

Frustrated, he tapped a ballpoint pen on the legal pad. He’d reached the point where he’d convinced himself to march down to the Medical Examiner’s Office and camp out there until Doctor Harper gave him some answers, when the telephone rang.

Nick snatched the receiver off the cradle. Wu.

“You want to get down here.”

“Find something?”

“Quarter-mile from the site,” Wu said. “Found a couple bones near a dilapidated wooden shack. McCormack spotted a squatter. Large guy. Called him Bigfoot.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“Getting a flesh-mask-with-chainsaw vibe out here.”

“On our way,” Nick said, grabbing his jacket and signaling Hank. Hank scrambled for his crutches and swung after Nick.

“Suspect?” Hank asked as he drew up alongside his partner.

“Might be Wesen after all.”

* * *

The two-story house set back in the woods had seen better days but had probably never been up to code in any sense of the word. Devoid of color, the weather-beaten planks shaping the unimaginatively rectangular dwelling clung together with the bare minimum of structural integrity, dependent upon a dwindling number of crumbling, rusted nails. The sagging roof maintained barely enough incline to shed rainwater. Two round columns supported a first-floor roof extension over a porch large enough to accommodate two rocking chairs or a porch swing, but the owner had left that space unfurnished. Along the exterior walls, irregular sections of tar paper and plywood patched long cracks and gaps with no eye for aesthetics or symmetry. More scraps of plywood obscured the small windows on the first floor, while dark cloth blocked the view through two visible second-story windows.

Fortunately, the terrain surrounding the house provided a level surface for Hank to navigate on crutches. Sergeant Wu and two other uniforms—McCormack and Harris—had approached the house from opposite directions to cover front and back doors. Wu monitored the front approach; the patrol officers waited around back. Now and then, the suspect could be seen striding through the house, his bulk shifting past one crack in the walls after another. And even if they hadn’t caught regular glimpses of him, the creak and groan of floorboards protesting under his weight were a dead giveaway that the structure was occupied.

Nick moved into position beside Sergeant Wu.

“We got one suspect,” Wu said. “Super-sized.”

“Name?”

“No address on this charming little cottage,” Wu said. “Legally, this residence doesn’t exist. Mountain man DIY special.”

“Where are the bones?”

Wu nodded toward a slight depression ten feet away, a repository for what looked like a couple broken rib bones and, possibly, a human femur.

“Only those?”

“That’s not enough?” Wu asked.

“Maybe,” Nick said, but he had his doubts. He walked over and peered more closely at the bones. The breaks on the ribs were jagged, as if snapped in half, not cleanly cut like those of the first victim. The presence of a human skull would have removed some doubt about the find.

“Okay,” Nick said. “Radio your guys. Hank and I are going in.”

As Wu pressed the transmit button on his shoulder microphone to advise the uniforms, Nick strode toward the small porch, the heel of his palm resting on the butt of his Glock 17. Hank stayed back one pace, giving himself room to maneuver on his crutches. When Nick glanced over his shoulder, Wu moved away from the tree line, hand close to his holstered firearm as well.

The floorboards of the covered porch groaned in protest, sagging beneath Nick’s weight as he crossed to the front door. Before knocking, he stood to the side and waited for Hank to clear the line of fire. Nick’s imagination worked overtime. Too easy to picture the behemoth sitting in the house, facing the rickety door with a loaded shotgun across his knees, waiting for the first knock to blast them where they stood.

Nick exchanged a look with Hank, who nodded, hand poised over his own gun as he rested on the crutches. Taking a deep breath, Nick rapped his knuckles on the door.

“Go away!” a voice boomed inside, unnervingly close to the door.

Had he been standing there the whole time Nick approached?

“Detective Burkhardt, Portland Police,” Nick said. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

“Don’t talk to cops,” the deep voice said. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

“This will only take a few minutes of your time.”

Silence.

“Or I could take you down to the station for questioning.”

Rusty hinges squealed in protest as the suspect yanked the door open.

The man stood a foot taller than Nick. Unruly hair and a thick beard spilled over a faded red flannel shirt and suspenders holding up tattered and grease-stained jeans. Technically, he was unarmed but that hardly seemed to matter. The man looked as if he could bench-press compact cars without needing a spotter.

And he was fast.

“Go away!” he roared, and charged Nick, head lowered, but not before Nick saw him woge into the bullish form of a Mordstier, complete with horns.

Nick’s hands rose to catch the lowered horns before they could gore him, but the inertia of the charging Wesen drove him back into one of the porch’s support posts. The wood split in half against Nick’s back and head, momentarily stunning him.

The roof of the porch sagged, its creaking punctuated by popping sounds as nails broke loose.

His bell rung, Nick dropped to hands and knees and tried to shake it off.

Hank sprang forward, raised the tip of one crutch and attempted to shove the Mordstier back, but the Wesen caught the crutch and swung it, along with Hank, around, slamming the injured detective into the wall.

As the Mordstier drew back a booted foot to strike Nick in the ribs, Wu shouted, “Stop!” He had his X26 Taser trained on the suspect.

Grunting, the Mordstier ignored Wu’s command and swung his foot forward.

Nick heard the crackling discharge of the Taser.

Roaring, the bull Wesen staggered back into the doorjamb but, incredibly, he fought off the effects of the paralyzing 50,000-volt charge and ripped the needle-tipped darts from his chest.

Instead, Wu was the one who looked stunned.

But Nick’s head had cleared. He rose from his knees and drove the Wesen against the wall, their combined weight cracking several planks along the front of the house. The Mordstier gripped the front of Nick’s jacket, lifted him up, spun him around and slammed him against the wall. Part of the wall caved in, catching Nick’s elbow.

He saw the flash of recognition—but not fear—in the Wesen’s eyes as he realized Nick was a Grimm. Some species of Wesen feared Grimms more than anything, viewing them as monsters or bogeymen. Others were simply wary of them, aware of the threat they represented. But some Wesen—usually the strongest among them—had little fear and maybe only grudging respect. The Mordstier, clearly, belonged to the last faction. He tugged Nick free and attempted to slam him into the cracked wall again.