Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 9

  “Right. He gets all pent up and boom. Someone's dead.” Already dismissing it, Gallagher turned to the graffiti on the basement wall. “Sounds like he's laying the groundwork for an insanity plea.”

  “It gets better. Way better.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Barely paying attention.

  “This affliction he describes? His curse? He's given it a name.” Lara balked, unsure of even how to pronounce it right. She blurted it out. “Lycanthropy.”

  “Like-a-what?”

  “Lycanthropy. The guy thinks he's a werewolf.”

  That stopped him cold and he turned his eyes to her. Parsing what the hell she just said. The word just hung there in the air between them.

  “Great.” He finally shrugged, like he came across this every day. “Now he's the dogcatcher's problem.”

  Not the reaction she was looking for. Lara pulled down the rest of the notebooks and shoved them into his hands. “There are six of these journals. Most of what I've deciphered describes the same thing over and over. Pushing it down, fighting it until it overwhelms him. He comes out of it racked with remorse. Suicidal over his guilt. This guy has killed before. God knows how many times.”

  Gallagher’s dismissive turn of mouth dropped away. He flipped through the top notebook. “You find any names or dates? Locations?”

  “Nothing solid to go on. So far, anyway.” She crossed the floor to where a chain dangled from the joists overhead. “But I found out what these are for.”

  Lara trailed up the end of a chain, held up the iron cuff. “My first guess was this stuff was some bondage gear, but it's not. They're his restraints. He chains himself up when he feels the urge come over him.”

  THE Siberian sniffed the perimeter of the rooftop, padding through puddles in the warped tar. It found a dry spot, circled twice and bedded down. Chin to the ground, waiting.

  The man sat on the roof's edge, one leg dangling over. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, teeth flashing through the whiskers of his beard. From his perch he could see his home. What used to be his home. Now it was ringed by police vehicles with their stupid flashing lights. He watched the pigs come and go, tearing apart his home. He cocked his head and spit. After a while, he turned away and crossed the tar roof to the exit.

  The Siberian rose and fell in line behind him.

  THE premises search turned up nothing else to identify the squatter. No other identification, no correspondence nor bills. There was no landline and no cell phone to go on. Nothing with a name on it.

  The CSU techs came back with a number of fingerprints. All of these were sorted and fed into the system, fingers crossed that something would match up. DNA swabs were taken from the beer cans and utensils and sent to the lab. With any luck it would match one of the myriad profiles found on the victim. But that would take time, their job joining a backlog of samples in a logjam of other investigations waiting to move forward.

  Lara stuck her nose in the pages of the notebooks and didn't come up for air. She studied the crazed writing for any tangibles like locations or names. She scrutinized every sketch, the renderings of wolves and naked women. The drawings of the house seemed important. Always the same house but rendered from different perspectives. Significant but with no context, useless to her.

  She found seven self-portraits peppered throughout the notebooks. She photocopied each one and pinned them to her evidence board. With no dates, she hazarded a guess to their chronological order, based solely on the increasingly sordid look of the subject. Lines etched deeper into the face, the hair longer and the beard progressively more foul.

  Gallagher stayed with the premises, canvassing every business around the site of the little broken-down house. He tramped into the trees, searching for anything. He dropped to his knees twice, winded and frail but waved off the concern of the uniforms and resumed the search. It took a direct call from the Lieutenant himself before Gallagher went home to rest up.

  Detective Mendes called early the next morning while Gallagher was making breakfast. They got a hit on the prints and the system just spit out a name.

  14

  IVAN PRALL.

  Lara's screen popped open a partial list of priors. No photograph available. She turned to her evidence board, which by now resembled an art project stapled up by some deranged child. She tore one of the photocopied self-portraits from the wall and handed it to Gallagher. “Ivan Prall. No fixed address, no known relatives.”

  “What the hell kinda name is that?” He nodded to her screen. “What do you got?”

  “Not a lot,” she said. “Both parents deceased. The father beat his mother to death, then hung himself inside the county jail. At age ten Prall enters the system, gets shuffled through a number of foster homes.”

  “Where was this? Here in town?” Gallagher took his chair, stretched out his legs.

  “Damascus.” Lara toggled down the screen. “Later on he lands in a foster home here in Portland and gets into trouble. Theft, arson, assault. Two years in a juvenile detention center, then he's released to a halfway house for troubled kids.

  “Prall flees the halfway house, missing for a couple days and then shows up in a hospital ER with wounds from—” Lara leaned into the monitor to read the details. “An unspecified animal attack, probably a dog.”

  “Sad story. Then what?”

  “Nothing. He disappears from the hospital and he's never seen again.”

  “When did he disappear?”

  “Six years ago.” Lara tapped a pen on her knee. “Where's he been all this time?”

  “Living off the grid. What about this halfway house? Somebody there must remember him.”

  “I checked.” Lara read from her notes. “The place was shut down over a year ago. The guy who ran it was charged with abusing the kids in his care. All the records were sealed.”

  “Who worked the case?”

  “Doesn't say.”

  “Find out, talk to them.” Gallagher stood. “I'll check in later.”

  She tossed one of the black notebooks at him. “Hold on, cowboy. We got six of these to decipher. Pull up a chair.”

  “It's insane gibberish. There's no specifics to these attacks he describes. Nothing to work from.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I know a few paranoids who live off the grid. Maybe they know our boy.”

  He left. Lara swiveled her chair around and got to work.

  “IT was a horror show.”

  This was Detective Roy Hammond, sitting across a checkered two-top in a diner off Quimby Street. He pushed the chair back to make room for the basketball swishing inside his shirt. He and Lara ordered coffee and discussed the weather until it arrived.

  Mendes had spent the morning digging up the files about their suspect's last known address, the Gethsemane House of Transition and Redemption. She found the name of the investigating officer in the Child Abuse Team, a primary partner of the Sex Crimes unit. Detective Roy Hammond had handled that charge but was now working in Fraud Detail, a lateral career move for a man of his age but he had to get out of C.A.T. He did not want to see anymore of the tragedy it wreaked.

  Having put it behind him, Hammond didn't want to talk but Lara persisted. So here he was, stirring two sugars into his coffee while Lara left hers black and let the detective talk.

  “The Gethsemane House was supposed to transition kids out of juvie and back home. If they had one.” Hammond slurped his coffee. “But this place, it just screwed them up worse.”

  Lara stayed quiet. Hammond's distaste for his former detail was clear by the grimace on his face. How many ruined kids had this guy seen? She kept her questions in check, letting him come around to it. He was doing her a favor after all.

  “One of the former residents came forward, spilled the beans about how he was abused as a kid there. We investigated and shut the place down.”

  “Who was the abuser?”

  “Ronald Kovacks. He'd been at it for years. Really did a numbe
r on those kids. We nailed him on four convictions but there was more. A lot more.”

  “None of the other victims wanted to press charges,” Lara guessed.

  “In a nutshell. Kovacks and his wife ran the place like a bible camp. He really indoctrinated the kids in his care. Even fifteen years later, these people deny anything happened to them.”

  “What about the wife? She was never charged.”

  Hammond shrugged. “We didn't have enough on her. She knew what was going on but kept herself pickled most of the time. So we focused on him.”

  Lara took out a pen. “What was her name?”

  “Betty? No, Bethany Kovacks. See, these two started out as foster parents. They got money from the state to provide for the boys in their care. Then they realized they could get more money if they turned their place into a halfway house. More kids that way, plus they got money from the city in addition to the funds from the state level.”

  “Where's Kovacks now?”

  “Disappeared. The wife puts up the bail. He goes home and promptly disappears. Dunno what happened to her. She lost the house, everything. She signed a complete statement against him and then she disappeared too.”

  Lara unfolded a piece of paper, smoothing it down on the table. The self-portrait, photocopied from the black notebook. “What about this man? He was one of the residents about six years ago. His name's Ivan Prall.”

  Hammond studied the picture. “Don't recognize him. You think he's another abuse victim?”

  “Could be. He's wanted for homicide.”

  Hammond studied the sketch again but nothing more jostled his memory. “Sorry.”

  “Where would I find the records from the Gethsemane House?”

  “Stored away somewhere. I'll call my old partner, she still works C.A.T.”

  There was little else to move on. The conversation drifted back to the mundane, both trading gripes about the job. Lara got the bill and thanked him for his time.

  “You're working with Gallagher on this, right?” He held the door as they left the diner.

  “Yup.”

  “Keep your eyes open. The man's hard on partners.”

  THE kitchen was dark, save for the bulb under the hood fan. Music filtered down from Amy's room. Gallagher had long given up trying to understand his daughter's taste in music, just as she withered painfully at his. He left his keys in the bowl and pulled the holster from his belt, remembering a time when they both sang along to the Tammy Wynette disc in the truck. Those moments he thought, “Wow, my kid's cool.” Then Amy turned twelve and declared his music stupid.

  He thumbed the release and the magazine slid into his palm. He made sure the chamber was empty. The gun, clip and holster went into a cupboard over the fridge. Routine habit.

  Last night's chicken was in the fridge. Easy enough to make a sandwich. Instead he got a glass and poured a lethal length of Bushmills. Put his feet up. The whiskey warmed his gut but teased out a dull ache along his shoulders.

  “Tough day at the office?” Amy padded barefoot into the kitchen, carrying dirty dishes from her room. All of it clanging as it went into the sink.

  “Why are you still up?” He flexed his fingers, warding off the swelling.

  Amy took hold of his hand and looked at the raw knuckles. “You should ice that.”

  “How was school today?”

  “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” Amy had read that in a book for English class and the sarcasm of it stayed with her.

  He took his hand back. “Go to bed.”

  “You gotta watch out for this stuff, dad. Remember Grandmama's arthritis?”

  His mom, Amy's grandmother. Her hands gnarled with it. She adored Amy and spoiled her rotten every chance she got. It was mutual, Amy doting on her grandmother, helping out when her hands curled up into knotty stumps. Gallagher thought about it whenever his knuckles went stiff.

  “Do you know how obnoxious it is to be scolded by your own kid?”

  “Get some ice,” she said. “I'll find the Advil.”

  A new picture hung from a pin on the evidence board. A medieval woodcut of a young girl being devoured by a werewolf, the figures stiff and doll-like. Lara had found it in a library book. Something about the picture— the simple lines, the expression on the woman's face— appealed to her. She couldn't say why, it just did. There were other pin-ups like this, not evidence but reference points and visual cues. Anything to get her brain stirring, to string together some insight into what she was dealing with.

  The last two days had been spent searching the system for any suspicious deaths involving dogs or remains that had been interfered with by dogs. Starting within the city, then expanding out to the surrounding towns and then the state. A few results had trickled in. Nothing conclusive, nothing even classed as a homicide. A body found by hikers outside of Longview, the remains partially devoured and scattered by animals. C.O.D unknown. A similar incident across the state lines near Shelton, Washington. Badly decomposed remains found near a creek, the pieces scattered by animals. In both instances the bodies remained unidentified, their deaths unresolved. Intriguing, but there was nothing to string them together, nothing to tie in with the death of Elizabeth Riley.

  “Where's Gallagher?”

  Someone looming up behind her. She looked up to see Lieutenant Vogel, big as a mountain.

  “God knows. He doesn't answer his phone.”

  “That's because he knows it's you.” The Lieutenant opened his cell and dialed. Lara watched him drum his fingers on the chair and then bark into the phone. “Where the hell are you? What? No. Stop talking. Stay put.”

  Vogel ended the call, turned back to her. “He's down at the amusement park. Oaks Bottom.”

  She spun her jacket off the chair, scooped a notepad off the desk.

  “Hold on.” He blocked her way. “What's he been up to? Have you seen him pull any stunts?”

  “Stunts?”

  “Has he been cutting corners? Abusing suspects, bullying witnesses or otherwise treating procedure like dog shit on his shoes?”

  Was this a test? In the short time they had worked together, Lara had watched Gallagher threaten and cajole half a dozen people so far. He broke procedure the way he breathed, made up his own stupid rules on the fly. She looked her boss straight in the eye. “No.”

  Vogel was silent. Staring down at her, sniffing out a lie. A tinge of disappointment in his eyes. Was he regretting his decision to make her Homicide? An eternity, then he turned away. “What are you waiting for? Go catch him before he takes off again.”

  She marched quickly for the door. Lara had always considered her mother, being both Mexican and Catholic, to be the master of the guilt trip. She realized now the woman had nothing on Lieutenant Vogel. The man was a ninja master of refracted guilt. She wondered if she had time to stop at the nearest church and light a candle to the Guadalupe. Probably not.

  OAKS Bottom was a rank marsh of black oaks and reeds, and a long time ago someone had built an amusement park at the butt end of it. The smell of popcorn and corn dogs had settled into the trees and the asphalt, a greasy haze of fun hanging like a mist.

  Gallagher had been here as a kid and came back when he was a dad. Lifting Amy into the kiddie rocket ride or blowing twenty bucks on the ring toss to win a stuffed froggy that spilled its stuffing two days later. He hadn't been back since the summer Amy was ten. Amy still came to the park but only with her friends now, not her old man. Another door slamming shut on his connection with a daughter eager to grow up. No more Tilt-A-Whirls.

  The smell finally got to him. The last two hours spent hunkered behind the wheel in the parking lot, playing a hunch. Waiting for the owner of one of the food stands to come back to his vehicle. Gallagher neglected to pack a lunch and his stomach curled in on itself. The smell of onion rings was too much.

  The lot was half full of cars. No one had come or gone in the last twenty minutes. He made a dash for the nearest stall and came back with two cheesebu
rgers and spicy fries. The paper in the tray already translucent with oil before he got back into the Cherokee.

  Detective Mendes sat in the passenger bucket.

  “Thanks for returning my calls, pardner,” she said.

  He settled the tray onto the dashboard. “What do ya want, Mendes? I'm on the clock.”

  Her eyes swept the amusement park and came back to the tray steaming up the windshield. “Doing what exactly?”

  He unwrapped a cheeseburger. “You want some spicy fries? Best in town.”

  Lara leaned back in the seat, watching the Ferris wheel circle over the fairgrounds. Why didn't she send in that request when she had a chance?

  “Unclench, chief. You're wound up too tight. Eat something.” He held out the tray. She took a fry. “So what do ya got?”

  “I found five deaths where the remains were partially consumed by animals, possibly dogs. One in Oregon, two in Washington state and two more across the border in B.C.” She licked her fingers, reached for another. “All of them inconclusive because of decomposition, cause of death undetermined.”

  “You think it's him?”

  “There's no consistency to it,” she said. “The deceased are both male and female. Two were in their twenties, the last one was a man in his fifties. But if it is him, it shows his movement over the last year-and-a-half.”

  “That's more than we had yesterday.” Gallagher's eyes looked past her, scanning over the parking lot. Watching people return to their cars. “Just don't fall in love with it. You might have to dump it all later on.”

  She tucked into the fries again. Last time. Promise. “I went through his journals again, the parts that I can decipher. And the thing is, this guy knows he's got a problem but he can't stop it. Weirder still, he's remorseful. Ashamed even.”

  “That's the Catholic in him. Did you see all those Jesus pictures in the basement?” He wiped the mustard from the corner of his mouth. “The guy's a loony tune, Mendes. Don't waste your time crawling into his head.”