FAKE Fic: Unnatural Causes - Part 1
Title: Unnatural Causes - Part 1
Fandom: FAKE
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Dee, Ryo, Ted, Marty, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3412
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: A series of mysterious deaths has the NYPD baffled. How are these people dying and what can be done to prevent more deaths?
Written For: spook_me 2022, using FAKE, Evil Cats, and this pic.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Set after Like Like Love.
Late November, and it was cold; there’d been no snow so far, but it was only a matter of time. The alleyways of New York City seemed grimmer than ever, dark and dank in the chill wind coming off the East River, full of shadows that seemed to move like living things in the dim light filtering into their depths from the city that never slept. Streetlamps, lights from a few occupied buildings, the headlamps of passing cars…
Not that there were many cars passing, not this late at night in a rundown area most people with any sense would avoid after dark unless they had no choice. NYPD Detective Dee Laytner fervently wished that last category didn’t include him. If he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, he would be.
This place would have been creepy enough in broad daylight; in the dreary fall drizzle at a little after two in the morning, with the wind moaning like the souls of the damned through broken windows and cracks in the surrounding masonry, it might have been the set of a horror movie. It certainly looked the part what with the dead body, but then bodies had a way of making pretty much anywhere seem less than inviting, and Dee doubted there’d been anything remotely appealing about this particular alley even before someone died in it. Just like the previous four, the deceased didn’t have a mark on her; she was just dead, with no obvious cause.
The first victim had been dismissed as natural causes, a homeless guy found three weeks ago in a doorway after a storm, soaked to the skin. Tragic, sure, but not unexpected. Hypothermia was a killer; it could do anyone in, faster than most people realised.
The second had been a demolition worker, a healthy, fit, thirty-four-year-old bodybuilder with a wife and two kids, who’d been on his way home from work when he’d disappeared. The body had been found two days later, behind a dumpster in an alley barely two blocks from his home. Unmarked, stiff as a board, wallet still in his pocket, wedding ring still on his finger, and his face twisted into an expression that could only be described as terror.
There’d been two more since then; a twenty-nine-year-old woman who worked in real estate, and an accountant in his early fifties. The accountant was divorced and had lived alone; he was discovered in the parking lot of the building where he worked, less than ten yards from his car. The woman had been reported missing by her boyfriend, when he’d arrived back from a business trip. He’d gotten worried when she wasn’t at the airport to pick him up the way she usually did, and she wasn’t answering her phone. After arriving home to find the apartment empty, he’d contacted her friends, none of whom had heard from her for several days, and then he'd called the police.
Naturally, the investigating officers had immediately suspected the boyfriend of being involved in the woman’s disappearance, but then her body had been found on a patch of wasteland a few blocks from the bar where she’d had drinks with friends shortly before she’d gone missing. The coroner had put time of dearth as approximately five days earlier, when the boyfriend had been giving a presentation at a conference in Helsinki, so that had ruled him out.
And now there was this one. Mary Beresford, forty-two, a kindergarten teacher who volunteered at a local shelter for the homeless three nights a week. She’d been missing for three days, and this wasn’t how anyone would have wanted her to be found. By all accounts, everybody liked her; she was kind and caring, dedicated to teaching, and to helping those less fortunate than herself. It was impossible for those who knew her to imagine anyone wanting to harm her.
Once again there were no signs of foul play. It didn’t look like she’d been robbed or assaulted, she was simply lying flat on her back, stone cold dead, with that same terrified expression on her face that had been evident in the previous victims. It was as if something had literally frightened the life out of her.
Detective Ryo Maclean, Dee’s partner and lover, straightened up from where he’d been crouched studying the body by the light of his flashlight. He’d been careful not to touch anything since the crime scene team had yet to arrive, but that didn’t prevent him from making a visual examination.
“No wounds that I can see, and no signs of a struggle. Whoever killed her, she made no attempt to get away from them.”
“Maybe she couldn’t. Look at her, she was terrified. Not everyone experiences the classic fight or flight response. Sometimes, someone gets scared enough they freeze up. Hell, maybe whatever she saw scared her so much she just keeled over.”
“I guess that’s as good an explanation as any, even if being scared to death sounds a bit far-fetched, but maybe she had a weak heart. We’ll know more after the autopsy.”
“Right, because so much was found out from the previous four.” Dee’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “It’s like an epidemic around here, supposedly healthy people droppin’ dead for no apparent reason. The two-four’s had two and this is our third.” The Twenty-Fourth and the Twenty-Seventh precincts were neighbours.
Glancing towards his partner, Ryo sighed. “Like I need reminding of that.”
“Just sayin’. Three weeks, five deaths that we know of, and we still have no idea how or why. Did ya find anything?”
“Not much. Got some footprints around the body…” Ryo started.
“Footprints?” Dee cut in, taking a careful step closer. “Where?”
“Animal, not human. Pawprints, I should’ve said,” Ryo corrected himself. “Sorry, it’s late and I’m tired.”
“You’re not the only one.” Dee skirted around the body, watching where he put his feet in the beam from his own flashlight, trying not to step on potential evidence. “Probably rats; they love chewin’ on bodies.”
“Except that nothing’s been chewing on this one and the prints don’t look like rat paws, too big and the wrong shape. More like a cat.”
“Plenty of alley cats about too.” Dee relaxed; rats he could do without, they spread disease, but he liked cats, always had. “Probably just curious.”
“Feral cats are opportunistic feeders too, Dee. Might’ve been looking for a free meal.”
“Cats don’t eat people.” Dee wasn’t sure of that, but he still defended the unknown moggy, preferring to believe that cats, even the feral ones, held themselves to a higher moral standard than the average rat.
“Might have been a fox instead of a cat. I’m not exactly an expert on pawprints,” Ryo conceded.
“Foxes kinda stink though, and I’m not smellin’ anything.”
“Really?” Ryo raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
“Not besides garbage and the expected alleyway aromas. If there’d been a fox around here recently, you’d smell it, even over everything else.”
“That’s true, so we’ll go with cat for the time being.”
Dee was crouching down now, examining the ground around the body. He quickly found the pawprints Ryo had noticed.
“Yeah, except…” He trailed off, frowning.
“What?” Ryo leaned over Dee’s shoulder for another look.
“Well, cats retract their claws, and I think I heard somewhere foxes can too, but it looks to me like whatever left these had its claws out.”
“Dog then? Wouldn’t surprise me if there were strays around. Or maybe a raccoon.”
“I don’t know much about those.”
“Dogs?” Ryo teased, knowing his partner wasn’t a dog lover.
“Raccoons, dumbass!”
Ryo just laughed, turning towards the alley entrance as a couple of vehicles pulled up across the street. “Me neither. Looks like the coroner and the crime scene team are here.”
“Hope dispatch are sendin’ a patrol car too, so we can head home. Shift should’a ended a couple hours ago.”
“You can head out if you want to,” Ryo told his partner, “but I’m gonna stick around until everyone’s done.”
“Thought ya said you were tired.”
“I am, but if the crime scene guys find anything that might be helpful, I’d rather see it for myself than read about it later in a report. Besides, if the rain starts coming down harder, they might need our help.”
Dee sighed, raking one hand through his damp hair. “Fine, guess I’d better stick around too. We should’a brought an umbrella.”
“Bit late to be thinking of that now,” Ryo pointed out.
“Wasn’t rainin’ when we left the station house.”
“It’s November; rain is practically a given.”
“And yet, you didn’t bring one either.”
“I had other things on my mind, like a dead body matching the description of our missing person.”
Dee quickly changed the subject, not wanting to get into a stupid argument over who was responsible for their lack of umbrella. “Think we’ll get overtime pay for this?”
Ryo smiled faintly. “We can hope, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I’m gonna ask the Chief tomorrow anyway. We deserve some compensation for goin’ above and beyond on a night like this.”
“Good luck with that.”
OoOoOoO
By the time the coroner had taken the body away and the forensics people were packing up, having failed to find anything of any use, it was almost five in the morning. Dee and Ryo trailed home to the apartment they shared, worn out and half frozen, knowing they had to be back at the precinct by four the following afternoon. Second shift wasn’t as bad as third, but it still sucked, especially at this time of year, when it got dark earlier every day and they barely saw daylight, sometimes for weeks.
“We don’t even know for sure that she was murdered,” Ryo said as they crawled into bed, for once too tired for anything more than snuggling together for warmth and comfort.
“You don’t think scarin’ someone to death constitutes murder?”
“I didn’t say that, but how would we prove something like that, even if we had a suspect? Which we don’t. Five people found dead in an area that covers maybe fifteen blocks. Different genders, ages, ethnicities, professions, marital status… Nothing’s been found so far to suggest any connection between any of them. As far as anyone’s been able to tell, none of them have ever met each other, and only two of them lived in the area; the other three just worked, passed through, or in Mary’s case, volunteered somewhere in the vicinity.”
“I already know all that. We’ve had tough cases before, but this one…” Dee trailed off into a massive yawn. “Can we maybe discuss this in the mornin’, when my brain doesn’t feel like it’s runnin’ on empty?”
“Sorry. You know me, sometimes I have a hard time switching off.” Ryo turned out the light on the nightstand, plunging their bedroom into almost complete darkness, except for the faint illumination from streetlamps four floors below filtering through the closed blinds.
“Yeah, I know you, the brain that never sleeps. C’mere.” Dee reached for his lover, wrapping one arm around him. “Stop thinkin’ and go to sleep, gotta have that brain of yours rested and sharp for tomorrow. We’ll need it firin’ on all cylinders if we’re ever gonna have any hope of solvin’ this one.”
“No promises, but I’ll try.”
“Good enough.”
They settled themselves comfortably and closed their eyes, but while Dee fell asleep almost immediately, Ryo lay awake for a long time, trying to find sense where there wasn’t any to be found.
OoOoOoO
The next few days dragged past with no progress on the Beresford case, or on any of the previous four suspicious deaths. The twenty-seventh precinct’s Serious Crimes Unit were coordinating their investigations with the detectives over at the two-four, sharing what they had on each of the victims, along with photos of the crime scenes. If they’d found any trace evidence, they would have shared that too, but there was nothing.
Well, almost nothing; it was Ryo who pointed out the pawprints again, but they only appeared at two of the other crime scenes. There were none around the first victim, although the heavy rain might have washed anything like that away, and none near the body of the accountant. Then again, the basement garage where he’d been found had a concrete floor so there’d been nothing there to leave prints in, unlike at the other three.
Mary Beresford’s murder, if it was a murder, wasn’t the only case Ryo and Dee were working on however, and their other two active homicide investigations at least had physical evidence, clear causes of death, and a fair possibility of tracking down the killers. The two detectives had plenty to keep them busy, but it didn’t stop them mulling over the seemingly unsolvable mystery.
Then there was another death, three blocks away from where Mary had been found, and again in the two-seven’s jurisdiction, although only just. Once again, the body was found in an alleyway.
This time it was a retired bus driver who’d left home the previous evening, telling his wife he was just going to get cigarettes. There was a corner liquor store only two and a half blocks from his building, and even though he walked with a cane it shouldn’t have taken him more than fifteen or twenty minutes to get there and back, half an hour if he’d stopped for a chat with the cashier at the store.
When an hour had passed and he hadn’t returned, his wife had grown worried, and after another hour she’d called the police, only to be told they couldn’t do anything until he’d been missing for twenty-four hours. By the time anyone went looking for him it was already far too late.
He’d made it to the store alright, had bought his cigs and left, but for some unknown reason, instead of going straight home he’d gone into an alley a block from his building where, like the other victims, he’d either died or been killed.
“Whoever’s doing this, they must be luring their victims somehow,” Ryo said, frowning at the body.
“So you do think they’re bein’ murdered then, even though the coroner can’t find any obvious cause of death?”
“People don’t drop dead for no reason, Dee. Okay, I could believe that if it was just one, maybe even two; people do die of heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, things like that, and they can happen out of the blue. But this is the sixth in less than a month, all within a relatively small area, and that’s stretching coincidence way beyond breaking point. Something weird is going on.”
“I agree with ya, guess I just didn’t expect you to be the one to say it.”
“Say what?
“That whatever the cause of death is, it’s nothin’ natural.”
Ryo sighed, exasperated. It wasn’t that Dee was superstitious, but he did have a strong belief in the supernatural, which Ryo didn’t exactly share, despite a couple of weird experiences over the last few years. “That’s not what I’m saying. Just because we haven’t found out how they’re being killed yet doesn’t mean there isn’t a perfectly natural explanation.”
“Like what?”
“How should I know? Maybe they’re being poisoned somehow, or exposed to a lethal gas.”
“Right, bring on the mad scientists.”
“Dee…”
“What about the pawprints? They’re here too, or do ya think that’s just a coincidence, nothin’ more than scavengers?”
“I don’t know, okay? I’m gonna have casts taken, show them to an expert, see if the species can be identified. Maybe the killer’s using an animal to lure random people into dark places where he can do whatever he does without risking being seen.”
“But why? The victims aren’t bein’ robbed or anythin’, just killed.”
“I never said it made sense,” Ryo snapped, frustrated. “Serial killers usually don’t, except maybe in their own heads. Okay, so it’s not much of a theory, but right now it’s all I can come up with. What we need is more evidence.”
“More? So far we don’t have any.” Dee sighed, feeling as frustrated and ineffectual as his partner. “Look, we’re not doin’ anyone any good just waitin’ around for the next body to turn up. We need to start actin’ instead of just reactin’.”
“No argument from me. So what d’you suggest we do?”
Dee shrugged. “We gotta track this killer down before he strikes again, so maybe we should set ourselves up as bait.”
Whatever Ryo had been expecting Dee to say, it wasn’t that. “Are you out of your mind? That’s crazy!”
“You got a better idea? ‘Cause I’m open to suggestions.”
Ryo deflated, shaking his head. “No, you know I don’t.”
“’Sides, it’s not like we’d be goin’ in blind. We’d be armed and ready, have backup nearby in an unmarked car… could maybe requisition gas masks just in case you’re right about mad scientists and poison gas.”
“The mad scientist idea was yours, not mine,” Ryo said, poking his partner in the chest with a stiff forefinger. He managed a wry smile. “I suppose I should at least be glad you don’t think it’s ghosts,” he teased.
“That is SO not funny. You forget about that skeleton deal last year?”
Ryo sobered immediately. “No, I haven’t forgotten; I wish I could. I just try not to think about it.”
“Yeah, same here.” Dee shuddered. “That was WAY creepy. So, we gonna do it, play bait?”
“I don’t like it, but you’re right about one thing; we can’t just sit around waiting for the killer to strike again. I’d like to put out a warning to the people who live around here though, tell them to avoid going out alone after dark, to keep in pairs or groups, and to stay out of alleys.”
“We’ll run that by the Chief when we get back to the precinct. Don’t wanna alarm the locals, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have people take a few sensible precautions.”
“Six unexplained deaths, Dee. If they’re not already alarmed, maybe they should be.”
OoOoOoO
The safety advisory went out on the ten o’clock news, later than Ryo would have liked but still better than not warning people at all. Around midnight, dressed in casual clothes, and wrapped up well against the bitterly cold night-time temperatures, he and Dee, accompanied by Ted and Marty, set out to put their plan, such as it was, into action. They parked the nondescript sedan from the two-seven’s motor pool near the center of what appeared to be the killer’s chosen hunting area and got out, leaving their colleagues to wait in comparative warmth.
“’Kay, so how d’ya wanna play this?” Dee pulled a woollen beanie down over his ears, his breath hanging on the air.
“Why ask me? It was your idea,” Ryo threw back at him. “I figured you’d have some kind of plan.”
“Wouldn’t call it a plan as such.” Shoving gloved hands in the pockets of his coat, Dee hunched his shoulders. “Much as I hate to say it, I think we need to split up. The killer’s targetin’ people on their own; he’s not gonna take the bait if we’re together, so we should probably keep at least a block apart.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Ryo agreed.
“Beyond that, keep your radio and phone turned on, and holler if ya see anything. I’ll do the same.”
Ryo gave a faint smile. “You’re right, I wouldn’t call it a plan either.”
“Smartass,” Dee grumbled. He looked around them. “Whelp, pick a direction and we’ll get started.”
“There’s no pattern to the killings, or not that I’ve been able to figure out, so one direction is as good as another. I’ll go that way.” Ryo gestured behind him.
“Don’t wanna get too far apart, so I guess I’ll head this way.” Dee pointed off to his left. “Go down a block and take the street parallel to yours.”
“Be careful, okay?” Ryo leaned in to give his partner a quick kiss.
“Goes without sayin’, babe; this ain’t my first rodeo.”
“I know, but it doesn’t hurt to remind you.”
Dee conceded that point. “You watch your back too.”
“Always.”
“And stay outta alleyways; don’t follow anyone, or anything, into one. If ya see or hear somethin’ suspicious, call me and radio our backup.” Dee gestured at the car across the street. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“Got it.”
“Good. Let’s find this bastard.”
Part 2
Fandom: FAKE
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Dee, Ryo, Ted, Marty, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3412
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: A series of mysterious deaths has the NYPD baffled. How are these people dying and what can be done to prevent more deaths?
Written For: spook_me 2022, using FAKE, Evil Cats, and this pic.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Set after Like Like Love.
Late November, and it was cold; there’d been no snow so far, but it was only a matter of time. The alleyways of New York City seemed grimmer than ever, dark and dank in the chill wind coming off the East River, full of shadows that seemed to move like living things in the dim light filtering into their depths from the city that never slept. Streetlamps, lights from a few occupied buildings, the headlamps of passing cars…
Not that there were many cars passing, not this late at night in a rundown area most people with any sense would avoid after dark unless they had no choice. NYPD Detective Dee Laytner fervently wished that last category didn’t include him. If he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, he would be.
This place would have been creepy enough in broad daylight; in the dreary fall drizzle at a little after two in the morning, with the wind moaning like the souls of the damned through broken windows and cracks in the surrounding masonry, it might have been the set of a horror movie. It certainly looked the part what with the dead body, but then bodies had a way of making pretty much anywhere seem less than inviting, and Dee doubted there’d been anything remotely appealing about this particular alley even before someone died in it. Just like the previous four, the deceased didn’t have a mark on her; she was just dead, with no obvious cause.
The first victim had been dismissed as natural causes, a homeless guy found three weeks ago in a doorway after a storm, soaked to the skin. Tragic, sure, but not unexpected. Hypothermia was a killer; it could do anyone in, faster than most people realised.
The second had been a demolition worker, a healthy, fit, thirty-four-year-old bodybuilder with a wife and two kids, who’d been on his way home from work when he’d disappeared. The body had been found two days later, behind a dumpster in an alley barely two blocks from his home. Unmarked, stiff as a board, wallet still in his pocket, wedding ring still on his finger, and his face twisted into an expression that could only be described as terror.
There’d been two more since then; a twenty-nine-year-old woman who worked in real estate, and an accountant in his early fifties. The accountant was divorced and had lived alone; he was discovered in the parking lot of the building where he worked, less than ten yards from his car. The woman had been reported missing by her boyfriend, when he’d arrived back from a business trip. He’d gotten worried when she wasn’t at the airport to pick him up the way she usually did, and she wasn’t answering her phone. After arriving home to find the apartment empty, he’d contacted her friends, none of whom had heard from her for several days, and then he'd called the police.
Naturally, the investigating officers had immediately suspected the boyfriend of being involved in the woman’s disappearance, but then her body had been found on a patch of wasteland a few blocks from the bar where she’d had drinks with friends shortly before she’d gone missing. The coroner had put time of dearth as approximately five days earlier, when the boyfriend had been giving a presentation at a conference in Helsinki, so that had ruled him out.
And now there was this one. Mary Beresford, forty-two, a kindergarten teacher who volunteered at a local shelter for the homeless three nights a week. She’d been missing for three days, and this wasn’t how anyone would have wanted her to be found. By all accounts, everybody liked her; she was kind and caring, dedicated to teaching, and to helping those less fortunate than herself. It was impossible for those who knew her to imagine anyone wanting to harm her.
Once again there were no signs of foul play. It didn’t look like she’d been robbed or assaulted, she was simply lying flat on her back, stone cold dead, with that same terrified expression on her face that had been evident in the previous victims. It was as if something had literally frightened the life out of her.
Detective Ryo Maclean, Dee’s partner and lover, straightened up from where he’d been crouched studying the body by the light of his flashlight. He’d been careful not to touch anything since the crime scene team had yet to arrive, but that didn’t prevent him from making a visual examination.
“No wounds that I can see, and no signs of a struggle. Whoever killed her, she made no attempt to get away from them.”
“Maybe she couldn’t. Look at her, she was terrified. Not everyone experiences the classic fight or flight response. Sometimes, someone gets scared enough they freeze up. Hell, maybe whatever she saw scared her so much she just keeled over.”
“I guess that’s as good an explanation as any, even if being scared to death sounds a bit far-fetched, but maybe she had a weak heart. We’ll know more after the autopsy.”
“Right, because so much was found out from the previous four.” Dee’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “It’s like an epidemic around here, supposedly healthy people droppin’ dead for no apparent reason. The two-four’s had two and this is our third.” The Twenty-Fourth and the Twenty-Seventh precincts were neighbours.
Glancing towards his partner, Ryo sighed. “Like I need reminding of that.”
“Just sayin’. Three weeks, five deaths that we know of, and we still have no idea how or why. Did ya find anything?”
“Not much. Got some footprints around the body…” Ryo started.
“Footprints?” Dee cut in, taking a careful step closer. “Where?”
“Animal, not human. Pawprints, I should’ve said,” Ryo corrected himself. “Sorry, it’s late and I’m tired.”
“You’re not the only one.” Dee skirted around the body, watching where he put his feet in the beam from his own flashlight, trying not to step on potential evidence. “Probably rats; they love chewin’ on bodies.”
“Except that nothing’s been chewing on this one and the prints don’t look like rat paws, too big and the wrong shape. More like a cat.”
“Plenty of alley cats about too.” Dee relaxed; rats he could do without, they spread disease, but he liked cats, always had. “Probably just curious.”
“Feral cats are opportunistic feeders too, Dee. Might’ve been looking for a free meal.”
“Cats don’t eat people.” Dee wasn’t sure of that, but he still defended the unknown moggy, preferring to believe that cats, even the feral ones, held themselves to a higher moral standard than the average rat.
“Might have been a fox instead of a cat. I’m not exactly an expert on pawprints,” Ryo conceded.
“Foxes kinda stink though, and I’m not smellin’ anything.”
“Really?” Ryo raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
“Not besides garbage and the expected alleyway aromas. If there’d been a fox around here recently, you’d smell it, even over everything else.”
“That’s true, so we’ll go with cat for the time being.”
Dee was crouching down now, examining the ground around the body. He quickly found the pawprints Ryo had noticed.
“Yeah, except…” He trailed off, frowning.
“What?” Ryo leaned over Dee’s shoulder for another look.
“Well, cats retract their claws, and I think I heard somewhere foxes can too, but it looks to me like whatever left these had its claws out.”
“Dog then? Wouldn’t surprise me if there were strays around. Or maybe a raccoon.”
“I don’t know much about those.”
“Dogs?” Ryo teased, knowing his partner wasn’t a dog lover.
“Raccoons, dumbass!”
Ryo just laughed, turning towards the alley entrance as a couple of vehicles pulled up across the street. “Me neither. Looks like the coroner and the crime scene team are here.”
“Hope dispatch are sendin’ a patrol car too, so we can head home. Shift should’a ended a couple hours ago.”
“You can head out if you want to,” Ryo told his partner, “but I’m gonna stick around until everyone’s done.”
“Thought ya said you were tired.”
“I am, but if the crime scene guys find anything that might be helpful, I’d rather see it for myself than read about it later in a report. Besides, if the rain starts coming down harder, they might need our help.”
Dee sighed, raking one hand through his damp hair. “Fine, guess I’d better stick around too. We should’a brought an umbrella.”
“Bit late to be thinking of that now,” Ryo pointed out.
“Wasn’t rainin’ when we left the station house.”
“It’s November; rain is practically a given.”
“And yet, you didn’t bring one either.”
“I had other things on my mind, like a dead body matching the description of our missing person.”
Dee quickly changed the subject, not wanting to get into a stupid argument over who was responsible for their lack of umbrella. “Think we’ll get overtime pay for this?”
Ryo smiled faintly. “We can hope, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I’m gonna ask the Chief tomorrow anyway. We deserve some compensation for goin’ above and beyond on a night like this.”
“Good luck with that.”
OoOoOoO
By the time the coroner had taken the body away and the forensics people were packing up, having failed to find anything of any use, it was almost five in the morning. Dee and Ryo trailed home to the apartment they shared, worn out and half frozen, knowing they had to be back at the precinct by four the following afternoon. Second shift wasn’t as bad as third, but it still sucked, especially at this time of year, when it got dark earlier every day and they barely saw daylight, sometimes for weeks.
“We don’t even know for sure that she was murdered,” Ryo said as they crawled into bed, for once too tired for anything more than snuggling together for warmth and comfort.
“You don’t think scarin’ someone to death constitutes murder?”
“I didn’t say that, but how would we prove something like that, even if we had a suspect? Which we don’t. Five people found dead in an area that covers maybe fifteen blocks. Different genders, ages, ethnicities, professions, marital status… Nothing’s been found so far to suggest any connection between any of them. As far as anyone’s been able to tell, none of them have ever met each other, and only two of them lived in the area; the other three just worked, passed through, or in Mary’s case, volunteered somewhere in the vicinity.”
“I already know all that. We’ve had tough cases before, but this one…” Dee trailed off into a massive yawn. “Can we maybe discuss this in the mornin’, when my brain doesn’t feel like it’s runnin’ on empty?”
“Sorry. You know me, sometimes I have a hard time switching off.” Ryo turned out the light on the nightstand, plunging their bedroom into almost complete darkness, except for the faint illumination from streetlamps four floors below filtering through the closed blinds.
“Yeah, I know you, the brain that never sleeps. C’mere.” Dee reached for his lover, wrapping one arm around him. “Stop thinkin’ and go to sleep, gotta have that brain of yours rested and sharp for tomorrow. We’ll need it firin’ on all cylinders if we’re ever gonna have any hope of solvin’ this one.”
“No promises, but I’ll try.”
“Good enough.”
They settled themselves comfortably and closed their eyes, but while Dee fell asleep almost immediately, Ryo lay awake for a long time, trying to find sense where there wasn’t any to be found.
OoOoOoO
The next few days dragged past with no progress on the Beresford case, or on any of the previous four suspicious deaths. The twenty-seventh precinct’s Serious Crimes Unit were coordinating their investigations with the detectives over at the two-four, sharing what they had on each of the victims, along with photos of the crime scenes. If they’d found any trace evidence, they would have shared that too, but there was nothing.
Well, almost nothing; it was Ryo who pointed out the pawprints again, but they only appeared at two of the other crime scenes. There were none around the first victim, although the heavy rain might have washed anything like that away, and none near the body of the accountant. Then again, the basement garage where he’d been found had a concrete floor so there’d been nothing there to leave prints in, unlike at the other three.
Mary Beresford’s murder, if it was a murder, wasn’t the only case Ryo and Dee were working on however, and their other two active homicide investigations at least had physical evidence, clear causes of death, and a fair possibility of tracking down the killers. The two detectives had plenty to keep them busy, but it didn’t stop them mulling over the seemingly unsolvable mystery.
Then there was another death, three blocks away from where Mary had been found, and again in the two-seven’s jurisdiction, although only just. Once again, the body was found in an alleyway.
This time it was a retired bus driver who’d left home the previous evening, telling his wife he was just going to get cigarettes. There was a corner liquor store only two and a half blocks from his building, and even though he walked with a cane it shouldn’t have taken him more than fifteen or twenty minutes to get there and back, half an hour if he’d stopped for a chat with the cashier at the store.
When an hour had passed and he hadn’t returned, his wife had grown worried, and after another hour she’d called the police, only to be told they couldn’t do anything until he’d been missing for twenty-four hours. By the time anyone went looking for him it was already far too late.
He’d made it to the store alright, had bought his cigs and left, but for some unknown reason, instead of going straight home he’d gone into an alley a block from his building where, like the other victims, he’d either died or been killed.
“Whoever’s doing this, they must be luring their victims somehow,” Ryo said, frowning at the body.
“So you do think they’re bein’ murdered then, even though the coroner can’t find any obvious cause of death?”
“People don’t drop dead for no reason, Dee. Okay, I could believe that if it was just one, maybe even two; people do die of heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, things like that, and they can happen out of the blue. But this is the sixth in less than a month, all within a relatively small area, and that’s stretching coincidence way beyond breaking point. Something weird is going on.”
“I agree with ya, guess I just didn’t expect you to be the one to say it.”
“Say what?
“That whatever the cause of death is, it’s nothin’ natural.”
Ryo sighed, exasperated. It wasn’t that Dee was superstitious, but he did have a strong belief in the supernatural, which Ryo didn’t exactly share, despite a couple of weird experiences over the last few years. “That’s not what I’m saying. Just because we haven’t found out how they’re being killed yet doesn’t mean there isn’t a perfectly natural explanation.”
“Like what?”
“How should I know? Maybe they’re being poisoned somehow, or exposed to a lethal gas.”
“Right, bring on the mad scientists.”
“Dee…”
“What about the pawprints? They’re here too, or do ya think that’s just a coincidence, nothin’ more than scavengers?”
“I don’t know, okay? I’m gonna have casts taken, show them to an expert, see if the species can be identified. Maybe the killer’s using an animal to lure random people into dark places where he can do whatever he does without risking being seen.”
“But why? The victims aren’t bein’ robbed or anythin’, just killed.”
“I never said it made sense,” Ryo snapped, frustrated. “Serial killers usually don’t, except maybe in their own heads. Okay, so it’s not much of a theory, but right now it’s all I can come up with. What we need is more evidence.”
“More? So far we don’t have any.” Dee sighed, feeling as frustrated and ineffectual as his partner. “Look, we’re not doin’ anyone any good just waitin’ around for the next body to turn up. We need to start actin’ instead of just reactin’.”
“No argument from me. So what d’you suggest we do?”
Dee shrugged. “We gotta track this killer down before he strikes again, so maybe we should set ourselves up as bait.”
Whatever Ryo had been expecting Dee to say, it wasn’t that. “Are you out of your mind? That’s crazy!”
“You got a better idea? ‘Cause I’m open to suggestions.”
Ryo deflated, shaking his head. “No, you know I don’t.”
“’Sides, it’s not like we’d be goin’ in blind. We’d be armed and ready, have backup nearby in an unmarked car… could maybe requisition gas masks just in case you’re right about mad scientists and poison gas.”
“The mad scientist idea was yours, not mine,” Ryo said, poking his partner in the chest with a stiff forefinger. He managed a wry smile. “I suppose I should at least be glad you don’t think it’s ghosts,” he teased.
“That is SO not funny. You forget about that skeleton deal last year?”
Ryo sobered immediately. “No, I haven’t forgotten; I wish I could. I just try not to think about it.”
“Yeah, same here.” Dee shuddered. “That was WAY creepy. So, we gonna do it, play bait?”
“I don’t like it, but you’re right about one thing; we can’t just sit around waiting for the killer to strike again. I’d like to put out a warning to the people who live around here though, tell them to avoid going out alone after dark, to keep in pairs or groups, and to stay out of alleys.”
“We’ll run that by the Chief when we get back to the precinct. Don’t wanna alarm the locals, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have people take a few sensible precautions.”
“Six unexplained deaths, Dee. If they’re not already alarmed, maybe they should be.”
OoOoOoO
The safety advisory went out on the ten o’clock news, later than Ryo would have liked but still better than not warning people at all. Around midnight, dressed in casual clothes, and wrapped up well against the bitterly cold night-time temperatures, he and Dee, accompanied by Ted and Marty, set out to put their plan, such as it was, into action. They parked the nondescript sedan from the two-seven’s motor pool near the center of what appeared to be the killer’s chosen hunting area and got out, leaving their colleagues to wait in comparative warmth.
“’Kay, so how d’ya wanna play this?” Dee pulled a woollen beanie down over his ears, his breath hanging on the air.
“Why ask me? It was your idea,” Ryo threw back at him. “I figured you’d have some kind of plan.”
“Wouldn’t call it a plan as such.” Shoving gloved hands in the pockets of his coat, Dee hunched his shoulders. “Much as I hate to say it, I think we need to split up. The killer’s targetin’ people on their own; he’s not gonna take the bait if we’re together, so we should probably keep at least a block apart.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Ryo agreed.
“Beyond that, keep your radio and phone turned on, and holler if ya see anything. I’ll do the same.”
Ryo gave a faint smile. “You’re right, I wouldn’t call it a plan either.”
“Smartass,” Dee grumbled. He looked around them. “Whelp, pick a direction and we’ll get started.”
“There’s no pattern to the killings, or not that I’ve been able to figure out, so one direction is as good as another. I’ll go that way.” Ryo gestured behind him.
“Don’t wanna get too far apart, so I guess I’ll head this way.” Dee pointed off to his left. “Go down a block and take the street parallel to yours.”
“Be careful, okay?” Ryo leaned in to give his partner a quick kiss.
“Goes without sayin’, babe; this ain’t my first rodeo.”
“I know, but it doesn’t hurt to remind you.”
Dee conceded that point. “You watch your back too.”
“Always.”
“And stay outta alleyways; don’t follow anyone, or anything, into one. If ya see or hear somethin’ suspicious, call me and radio our backup.” Dee gestured at the car across the street. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“Got it.”
“Good. Let’s find this bastard.”
Part 2