Ukiah - Alien Taste Part 3

Max eyed her blue jeans, T-s.h.i.+rt, and dyed hair. "I didn't hear that the agency had gone casual on the dress code."

"I was working undercover," she stated in a feminine version of "just the facts" impa.s.siveness. She took out her FBI ID and flashed it at them. "Special Agent Indigo Zheng, Pittsburgh field office.""Maxwell Bennett, Bennett Detective Agency." Max had his hands in his jeans pockets and didn't bother to take them out to shake-a sure sign he was in a bad mood. "This is my partner."

Max paused for a beat to let Ukiah introduce himself. Max insisted on Ukiah giving his own name; "establis.h.i.+ng a strong presence," he called it. They practiced it until it was smooth, but Ukiah would rather let Max do the talking.

"Ukiah Oregon." Ukiah shook hands like he was taught and left Max to deal with the agent. In the name of learning, Max had once gotten Ukiah into an autopsy, so he was faintly familiar with the layout of the room and the procedures that the coroner would have followed.

The first step would have been to draw blood samples. Ukiah found the vials labeled janet haze scattered across the appropriate table. They had been dusted for fingerprints and left, so he felt free to pick one up.

Tiny sharp teeth had gnawed through the rubber top. Four hairs lay almost invisible inside. He tapped them onto his hand. They were-mink fur? No, something close to a mink, some animal related to it.

The teeth marks matched that of a mink cousin. The strong musk odor coming from inside the vial also confirmed that it wasn't a mink, but something close. He eyed the small gla.s.s cylinder with its gnawed-open top. Mink and weasels were common in Oregon's Umatilla National Park where he ran with the wolves, but at a morgue in downtown Pittsburgh?

The second step would have been to remove the vital organs. He found the neatly labeled, semirigid bags, but they too had been gnawed open. This time it was apparent, at least to him, that the damage had been done from the inside out. In the organ bags were more minklike hairs. He noticed this time the lack of blood. There was no residue, no blood cells, no organ cells-only the stray hair. He studied the labels.

Janet Haze, heart, weight 3.4 pounds, extreme damage from advanced viral infection noted.

She had been sick? He checked his memory and found only black holes. He sighed and examined the vials for blood traces. They had the same lack of residue, yet the labels stated that blood had been placed inside. He doubted that it was a case of labeling the vials and bags prior to use. The dead coroner would have been under pressure to do it by the book. He theorized that the mink cousin had licked the bags clean, but there wasn't any sign of saliva.

So someone had dumped the bags of their contents, washed them well, and then sealed animals inside. Yeah, like that made sense!

Mystified, he studied the room. The first true sign of blood was two feet in front of the vital organ table. It belonged to the coroner-he a.s.sumed, then caught himself. It didn't belong to Dr. Janet Haze. The subject had been male, black, and mature, so maybe it did belong to the coroner. There were faint traces of drugs in the blood, ones he recognized from experience to be heart medication.

More blood of the same type splattered the floor in increasing amounts, leading to the coroner's body.

The coroner had died slumped against a wall, knocking a ventilation grate askew with his last struggles. His feet almost touched the table where Dr. Janet Haze would have lain, cut open and gutted. In metal trays were the dissection tools: large knives, bone saws, and one small circular saw to cut open the skull. In a steel bowl were two twisted lumps of .45-caliber bullets.

He found countless little footprints in the pool of congealing blood, trampling over each other until they had become a blur. Here and there, though, he could pick out individual prints. He used his pinkie to measure the prints. Five. Six. Maybe seven individual animals. Over and around the body they had gone, tearing and eating. But where had they gone? They had to have gone somewhere. He felt the hair on the back of his neck lift slightly; the whole situation was creepy. He ran a hand across the apparently clean section of the floor, hoping to hit a blood trail too faint to see.

Agent Zheng walked over and placed a foot in front of his searching hand. "Is this some version of good cop, bad cop? Talkative PI, silent PI?"

He leaned back on his haunches to look up at her. The foot had been a firm "stop it," but there wasno anger in her face or body. "I don't talk much."

They regarded each other. She had a strong face, sharp lines, and hard angles, tightly composed to neutrality. Only her large eyes were slightly readable, and they seemed narrowed in vague suspicion. What had she and Max been talking about? Ukiah reviewed their conversation and found that someone had also broken into police evidence and stolen everything held there. Their recording from his head camera was the only shred of evidence left on the case, and she was concerned whether it was safe from theft too.

"I was told," she said, "that you left your hospital bed sometime after two a.m. Since I was already here at the morgue at 2:15, it's doubtful you had anything to do with this murder."

"I can't believe you're considering my partner as a suspect!" Max snarled behind Ukiah. "We were called in by the police without a clue as to what was going on. Mr. Oregon was almost killed by your top-secret scientist, and was confirmed in the hospital when this murder happened. How dare you try to stick the blame on him?"

"The facts remain," Agent Zheng replied quietly, "he killed Dr. Janet Haze and he left the hospital in the middle of the night."

"He's got seventeen st.i.tches in his left arm and five in his neck! The shooting was self-defense.

And what if he did leave? There's no law that says you have to stay in the hospital once checked in."

Agent Zheng ignored him. "Mr. Oregon, will you please explain to me yourself why you left the hospital?"

He considered what to tell her. At least part of the truth seemed safe enough. "There was a man and a woman in Schenley Park. The man was at the crime scene before my backup arrived-they stepped onto his footprints, not vice versa. He didn't actually come close enough to touch either one of us, but he did walk around our bodies. Then he moved off and was joined by the woman. They wore leather jackets and boots common to bikers. They ran to the edge of the park where they had two motorcycles, j.a.panese high-performance machines, the man's a nine hundred and the woman's a six hundred."

One of her eyebrows lifted. With someone else, the gesture would have been unremarkable. In her, it was a shout of surprise. "How do you know this?"

He hated lying, but he'd learned there were limits to what people believed. "When I came to, he was there, but I was too faint from blood loss to tell anyone. When I felt better, I went back to track him."

"Your head camera will confirm or deny this." Was it a warning or a question?

"I don't know if he'll show up on the recording," Ukiah said. "It was dark and raining, but I could sense him moving around. You can hear a black dog walking in the woods at night, but you can rarely film him."

"I see." She showed no hint of believing or disbelieving him. "And were you able to track him?"

"Not far. Their wheels were muddy, thus leaving tracks, but the mud eventually gave out and I lost them."

"Any other questions?" Max interrupted, motioning to Ukiah to get up. "Come out to our truck, and I'll make you a copy of the disc now. Then, if you don't mind, Mr. Oregon has had a rough twenty-four hours, and I should take him home."

She considered them, first Max and then Ukiah, with her somber gaze. "No more questions for now."

Coroner personnel were waiting at the door as they exited. Agent Zheng indicated that she was done and they could remove the body. Max led the way back through the morgue.

Ukiah found himself in step with Agent Zheng despite his longer legs. He wondered if she believed him, if she was suspicious of him still. What did she feel? Why did he care? Why, for that matter, was she even involved in the case? "Agent Zheng, I don't understand why the FBI is involved. This is a straightmurder case to be handled by the local police, isn't it?"

"Not completely." Agent Zheng gave him another measured, unreadable look. "Doctor Haze worked for a company with several ongoing top secret projects. A month ago, her immediate superior was killed and Doctor Haze took over his position. We think his death was accidental, but there were some suspicious details and the case is still open. We had our net filters scanning all law databases for anyone connected to the company, and it alerted us when the police filed their initial reports."

"What I don't understand, why was a doctor living with three college students?" Max asked.

"Janet Haze only recently received her doctorate," Agent Zheng said. "She had been roommates with the other three for the last four years."

They emerged from the dim building into the parking lot. The cement was still damp from the night rain. It glistened in the bright morning sun. The police cars were gone and the Hummer squatted alone, waiting unmolested for their return.

"A Hummer?" Agent Zheng studied the truck. "How does a small-time detective agency afford one?"

"Good fortune in a previous life," Max grumbled, remotely unlocking the truck. Opening the driver's door, he leaned in and slotted a blank optical disk into the computer.

"Previous life?" Agent Zheng opened the pa.s.senger door before Ukiah reached it, leaning in to eye the Hummer's interior. She waited for an answer, but Max rarely talked about his life before becoming a private detective. "You have it loaded for bear."

"I like it that way." Max ejected the copied disc and held it out to her. "I made a copy of the disc yesterday and gave it to the police, but I guess that's gone. What's here in my truck is a copy too-the original is in a secure place. Myself, Mr. Oregon, and the agency's lawyer know how to access the original." Which meant it was in the floor safe at the office. "Now, can you let Mr. Oregon in so I can take him home?"

She stepped back, turning to let Ukiah into the Hummer. She gazed up at him, and he thought he saw a sudden wistfulness in her gray eyes. She held out her hand. "Mr. Oregon."

He took her hand and they shook firmly. "Agent Zheng."

He got in and shut the door, fastening his seat belt out of habit. Max started up the Hummer and they pulled out of the parking lot, leaving Agent Zheng standing alone.

It was a long drive from the morgue back to Ukiah's moms' place. Usually Ukiah liked the trip; it let him unclutter his mind of useless junk before rejoining his family. The day before, however, still contained choppy flashes of memory. He could tease nothing new from the time after he woke wounded in the park.

There remained only the morgue with its grisly puzzle, and he wasn't sure he wanted to think about it.

Max stayed quiet until they hit I-279 north, running up out of the city. Then he glanced over at Ukiah. "You okay?"

"That was really, really scary, Max."

"What, special Agent Zheng?" Max snorted. "Don't let her get to you."

Ukiah shook his head, running his hand repeatedly down the back of his neck in an effort to get the hair to lie down again. "The stuff in the morgue. I've never seen anything like it."

"It looked pretty gory. So what did you find?"

Ukiah shrugged, having no idea where to start. "Janet Haze was really sick when she died. All her organs had extensive damage to them due to viral infection. Or at least that's what the coroner noted on the organ bags.""Oh Jesus, I wonder if she was working on a germ-warfare project. Maybe we should get you checked out. If she was exposed to something nasty, you could have been too."

Ukiah pondered his own body. "I don't feel sick. Hungry again. And I could use a nap, but I'm not sick." A memory came to the surface-her room filled with K'NEX toys and books on robots. "Anyhow, she worked in robotics, not biology."

"What else?"

He sat for a long time considering what to tell Max.

Max shot him a puzzled look after the first minute or two of silence. "That weird?"

"Far as I can tell, Max, all her internal organs"-he shrugged with helplessness-"changed. They became weasels or mink or something. They attacked the coroner and killed him."

"Yeah, that's weird." Max nodded, then screwed up his face trying not to scowl or laugh. Ukiah wasn't sure which. "Changed into weasels? Are you sure? Even if they did, how could those little animals kill a man?"

"Scout's honor." Ukiah retold how the residue blood and organ cells were missing and that all the bags contained was animal fur. "And the coroner had a heart condition. I figure it probably would be scary enough to kill someone."

They fell silent for a few moments. They hit where I-279 merged with I-79 and worked their way into the traffic.

"What really freaks me out is the fur," Ukiah finally admitted. "But I think it's the real proof of the organ changing somehow. There were two sets of DNA active in it. One set was the weasels' DNA. The other set was Dr. Janet Haze's."

Max shot him a look that he had given Ukiah often over the years. Ukiah wasn't sure what emotions hid behind the look. Max had used it only once on someone else, a con artist that could steal your wrist.w.a.tch while you were checking the time.

"So," Max muttered after a while. "They cut out Doctor Haze's organs and set them aside. Poof, they turn into a pack of rabid weasels and attack the coroner. Like any sane human being, he's scared silly and drops dead and they eat him." Max considered the run of logic. "Okay, it hangs together in a twisted Outer Limits kind of way. I suppose you could even say that after all that effort to change into a weasel, one would be very hungry and snack on whatever was at hand. Then what happens? Where do they go, and what happened to the rest of her body?"

"I don't know, Max. Agent Zheng stopped me before I could get into seriously tracking them. But I got to thinking. If her vital organs can change into weasels, why can't all of her body? The coroner had knocked the grill off the air vent. They're little, they all could have gone into there."

They glanced at each other. After more than three years of working together, they had developed a full language of expressions. The look they exchanged was an agreement not to talk about it for a while.

Ukiah looked away to stare out the window at the pa.s.sing landscape.

They were almost to their exit before Max found a semisafe subject. "So, tell me about these people in Schenley Park that you went haring off after? You didn't tell Agent Zheng everything."

"How could you tell?"

"Oh, after you learn wolf body language, you're as clear as water."

Ukiah wasn't sure if Max was joking or not. "Well, after I killed Doctor Haze, I pa.s.sed out-"

"After she sliced you open, you pa.s.sed out," Max corrected him with a light cuff. "Shock does that to people. Which reminds me." He pulled over onto the shoulder. "Let's have a look at that cut."

Ukiah sighed and winced as he peeled up one edge of the bandage.Max set the Hummer's hand brake, leaned over, and peered closely at Ukiah's neck. "Take the bandage all the way off," he commanded and pulled the Hummer back into traffic.

"Really?" The Hummer was sadly lacking in vanity mirrors.

"The cut looks better than that huge bandage. If you're feeling okay enough to run all over Schenley Park in the middle of the night, then we might as well do damage control with your moms. It's a good thing you heal so quickly."

Ukiah considered the truth of this and started to coax up the sticky bandage. "Well, I pa.s.sed out.

When I came to, there were police and the helicopter and everything."

"Yeah?" Max was obviously puzzled as to where Ukiah was leading.

"And there were these two people, standing off where I couldn't see them, talking about me." He recounted the discussion completely. "I went back to Schenley Park to look at the tracks. It was creepy how they could move through the thick brush, in the dark rain, at a full run, without anyone noticing them."

"This case gets better and better." Max leaned over and cued up the disc on the Hummer's deck. "I didn't pay any attention to your headcam after you went down. I was glued to the GPI screen. When I watched the recording this morning, I turned it off after Haze dropped. Your watcher might be on the disk."

The screen hissed with static and came up with the chaotic jumble of police cars outside the apartment building. "Testing Ukiah's VOX." His own voice always startled Ukiah. The timbre was wrong and slightly higher than he expected. "Testing, 1, 2, 3. How's that?"

Max sounded like Max at least. "Good, it's coming through clear. There's my channel good and strong. We're go."

It was the first time Ukiah had ever really watched one of their recordings. Usually his memory was so much fuller and clearer. This time, however, there were holes in his memory. He and the camera went into the building. Despite state-of-the-art steadycam, the view was jittery and vaguely fish-eyed. The lack of smell and touch, the limited view, and the reduced sound left Ukiah feeling more and more frustrated. Finally he started to skip through the tracks, letting time leap forward in huge bounds. He would watch the disk later, maybe. He hated the gaps in his memory, but he didn't want to relive the case right now.

He found the end, his gun flas.h.i.+ng again and again, set the recording to play normally. The camera showed only part of Janet's unmoving foot. There was silence in the foreground except for the hiss of rain.

Max's voice continued in the background. "Ukiah! Ukiah! Kraynak, Ukiah's down and not responding. The f.u.c.king girl got him with the sword. I think he's hurt bad. I'm coming in."

This started a heated argument between Max and Kraynak, which Ukiah tuned out. He considered the angle of Janet Haze's body and what he remembered of the footprints in the mud. If he were right, then the male watcher would enter in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

"When I went back to the crime scene, his tracks put him right here." He tapped the screen, and at that moment lightning lit up the woods. "There! Did you see him?"

"Ukiah, I'm driving. I didn't see anything."

Ukiah clicked the recording backward frame by frame. For one frame only, a man stood in the brilliant light, facing the camera but starting to turn. "There's the guy."

From the angle, it was hard to tell how tall the man was. He was lean-rangy was what Mom Jo would call it-with s.h.a.ggy, grizzled hair and dark eyes. The flash of brilliance had drained his face of color, making it all stark angles and shadows. Ukiah guessed at an age range of mid- to late-twenties.

Max glanced over and shook his head. "Doesn't ring any bell except he wasn't any of the police running around last night. None of the media either. Here." He pulled off onto the shoulder again. "Why don't you drive?"They switched places, and Max tried not to wince when Ukiah ground the gears starting out. Max worked at pulling a usable headshot from the recording, muttering, "I've got to let you drive more often. It's the only way you're going to get any better."

"I could go to the defensive driving school. The ad looked like fun."

Max laughed. "It's in California. Two days ago your moms might have let you go, but today, I doubt it."

"So when do I get to stay an adult all the time and not have to go back to being a kid?"

Max shrugged. "It's weird with parents, Ukiah. There's s.h.i.+t I don't tell my dad because I don't want to deal with his fatherly outrage."

"Yeah, but he can't stop you from doing what you want."

"No. He can't. There! One clean mug shot. Let's see what we can pull up on our friend the peeping tom."

Ukiah got off I-79 at the Evans City exit, whip-sawed down 528 to the small town itself. Town, both blocks of it, was quiet as they drove through. They were approaching the long twisting drive back to the farm when Max swore. "Oh h.e.l.l, this just gets better and better. Pull over and listen to this. Our friend in the park is Rennie Shaw, and he comes with Mr. Uck stickers. 'Armed and considered dangerous.' 'Do not approach.' 'Report all contact to the FBI.' He's suspected of arson, auto theft, burglary, carjacking, drug dealing, drug smuggling, oh I see-we just go down the alphabet. Homicide. Manslaughter. Murder. Look at all those outstanding warrants for arrests. Wanted for questioning in the death of FBI agents. Wanted for questioning in the disappearance of FBI agents. Wanted for questioning ..."