Chapter 2
Riverside Park, at the edge of Goldport, was a thrill whose time had passed. Competing with the various flags, gardens and other franchised, national attractions which specialized in rides based on the latest technology, its main advantage was being cheap and therefore it appealed mostly to the young, the recent immigrants and the impecunious.
Slumbering quietly at the edge of a small lake—the river in the name being one of those mysteries no one could explain—it displayed a flashy entrance tower that dated from the orientalist period of the nineteenth century when pseudo arabesques had been in vogue. It appeared quite nice at night, when bright little lights outlined its contours making it look like something out of a fairy tale and when no one could see its flaking paint and the parts that were boarded up.
Its vast central pavilion, which once had hosted shows by all the big bands and dancing by all the fashionable local couples, now housed bumper cars. The hippodrome that had seen horse races back in the middle of the twentieth century had long since closed. Its sun-bleached carcass, encircled in a tall wall that stood, as incongruous and forlorn as the bones of a long-dead dinosaur, was posted all over with signs warning visitors off exploring its dark interior.
Not that many visitors were interested. Most came for the corny spider rides, the colorful dragon roller coaster, and the not very horrible house of horrors. A few aficionados and romantic souls came for the wooden roller coaster or the turn of the—twentieth—century merry-go-round.
But right then, early May, the only people in the park were there to work. Teams of men fanned out up the slope and down the path, cutting down the knee-high grass and calling to each other in Spanish.
Jason Cordova straightened up, as the mower he’d been pushing choked on the knee-high weeds. Man, the least they could do is get some riding mowers. Rent them or something. And if not, then with grass like this, we should be using scythes.
Despite the relatively mild weather, sweat glued his T-shirt to his body and his jeans felt like they had insects climbing up inside them. He knew it was probably his imagination, but he still had to suppress an urge to scratch and an even stronger urge to take off his jeans and shake them.
He listened to the chatter around him and frowned. It’s like they went to the day labor office and picked everyone with a Spanish name. Which was probably exactly what they’d done. And it wasn’t that Jason didn’t speak Spanish. He did. He’d studied it in college. For all the good it was doing him in the current economy.
A shout that he couldn’t quite understand but that seemed to mean he should be getting back to work made him say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he started pulling the cord to restart the mower. But the motor only sputtered, and then he realized the shout hadn’t been at him.
Instead, his coworkers were shouting to each other and running towards an area where tall grass remained. Oh, what the hell, Jason thought, as he ambled in that direction, wondering exactly what they’d found there. A credit card? Someone’s illegal weed patch? Or, judging by the trend of the conversations he’d heard before, and what seemed to really interest all his coworkers, perhaps there was a girl there who’d somehow lost all her clothes?
Before he got to the center of the excitement, he saw two of the guys running away, their faces more green than olive, and another one throwing up into a recently mowed patch.
Jason jogged forward the next few steps. And froze. Laying on the trampled tall grass was one his coworkers. He was small, probably Mexican. What remained of his white T-shirt was torn and covered in red-black blood. The lower half of his body was unrecognizable—his stomach torn open, the guts spilling. It looked like something had eaten a good portion of the man’s insides.
Jason would never know quite how it happened, but he found himself throwing up, too, right beside the tall grass. But as he straightened, wiping his mouth on the back of his leather gloves, he realized there were a lot fewer men around. Like…none. Though he could see one or two in the distance, jumping the fence, and another desperately swimming across the lake.
Oh, good God, he thought, as he called aloud, “Stay, don’t go. We must report this to the police.” Which he realized was exactly the wrong thing to say, as they ran even faster.
A trail of moving grass near at hand called his attention, and he rushed there, determined not to face the police alone. “Stop,” he said. But then realized it wasn’t one of his coworkers he was looking at. It wasn’t any human. It had to be the largest feral dog he’d ever seen. Well…feral something. Immense, beastly, its maw stained with blood, it looked like what happens to big bad wolves who die and don’t go to heaven.
Jason felt his body clench and twist. His mouth contorting, he made an effort to speak, as he managed to pull off his jeans and T-shirt before they got shredded. “Nice doggie,” he said.
* * *
Rafiel felt like he was going stark, raving mad.
Okay, so no murder investigation—or in this case, what seemed to be the investigation of death by misadventure—was ever a good thing. Ever.
Goldport wasn’t exactly a crime capital, but as one of four senior investigators in its serious crimes unit, Rafiel saw his share of the seamy underside: thefts, break-ins, the occasional drunken Saturday night mutual shoot-out, and the share of drug traffic that couldn’t be avoided anywhere these days. They even had murders—quite a few recently.
But on this particular Friday afternoon, he’d been finishing his paperwork, and giving some thought to the girl his parents had arranged for him to go out with that night. His parents—heck, his entire family—were anxious to see him matched up. Nearing thirty and living in your parents’ house was not how the story should go. Particularly not when you were a successful police officer. But Rafiel’s parents should know better.
They knew that their son shifted into a lion at the drop of a hat, or sometimes even without any hats dropping. They knew he lived in fear of hurting someone while shifted, and also that normal people, who didn’t change shapes, wouldn’t understand that he remained throughout more than half human: that in either form he tried to do the best he could and serve justice.
What did they think would happen if a woman came home to find her husband—or fiancé—had changed into a giant jungle cat? Did they think she would take it as an inconvenient but endearing thing? Oh, well, he’s a lion shifter, but at least he makes good coffee?
He could only imagine his parents’ desire for grandchildren had overwhelmed their common sense, leaving him with the task of taking this “daughter of old friends” on a first date, being polite and nice but cold, so she wouldn’t feel too disappointed when he never called again.
Some days he wished he didn’t know there were female shifters in the world, people with whom, theoretically, he could share both sides of his nature. He also wished he were unaware that Kyrie Smith, one of his two best friends, shifted into a panther. Some days he wished he could help thinking that he and Kyrie could have made a go of it, if the other one of his best friends hadn’t been around. But Tom Ormson was around. And though he was quite unsuitable for Kyrie as a shifter—shifting into a dragon—he was very compatible with Kyrie as a human.
Rafiel had had doubts about that, in the beginning, but once those two had gotten together, they’d stopped being individuals and become a whole that was bigger than the sums of its parts: they’d become Tomandkyrie, a composite creature more competent than either of them was separately, and so inseparable that he might as well try to come between Siamese twins.
What made things worse, was that Rafiel wasn’t even sure he would have a chance with Kyrie if something happened to Tom. He had a feeling that a Rafielandkyrie creature would not be nearly as good as Tomandkyrie, and might in fact fail to gel at all. And besides, he liked Tom—the scruffy, scaly bastard that he was—and, if needed, he’d die ensuring nothing bad happened to Tom. The two of them had fought together enough, been through enough danger to develop a brother-in-arms camaraderie, stronger than any romance.
No. What Rafiel really needed to do was find a girl he could love and who wouldn’t mind his shifting. And the last requirement cut down the population of eligibles to a negligible number, most of whom would live too far away for him to ever meet.
He’d been contemplating that when his afternoon got worse, with the phone call about the man found mauled. At Riverside Amusement Park—where, even at the height of the season, if one dropped a virus that selected for non-native Spanish speakers, no one would catch it—a man had had some sort of death by misadventure and the police were called to investigate.
It had been hard to understand what the heck was going on, because the person calling it in kept lapsing into something that Rafiel suspected was Greek. But Rafiel had caught stuff about a mountain lion and Mexicans and—this was emphatic—definitely not the owner’s fault.
Now he stood in the middle of Riverside, while a medic, who’d accompanied the police, patched up one of the workers: the only one remaining. Well, the only live one remaining.
Not far from them, in the long grass, a forensic team went over the victim: Hispanic, late twenties and dead. Very dead. According to the forensic team, several feet of intestine—and various other internal organs—were missing.
They hadn’t found the mountain lion yet. But that wasn’t the worst news. The guy who’d been mauled and was being patched up said it wasn’t a mountain lion but more like a dog, but even that he wasn’t sure of. He said it was a weird animal.
And Rafiel could smell shifter. It was a smell he’d decided only shifters could smell, metallic, with a salty tang, and unmistakable once you first smelled it. And it was all over the place.
“So, it was a dog?” he asked the guy who sat on the chipped cement bench by the closed spider ride—the big black apparatus with its cuplike seats frozen and vaguely threatening in the afternoon light.
The guy’s name was Jason Cordova, notwithstanding which, he spoke English perfectly and without the slightest hint of an accent. His only Spanish words came flying out as the emergency medic bandaged his arm and shoulder, which had been mauled by something. Something with sharp teeth. His white T-shirt, smeared in blood, lay on the bench by his side.
Jason was dark enough to be some variety of Hispanic, though most of it, Rafiel thought, would be due to his working outside in the sun. He wore his hair short, with the tips dyed white-blond, and he looked at Rafiel, shook his head, then tried to shrug, which brought about another outbreak of Spanish, in which the word “Madre” featured prominently. “Thing looked like a dog,” he said, at last, looking at Rafiel out of narrowed eyes, though they seemed to be narrowed more in pain than in suspicion. “But it didn’t fight like any dog. And it didn’t bite like any dog.” He shook his head. “I was lucky I had my hunting knife, because the day labor office is in a bad area and— Anyway, I must have cut it halfway to pieces before it let me go. And its jaws were like…steel clamps.”
“I’ve never seen a bite like this,” said the medic who’d come with the ambulance Rafiel had called. He blinked grey eyes behind coke-bottle glasses. “I’ve treated all sorts of injuries, even people mauled by mountain lions.” He looked at Jason. “You’re very lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah, I feel lucky,” he said, in the tone that implied he didn’t. “I’m unemployed, divorced, crashing on a friend’s sofa and, in good months, making enough to pay for my own food and fuel, and now I’m going to have to pay for the ambulance someone called. It’s not like the park has insurance.”
The medic grinned, and started to put his stuff away in a little bag. “Nah, the park will pay. They don’t want you to go to a hospital and have to show papers. I’ve sent the ambulance back anyway, so it’s just my time.” He stopped. “And I suppose you do have papers.”
“Sure I have them. I was born in California, so I have a birth certificate,” Jason said, sounding vaguely amused. “I suspect I was the only one. I mean of the workers. But I didn’t tell the owners. They can’t pay minimum wage or do all the paperwork stuff, and if I’d told them I wanted that, they’d never have hired me.”
“Yeah, I won’t tell them. You keep a watch on that. I disinfected as much as I could, but there might be something left in there. It’s a deep wound. If you notice a ring of red form and start to expand, get yourself to emergency and fast. Oh, and…”
But Rafiel was no longer listening. Instead, he was smelling the air around him. It didn’t much matter to him—or not exactly—whether the creature was a dog or a mountain lion, or some mutant, undefined creature.
What mattered—and this was very important—was that he could smell shifter in the area, all around, in fact. There was a sweet-metallic tangy scent that he knew all too well. He smelled it every day in his own clothes, rising from his own body. And he smelled it from Kyrie and Tom and the dozen or so shifters who frequented The George—the diner Kyrie and Tom owned together.
The thing was that the scent lingered in areas where shifters had been. Sometimes for hours. It had been so strong around the dead man, that Rafiel was sure the man had been a shifter. But was the killer a shifter or not?
It made all the difference. As Rafiel stood here, away from the scene, he could hear the forensic team discussing their findings in the blood-spattered area with long grass, where the body lay.
If the killer was just a wild animal on the loose, then Rafiel could let the team figure it out in their own way. There would be the routine police investigation, the normal adding up of evidence till they could take the case to trial and corner whoever was responsible for the animal being loose: police, park or perhaps the owner of the animal. Then whoever was responsible would be fined or given community service, or something similar.
In that case, Rafiel would function just as Officer Trall, a professional and well-trained police officer.
But if the killer had been a shifter in his shifted form, it all changed. Because a shifter who killed once, rarely stopped killing unless he were caught. And it wasn’t as though Rafiel could bring the apparatus of the law to bear on him. You couldn’t really tell a judge “This isn’t a dog, it’s a werewolf.”
Well, you could. But then they put you in a nice resting place, medicated to the eyeballs. And, given that Rafiel himself was a shifter lion, heaven only knew how the meds would affect his shifting. He might become a lion and eat a few nurses not-in-a-good-way. He took a long whiff of the air. There was the smell from the dead body, the smell around it, and another smell.
“Hey, something wrong? You allergic to something?” the medic asked.
And Rafiel became aware that he’d been sniffing for all he was worth, as though he expected to find his way with his nose. Which he probably could. In fact, he would swear the smell came from the path to the parking lot, past the closed-up hippodrome.
“Ragweed,” he said automatically. It had the advantage of being true, not that it mattered. “So, could you write me an informal report on the wounds? In case I have to take this to trial.”
“You can’t take an animal to trial,” the medic said. Then he grinned sheepishly. “Though I suppose you could take his owner. And maybe you should. But I bet you it doesn’t have one. I bet you it’s one of those wild animals that seem to show up further and further into town every year. Like that Komodo dragon that went around eating people—what was it? two years ago?—and did you hear about the bear who went through the trash dumpster behind the alcohol and tobacco kiosk on Fifteenth? He then ran through bar row, looking in dumpsters. When they tried to catch him, he ran through ten backyards and across five streets before being struck by a car as he ambled across the road in front of Conifer Park. And I bet you that they treated him and freed him, too, probably not too far from town. Ready to do the same again next year. A miracle he didn’t kill someone.”
Rafiel made a perfunctory nod and said, “Nothing we can do, eh? It’s the way it is. But I still need that report.”
“Right. I’ll write up something. It won’t be Shakespeare.”
“No problem. Shakespeare didn’t really report on medical conditions and it wouldn’t do us any good to be told the wound is not as wide as a church door,” Rafiel said. The intensity of the smell was driving him insane. It was separating itself into strands, too: the dead body, or the area around it, and a trail leading to the hippodrome and another…
He should—to follow proper procedure—go over to where the forensic team was working and see if there was anything else they needed. Instead, Rafiel frowned as Jason put his blood-spattered but intact T-shirt over his badly mauled body. At that moment, the shifter-smell hit Rafiel full in the face, and he stared, his mouth half open.
The medic was walking away, far enough along the path that he wouldn’t hear anything that Rafiel or Jason said. Jason turned a puzzled and slightly weary face to Rafiel.
“Lucky you had your hunting knife, huh?” Rafiel said. “I don’t suppose you want to show it to me?”
Jason blinked. A dark tide of red flooded behind his tanned skin. “I must have dropped it,” he said. “Somewhere in the grass, I guess.” And with a shrug, he continued, “Maybe your team will find it.”
Rafiel sighed. He sat in the clear space of bench beside Jason. “I’d think you were the killer, you know, and that those wounds were received from whatever that poor bastard”—a head inclination towards the crime scene—“turned into, except that they say he’s been dead since probably really early morning, before you came to work. They think he was one of the guys they hired yesterday, and he decided to bunk here for the night. And your wounds are fresh. So it’s clear there’s yet a third shifter around—or maybe merely a second, if that’s only his smell around the corpse—but he’s still around and you got those wounds in a shifted fight with him. Don’t go telling me about a hunting knife. You might have cut the other shifter up pretty bad, but it was all teeth and claws, wasn’t it?”
Silence went on so long, that if Rafiel couldn’t smell the scent of shifter coming from Cordova—a scent made stronger by exertion, and mixed with that of his blood—he would have thought he was imagining it.
But then Cordova spoke, his voice very tired. “I see. The police know.”
“Eh. This policeman knows,” Rafiel said, inhaling for all he was worth, intent to detect a shift in adrenaline that would signal that the man was about to attack. Or shift and attack. It never came. Rafiel extended his legs in front of him, doing his best to appear at ease.
Turning, he found that Cordova was staring at him, studying him. “What…do you change into?” the man asked at last.
“Lion. You?”
“Bear.” And to what must have been sudden comprehension in Rafiel’s face, “Hey, I’m broke, and I guess I like liquor? I don’t know. I don’t remember much when I’m already tipsy and then become…you know…That hike from the forest preserve about killed me too. Just happy we heal fast. And that the person who found me thought I’d got drunk and undressed while drunk, and got me clothes and food.”
“I have a cell phone,” Rafiel said, “strapped to my thigh with one of those plastic coil things. Stays in place even when I shift. That way, if I end up too far from where my clothes are, I can always call friends.”
“Smart that,” Cordova said, and looked down at his feet. “Only you have to have friends who know, and I don’t have those. Even my wife didn’t know. She thought I kept disappearing and was having an affair, and when I didn’t want to talk to her about it, she said I was emotionally unavailable.” He shrugged.
They sat side by side a little while, then Cordova said, “But that guy, the dead one, I don’t think he was shifter. I think the shifter-smell is from the killer. It’s really strong around all that area, and it goes that way.” He pointed the same way Rafiel had been smelling it.
“Could it be one of the other workers?” Rafiel asked. “Where did they go?”
A grin answered him. “It’s as I told you before,” he said. “They ran so fast, they’re probably halfway to Mexico by now.”
“Yeah, but what path did they take out of the park, do you remember?”
This got him a very odd look, as it should have, because Jason was not stupid. Clearly, from his diction, his vocabulary, the man was smart and well-educated. He stood up on visibly shaky legs. “Three of them went that way. And a bunch ran that way. And then a few ran that way.”
He pointed in three directions, in which the park ended in a fence, bordering a little used road. Which made sense if you were an illegal worker trying to run away.
“Not that way?” Rafiel asked, pointing in the direction of the path to the parking lot.
Jason shook his head. “Nah. None of them had cars, you know? The owners picked us up in a truck.” He hesitated a moment. “Say, you’re not going to try to catch them or…?”
“I’m not INS,” he said. “And if I caught them, there would only be a mess and they’d end up on the streets again.”
“It’s just,” Jason said, gesturing with his head towards the ticket house where a motley group of people clustered, “that I don’t think they have much choice.” The people in the ticket house looked Greek and seemed to be the extended family of the owner of the park. They were arguing—or perhaps just talking—in very loud voices.
“The workers?” Rafiel asked.
“Any of them. The workers come because they’re hired, and these people hire them because they couldn’t afford minimum wage much less all the deductions and things.” He frowned. “The minimum wage law and the benefits and things, it’s all very pretty on paper, but it’s like legislating the weather, man; it does no good. All it does is make you think everything is fine until reality bites you some place or other.”
Rafiel nodded and said, “So none of them went where the smell goes,” he said. “Which means…Shit. There is definitely another shifter at large, isn’t there?”
Cordova hesitated. He lifted his hand, then let it fall. He looked over his shoulder and all around, to make sure he was suitably isolated and that no one could hear him. Then he sighed. “Man, I don’t want to tell you this. You look like you have troubles enough.”
“What?”
“After…in the fight, you know…I had a pretty good grip on this dude, and I was biting and then…”
“And then?”
“He shifted and slipped out of my grasp,” Jason said. “He just became this skinny, young dude, maybe fourteen or fifteen…” He hesitated while Rafiel gave vent to a string of profanity.
Jason Cordova just nodded, as though Rafiel had made an observation worth noting, then said, “Yeah, but…that’s not the worst of it. I grant you I was shifted myself, and I don’t remember what happened really clearly, but from the way he looked and how…well…I don’t think he’s all there. And I’m almost sure he’s not, you know…normal. His eyes, you know. They were more feral as human than in animal form.”