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Cry Me a Murder.

Chapter VII.

The Other Side of Zero.

Morning. I needed a smoke, I needed coffee, I needed a drink and I needed to puke. My stomach cramped up from last night's good bourbon and bad judgement. I'd been so eager to solve the case I'd made a phone call to my closest enemy - the MI-16, and invited them to join me at the hotel to interpret a five second video of a man pouring his heart out, moments before a demon tore him into pieces. Last night I'd been over-confident and now buyer's remorse kicked in; Caveat Emptor. Fernando had all but carried me back into bed the night before because I was too drunk to walk and too tired to make sense.

I checked my watch; in three hours, an agent by the name of "Dakota" would arrive by helicopter to put us out of our misery. Dakota as in "D", the fourth letter of the alphabet and the fourth MI-16 agent I'd met face-to-face. But also "D" as in "death", the three agents before him had died screaming by my hand or paw - and the MI-16 knew. They knew I was dangerous, too dangerous to piss off and too dangerous to let live. Most private investigators carry a gun, a tazer, even a can of mace, anything to protect themselves. But I'd never carried a gun; I wouldn't even know how to fire one in case the agent decided my person was the case to close. Was I only fooling myself? I wondered. As much as I liked to dream about it, I was never a proper investigator, just some guy who stumbles into trouble, and the only case I know how to close is a guitar case. I'm half demon or half insane, take your pick. I dumped the contents of my suitcase onto the bed, deciding on a change of clothes. If agent Dakota made a sudden move and I had to change into demon-form, I'd wear a suit that tears in a second or less, something that wouldn't constrict my freedom, and nothing tears better than cheap clothes from Jay-mart, although you won't read that fact on their billboards. With two hours and fifteen to go, I decided on a pair of colorful Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with an airbrushed drawing of a Maui sunset and nude hula girls.

Agent Dakota flew in at noon sharp, in a two seater helicopter, both sides decorated with a grinning locust holding a sign up that read "Varrick's Crop Dusting Service, Est. 1973". I recalled the dead faces of Bruckner, Burris, and Samza; the previous MI-16 agents I had met were all trained killers and I expected Dakota to be no different. I wondered if I had made a mistake by inviting him up for a meeting; what if I was on the MI-16 kill list and I had only invited my own hitman? Fernando cast me a disapproving look when he saw my clothes; he wore his finest for the occasion and giggled like a schoolboy about to meet some sports hero. He'd shaved and trimmed his moustache and polished the one pair of shoes he saved for special events. "Are you sure this is the proper attire for a meeting with National Security?" He whispered as the chopper touched ground.

I nodded, I was sure.

"Don't worry," I whispered back. "I'll change if I have to."

My worries burst like a bubble the second agent Dakota stepped out of the helicopter. She was a short, pretty woman in her mid-thirties with brown, curly hair and a cute smile. She was hot, but she wasn't packing heat and I regretted not listening to Fernando's advice.

"Agent Dakota," she said. "You may call me Evelyn."

"Evelyn Dakota? Is that your real name?

"Of course not."

We walked ten paces before shaking hands. With slack pants and a short business jacket, Evelyn Dakota looked like a shrewd estate agent, sooner than a secret one.

"I believed all MI-16 agents were tough military types hauling AK-47s around," I joked.

"-and I believed the man who've killed three of our agents would be a better dresser," Evelyn snapped back, I let go of her hand and tried to ignore Fernando snickering behind my back.

Evelyn remained quiet while we watched the CCTV footage, but now and then she asked us to pause the video. For a girl with such a cute smile, she sure didn't know how to say please.

"The murderer wears an animal costume," she noted. "That's a new one." She pressed play again. Despite her professional style and cool attitude, she seemed clueless to the true nature of demon-kin and believed we were dealing with a costumed killer. If she didn't know about otherkin, I was sure the MI-16 as an organization didn't know either. This relieved me to no small degree.

"He uses some kind of sharp instrument, disguised as claws," Evelyn leaned forward, her nose almost touching the screen and she studied the pixelated murder without blinking or flinching as the silently screaming Tejon was torn into ribbons. "Do you know if the victim had ties to the Yakuza?"

"We... didn't know the victim; only that he was a marriage councillor."

"Marriage councillor, huh?" Evelyn stopped the video, scribbled a few comments in her notebook in a style of shorthand I didn't recognize, put the pen down and looked at me for a long time.

"Why did you ask me to come here, Mr. Wolf? This case doesn't present a national threat?"

"That costumed freak killed your agent Phelps, and I wanted you to know that I'm not to blame - not this time, anyway."

"We'll take that into consideration, during the next review" was her only reply as she closed her briefcase.

Fernando broke the awkward silence by reaching over and rewinding the recording to the few seconds where Tejon spoke. "We have a small bet going, Carter and I; does he say

I hate you, Huey.

Or

I'll take a bullet.

Evelyn Dakota sighed and rolled her eyes. She rewound the video to the few seconds of Tejon's final words.

"In that bit the victim says: I have to do it -or I HAD to..." Evelyn said. "Probably I had, otherwise most people say I gotta".

"Do WHAT?" Wondered Fernando.

"Sabotage Chris' wheelchair," I said. "Tejon warned me against the boy, claimed he was dangerous. Tejon also left the scene when we helped nurse Richards get out of the stuck elevator. Tejon knew Chris would be alone for a while, and being one of the few people who could get close to the boy, he loosened the handles to his wheelchair. Tejon was a professional, and an accident always looks better than flat out murder."

"Okay, so who's Mary Poppins?" Chirped Fernando. He was clearly enjoying the official company of a secret agent. "Is she one of yours?"

"The victim says I had to STOP him; NOT Mary Poppins." Evelyn rose to her feet and offered a parting handshake. "It's an interesting case, but a trivial one. I suggest you leave it to the local police force."

"But you knew all of this," I argued. "I told you guys over the phone. So why did you decide to come?"

"Domestic violence cases like this propose no threat to national security." She said bluntly "- but YOU just might, Mr. Wolf."

"Tell your people to step down," I said. "You put Phelps on the case, so the death of Mr. Tell must have some interest to your organization. But with Phelps out of the game, I'm the one guy who can close the case -but only if the MI-16 stays off my back."

Evelyn Dakota paused in the door. She eyed me up and down, judging me by appearance and remaining unimpressed. "You really believe you can do better than us?" There was a slight ironic twist to her smile.

"I've already beaten you at your own game twice before, remember?" I replied and Dakota took a step back. "Maybe it's time we start looking in the same direction."

"Wait here," she ordered and left the office. Through the window we watched her talk with someone on her mobile phone. She returned some ten minutes later, wiping a drop of sweat off her forehead with a damp baby wipe.

"Alright," she said. "Work with us on this one, and we may lower your current standing to level three."

"One last question, before you go" I said. "I'm at level four; where does that put me?"

Agent Dakota marched down the lobby, her footsteps on the marble floor echoing off the walls. She replied without turning around, "Level five is where we target you for immediate termination.

---

Darleen and Slater had worked together to wrestle Chris out of the clutches of Jack Tell. Of course the old man had resisted, he'd finally found a golden goose in the son he had ignored for years. Too bad his paternal love was limited to slapping the boy around every time he was strapped for cash.

Jack Tell was too stubborn to let go, and too greedy to give a damn. Mr. Tejon was called in to negotiate, but he was scared; the more time he spent with Chris and his mother, the more terrified he grew with the boy's connection to a dark world he didn't understand. Finally he decided to bump Chris off without getting his hands dirty - from his years in international affairs, he knew better than that. When his plot to fix Chris' wheelchair failed, the murderer caught up with Tejon and dragged him into the view of the kitchen CCTV to finish him off - the only camera still online. The killer not only wanted blood; he wanted me to know I wasn't the only demon-kin around.

---

Nurse Richards packed up and left with the rest of the surviving guests. Had she been planted in the enemy camp all this time, or had she been kidnapped by Darleen and Slater? If I were to find her, I needed to know her background. "I'm g_oing back to the convent_," she cried when she was stuck in the elevator, and with only two convents in Ra'gasso:Mother Mary's Blessing -a catholic nunnery, and Sisters of Iuna, it took only a phone call to learn nurse Richards was a long-time sister of Iuna; a cult devoted to the local matron saint of light and protection. The sisterhood devoted their lives to protect the needy and innocent and there was no doubt she was protective towards Chris. But maybe this time, she had gone zealot about it and protection turned into murder? I borrowed Fernando's beaten pickup and mapped the route to the Sisters of Iuna_when something moving caught my eye; a single leaf dropped off a plum-tree and landed in the water of Miguel's fish farm, the water was in motion and bubbles rose to the surface near the pump. The stream soon caught the leaf and carried it lazily towards the far end of the pond. Here its brief journey terminated at the concrete wall. I was reminded of another falling leaf I'd seen the day I arrived. Only, that one leaf had not been green, but bright red. _Like a ruby. Miguel was down by the pond that day, bleeding from his wounded arm, but he wasn't working on the pump that day; he was ditching a ruby he believed to be cursed; a single, cursed gemstone the size of a corn kernel. He threw it high with his good arm and we both watched it blink in the sunlight before it struck the water. The wound was deep and bleeding, days after he hurt his arm, yet nobody had healed it; not Darleen, or nurse Richards. Miguel was alone with a troubled past and a lovesick heart, in love with Catalina and in love with his fish-farm. Even though his bad arm would have hurt like hell, he spent days working on the pump. It had a small LCD screen that monitored the oxygen level, the pH value and phosphate content. Everything was logged and saved to memory, like the CCTV inside, only with numbers instead of murders. If the ruby was a cursed relic from the abyss, maybe dispatching it had caused fluctuations to some of the values. The control unit held data points from the past two weeks, but every value was rock solid and had remained consistently so, from the day they booted the system to this very second. _Stupid,_I thought. It's only a piece of rock, why would it make any change to water quality; I thought and laughed out loud.

Wait!

How the flow could have been stable the day before, while the power was out for hours, I wondered. A power-cable ran from the pump, across the path and into to the wooden tool-shed. Inside, I discovered the cable was attached to a knee high device left on the floor. I didn't need a degree in electrical engineering to recognize the missing UPS from Fernando's "control room." Miguel had borrowed it to power the system while he worked on the pump, only to be arrested before he could put it back, and nobody knew the UPS was here because nobody set foot in the enclosed farm. Nobody except me and Slater, Slater who found the hidden bag of rubies "near the pump" he'd explained, but why hadn't the stream dragged the bag along, just like the fallen leaf? Unless someone had planted the bag to frame Miguel. If I could only find the single ruby he tossed into the pond that day, it would prove his innocence, so I stripped out of my clothes and lowered myself into the water by the far end of the pond, right next to the plum-tree. The water was chill and curious fish of all sizes brushed against my arms and legs. The water stung my eyes and I had to force myself to keep them open while I searched the cement floor of the pond, carefully brushing the thin layer of mud and dirt from the concrete with my bare hands. After what seemed like an eternity, my lungs were about to burst into fire and I surfaced to gasp for air. I checked my watch, only to see I'd been under for less than forty seconds before my lungs gave up. I cursed my addiction to cigarettes and promised myself to quit smoking once this case was solved, but smoking also keeps my symptoms at bay. I waited a few minutes, catching my breath before diving under again. The water felt like fire in my eyes and seemed darker than the first time I dived. I raked the smooth bottom my hands, blindly clawing for anything harder than fish shit and wispy seaweed, but thirty seconds later, I surfaced empty handed once again and rasping for another round of air.

I pounded the tiles with my fist. This wasn't fair; I'd never asked for any of this to happen, I never asked to have schizophrenia, I never wished to be half demon or to have friends who howl at the moon and hand their unsolvable cases over to me, cases that involve tentacles and pulsating gateways to hell.

"You're lying!" said a voice behind me; it was the voice of a child, but the words he spoke changed in my mind the second after he had spoken them, my memory echoed the two words "Lying! You're lying." Had it been a playful voice? Or an angry one? I spun around to face the child, but found no one there.

"Are you in my head?" I asked.

"Liar!" Repeated the voice, soft and bubbly like the noise from the pond. "You always wanted."

"Go away," I shouted and held my ears, well knowing it would not drown out the voice because it originates, not from the outside, but from inside my brain. "I already have two voices lodged in there," I groaned. "I don't need another one, telling me what to think."

"You wanted to be a detective," giggled the voice.

"SO? Every kid wants to be Inspector Gizmo."

"Special, so special." The voice was now that of my sister Kamryn and the words were her response when I first told her I was hearing voices, ten years ago.

"The tentacles are real," said the child again - somehow his voice was now hovering over the pond in mid-air, but now I recognized the voice from my father's home videos: it was my own voice from when I was six; innocent, playful and ten years away from insanity. "If you don't stop him," said my voice, "the tentacles will return."

"Touché!" I thought. The tentacles were real, so were the murders, and the fact I had boasted to agent Dakota how I could crack the case single handed, only hours ago.

"Stop WHOM? I cried. "Chris?"

There was no reply; the voices had blown away with the afternoon breeze.

I lowered myself into the water again. The water, now muddy and smoky from the whirling dirt reached my upper chest when I stood up straight. If I couldn't use my eyes to search, maybe I could feel my way. Step by step, I paced the far end of the pool, shuffling slowly and probing the mud with my feet. I took fifteen paces towards the pump, one step to the side, turn and shuffle back again. I repeated the pattern, until something sharp stabbed the bottom of my foot. I froze midstep and stomped on the offending object to keep it in place. I took a deep breath and knelt into the water, retrieving the sharp object -it was a single, cursed, beautiful ruby.

---

Professor Carswell of the University of Ra'gasso was a tall, skinny man in his mid-fifties, with trousers two inches too short and left a gap that exposed his mismatched socks. He was either color blind or living by himself. He remembered Paul Slater well; a bright student with a vivid imagination matched only by his appetite for women and surfing. "He almost didn't pass," said the professor, thanks to a shark attack that nearly cost Slater a leg, and left him permanently disfigured all over his upper body. He missed a semester while confined to a hospital bed and being tended to by a nurse who raised his spirits. Apparently, she also raised the sheets with him before changing them, because they left the hospital together, hand in hand.

"Her name was Diana, I think?" Pondered the professor," or maybe Eileen?"

"How about Darleen?" I suggested.

"Yeah, that's it. You know her?"

"They're still together."

Carswell smiled. "Good! Maybe she can talk some sense into him."

"A lot of people have been in need of sensible talking, lately. What was Slater's problem?"

Carswell took off his glasses and polished them with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. "Where do I even start?" He opened a folder and browsed a pile of A3 sized prints. I recognized the halls and the steps of the Kisanti cave from the photos, but they also showed details I'd missed during my brief visit there with Slater. Carswell pulled out a close up of the doorway of the mural and pointed his desk lamp at the inscription above the door.

"Slater was convinced the inscription reads MARIAH, as in love." Carswell focused his magnifying glass on a blank space next to the inscription. "But look at the white space before the M and after the H. It's two letters too wide. The original would have read TA-MARIAH: this mural shows a group of Kisanti emissaries visiting the lost library of Tamariah."

"The last time I took out a library book was six years ago. I wouldn't know a lost library if I found one."

Carswell laughed. "Tamariah was like the library of Alexandria, but older. According to history, this library was open to the most learned men until its destruction during the second Namairian war in 1500BC. My guess is, Aristotle told his student Demetrius about Tamariah, and it was he who convinced King Ptolemy to rebuild a place like it."

"The Kisanti cat-people knew how to read?"

"Cat-people," sniffed Carswell and handed me his loupe. He pointed to one detail all the Kisanti heads had in common: they were proportionally larger than their bodies and all displayed the same, unsmiling, frozen expression.

"Large heads with frozen smiles?" I asked.

"Masks," replied Carswell. "The Kisanti tribe dressed in animal costumes for ceremonial purposes, just like Norse berserkers in bear skins, or south American jaguar men in leopard hides."

"So... the Kisanti tribe were not were-creatures?"

Carswell looked at me intensely over the rim of his wireframe spectacles, like he would look at some hopeless student.

"Were...creatures...indeed!" He emphasized each syllable, as to highlight the stupidity of my question, and I quickly changed the subject to the identical bracelets every Kisanti in the mural wore around the right wrist. They were shaped like two interwoven branches, with red dots in between that looked like berries. Seeing my interest in the subject, Carswell warmed to me again. "Laurels," he said, "represented wisdom. Gaining admission to the library of Tamariah was an exclusive honor awarded to the privileged few. The bracelet was like a library card and owning one..." Carswell whistled. "It wasn't a common thing. Then, imagine a tribe with enough bracelets to send a whole convoy into the library."

"And the red berries between the laurel leaves. What would that be?"

Carswell unlocked a drawer in a heavy steel cabinet and took out a bundle of faded, blue velvet, which he unwrapped under the desk-lamp.

"This is an original bracelet," he whispered, glancing around as if he expected thieves to materialize out of thin air to steal the artefact. "The bracelets could be forged, so they added gemstones to the design - rubies to be precise." Several rubies were missing from Carswell's bracelet, leaving corn-sized holes in the filigree while enough had survived over the years, dusty but bright red and resembling the tears of Chris Tell. "The secret was," said Carswell. "The bracelet didn't open the door - the rubies did."

Carswell said no more, but simply nodded and expected me to understand the extreme value of the library bracelets. Back in 1500BC, Ra'gasso was the trade capitol for the Kisanti tribes, much like Timbuktu or Samarkand centuries later. The site now known as the Kisanti cave was a greeting room for guests and travelling caravans wishing to trade with the Kisanti. Foreign chiefs were welcomed and treated as honored guests with drinks and fruits while surrounded on all sides by colorful paintings screaming: hey! Motherfucker; we're wise, powerful and we can claw you up, so don't think you can dick with us when we do business? The murals were a brute display of money and power - but what better way to secure a fair trade?

"What about the Kisanti tribe sacrificing themselves to the abyss?" I asked.

Carswell laughed. "All in Slater's mind, a strange fancy of his, he even built his thesis around that obsession. We dismissed it of course."

"We?"

"The external and myself. Gods! How Slater argued to make us accept it."

"But he still got his degree?"

Carswell let out a heartfelt sigh. "Professor Altschuler, the external had a sudden change of heart and allowed Slater to pass the course. I mean, the thesis was well written, even if his interpretation of the mural was ...unorthodox."

Professor Carswell took off his glasses and gazed into infinity, thoughtfully rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Pity," he said. "That was the last time we called on Dr. Altschuler as an external."

"Maybe he let slater pass, before retiring?"

"Retiring at fifty?" Carswell looked puzzled, "no!", and then with some afterthought he added "Professor Altschuler is a hopeless alcoholic."

---

Altschuler lived alone on the outskirts of Ra'gasso. His bungalow, once fashionable was now in disarray, the garden overgrown, the woodwork peeling, and the windows were covered in year-old grime. When I rang his doorbell, the professor peeked out from behind a curtain and looked me over with bloodshot eyes framed in grey puffy bags. Minutes later, he opened the door two inches. His breath carried the faint but tell-tale sweetness of straight vodka. Every alcoholic knows how to hide his habit behind a wall of vodka, which carries no scent, unlike bourbon or beer. But the odour of unwash that radiated from the professor could not be covered up, even if he showered himself in Talisker. He invited me inside, and I seated myself on a couch between two piles of the Ra'gasso Gazette dating back several years.

"Drink?" Altschuler offered me a half-gallon bottle of Ranting Griffon Vodka.

"I don't drink," I said in near accordance with the truth.

"I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink," slurred Altschuler. "People who don't drink have something to hide."

"I'd like to ask you about a former student: Paul Slater."

"Aw, MAN! Altschuler slumped into a worn recliner by the TV. "Slater is the reason for my condition."

"I know you rejected his thesis, but was it really that bad?"

Altschuler stared at the TV for a long time. It wasn't turned on and the screen projected only a colorless reflection of the professor. I began to fear he had gone catatonic on me, but the occasional swig from his bottle revealed he was still with me. By mentioning Slater's thesis, I had ripped into a painful memory, but he had something he wanted to share, and he was now searching for the words in that labyrinth of cooked neurons that once made up a brilliant mind.

"I got his thesis right here." Altschuler staggered to a bookcase, crammed with reports and theses dating back to the seventies. The older ones were typed on thick, yellowing paper, the recent ones printed in inkjet with covers showing scanned images of antique artefacts. "Slater came to my house a week after we rejected this." He pushed a worn copy of Slater's thesis across the table with an ivory letter-opener, as if he was afraid of touching it barehanded.

"He called me up the night before his defence, said he had some new evidence he'd like to discuss. Half an hour later, he showed up at my door, barefooted and shirtless. I was about to make a comment, when I realized something was wrong -dead wrong."

"He was disfigured from the shark attack?"

"That's the problem!" slurred Altschuler and breathed fumes of vodka in my face that made me take an involuntary step back. "There was nothing to see!" he rasped. "No scars, no wounds and no bandages. When Carswell visited him in the hospital one week earlier, Slater was barely conscious, but now he didn't have as much as a single nick from shaving."

"That's incredible."

Altschuler leaned on the desk with both hands; he stared at the texture of the dark oak while breathing in shallow gulps.

"Do you... believe in monsters, Mr Wolf?"

"I do. In fact, I've seen a few."

Altschuler looked up but held on to his desk, the only thing in recent years that hadn't slipped through his fingers.

"You're not mocking me," he said. "I can hear it in your tone of voice."

"Mocking anyone won't get me to the bottom of the case."

"He's a monster," said Altschuler, his voice little more than a whisper. "Slater changed before my eyes. He changed into a monster, a nightmare creature all covered in fur and with horns mounted on a lion's head." Carswell took a massive draught from the bottle. "Want some?"

"Err. No.. I had vodka for breakfast."

"Slater, or whatever he had turned into, lifted me off the ground by the scruff of my neck and shook me like a puppy. Imagine that, a student half my age shaking his external like some ragdoll. Slater's voice no longer human, dropped to a terrible growl. Do you believe me now? He repeated... "Do you believe me now?" He could have snapped my neck like a pretzel stick."

Altschuler slumped back into his worn recliner, his gaze once again turned to the unplugged TV. It was the first time he'd shared his story with anyone, his hands trembled from exhaustion but he looked lighter now the load of his grim secret had been lifted off his shoulders. I squatted on the floor next to him and waited for him to surface.

"Do... do you think there are more of them out there?" He asked eventually, his eyes almost begging for me to pat him on the shoulder and say "no!", to laugh and say "of course, not." But we both knew Slater was not the only one of his kind. He and Chris Tell were playing a dangerous game; if the tears of Chris tore a wound into the thin veil separating our world from the abyss, the otherworldly creatures would pour into ours once again, like so many thousands of years ago; creatures with shapes and dimensions that defy sense and drive the beholder to near insanity.

"I know there's at least one more of his kind," I said. "And if Slater is not stopped, what you saw is only the beginning.

"Then you'll need a drink," said Altschuler and offered me his bottle. "We both do..."

This time I accepted.

---

TO BE CONCLUDED

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