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Ten minutes later, Randall stood in the woodsy area behind the hospital’s employee parking lot. She stared down at the bloodied corpse of a young woman lying in a bed of leaves beside a rotting log. The caller was a cafeteria worker who’d been arriving for his shift when he saw the body and called 911 on his cell phone. He was waiting in the parking lot.

  Sergeant Lively was going to be pretty pissed off that she was even here, but she needed to know if the creature was responsible.

  Opening the field kit she’d found in Heager’s trunk, she snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and reached for the woman, who lay on her side. She could see the jagged edges of the throat wound from here. It looked a lot like Heager’s.

  She told herself she was still following procedure—her first duty, after all, was to determine if the victim was dead before summoning the major crime scene unit or medical examiner. But there was really no question of that. The woman already smelled like rotting meat, an odor that would quickly worsen in the ninety-degree heat and humidity. The stench awakened Randall’s allergies, forcing her to turn her head and sneeze. She pulled down the collar of the woman’s blouse and found fang marks on her shoulder. Yep, no question it was the creature’s work, but . . .

  She shouldn’t smell like this if she just died, Randall thought.

  No, if the victim had just died, she would more likely smell like the excrement and urine recently voided from her relaxed sphincter muscles.

  Quickly, Randall noted the other clues to a time of death. The woman’s skin was purplish-red on the cheek toward the ground where blood had settled. It was cold and clammy to the touch. Her jaw hung open and moved easily when tested, which meant rigor mortis was resolving. Eighteen to twenty hours dead, then. It certainly hadn’t happened after the attack by the lake.

  Except that didn’t make sense. The creature couldn’t have killed this woman a whole day ago. All of its activity so far had been far north of here. A week ago, it raped Valarie Thompson in front of Sharky’s bar up on Route 7. Three days later, it raped Sandy Giddes behind the shopping center a mile from that. And twelve hours ago, it raped Daniella Connolly behind the movie theater, again in the same neighborhood and miles north of here. Since then, it had worked its way south, raping Jan Lee on her lawn, running through traffic on Interstate 66, raping the jogger, and finally swimming across Fairview Lake to evade its pursuers—only to encounter the crowd behind the Gensler house. Randall found it unlikely the monster had quietly traveled back and forth from here a day ago in order to kill this woman. It wasn’t a suspect who moved unobtrusively.

  . . . Unless the creature was transported?

  Or the victim was killed farther north and then dumped here. Both possibilities suggested a co-conspirator.

  And another question: why did the creature kill this woman instead of raping her?

  Two patrol officers approached through the trees. Randall stalled by ordering them to take the 911 caller’s statement and to tape off a perimeter. As she watched them go, she hoped to hell she was right and this wasn’t a conventional crime scene she was fucking up by not following procedure. It wasn’t just that she shouldn’t be here, but she was doing things all wrong. She’d already touched the corpse and yet she hadn’t taken a single note or photograph.

  Screw it, she thought. I know I’m right about this.

  She returned to her examination. A picture I.D. hung from the woman’s belt within a plastic sleeve. Randall turned it over to read the name . . . and cursed again.

  Cassandra Elliott. Crisis Counselor. Inova Women’s Center.

  She was the new rape counselor so noticeably absent from the ER last night when Daniella came in.

  Ms. Elliott’s hand clutched something half-buried in the leaves. Randall gently brushed aside as little of the debris as possible. It was a vial of pepper spray. It was attached to a key chain with a Jeep’s ignition key. The leather flap protecting the vial’s nozzle was flipped open.

  Together, the clues told a story: Ms. Elliott arrived yesterday for her first day on the job. Randall expected a plate check would confirm she owned one of the Jeep Cherokees in the employee parking lot. The creature attacked her and bit her to determine if she was fertile. But before it could get down to business, the young crisis counselor fought back—and paid the consequences. Given the thickness of trees and deadfall, Randall wasn’t surprised a day had passed before someone saw the body.

  So the woman hadn’t been killed elsewhere and dumped here.

  That left a few possibilities: the creature had quietly sneaked back and forth from here (again, unlikely), a collaborator had transported the creature (seemed even more unlikely), or . . .

  “Uh oh.”

  A third, worse option.

  With quick glances around her because she half expected a furry form to come leaping out of the trees, Randall jogged back to the parking lot. She ignored the stares of the two patrol officers as she ducked under the yellow police tape and yanked open the trunk of Heager’s cruiser. Before Heager was hauled off by the paramedics, and knowing he would be in the hospital for some time, Randall had relieved him of his weapons belt, promising to lock it up until he returned. Clipped to the front of it was the tiny silver cell phone he’d been yakking on in the emergency room. She opened it now and was soon in touch with Sergeant Lively. She told him where she was.

  “Randall?” Interference cut off parts of his words. “—off-duty? Why are—” hiss, crackle, “—crime scene, for godsakes?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll hand over the scene as soon as a ranking officer arrives. But please, I gotta tell you what I’ve found.”

  Lively listened as she told him—often repeating herself when the cellular signal faded. She wondered if her message got through—particularly her reminder that there were animal noise complaints near the hospital last night.

  When Lively spoke again, the anger was gone from his voice. Randall sighed in relief when he reached the same conclusion that she had.

  “Oh, Lord,” he said. “You mean we could have a second one of these bastards out there?”

  Chapter 8

  In his nail salon at Yorktowne Plaza shopping center, a mile north of the hospital, Kanaye Takahashi paused from sweeping broken bottles of polish into a large pile. He wanted to bag it up and throw it away into the Dumpster out back, but the insurance adjuster would need to inspect it whenever he showed up.

  “Bucka,” he cursed—and then because he also liked American profanities, added, “Fuck.”

  Although it was after one o’clock on a sunny Saturday, his rows of nail care tables and pedicure baths stood empty. The sign on his locked front door read, CLOSED. If his lease had permitted it, he would have also pulled blinds over his plate glass windows so people couldn’t look in on him now—not that he had windows anymore, as the burglar had shattered them to gain entry. But at least, now that the cops had finally left, nobody was here to witness the dishonor of this mess. He’d canceled the day’s appointments and sent his employees home. He’d even forbidden his wife, Aiko, to come in and help.

  The racks of metal shelves along the walls, which had held hundreds of bottles of polishes and lacquers, had been toppled over as if by an enraged child. The burglar or burglars—the ah-ho policemen didn’t specify—had hurled handfuls of the bottles against the floors and walls, making sure to smash the ones that survived the initial fall. But why? Why would they do that and not touch the cash register?

  “Dohna know shit, those policemen. Ah-ho.” He set aside his broom and went to the back in search of his dustpan. “I’m hifty-six year old, and they talk’m me like I’m just offen them boat.”

  Worse, the policemen were liars. They’d promised to send somebody by today to check in on him, but he’d seen no one so far. No doubt they had more important things to do than coddle a funny speaking Japanese man.

  He stopped to glare over his shoulder at his front door. It faced northeast, a very unlucky direction. The ancient architectural art of Kaso said putting
an entrance in that direction attracted demons to one’s home. Having the numbers four and nine in his store’s address, which in Japanese sounded like the words shi (death) and ku (pain), no doubt worsened his luck.

  As he stared, a bushy-headed fat woman in exercise tights tried to open his door. When she found it locked, she finally noticed the broken windows and gawked inward.

  “No open today,” Kanaye said. “Next week. More better time.”

  She nodded and closed her ugly, gaping mouth—then opened it again to pant, redfaced and winded either from her exercise session or from carrying the bulky laundry bag slung over her shoulder. It all gave her a fleeting resemblance to a female namahage demon with its sack full of the severed heads of naughty children. She turned away and headed to the laundromat next door, which was run by his friend Toshio—but then, for some reason, she returned to her car, still carrying her laundry. Strange. All Americans were strange.

  He shouldn’t have opened the salon here to begin with. It was Toshio’s fault he was in this mess, after all—Toshio, his supposed friend. He’d consoled Kanaye over cups of sake when the newsstand at National Airport went belly-up during the post-9/11 shutdown of services there. “There’s a twelve-hundred square-foot vacancy next to my laundromat,” Toshio said in his slick, second-generation English. “Foot traffic is excellent, and it has some absolutely wonderful frontage on Gallows Road.”

  Having found the dustpan, Kanaye paused to light a cigarette. He shook his head sadly. The day he opened this place, Toshio had wrapped his meaty arm around him, thrusting him shoulder-to-shoulder with the leasing agent there for the occasion, and made him mug for a photo. It was extremely bad luck to be the middle person in a picture with two others in it. This place had been cursed from the start. None of the intervening years had changed that impression.

  Notching his cigarette in an ashtray, Kanaye reached for the kettle of green tea he’d left on the hot plate. But his hand paused short of it when a voice called from the front, “Hey, do you know if they’re open today?”

  A young Asian woman with bleached hair peered in at him through the broken window.

  “We closed. Dohna you see nothing?” Baka, he thought. Idiot.

  “No, not you, man. Your neighbor.” She pointed at Toshio’s laundromat next door.

  “Toshio?” Kanaye turned his back. “I dohna know.” Silently, he added, Dohna care. Besides, Kanaye had been so wrapped up in his own problems today that he hadn’t even noticed the laundromat was closed. He hadn’t stepped out the door since arriving at three a.m., when the police summoned him.

  When Kanaye looked again, the young woman was gone. His shoulders slumped. The simple exchange had replaced his remaining strength with depression. He collapsed onto his weathered green easy chair, glad it was out of sight in the back room’s corner, then took his onamori good luck charm from his pocket. He considered it—and hurled it into the trash. Closing his eyes, he lay his head back against the chair and smoked his cigarette.

  His eyes snapped open again. The suspended-ceiling tile directly overhead lay askew, exposing a large wedge of crawlspace. The police had asked him about that, of course, and he’d reported that the HVAC repairman left it that way. Nothing unusual there. . . . But he was now staring at the metal access door set into the portion of the cinderblock wall that extended above the plane of the ceiling tiles. The door was for the repairmen to move between the two rental units when necessary and was normally padlocked by the landlord.

  The padlock was missing. And the access door was cracked open an inch.

  Kanaye stood up and removed the cigarette from his mouth. He looked down to find the remains of the padlock lying behind the easy chair. He wasn’t surprised that neither the policemen nor himself had noticed this small vandalism, distracted as they were by the larger vandalisms. Besides, the burglar obviously entered the nail salon through the broken windows, not the ceiling access.

  But did the burglar perhaps leave by this other route . . . and go into the laundromat? That might explain why it was closed today.

  Stubbing out his cigarette, Kanaye exited into the alley behind the shopping center. At the laundromat’s back door, he knocked and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. The two neighbors had long ago exchanged door keys in case of an emergency, so Kanaye now hauled out his key ring.

  A moment later, he was inside and entering the bypass code to the burglar alarm. The laundromat was dark, and it stank—oh heavens did it stink of . . . fabric softener? He left the door open and moved toward the front.

  “Ojama shimasu,” he called. “Toshio?”

  Blue smears of fabric softener slickened the back hallway beside the customer service booth. Behind the service counter, he found more signs of wreckage: detergent boxes and bottles of Snuggle Ultra pulled off of the shelves, their contents scattered across the floor and tracked through with large footprints. Toshio’s car keys sat next to the closed cash register. A cigarette, long since burnt down into a column of ash, balanced on the edge of the counter. Toshio’s lighter and pack of Marlboros sat next to it.

  Sucking in a shuddering breath, Kanaye left the service booth. He sidestepped the blue puddles on his way to the main room.

  A pair of legs stuck out from one of the dryers.

  “Toshio!”

  Kanaye ran forward and placed his hands on his friend’s back to yank him out—then quickly let go. Toshio was dead. He’d been rammed headfirst through the glass door of the dryer. Now Kanaye smelled another odor. Blood.

  A low voice growled.

  It startled him so bad that he jumped backward into the blue puddle, slipped, and fell. His hands splashed into the liquid. He gagged on the overpoweringly sweet fumes.

  Another guttural rumble.

  It came from behind the next row of machines. Kanaye scrambled to his feet and backed away.

  A tall form stood up and snarled at him.

  The youkai apparition that faced him—a monster with solid black body hair—had the aspect of a cat. This didn’t surprise him as ghosts often assumed feline form. Blue smears of fabric softener covered its snout and the tip of its enormous, flaccid penis. When it raised its claws, Kanaye saw splotches of Wyatt Earple Purple OPI nail polish on its palms. The youkai’s triangular ears twitched in time with Kanaye’s breathing.

  It suddenly doubled over and vomited blue and red liquid onto the floor.

  Kanaye turned and ran. “Aiyeee!”

  He heard the youkai slap through the puddles behind him the moment before it slammed into his back. Kanaye tumbled out the back door and landed face-first on the asphalt. Sharp pebbles ripped through his hands and knees as he skidded to a stop.

  He raised his face to meet his death.

  —And saw the youkai bounding away on all fours. It veered right, in the direction of the hospital, and disappeared around the corner.

  “Arigato,” Kanaye gasped, thanking it for sparing him. “Arigato. . . .”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The detective’s news about the rapist man-cat creature and the bizarre pregnancies had only worsened Margaret’s need to see Daniella—but despite what others might say about her being a hothead, she was still a practical woman. At least, that’s what she always told herself. She knew, for instance, that she should go home first to change out of her torn and muddied clothing, even if just to put on clean panties. But that was easier said than done right now. Her near-death experience had left her unable to think.

  “Dammit!” she whispered as she drove out of Eric Gensler’s neighborhood. She paused for an unnecessarily long time at the stop sign at Fairview Parkway. “What do I do?” She was trembling.

  Finally, she succeeded in convincing herself to first go home by realizing one purpose would serve the other: she wouldn’t be very effective at the hospital—which included getting the doctors to respect her medical opinions—if she looked and smelled like a homeless person.

  A few minutes later, therefore, the cat met her at the fr
ont door. It meowed for food, which gave Margaret an unpleasant flashback to the monster. “I don’t have time, Gemini,” she said and ran into her bedroom to change.

  No, she couldn’t think straight at all. Her thoughts were scrambled again and again by memories that exploded across her mind like electrical arcs: the monster’s huge genitalia, its iron grip around her throat as it lifted her off the ground, the sensation of hurtling through the air before slamming into Detective Randall. She felt like she would faint again. Her bandaged shoulder ached as she changed clothes, her head hurt, and Daniella had been raped by that thing and it tried to kill me and god no and my glasses are gone—I must have lost them at that lake and . . .

  Margaret sank to her knees in front of the bathroom sink. She buried her face in her folded arms and sobbed.

  When she felt like she could move again, she dug out her spare glasses and put them on. Then she trudged into the kitchen and refilled Gemini’s food bowl. As the cat ate, she forced herself to sit down and have an orange and a yogurt.

  Afterward, with her energy and sense of urgency coming back, she returned the address book to her daughter’s dresser. She made sure to leave it open to the page with Eric Gensler’s number, just as she’d found it. This wasn’t to encourage Daniella to date the boy—far from it—but she didn’t want Daniella to know what she’d done. No one except another mother would understand why she went on the warpath. And as for the issue of Eric’s saving her life . . . well, she’d just have to set that aside for the moment. She couldn’t be expected to figure out everything right now.

  Back in the car, she ignored the speed limits on the way to the hospital. The cops had bigger fish to catch at the moment.

  “Knew that fucking Dr. Sharma was lying to me,” she mumbled as she turned into the hospital entrance. Two police cruisers passed her and took the second entrance onto Woodburn Road. “Neurology is ‘too much full.’ He better start being honest, or his ass is going to be ‘too much full’ of my foot.”

  She parked in the hospital’s Blue Garage and launched herself from the car, running flat out for the connector bridge to the hospital—but stopped when she remembered the bag of fresh clothing she’d brought for Daniella. Cursing, she went back to retrieve it, then took off again. Halfway to the hospital entrance, she realized she’d left her keys in the ignition, but this time she didn’t go back.