Last of the Shapeshifters

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

SASHA

Purple and pink smeared the sky, and clouds glowed on their undersides with an orange-red hue the color of grapefruit. Shafts of light streamed through gaps in the cloud cover at a harsh angle, and the rubicund desert sand seemed to sparkle in the morning light.

But Sasha was in no state of mind to appreciate a beautiful sunrise.

Instead, she felt tired, and driving in her rattling, beat up car was testing her temper. They hadn’t had enough time to assign a squad car to her yet – it was a paperwork holdup – and so, for now at least, she’d use her own car.

The cup of coffee she had gulped down before heading out of the door was making an unfortunately heroic effort to mimic decaf, for she found no respite from her weariness in the bitter black and piping hot liquid she had forced inside her in three gulps flat.

She barely slowed as she took the sharp right-angle bends through the suburban sprawl, and her car creaked with continuous complaint. She had her dashboard light flashing, but the siren remained mute so as not to wake children in the houses she drove past.

The town of Salty Springs was small, but it sprawled. The city center consists of just two ‘competing’ supermarkets, and a single-story shopping mall. Low bungalows grew outwards on a rectangular grid that spoke of the kind of unimaginative town planning Sasha had been familiar with her whole life, and it meant that navigating the small suburbia was just a series of right-angled turns with not a curved bend in sight. To Sasha, the driving in Salty Springs was about as boring as it got.

“Mmm,” she murmured to herself, shaking her head while peering out her driver’s side window at the rising sun. Cresting over the tops of the low-lying bungalows, light glancing off the slatted tiles, she could see that it was going to be a hot day. Sometimes, the sun just looked fiercer. Having lived in the town her entire life, a real desert person, her intuition was often correct. And sometimes, she hated being correct.

The summer had so far been unusually hot. The hottest day of the year had already been recorded a couple of weeks earlier, and she was fairly sure the scorching summer was not yet done. No, that oppressive b***h had a lot left in store for the residents of Salty Springs. She asked herself a question, as she had done many times before: Why the hell would anybody choose to live out here?

But that was unfair. She loved living here. One of the reasons was that many people didn’t. But you have to get used to the desert. It takes time, but eventually, you can fall in love with it. Well, some can. Some can’t.

Cobalt beams pulsed from the light bars atop a pair of police interceptors parked in the center of Lester Street, a slender byway flanked by an endless procession of cookie-cutter homes, each a mirror of the next. The only hints of individuality were a stray child's bicycle propped haphazardly against a mailbox, an old rope swing swaying forlornly from the bough of a dying tree, and an iron basketball hoop mounted above a garage door, its net frayed and weathered. The officers had parked at angles to block the throughway, and there was an eerie calm that surprised Sasha with a shiver. She pulled up next to the two police cars and sat in her car for a minute, calming her nerves and collecting herself.

She closed her eyes, rocked back and forth a little, the cotton-clad cushion beneath her lumpy against her. She was preparing herself to deal with cops she knew, but now as their superior, as well as the sight of the deceased Charlie Kinnear.

It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of seeing a dead body – though the sight was always grim, and definitely more than a little creepy in the hair-raising, goose-bump-inducing way. This certainly wouldn’t be her first. The town wasn’t known for its low crime rate, even if recently the rate had spiked.

What concerned her most was the daunting fact that this would mark her first solo foray into an active crime scene, and the immense responsibility of spearheading the investigation weighed upon her shoulders. Still fogged by the dregs of one too many drinks and far too little sleep, she knew her faculties were dulled, her usually razor-sharp mind and senses sluggish. This was not the ideal condition in which to make her debut as lead detective.

Yet there was no time for rest or recovery now, no chance to return to fighting form. She didn't choose which cases she was assigned to, and being thrust abruptly into the deep end was, she knew, an opportunity to prove herself.

One thing she had to keep in check was the rising tide of self-doubt. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves, straightened her spine, and reflected: In cases where people have been killed, no job after the fact was ever good enough.

Hearing a tap at her driver’s side window, she turned to see a familiar face. The police officer, a young and cherub-faced man, moved back to a respectful distance while Sasha climbed out of her car carefully. She knew if she stood up too quickly, her headache would come hammering back in full force.

“Detective Sasha Monroe,” he said, grinning and nodding, the tone in his voice congratulatory, but with a hint of humor.

“Hey, Jack,” she said, returning the smile. The boy was in his early twenties, brimming with enthusiasm, and prone to foot-in-mouth moments. He was a nice kid, even if his edge was a little dull. “Mr. Kinnear inside?” She nodded with her head at the dark and narrow house.

The young police officer nodded gravely, and his smile faded.

“Yes, he is.”

“Bad?” Sasha asked, making a face, and placing her front teeth on her bottom lip. She felt then how dry her lips were, and dug out her lip balm. She carried it everywhere. It was essential out here.

He blinked, and nodded again. “Yes.”

“They haven’t told me much of anything, yet.” She took a deep breath, her mind doing its best to run through the standard crime scene protocol. “You’ve got everything taped up?” she asked, but she could already see the police tape cordoning off the house.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Coroner on his way?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that,” Sasha said quietly. She turned her back on the sun, already formidable. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. “It makes me feel old.”

“Should I call you sir, then?”

“Why not?” Sasha said with a good-natured smile. But the look of confusion on the young man’s face reminded her that he was none-too-bright.

“Yes, uh, s-sir.”

She took a breath, and put a hand on her hip. She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “Touch anything?”

The young officer recoiled visibly. “Of course not.”

“Come on, Jack. I’ve got to ask.”

“Didn’t you always hate it when the detectives asked you?”

“Yes,” Sasha admitted. “I did. Touch the body?”

Jack laughed, shook his head. “Just the wrist to check for a pulse.”

“Not the neck?”

He stalled for a moment, scuffed his feet against the ground, kicking up sand that drifted away like a puff of orange smoke. “Maybe you’d better go inside.”

Sasha looked at the young man. She hated that he was being cryptic. That was always a bad sign. It made her stomach knot. “Right. Who called it in?” She looked at the two flanking houses, and saw a face in the windows of both.

“Um, hold on.”

“Okay,” Sasha murmured, watching him flip through his pad. “Take your time.”

“Mrs. Sally Clark over here,” he said, pointing at the house to the left. “Called in saying she saw a large animal outside of her house. That was at two in the morning.”

“I wonder what Mrs. Clark was doing up at two,” Sasha murmured. Her instincts told her that wasn’t a particularly useful avenue of speculation, but she almost felt put on the spot now, as though she was supposed to be doing more, considering everything. And, for no reason she could figure, she suddenly felt like she had to make a big show of it all, as if to prove her worth.

“So we responded, my partner and I, but we didn’t find anything.”

Sasha blinked a few times. “Wait, you were here last night?”

“Just hours ago.”

“But you didn’t see or notice anything.”

“No, sir.”

Sasha paused. Being called ‘sir’ was a bit weird. “Okay, so who called Charlie Kinnear in?”

“Over there on the right, Mr. Sands – I’m sure you know him.”

“I do.” He ran the free local paper in town, and was standing at his window, peering at them.

“Right, I’d like to talk with him,” Sasha said, not looking forward to it. “Could you go over there and ask him to get dressed?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I can see he’s still in his robe. I’m not in the mood to see a hairy paunch this morning, so ask him to get dressed and come outside. I want to have a chat with him.”

“But it’s half past five in the morning.”

Sasha put her other hand on her other hip, shifted her weight as though considering how she should respond to him. “So what? He’s up, anyway.”

She watched as the patrolman nodded quickly and then began walking to Mr. Sands’ house, nearly tripping over an empty bottle of beer on the pavement.

Sasha shook her head. Social etiquette was the first thing to go whenever there was a crime scene to work, even in a small town like this. The boy should know that.

After taking a few moments to prepare herself, she then ducked beneath the plastic, reflective crime scene tape and entered the house. She nodded at a uniform, a man she recognized but didn’t know by name. They had never worked a shift together.

“In the bedroom, Detective Monroe.”

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said. “I can’t remember if we’ve—”

“We’ve never formally met, but every cop in town knows you by now. Hell, everyone in town knows you now, after what you did. It was really brave of you.”

Sasha swallowed. “Thanks.”

It was not exactly what she wanted to hear, given now that she was in charge of what was growing more certain would be high-profile death. Something in her gut told her so, and she had learned to trust that instinct long ago.

On top of that, there were usually only three likely outcomes when a body was in the bedroom, and two of them were bad. The third one was worse. The first and best case was that the death was due to natural causes. Old age or a heart attack. Then came accidental deaths. There was that one case a few years back… autoerotic asphyxiation. More common than you might think, or so she was told anyway.

The third most likely possibility, and the worst, was murder.