A Wrench In The Works
The desk was all but invisible behind the stacks of file folders, fast-food wrappers, abandoned coffee cups and empty, crumpled packs of American Spirit. The office itself was abysmally filthy, and very cramped, with small tables holding plastic-bagged bits of bloody clothing and brick, filing cabinets overloaded with assorted papers, and a small table that groaned under newspapers. The walls were papered with take-out menus, photographs that would make murderers blanch and hot-sheets listing car makes and models, license plate numbers and descriptions. It was a small, untidy corner of Hell, filled to the brim with examples of the purest human cruelty.
First Lieutenant Detective Tom Landsman had seen enough.
Leaning back in the creaking metal deathtrap that served him as an office chair, the middle-aged cop lit another cigarette and took a deep drag, pulling the poisonous smoke as far into his lungs as possible. Suicide by lung cancer was taking too long. Maybe he should try eating a bullet.
Landsman wasn’t the suicidal type, normally, but there were times like today when he felt death couldn’t be much worse. All of the people he’d scraped up off the streets seemed perfectly calm and very much at ease. He felt around blindly for his coffee cup and took a sip, then promptly spat into it, wiping cold coffee and cigarette ash off of his lips. Just his luck to chug from a makeshift ashtray. Groaning faintly, he slumped back into his chair and took another drag. His faded grey eyes kept neatly avoiding the file sitting on his desk, all juicy four inches of it.
A serial killer. Fuck.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to not think about it, but his mind kept wandering back to the scene from way too damn early this morning. Landsman had been a detective for twenty three years, in Homicide for eleven, and nothing he’d seen before had matched up to that. The file sat, still waiting, the VICAP folder seeming to gleam a bit under the dull overhead lights. The detective grumbled faintly and glanced at his lower left hand drawer, thinking longingly of the bottle of Jack Daniel’s waiting under old case files. Landsman sat up and rubbed at his temples, glancing through the frosted glass window of his office door. It was nearly two in the morning, almost a full twenty-four hours after they’d found…the scene, and the Homicide department was deserted. Michaels and Jacoby were out on a call, and Brown was asleep in front of the department’s miniscule television. As the the department’s head detective, it really was up to him to set a good example. Landsman’s eyes shifted to the file. Fuck the good example.
With two inches of Jack concealed in what was left of his lunchtime Coke, Landsman lit another cigarette and steeled himself. With a deep breath, he flipped the cover back and looked right into the face of a lovely, fifteen year old blonde girl. Landsman’s lips twisted around the cigarette’s butt, remembering what they’d found that morning. Shaking his head, he chased a gulp of his Jack n’ Coke with another cigarette, having already smoked the first in about two minutes. He began paging through the file, forcing himself to pause and look at the photographs of the crime scene, of what was *left* of the teenage girl (Coleen Stevens, she has a name) and then continued through to the file from VICAP, the one he really didn’t want to look at.
In twenty-three years of police service, Landsman had only encountered one serial killer. It had been more than enough, and he took another drink from his cup, trying to drown out the memory. (…stuck underground, smelling the fresh blood…he was close, so close…not human, it’s not human!) Shaking his head, the detective bit his lower lip and closed the file again. This was going to be a hellacious call to make, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to give it a try. Would it be better to wait for one of the other detectives, Strunt perhaps, to make the call? He put his head in his hands, heedless of the smouldering cigarette, and took a few deep breaths.
There were a few perks to knowing Brandenburg’s darker side. Ever since that encounter with Nathan Talbot fifteen years ago, Landsman had been ‘in the know.’ He wasn’t confused by corpses that were found with no blood. Most of the time they were troublemakers, cheap pimps or transients. Although he was sworn to defend the public trust and uphold the law, Landsman had long since ceased believing that every human being had the right to live their lives as they saw fit. Too many people used their lives to control others, to use others, to override another person’s rights and enhance their own. He had been before the board a couple of times for his ‘irrational’ behavior, usually connected to something he had to do for the city’s more unusual inhabitants. It was a price he was willing to pay, but there were times when Landsman envied his collegues’ ignorance. It would have been so much easier to examine a crime scene if he could think of just human reasons, just human threats.
Like this. He looked at the crime scene, and he honestly couldn’t see how the perpetrator had been human. The autopsy report had already come back: her pelvis had been *shattered* by the sexual assault, not just broken. The internal bruising and tearing couldn’t have been made by a human man, and the way her limbs were wrenched out of socket… Landsman rubbed his eyes and lit another cigarette. It couldn’t have been done by a human. He ran through all the possible culprits in his mind: vampires, fae, shifting creatures, the demons… Who did he ask first? Where did he go to even *begin* tracking this down?
"Why the hell did that bastard decide to come into *my* city for his fun?" Landsman mumbled, reaching for his cell phone. He hesitated, then picked up the office phone. Better to make this from the ‘business’ number: it would work better that way. His hand shook, and he tried taking another deep breath. How did you call a friend and tell them there was a frighteningly good chance that their daughter had been murdered by a serial killer? Even worse, how did you tell a good friend with exceptionally dangerous friends that his daughter may be dead?
Landsman closed his eyes, pressing the receiver against his forehead for a moment before he dialed clumsily. A deep breath, and he put it to his ear, listening to each ring with an increasingly heavy heart. His eyes strayed back to one photograph, the only one he’d liberated immediately from all the files, and his throat went dry. With another deep breath, he turned away from the photo of the blood-stained feather and braced himself.
"…hey Jonas. Landsman here…uh-huh. Yeah, I know… Look Jonas? I…I’ve got something I need to tell you about."