The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3) Read online

3

  Back in the parlor they all sat down, beers in hand, and Calvin turned on the TV, a twelve-year-old 24” Sony that he had earmarked for replacement as soon as possible. He had already decided that a 54” flatscreen would fit quite nicely in the old TV’s space if he just scooched the nearby furniture out of the way a little bit.

  The news was just starting. The top story was about a house fire in eastern Kingwood that was still being brought under control. The second was about the murder.

  There was a clip of a press conference given earlier at Kingwood City Hall, during which Kingwood Police Chief Trent Dowdie and County Coroner Jagannath Chandra summarized the few known facts: A man named Bradley Vallance had been found dead shortly after dawn in an alley in Kingwood’s West River neighborhood. The coroner estimated that he had been dead for about six hours, which tallied with the statement of Vallance’s girlfriend, Christine Ruddy, who had last seen Vallance at around midnight the previous night in the mouth of the very alley where he was found dead. It seemed likely that he had been killed mere moments after Christine wished him good night. A resident of West Train Apartments who had a room overlooking the crime scene reported hearing “unusual noises” from the alley at around the time in question.

  The condition of the corpse was grisly and perplexing. Large areas of flesh were missing, all the way down to the bone in many places, and though the damage was reminiscent of animal bites, there were no actual tooth marks anywhere.

  “Whatever made the injuries came together like a set of jaws closing, but had perfectly smooth edges and left no marks of individual teeth,” Coroner Chandra said. “Imagine a bear trap, only without serrations on the blades, just smooth, curved steel all the way across. I cannot say yet exactly what might have produced these injuries, or even whether it was a living creature or an implement of some kind.”

  Chief Dowdie then jumped in to say that in light of certain details, the nature of which he could not divulge, the police were provisionally treating this as a homicide, though an unusual animal attack could not, of course, be ruled out at this time.

  “In other words, they have no fucking clue,” Violet translated.

  The telegenic female newscaster closed out the piece by announcing that the police were refusing to speculate whether or not Vallance’s death might be connected with the mysterious disappearance of two teenage boys in the same neighborhood last Friday.

  The newscaster moved on to a follow-up story about the lurid murders of two members of a kiddie porn ring in Castle Township last month. Calvin turned off the TV.

  “Interesting,” he muttered.

  “I didn’t know about the two missing teenagers,” Lauren said. “I wonder if it’s connected.”

  “Of course it’s connected,” Violet said. “That’s as obvious as a turd on a radiator. We don’t need to wait for some little egghead science lab nerds to tell us that.”

  “There are these things called the rules of evidence, you know,” Cynthia said.

  “Rules are for people who are ruled.”

  Calvin shook his head. “There isn’t enough information for us to say whether there’s a connection or not. Any time there’s a sensationalistic unsolved murder, the media is quick to try to link it up with any other recent deaths or missing people in the area. And in a big, heavily populated city like Kingwood, there’re always enough murders and disappearances to provide plenty of potential links. Even if there does turn out to be a link, we still don’t know if this falls under our purview in the first place. An unsolved murder and some unusual injuries don’t necessarily contravene any natural laws or reigning scientific paradigms.”

  “Very unusual injuries,” Cynthia said. “Don’t forget: Chandra’s been the county coroner for nearly fifty years. He’s gotten awards from the Coroner’s Association of America, or whatever it’s called. He’s even written a couple of books. There’s probably very little he hasn’t seen by this point. If he’s really as baffled as he seemed to be, I’d say it’s at least worth checking out.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Calvin said. “I wasn’t saying we shouldn’t check it out, just that maybe only a couple of us should head out there tomorrow to sniff around and try to determine if this is worth devoting more time and attention to.”

  “Like scouts, or something,” Brandon said.

  “Exactly. And in the meantime we should find out the story on these missing teens—”

  “Done,” said Lauren, who for the last couple of minutes had been doggedly pressing buttons on her smart phone. “I just hunted up the info on them. Charles Reed and Zenon Dovzhenko.”

  “Xenon?” Donovan said. “Isn’t that, like, an element or something?”

  “Zenon with a Z. Says here his family’s from the Ukraine. Anyhow, the two kids, both 16, went out Friday night to ‘party’ and never came home. The kids had no known enemies, no recent troubles with anyone…” She paused to read on, then raised her eyebrows and held up a finger. “Ah. Except the police. Turns out these two had repeated arrests for what the cops refer to as vandalism but what the kids’ friends call street art.”

  “Ah, graffitists,” Brandon said with a smile. “Fellow artistes.”

  “No sign of either of them since Saturday night. None of their friends or family knows anything, their cell phones go straight to voicemail, et cetera, et cetera. They basically just went out to party, or perhaps to scrawl giant illegible letters on the sides of bridges, and then dropped off the face of the Earth.”

  “But no bodies,” Cynthia said. “I don’t know. Dropping off the face of the Earth is a whole different thing from being left horribly mutilated in an alley in a busy neighborhood.”

  “The graffitists might have been killed somewhere they haven’t been found yet,” Brandon said. “I’ve known plenty of guys who do street art, and sometimes they do their thing in very obscure, untraveled places. You’d be surprised how many places there are like that even in the middle of a city.”

  “You know, this could be, like, a serial killer or something,” Donovan said. “The poor graffiti guys could just be heads in refrigerators at this point.”

  “Maybe,” Calvin said. “But if this turns out to be just some sociopath hacking up his victims with some kind of bizarre home-made choppers, then it’s not worth our time. Human psychopathology, nasty and weird as it can be, is not anomalous and isn’t something we should be spending our time investigating.”

  He turned to Lauren. “Do you want to be part of this?” He gestured at her phone. “You’re already doing our research for us.”

  “Um…do you mean part of the group or just this investigation?”

  “Either. Both. Whatever. I mean, you’re welcome to join up with us if you want. We’d be glad to have you on the team.”

  “Um, I don’t know. I’m definitely with you for this mysterious murder. Since I’m the one who brought it to your attention, I feel a kind of proprietary interest, so I at least want to see how it shakes out. But after that…I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You definitely oughta join,” Violet told her sister. “You’ll fit right in with all these geeks.”

  “What, like you?”

  “Hell no! I’m just doin’ this for the kicks, is all.”

  “So who’s gonna be doing the scouting tomorrow?” Lauren asked Calvin. “I can’t. Or at least not until late in the day. I’ve got my job training.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve got a bunch of job interviews lined up,” Brandon said.

  “I was thinking just me and Cyn would constitute the advance team,” Calvin said. “I mean, since we read through all of Mr. May’s files, I think we’ve developed a pretty good idea of what kinds of questions to ask and what kinds of things to look out for. Uh…” He glanced at Cynthia. “You are free tomorrow, right? I mean, I know you’ve been working at the bookstore a lot lately…”

  “No, Donovan’s the only one with bookstore duty tomorrow,” Cynthia said. “So I’m good to go.
” She suddenly sat bolt upright in her seat with a big smile. “Ooh! And we can take my new car.” She noticed how everyone was looking at her with amusement. “C’mon, I’m excited, okay? I’ve never had my own car before.”

  “Yeah, well, enjoy it while it lasts,” Brandon said. “You’ll be singing a different tune when you need to get the transmission fixed, and the brake lines replaced, and all the other ten billion little things that go wrong with cars and bleed your bank account dry.”

  “No offense, but unlike you and Calvin, I plan to take good care of my car and not let it turn into a creaky box of rust.”

  “Pipe dreams. Cars age and die like everything else, especially with our shitty Ohio winters and all the concomitant potholes and body-rusting road salt. As the sage said, ‘This, too, shall pass.’ That includes cars.”

  “Yes, I know. But let me keep my new-car-owner illusions a little while longer, okay?”

  “Sorry.”

  “So, yeah,” Calvin said, “Cyn and I will check things out tomorrow in Cyn’s lovely new car, and then we can all meet back here tomorrow night, same time, same place. It looks like we’ll have a ton of leftover beer, too, so we’ll be able to either celebrate our first case, or drown our sorrows over the lack of one.”