Black City Demon Page 6

  “Are you here to try to help identify the body?” Kowalski chirped as we walked. With his ruddy face and dull red hair, he looked more Irish than Polish. I judged he’d been an officer for no more than three or four months. “I’ve heard it looks something awful.”

  “I won’t know what I can do until I see it. I’ll need to be alone so I can concentrate better.”

  “Oh, sure! That’s what Detective Cortez said to the sergeant. I was there.”

  When Kowalski spoke of Cortez, there was more respect than what the sergeant had shown. I didn’t know if that was a sign of more tolerance in general or simply that the rookie was an obliging man. It probably didn’t matter. The odds were good he’d either be jaded or dead in a year or two.

  “There’s no one in today, but since you were supposed to stop by, everything should be arranged. Michael promised.”

  It was all I could do to keep from stumbling. “Michael?”

  “He keeps things orderly for the coroner.”

  “This Michael? I think I know him. Is he a Negro?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a good, hard worker.” Officer Kowalski gestured to the right. “Here, sir.”

  I nodded absently as I entered the morgue. I was about to tell him he didn’t have to come inside, only to find he’d already turned around and left.

  I’d thought that Cortez had gone to a lot of trouble just for me, but now I saw another’s hand in the matter that might’ve influenced the detective without him knowing. I knew a Michael who’d made his presence felt more than once during the fight with Oberon, an elderly Negro with a habit of popping up at some opportune times.

  An elderly Negro who might have been Saint Michael, the archangel.

  To my recollection, I’d never before actually met another saint, much less an archangel. True, I spent most of my prayer in the church named for him, but I’d never expected an answer, much less a personal appearance. I wasn’t even sure if I’d really met him, for that matter. I only knew that evidence suggested Saint Michael had tried to lend a hand against Oberon.

  That made the corpse of even more interest to me. I didn’t have to wonder which one it might be. Someone had marked one of the drawers with a tag on which I found my appointment written. I tore off the tag and pulled the drawer open.

  The body was covered with a sheet, of course, but I judged it to be roughly my height. I assumed that meant it was male. That made sense if it was a casualty of the bootlegger war between Moran and Capone. I wondered what was so special about it that Cortez—and maybe a higher power—had wanted me to see it so badly.

  I pulled back the sheet . . . and almost dropped it.

  Someone had vivisected the victim from head to toe. Someone with knowledge and skill. I’d seen butchery many times in my life. This was practiced butchery. I’d no doubt that it’d been done while the victim was still living, too. I silently cursed Cortez for not warning me about what I was going to see. Clearly, he’d somehow kept the truth of the corpse’s condition from the press. There wasn’t a stitch of clothes nor anything that would’ve marked this as a gangland hit.

  I looked at the face . . . or where it’d been. Something was bothering me about the body. I wondered again why . . . assuming I was right . . . powers above had also wanted me to see this.

  What do you want me to see, Michael, if you want me to see anything at all? What do you—

  Then, I saw the telltale details that even so much time in the water—as the one article said the body was found in the Chicago River—couldn’t hide. The narrow jaw. The slightly longer skull. The different placement of the ears—or at least the holes where the ears used to be. I took another look at the limbs, at the fingers, which stretched farther than they should’ve.

  Inside, the dragon hissed as he, too, came to understand the truth.

  This was no human corpse.

  This was the mutilated shell of a high-caste elf.

  CHAPTER 6

  The dragon hissed again. For once, we were in concert. Yes, it saved us the job of hunting this elf down, but it also meant that there was something worse out there.

  I knew that Her Lady had her enforcers in the mortal world. I suppose this could’ve been the work of one of them, but it didn’t have that Feirie touch. Of course, I didn’t know exactly whose touch this could be. I couldn’t imagine any of Moran’s or Capone’s boys spending this much time and interest on a victim. Moreover, I couldn’t help but think that whatever had done this had done so with some curiosity as to how this elf looked inside.

  Suddenly, I was no longer concerned about Oberon or any leftovers from his supporters. Suddenly, I wondered even more just who—or maybe what—Alexander Bond was. If he was the physician he said he was, then this looked like something just up his alley.

  Right away, I thought of Claryce. She already knew to be wary of Bond, but this added a new level of danger.

  I’d seen enough. There was nothing about the corpse that would identify it as from Feirie; any normal person would either chalk it up to the mutilation of the body or maybe a problem of birth. For the sharp-sighted Cortez, I’d come up with an excuse he couldn’t argue with.

  After shutting the drawer, I headed out of the morgue . . . and right into Cortez himself.

  “Nick Medea! With this lousy weather, I thought I’d miss you!”

  I’d been hoping just that. I eyed his less formal coat and slacks. “Are you on duty?”

  He toyed with an unlit cigarette. “Nah, I’m off today, you know? I was actually on my way to see my brother, but just before I left, Maria told me there was a call. Said that I was to know that you were on your way here after all, despite the lovely day.”

  I hadn’t been aware he had a brother, not that I’d been curious. “Did she say if it was Michael who called?”

  The detective frowned. “Didn’t say who called. Did you want this Michael to call?”

  “Never mind.” There was no escaping Cortez, so I quickly went into an explanation on the corpse. “I looked it over. You may have a slasher out there. Jack the Ripper type. He did a beauty of a job on the victim.”

  “Yeah, some piece of work, eh? Made me cross myself when I first saw it, you know? Wanted you to see it, ’cause you work with all that spooky stuff. You ever run across anything like that?”

  “I disprove ghosts, Cortez. Murder’s your department.”

  He chewed on the Lucky. “He look a little funny to you, though? Not quite right?”

  “Time in the Chicago River’ll do that to you.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I suppose so.” Cortez turned to walk with me. I hid my frown. “Well, that’s about what I thought I might get out of you, but I wanted to hear.”

  “Sorry you wasted your time. Hope your brother won’t mind the wait.”

  Cortez grunted. “Pedro won’t mind. He’s been gone two years now.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope it wasn’t bad.”

  “Killed in a construction accident while working on the new Union Station. Pedro, he came here first as a traquero—a railroad laborer—you know? Worked hard to save enough to bring me and the family up. No schooling like I had, but a good, honest worker.”

  “You have my belated sympathies.”

  He nodded his thanks, then grinned sadly. “I did good for him in one way, you know? I got him a nice place in Saint Boniface. Lot of Krauts there, but good, Catholic folk. He was like my Maria. Very religious. Met a Kraut priest preaching at a mission and took a liking to the father’s patron saint, you know?”

  I paid the rest little mind, the mention of Saint Boniface snaring my attention. I wanted to ask just where Cortez’s brother was buried in the cemetery, but decided better of it.

  “Listen, Nick Medea, I appreciate you coming, though.” Cortez started to reach a hand to me, then, with a weak grin, pulled it back.

  I took it before he could finish putting it away. I gave it a congenial shake. His expression didn’t change, but there was a look in his eyes. He shook back. I
doubted most of his colleagues shook hands with him. After all, he was a “wetback.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help more,” I said as we let go.

  “It’s jake, Bo. Just get that windshield fixed, okay? I saw that when I got here.”

  “Soon as I can.” A sudden thought occurred to me. I knew I shouldn’t get Cortez curious on the subject, but I suspected time was of the essence. “You hear of anything that ever happened around West Sixty-Third Street? Near the six hundred block? A murder or something a long while back?”

  “This got to do with your ghost work?”

  It was as good an excuse as any. “Yeah. Client wants me to check out a building for him. He swears he sees shadows and hears voices.” I gave the detective a look that indicated I didn’t believe there was anything supernatural.

  Cortez sought for another Lucky. I had no idea what’d happened to the other. “West Sixty-Third? That sounds familiar. Six hundred block, you say?”

  I dared push a little more. “Six-oh-three, I think.”

  “A murder on West Sixty-Third . . . six-oh-three . . .” His eyes widened. He stuck the new Lucky in the corner of his mouth as he grinned. “Aaah, Nick Medea, you gotta know that one or you’re no good ghostbuster! That’s where the ‘Murder Castle’ stood, Bo! That’s where the Beast did his dirty work! They talked all about him when I was training. It was a big thing, Bo!”

  “The ‘Murder Hotel.’” That rang a bell. “The World’s Fair.”

  “Yeah, that’s when. What’s that, over thirty years ago?”

  “Just over.” The World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition. I remembered now. While I’d been hunting Wyld, a monster in actual human form’d been torturing and slaughtering innocents in a hotel he’d had built with the help of an accomplice. I remembered that there’d been at least eight victims, many of them female. Rumors had had it that there’d been a lot more, though. The man the newspapers had called “the Beast of Chicago” had been very meticulous about removing all remains, from what I could recall, so it’d proved impossible to verify any count.

  “The Beast,” I muttered. “I’d forgotten about that. What happened to him?”

  The detective shrugged. “I suppose they caught him. Don’t really remember more than that. Just recall at the time thinking what a place of horrors that’d been.” He exhaled. “Listen, Bo, we got enough murders going on these days, not just with the gang wars, but things like what you saw. Got two more strange murders. Not so . . . so like that . . . but more than enough to deal with, you know? Only reason I remembered the address was because my first sergeant was a beat cop when it happened and yakked about all the hubbub.”

  I should’ve left matters where they were, but again he’d mentioned something of interest. “You said ‘two more’ odd murders?”

  “Yeah, the type that they like to drop in my lap . . . just in case.”

  We both knew “just in case” meant failing to solve those murders could be embarrassing, which was why they’d left them to the “wetback.”

  For once, the mask of congeniality fell from Cortez’s face. He leaned close. “Dropped them in the lap of their own traquero, you know? That’s the way some of them think. Well, if I’m half the traquero my brother was, I’ll do him and my family proud, Bo, and that’s what matters.”

  Cortez tipped his hat and walked off. I had the feeling that I’d missed some earlier argument and that he’d been glad to see me just to get that off his chest. It said something that Cortez thought he could be so blunt with me. I doubted he had many friends in the department. I realized that I might be the closest thing.

  The dragon chuckled at that, naturally . . . and I really couldn’t blame him.

  I could’ve had Barnaby deal with the Packard, but I knew he’d ask when we were going to see Joseph. I couldn’t arrange that just yet, so despite more promises to Cortez, I toughed out driving with the bullet hole in front of me until I got out to Andersonville on the North Side just before what passed for sundown. My former clients, the Nilssons, made their home out here, and although I’d driven by once already, I wanted to take one last look around. I knew I was close when I saw several blond heads and the light jackets despite the cold. After the Night the Dragon Breathed, a good number of the Swedish immigrants to Chicago—and there’d been many who’d made the journey to the Windy City from Scandinavia—had moved up en masse to here. They were taking the storm a lot better than most of the city, which meant I couldn’t just park in front of the house.

  There was no good reason to come back here a second time, but I was following a hunch. I pulled up a block from the house, parked, and started walking. The houses around here weren’t that old, but Wyld only cared about places to secrete themselves. The one I’d expected to find had likely figured that no one would ever think of coming to this outer neighborhood.

  But what had happened to my quarry, I wanted to know. After seeing the corpse, I now wondered if something had happened to the one supposedly hiding here.

  Even though it was daytime, I risked the dragon’s gaze. Unfortunately, doing so revealed nothing. I shifted back to normal, then decided to take a chance and climb over the fence into their yard.

  Hurrying to the house, I peered inside. There was no movement. I waited, then carefully checked the back door. Too often, people locked their front doors, then forgot about the one in back.

  The knob turned. I pulled the door open slowly before stepping inside.

  That was when the stench hit me.

  Gritting my teeth I pulled out Her Lady’s gift and moved through the kitchen. I hoped and prayed—prayed a lot—that I was wrong, but there was no other reason for the all-too-familiar odor permeating the house.

  And there they were. She sat with her hands on her lap, her skirt neatly set . . . and her head tipping so far back due to the cut through her throat that, if she’d still lived, she’d have been staring at the front door. Her husband sat across from her, his death from some sharp point driven through the base of his skull. He still held a pipe in his hand, the remnants of the burnt tobacco trying in vain to outdo the smell of decay.

  They’d died quickly if violently, but not where they’d been sitting. Someone with a sick sense of humor’d arranged them like this. Oddly, there was little blood even at the wounds. When I looked closer, I saw that the wounds had been cauterized somehow, almost as if by a weapon from Feirie.

  Fetch wasn’t with me, but thanks to the dragon, I could smell something else about them that bothered me even more. They’d been dead for some time. In fact, they’d already been dead when I’d called and supposedly talked to the wife.

  I cursed myself for failing them. If I’d come the same day that they’d first called me, maybe they’d have still been alive.

  Maybe.

  The stairs beckoned me. I knew the Wyld had to have fled after its dirty work, but still I might find a clue. I no longer worried about Dr. Bond; this was a task I’d failed miserably at, and the only way to atone for my sin even the least was to see if I could track down their killer.

  Give me your gaze again, I ordered the dragon.

  There is nothing here. . . . The prey is gone. . . .

  “We’re going up,” I muttered to him. “Give it to me. . . .”

  I waited. Then, slowly, the world turned emerald.

  The steps creaked slightly as I ascended, but I wasn’t worried. If, on the off chance, the Wyld was still here, it already knew someone was in the house.

  I reached the top and immediately spotted the door to the attic. The sword gripped tight, I headed toward it—

  —and sensed movement in the bedroom to the right.

  The weather and the angle of the house combined to provide plenty of shadows in the bedroom. Some of them were very dark even through the dragon’s gaze. I focused on the areas with the blackest shadows and entered the bedroom.

  There was a hint of Feirie in the shadows before me. Not much. In fact, too little to have been th
e source of the movement I’d noted.

  I turned from the shadows to the least likely place in the room: the bed itself. Sure enough, the shadows beneath were darker than they should’ve been considering the dragon’s eyes.

  “The monster under the bed . . .” I growled as I neared. “Is that what it always was? One of you biding your time by tormenting children? Is that how powerful you are? Just a tormentor of children?”

  I knew that this was more than some simple creature out of a child’s nightmare, but I also knew one thing about the Wyld . . . and of Feirie folk in general. Even more than most humans, they had a vanity about them that made such a taunt often strike home. No force of Feirie liked to be reduced to a child’s nightmare.

  The bed rattled, then started to rise. I wasn’t impressed. I’d seen Wyld do a lot worse just to show off. Still, I wondered why it was here at all anymore. I also wondered why it’d been so hard for me to sense, even with the dragon.

  Then, the bed began spinning. The Wyld was strong, I knew that, but it continued to go out of its way to show off rather than attack.

  I had no patience for that. Two innocents were dead, and we were both guilty in some manner or another of the crime. At least I could see that their actual murderer faced the consequences. It still wouldn’t assuage my own guilt, but it would be some justice.

  “Are you through?” I mocked. “I’ve seen better. Show me something impressive.”

  The bed tipped over and flew hard into the outer wall. I hoped the neighbors wouldn’t hear the thud as it crashed and splintered.

  And there, rising high enough to nearly touch the ceiling, stood my quarry. A living shadow. It wore a hood that gave it the look of the Grim Reaper, and even with the dragon’s vision I could only make out a murky face with pits for eyes.

  A pair of long, sinewy hands emerged from the shadow cloak. There were only four digits on each hand, all of them ending in nails as long as the fingers themselves. I sensed power swelling between those fingers.