Candyman Coming III
| Candyman Coming III | |
|---|---|
| Players |
Nadia and Hazel get the call to yet another grisly murder. Alex tags along and encounters a fleeting ghost who helps point the way. |
Nadia nods a few times although the voice at the other end can't see her. "Ok, yes I'll be there asap. I can bring Dr McReady as well, we've been consulting on this one. Understood. Tell the techs to look for teeth....Yes teeth, fangs, like an animal...yes. Yes!" She roll her eyes, exasperation clearly written across her face. "Alright, half an hour tops." She hangs up and slips the phone away. Hazel looks down at her phone, the "confirm order" button unpressed. "Christ. All right then." Her own phone buzzes, she looks down and checks it. Sure enough... "And there we go, that's my summons. Such efficiency." She smiles ruefully. "Sorry boys, dinner is off. You can come along, but you'll need to stay behind the official line while we do our thing. But if you want a trail to follow, this is your best chance. I can get you closer to the body, say you're an intern or something Alex. Best i can do on short notice, and you can't get full furry..." And with that, she grabs her helmet, and her work kit from the kitchen cupboard. She suits up, she rolls out, and anybody who wants a ride on the back of her bike is welcome to take their own life in their hands... Yellow tape surrounds a single-family craftsman home on the corner of the block. Yellow tape cordons off the lawn facing the street corner and to the house, where the bushes just in front of a window lie torn up and drenched in blood. Within, a mangled body lies limp, surrounded by crime scene investigators. At least three different technicians are out here tonight, dutifully collecting samples and photographs. To wolf senses, the smell of fear is redolent, pouring from the house and to a lesser degree, the surrounding neighborhood. An elderly man sits on the stairs leading to his front door, an untouched mug of tea next to him, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, a vacant, hollow expression on his face. On the drive over here Nadia has shrugged into her uniform jacket and shifted entirely into work mode. So much for a quiet evening chatting about the case over pizza and beers... She pops a couple of mints into her mouth to deal with the evidence of the latter before sliding out of the car and heading for the scene. Shrewd, dark eyes dart around the taped off area, take in the bloody mess of the body and the man sitting on the steps. She alters her course to the latter and sits down next to him. "Sir, Detective Tofana, please call me Nadia. Can you tell me what happened?" Hazel flips her badge to the officer by the tape, and is ducking under it even as she pulls on her gloves. She nods to the others poking around the scene, and heads to get her first look over the poor unfortunate. "Sweet jesus. Well, it certainly fits the MO. Let's get a look. Bring that camera over here, get some shots here." And with that, she started as full an examination as she could under the circumstances. Her mind is clicking into gear, not someone who had been stalked this time then, that could have several different connotations. "I am so very sorry for your loss sir, this...thing has killed too many people already but you calling us so quickly may be the thing we need to finally pin it down. I cannot bring your wife back but I can catch the thing that killed her." She can't bring herself to call it a person, even had she believed the killer entirely human she would have been reluctant to grant it personhood after the violence it displayed. "I don't want to make you relive everything tonight but if you can think of anything like the direction it came from or details of what it looked like, anything could be helpful no matter how small. I can get one of the medics to sit inside with you? You don't have to watch all of this..." There isn't much else she can do until the horde of swarming techs thins out a little but she can at least make this poor man's night a little warmer perhaps. Alex heads over on his own, smoking as he comes into view and standing on the sidelines. Once his cigarette is done he drops it to the ground and crushes it out. With a look towards the body he tries to cross the tape, trying to talk his way past but not looking like he's doing that good of a job. Hazel looks up from her work and remarks "He's with me. intern. Get over here and help me examine this. About time you got some close up exprience." She produces a set of gloves and tosses them to Alex "And put these on. how many more times? get some of your own! honestly, you want to learn, but you never pay attention... Help me roll her." Conveniently, onto her back, face up... Alex grabs the tossed gloves out of the air when they're thrown to him and quickly pulls them on. Following Hazel's lead, he takes the time to bend down and fix his gaze on those of the dead woman. It doesn't take long before the Bone Shadow gets the info he needs with a soft, rumbled growl of displeasure. Looking up from the corpse, he lets his eyes scan their surroundings as if looking for something. Frowning again, he stares at a spot near a nearby light post. Turning his attention to Hazel he says softly, "Dirt in the eyes, face down. Terror, confusion, and then pain, mortal pain as the body was torn open with fangs and teeth." Sniffing at the air, he adds, "There is a ghost nearby." Looking back towards the lamp post he tacks on softly, "I should try to track the scent, but the city makes it hard." Beckoning over one of the paramedics Nadia tries to make sure that the widower has all he needs, although there is little she can do to offer him any more comfort right now. She pushes to her feet again and takes a slow walk around the scene, eyes open for broken down bushes or indications of where the creature came from. Something has been bothering her since she first talked to Hazel, if this thing is losing teeth then how is it still killing the way it is? Is that why it tears into the bodies rather than simply biting down... She slips a pair of gloves onto her hands and snags a bunch of evidence bags from one of the techs. Hazel nods to Alex. She murmurs softly. "I see her. How do you think I got so good at my job? SOmetimes the victim talks, even post mortem. I can't really talk to them the same way you can, though. If you get the chance, go and have a word. You're an intern. Walking away to the lamp post and throwing up would be pretty normal, and you might get a chance to speak to her. The city stink is a problem, but maybe you can learn something else that way." She continued with her examination, but for all the horrible situation, it was not actually a hard case. "Whatever it was had hit her like an offensive tackle at full speed. The poor woman didn't stand a chance, she had gone flying like she was as light as a feather." She spoke at a normal level to Nadia. "Came down in the shrubs, and that was it. Tore her open and did what we know it loves best. Went right for the aorta." She looks at the blood spray around the area. "Pretty conclusively. I can give you more detail once we get her downtown, but there's not much more I can do with her right now. However." She moved back from the body and examined the ground. "I can do something else. We've got excellent footprints here. With the right equipment, I can maybe estimate the thing's size. Weight ratio to depth resistance of the mud. If there are enough prints, I could even get a decent idea of the velocity of the thing. It's not much, but... Every little part helps us build a picture." She knelt by the prints, and started testing the ground resistance, and measuring the prints. Nadia leans forwards and pokes at something with the tip of a swab. "Just in case we were in doubt about it being the same killer..." There's a tooth snagged against a rib and barely visible with its coating of fresh blood and viscera. "Looks like it headed off that way, unless I'm mistaken it's a sheer drop off to the canal just past that hedge. Any chance it might have left us something useful?" The fang curves from the root, probably another left. "It keeps leaving fangs behind but it barely registered the pain from losing the one at Angel's and it certainly didn't seem bothered by the loss. Can they regrow teeth?" There's a certainty in her statement about the creature's response but she seems to have not registered the way she spoke, as though she'd experienced it from the inside. Alex nods at the pair with him at the body. Taking the tooth he palms it while making like he's getting sick and running off to the nearby pole, leaning against it to talk softly with the ghost. Hazel is frowning at the print, and looks troubled. She looks up as Nadia speaks. "I can't be sure of anything any more. Maybe it can. There's a fair few creatures that can do, and none of them have the most pleasant dental hygeine.I'll run the usual check on whatever you find, but for now, we can say pretty safely it is the same thing. Unless it's picked up a girlfriend along the way" She frowns. More. And gets up to measure the distance between the footprints. "Sweet Jesus." She called out to a nearby technician. "Waldo, can you get me silicon casts of these prints please? Finest detail possible. There's a few visible prints. It might be a very long shot, but who knows? maybe, buried in records somewhere, we'll find a match." She gives Nadia a nod, indicating that it is OK for Alex to take what he needs to do a proper tracking. "Odd, though. It did all this... and left. I mean, wouldn't the husband have been an easy target too? Maybe it was full..." To those with the sight to see, the ghost's features are hazy and pale. Much of what once could have identified it is gone, its face like a mask of ephemera, its body ending at the knees. "Go down there," it says in a soft, mournful voice, "And you'll join Mrs. Whitehead over there. That bloodsucker won't hesitate to kill you, young man." For all of her talents, Nadia cannot see the spirit. She lets Alex take the tooth but winces as he handles evidence with no gloves or preparation. "Now there's a horrible thought. One is more than enough for me. Whatever this thing is it's...If we go diving into case files we're better off contacting the kind of people who collect 'bigfoot' prints and things I think...Does seem strange that it didn't grab the husband as well, maybe it doesn't like being watched and he disturbed it? The husband says she was out here looking for the cat...I guess it could have left *before* he came out?" Looking at the ghost from the corner of his eyes while acting like he's doubled over getting sick, Alex slips the tooth into his pocket. Speaking softly he replies, "What do you know of it? That thing that did this?" Clearing his throat he adds, "You knew Mrs. Whitehead? Why did it attack her?" "It's been here for years," the ghost replies matter-of-factly. "It started twenty years ago, some people from the neighborhood got together and formed a pact to kill it. They thought they succeeded and moved away or died in the years since, but it rose again and picked up right where it left off." The ghost turns its hollow eye-sockets in the direction of the yellow tape. "I knew her when she was just a girl," it says mournfully. "The bloodsucker got hungry. I see it feed on rats and cats, but it wants human blood eventually. It always does." Hazel watches Alex from the corner of her eye, then sits back on her haunches. "At this point, I'd do anything to get a lead. But what we're looking at is... Nadia, this scares me. I've seen weird, and I have seen some truly horrifying things, but this? Look at the prints. They're human sized. Larger than ours, maybe, but nothing out of the ordinary. Barefoot, but the overall anatomy is indistinguishable from humans. But... look, I know my job. And I'm good at it. I'm damn good at math, too. I ran the numbers off the top of my head. Weight based on dirt dislodged, distance between the prints. Other factors. This thing is human sized, though god knows what it looks like. But it covered this ground in a way that makes that Bolt guy look like a slacker. And the force it hit her with? I can't give you pound per inch, but we're talking the sort of power you see in auto accidents, not a tackle from an athlete. This is way outside human strength." She lowered her voice considerably. "Seals the deal. The other stuff we had could have just been one super hideous Gacy type - awful, but still human. No chance of that now. No human could do what we see here." She leans in and takes a closer look at the prints. "Worth a check then. This is...I didn't think it was human, it...Once you told me there were other things out there it became obvious, it had to be something else. There are monstrous people in the world but they don't rip bodies apart the way this thing has, they don't leap over six foot hedges as though they're not there, they don't...they don't chase down teenagers and make cameras fritz by their mere presence. I know you gave me the whole 'if it exists it's natural' line but..." Nadia shrugs. She dealt with a lot of her terror last time, and the bug monster, and...She was convinced that one of these days she'd have a full on melt down and decide she was crazy but for now there were yet more bodies on the ground and the thing killing people was still out there. Alex speaks softly with the ghost. "It's a vampire then? Blood sucker?" Looking in the direction it went he adds to the ghost, "We want to help stop it. What can you tell me that can help? How can we find it?" Hazel nods slowly. "I remained in hope. Even now, I try to be optimistic. It's my nature. But this seals it. And I have got a lot of work ahead of me. I'm going to have to do some serious tweaking in my reports to make this work out properly. But I think you and I? We've run into a wall here. We can do your idea for triangulating the lair. But we need to see what Alex and the boys come up with. They're good." She looks over to Alex and the ghost. "I *think* they're good. They'd better be. Even if we pin down where it sleeps, we're going to need them to deal with it. CPD isn't remotely prepared for this. They go in to take down some wild animal, we'll be hip deep in blood." She sighs. "Not this time. Not again." "Yeah, I was going to tell you about the thing I found out in the woods but then the phone rang and...Priest suggested I call in backup but...Dio. No one should have to deal with this stuff really, but I don't want to be the reason someone else gets killed because there's no way I can prepare them for what they're going to face." Nadia frowns. "I don't like letting someone else do my legwork for me but...This is so far out of my depth, my comfort zone. I feel like a rookie who's been dumped in at the deep end on her first day with zero training. How do you do it?"
"I hadn't even considered the undercity..." Nadia looks chagrined as though she should have covered all possibilities already. "Shit. Sewerage and animal control calls don't tend to get our way unless they require police presence, usually someone who's trained their dog to attack or something and we need to deal with the human while AC deals with the pet." She nods to Alex and strips off her gloves before running one hand through her hair. "Not saying I haven't seriously considered the fact I'm just losing the plot... Dead animals...Does this thing eat them as well?" Her eyes drift closed for a moment, blocking out the scene of horror around her. "Daniels? Once you folks are done with the body I'm releasing it to Dr McReady's custody so you can get it to the morgue. So far I'm pretty confident in saying it's the same MO as the others." Cop mode, her voice is all business while she snaps orders to one of the scene techs. "I can pull a bunch of maps up, perhaps contact the city library and see what they have in their archives for the sewers and the bits of the undercity that have been mapped...what little there is of it."\ Alex nods in agreement with Hazel's potential plan to find the creature's haven. "We could also use this as a start, track it by scent and any clues like blood, foot prints. Look for those signs of it's lair." | |