South Beach Diet...Part 3

I slipped back into the Shadowland, hoping to catch a glimpse of my prey yet again, only to find that the creature had slipped away for the moment. I shifted back to normal vision, clenching my fist in frustration. I turned, stepped out into the street, easily slipping between the cars stuck in traffic. It was time to check out the beach. Once on the far side, I pulled the Shadow closer, hoping to use it for cover as I thought back to Corrales’ reaction to Jennifer’s shocking pronouncement.

“What do you mean by ‘not entirely human’? What else could the killer be? No animal would leave the victims spread out like that or draw those weird pictures next to the bodies.”

Jennifer nodded. Her medium length gray curls bounced as she did so. She pointed out items on her computer screen with her long elegant fingers as she spoke. “The pattern of the bodies and the symbols that are drawn has meaning, so it definitely isn’t an animal. But the way these people have been killed, it isn’t with a weapon. A knife, even a dull one, wouldn’t tear the flesh like was done on this victim and over here on this victim. These are wounds that have been made by claws of some kind, very sharp claws.”

“That doesn’t mean that some sicko hasn’t found a way to make a weapon that acts like a claw. Remember, we are in South Florida. We have more than our share of weirdos down here.”

She looked back at Corrales, her eyes intense behind her large glasses. “This killer is not your average weirdo, Miguel. There is something about the feel of this case…I believe that the missing organs of the victims have been removed for some important reason.” She shook her head violently as she contemplated the case, which sent her silver-gray curls flying. When she started speaking again her words spilled out in ever faster sentences. “I just don’t think a human killer would have been capable of doing everything this killer did to each victim in such a short time in place where someone could come up on them at any time. The evidence is here Miguel. These people were killed on this beach. They each walked to the spot of their death with someone else who was clearly human at that time, but the tracks leading away from the site are not human. Each victim is missing an organ, a different organ from any of the other victims.”

Both Miguel and I just sat there watching and listening as she ran through the evidence as she spoke, clicking on a photo here, flipping past a slide there, all at the same speed she was talking. It all came so fast that it took us a moment to catch up to her when she had stopped, glancing between the two of us. She was the first speak again, but only as she reach over to click on the final slide in her presentation.

“I think the killer is a doppelganger.”

To be honest, I wasn’t that shocked. I had been following her points fairly closely and had already come to the conclusion that this killer was not your run-of-the-mill psychopath.

Miguel broke out in laughter, slapping his forehead. “You almost had me there, girl! I haven’t heard that word in over twenty year…doppelganger indeed. I remember those creatures from my role-playing days. So, now that you’ve had your little joke at my expense, what’s your real theory?”

Corrales had gone from side-splitting laughter to serious-as-a-heart-attack in the span of ten seconds. He looked from Jennifer to me and back to Jennifer.

“I wasn’t joking Miguel. That’s why I asked for Agent Bones to be here as well. He has considerable…experience…with creatures like this.”

His expression went from serious to confusion as he tried to make sense of this.

I slid my chair over to be close to him and looked him in the eye. I reached out and gently but firmly brought his right hand up to my neck. He was so confused that he didn’t even try to resist.

“Miguel, I not this ugly because of some crazy disease or any botched plastic surgery. I know you look at me and you think you see just a deformed person; at least once you try to process that information. But your true first reaction, the reaction you have before your brain dismissed it out of hand, is that I look like a zombie, that I look like a walking dead man. Well guess what? Your first impulse is right. Feel my right there where the carotid artery should be. No pulse. Feel how cold and clammy my skin is? I’ve got the flesh of a dead man because that’s what I am.”

“But…but…” He jerked his hand away, wiped it on his Armani pants as if they were dirty jeans and as if the feel of Death could be wiped off like a smudge of dirt.

I nodded. “I know. You see, I’ve found that I can walk around with less and less make-up than my makers ever thought I could because people see me for who I am at first glance, but then dismiss the mere thought of an undead zombie as either a good Halloween costume, or some weird skin disease, or a botched surgery or two. The human mind doesn’t deal well with things that don’t fit neatly inside the niches that it has assigned to them to. Simply because everyone knows that monsters such as zombies and vampires and…doppelgangers…their own minds fool them into believing that the thing they just saw with their own eyes was something else entirely.”

He looked shaken, to say the least. I put one hand to try and steady him, but he cringed, so I pulled it back with a shrug.

“Like Jennifer says, I do have some rather specialized knowledge and experience about creatures like this killer of yours. I agree with her profile in that I don’t think you are dealing with a human killer here. But why this thing is killing people like this, so publicly, so quickly, that I don’t know. I’m going to have to try and track it for awhile. I will need to spend time where it has been hunting. I need to see what it is seeing and see if I can discern its real purpose before it actually kills again. I will start tonight, since that is when it is active, at night.”

Jennifer was nodding as I spoke. She really looked pleased that I agreed with her profile so far.

Miguel, on the other hand, was looking almost as pale as I did. He was looking at me, listening to me, but with the vacant kind of stare that told me that his understanding of the world had just been turned upside down.

“Jennifer, make sure that the Bureau communicates with the local police. They should maintain the same vigilant presence that they’ve had in place for the last week, but I don’t want anyone else trying to cover for me. I need to hunt this thing in my own way. I don’t want to spook it, unless we absolutely have to in order to save a life…”

Standing on the edge of Light and Night, of City and Beach, I was in Shadow. A watchful, vigilant Shade that moved from one world to the next with the ease of a moth flitting around a light bulb, one moment fully visible and real, the next moment a figment of the imagination.

In this new quasi-state of being, I could walk among the evening revelers leaving no more memory of my passing than that of a strange, cold shiver that caused a tingle along the spine and raised the hairs on the back of the neck.

The Hunt continued…