Chapter 2
2. Le Bête
Desmond stood in the middle of a room he didn't recognize with no idea of how he got there. Everything about his surroundings was unfamiliar - the beige walls, the simple gray comforter twisted up on an air mattress, the room cluttered with luggage and cardboard boxes belching forth their contents. The room was a studio apartment with rattling radiators, a musty smell, and a kitchenette with decades-old appliances. He reached for his service weapon on the floor beside the air mattress. He raised it in the air and cleared the studio and bathroom, which he accomplished in a few quick turns. Desmond blinked, cleared the studio once more, and it was then that he remembered.
He was at home.
He and Rhonda had split up, and this was his new place. He put his weapon away, crossed the ten-foot length of his studio to the kitchenette, and poured a glass of water. He gulped it down and glanced at his phone. Four in the morning. One more hour before his alarm was set to go off. Even if he managed to fall asleep, he couldn't get decent rest in an hour, not with the nightmare he just had.
Desmond rarely dreamed, but when he did, he had that dream. It first came to him in the months following his father's death when he woke in the night wishing he could hear him snoring in the next room. He had it in the early mornings when he listened for the rattling muffler on his mother's car as she came home from the night shift at the hospital. He didn't have it again until years later when he was shot as a beat cop. Desmond poured himself another glass of water and polished it off. He started a pot of coffee and jumped in the shower. He massaged shampoo into his scalp and closed his eyes, but his vision filled with ebony trees and shadows. He still felt the hot breath of the creature that had been chasing him on the back of his neck. Le bête.
He rinsed quickly and got out of the shower. His phone buzzed as he poured a cup of coffee, and that's when he saw that he had missed three messages from his partner Tyler. He didn't have to check it to know what it was. Tyler only had one reason to message at this hour. The body could wait until Desmond had his first cup of coffee and cleared that ungodly nightmare from his head. He stood in front of his bathroom mirror and rubbed the shadow of beard that grew on his face. He spread shaving cream until it covered his sable skin and stroked the razor from his cheek to his chin. By the time he got to his neck, he had not been able to shake the image of dark flitting shadows or the tickle of the hot and humid breath of le bête.
He rinsed his face and rubbed it in a towel. His phone's screen came to life, and it bounced with the bzzt bzzt bzzt of an incoming call. Tyler was calling again. He must have been anxious if he was calling this often. Desmond could imagine him biting his nails as the phone rang. He thought of the other three bodies that they were already investigating, a teenage girl who was walking home from school one night, a 13-year-old-boy who was shooting hoops in the park, a middle-aged man who was working in his garden. Their bodies were mangled and the blood drained, their gutted remains a savagery that was out of his depth. What he would give for an overdosed junkie or a woman who shot her husband.
Desmond rarely dreamed, but he was having that dream again.
A garbage truck rumbled down the street, and its screeching brakes yanked him back into the dream. The high-pitched cries of le bête shrieked in his hear; his phone pulsed and jolted, bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt; the moist breath of le bête tickled the back of his neck. In a single movement, he lunged for his weapon, flicked the safety off, and spun around with his finger curling around the trigger. At last, he would come face-to-face with le bête. He would stand up to it once and for all..but nothing was there but a blank wall.
Desmond stumbled backward on the bed, releasing his pressure on the trigger. He fumbled for the safety, and his phone went off with the incessant bzzzt bzzzt bzzzt. His hands shook in horror at what he nearly did - I nearly shot off a bullet, I nearly shot a bullet into that wall - he set his weapon on his nightstand and answered the phone. "What?" Desmond answered.
"Dude, where in the high holy fuck are you?" It was Tyler. "I've been texting and calling you for a fucking hour. Why didn't you answer?"
"I'm sorry," Desmond said. "I was, uh - " he walked in circles around his studio apartment, turning on all the lights and inspecting every single shadow, "asleep."
"For the love of Christ, man, will you get your sorry ass over to this crime scene?"
"Yeah, I'll be over as soon as I can. What's the address?"
"And check your messages, for fuck's sake." Tyler hung up.
The crime scene was chaos and confusion when Desmond arrived. Throngs of reporters and pajama-clad neighbors swarmed the perimeter, and two young officers attempted to keep them on the other side of it. Two medics lingered next to the ambulance, vaping, and engaged in an intense conversation with each other. A female officer stumbled out of the house with a clammy, sickly expression on her face, and a male officer was retching in the bushes outside the living room window. Desmond strode up to him and yanked his should back.
"C'mon, man. You're going to ruin evidence. Go ask one of those medics over there to help you." Desmond shook his head in disbelief and entered the white, one-story house.
The house was filled with the sickly sweet odor of rotting meat. Tyler and a medical examiner named Ash scrutinized the body. When Desmond looked at it, he thought it was a prank. It was nothing more than hunks of meat and bone from a butcher shop. The eyes convinced him. The cold, dead eyes that stared out of the bloated, purple skull convinced Desmond that this mound of flesh and bone was once a man who lived and breathed. The neck was torn open, and nothing more than a few tendons bound the head to the body. His head was tilted in such a way that his frightened expression stared upside down at Desmond. His mouth gaped open, allowing Desmond to see down the throat at the shredded tendons on the other side. His soft, flabby body made Desmond wonder what he might have tasted like to the thing that gutted and devoured him.
The first victim, a twenty-four-year-old male biking home after his shift at a bar on Mississippi. His mangled body was found beneath an underpass on Interstate Avenue by the Steel Bridge. An early morning commuter pulled over when she saw his bike overturned on the side of the road. The first of the nightmares began. Rhonda wasn't happy when he started sleeping on the couch and even more so when he picked up smoking again.
The second was a twenty-seven-year-old bartender, who closed out the Sandy Hut four nights a week. She was found seven days after the first victim, less than a mile north at a MAX Yellow Line station. Surveillance footage showed her scrolling through her phone. What was not as clear was the form that swept across the screen and out of view. It happened so fast that the victim didn't have time to look up to notice her attacker coming at her. As for her attacker, it was blurred at the edges but appeared to be a young woman. In the clearest still, it revealed a child-like figure with a mop of hair dyed either purple or blue. They wore skinny black jeans and a black bra under a sagging tank top. Even though the attacker was by all appearances human, the wounds they inflicted on the victim were that of a feral animal, neck, and torso torn to shreds, body drained of its blood.
Then the dreams shifted, and he was the one standing on the platform. When the attacker pounced, he turned to look at her face, but she had no eyes, nose, or mouth. Her face was a sheet of smooth, pale skin. Desmond remained at the Sandy Hut for as long as he could avoid sleep, and then he drank himself black. Rhonda begged him to talk about the victims. They were all over the news by now, but he refused to talk about it. If he did, then he would have to utter the word in the back of his mind. He would have to say the word that made his skin prickle and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up when he saw the police tape enclosing the tangled bicycle, and he knew without viewing the body what he was up against. Standing at the doorway of the shotgun house, a heavy-set elderly black woman pressed the victim's young son to her side. The grandmother wept, but the young boy stood frozen, stoically observing the police gather evidence at the crime scene. Every so often, the grandmother concealed her grandson's face from the grisly scene, but the boy tore away from the cover of his grandmother's bathrobe and exposed his young mind to his mother's horrific death.
That day, Desmond went home early before Rhonda got off work. He packed a suitcase and crashed on Tyler's couch until he found his own apartment. After that, Desmond couldn't close his eyes without seeing the pageantry of blood and bone and the attacker's feline form in his mind. He slept in short bursts, and the surveillance footage haunted him in his dreams. Night transformed to dawn, and he met the day feeling as if razor blades were clipped on the insides of his eyelids.
This man was the fourth victim in two months that had been savagely torn apart. The victims had been found in their homes, on their driveways, and on busy streets. They had nothing in common as far as Desmond could tell. Those details were enough to believe that the perpetrator was a serial killer of some kind. Fear in the city was raging, and people were terrified. As far as Desmond was concerned, they had every right to be.
"Neighbor called it in when he woke up in the middle of the night. He said he had a real bad feeling. He went to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and when he looked out of the side window, he saw the lights on in the house and thought it didn't look right."
"Did he see anybody?"
"No. He called to have an officer come check it out."
"Did he touch anything or move the body? Was the victim still alive?"
"Desmond, the guy didn't even leave his house. He looked out his window sometime around two in the morning, saw the lights on, and called for an officer to check it out."
"How'd he know to call, if he didn't know there was a body?"
Tyler looked at him as if he were wearing a tinfoil hat. "People are scared, man. Nobody wants to leave their homes at night."
The light faded, and the room turned dark. Shadows danced across the walls, and a creature growled.
Le bête.
The third victim was the worst of them all.
She was found off Williams, a single mother arriving home from her night shift early in the morning. She barely had time to get out of her car when she was attacked. Her head and torso were hanging out of the driver's side door, and her legs and lower body were still in the seat. Her neck was ripped open and hanging on by the tiniest of sinew, which snapped when a careless rookie disturbed the body. The head dropped to the ground with a thud. A bystander got a perfect shot of it on his phone that went viral before the body arrived at the morgue.
Standing at the doorway of the shotgun house, a heavy-set elderly black woman pressed the victim's young son to her side. The grandmother wept, but the young boy stood frozen, stoically observing the police gather evidence at the crime scene. Every so often, the grandmother concealed her grandson's face from the grisly scene, but the boy tore away from the cover of his grandmother's bathrobe and exposed his young mind to his mother's horrific death.
That day, Desmond went home early before Rhonda got off work. He packed a suitcase and crashed on Tyler's couch until he found his own apartment. After that, Desmond couldn't close his eyes without seeing the pageantry of blood and bone and the attacker's feline form in his mind. He slept in short bursts, and the surveillance footage haunted him in his dreams. Night transformed to dawn, and he met the day feeling as if razor blades were clipped on the insides of his eyelids.
Someone was saying his name. Everything in Desmond told him to run, to get as far away as possible and as fast as his body would take him, but he was frozen in place. The shadows vanished, and the room filled with light. "Where'd you go, man?" Tyler asked. Ash stared at him over the lenses of his black-framed glasses.
"Sorry, I drifted off there."
"You okay, Des?"
"I haven't been sleeping much, since, well - "
Le bête.
Ash crouched down to get close-up shots of the body, and Tyler pulled Desmond aside. "Des, there's talk of the Feds getting involved. They're going to take over the case, and we're going to lose control of it. The public has lost faith in us." Tyler took short breaths and wiped the sweat from his brow. Ash fiddled with the settings on his camera, but his head was tilted slightly. The creep was eavesdropping on them. "I can't sleep at night, Des. I close my eyes, and I see these - " he gestured a hand at the heap of flesh and bone that remained of who the man's former self. "Jenny and the kids went to stay with her mom in California. I go home, and the house is empty. I show to work and - " Tyler's voice choked.
"I get it, man. I do," Desmond said. "The whole city is sleeping with the lights on. Go outside. Interview the neighbors. Don't talk to the press. I'll handle things in here. Go on now."
Tyler nodded, mouthed the words "thank you," and left the house.
It was mid-day when they wrapped up the crime scene. The neighbors had returned to their homes, but a few reporters and their camera crews lingered, hopeful and ready to broadcast any new detail in the case. Desmond sat in his car and watched uniformed officers secure the front door and cover it in crime scene tape. The name of the thing rattled in his head, but if he uttered it out loud, his peers would laugh in his face. He texted Tyler to say that he would meet him at the station later. Desmond had to make a stop.
In the parking lot of his grandfather's nursing home, Desmond ran into his mother, Gabrielle. "Surprised to see you here. I would think you'd be at the crime scene."
"What?"
"The body they found this morning. It was…killed, like the others, no?"
"Jesus, it's on the news? What did they say?"
"Other than that, not much," Gabrielle said. "Your grandpère is glued to the TV, and he won't come out of his room." She leaned in close and whispered, "La rousse a travaillé la dernière nuit."
The redhead worked last night. Grandpère Rémy loathed the redhead. When their paths crossed, Rémy met her gaze with venomous scorn. “She did?” Desmond said, feigning surprise. He knew her schedule down to the minute: three ten-hour shifts, from eight o'clock at night until six-thirty in the morning, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He imagined what it would feel like to bury his face in her mass of red curls. Her name tag read, "Sydney," and when their paths crossed, Desmond could hardly utter a "hello" before the air was knocked out of his chest as if he'd been hit by a gale-force wind.
Gabrielle squinted your eyes. "Don't even think about it."
"Think about what?"
"You know what I mean. A mother always knows. Stay away from that girl. Your grandpère is right. She has darkness in her.
Rémy was napping on his bed when Desmond entered his room. The TV was turned on to a daytime talk show, but the volume was turned down. Rémy stretched straight out on top of his bedspread with his hands clasped over his chest. The image of the closed casket at his father's funeral flashed in his mind. He unfolded a throw blanket and threw it over his grandfather. Then he slumped in his massive, brown leather armchair and fell asleep.
He still heard the cries of screeching animals when he woke. The room had darkened from the passing hours, and his phone buzzed angrily in his pocket. He had several missed calls and text messages from Tyler and his captain. The Feds had arrived, and the captain was arranging a briefing. Desmond let the calls go unanswered and slipped the phone into his jacket pocket.
Rémy awoke and rose in his bed. His eyes were wide when he noticed Desmond sitting beside him. "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" What is it?
Desmond answered, "Le bête du sang."
The blood beast.