Trafficking in Demons Read online

  Trafficking in Demons

  Book Seven of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  By Michael Angel

  Copyright 2017

  Michael Angel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.

  Thank you for downloading this eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for any purpose.

  COLOR AND B&W MAPS OF ANDELUVIA

  Trafficking in Demons

  Book Seven of ‘Fantasy & Forensics’

  By Michael Angel

  Chapter One

  There aren’t enough coffee beans in Colombia to turn me into a morning person.

  I’d gotten a text less than ten seconds after I’d stepped out of a shower steamy enough to double as a rain forest. And the Office of the Medical Examiner didn’t care if I was a morning person or not. I had to forget the office and get ready to slip into my Stompy Boots of Doom. I hurried through dressing and an emergency infusion of caffeine from my coffeemaker before I slipped behind the wheel of the OME van.

  Specifically, the newly refurbished OME van. Said condition was made crystal clear to me when I’d been given the keys (rather reluctantly, I might add) by the manager of the LAPD’s motor pool. I couldn’t really blame the man. According to the report turned in by yours truly, I’d left the vehicle in a spot where it had been broken into and savaged by vandals. That made me careless in a lot of peoples’ eyes.

  I could live with that. I rather doubted that they’d have accepted the truth – that the interior had been torn out by an Andeluvian griffin who needed some extra cabin space.

  A postcard-worthy spring morning greeted me as I pulled the van out onto the freeway. It helped keep the bumper-to-bumper morning commute traffic and the aroma of car exhaust from grating too heavily on my nerves. Which was a good thing, as I ended up stopping-and-going for more than ninety minutes along Interstate 5.

  I didn’t usually have to drive for that long, but it wasn’t an extremely rare event, either.

  Los Angeles sprawled in all directions for over five hundred square miles. The city had grown more than a few offshoots of real estate that curled around smaller cities like the tentacles of some leviathan octopus. And as it happened, I had to make my way to the far edge of the northernmost tentacle.

  Out here, the city petered out as the San Gabriel mountain range began poking up granite fingers from the valley floor. In fact, the mix of slot canyons and steep slopes produced an interesting mix of isolated million-dollar homes and out-and-out wilderness. I exited the freeway and drove along a lonely two-lane road that wound its way further into the rugged terrain. Freshly blooming wildflowers blotted out the usual dusty asphalt smells.

  For once, the crime scene looked like it might be somewhere halfway pleasant.

  The street address indicated on the van’s GPS came up on the left. My eyebrows raised as I slowed and made the turn. Whoever owned this rugged piece of property had plenty of money, that much was certain. Reinforced steel bars and a retractable tire spike barrier guarded the entryway, though they were retracted at present. The driveway’s asphalt glittered with powdered silica and was in a heck of a lot better shape than the public road.

  A stack of beige stones made up the mailbox post. Curlicue script carved into the side announced the residence as belonging to someone named ‘Wainwright’. I stepped on the gas, encouraging the van up the steep slope until the drive ended at a circle of pebbled concrete. Said circle was bordered by expanses of well-trimmed lawn that gave way to stands of gnarled valley oak.

  The Wainwright residence sprawled at the far end of the parking circle. From what I could tell from between the trees, it was a rambling post-and-beam design. The gray cottage roof and white trim made it look as if a value-sized Cape Cod beach house had somehow washed up into the California wilds.

  It would have made for a very upscale, tranquil backdrop had it not been for the trio of parked LAPD cruisers. The festive yellow crime scene tape strung up all along the front didn’t exactly help mellow things out. I parked the van off to one side and then got out and went around back to suit up.

  There was a great view out over the surrounding valleys from where I sat on the rear bumper. The land rolled away to the north and east in a series of receding ridgelines, shimmering dusky green and gold in the sunlight. From this angle, I couldn’t make out any other properties, roads, or even power lines.

  A chill ran through me as a thought crept into my head: It looks like I’m all alone out here.

  The chill ran its course, and I shook it off with a shrug of my shoulders. That feeling of solitude was an illusion. The Los Angeles metropolitan area alone contained more than twelve million people.

  I wasn’t as alone as I thought. Not by a long shot.

  Once I had my Stompy Boots on and crime scene case at my side, I made my way up to the front door. A pair of cops were sweeping the lawn off to one side. Three more were engaged in a heated discussion over by the parked cruisers. I didn’t see Esteban, but I spotted Isabel Vega easily enough. Even though she was facing away from me, I recognized her coffee-colored bun and the gleam of her wire frame glasses.

  A uniformed officer stood by the house’s front porch. He nodded silently and beckoned me to duck under the crime scene tape barrier. It was obvious he was more interested in trying to hear the argument going on between the other three cops than he was in my presence. Which was fine by me. I signed the sheet he thrust forward and turned back to the entry.

  The front door, a slab of glistening oak punctuated with triangular windows, gaped open like a woody mouth. An emerald-sheened digital keypad sat above the doorknob. It matched the color of the Boston ivy running along the wall from the right. Thick vines grew from a nearby sheltered patch of dirt, arching up and over the door’s frame as if it were embracing the entryway.

  I glanced down before crossing the threshold. The rubber-backed fibers of the doormat depicted the outline of a sawed-off shotgun. Below the image lay a single sentence.

  THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS HOUSE WORTH DYING FOR.

  Well, that was friendly.

  And if my rotten luck kept up its winning streak, the warning was probably false.

  I took maybe a half-dozen steps into the house. The entrance led into a short hallway lined with black-and-white photos turned sepia with age. A blur of men doing outdoorsy things made up the bulk of the pictures. Men travelling in military jeeps, boarding propeller-driven aircraft, or posing with recently shot big game animals.

  I froze.

  I’ve smelled some truly terrible things in my time. It came with the job. In fact, the patent was still pending on my very own Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness.

  This was different. The awfulness wasn’t what set it apart. It probably rated no higher than a six. No, it wasn’t the stink factor. It was the gaminess that got me.

  Relatively fresh bodies could emit anything from a coppery smell to a sour stink like tomcat urine. But this place reeked of ground organ meat. It sank down on my taste buds and scoured itself in like gone-off liver pâté.

  I forced myself to start walking again. The hallway ended abruptly as I entered a large open area. The house had an ‘exposed interior’ design, where
most of the ground floor was a single open space. On my left, warm track lighting glittered off what had been a clean, upscale country kitchen.

  Glass lay smashed almost to powder across a speckled granite countertop. Shards of metal peppered the brushed-metal finish of the appliances like shrapnel from a bomb. Flecks of drying blood and still-moist tissue decorated the copper cookware hanging from stainless steel hooks. Body fluids and bits of gristle spattered almost every surface of the kitchen, as if someone had tossed a cherry bomb into an open can of rust-colored paint.

  A recreation room stretched off to my right, complete with a pool table and a flat-screen television larger than the side of my van. A bar that looked shipped in from a Wild West saloon sat in the corner. Deep gouges scored the bar’s wooden surface as if from a single horrific claw.

  The living room lay between the two other areas. The space could have graced the cover of Millionaire Interior Decorating magazine. That is, if it hadn’t been turned into an abattoir. Several of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lay shattered. I counted three separate foot-wide craters blasted through both the shelving and an underlying layer of reinforced concrete and rebar.

  Then, there was the body. Or what remained of a body.

  The head, limbs, and pelvis of a Caucasian male lay scattered about the edges of a massive splash zone of gore. The expression on the man’s grizzled face was one of surprise, but that didn’t count for much. Most forms of violent trauma caused facial muscles to distort and shift at the moment of death. As for the rest of the body, nothing but pulped meat, ground bone, and liquefied organs remained of the upper and middle torso.

  I’d never seen the effect of artillery fire on the human form, but this must have come close. I simply stood in place, not knowing where to begin.

  I wasn’t going to be using a body bag.

  It looked like I’d need a wet-vac for this job.

  And although it would probably seem callous to someone not part of the forensics world, my first thought wasn’t ‘How horrible’ or ‘This is totally gross’.

  Rather, what popped into my head was a single annoyed realization. I was going to have to go back to the OME van and lug the damned vacuum equipment out here.

  Just my rotten luck.

  Chapter Two

  Someone walked through the front doors and stopped by my side.

  “Mierda,” breathed a male voice. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  I turned to one side and saw Hector Reyes staring at the carnage with bugged-out eyes. Sweat popped out on his forehead and stained his light-gray tee-shirt. The man was one of the best crime scene photographers and evidence examiners I knew.

  Hector announcing that he felt sick was something new. I’d seen the man cover grisly murder scenes involving everything from gunshot wounds to violent dismemberment. Only a minute or two later, I’d catch him back in his truck, chowing down on a cup of homemade menudo.

  “This is pretty bad, isn’t it?” I agreed.

  “It’s a damned war zone, that’s what it is.” Hector dug into one of the pockets on his Chihuahuan leather belt and came up with a circular lens. He screwed it onto the end of his big black camera as he added, “Whoever did this must’ve had a BFG, that’s for sure.”

  “A what?”

  “A big effing gun, that’s what.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Hector began shooting pictures, methodically starting with longer distance shots from the body to place it in relation to objects in the room and the accompanying blood splatters. As he finished that up, I set my case down, opened it, and took out a couple of sample kits for tissue analysis. Then I pulled on gloves and went to work.

  The floor surrounding the body made an unnerving squish as I stepped on it. The liquefied remains had soaked into the carpet, turning them a muddy red-brown of semi-congealed fluids. I sent a silent thank you up to whomever had invented my zip-tack Stompy Boots and ignored the sound effects.

  Using each kit’s tools, I quickly bagged samples of tissue and liquid. Taking care not to contaminate my bags, I returned to store them in my crime scene case and then squish-squished my way back across the sodden carpet to take a second look at what remained of the body.

  The splatter pattern around the corpse was consistent with a high speed impact. But it was the edges of the remaining bits of torso and limbs that got my attention. My sense of smell picked up the barest whiff of something…

  …something damned familiar.

  I bent down to get my nose closer to the base of the corpse’s right arm. The itty-bitty hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I caught the ghost of a scent nearly blotted out by the miasma of vaporized torso and organ meat. I closed my eyes and inhaled, grasping on to twin strands of scent and memory until I found it.

  The acrid tang of sulfur. The coal-dusty scent accent of charcoal. I could taste it on my tongue like the residue of a backyard barbecue grill. I suddenly remembered exactly where I’d first come across that scent.

  It had been on the body of ‘Connor McCloud’. The very first body I’d run across that had come from Andeluvia. It had turned out to be the body of Duke Kajari, which had been used in a desperate ploy to bring back someone who could solve a king’s murder. And unbeknownst to the Court Wizard who cast the spell, it was also a ploy to bring back a Hero. One who could smash destiny and defy prophecy.

  They ended up with me, of course. I still wasn’t sure if it was the court of Andeluvia that had gotten a raw deal, or if it was me.

  But that same smell had clung to the charred, gaping chest wound that killed Duke Kajari. My mind didn’t want to wrap itself around the logical conclusion.

  Magic had been involved in this man’s murder.

  “Any thoughts, Dayna?” Hector called over from where he was starting to shoot pictures of the recreation room. “Aside from this thing being totally chueco, of course.”

  I didn’t think Hector would take well to my ruminations over a hidden world anyone else would call a fantasy. And of course, lock me up for it. So, I skipped over to the second item of interest. I gingerly turned the severed arm so I could get a clear view of the tattoo on the victim’s still-firm bicep.

  “I’m thinking our victim here was ex-military,” I said aloud. I squinted, making out the faded form of an eagle sitting atop a stylized globe. The globe had an anchor poking through its core. “From the looks of it, he was a Marine.”

  “This guy was a jarhead? Seriously?” Hector made his way over to the border of the splash zone and took pictures of the tattoo. “I would’ve guessed that he was in the Army, maybe in the Armored branch.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The craters in the back wall look like they came from a main battle tank’s gun.” His face said he was only half-joking. “One of our guys outside told me that’s what got the ball rolling. About two hours ago, one of the local ranchers heard what sounded like a howitzer going off up here and called it in.”

  I nodded. “So, that’s when the LAPD got involved. And us.”

  Just as I was about to get up, I spotted something else strange. The hand at the end of the severed limb had remained clenched in a fist. But something dark green poked out of its death-grasp.

  “Hold on, this might be interesting.” I gently pried open the closed dead fingers with my own gloved ones. The green object turned out to be two leafy stems of a plant. A distinctive aroma curled up from the bruised leaves. I didn’t even need to sniff that closely to identify it. “That’s freshly picked spearmint.”

  “You think he was a…I don’t know, an herbalist?”

  I considered. “Maybe, but I think there’s another possibility. You see anything like a wine bottle on that granite counter?”

  Hector looked back towards the kitchen, pursing his lips as he thought about it for a moment. “Not for wine. There’s a broken bottle on the kitchen floor, and I recognize the label. It’s for a brand of light rum.”

  I looked up at him, putti
ng the pieces together. It didn’t even require one of my weird ‘clicks’ this time.

  “Mojitos,” we said at the same time.

  I chewed my lip for a bit, thinking.

  “That’s just odd,” I said. “Seems a little early for cocktails.”

  Hector snorted. “Depends on what your habits are. My tío, he used to start every day off with a shot of Guanajuato’s best. Blue agave mescal.”

  “You have a point.” I carefully stepped away from the body and pulled cloth wipes from my case to clean off my boot soles. Once that task was done, I bagged up everything on me that had been soiled. I paused only long enough to pull on a new pair of gloves before I moved to the recreation room. “If our victim was serving drinks, then I’m going to see what there is to see over by the bar.”

  Hector had already finished taking photos in that area. I passed him on his way towards the kitchen. “Gotcha. Let me know if you need any closeups of anything.”

  I made my way around to the rear of the antique piece of furniture. A matching wooden chair sat roughly behind it, but far enough back I didn’t have to push it out of the way. I leaned over to take a closer look at the gouges in the bar top. There were three sharply defined lines. Each one tracked perfectly with the trio of holes in the living room walls.

  “A gun powerful enough to do this kind of damage must’ve had a lot of recoil,” I remarked. “An awful lot.”

  “More recoil than I could handle, that’s for sure,” Hector agreed, as he began snapping away. His flash went off like a strobe, glaring off the red-speckled copper cookware.

  I knelt and immediately found the curled mass of wood shavings from the gouges in the bar top. I bagged it and then felt around by one of the wooden counter’s supports. Something felt cold and metallic against my fingers.

  It clinked and then rolled out of reach, so I leaned down further to grab it. I grasped the object and held it up where I could get a better look.