Natural Enemies: Dante Side 1

I received the letter from Anderson on a rainy November.  As I read the letter, I nursed a straight scotch on the rocks.  For half of the letter, he bitched about the validation system and how it prevented him from calling me directly.  And it should.  He didn't have supernatural killings for me to investigate.  From what he described, it was a human serial killing.  Anderson had enclosed a packet of crime scene photos and preliminary notes for me to look at.  I was not certain if I was amused or annoyed when I saw the pictures.

    The victims were human.  They were murdered with similar M.O. -- severe knife wound in the lower abdomen.  The first three victims were sloppily cut up -- as if the killer either hesitated or was not certain what he was doing.  As the number of the victims added up, the knife wounds were more precise and exact, as with the apparent anger becoming more evident.  Most were left with entrails pulled out from the careful slits.  According the dates on the one- month-old report he enclosed, the victim count was fifteen.  There's no leads nor physical evidence on the possible suspect.  I saw why Anderson thought to send the case to me.  

    I knew Anderson from one of my earliest cases which involved a demon in human form killing the homeless in skid row in Brooklyn.  It was an unwanted case he had that would either promote him out of the rut of a department he was in or force him into an early retirement.  To the politicians, Anderson was a nice scapegoat.  His old-school ways made him a ripe target.  I liked him.  He was the kind of cop that I'd like to admire but only from a distance.  Rough on the edges but over-qualified for his job and he knew it.  He was also one of the very few people who knew I was half-human.  According to the letter, he had been promoted to chief of Homicide in San Francisco.  Nice change.

    His secretary answered the phone and told me he was in a meeting with the Mayor.  I asked her to page him.  She did, after an assurance from me that I would take the blame if he threw a fit.  I didn't feel like calling back later.  

    "It's about fucking time," Anderson said into the phone seconds later.  "I'm somewhere I can't be at to talk to you about the letter.  Give my secretary your number and I'll call you from my office in a few minutes."

    I did as he asked.  I fetched myself another drink while I waited for the call that came five minutes later.

    "You are fucking out of your gourd," I said.  "Just because the victims had white hair -- no, white wigs, you think that could be connected to me?"

    "There's not that many albino-haired individuals out there.  The killer was making a deliberate attempt to match his victims to you.  All of the victims also had blue eyes."

    "So?"

    "Two for two."

    "And perhaps the killer simply has a kink for white-haired, blue-eyed people," I said.  I kicked my feet up on the desk and leaned back on my chair.  "If this killer was trying to make his victims to emulate me, wouldn't he be more successful getting his point across with killing them here?"

    "Maybe he didn't want you to track him.  Yet."

    "Meaning?"

    "Obviously he has no intentions on hurting you," he said.  "So he chose a location that's on a different coast to ease his cyclic anger or frustration." 

    "Which by your theory, I caused somehow."

    "Correct.  If he did the killings in your backyard, he probably knew you would find him.  And confrontations will lead to one of you getting hurt or killed -- something, I think this killer is not ready to do."

    "I'm not seeing this in the pictures you sent.  He was quite vicious and angry."

    "The pictures told half of the story.  You kind of have to see the bodies and maybe visit the sites.  I can't put my finger on it but somehow, I know this killer is not entirely human."

    "He killed in very human way.  No parts of the human were consumed."

    "No no, he's killing them for a different reason.  He left the bodies in places where he knew they would be found.  He's too neat in everything else to be this sloppy."

    "I can't see how I can help you."

    "I thought it's obvious how you can help."

    "Besides being live bait for you to use?"

    "As we speak, he's already left body number twenty-one.  The Mayor and the Governor's on my ass every fucking day because we have absolutely no leads or suspects.  There's only so much time I can tell the reporters 'no comment pending investigation' before they figure out we don't have shit.  If the real thing comes out to the guy's playground, he's bound to come out."

    "Or he might leave town and do his killings somewhere else."

    "I can only worry about the mess he leaves in my backyard."

    "Spoken like a true bureaucrat."

   I pictured him breaking into a grin and shrugged his shoulder at the remark. 

   "I don't think he'd leave town though.  If anything, he'd be fucking delighted that you came to see him."

    I emptied the scotch from the tumbler.

    "I'm not really interested," I said and got up to fix myself another drink.  "You've only convinced me the victims' profiles happened to fit mine.  I don't do cases that involves humans."

    "What a self-righteous asshole you are," he said.  I couldn't tell if he was angry or being sarcastic.  "What the fuck is the point of what you do if you can't stop one serial murder?"

    "You don't know me, Anderson," I said and uncorked the top of the scotch bottle with my teeth and spat it to the side.  "You don't know what I do or why I do them."

    "You always do have these nifty convenient answers."

    I poured what was left of the bottle into the tumbler, nearly filled it to the rim and took a tentative sip before I answered. I was getting annoyed.

    "I'm going to hang up on you in a couple of more minutes," I said.  "Then you will not call me again.  Say what you have to say in the time you have left."

    He was quiet for a few seconds.  Then he let out a deep sigh.

    "It might just be as you said, a coincidence, but you came to mind on this case because a painting you've been chasing turned up a couple of weeks before the killing began."

    I frowned.

    "I will fucking kill you if you are lying to involve me in this case."

    "I'm not. I saw how upset you were when you saw the replica painting... so I didn't want to bring it up unless I am sure it's connected. I really think it is."

    "Where is the painting?"

    "In the Port Authority warehouse.  Customs' been doing complete searches on the boats coming in to stop the high trafficking of the artifacts from Middle East due to its recent coups.  The painting was in the inventory of a professional gang that did commissioned looting.  One of them said this came out of a place in South London -- a small country side church, of all places.  I am not sure if that was the original but for the price paid on it, I think it is."

    "Who commissioned it?"

    "Don't know. The contact name's a handle and he never showed do the pick up.  Well fuck, the bust was broadcasted all over the television. He probably knew we were waiting for him to do the pick up."

    I said nothing for awhile.

    "I really think there's too much coincidences in a rather exact area and close frame of time.  It's probably not too unreasonable for me to say that the commissioner-killer started to select its victims to take the place of the prized painting he was out."

    I drank the scotch quickly, swallowing it so fast that it burned my throat.  I didn't stop until I finished it.

    "You okay?" Anderson said after awhile.

    I put the empty tumbler on the counter and walked back toward my desk.  I sank down into the battered leather chair -- suddenly feeling anxious.

    "I want that painting."

    "It's not as easy as that."

    "Use that title of yours and arrange something."

    "My title does not spill over into Federal departments.  I can try to do some...unofficial negotiating with someone I know that worked there...if you would be willing to help me."

    "I'm only interested in that painting."

    "Goddamn Dante, that all you know how to do? Give me some fucking slack."

    "Send me the inventory papers and photo documentation on the painting through overnight mail today.  If this is the piece I'm looking for, I'll be in San Francisco tomorrow night."

    He said something that I couldn't make out. He was probably cursing at me.  I didn't care. I waited until he finished then gave him my office address.  After he read the address back to me, he started to curse again. I hung up on him. 

 

    The parcel came at noon the next day.  I locked up the office and went upstairs with the oversized manila envelope.  I had an office next to my bedroom that I rarely used.  In the recent years, it had been filled with artifacts that I didn't want around but I know I would still need it.  In the corner, on the bottom of several plain boxes, was a box with black velvet fabric.  I didn't like touching it, much less seeing it. 

    I laid the velvet box on the corner of the desk and sat down with the parcel.  I went through the stack of color photo first until I found what I was looking for.  My heart nearly stopped, seeing it again.  Seeing the painting always made me more than a little anxious.  There's a heavy sense of hatred and anger that's rolled into a wide spectrum of un-named fear and guilt that I've carried with me for years.  The picture was a testament of my failures and my faults.  I hate looking at it and I hate thinking about how many eyes had seen it. 

    For a moment, I pushed the thoughts out of my head and ran the magnifying glass over the right corner of the painting.  The writing in beautiful curves that is in the dark language was scripted there.  The writing had faded into nearly nothing from age.  I opened the velvet box and another sensation speared through me that made me want to slam the case shut.  I drew in a few breaths and picked up the silver collar from the case.  The silver collar with a single diamond that Remus had locked around my throat as a wedding band.

    I turned the collar over and on the inside, I matched the writing there to the painting.  It was identical.  The writing was Remus' demon name in the dark language.  

 

    Dante was pulled away from Remus' arms and dragged a distance away by one of the hooded men while the other two looked at their former king.  Dante struggled to sit up but was thrown on the ground hard, with a hand pressed over his neck.

    "Don't move.  I'll break your neck if you try to get up again."

    He couldn't have, even if he could.  The pain in his belly that had been blessfully numb for days started to throb again.  He gritted his teeth, fighting the pain that only grew worse.  The thing inside him was feeding again -- not only drinking his blood but also ravaging at his organs inside.  

    "Let...me...up...."

    Dante was answered with a hard squeeze of his neck that nearly snapped the bones.  He wish it had.  At least it would have given him unconsciousness for awhile.

    "Stop," one of the hooded men tending to Remus' body looked up.  "You will kill him."

    "He should be dead."

    "It is not your will.  Take him to the Tower."

    Dante felt himself picked up and thrown over the shoulder.  Dante panted -- his vision clearing and blurrying.  He was having a difficult time breathing.  There was something tugging at the diaphragm whenever he drew breaths.  Dante looked up one last time and watched as Remus' body was wrapped carefully in a dark cloak.  He would have cursed out loud at him, if he could find his voice and the strength.

    The Tower he was taken to looked out to the sea.  It had been a watch tower used to keep watch over the ships that came near the palace.  The stone stairs spiraled sharply, its close quarters smelled strongly of mildew and neglect.  Dante could only see the darkness left behind as they ascended up - guided forward with a single flashlight his captor held in one hand.

    "It sickens me to think our next king lives inside your weak half-human body."

    "I feel...the same..." Dante said between breaths.  The pain inside his belly had subsided a little.

    "After our king is born, you will die...although death would be too kind for you."

    They came to a stop at the top of the stairs.  Dante heard keys being jingled as they were fished out of his captor's pocket.  He was thrown unceremoniously on a raised, hard platform and left alone.  He turned over onto his back and glanced around the room.  He could see very little in the dark.  The only slight light came from the moon that had spilled through a barred window with a broken glass pane.  The window was too small to consider it an escape route.  

    "Shit..." Dante moaned and pressed his hand over his eyes.  He was wishing for his sword and guns again.  Just the feel the weight of them in his hands would be nice.  

    He drew the sheet around his body, suddenly aware the room had become colder.  He could hear the wind picking up outside as it pushed the waves toward the beach.  At least there is that, he concluded.

 

    I was in San Francisco the next night.  Anderson picked me up at the airport and drove me to a condo that was used as a police safe house.  He didn't answer me right away when I asked him about the picture.  His hands gripped the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white.

    "It's not as easy as you think," he said finally.  He kept his eyes centered on the road.  "Press' starting to show up after they learned it's a piece from Alexander.  It's a historical find.  No one knew he did this piece...and now, suddenly it turned up in the Federal inventory."

    "It cannot be released to the public."

    "The people who has more brass and more power than me makes that decision.  Anyway, my friend in there only released partial parts of the painting for the experts to authenticate it as an Alexander painting.  It's a reasonable request made through the court. As far as its fate. I don't know.  We are talking about something everyone's got its eyes on now -- that painting's priceless."    

    "What will to happen to it?"

    He shrugged.  "If the property's not claimed after 90 days, then it goes on the auction block.  I doubt it will go that far, if the experts did authenticate it.  If that's a real Alexander piece, then the State will probably take ownership over it for historical value and put it in a museum."

     He got quiet for awhile then looked over me once and back on the road again.

    "Are you ever going to tell me the meaning of that painting?"

    I reclined back.  Suddenly feeling tired.

    "No."

    He didn't ask again.

 

    He watched me unpack.  A curious frown formed on his face when I unrolled my jacket to unfold Ebony and Ivory.  They were the only weapons I had that was small enough for me to send through the checked luggage.  He inched toward them until he was close enough to touch.  When I didn't object, he picked them up carefully.

    "Beauties..." he said as he practiced aims with them. 

    "I want to talk to the people that'd been detained that's connected to the painting theft."

    He put my guns down and walked over to the window.  He opened it half way and took out a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket.

    "I can arrange that.  When?"

    "Now."

    "You don't waste any time, do you?" He said and took in a long drag on his newly lit cigarette and blew the smoke out of the window opening. "I suppose that's the least I can do."

    "I don't care how, the painting has to disappear."

    He frowned.

    "Meaning what?"

    "The picture cannot be seen in public."

    He scratched his chin thoughtfully and took in another lungful of smoke and let it out through his nose.

    "I suppose I understand your ambivalence.  You will be troubled a lot because the subject of this soon to be famous painting looks like you.  Well, it is you."

    I didn't answer him.  Anderson... a human is the last person I wanted to speak to about the painting.

 

    He called the jail and arranged for the interview as we were driving there.  He asked me some questions after he hung up but nothing registered.  I was thinking of something else and was completely immersed in my own world in my head.  I looked at him when he pulled the car over to the side of the road.

    "I know there's a lot about you that I should not know about or simply, you don't want to talk about.  But, I can't fucking help you if you don't talk to me."

    "About?"

    "Have you heard one fucking word I've been saying?"

    "No."

    He looked like he was about to lose his mind and scream.  Instead, he let out a deep breath and fumbled for the pack of cigarette in his shirt pocket.  As soon as he lit one and took in a deep drag, he looked calmer.  

    "There's a lot on my mind right now," I said and lowered the window.  "I don't know what you should or shouldn't know until I talk to the smugglers."

    "Well, there's that too," he said.  "I want to know if there's anything...demonic or supernatural that's connected to the painting that I should know about.  You know -- if this damn thing will bring about Judgment Day or something."

    "Don't know."

    "Why was it kept in a church?"

    "Don't know."

    "Damn it, what do you know?"

    It took me a few minutes to compose my thoughts.  Anderson waited patiently, working on his cigarette as he watched the traffic roll by our car in alarmingly high speed.  Then I told him.  I said to him something that no living being had heard me speak about.  Saying it made me feel strangely at peace.  As if I had finally confessed the sin that had been wedged in the darkest depth of my soul for what felt like an eternity.

    "Seven years after that painting was completed," I said.  "I returned to the island and destroyed that clan.  That was when I first saw the painting.  That was the first time I raised my sword but couldn't bear to bring it down -- the painting disgusted me.  I hated it but I couldn't destroy it by hand.  So I left it and set the palace on fire."

    "The painting must have meant something to one of the survivors of the massacre to take it with him," he said and rubbed out his cigarette butt into his overflowing ashtray.

    "Don't know," I said again.  "I saw the entire place engulf in flames.  It would have been difficult to escape the fire, much less take a meaningless painting with them."

    "Is it meaningless?" He said and pulled back into the traffic.  "You couldn't destroy it by your own hands."

    "It would be meaningless to a goatling."

    "You didn't answer my question." 

    "I couldn't," I said.  "I don't even know the answer myself."

    He nodded and didn't pursue the subject any further.

 

    The three smugglers were brothers who spoke with heavy Italian accent.  Anderson would pound on the table whenever they would try to consult with each other in their native language.  They had little information to offer, except for the repeated observation that I was the man in the painting.  They were mere minions -- quite disposable in the intricate international network they worked in.  The only name they can offer was from a known ring leader being sought by Interpol for years.  The realization never came to them that they had been abandoned by the network to take the fall.

    "All we got was a fax from our handler to go pick up this painting at this small, old church in South London."

    "Who was your handler?"

    "Don't know his real name.  We got different ones each week anyway.  They all got handles and they send faxes from different places. We don't try to find out who they are. We just get the job, go do it and get paid."

    "How are you getting paid?"

    "After we get the delivery made at a drop-off point, we'll get a key to a locker at some train station in the mail.  The money's in there."

    "How would you get a hold of them, if you need to?" I asked.

    "We don't," one of them said and shrugged.  "They call us when we get a job."

    I told Anderson I was done with them.  Anderson called the guards in and marched the three out -- each one still staring at me quizzically as they spoke to each other in Italian again.  Anderson lit up a cigarette and gave me a few moments before he sat down and asked me what I thought.

    "I think you should release them."

    He frowned.

    "Why the fuck should I do that? This case's huge. The governor's going to fry my nuts if I let the only leads to one of the biggest smuggling rings free."

    "They know nothing," I said.  "You know as well as I do that they've been abandoned by the network to rot in your jail.  Likes of them are disposable because they know nothing and poses no threat to the network by being in custody."

    "And you think just because we let them walk out of the door that organization will welcome them back with open arms? If anything, they'd be whacked simply for being caught -- good example for the smugglers in their employment...not to mention they know we'd be watching to see who calls them up."

    "I'm not a dreamer," I said.  "I am well aware of reality of the situation.  I want the person who had hired the organization to steal the painting to contact them. If your theory of the serial killer and the man who wanted this painting are one in the same -- he will want to talk to these three simply because these three were the last ones to have physical contact with the painting.  He will want to know about its condition and he will want to know about the church where it was taken from."

    He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

    "The Federal attorney will kick my ass for just to suggest it but I suppose I can try to sway him into dropping the charges."

    "Use that analogy about using the little fish on the fish hook to bait in the bigger fish," I said dryly.  "You cops always talk silly shit like that anyway."

    He smiled cordially.

    "That, we do."

    I told him I'd take a cab back and left the station.  I did, after I visited a bar that was a block away.

    

    It was well after three a.m. when I stumbled out of the cab.  I didn't get drunk but I was feeling pretty nice, with a nice buzz going.  So nice that it took me five minutes to open the front door.  Then I sensed it.  It was a familiar sensation that I had not felt since I was a child -- it was one mixed with both fear and awe in equal proportion that blind-sided me.  I reached for my gun but something slammed me hard against the wall and pinned me there.  

    An iron-like grip locked around my wrists and held them above my head.  I kicked at the intruder but got a nice knee in my belly instead.  

    "Stop fighting...or I will hurt you."

    It might have been the alcohol in me that helped in my decision making but I didn't stop fighting him.  I was close to panic, not understanding why I couldn't break out of the grip.  There's also something of a darkness in all of this that was swelling inside me -- something that made me fear this intruder although I didn't know who he was or know why he was there.  He locked his other wrist around my neck and squeezed until all the fight left me -- and I was dizzy with lack of oxygen.

    "You done?"

    I wanted to say 'no' but I was limp -- a boneless doll that was held up against the wall completely under this man's strength.

    "You've come along nicely," he said -- his voice was calmer and he spoke in a near whisper.  A whisper that I was familiar with but I couldn't recall a name to go with it.

    He bent over and pressed his mouth against mine.  I let him kiss me -- utterly confused.  The darkness inside me grew -- boiling over when he slipped his hand up my shirt and ran the palm of his hand across the my chest.  Somehow, I pulled out of his grip and pushed him away.  He laughed when I scrubbed at my mouth with the back of my hand.

    "You are so cute," he said and walked backwards until he was close to the sofa and sat down.  "Turn the light on.  If the kiss didn't remind you who I was, maybe you should look."

    I pulled my gun out the same time I clicked on the light.  He looked over his shoulder and winked at me.

    "Sit down," he said and patted at the empty spot next to him.  "We do have a lot to catch up on, Dante."

    I backed away until my back was flat against the closed door.  If I could make myself move then, I might have just broken down the door and run away.  Run away... just like I did when I was sixteen.

    "Cody..." I said the name that took me years to forget and in that moment, that simple word brought all of the hate and love and guilt back.  

    "Come," he said and held open his arms.  "Show me how much you missed me."