Chasing Robes & Shadows

"Yeah, um... Dave, Dave Simpson, right?"

"Got me. Hey, can we talk?"

He looked around.

"Alone?"

Her head tilted but then she nodded. The restaurant staff and the other set of customers were being released. A handsome young man, taller and broader than this Dave or even Nixon and with a very tall young woman with intricate brunette braids and with incredibly pale skin looked over. She had very green eyes.

"Hey, Dave, you be okay?"

"I'll be fine Bobby. Hopefully these folks will let Asha and Tracy out soon."

"Good to meet you, Dave, sorry this happened. We're going to the hospital, check up on Jayne. Give our love to Asha and Tracy."

Shaw twisted her head slightly. The tall woman's voice was smooth but her accent was strange. Shaw fancied her ability to suss out accents but this one escaped placement. Her expression showed concern but her words were... flat.

"Give me a call tomorrow, Bobby, Anna, let us know how she is."

"Oh, she'll be on tomorrow's news shows no matter what," Anna, the tall woman said with a slight and strange laugh. They waved and walked toward the parking garage entrance. Shaw led Dave a half-dozen steps in the opposite direction.

"Didn't Pearson take your statement?"

"What? Older guy? Fifties? Yeah, he did. Not that. You're the teacher, right? Peter's teacher? Peter Miller?"

Shaw took a moment to register his words, her mouth opened in a small 'o' before she nodded.

"You were at the Church. And... well, you spent the night together right?"

"That was five years ago..."

"He was my best friend, pretty well. We were undergrads together, I'm a grad student now. I was with him at the Church. But I got out with Anna and Cat. He told me to never talk to you. I've never even told Asha about the Church. He told me he'd shown Anna to you, that you saw her and Laurel and Hardy."

Shaw hid her reaction. She hadn't recognized Dave's name when he'd been pointed out. But now it came back to her. She'd looked into Peter's friends at the time, had discounted them. Including this Dave Simpson. But. Tracy's attack. Now, this?

"Of course he did. That's ok, I believe you. But I'm sorry, I don't know what happened to him when he disappeared."

"I think I know someone who does... well, maybe more than one."

Shaw again hid her reaction. Let him talk. Another silent 'oh.'

"One of my undergrad students, Chris, him and his girlfriend. They're... odd. They think they know who took him and Carole."

"How do they know that?"

"That satellite that crashed. They found more. It's them. Aliens."

"Satellite? You mean the asteroid or meteorite?"

"Talk to them. They're, um, committed. Did a press conference and everything. And one more."

"Who?"

"Cat. Oh. Jayne. The reporter. She was Anna's driver that night. And she was with Carole and Peter the day before they disappeared. And she's the one that filmed us this past Halloween. Me, I was there, and Chris and his girlfriend. She was the succubus."

Falling, Falling, Falling

"Someone pushed him," Bonnie Baxter said firmly, she hit the table with her fist. Her eyes were rimmed in deep red and tears of anger and grief covered her cheeks and drops hit her orange jail jumpsuit. This wasn't her first visit to an interview room, but she'd never been in orange before. All of the members of their little gang had on a few occasions been hauled in but never before had any substantial charges been likely to stick. Shaw knew they'd dealt harder drugs before their attempt at the big score at the Broiler but Wolfie was good, neither she nor Brenda nor their colleagues had caught him or the others in possession of anything but trivial amounts of grass, a couple of slaps on the wrists and off they went. Gail had skated away from a few potentially serious assault charges when male victims she'd beaten senseless had refused cooperation. But this case was about as slam dunk as it could get.

"Who was up there? Wasn't he the last one?"

"I wasn't on the roof. Someone must've been hiding, followed."

"Bonnie," Joyce Shaw said softly, "no one saw or heard anyone up there after Jake fell. He must've stumbled. You're in trouble, but well, you can help yourself. I know Tommy and Gail drove this."

Bonnie's right hand reached across her chest and scratched at the back of her neck on the left side. Shaw took it as a sign of the young woman's nerves.

"Our ticket out, me and Jake. Gail found out about what that Stan idiot was doing, Tommy was all in, we'd pull this, skip town, sell it all, split the money. Those two been nuts since... since Jed and that little college slut. His stroke. But we needed enough money... get away from them. Set up on our own somewhere new."

Bonnie had taken a few moments when she'd entered the room to recognize Shaw as the woman who'd helped rescue her and then had met her on odd occasions, always as a buyer of drugs or as a call girl disguised as an office drone. Her grief was about to turn to anger at the perceived betrayal when Shaw had disarmed her.

"I'm sorry Bonnie, that I wasn't able to save Jake."

Shaw had learned about the planning, but little about the players and the kidnapping. Bonnie had waited in the empty store that was being remodeled until she'd heard the pre-arranged knocks and had opened the hatch. Had the original plan worked out and the gang had slipped out of the Broiler without the hostages they'd have called her on the phone the construction company had in the store and she'd have sneaked back down the service stairs on that side of the mall where the cameras had been disabled.

"Why'd you cut the reporter, Bonnie?"

"What? Oh, the TV bitch. I didn't... mean to. When Jake fell we all jumped, I was next to her... it was an accident. That's all I remember until you cops were there and I woke up."

"Your neck okay? You keep scratching it."

"I don't know. Itches."

"Turn your head."

Bonnie turned her head. Shaw saw a reddish, oval spot a couple of inches on the long side overlaid by deeper red scratches from the girl's short fingernails. The story had been she and Jayne had tumbled and Bonnie had stabbed her then hit her head as they fell. But the paramedics hadn't reported any bruises.

"Ok, thanks. Maybe it's a bite," Shaw said but she didn't believe it. But she had no other explanation.

"I'll tell the DA you've been helpful Bonnie, I'll do what I can. And I'll see you're kept away from Tommy and Gail once they're out of the hospital. But, you'll have to help me deal with those two. Jake would still be here but for them."

The young woman took a deep breath, nodded.

Shaw walked away from the interview room as a uniformed officer entered to take Bonnie back to her cell. That distraught young woman claimed to not know the parties beyond that chef Stan at the Broiler and so far Tommy and Gail had refused to talk. But Stan wasn't a real criminal. Brenda was running down a couple of the leads he'd blabbered. Using amateurs and an indirect channel through a new and upscale restaurant's kitchen appeared to be aimed at avoiding the Mongrels as much as the police. The bikers didn't like touching the drugs but they 'taxed' those who did for the 'right' to move and sell on Mongrel 'territory.'

Stan and his friend Alan who'd been hired as the morning guy at the Broiler to receive the coke planted in the fish most Fridays were fine amateur patsies, unfamiliar with the 'unwritten rules' of the local underworld. That insulated the real powers a bit, forced the police and other criminals to chase ghosts. The driver that delivered the fish was the same and had skipped town but he was of little matter. They had APBs in neighboring states, he'd turn up, no record of violence, no experience staying hidden. They'd all just figured it was a way to make some easy cash and hey, they weren't the ones actually selling or using the drugs.

The pieces would fall in place. The question now, would the police get to the real players first. Or would the bikers.

She had little expectation this would do anything in the long run. The drugs themselves she knew deep down weren't the crux of the problem. It was the crap around it, like a group of thugs busting into a restaurant and taking bystanders hostage.

Only the combination of a clumsy young man and a seemingly combat-trained young woman had kept almost everyone alive and ended things quickly.

But she'd surveilled that young man. He wasn't clumsy. Underground rumor held him and his cute little faux-flapper girl had used a six inch tenth floor ledge about eighteen months earlier to get into a window to steal materials other rumors held were now being used to blackmail some high local religious figure. No such robbery nor blackmail had ever been reported but if the rumors were accurate that wasn't surprising.

Everyone had made it up once and all but him down without mishap, including two women in wild heels and slinky dresses.

And that redhead. The reporter Jayne Jacobs had kicked her own fame up another notch or two with her extended stories about her personal experience and the heroics of the twice-endangered Tracy and her no-longer-secret ninja friend Asha. A pair of very reluctant heroines beyond stripping to their underwear in public.

Filming mostly-naked college students for Halloween had moved Jayne in front of the cameras. Covering that attack on Tracy and her incredible escape a month later had lit the fuse but her ability to make Jed's criminal family almost sympathetic after she revisited the disappearance of his brother Peter Miller, the one member of that family seemingly on a path to legal success, had been the takeoff. It had convinced Shaw the reporter was very good. Even if it had saddened the detective to revisit his sudden vanishing. But Shaw had noted Jayne hadn't included mention of her tangential involvement in Peter's life just before he and Carole disappeared.

Why? She used the personal angle to great effect in the Broiler coverage. Had she learned from her work these last few months?

Shaw also needed to know more about that beautiful and curvy redhead. Her fighting skills made her enough of a wildcard. That her boyfriend was Shaw's one-night lover Peter Miller's best friend... and that boyfriend also connected her to a pair of UFO-crazed oddballs obsessed with finding that disappeared lover... Wrapped around them was an up-and-coming reporter with a possible hidden past.

A disadvantage of being a detective. You were always trying to connect dots.

But these dots just screamed they needed to be connected.

Just over a week later Shaw paused outside of Bill 'n Ada's entrance. They'd chosen... this place? She thought back to her college days. Sure, you ate at places like this. Her family had arrived in this city when she was a teen a couple of decades ago and this dive diner had been old and decrepit even then but in the years before and since her arrival had never closed, not even when a couple of small fires had forced adjustments on the kitchen staff. Uniformed officers knew the place as a last resort for sustenance in the wee hours or a place from which to haul off the odd verbal jousters who'd abandoned words for fists although by the time the police arrived the staff had usually dealt with them in vigorous fashion.

But for this meeting? When they'd been told someone else was paying?

"You said they're strange, Dave," she said aloud to the imaginary informant beside her. She'd not been here since her days in vice, a disguised hooker or call girl to meet a 'client' or just off the clock around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. Now, it was 10:15 on a chilly last day of February Friday night. Just like she'd been told. A quick check had shown neither of the pair had come to the attention of officialdom beyond the boy having a commercial driver's license. He also drove an old Ford. No records for the girl from out of state.

Intriguingly, Peter Miller had also had a commercial driver's license. And he'd driven an old Ford. And both were computer science majors.

No one else on the force knew of this meeting except Brenda who she'd told about it but had turned down her friend's offer to accompany her, told her fellow freshly-minted junior detective to spend a rare Friday night off with her new husband. This was personal. The one minute phone call that had arranged this meeting had ended "you'll know us."

After Dave's statement at the Broiler, she'd asked around and unsurprisingly had little trouble finding a copy of the infamous Halloween video report. Apparently half of the police force had personal copies and even plenty of stills had been produced 'in case they're needed in investigations' along with the video copies in the force's photo processing lab.

Shaw had seen but paid little attention to the original airing where Jayne, in a skin-tight Cat costume, had recorded a group of costumed Uni students. Barely costumed Uni students. The tall and well-built black-winged succubus who couldn't move without exposing her tits and pussy since she'd apparently forgotten to wear any underwear under her barely there skirt and open shirt. Her leashed 'prey' in leather jeans so tight you could see the veins on his cock. And the white-haloed redheaded angel whose skirt was barely an inch longer than the demon's and her figure almost as impressive.

She'd paused the video and had found Dave in the background as well as the tall couple from the Broiler, Bobby and Anna, likewise not centers of attention. But the redhead of the video hadn't been the redhead, Asha, from the Broiler. Nor was her little friend Tracy in the video. Just like she couldn't explain the connection of Asha to Tracy, how Dave then got pulled in was all to be sussed out.

Dave had said the girlfriend was the succubus. So. The taller and black-haired one of the two young women who'd surrounded her target boy. She entered the diner. And was certain.

The last booth, along the right wall. The section without windows. Past any sort of dinner time but the bars didn't close for a couple of hours so otherwise just a handful of parties and none were even near matches for her targets. A waitress with a glass coffee carafe in each hand stood next to the couple's booth and three sets of eyes turned onto her as they all laughed at some joke.

Shaw maintained a friendly but not broad smile as she approached them.

"Coffee, dear?" The waitress lifted one of the carafes quickly.

"No thanks, Rose," Shaw read the name tag, "but I'll have tea if you have it."

"Can do." She strode toward the other diners on her resupply run.

Shaw's trained eye tried to be casual as she looked over her targets. But it was hard.

The young woman on the outer half of the booth bench, the boy at her left arm. She was in jeans, plain but snug jeans. And a red blouse. A too small red blouse. A way too tight very see through red blouse. With no bra. They weren't tiny either, not huge, not like the knife-fighting redhead at the Broiler, but decent. Perfectly round. Exactly what had been implied but only just flashed in the Halloween video.

But. To be barely dressed for Halloween? That was one thing, Shaw recalled costumes she and friends had dared. But here? The girl was a demon.

And it was obvious she didn't need a bra. Even at that age, Shaw thought, mine didn't do that. And she'd always been proud of her figure. It had been a weapon during her days in vice and she worked hard to keep it.

So did these two, it seemed. The young man wasn't unlike Peter in build it seemed, his brown hair and firm face matched, unlike his instructor Dave he didn't seem to have extra padding. The young woman was padded but the firm abs visible through that blouse made clear that padding was only in the right places.

And that girl. Black curls and waves started on top of her head to fall over her shoulders and onto her back. A lustrous sheen showed through despite the fact she apparently didn't own brushes or combs. But Shaw's eyes stayed too long on the two red-black horns whose points jutted from that hair. Again. They'd been there for Halloween. Tonight?

She caught their smiles, victorious smiles that they'd won this first round by unsettling her before she'd even sat down.

Then she saw the red-black shape on the bench along the girl's right thigh. It had a triangular point.

A devil's tail.

Shaw's last two steps were on autopilot.

"Joyce Shaw, we presume?"

The girl's voice had a tremolo that Shaw wasn't sure was real or put on. She'd used similar in various of her roles of pretend seduction. With her shoulders squared and her firm posture and that shirt, the effect was impressive.

"That's me, you're Mel, I take it?"

"Mel Caldicott," she extended her right arm and Shaw took it, "join us."

"Chris Bajevic," the young man followed suit and she shook his hand across the table, "you're Dave's friend?"

"Not so much Dave's friend as Peter's. Peter Miller's."

She'd hoped to regain initiative with that but it was clear from their muted reactions that Dave had preempted her before Chris continued.

"And you're a detective, Joyce?"

"Yes. But this is personal. Not official business."

"We'd noticed from what few articles that were in the press you'd not taken his disappearance all that seriously," Mel tried to keep her voice neutral but there was a hint of accusation in it and those dark eyes bored into Shaw. She was held by them for a moment, the irises so dark she couldn't separate them from the pupils. Those eyes glittered and Shaw looked away before she fell into those pits.

"Don't confuse the official response to what I and others might've felt. I wasn't in position back then to force anything. I tried but there are things I didn't know. Like who Cat was. Is."

"The reporter who doesn't report on herself," Chris laughed, looked up as Rose brought Joyce a mug of hot water and the ubiquitous tea bag.

"You three be wanting food tonight?"

"Just a plate of fries, you want to share some, Joyce? They have pretty decent chocolate cake, too. Best kept secret in town."

She shrugged, if that was true it indeed was the best kept secret in town.

"No dessert for us, he owes me ice cream," Mel bumped her shoulder into Chris and smiled at him, Dave had said they were a couple, clear unless they were the best actors she'd met, but further explanation wasn't forthcoming. Rose walked off with a light laugh.

"So why are you two interested in Peter? I know you're in comp sci like he was, Chris, but you're too young to have met him, right?"

"This one, mostly," Chris nodded at Mel, who smiled softly, "I introduced her to friends as 'my demon' and well, everyone made me explain that."

"He saw through my disguise of just being a girl from North Dakota," Mel said, a slight rasp apparently natural Shaw concluded but the girl knew how to wield it too, "and so now I just let the horns and tail show. But back then..."

The 'North Dakota' mention surprised Shaw. Like that state, plenty of locals descended from Scandinavian immigrants but assayed a much mellower form of that northern inflection. But this 'demon' offered no vocal clue to that heritage. And her boy's smooth not quite baritone had none of the local version. But both of their olive skin tones and dark hair argued against much of that Northern European blood in either background.

"It was Dave's fault," Chris picked up the tale. His eyes were not as dark, a mahogany brown but they shone with the same intelligence, and what seemed a general shared whimsy, as the demon girl.

"Dave? I know he's one of your TAs..."

"He said Peter always called that Carole girl 'my succubus.' His demon. So after they disappeared it sort of became tradition that on the rare occasions us CS guys got beautiful girlfriends they became 'our demons.' So this one..."