Churning Butter

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Two Chicago detectives solve a series of rapes in the windy city.

This is more of a sci-fi story with sexual overtones than a sexual story with sci-fi overtones. If you want more sexual content, read some of my other stories.

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The bright blue Ford compact glided smoothly to a stop at the curb in front of a run down bar in an even more run down area of the city. It was supposed to be an unmarked car, but the blue police lights clearly seen mounted on the dashboard and in the rear window gave things away rather badly. Besides that, shortly after the city of Chicago put several dozen of these identical "blend in with the traffic" vehicles on the road, there were at least a dozen YouTube posts showing them with their lights flashing, pulling over motorists or responding to calls. With the easily recognized color and the visible lights, they might as well have had been painted white with the blue stripe on the sides and CHICAGO POLICE in big, red letters.

It didn't make much difference anyway. Detectives Katrina Ecstranger and Melvin Beckermann were not undercover or trying to sneak up on anyone. They were working a major case and someone had called in what sounded like a good tip. The late-afternoon call had come from the owner of a dive called Clancy's Place. He told the desk officer that he would be tending bar "all day and half the night," and that they should send somebody down to talk to him.

This wasn't an area of town a cop wanted to be in after dark without backup, so the wise choice was to follow up on the lead immediately. They walked quickly into the bar with Katrina staying several steps behind her partner just in case this was some sort of trap. Moving from the bright sunlight of the street into the dim darkness of a sleazy bar always had a certain pucker factor to it since you were basically defenseless until your eyes adjusted to the darkness. Keeping one eye closed as you walked from the car to the front door helped, but still, if this was a set up, things could go south very quickly.

The bar, however, was empty except for Harvey, the bartender and owner. He was the one who had called the station house earlier with "maybe a tip on this Full Moon Rapist guy."

Behind their backs around the station house, detectives Katrina Ecstranger and Melvin Beckermann were known as Tom and Jerry. "Tom" because Katrina told everyone to call her "Kat," had a cat-like face, and always moved with lithe, almost feline movements. "Jerry" because Mel's rather pointed noise and almost permanent smile made him look very much like the cartoon mouse of that name.

Mel leaned against the bar and waited for Harvey to start the conversation while Kat stayed closer to the door to cover things. After a long silence, Kat finally said from across the room, "So, Harvey, what have you got for us?"

"I'm sure this is nothing," he replied, glancing nervously up at Mel, "but youse guys have been coming in here couple times a month for the past year asking if I've heard anything unusual. You know, somebody bragging about what they done... that sort of thing. You even said that if I got something there might be a reward in it for me.

"This can't be anything, but it..., hell, I don't know... it just struck me as really odd. There's this little nothing of a guy. Must work or live in the area 'cause he's been coming in here about five every day for eight or nine months. Doesn't say much. Just sits here drinking beers all evening. Not drunk, ya' know, but getting a real buzz on by the end of the night. Yesterday, I tells him, 'You need to watch how much you're knocking back or you're going to end up having to go to those monthly meetings.'"

He glanced down nervously and wiped the bar with the rag in his hand. "I was just kidding him, you know..., in a friendly sort of way, to tell him to watch how much he was putting down. This is a family place regardless of what it looks like. I don't really need barflies and drunks, but he didn't seem like that either... Anyway, he says to me, 'They don't have meetings for what I'm addicted to...'

"He looked really sad, almost desperate, so I says, 'They got meetings for everything. What's your particular brand of trouble?'

"He downs the rest of his beer, lays his money on the bar, and gets up and starts to walk towards the door. Just before he goes out, he turns back to me and says, 'Churning butter under a full moon.'"

"Like I say, it can't be anything, but he said 'full moon,' and youse guys have been driving me nuts about anybody who says anything weird about the full moon cause you don't got no leads on this Full Moon Rapist guy."

"You don't happen to have security cameras, do you, Harvey?" asked Mel.

"In this dump?" He snorted. "There's an ATM across the street. Last time I got held up, youse guys got a clear shot of the punk who did it off them tapes. Maybe there's a picture of the little weirdo over there."

"We will check that out," said Detective Ecstranger. "And if it turns out that there is anything to this, you'll get a portion of the reward."

"What's it up to?" asked the barman. "Last I heard it was over a million. Wouldn't mind getting a big piece of that."

"If this weirdo has anything to do with the Full Moon Rapist, you will get something. It will depend on how important your tip has been to the case."

Just before Mel walked out the door, Harvey spoke up one last time, "Oh yeah... I shoulda told ya. He will probably be here tonight, but definitely not tomorrow night. He might stop by for a quick one tomorrow, but he won't stay. Moon's almost full, ya' know, and he ain't never in here on the night of the full moon... always leaves before it gets dark."

***

As the two detectives walked back to their car, Mel stopped and turned to his partner. "So what do you think?" he asked. "Doesn't sound like the type of person who could overpower twenty-some women and several men over the course of the past three years, but he said the magic words and disappears on the night of the full moon."

"'Full moon' could be a coincidence," answered Kat, "But it has never been released that the rapist uses butter as a lubricant and to screw up DNA testing. Lab boys say it shouldn't interfere with DNA tests, but somehow it does. They can't get anything human to try for a match. And 'Churning butter under a full moon' is too good a description of what is happening. He's got something to do with it, even if he isn't our perp."

They had reached the car. Mel triggered the door locks and they both slid into the seats. Kat was unusually quiet. Her breathing was a little heavier than normal. Mel noticed, but said nothing.

Mel noticed a great deal. He was a good detective, and good detectives notice everything. He and Kat had been partners for three years now and had been working this case as point on the task force for over a year. He knew that the case affected Kat deeply. It affected him too. It was almost personal. Someone had been raping woman... and men... in his city, once a month for the past 40 months and the police were no closer to catching him now than they were three years ago when he first started.

Over the past year, Mel and Kat had watched or listened repeatedly to the interview tapes with the victims. The story was always the same. It was a full moon. They were in a relatively deserted area of some sort where they thought they were safe. One woman was in a park. One woman was on the roof of a building. One man was in his own home. Each thought that they were alone. They all insisted that they neither saw nor heard anyone approaching them when they were suddenly knocked to the ground by something large and heavy being thrown against them.

"It was like a large bag of sand" one of the victims had described it. "It knocked me off my feet, and the next thing I knew I was lying naked on the ground." Another said, "I was in the garden in my back yard, and I thought I was safe because it's totally walled off with a heavy gate that I keep locked. But somehow, whoever it was got in without me seeing or hearing him. I don't know how long I was lying on the ground, but I know it had to be several minutes. I must have hit my head because it was like I was stunned or something and I don't remember him taking off my clothes. As I came back to my senses I could feel something cold being inserted into my ass. It felt slimy. Then something slick was being rubbed on my body, especially on my breasts and buttocks."

Mel especially remembered one victim had trembled and looked down at the ground describing the attack. "It almost felt good," she said in a quivering voice. "I am so ashamed. It felt soooo good. Despite what was happening, my body was responding. And then I felt his tongue on me. He was licking me. I've had oral sex before, but this was different. It felt really odd. His tongue was longer... and rougher than it should have been. And it wriggled strangely inside of me... both in the front and in the back."

She broke down and cried for several minutes. The female officer conducting the interview waited patiently for her to finish and then asked, "Can you continue? We really do need as much detail as you can remember."

"I am so ashamed," she repeated. "I was so turned on. Am I a bad person?"

The interviewing officer remained silent, but put a hand on the victim's shoulder to show support and then asked her to go on. She continued, "I felt him pull me up into a kneeling position." She suddenly looked startled and looked up at the camera that was recording the interview. "He had gloves on! I had forgotten that. Really strange gloves that were soft and rough at the same time. Something on the gloves almost scratched me, like there was metal or something somewhere on the fingers. Then he entered me from behind. I've never had anal sex before. I thought it would hurt, but it felt good. He was rubbing me with something soft between my legs. It felt like a fuzzy rope. Despite myself, I kept going higher and higher. Suddenly I started to orgasm and he pulled out of my backside and thrust himself into my front. He made a really strange sort of screeching kind of yell as he ejaculated into me."

She sat quietly for a moment before finishing. "Then he was gone. I lay on the ground in my garden for a little while pulling myself together, and then I got up and went back inside my house and called the police." There were several more minutes of video of her sitting there quietly crying.

The interviews with the other victims told pretty much the same story. One woman said that whatever hit her felt and smelled like an oversized version of the scented wheat bag she used for neck pain. "There was definitely the smell of lavender," she had said. "The smell was overwhelming as soon as the bag hit me. It felt like a sack full of grain, but it was like the grain in the sack was moving around me. When I smelled the lavender, I felt really calm. Then I passed out."

The most recent victim, a man, said that the rapist tried to disguise his voice by speaking in almost a growl. "He kept growling softly in my ear as he raped my ass. He kept saying, 'I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. It would have been better if I had died in the crash like everyone else. I can't control myself here..., and I am so alone.'"

After they watched that particular interview, Detective Beckermann turned to his partner and asked, "What in the hell do you think he meant by that, Kat." But Detective Ecstranger didn't answer. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were clenched tightly on the lip of the table which held the video monitor. She seemed to be quivering almost as if in a mild epileptic seizure.

"Kat, are you OK?" Mel asked.

She spoke slowly and softly, almost as if she were speaking to herself, "He's not alone, but he doesn't know it. He was not the only survivor."

"What in the hell do you mean by that?" sputtered Mel, and Kat just stared at him. She would do that once in a while- seem to go inside herself. That was one of the primary reasons that her previous partners had requested she be re-assigned.

"Watch her," one former partner had warned Mel. "She gets creepy as all hell at her time of the month, but she's a damn good detective the rest of the time. Captain thought seriously about getting her dismissed at one point, but was afraid of how it would look if he complained about a woman's severe PMS."

Kat definitely got weird once in a while... actually about every 28 days, but it was usually in those fits of weirdness that she came up with her best insight into their cases. Mel had been a good, but not outstanding detective before pairing up with her. Now he had one of the best case closure rates in the department, and most of that was because his partner was "the cat."

Fellow officers joked about them behind their backs, but when a case was going very cold or started out more baffling than usual, the precinct captain, or sometimes even someone from downtown, would say, "Let's send the cat over there and see what she sniffs out."

Mel and Kat looked, and often acted, like a station house joke, but "Tom and Jerry" solved cases, and that was what was important. So Mel's odd looks and bumbling ways and Kat's weirdness and periodic missed days were tolerated by fellow officers and the precinct captain.

When they were put on the Full Moon Rapist Task Force, it was expected that they would soon help break the case. But almost a year had passed and they were no closer to solving this case than before. Harvey the bartender's strange tip was, in many ways, the best lead they had yet received.

***

As they drove back to the station, Kat broke her silence and said quietly. "This will be over soon, but the case will never be officially closed." She looked over at her partner and smiled. Somehow her smile made her look even more cat-like. "I'm sorry," she continued, "but that's the way it's going to have to be."

She looked down at her smart phone and opened an app of some sort. Mel started to ask what she had meant when suddenly she almost yelled, "We have to go back to the bar. Harvey was wrong! Tonight's the full moon, not tomorrow! His sense of smell will be heightened. He'll know that I have been there! He'll run and never return! We'll lose him!" She looked frantic. "But I might be able to get a message to him before my scent..."

Her voice trailed off as she saw Mel's startled face. "You're getting weirder than usual," he said slowly. "Going to let me in on what is goin'on?"

Kat stared back at him for a long time. "Mel," she began, "do you remember right after we became partners and you checked up on me?"

He said nothing, though surprise showed on his face that she was aware that he had called an old buddy of his on the Philadelphia PD to ask about her.

"You asked one of your contacts in Philly what I was like when I was on the force there and he said he had never heard of me. A few days later, he called you back and said I had just slipped his mind, but he had talked to some of the officers who had worked with me."

Mel still said nothing.

"He was lying to you. He knew nothing about me until federal agents called on him and told him what to say. I'm in sort of a witness protection program. I'm a very good cop with a very wide range of experience, but I've never been on the force in Philly."

Mel pulled up in front of the bar. "And you couldn't even tell your partner?" he asked.

"You would never understand unless you've seen me naked," she said with almost a laugh. "And that ain't never gonna happen."

"I don't need the past," he said as they again walked toward the bar, "I just need to know what it has to do with this case."

"Harvey's barfly is the perp," she answered. "But he can never be arrested. He needs to be taken into the same program that I am in..., but as a prisoner, not a guest. The feds will handle it. The rapes will stop, but we can never arrest him or say anything specific about him to the public or the rest of the department."

Mel followed her into the bar in silence. As soon as they were inside, she called out, "Harvey, I need you to do something for us."

She walked up to the bar and picked up one of the large, cork coasters that advertised a particular brand of beer. She began writing strange symbols on it with the felt-tipped pen she normally carried to mark evidence bags.

Then she pulled Harvey up over the bar by his shirt so that their faces were just inches apart. "As soon as he comes in the door, you yell this out to him. You tell him, 'A Butter Cat left you a message.' and hold up this coaster so he can see it. He's going to be surprised by what you say and not sure that you actually said it, so you repeat yourself. Hold up this coaster so he can see it and say again, 'A Butter Cat left you a message.' You have to say that as soon as he enters the door."

She released her hold on Harvey's shirt and said a bit more softly. "He will probably leave as soon as he gets the message. If this works, I will see to it that you get a big chunk of the reward. ... But if you ever tell anybody else anything about this you won't get a dime and you will probably never be seen again."

Harvey stared at her blankly. She pulled him back up to her face once again. "Do you understand me?" she asked. Her voice was now almost a snarl. Harvey blinked his eyes and shook his head yes. Mel also blinked. For a minute it looked as if Kat's face was furry and her teeth appeared to be long and pointed.

Harvey was now standing back from the bar. His eyes were wide open. He was trying to speak, but having no real success. Finally, he found his voice and stammered out, "I'll tell him. I'll tell him as soon as he sticks his face through that door."

As they left the bar, Kat staggered slightly and then caught herself. "Mel," she said as soon as they go into the car, "you have to get me home immediately. It is way too close to the full moon and that bar was saturated with his pheromones. No one can see me like this. If I lose control, call the number on my phone that I have listed as Emergency X."

Mel felt something sharp dig into his skin and looked down at the steering wheel. A furry hand was wrapped around his arm, long claws digging slightly into his skin. He looked over at Kat. Her face was covered with a fine, tawny fur. She was meowling lightly. Her voice was distorted, but she was clear that she was saying, "Please don't let anyone see me like this. Don't let them see me." She was almost crying as she said, "You don't know what's at stake."

He looked around quickly and stopped the car. They were in a deserted block and there was no traffic. "Get in back," he said quickly. "And lay down on the seat. Leave your phone up here."

Minutes later they were racing toward Kat's house in the suburbs. The meowling from the back seat was now long, loud, and drawn out. Mel picked up Kat's phone and scrolled the call list looking for the right number. Finally he found it and pressed CALL.

It was answered almost immediately with a very calm, professional voice which said, "What is the nature of your emergency?"

"This is Detective Melvin Beckermann. Katrina Ecstranger is my partner. I have a cat in heat in the back seat of my squad car and she suggested I call you."

The voice on the other end of the call was no longer calm. "Shit! Are you in public? Can you get her home unseen?"

"She is in the back seat of the car. No one can see her. I can get her home, but I'm not sure I can get her into the house unseen."

"Good so far," answered the voice on the phone. "Someone will meet you at the house. Pull into the garage. It will be open. It is connected directly to the house. Stay at the house with Kat and the person who meets you. Someone will come by later and read you in. Do I need to tell you not to tell anyone about this?"