- Part 1, "Passing Shadow..."
- Part 3, "Passing Shadow..."
- Part 4, "Passing Shadow..." (A Miscellany of Skins)
(Welcome back, children. Your scaly Uncle Indrid here to read some more of your bedtime story. Settle in, now, and get comfy...)
Cameron Hancock stood in the rec center lobby, gazing at the large cork bulletin board filled with flyers.
In his stomach waves churned and surged. Something was wrong, and he didn't know it until today.
Just two hours ago he, Max, and Kat had helped little Taylor Waycross to her mom's, explained why the girl was so distraught, and headed back out to the lakeside woods to see for themselves what the girl found.
Taylor's directions to the spot just off the main path, the one where both Cameron and Kat sometimes jogged, were accurate, but Cameron knew once they arrived that they'd have found little Strudel's remains anyway.
Parts of the schnauzer were everywhere.
"My God..." breathed Max.
Kat was the first to take a closer look. The heat of the day had begun to rise, and the odor rode the wave. Cameron was surprised at how the smell hit him. He'd never thought himself squeamish - at 8 he'd idly picked up a folder his father carelessly left on the dining room table and opened it to see 8 by 10 glossy color shots of a woman who he found out later was raped, beaten, and nearly decapitated by a maniac his dad eventually helped send to death row. Rather than be shocked, Cameron had been intrigued.
But to confront the smell of the little dog's dismembered corpse hanging in the heavy, wet air, tinged with the clashing scent of the cedar trees that lined the path behind them, that was another story. Cameron consciously steeled himself against the urge to gag.
Kat, however, seemed oblivious to the odor. "She was right," said Kat in a low voice.
Max had hung back, already more freaked out than he liked at this hour of the morning. His nose, he figured, was a bit deadened by the regular ingestion of pot smoke, but the grotesque sight of the little dog spread out over the clearing where they now stood was enough. Kat's words brought him forward. "Right, as in-"
"As in someone chopped this dog up."
Cameron broke out of the sense of being frozen in place by the sight and the smell and crouched next to his friend. "How can you tell?"
"Look." Kat pointed to the little round lump of fur sitting on an exposed, flat surface of stone about two feet from her fingertip. Cameron recognized with a start the little dog's glassy eyes gazing back at him through blood-caked fur. The dog's head had been severed very neatly, and it's head sat upright, almost as if some bizarre accident had melted the rest of the animal into the stone below. Logic told him what Kat had quickly concluded - only an even cut could allow the animal's head to sit upright like that.
"Holy shit," Max said behind them.
"What?"
"There's a pattern."
Kat and Cameron stood in unison, following Max's gesture towards the far side of the little clearing.
To their right two of the animal's legs were crossed in a lowercase "t". To their left, directly across from the first two legs, the head in the middle, were the other two legs. Directly ahead, about 6 feet beyond the head was the animal's torso.
"A triangle..." breathed Kat.
Someone had killed Strudel, chopped him into pieces and then arranged those pieces in this clearing in a roughly triangular way.
"Can we go now?" said Max.
No one argued.
They debated what to do next. Cam immediately thought of his dad.
"What could your dad do?" asked Max, obviously skeptical.
"Damn, dude, he is a homicide detective." Kat responded before Cameron could.
Cameron shook his head. He knew Max liked his dad, but his dad was a cop, and Max's extracurricular pursuit of chemical amusements had made his old friend extremely wary of the senior Hancock in the last couple of years.
"Yeah, he is," said Cameron, "but he might not take this too seriously. Or tell me to call animal control."
Cameron knew his father would actually find it interesting and weird, and maybe even be concerned. Dad's work in homicide had made him a tad overprotective at times, so exhausted he couldn't pay any attention to his only son at other times. "Let's see what we can find out by ourselves, first." he said.
Max's brown eyes widened. "Look in the mirror, bud - you ain't Sherlock Holmes. I'm not Dr. Watson. This is too creepy for me to want to know any more about it, Cam."
"What about Callie?" asked Kat.
Cameron could tell she'd scored a hit. Callie was Max's beloved tiger tabby - a big cat of indeterminate age who in behavior and friendliness was more like a happy-go-lucky dog. The personality of an Irish Setter in Garfield's body, is how Max described his pet. In spite of Max's well-earned rep as the local laid-back pothead, he was all responsibility when it came to Callie, who in spite of the feminine name was a big tom cat.
"Point taken, Ms. Korbut." said Max with a rueful smile. Cameron and Kat both knew that any hint of potential danger towards Max's baby was enough to change his mind.
They agreed that they'd try and find out who had last seen Strudel. Theirs was a rare section of suburbia where most of the residents had bought their houses new and been in them for up to 25 years. It was the kind of place that seemed deserted on any given work day during the school year, but teemed with friendly people on the weekends. A majority of the kids went to school together. That was how Cameron, Max, and Kat became friends - they waited for the bus together from first grade until the previous school year, when Cameron was the first of the three to get a car. His father had scored an unbelievably good price at a police auction of impounds that resulted in Cameron driving one of the nicer minivans of any on the block. This wasn't the plus it seemed, since Cam was painfully aware that minivans were anything but a badge of coolness for a high school junior or senior. But, as he pointed out to his closest two friends, he could remove the back seat, and whenever he and Dahlia Rosenblum went out the back seat was definitely left behind in the Hancock mens' garage, under a pale blue tarp. Cameron liked to think his dad didn't notice, but homicide cops noticed everything if they wanted to. He loved his dad a little more because he knew his father was making it a point to ignore the removed seat.
They split up to go chat up neighbors they could catch at home, Cameron heading to the rec center.
Now he stood, studying the flyers.
April - Susie Q, the Warner family's old black cat missing. A reward offered.
May - Wrangler, Sam and Tammy Barber's big labrador. The Barbers were one of the youngest couples in Cameron's neighborhood. The teenage boys, him included, could not help but appreciate the fact that stay-at-home wife Tammy was fond of laying out in good weather in the Barber's front yard. Sam Barber kept them all honest, though - at 6'5" and nearly 300 pounds the former college football star was affable once you knew him, but in appearance he was decidedly intimidating.
Wrangler wasn't the only pet from May, though...the Patterson's poodle, Mimi, the Tran family's sheepdog Lucy, the Brinkman's cat Windy...Cameron squinted. He thumbed back one of the newer flyers to see a layer beneath - and from March he found the Winchester family's faded pink offer of $100 for the return or finding of their old shepard mix, Dale.
Cameron wasn't sure, but it seemed to him that there were one too many missing pets for a neighborhood like theirs.
Gooseflesh crawled up his arms, even though a warm breeze rushed in from the single door propped open at the rec center's entrance.
"Help you?"
Cameron turned, startled. A man only a few years older than him stood there, dressed in a blue workman's shirt. The guy was tall, with pale blue eyes and wavy blonde hair that he wore a little long. He was well-built - an athlete. He was dressed like he worked at the center, but not as a trainer - Cameron recognized the workman's shirt as being the kind the janitors typically wore in any county-run facility. Something in the man's broad, semi-handsome face was familiar, but Cameron couldn't pin it down. "Oh, no, man, thanks. I haven't been down here in a while and just noticed all these missing pets on the board. Weird, huh?"
The man smiled. Cameron thought that was an odd response, but didn't have time to analyze - the guy pointed to the office window behind Cameron's right shoulder, to the side of the bulletin board.
"You wanna play ball or anything just ask Miss Piedmont in there."
"Yeah, I know." said Cameron. The guy just stood there. Why did he look familiar? "Do I know you?"
"You the Hancock kid?" asked the man. His voice was a little high.
"Jim?" Cameron couldn't believe it. It was Jim Fremont. The golden boy. Wearing a janitor's shirt at the rec center.
"Cameron, right?" said Jim.
"Right...man, I thought you were-"
"At Tulane? Yeah. Long story."
Jim Fremont's face was all over Cameron, Max, and Kat's high school. All-state quarterback two years in a row. Prom King. Tall, chiselled features - not exactly handsome but still, he looked like a high school hero with his lean, muscular build and dimpled chin. The guy was still a legend. He even entertained in other ways. Cameron could still remember an assembly from his freshman year - the year Jim Fremont graduated - when Jim got up and sang the Star-Spangled Banner - beautifully. His voice was a high, almost trained-sounding tenor.
Jim had been the kind of kid other kids bragged about if he deigned to talk to them. Max's family's back yard bordered the Fremont family's yard - it didn't much matter, because the Fremonts had one of the highest fences in the neighborhood, and half the yard was a vegetable garden. They'd only ever seen Jim Fremont out there helping his mom plant, or later in the growing season, picking tomatoes to take inside and ripen on the windowsill.
Funny thing, though, thought Cameron, it was really hard to find anyone who knew Jim Fremont.
Cameron could sense that Jim Fremont didn't want to stand there and shoot the shit. "I'm gonna get going," he said, "see ya 'round?"
Jim Fremont nodded, a casual gesture that still, janitor's shirt or not, spoke of ease and cool. Whatever the reason this guy wasn't at Tulane screwing every summer student in sight while he bulked up for the coming football season, he still had a kind of enviable self-possession. Obviously the reason he was at home didn't leave him feeling demoralized.
"Sure, dude, see ya 'round...and I hadn't really noticed about the pets, but you're right."
"Didn't notice?" Cameron asked before he thought about it. Later he realized he sounded rude, but that didn't matter in light of Jim Fremont's answer.
"I hate animals, Hancock." said Jim Fremont.
(to be continued...)
