Unidentified Flying Suspect (Illegal Alien Book 2) Page 9

  “How’s Aunt Rose recovering?” he asked as I stepped through one of the doors he was holding.

  “Just fine, thanks. I didn’t realize how bad her eyes had gotten—wait a minute. How did you know she had cataract surgery?”

  He shrugged. “I check in on her sometimes. I know you’ve got it covered, but I box at the gym down the street, so I swing by and make sure she’s okay whenever I can.”

  “You go to Phillipe’s? No way. I’ve never seen you there.”

  “I’m a late nighter, so I usually swing by Rose’s with a treat for Dumbass when I’m done.” He paused and cocked his head inquisitively. “You box?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Contrary to popular belief, even middle aged women can box.”

  “Fair enough.” He paused and then added uncomfortably. “I should probably mention that she keeps trying to set us up. I’m not trying to worm in or get a leg up in the detective bureau. It’s all her idea.”

  “You and me, you mean? On a date?”

  “Yeah.” He gave me a look of fond exasperation that I knew all too well. It was tough to dissuade Aunt Rose once she got an idea in her head. “I keep telling her no, but the lady won’t listen.”

  “Why? You got something against older women?”

  I put just the right amount of indignation into my voice, and he looked stricken until I burst out into a round of laughter that hurt my shoulder and cut it off quick.

  “I can’t decide if I feel bad for you or think you deserve that,” he said.

  “A bit of both, probably.”

  “Fair. Here we are.”

  He held open the final door and ushered me into the lobby like I was a debutante making her grand entrance. It felt ridiculous, quite frankly, but I was beyond complaining at this point. My best friend Jenn sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the door, leaning against her massive boyfriend Reginald. Reg was a big block of a man but ill at ease with his size. He worked as an accountant and might have been the biggest nerd I’d ever met. No one was good enough for Jenn, but I liked him. Jenn looked like a rock star, with her close cropped hair, now dyed platinum, and her long, regal figure. He treated her like one too.

  He stood up, and the two big black men took a moment to size each other up in that wordless way men do. They must have passed the test, because they each stuck a hand out, introduced themselves, and shook.

  “God, Audrey,” said Jenn, bypassing them to give me a gentle hug. “Are you okay?”

  “Hurts like hell,” I said, “But yeah. I’m really wanting some takeout and a hot bath. Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “Sure. I just wish I could do more. I’d like to get my hands on the penis pustule who did this to you and throttle the crap out of him.”

  I blinked. “Penis pustule? What kind of insult is that?”

  “Hey, I worked for a long time to come up with that!” she protested.

  “We don’t all have your skill for invective,” rumbled Reginald.

  “You can say that again.” I shook my head. “Let’s go. We don’t want someone overhearing and thinking one of you guys has a bad case of the penis pustules.”

  It turned out that those were the magic words. Reginald and Burgess practically picked us both up before sprinting out the door. We attracted a lot of scandalized looks on the way, and I couldn’t stop laughing no matter how badly it hurt. Maybe I was a little hysterical, but I didn’t care. After everything I’d been through, I’d earned it.

  CHAPTER 15

  From time to time, I had been accused of extreme stubbornness, and rightfully so. Although I woke up to a voice mail from Scorsone offering me a day off, I skipped the painkillers and forced myself into the shower. Sitting at home and counting my various contusions and abrasions didn’t appeal to me. I preferred to head into the office so I could catch the penis pustule. After Jenn’s outburst, the nickname had stuck in my head, and now I couldn’t think of my assailant as anything else. Hopefully I’d manage to keep it out of my report, because I drew the lines at saying the words “penis pustule” in court. Everyone has standards, and apparently, those were mine.

  Although I turned down the free vacation day, I did take my time over my morning coffee, and I used up the hot water in the shower. Neither managed to make me feel normal, but I was walking a little less like Frankenstein’s monster girlfriend by the time I left my apartment.

  My cell phone rang just as I was settling gingerly into Candyass, my prized convertible. A quick glance at the caller ID showed to my surprise that Hardwicke was on the other end. Maybe he’d finally figured out that he’d been an asswipe and should have accompanied me into the tunnel the night before, or checked on me at the hospital, or maybe taken the time to update me on the investigation. Since we were supposed to be partners and all. Of course, he might have been trying to do those things now, but it was too late from my point of view. I let the call go to voice mail.

  The drive into work helped improve my spirits a little further. Thoughts about the case—about the aliens—kept trying to surface, but I pushed them down firmly. I deserved to relax, just for this drive. I could worry about those things when I got to work. But for now, I’d revel in the fact that I was still alive and kicking.

  The weather hadn’t entered the try-to-boil-you-alive stage this early in the morning, so I opened my windows and let the wind ruffle my hair. Running late meant I’d missed the worst of the traffic, so I didn’t spend half the drive cussing people out for driving like four year olds in bumper cars. Instead, I arrived at the precinct relaxed and with a plan for the day.

  I knew I’d have to talk to Hardwicke, but now I’d be able to do it without wanting to tear his head off. Before I tackled that task, though, I decided to stop by Sheila’s office to debrief her on what had happened yesterday and find out what they’d learned about the device, if anything. Since I’d been taken out of the investigative picture, I was happier than ever that I’d requested her presence at the scene. Hardwicke couldn’t be trusted to tell me everything, but Sheila didn’t have a duplicitous bone in her body. Those were missing along with her funny bone just like that emergency room doctor, but I was pretty sure she didn’t have a micropenis. Not entirely sure, but fairly so.

  When I entered the lab, Sheila looked up from her microscope and came right over to me. I knew immediately that something was up. Her thin face looked almost animated, and her lips quirked in what might have been a smile. I wasn’t sure. Maybe Sheila was like your average baby. You might think she was smiling, but it would turn out that she just had gas.

  “You’re okay,” she said. “Good.”

  “Yes, thanks for asking,” I said automatically, even though she hadn’t asked a damned thing. “I need a debrief on the investigation. You got a second?”

  “I can do better than that,” she declared, taking me by the arm and pulling me toward the microscope. “I can show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  My eyes scanned the table but couldn’t make sense of its contents—colorful graphs, squirt bottles, stacked slides, and printed photographs of what looked like giant black crystals. I had never been a stupid woman, but laboratory analysis had never been my forte. Rather than attempting to jump to conclusions that would likely turn out to be blazingly wrong, I preferred to let the expert tell me what shit meant and then draw my own conclusions from there.

  “So the bomb wasn’t a bomb after all,” said Sheila, fiddling with the microscope. “At least, we’re fairly sure it isn’t. It’s some kind of device, but we don’t know what it does.”

  “Then how do you know it’s not a bomb…?” I said slowly.

  “It would be difficult to build a bomb without some kind of fuel. Or an ignition mechanism. This thing has neither.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “That makes sense. So what does it have, then?”

  “Well, according to the scanner, it’s a solid block. No moving parts inside. The assumption in the field was that the exterior was a casing with a bom
b inside, but that’s not the case.”

  “The casing is not the case?” I snorted. “Exactly.”

  Sheila went on like I hadn’t spoken. She shoved the microscope toward me. “So I’ve been running the sample through a bunch of tests to try and figure out what substance we’re dealing with. It’s got a crystalline structure the likes of which I’ve never seen, and—”

  I held up my hand to forestall her. “I’d love to hear about this in detail later, but right now I need you to jump to the point. I’ve got a sewer assailant to catch.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, unflappable as always. “Well, this material registers funny on the spectrometer. It doesn’t fit the profile of any known elements.”

  That caught my attention. I looked at the black crystalline printouts with growing suspicion.

  “So you’ve never seen whatever this is?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t fit any known element on the periodic table, and I ran it three times. We could be looking at a completely new molecular structure here, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”

  “Could I see the sample?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not. It isn’t dangerous.”

  She retrieved a sealed plastic bag from her desk drawer and plunked it down in front of me. The bag made the object inside difficult to see, but it was about the size of a toaster and of irregular shape. When I opened the bag, it only took one look to confirm what I’d just begun to suspect. The unknown device found on the air show grounds was a piece of Sankanium, the same material that made up the UFO I’d found under the Cherry Street Bridge last winter and lost only a short time later.

  I might have figured it out before I had visual confirmation, but I couldn’t help gaping at the damned thing anyway. It was a solid, heavy hunk of material, the same sparkly black as the piece I kept hidden at home in one of my air vents. But that one looked like an irregular lump of what might be rock. I could see how someone might mistake this one for an explosive device. It looked like a machine, with button-like protrusions and a thing sticking out of one side that looked like a piston even though it didn’t appear to move.

  Sheila kept glancing at me like she expected a reaction, so I said, “Interesting.” I didn’t know what else to think, let alone what to say, so stalling seemed the best option.

  “You haven’t seen the half of it.” She handed me another printout, which I glanced at long enough to see that it was a graph measured in megawatts. I didn’t know enough about electricity to put it into perspective other than knowing it was an energy readout. I quirked a brow at Sheila, and she needed no other encouragement to explain. “See how the blinds are all drawn in here?”

  I looked around the lab. The blinds were indeed drawn, but that didn’t strike me as unusual. Sheila and the rest of the techy types seemed allergic to sunshine. Or maybe they were vampires. I couldn’t remember ever seeing those blinds open, so I shrugged, not getting what she was trying to say.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “We opened them this morning, because the fluorescents were out at my workstation, and I couldn’t see what I was doing. When the sunlight hit the sample, my hair immediately developed a static charge and went floating to the ceiling. At first, I assumed that I’d built up a charge by scuffing my feet across the mat at the door, but that theory turned out to be incorrect. When I touched the sample, the electrical shock was enough to knock me unconscious.”

  I backed away from the sample instinctively, and she waved me down. “Don’t worry. It only puts out energy when it’s in sunlight. In darkness or artificial light, it doesn’t emit anything. See?” She put a finger to the sample to demonstrate. “But when I tested it under controlled conditions, I found it puts out almost 100 megawatts an hour once it charges for an hour in full, direct sunlight. I was lucky it was in muted light when I touched it, or I would have been in big trouble.”

  “So 100 megawatts is a lot of energy?”

  “The average nuclear reactor puts out about 500 or so megawatts per hour. This is a little chunk of rock hit by sunlight. How in the hell does it do that? What the hell is it?”

  Her voice got a little shrieky at the end. I’d driven her to swear and raise her voice, both of which were unheard of, around the office at least. I couldn’t decide whether to feel triumphant or scared.

  “I…don’t know.”

  The answer was a copout, and I knew so the moment the words left my mouth, but what else was I supposed to say? Oh, well, I have some of it at my house, and it came from a fallen UFO. It’s probably alien technology used to travel between planets, which explains why it puts out so much energy. We could maybe figure out how it works and build our own spacecraft. Why don’t you put that in one of your meticulous lab reports? Sheila didn’t seem like the kind of person who would handle that news well. Hell, I hadn’t handled it very well myself, and I knew what would happen if I started throwing around accusations of extraterrestrial craft. I’d end up on psych leave for sure.

  No, if this really was a piece of a flying saucer, Sheila would figure it out all on her own. In the meantime, I’d start looking around for the craft it came from. I’d find the aliens, and she’d provide the data that proved I wasn’t insane and this was all really happening. It would be a relief to have it all out in the open. I couldn’t believe it was happening, after all that time, all that doubt. Finally, I’d be able to move on with my life without constantly questioning myself.

  But would I be able to do that? How could I trust anyone in a world where aliens really existed? For all I knew, anybody could be one. Sheila could. Maybe her cadaverous nature wasn’t due to running at all—maybe she wasn’t human. It was a ridiculous thought, but in light of everything I’d seen, I couldn’t be sure. Proving the existence of aliens wasn’t going to solve all my problems after all. It would just bring me a host of new ones.

  Sheila didn’t seem to notice my discomfort, or the fact that I knew more than I was saying, probably because she generally failed to notice people at all. She’d been sucked in by further examination of the sample, making notes on one of the many sheets of paper on the table. When I glanced over her shoulder, I saw a list of tests she wanted to run. At least that was my assumption, since I only recognized a small handful of them.

  “I suppose I should let you get back to work on it, then,” I said.

  She started, surprised by my continued presence. I couldn’t keep from smirking a little but wiped it from my face as soon as I realized I was doing it. Sheila might have no people skills, but her lab work couldn’t be beat. And really, I couldn’t do much stone throwing on the whole obsessed-with-work front. I resembled that remark too much, especially since Ronda’s death.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” she said after a beat of silence.

  “Thanks. I’ll see what I can find out about this thing’s origins. How it got onto the airport grounds. If it’s a fragment of a larger piece, there should be more of it somewhere, don’t you think?”

  That got her attention. She perked right up and added another note to her list in an excited scrawl.

  “If you could locate more, it would be wonderful. I’ll run some oxidation tests. If this stuff oxidizes, I should be able to tell if this sample was once part of a larger structure and determine where it broke. Good idea, Detective!”

  She smiled at me. Her eye teeth were long and almost vampiric. Like fangs. If Ronda had been here, I would have told her that she’d been wrong, that Sheila Focht was a vampire, not a mummy. Then we would have laughed. But Ronda fell off a building, and my world hadn’t made much sense ever since. But maybe, just maybe, I was finally on the road to the answers I so desperately needed. I made my goodbyes and went up to my desk, determined to make it so, and just as determined to ignore all of my fears and doubts.

  CHAPTER 16

  The detective’s bullpen already bustled with energy and middle aged men in shoulder holsters by the time I arrived. With Ronda’s departure, I held the dubious distinctio
n of being the lone female in the department, although I knew of a few female uniforms who were bucking for a transfer to the detective bureau, so that might change soon. We’d had a few women come and go, but it wasn’t much difference to me. I had no preference so long as my coworkers were good at their job and not going to get me killed. Feminism was great and all, but in my mind it took second place to skill. Maybe I was just old-fashioned and out of mode, but it didn’t change how I felt.

  I dropped a quarter in the kitty and got myself a cup of steaming coffee before sitting down at my deck. Although I itched to get working on the Air Show device and hunting down the penis pustule, my inbox contained a few inquiries on some of my pending cases that really couldn’t wait, so I tended to them first. Most were simple to respond to, but the DA wanted me to fill out a long form on my bowling pin murder that was going to take longer than I wanted. As tempted as I was to set it aside for later, I forced myself to get cracking at it lest we miss our opportunity for a plea bargain. The clock wouldn’t stop ticking just because I wanted to chase down some aliens on a personal vendetta. An hour or so wouldn’t make that huge of a difference.

  The form was one of those annoying multiple choice things that didn’t offer any relevant choices but didn’t give me a fill in option, either. I spent longer than necessary agonizing over which box got the closest to the truth in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to do the whole damned thing over again. I’d always had a knack for documentation, and it felt like every returned form was a bullet in my cherished reputation. By the time I got to page two, I decided I needed more coffee, because my line of thought had clearly turned over-melodramatic.

  As I stood at the pot, doctoring my drink just so, Sergeant Scorsone clomped in. He sounded like a toddler playing dress up in parental shoes, each footfall sounded loose and way too loud for his size. Scorsone had begun to lose weight, and soon he’d be giving Sheila a run for her money in the mummy-adjacent appearance category. That thought gave me pause, as I realized that maybe his abrupt change in behavior didn’t have a damned thing to do with me. Maybe he was sick, and I’d been so wrapped up in my own shit that I hadn’t noticed. The thought was immediately followed by a wave of guilt and a painful burning in my hand as I stirred a little too quickly and slopped hot caffeine all over myself.