Under Suspicion

But something kept niggling at me.

*   *   *

“Alex?” I was upstairs at the police station, rapping on Alex’s office door.

“You’re going to have to knock a lot louder than that,” someone said as they coasted by me. “He ain’t here anymore.”

I felt my eyebrows go up and pushed the door open an inch, poking my nose in. I snaked an arm in and flicked the light switch and then stepped in.

“Alex?”

The room was empty, every cardboard box gone. Alex’s desk was still pushed against the wall, chair stacked on top, but other than that, the room was spartan. It looked as though Alex had never existed—or was never coming back.

An unexpected sob choked in my throat.

“He left? He didn’t even say good-bye.” I sniffled pitifully, feeling tiny and alone.

“Aren’t you Sophie Lawson?”

Had there been anything in the room, I would have tumbled over it when the man spoke. Instead, I clutched my heart and stumbled backward, hyperventilating like a COPD ad.

“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

The man who was trying to coax me down from my near heart attack was dressed in a pristine San Francisco police uniform, which he didn’t look quite old enough to wear. He had smooth, dark skin and thick eyebrows, which stood out underneath a close-cropped Caesar cut. “I’m Officer Romero. I worked with Alex a couple of times. Are you okay?”

I used the heel of my hand to wipe away my few piteous tears. “Yeah, I just ... um, I’m allergic to carpet and it’s not been cleaned yet. How do you know my name?”

“You’re the one Alex used to call when things were ... weird, right?”

I nodded miserably. Sophie Lawson, Call When Weird. “Yeah.”

“Then it’s a good thing I found you.”

“Look, I really should be heading back to work—”

“We found something.”

I stopped. “Something?”

Officer Romero nodded. “They just pulled it in from the Bay.”

“What is it?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

I was following Officer Romero in his squad car, lights flashing (him), Lady Gaga blaring (me). Our little motorcade sliced through the streets, and yellow taxicabs and rental cars swerved to avoid us. I would have felt very presidential and important if it weren’t for the cold stone sitting at the pit of my stomach.

Officer Romero had called what they pulled from the Bay “it.”

When I pulled up to the docks, police barricades were already set up, and a crowd of people hunkered over them. They crowded along the sidewalks, and were rolling up on tiptoes, trying to get a better look. Phones flashed and people chatted as Officer Romero led me through the crowd. I heard the word “chupacabra” uttered under someone’s breath. A woman, with wide brown eyes, whispered, “Tiamat” and pointed toward the dock.

Officer Romero slowed; and when I caught up to him, he leaned into me. “We hardly had the thing out of the water before people started coming down. Everyone’s got a weird idea about it. Frankly, I’m pretty sure it’s just a regular man in a pretty advanced state of decomposition. He’s probably been submerged for quite a while.”

He shook his head and I pulled my sweater tighter across my chest.

“Let me see him.”

I edged around the assembled officers and sucked in a deep breath of ocean-tinged air. Three police officers were standing in a semicircle around a body-shaped lump covered in a blue tarp and leaking seawater. Officer Romero leaned down and edged the tarp back. I saw the dark hair first, tangled with kelp and trash. The smooth arc of his neck was purpled and marred, a thin piece of plastic rope coiled around and around his throat. I saw where his lips were slightly puckered and pale, the scratches at his neck where he must have pulled at the rope. My saliva went sour and I felt that familiar sickening need to vomit. My eyes teared up, and my breathing became hoarse and ragged.

Officer Romero moved the tarp a bit more and I could see the broad, naked shoulders of the man, his lifeless limbs. My heart started a spastic palpitation as the arch of his spine gave way to coarse, sand-sprinkled fur. I knew why the police officers were shaking their heads, while the people gathered at the barricades were uttering the names of legendary creatures.

“It’s a centaur,” I mumbled.

There were very few centaurs registered with the UDA, and this one was curled in on itself. His human hands were bound in front of him; his flank and cloven feet were puckered with clean knife wounds and wound with thin strips of the same plastic-looking rope.

“Did you say something?” Officer Romero asked.

“Who else has seen this?”

Officer Romero opened his mouth to answer but stopped as we were both drawn to a scuffle behind the police barricades. A floodlight had gone up and a camera crew had arrived. In record time the smooth-voiced narrator was going into his spiel.

I knew that smooth voice.

Harley had one hand wrapped around a microphone, the other resting on the stooped shoulder of a woman with dark hair pulled back into a hasty ponytail, half covered by a hairnet. The camera rolled in front of them and Harley asked the woman to describe what she saw; his brows were knitted, eyes rapt.

“Es un demonio.” She clawed her hands and growled, her lips curling into a fearsome snarl. “Es un chupacabra. No lo creia, pero lo vi con mis propios ojos.”

“She says it’s a chupacabra,” Officer Romero informed me with a disbelieving head shake. “My grandmother used to tell us the chupacabra would snatch us from our beds if we didn’t go to sleep. I thought it was a legend.”

“It is,” I said, beelining toward Harley.

By the time I got to him, he was on to another woman, zeroing in on her as she used huge arm gestures. Her cheeks were flushed as she stared into the camera.

“It was Tiamat,” she said, with an exaggerated shudder. “They pulled her in, and when she opened her mouth, I saw the serpent inside.”

Harley had a slight, abusive smile on his face as he ping-ponged his microphone between the two women.

“No, no,” the other woman shook her head, stepping in front of Harley’s camera angle. “Es un chupacabra!” She did the growl again, and a team behind her nodded enthusiastically, backing her up with a chorus of “Sí! Sí!”

I yanked on Harley’s sleeve. “Can I talk to you, please?”

Harley hid his annoyance at my disruption like an absolute pro; his smile never faltered even as he ushered aside his interviewees still fighting over the identity of the body on the dock.

“Sophie, right?”

“What are you doing? You’re riling everybody up.”

“I’m simply interviewing these bystanders.”

I put my hands on my hips and cocked an eyebrow. “For your next book?”

Harley stared me down. “What does it matter? Do you have a theory on John Doe over there you’d like to kick in?” Harley’s brown eyes slid over me, head to toe, and I stiffened, feeling immediately violated. “I bet you’d look great on camera.”

“Aren’t you interested in my best friend?”

Harley blew out a sigh and waggled the microphone in front of me. “Do you have something to add or not? This is for a major network, you know. Not cable.”