Coffee and Serial

Warning: Strong Language, Mature Themes, Graphic Violence

A WHISP story. If you like it, please check out Whispers of a Killer (WHISPs Book 1)


The scene smells more like a slaughterhouse than a coffee shop, but I force myself not to cringe or wrinkle my nose. I’m the senior detective here and I need to act like it.

“I’m Detective Harbinger. What do we have?”

The first responder beat cop is wide-eyed and green around the gills. He swallows hard. “Single victim. Male. Jacob Beene. Um, found by the owner around seven a.m. when,” he takes a deep breath through his mouth, “a customer called to complain that the shop wasn’t open. Owner called 911. No one else but paramedics, owner, and I have been in there.”

“Paramedics?”

He nods.

Considering the smell, they were optimistic. I point to bloody boot prints leading out the front door. “These from them?”

He nods again and sways slightly.

I glance down at his badge, Officer Trout, and stifle an inappropriate chuckle. “Officer,” I can’t bring myself to say his name, “why don’t you go outside and make sure forensics gets shoe impressions of all the paramedics?” And get some fresh air before you pass out.

He nods and bolts like a frightened colt.

I have more questions, like what time the coffee shop normally closes, what time it normally opens, if the victim was in a relationship and, if he was, if it was a stable one, but those can wait. Pulling booties and gloves from my pockets, I put them on before advancing to the store room. The tables in the customer area are all clean with the chairs stacked neatly on the tables, the counter is wiped down, and the cash register is closed. Doesn’t strike me as a robbery gone bad, but I reserve my judgement. Way too early to start a theory.

The hallway is likewise free of debris and blood other than the occasional smear from the paramedics’ shoes…but the smell is worse here. I begin breathing through my mouth. The heavy air presses in on me as I approach the wide open storeroom door. I’ll have to ask if it was open or closed when the owner arrived; if the obnoxiously flickering fluorescent bulb was on or off. Pressing my eyes closed, I stop and count backwards from three. At zero, I turn and gaze into the room from the doorway.

The scene is worse than I was imagining. It usually is. Not exactly shocking—after thirty years as a police officer, almost nothing is—but my breath catches. Blood is everywhere but in the body of the man on the floor. Large, jagged, gaping holes in the victim’s chest and abdomen expose the shiny organs beneath, which explains the crimson painted walls and bags of coffee, but I have no explanation for the angular bulge in his throat. There’ll be no getting up close to this body to search for subtle clues. The paramedics have already made Forensics’ job that much harder and I won’t add to the mess. Pulling back into the hallway, I carefully follow it to the emergency exit in the back. No alarm. I make a mental note of that, and of the rock undoubtedly used to prop it open. Nothing else to see here, I return to the front of the shop, avoiding looking into the store room. I’ll see plenty of photos later.

#

I leave Forensics to their work at the scene. Hours later, I haven’t left the precinct. After interviews with the wife, just back from a business trip, poor thing, and the owner of the coffee shop, most of my questions are answered; still, I’m no closer to a motive or suspect. The coroner’s full report is about a day out, but one question was answered by the preliminary report: a cell phone. That’s what was lodged in the victim’s throat. I’m sitting at my desk trying to wrap my brain around the physics involved when someone clears his throat. My heart hiccups. It’s Chief Lowman.

He gives me a grim smile. “Deep in thought, Detective?”

“Was just checking the preliminary coroner’s report. Why?”

Something over my shoulder catches his eye and he waves a hand. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

I turn to find a mid-height, muscular woman with close-cropped black hair, tan skin, and green eyes.
She holds out a hand. “I’m Detective Pereyra.” There’s a trace of tall mountains topped with llamas in her accent.

“Detective Harbinger.” After standing and shaking her proffered hand, I turn back to the chief. “What’s this all about?”

The chief nods to Pereyra and she takes over.

“Sorry to intrude on your case, but we asked the coroner to flag any cases with a specific MO, and yours has it.”

I don’t really have to ask. “A cell phone crammed down the victim’s throat?”

She nods.

“A serial?”

She nods.

“How many?”

Pereyra shrugs slightly. “Three, so far, we think. In NYPD jurisdiction, anyway.”

“Any other commonalities in the victims that we know of?”

“All the victims had WHISPs.”

Keeping my face neutral, a knot forms in my stomach. WHISPs. It had to be WHISPs. “I see.” I clear my throat. “Anything else?”

She shakes her head. “Not that we know of.”

“So, hate crimes maybe?”

“Maybe,” she agrees, “but if that were the case, you’d think they’d have left a message. You know, like ‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against dark spirits of evil.’”

I nod slowly. She’s not wrong. There’s been a lot of talk about WHISPs being demons or a person’s guilty conscience manifesting in a creepy, grey shadow instead of being clouds of electromagnetic particles pushed out by cell phones, high-tension power lines, and god-only-knows what else. “So, you’ll be taking lead on the investigation?” Normally I’d be pissed about someone sniping one of my homicides, but in this case…

Her gaze stiffens and finds the chief.

He straightens and turns to me. “Harbinger, the commissioner wants you to head the investigation.”

Oh crap. “Me, Sir?”

“You have seniority here and he wants our best heading up this case. Wants it wrapped up quick and quiet before the press sinks its teeth in.”

No pressure. “But, Chief…” He must know. Everybody in the precinct knows about my shadow phobia after my blowout with Waller at the WHISP sensitivity training seminar last year.

“Is there a problem, Detective Harbinger?”

“No, Sir.” No problem. Shit.

Design Your Very Own Superhero

Writing prompt (4 minutes).

I am Whisper. I am the shadow in the corner of your eye. I am the flickering of candlelight and the soft tickle of wind in your ear. My voice is breathe carried to the far corners of the earth. I could be struck down by a child, crushed beneath a mound of feathers, yet I am powerful. I am the words in your head. I am the angel on the shoulders of demons. I am the conscience of the night. With small sounds I hold the darkness at bay and tip the souls of humanity towards the light. I am an echo of goodness. I am Whisper..

Chairs and Pears, Pairs of Gears, People Upstairs

One of our weekly writing prompts.

Granny’s house is a strange place. The main floor seems normal. There’s a rocking chair in the living room with an orange and gold afghan draped over the back and a sofa that has ugly flowered upholstery. The kitchen is tiny and there is always a bowl of yellow pears in the middle of the miniature table. Her bedroom is also on the main floor and not too interesting except for the cuckoo clock on the wall that ticks and grinds and makes all sorts of noises, and then on the hour, the little wooden cuckoo explodes through the painted doors and screeches its mechanical coo.

But these are the normal things. It’s the people who live upstairs who are strange. The first thing that’s strange about them is that Granny tells me they aren’t there even though she has pictures of them in frames on the mantel. The second thing that’s strange about them is that they never seem to sleep. When I visit Granny I sleep in a bed upstairs, but even when I wake up in the middle of the night the people are awake and staring. They don’t talk much, the people upstairs. That is the third strange thing about them. When they do speak their lips don’t move. I think that is also strange.

There’s also a cuckoo clock upstairs, but there are two cuckoos in it, one is white and one is black. The white one cuckoos on the hour, but the other only cuckoos when someone dies, like when cousin Emma was sleep walking and fell down the stairs. I only heard it cuckoo then.

The Little Mermaid Where the Mermaids are Feral and Eat Humans (4 min):

 Fun and Frisky Recent Writing Prompt.

The little mermaid sat on the sand and tears streaked down her face. She thought that it would be so much easier to catch men and eat them on land, but without her voice and her siren song, it was proving difficult to lure lone men to their deaths. She had never really cried before or felt the salty sting of the tears on her face for the ocean’s waters had always washed them away as soon as the tears left her eyes. She was marveling at the sensation when she heard a horrific noise akin to a giant squid being macerated in the jaws of an orca. She turned and saw a man stumbling down the beach towards her. After a few moments she realized that he was trying to sing. The sound hurt her ears. He got closer and then peered down at her with blurry eyes. “Well now Love, what are crying about?” A smile curled the corners of the little mermaid’s mouth. So tears will also attract men, she thought, and lunged.

I Had Their Scent, It was Hard to Describe

Warning: Mild grotesque horror

Part 3 of 4 of a multi part prompt dealing with the senses.

I’m not some two bit tracker. I don’t put an ear to the ground and tell you that someone passed this way ‘not but an hour ago’. I’ve been blessed…or cursed. Depends on how you look at it, though today there was only one way to look at it. The creatures we were trailing were about as foul a thing as I had yet encountered. I had their scent to be sure, but it was hard to describe: rotten blood sausage, three day old standing sewage from a dysentery camp, a microwaved Chihuahua? Never before had my sensitive nose had to withstand such ongoing offenses.

“Yeah, they came this way.”

The hunter grunted. “Didn’t really need you to tell me that.”

We were standing over remains, though of what unfortunate animal, there wasn’t enough left intact to say.
“Sure, but I can also say that they stopped here about an hour ago and are heading southeast at approximately 12 miles an hour.”

“How in the crap do you know any of that?”

“Do you really want me to explain it to you or do you want to go kill these things?”

The Person Finally Arrives at Their Destination but is Disappointed or Surprised by What They Find There

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt in which the heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

I sprinted away from the grinning, stripy, half-cat through the trees, wincing as the pain in my ankle increased exponentially. Finally, unable to run any longer, I stumbled to a stop in a clearing and sat on a felled tree. Elevating my ankle onto the tree, I decided here would be an okay place to rest until I found my adventure. Maybe, my ankle would be better in the morning. A man hiked out of the woods across the clearing from me. He was tall, dark, and handsome. Now this would be okay, I could do with a little prince charming, I thought. He saw me and stopped.

“Oh no, you must get away from here, run!”

“What?”

He doubled over in pain and then fell to the ground. I tiptoed over to him, and heard a growl. It was then that I noticed the large, white full-moon above the trees. And then I noticed sharp teeth.

A Person Sets Out on a Long Journey, but the Journey is Interrupted

Part 1 of 3 of a multi-part writing prompt in which our heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

They say every journey begins with the first step. Well I took that first step, twisted my ankle and fell into a mud puddle. Some adventurer I was. As I sat on a rock rubbing my ankle a brightly colored caterpillar sidled up beside me.
“Good Morning!”
“Don’t know what’s so good about it.”
“Awe, don’t talk like that, Miss. The clouds have gone away and soon the sun will dry that muddy water in your hair right up.”
“Great.”
The caterpillar began whistling a jaunty tune.
“Um, can you not do that,” I said putting a little weight on my ankle to test it and being rewarded with a stabbing pain. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“Fine, fine.”
I began limping away.
“Er, don’t mean to be nosy, but where are you off to?”
“I’m trying to get to the castle beyond the goblin city,” I said.
“Oooh dear.”
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just that, well, you can’t get there from here.”
I hobbled back over to the caterpillar.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s copyright infringement.”
I looked around at the setting and the glittery, high stone walls.
“I see your point.”

The Other Person Goes East, Looking for Something They’d Lost

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made into an homage for Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel Something More Than Night.

I didn’t want to take the sword, but Gabriel isn’t a Seraphim you argue with, so I took it and stowed it before my jitters could unmake a sound principle of physics.

“Where are you off to?”

Gabriel looked beyond me to the rising of a hundred million suns. “I must fortify the essence of religious sanctity, make pure the rivulets of undying devotion, and find my car keys.”

“I thought you said that this wasn’t a time for jokes, Sir.”

Gabriel turned his gazes back to me. “Who’s joking?”

With that he vanished and took a small child’s wonder with him. Having no intention of actually braving the deeps, I decided to camp out a while in the dark matter on the metaphoric end of the spectral universe.

The First Person Goes South, Taking Something They Shouldn’t Have

Part 2 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made an homage to Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel, Something More Than Night.

Gabriel gave me that look he has, you know, the one that begets fusion and melts crusts of planets. I didn’t like that look.

“Sir?”

He put a talon on my shoulder or what would have been my shoulder if I actually had shoulders. His mere touch buzzed through me like lightning cutting through atoms to make ozone.

“We need you to infiltrate the Deeps, Thuriel. We must have the first strike.”

I’m not much of a hard hitter by way of angelic beings, I’m more of a weaver of mathematical improbabilities, so Gabriel’s words unnerved me. They caused a gaping maw of fear to open in my representation of guts, but I plastered it over with indignation.

“Uh, why me, Boss? I don’t even own a flaming sword.”

Gabriel reached into robes glowing with the light of a thousand dying planets and withdrew a sword swathed in flames brighter than the plasma in the center of a baby star.

“Here, take mine.”
.

Two People Standing at a Crossroads Taking Care of Business

This is part one of three writing prompts, and an homage to author Ian Tregillis's latest novel Something More Than Night.

We stood at the crossroads of interplanetary dissonance and quadrilateral harmony. It was nice there. Despite the nomenclature, interplanetary dissonance can sound quite beautiful at times. But Gabriel wasn’t there for the ambiance. He was all business, though his feathers beat in time to the pulsing of the nearest quasar.
 
“Thuriel, what have you to report?”
 
“The outer reaches of mortal trimaterial thought processes are secure. There will be no breech from there, Sir.”
 
“What of the motes of carbon between the toes of the Precambrian era?”
 
“Tight as a cheerleader’s sweater.”
 
Gabriel raised an angelic eyebrow at me. “You’ve been spending way too much time on the mortal plane.” He shook his head and somewhere a newborn nebula was blown back into disparate particles. “But this is no time for jests. The demons are poised and ready to strike and we must bar them from objective reality in any way that we can.”

A Group of Friends (3 min):

Writing prompt part 4 of 4.
Hera stood guard while the others:  Jeth, Miso, and Skutcha played behind her. She wanted so much to run and spin like they did, but it was her night to watch, so watch she did. She would protect her friends from the Unseelies, here in this place where the veil was thin. Laughing broke out behind her and she stole a glance back to see Miso had toppled over into a BarraBush and now all that could be seen of him were his legs. Smiling, she turned back to face the dark wall just in time to see a blur disappear behind the gnarled stump.

“Skutcha! Skutcha I see Unsee!”

She was afraid to take her eyes off the darkness, but Skutcha didn’t hear her over the laughing.

“Unsee, unsee!” Hera shrieked again as another blur peeled from the darkness and rose into the air.

Finally the laughter behind her faded and she heard Jeth’s voice.

“Hera you squeak? You squeakie?”

This is Not the Way Out

Post group inspiration inside the Maynard parking structure.

Silence echoes all around, but the too-bright lights scream in my eyes,
“This is not the way out!”
Surrounded by crumbling concrete splashed with faded paint. Blue arrows point in any direction,
but this is not the way out.
I spin round and round watching as the filthy, tattered tarps block out the view of the outside world,
and this is not the way out.
I am relentlessly pursued by unblinking eyes boring into the back of my skull. They follow me, follow me, hound me, and I try to tell them
this is not the way out.
Around each corner a new obstacle awaits, but every one is the same. Though the signs say exit,
this is not the way out.
I finally pay the rickety gatekeeper and emerge into the night. He waves me on smiling, and his teeth speak to me.
“This is not the way out.”

Dark Dreams and Darker Crimes

Warning: Strong Language

This was a prompt designed to allow writers to flush out a scene. They wrote three segments separated by about 20 minutes of the same crime scene. After wards they were asked to fill in those twenty minute gaps however they wanted. The gaps in mine did not need much to expand them to keep the flow going.

“Captain, Someone moved it. The pooling of blood and the streaks suggest it might be hauled towards the alley down there.” I said.

The Captain muttered for a bit and said, “Fine. Finish up here and we will take a look down there. I hate the weird creepy shit that happens in this town.”

We wrapped things up in under 30 minutes and head to the alley.

“The alley is a dead end. I don’t like this. Maybe it is hidden in one of the dumpsters. Or beneath those boxes.”

“This is a high profile case but we need to keep it on the down-low,” the captain emphasized. “Check every corner of the alley. For all I know it could be a maniac serial killer. Just what we needed.” He sighed audibly.

It took us another 40 minutes to do our due diligence and it was nearly dawn. It had been a long night.

“There is absolutely nothing here. I see the blood trail but it disappears in the middle of the alley. No tire tracks anywhere. No doors, windows or grates either. This isn’t looking good. It simply vanished. Doesn’t make sense, Captain,” I said. “Captain?” I repeated.

The Captain had turned white. He turned to me and said, “I had hoped they were gone. But they are still here. We should talk, you and I. In private.”

A New World: Progress is Made (Part 2)

“I felt it was prudent, seeing how you always react to bad family things. Thought maybe it would lessen the blow on the owner’s children.” Alex statement caught me off guard, but I knew where it was going.

“Owners children?”

“Yes, apparently the old owner sold it to his brother…”

“But the brother didn’t want to deal with it, and lalala family fight?” a familiar story,

“Indeed. Looks like family issues are true even here.”

I rolled my eyes “Lot less murder about them though. What are you tapping?”

He looked down, as if he had forgotten it was there. “Oh yes, this, it’s a laptop I picked up while you slept. It’s what you use to interface with stores from a distance, and something called the internet. It’s quaint, like what the roots might have looked like a thousand years ago. Want to try?”

I snuggled into my chair. “No thank you.”

“Also, I was looking around, apparently you aren’t allowed to walk around like that.”

I raised an eyebrow “not allowed to look like a 7 foot tall feline ape hybrid? Thank you for the update Alex, I wouldn’t have known.”

A New World (Part 1)

It was my first day on earth, and so far so standard. The sky was blue the ground was solid and the intelligent spices was bi pedal and civilized, for the most part anyway. I looked back at my second, Alex, who was trudging along behind me, resigned to our new existence on a back-water no-name world that had been thrust upon him after he refused to let me leave our home world on my own.

I was excited to see the place that Alex had scouted to be our new home and cover story. It had been a bar and restaurant for a long time. Then one of the sons took it over and drove it into the ground as his gambling problem had gotten worse. His brother now owned it and seemed eager to get it sold off, bad memories or some such.

I saw the man and waved as we walked up, ignoring Alex glare of disapprove at my obvious excitement.  The old man shook my hand and offered to show me around the inside of the building, but I declined, saying that I thought better when I was on my own, asking Alex to collect the details on the place while I did an in-depth scan of the underlying plumbing and structure.

El'Tash: Elliott's Story (part 1)

Warning: Graphic Violence

Part of our group is starting a Pathfinder campaign in an original setting of the DM's (Suleman's) creation. Here I shall record the events of the campaign from the perspective of my character, Elliott Durand.

     The air crackled and took on a static charge. A light breeze began to blow through the darkened chamber, though nothing stirred, too heavy to be moved by a simple brush of wind. Sparks danced along the metallic surfaces of the room, coalescing towards a focal point in the middle of the room. A moment later, reality itself seemed to tear apart as a roaring rift opened near the ceiling. From its flashing lights a dark, humanoid shape tumbled, crashing into the floor.

     “Owww…” the shape said, though the howling wind of the rift drowned the word out. After being unceremoniously dumped on the floor, the figure was left in total darkness as the rift vanished as suddenly as it appeared.

     Shuffling about, the figure rose to its feet. Its clothes rustled as its arms moved about, trying in vain to cast a spell.

The Lightning Bug

Inspired by actual events on the way home from post writing group festivities.

   As she walked along the moonlit street with the cool breeze in her hair, the vestiges of a night of comrades and jocularity clung to her like fine, silken spider webs, but the further she tread from the noise and warmth of the restaurant, the more they faded. Dreary thoughts wormed their way through her placid joy and stole her smile by measures. I need to do this. I should do that. I mustn’t forget to... Did I forget to? The mundane maintenance of the tedious machinations of life slowed her steps as she climbed the stairs of the too bright parking structure.

    Trudging up the last few steps, she spotted her car and took a few steps towards it before something odd caught her eye. A lightning bug hovered just below her waist in the middle of the lane, deep enough in the building that it was far from escape out into the night. She wondered how it could have gotten there, for surely fireflies weren’t prone to simply wander into parking structures. Perhaps someone’s car alarm had gone off and the blinking headlights had lured it, or maybe it hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup truck parked obliquely next to her. It was such an incongruous sight that it gave her a moment’s pause. She watched it in fascination until she eventually overcame her initial bewilderment then continued past the misplaced insect.

Vampire child part 3

I am now re-writing this, but here is the last part of the attempt i have been posting.

It seemed to work better with three hands, not having to use a finger as an in-between to keep her occupied.

“Dose she always chew on things?” Andréa looked at him before walking towards the rocking chair in the corner of the room. Thomas nodded.

“She starts crying otherwise, even when she was a newborn. Why? I have no idea.”

Donna piped up again “if her mother was still alive she would be latched onto a flap of skin on the back of her neck, it’s to keep their heads from bouncing and assists in developing neck muscles. As we take care of her, we will do exercises that will do much the same thing.”

Want

Just a little something I came up with on my way home from writing group Tuesday night.

I wanted to work in words the way that fine smiths wove metals. I wanted the sorrows that I wrote to spill tears of molten honey from the golden eyes of angels. I wanted the joy in my voice to ring out like a wedding chime and its vibrations to fill a reader’s heart until it burst with delight. I wanted my scribbled passions to rise like the wanton sun on a summer’s morn and sear the ears of all who heard them. I wanted the foreboding of my prophecies to shiver the nectar-laced dew from the flowers’ silken petals. I wanted to paint beauty with my words more breathtaking than the pallid orange and steel grey of storm clouds breaking over an autumn sunset.

“Aye child,” my fairy godmother murmured, inclining her head just a fraction of an inch such that a single strand of her impossible silver and gossamer hair whispered across her face and her dragonfly eyes shimmered in the moonlight. “But what are you willing to surrender?”

Weekend A Posteriori

Warning: Strong Language

I wrote most of this piece in one sitting at our normal Tuesday Night Group Meeting. This is a departure from my normal writing style - I was extremely ill with strep throat at the time, so my mind was in a bunch of places. Things really turns around at the end. Enjoy!

I wanted to know what it felt like to go.

I wanted to know who he was. I hoped in some weird way that I could coax him into showing me. But, I had no idea how. Why did I keep thinking about him? I just looked up and there he was - he was willowy. How far can a tree bend?  I asked him something about Chicago in an unnatural screech and he didn't hear me. It was really loud downstairs. There were lots of other unnatural screeches. But he smiled, and it split me down the middle. 

There's this type of beech tree - ironwood - that's also called "muscle wood", because the trunk looks like a really smooth, toned bicep. Don't ask me why, but I just couldn't stop thinking about this tall, scruffy-looking boy's lanky limbs and ironwood trees. It's one of the most erotic images that comes to mind, actually.

But then I thought, shake it out - there were probably too many birds in that tree already. 

And still, I don't know. I wouldn't have minded standing just a little bit closer to him I guess. Just one more bird. If that's cool, I mean.