Hannah Jayne - Under Suspicion

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.”

“I don’t care. There is nothing to see here. If you know that”—I pointed to the body that was now being moved, still under cover of the tarp—“is a regular John Doe, why are you interviewing these people?”

“I sell books, Sophie, and people like these”—he spread his arms as if he were among his brethren— “keep the myths that I debunk alive. More myths, more books.”

“More sales.”

“Spoken like a true capitalist.” He pressed the microphone underneath my nose. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to add?”

I looked from the fallen centaur to the woman with the hairnet, wringing her hands; the woman beside her was still muttering “Tiamat” and describing the evil attributes of the sea legend.

Harley may not have had fangs, but he looked every inch the bloodsucker lurking beside them, his microphone at the ready.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

I was inching through traffic and listening to Nina’s cell phone ring in my ear after my run-in with Harley and the centaur. By the time a Muni bus cut me off, and a line of Art Institute students zigzagged in front of my car, Nina picked up and I screamed, “Finally!”

There was a short pause and then, “Sophie?”

“Sorry, Neens. I’m stuck in traffic and I just came from the docks.”

“Trolling for dates again? Do we need to have another talk about acceptable places to meet men?”

My left eye started to twitch. “I was on the dock because the police pulled a centaur out of the Bay.”

“That’s weird. Centaurs are not known for their swimming prowess.”

“He’d been murdered.”

“Oh.”

“I called Dixon. Investigations is coming out to take care of it.” I shook my head, tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “This is scaring me, Nina. First Mrs. Henderson, and now a body in the Bay?”