Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels)

  GUILTY

  BY ASSOCIATION

  A Judah Black Novel

  E.A. COPEN

  COPYRIGHT

  Guilty by Association

  A Judah Black novel

  ISBN-10: 1523281604

  ISBN-13: 978-1523821600

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by E.A. Copen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover Art by Ravenborn

  Published in the United States of America.

  The author respects trademarks and copyrighted material mentioned in this book by introducing such registered items in italics or with proper capitalization.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, persons, places and incidents are all used factiously and are the imagination of the author. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or locales is coincidental and non-intentional, unless otherwise specifically noted.

  To my father who taught me how to choose my battles and to my husband, Jon, who pointed me in the right direction to fight them.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Tommy “Torquil” Shaw who is indirectly responsible for my venture into urban fantasy and who read my first drafts before I knew what I was doing. My editor, Becca Bates, and cover artist, Raven Blackburn, were invaluable in the final stages. I also need to thank my sister, Anne Young, because her visits have kept me sane. Most of all, though, thank you, the reader, for being willing to take this journey with me. Without you, these are just dead words on a page.

  GUILTY

  BY ASSOCIATION

  A Judah Black Novel

  E.A. COPEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a dead werewolf in the twenty-four-hour laundromat just down the street from my house. He was a small framed Hispanic man, no older than twenty. The only facial hair he'd grown on his face had come in as uneven peach fuzz on his upper lip. He was naked when I found him, slumped over in the corner against the dryers, chin tucked against his chest. I paused in the doorway, a basket of dirty laundry tucked under one arm, trying to discern if he was really dead or just passed out. From the door, it was impossible to know. I put the basket down and approached slowly. The last thing you ever want to do is sneak up on a sleeping werewolf, especially when you're a stranger in what could very well be his territory. I hung back as far as I possibly could, fingers outstretched toward his still body. “Come on, Judah,” I whispered. “It's just a werewolf. He might only rip your face off and feed it to you.” My fingers brushed against the hair sticking to his forehead. The skin was waxy and oddly stiff. A bluish tinge was creeping into his lips and fingernails. He'd been there a while.

  I cursed and pulled out my phone to dial the only person that I knew would answer at six in the morning. Two rings later, a groggy voice on the other end answered. “Detective Tindall. Go.”

  “Good Coin Laundry on Willow road. Code one-eight-seven.” I paused for a minute before adding, “He's a werewolf.”

  “Wait just a minute. Who the hell are you and how'd you get my number?”

  “Hurry up, detective. You better get your people down here to clean this up before the rest of the pack catches wind of what's happened or you're going to have a lot more bodies to deal with.” I hung up before he had a chance to respond.

  Paint Rock was a small town as far as population went, one of the smallest in all of Texas. There were maybe five hundred folks there, but they were spread out over more than three miles of empty, dead land in the center of the state. The locals tell me that it used to be the county seat of Concho County before the federal government relocated a bunch of supernaturals to the land. As the story goes, the government paid the former residents of Paint Rock over ten thousand dollars each to pick up and move to Eden a decade or so ago and quietly put up the rickety old fence that marked the land of the Paint Rock Supernatural Reservation and Sovereign Fae Nations. If I had called dispatch, it was Eden they would have relayed me to and I would have had to wait hours for someone to sort through a bunch of government red tape before they drove all the way down. It pays to know people, especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere.

  At best, I had ten minutes of alone time with the corpse. That was just enough time to go around and check the place for signs of a struggle or obvious weapons. I was careful not to touch anything. Contaminating evidence would not be the best way to start my new job. New job. I make it sound like I was a novice or something. Really, I'd been working the supernatural beat for almost a decade by the time I got assigned to Paint Rock but my specialty was demons and the occult, not werewolves. And this was Texas. You know what they say about Texas.

  The laundromat had an emergency exit off to the side covered in extra thick safety glass. It looked like someone had thrown a softball into it. The glass flexed inward without breaking, cracked into a million bloodstained pieces, some of which were still sticking out of the dead werewolf's head. Three washers had been dented beyond repair and one near the victim had been uprooted and tossed aside, guts spilling out all over the floor. There had definitely been a struggle in there. Still, I didn't find any obvious footprints or clues. There was too much blood everywhere to visually determine what belonged to the victim and what might have belonged to his attackers. That was going to be up to CSI.

  I sighed and walked away from him, following a trail of broken glass and blood back to where the vic sat to squat down in front of him. What a mess. His limbs were all wrong, caught halfway between digits and paws. His head was on all askew, stopping about a quarter of the way into growing his nose into a snout. The rest of him was mostly human aside from all the extra body hair and even it hadn't come in all the way. He'd stripped off all his clothes, making the scratches and cuts obvious. Some of them were still oozing a little. I leaned to one side and found a hole the size of a quarter maybe an inch below his ear. Someone had gotten him in the jugular.

  I stood, cracked my back and looked around again. The laundromat was notably empty of baskets, soap or clothes other than the ones spinning behind his head in the dryer. I doubted my guy was the kind to wear lacy bras and pink halter tops. But then, I'd been wrong about that sort of thing before.

  About the time I started my second pass around the inside of the building, a car pulled up, a late model Cadillac with one of those detachable police lights stuck to the top. The man driving it was a walking cliché from a twentieth century neo-noir film. Middle aged but still reasonably attractive, his hair was slicked back in a conservative fashion. He wore dress pants, a white shirt and a loose fitting blue tie that accented the shoulder holsters he adjusted when he climbed out. He was overdressed for six fifteen in the morning, I thought until he passed under a flickering street light and I saw that everything he was wearing bore the distinct wrinkles of having fallen asleep fully dressed. For a moment, the detective paused under the lamp outside, patting himself down as if he'd forgotten something. Then, he reached back into the car, picked up a dark fedora and dropped it onto his head.

  The bell above the door chimed when he pushed it open. He took one look at me, scowled and then turned to the body. “Fuck, woman. One day in town and you're already attracting trouble,” he growled at me. “I knew you were going to be a problem.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Detective Tindall.”

  It wasn't like Brian Tindall and I knew each other that well. I'd just moved there. Most cities in the U.S. have government agents on staff from the organization I work for, the Bureau of Supernatural In
vestigations. That works just fine for big cities like Chicago and New York but out here in the middle of nowhere, the law was a little different. The reservations were supposed to be self-policing. In theory, that meant they arrested the bad guys and handed them over to the state for prosecution. The crime rate, though, was sky high and the concerned citizens of Concho County built a nice police outpost, staffed by trained professionals like me and Tindall.

  Trained professionals my ass. We were there because we weren't wanted anywhere else. Tindall and I had that much in common, at least.

  “Where's your partner?” I asked as Tindall fanned himself with his fedora.

  Tindall shrugged and drew a hand down over his chin as he beheld the body. “Sleeping off his cups, probably. What was your name again?”

  I crossed my arms and leaned to the side. “Black. Special Agent Judah Black.” I made sure to say it slowly.

  He snorted. “Judah's a man's name. What's the matter with the BSI? Couldn't think of any decent code names to give a woman? Gotta go with something edgy, right? Young people today.”

  My name's not really a code name, not exactly. But Judah Black isn't my real name, either. BSI learned early on that it was safer for their agents to carry self-assigned pseudonyms. Call it an extra layer of protection against magick and whatnot. If it was easier for him to think of it as a code name, though, it didn't suit me to correct him.

  Tindall swaggered up to the corpse and squatted down next to it. “Shit, what a mess.”

  “Stab wound to the neck probably did him in. Silver, given that he's a werewolf and all.”

  “Who died and made you the M.E.?”

  I turned my attention to the corners of the room. Any place that had a door chime probably had a camera. I found the hole in the wall where one might have been but it looked like someone had ripped it straight out of the wall. Damn. “They ripped the camera out of the wall. Any chance you know the owner?”

  “This is Paint Rock,” Tindall grunted at me and jerked on the dead werewolf's arm. “I know everybody, Black.”

  “Shouldn't you call someone? The coroner? CSI? Somebody?”

  He looked up at me and drew his eyebrows together. “That's what you're for.” Then he jabbed a thumb into the bend of the dead man's arm. “Track marks. Our guy was a junkie.” He stood and wiped his hands on his pants. “Werewolf so he was either on the roid juice or on barbs to keep himself from shifting. Could be a deal gone bad.”

  “Hold on. You can't just say that based on some old needle marks in his arms.”

  “See it all the time,” he continued. “Drugs and booze are a problem here, Black. It's common. But we'll give him his due process. Can't close the case anyway until we have an ID on him.” He frowned at the corpse. “I don't recognize him and I thought I knew most of the werewolves here. Maybe he's a stray. What the hell was he doing in here?”

  I gave a one shouldered shrug. “I don't think he was doing laundry if that's what you mean.”

  “What kind of looney toon psycho does their laundry at six in the morning?” Tindall glared up at me. I raised my eyebrows at him. For a short moment, the two of us traded unblinking, unwavering stares. He lowered his eyes first, sighed and pushed himself up to walk the room just as I'd done.

  When he concluded the same thing I had, that there had been a fight and that the perp had probably jerked out the cameras, he went back out to his car and came in with a body bag. He unrolled it on the floor next to the body and slapped on a pair of rubber gloves, the kind you wear to wash dishes. “Well,” he said, glaring up at me. “You going to help me bag him or just stand there?”

  I'm not squeamish. I can't afford to be in my line of work. Cleveland’s murder rate was one of the highest in the country while I was stationed there and I had seen my fair share of dead bodies, most of them in worse shape than our dead werewolf. I'd never had to haul one out of a building in a laundry cart and shove it in the trunk of a Cadillac, though. The process made me feel dirty, guilty. Whoever this guy was, I felt like he deserved more dignity than Tindall and I gave him. If it had been later in the morning when I found him, Tindall informed me that he would have called his partner, Morris Quincy, and had him bring his truck but he seemed sure Quincy wouldn't even come to the phone before nine. I found myself wondering what I was getting into, working in a place where coroners and CSI didn't come out to murder scenes and where ranking detectives could sleep in at their leisure without consequence. Maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew.

  I turned away from the trunk of the Cadillac. “So, how does this work exactly if there's no CSI?”

  Tindall gave me a dismissive gesture. “I'll call a team down from Eden but they won't get here until later. We'll have to keep the scene secure until then. I'll put someone on it. As for the body, going to have to take him to the clinic and get Doc Ramis on it right off.” He tried to close the trunk and quickly realized that the body bag wasn't all the way in. He had to stop to adjust it before trying again. “You can follow me over after our backup gets down here.”

  I looked down at my watch. Five after seven. I was supposed to have my laundry in the dryer and be out for my morning run by now. If I took too much longer, my son would be waking up, wondering where his breakfast was. I definitely needed to stop by my place to update him on the situation and change into more weather appropriate clothes. Once the sun got up above the horizon, I was going to regret the sweats and oversized t-shirt I'd picked out for the morning routine.

  “Can I meet you there in an hour or so?” I asked with a sigh. “My kid's going to be up in a few.”

  Tindall scowled at me again. “Your superiors made it very clear that I was to let you take the lead when it came to this kind of thing.”

  “Come on, Tindall. You're an old pro. You don't need a federal agent to hold your hand through an autopsy. This ought to be a walk in the park for you. I promise. I'll be downtown by eight thirty.”

  “I'm filing a complaint with your superiors,” he informed me.

  “You do that and see how far that goes.”

  I walked the laundry back to my car, tossed it into my backseat and then sat behind the wheel, trying to ignore the way my hands were shaking. I'd seen death plenty of times before. Seems like there's always someone or something somewhere wanting to kill someone else. We are the only sentient beings in the universe actively seeking to make ourselves go extinct. An old teacher of mine told me once that it gets easier to deal with death the more times you see it, that you eventually become numb to it. If that was true, I hadn't reached that point yet. Every dead body I'd ever seen was burned into my memory like a bad stain on good carpet. While I could deal with it so long as I eventually nabbed the bad guys, I had a hard time not bringing my job home. Every time I left a scene, I had to stop and collect myself before going home to pretend like the life I lived had some degree of normalcy. Once, I'd actually seen a therapist. He recommended yoga. Making a human pretzel out of myself wasn’t going to somehow make all the stress headaches go away.

  I reached over and pulled a bottle of Ibuprofen out of my glove box, downing three of them without anything to drink to try and head it off. Then I pulled back out onto the sun and sand beaten road that cut through the reservation.

  Most of the permanent buildings on the Paint Rock Reservation were single wide trailers with hodgepodge additions thrown onto one side or another. Broken chain length fences outlined some of them while the property boundaries of others were marked with nothing more than a couple of big stones. A few skinny dogs raced alongside my car when I passed the post office but quickly gave up the chase.

  My house was one of the few buildings that hadn't started its life out as a mobile home. A more creative real estate agent might have called it a log cabin, since the outside sort of resembled that. In reality, it was mostly plywood, chipboard and drywall with some paint thrown on. Whenever the wind kicked up really good, the whole house leaned one way or another.
When my son, Hunter, and I arrived, we found the gutters laying in a pile beside the house and I still hadn't gotten around to getting them up. I wasn't in a hurry to do it, either, since Texas was smack dab in the middle of a ten-year drought. There were three or four trailers within sight of my place so I had neighbors. I just hadn't introduced myself yet. Today wasn't looking promising for that, either.

  Hunter was already sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal when I came in. The pale light of morning cartoons illuminated his blank face as he chewed. I sighed, grunted and hauled in the laundry. “Don't get up or anything, Hunter.”

  “Wouldn't have to drag the laundry everywhere if we'd stayed in Ohio,” he grumbled. “This place sucks. The air conditioning doesn't even work.”

  I went over to the tiny unit in the window and put my hand over one of the vents. The air trickling through it was maybe five degrees cooler than it was outside. “Seems fine to me.”

  Hunter picked up the remote and flipped through some channels, lingering on an exercise program featuring a muscular guy with an Australian accent and his two petite assistants in their skin tight leotards. He took a bite of his cereal before switching the channel over to The New Adventures of Scooby Doo. “Better?”

  “What? I didn't say anything.”

  He stuck his tongue out at me. “I saw your face.” I went back into the kitchen and started moving some dishes around in the sink. “How come you didn't get the laundry done?” he asked with a mouthful of cereal.

  “Don't talk with your mouth full. And I couldn't. Place was closed.”

  “I thought you said it was a twenty-four-hour laundromat?” I shrugged. “You smell like death. Someone died?”