Forever In Deep: The Forever Detective, #3

By Helen Krummenacker

Raphael Jones is always a little out of his depth in rural settings, but he's not just a detective, he's also undead. So, when the Saratoga County coroner mentions bite marks found on several drowning victims during the Spring and Summer of 1947, he simply cannot ignore her request to investigate.

However, Raphael knows he has weaknesses (like sunlight, running water, and a woeful lack of country manners), so he has decided not to work alone. With the help of Medium Brown, Michael Flannery, and another not-necessarily-friendly face from his recent past, he hopes to find the person or supernatural being responsible, and put an end to their murderous spree.

 

However, will his slowly developing powers, quick wits, and allies be enough to prevail against something old, strong in magic, and completely cursed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helen Krummenacker
• Release date: Dec 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223732143

Helen Krummenacker

Helen Krummenacker is uncomfortable talking about herself in the third person, so I won’t. I’ve always loved writing and helped create the Para-Earth Series with my husband Allan, though he has done most of the writing on it. Later, I started The Forever Detective series, and this is a spin-off from that. I have a B.S. in Mathematics, and hope that writing proofs has helped keep my fiction streamlined and without serious plot holes. Of course, like most people, I yell at characters who do stupid things when I’m reading or watching a movie, and thus try to avoid giving others reason to yell. Hobbies include gardening, dancing, and painting. Health issues limit my activity level, but I manage to work in accounting by day and escape into mystery and adventure genres at night.

Book preview

PLUNGING IN

Ahorse can lead you to water, but it cannot make you sink , I thought as I drifted on the top of the river. It was almost a clever thing to say, just like taking on this case had been almost a clever thing to do. As the creature swam back, grabbed my shoulder with its teeth, and began to drag me under the water, I realized I had been equally wrong about both things. 

Here I was, in running water, one of the only things that could render a vampire like myself completely helpless. Running water removes magical energy from things and since magic was all that could keep a vampire moving, it didn’t take long to turn a nigh-immortal creature of the night into a corpse still capable of worrying about its plight. The horse’s teeth were sharp and some of my blood spilled into the water. The rivers and lakes of New York State don’t have sharks, but I worried about possibly contaminating the water with vampiric corruption... until I realized the magic dissipating power of the river meant life downstream was safe. 

It seemed a shame that I would die when I’d just gotten my first real insight into what we had thought were serial killings, but there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it. 

Then a powerful current dragged me under, away from the vicious stallion. I kept holding my breath, on the off chance I might bob to the surface later and breathe again, maybe even wash up on shore. My never-say-die spirit is as prone to return as a stray cat that’s been fed, even if it’s ironic in a guy that’s been killed already.

Even the most optimistic part of me wasn’t expecting to be greeted, as the river current pushed me onto a lake bed, by a beautiful woman who put her arms around me and gave me a solemn but sweet kiss on the lips. 

But I probably should have started with how the case began. New York City was going through a hot and humid spell that didn’t bother me at all, as my metabolism these days didn’t create much body heat. I was in a lull between cases and Eugene had his next year’s production line-up set for his plants and had insisted on turning more attention to my condition. The day before, I’d been in his labs while he had me stand in a wind tunnel in human and in bat form I’d gotten plastered against the wall twice before I got tired of it and just let my weight settle in. After that, he had me step on a scale, and we got proof that it hadn’t just been the way I’d been posed in the end; I could actually make my bat form have the same mass as my human form. So we tried it the other way and, without dispersing into mist, I could still reduce my mass while apparently remaining human down to a few ounces. At the end, I hadn’t been able to keep it and suddenly snapped back to full weight. 

Of course, the problem of trying to use science to understand magic is you can measure what is happening, but it doesn’t give you information as to how. That didn’t make it useless, though. 

That’s why Eugene was in my office an evening later, carrying a wire-articulated bat skeleton. What’s that? I asked. 

A wire-articulated bat skeleton.

I can see that. What I intended to ask is: what is it for?

Flight has been on the minds of scientists since at least Leonardo Da Vinci. We have powered flight now although I still haven’t gotten my pilot’s license. I mentally thanked the bureaucrats who had shaken their heads and his chauffeur for taking the helicopter training instead. But biomechanical flight has remained the realm of birds, insects, and... bats.

And I can turn into a bat.

Yet you have not been able to fly. Our tests yesterday showed there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to. You’re aerodynamic. You’re light. You have a fine set of muscles. True enough. I was a fairly compact size, but every bit was fit. 

So what’s wrong?

Without changing shape, I would like you to demonstrate for me how you move when you try to fly.

Feeling silly, I moved my arms up and down as if flapping. 

Eureka! 

What?

I want you to look closely at the skeleton. He traced a few bones with his finger as he explained. This is the shoulder, up here.

Is that part of the wing?

It is not. The wing... is made of your hand bones.

I did not realize that. I need to flap my hands?

Not exactly. The wings should not just stroke up and down but forward and back.

I pushed the wings through a motion, then looked at my hands. Jazz hands?

Jazz hands.

I can do that. I can do that all night! 

I changed shape. It did take launching off the edge of my desk rather than the ground so I could complete a downstroke while I jumped, but I got lift and did all right for a few beats before I smacked my head against the ceiling and dropped. If I was a smaller bat, I could probably have flown well inside my office, but the problem was, my bat form was modelled on the flying fox. They’re the biggest of the bats, non-vampiric (which made it easier not to lose control, since using magic made me thirsty), and the only ones I’d seen up close before a vampire murdered me.  

As I sat up, man-shaped again, I rubbed my forehead. Eugene asked if I wanted an icepack, but before I could answer, the phone rang. 

I picked up myself and then the phone, waving at Eugene casually to show I was all right. Hello. Harmony Investigations, Rafael Jones speaking.

My name is Ethel Dunford. Is this the Rafael Jones who worked with Sergeant Mary Gunther? Ethel had a robust and mature voice.

I am. Mary was a WAAC nurse who had interviewed concentration camp survivors while they were in treatment for malnutrition and other aftereffects of their experience. We’d had dinner together a few times, but those dates had basically amounted to me listening and providing emotional support, because the work was really more important than her having a nice smile. Besides, it was stressful enough for her taking those notes that she might have lost her smile if there wasn’t someone there for her. 

Splendid. It was a bit of a long shot, looking you up. Luck must be running with me, making you a private eye. How much is your retainer?

Hang on, I think I need to hear what you want me for.

Well, Mary says you don’t tune out women’s opinions, which puts you ahead of most of my colleagues. I’m a coroner, for Saratoga County. We’ve had a number of drownings this summer, and by a number, I mean too many.

Isn’t any untimely death too many? I still wasn’t quite clear on what she wanted. Homicides were police business. There would be people better qualified than I was to investigate if something was causing accidents. 

That’s sweet, but unscientific. There are risks around water. Sometimes people drown. But there’s an expected range, and around here, zero to two might be normal. Instead, we’ve had six bodies turn up in the lake. Not all from one incident like a boating accident might explain. Each girl has turned up on her own, at least a week apart.

You think you have a killer on the loose?

Looks like. The problem is, I don’t have enough evidence of it. The first few bodies that I think fit the pattern were in very bad shape. There’s a lot of woods around the lake, you know, and animals found them before people did. We were lucky to be able to identify the bodies. Well, there was water in the lungs and aside from where they’d been eaten, the only injuries were abrasions and contusions shortly before death consistent with a simple fall. It looked like accidents: girls who slipped on the rocks along the river bank, or maybe tried to do a bit of fishing by themselves and fell. None of them were dressed for a swim.

You say that animals found them? It was possible. I knew it was possible. But the back of my mind was yammering at me about how when the vampire ripped my throat open, it was thought that I’d been savaged by a dog, although all the other injuries I’d gotten during my battle with Rasputin, combined with the fact that a cop had caught him trying to run off with me, had led them to see the circumstances as very suspicious. Fortunately, no one had ID’d me before I woke up and took off from the morgue, stealing the police report in the lab. A good friend of mine was still on the force, and once I told him what had really happened, Flannery had buried the station copy. 

Yep. She gave a sigh. Actually, most of the ones I’m including as likely victims of the unknown killer have bite marks on them, so it might not be random bear snacking. Could be our killer likes using dogs or pigs on them.

Have you tried to identify the type of animal from the bites? 

Honey, I may have been elected to this office, but I know how to do my job. Bite marks are difficult, and the first bodies were so ripped up, there weren’t clean edges. The ones where we do have good, clean bite marks left... well, those seem like they could have occurred in the water.

What makes you say that?

Semi-circle, triangular teeth. I’d say some kind of small, freshwater shark might have been released into the lake. There haven’t been any spotted, but people do dump exotic animals sometimes. I’m going to ask Parks to look into that. There’s a real chance that that stuff is all happenstance.

The ones you’re connecting, what do they have in common?

Females, ages 16-37.

Careers?

There’s a riding instructor, a veterinary assistant, couple of girls who work on their family’s farms, an Indian girl acting as her grandmother’s companion, a magazine photographer—

I broke in then. Sounds like a complicated case. If I understand correctly from your introduction of it, you haven’t been able to get the sheriff to take your suspicions seriously.

That’s right. He even brought up the theory of suicide as a social contagion.

If these were all high school girls or coworkers, that would be a real possibility, but no matter how on the verge someone is, they don’t commit suicide because someone they barely know in passing got mentioned in the paper for dying. They didn’t even leave pretty remains. The death of Evelyn McHale had left a lot of people tense about other young women wanting to copy her. But then, not everything in her story had been what it seemed. I got back to the current case. So do you just want enough evidence to get all the deaths reopened for investigation as homicide, or would you like the culprit found?

To be honest, I’d rather see the job through to the end. Otherwise, it would be like reading only the first chapter of a really exciting story. But even if she wanted me to just get things started, that didn’t mean I would have the ability to stop there. I was only looking for reasonable grounds for suspicion when I found the vampires. By the time I knew what was going on, I had no control over my fate. 

Well, depending on what you find, you might be required to report to the authorities immediately, but if you do manage to catch the bastard yourself, in addition to your regular fee, I’ll pay you a $300 bonus out of my own pocket.

That was a substantial amount of money. Can you afford that?

It’ll pinch, but I’m angry at the perp and the sheriff. She paused. Hell, I can justify the expense for the county. How many extra man-hours would it take to have the department go all out? That’s why I’m getting resistance now. Reopening these cases as homicide investigations will take a lot of manpower, and that means tax dollars. More manpower than you’d think because of low levels of experience. Saratoga County had things pretty quiet for a decade or so. It will save money if you do it.

Do you have the authority to make me a temporary deputy?

You’ve done police work for Buffalo, NYPD, and the military, you can sure as hell get a shield from the county. Come to the courthouse and I’ll get you sworn in.

I have to come clean about something. I have developed a terrible sun sensitivity. I can only drive at night. Is that going to be okay? 

There was a rap on my desk as Eugene signaled for my attention. He mimed driving. He wasn’t offering to do it himself, thank goodness, as that was one thing he was terrible at. But we had a sort of agreement regarding one of his employees. I told her quickly, Scratch that. It isn’t an issue. My part-time colleague will be available to assist with the investigation. I quoted her my rate then, knowing the case was important enough to leave the comfort of the city and able to factor the expense of paying Brown into my fee. 

Is he an officer?

No, he’s an accountant. But he has a lot of insight.

She told me he wouldn’t get his own badge, not that I expected it, and she gave me her phone number to let her know when I got into Ballston Spa, where the courthouse was. Once she rang off, Eugene asked to use the phone so he could set up leave time for Brown. When he said paid leave, I reminded him that Brown would be working for Harmony Investigations and getting paid. Eugene shrugged. 

I pay him what he’s worth.

I— Did I pay him what he was worth? Could I? He wasn’t just an accountant with good instincts for detective work. He went by the name Medium Brown, because he was a medium. He could talk with the dead, not just ones like me who could talk to anyone. He was the only person I knew of who could probably ask the victims questions about how they ended up in the water. I decided not to argue with him getting double pay. 

EASY ON THE EYES

We drove up to Saratoga early in the morning, or rather, Brown drove and I fell asleep covered by a blanket.  No vampire suffers insomnia during the daylight hours. You see, the sun has an incredible amount of power over vampires. While we can be active during the day, it takes an act of will to stay awake during sunrise; it’s easy to sleep and hard to wake until nightfall. More than anything, of course, sunburn for us doesn’t mean red, peeling skin, but flame and ash. The reason the sun is anathema to us seems to be this: as the sun is the source of energy for all life on Earth, it can be considered the foundation of life magic, although it also has the power to erase magic. Vampires, on the other hand, are fueled by anti-life magic. Anti-life generally preyed on or was parasitic to life, but sunlight was too strong a dose for it to take. 

Don’t ask if I’ve ever been tempted to try exposing myself to sunlight. I had been undead for less than half a year, but everyone said I wasn’t quite like other vampires. I drink my meals from a jar, for one thing, and I sometimes wondered if I could actually survive it, just burning off the anti-life energy and seeing if there was enough life left in me to survive it. But I’d seen vampires die from sunlight before and it’s a horrible way to go. Clara Thomas, the love of my life, would never forgive me if I was wrong. 

When we got there, Brown shook me awake. This time he was prepared for the scream as I surfaced through layers of nightmares. I only woke like that when I was disturbed during the day, and he’d been the first person ever to do it.  I looked around. The courthouse at Ballston Spa was a red brick building with a tall tower on one end. I’d call it a big building if I didn’t live in Manhattan. It was a few blocks away as Brown didn’t want me to give anyone the wrong idea with how I woke. 

With my client prepared for my sun-sensitivity, I didn’t hesitate to use an umbrella to shield myself on the way in. We spoke to a deputy