The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

photo opened on his screen. As usual, he did a quick once over around the office to be sure that no small eyes had snuck in behind him, that Annika wasn’t there looking over his shoulder. His desk faced the door and was back against a solid wall for exactly this reason, but he’d never forgive himself if Charlotte ever saw what he did.

“Oh.” His stomach rolled a little at first, just like always. But, God, if that wasn’t signature work all over that body. “When’s my flight?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Knowing and not caring that the dispatcher couldn’t see it, Owen nodded at Randolph’s standard line. The plane was waiting. He didn’t need to pack, because he packed a new bag at the end of each trip, but he did need a few minutes to tell Annika and Charlotte goodbye. It wasn’t like the body was going anywhere. “Bye, ‘Dolph.”

The line disconnected as Owen tried to figure out how the man had been so neatly thumb-tacked to the wall. He should have fallen over and taken the plaster with him. At least the trip would be interesting.

Owen reminded himself of that fifteen hours later.

He scrubbed a hand over his face as his logical brain got away from him. He tried not to calculate how long he’d been awake. But his alarm had gone off at five-thirty the previous morning, putting him at roughly twenty-nine hours up.

He tried to forget the number instantly, and slugged back another cup of coffee. It was too thin. The coffee he was given everywhere was always different, but always equally bad‒it was just part of the badge. Cops everywhere hated him, thinking that he tread on their turf, when really it was they who had tread all over his murder scene, so they gave him bad cop coffee. And since good cop coffee was an oxy moron . . . Owen tossed back another shot of it, thinking that if it went straight to the back of his throat it might not linger on his tongue like the socks Randolph wasn’t going to have to eat.

Reminding himself that he was nowhere near his record for hours awake, he decided to check out the lab work on their body and their ninja.

In the middle of the night, while still on the scene, he had sent close-up photos of the tag to the handwriting analyst who had opened the file and declared the writing identical to the other tags without even waking up.

The body bore marks of piercings with a long slender awl. Slash marks were cut no more than an inch deep in a handful of non-vital places. Owen had studied the ninja’s work before and decided that the knives that held the body had been thrown, the piercings were from sais, and the slashes were the work of kamas. Kamas weren’t pretty or flashy. Curved metal knives, mounted sickle-style at the end of wooden, hammer-sized handles, they were all but unheard of beyond the martial arts world. They hadn’t hit the movie circuit yet. Given the expert weaponry and use thereof, Owen was certain they had a pro on their hands. He had sighed at this body the same way he had at all the others. The ninja definitely got the job done.

So he had stood in front of the body with the sais he had picked up to match the holes after the last corpse the ninja had left, and this time he mocked poking at it while it still hung on the wall. The cops in the last town had moved the body before he got to play, changing every piece of evidence from certain to possible, and pissing him off no end. He’d been no good to Charlotte and Annika for a full week after that one.

Owen then inserted long metal wires into the many punctures the body bore and he saw something very interesting. Every single one was sticking out a good six inches below his comfort zone in his own natural grip. Blinking, he pulled out a wire and stuck in a sai. Then he replaced the wire and did the same at each hole. Even the angle of the stabs down into the shoulder matched. Owen had smiled.

He smiled again now as he and Blankenship stared down at the body on the slab, still with the long wires sticking out of it as well as the ninja’s metal knives. They were overly utilitarian, looking like they’d been cut with a welder from a sheet of thick metal. “Our ninja’s about five foot six. Not too tall.”

Blankenship snorted. “Of course. Ninjas are little Japanese guys.”

There was no comment. Owen had never been sure how Ron Blankenship had gotten into the FBI in the first place. Just as he had never been sure if being the man’s senior partner was a blessing or a curse.

Just then, one of the lab guys burst in. Special Agent Nguyen was clothed head to toe in white paper-drape clothing that was catching the sick burning of the fluorescent rays and bouncing them off in all directions. His lips were pressed together as he confronted Dunham. “I got this niggling last time about the hairs we got from the ninja.”

“And?”

“I pulled the old samples. They all match.” He was clearly upset.

Owen failed to see the issue with that. The hair was about the only evidence they had on the guy. There were no clothing fibers, no fingerprints that could be trailed from scene to scene, and no blood. It seemed no one ever got a wounding hit on the little bastard.

“They match too well.”

“Is that even possible?” What the hell was too well?

But he was about to find out.

“This hair,” Nguyen held a strand up, shaking it, “is old. It is, in fact, the same age as all the other hair we found. The only thing I’ll bet on now is that this hair did not come off the head of our ninja.”

“What?” They had