Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Seven:
Kindling

Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
― Harry Graham
Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, (1899)

“I got it! I got it! I’m real again!” Jackie Renfrew danced into the small, off campus apartment she shared with Frank Ahtram. Her purse dropped to the floor by the door and her shoes went flying in a low arc into the same fireplace which Frank had been procrastinating about checking for functionality, despite the andirons and gas log already installed. Seconds later dance music was playing loudly on her roommate’s stereo as she danced over to him and hugged him from behind.

“Congratulations,” Frank responded, albeit with a voice slightly muffled by the huge pile of architecture texts and three-dimensional structural dioramas surrounding his face as he bent down to make a minute adjustment to one of the model struts using a pair of Kelley forceps and a hypodermic loaded with cyanoacrylate glue. “Now please turn that down, I’m on a deadline; I have to finish my architectural model and I’m not even close to finished. Plus, Doctor DeBauck wants me to show him the finished cost analysis at the construction site this evening, around eleven o’clock for some God-awful reason.”

“But I want to celebrate,” Jackie said in a high-pitched, little girl voice and pouted briefly. She stood behind Frank, tapping out the rhythm on his head as she danced, but realized he was ignoring her. With a mischievous grin, she stopped tapping in favor of another method of obtaining his attention.

“Yeow! Don’t do that!” Frank shouted in surprise as he nearly fell backwards off his chair trying to jump back from the table. Jackie merely smiled back at him from her new position. She had become immaterial and floated up through the table, her neck now apparently connected to the table.

“Thanks for the forced work break,” Frank grumbled. “So…what are you so happy about?”

“I finally have legal identification, a new birth certificate as Jacquelyn Leigh Renfrew, a driver’s license, college transcripts, all the proof I need to get a credit card.”

“To get a credit card, you don’t even have to be human, just breathing.”

“My point exactly. Remember, I don’t have to breathe any more.”

Reminding Frank of Jackie’s recent death and subsequent reïncarnation as a supernatural wraith put a damper on his annoyance at being interrupted. Jack Renfrew had been his best friend and Jackie Renfrew was still his best friend — as well as live-in girlfriend and roommate for the past four months, but no sex yet, since Jackie was still afraid that she might hurt him until she gained more experience as a succubus/cupid who lived off the sexual and emotional feelings of humans. Then too, she’d talked to an angel, or so she’d claimed, and he’d convinced her that waiting until marriage might be the best idea. It’s hard to argue with angels, or at least it seemed to be so for Jackie.

“I’m sorry, Jackie,” he said as he righted the chair and hugged her even before she fully cleared the tabletop.

“Umm.” Jackie moaned sexily. “A hard man is good to find.”

Frank blinked twice and then started laughing. “First, that hard object you’re feeling is the tabletop. Second, where do you find lines like that?”

“The late late movies on cable television. They had a Mae West marathon last night. Do you like it? I’ve been dying to try it since I heard it.”

“Well, I appreciate the laugh. I can’t afford it, but I really need a break from this project.”

“What does Doctor DeBauck have you doing now?” Jackie asked with a gesture toward the project materials scattered over the table.

“You mean Doctor Debauched? I’ve got to find a better class of professor if I’m going to continue to be a research assistant.”

Jackie just nodded knowingly. Even though she wasn’t really a succubus, she still spent time at Calaca E., the night club where Lilith, the ur-succubus who’d initiated her change, worked. Many were the times that she had seen DeBauck there, trying to pick up another one of his infamous ‘one night stands, and she knew that Lilith didn’t like him, but she refused to say why, exactly.’

“I know he’s supposedly a genius,” Jackie said, “and seems to know just about everything about everything, but he’s still a creep. Given some of his private comments, he might even be crazy, at least from what I’ve heard. How did you end up having him for an advisor anyway?”

“Bad luck, I guess. He actually selected me. He said he had a minor in chemical engineering and thought we’d have a lot in common to talk about.” Frank rubbed his stubble covered chin. “Funny thing is, I don’t think we ever did discuss anything related to chemistry. Now he’s got me doing busy work, doing a cost analysis of that project he’s just completing down by the lake,” Frank righted his chair and sat down. Jackie immediately sat on his lap and squirmed enticingly, reminding Frank of exactly how well his ex-best guy friend had adapted to being female, albeit any female she wished to be. “Hey! No fair.”

Jackie rolled her eyes. She may only have been a woman for a few months, but she had teasing down pat. “That’s the one Doctor Long is still steamed about?” she asked.

Dr. Long was a full professor in the Humanities Department and Jackie’s advisor. In the last few months it had been the exceptional advisory meeting when he’d failed to make at least one, and often several angry comments about the house being built by DeBauck, since it blocked his view of the lake, and had somehow been built on what had been a protected area adjacent to œcologically-significant wetlands.

“Yup. That’s the one. There’s something wrong with the figures, though. It looks like it’s costing about twenty percent more than it should.”

“Well, given Debauched’s reputation, maybe he’s skimming money off the top on the project.”

“I don’t think so. If he is, it’s through a dummy company or something. The bills seem to match the charges. What I don’t understand is why so much concrete was needed. It’s more than twice the amount that should have been necessary for a building of that size.”

“Don’ ask me; I’m just a lowly Humanities major. I don’ know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no buildings.” Jackie offered her best imitation of the Black slave ‘Prissy’ in Gone With the Wind, and had transformed into her clone. It was in questionable taste, but they were alone.

Frank rolled his eyes. “Right. My barefoot and pregnant girlfriend.”

“Who’s pregnant?” she responded glumly, although she did raise one leg and wiggle her bare toes in tacit admission that he was at least partially correct. The topic of pregnancy kind of bummed her out though, since she was not now, nor ever would be, likely to have a child. Being dead puts one at a distinct disadvantage in the pregnancy department, since she didn’t ovulate, didn’t go through any of the physiological changes necessary to carry a child, and didn’t menstruate, which last wasn’t so bad, but it depressed her when she sensed the menses of her woman friends, and realized how far from being a real woman she really was.

“Aren’t you the one who has always helped me complete my architecture projects and checked my math?” Frank continued as if she hadn’t spoken, the twit. “Aren’t you the one who reads all those mystery novels?” He poked her in the ribs.

“Aren’t I the one who’s going to kick you if you don’t stop tickling me?” Jackie responded, and then vanished into thin air. The only reasonable response to his infuriating questions, which were depressingly logical, was to adjourn to her bedroom, at least for a while, and sulk.

Someone was banging on the door, loud, repetitive slams that rattled the door on its frame. An angry man yelled, “Open up. Open up this door right now!”

Jackie rolled out of bed, where she’d been reading one of her trashy romance novels — not having to sleep, or even being able to, left her a lot of free time — to the sounds of loud, persistent pounding and glanced at the bedside alarm clock; seven-eleven in the morning. Next she poked her head through the wall and checked the other bedroom for Frank’s blanketed form and thought, “At least Frank is safe at home. I wonder what time he got home last night.”

A moment’s concentration and she was magically dressed and ready to meet whoever was at the door. As soon as she unlocked the door two large men in cheap suits pushed into the apartment flashing badges.

“Is Frank Ahtram here?” The taller one asked as they both began suspiciously examining the room. The one in the brown suit walked over to the kitchen table, still covered with Frank’s project material, and began nosing about.

“Who wants to know?” These guys were rude, noisy and intruding into Jackie’s home. While she considered herself a law-abiding person, this smacked of abuse of authority.

“Don’t get wise, lady,” the one in the grey suit snapped. “We have a warrant.”

“Then you’ll show it to me, along with your badges again, and slowly so I can really read them.” Jackie stood her ground and grey-suit was surprised to be unable to push past her. Putting as much authority in her voice as she could she demanded, “And get away from that table! Now!”

Brown-suit jumped and actually stopped poking at the papers on the table for a moment. Grey-suit shrugged and presented the requested items as he rumbled, “You a lawyer or something?”

“Nope, just a citizen exercising her constitutional rights. You remember them, don’t you?” Jackie examined the badge first and then started on the papers. “Hey, I said leave the stuff on the table alone.”

“Read the warrant, lady.” Brown-suit continued flipping through the material on the table. “I’m just doin’ my job. Send your complaints to Internal Affairs.”

“Are you done reading yet?” Grey-suit was again trying to push past her, and it pissed her off, so she did something about it, and besides, he’d touched her first, and was being rough about it. He instantly backed off, and they both looked at the wet spot on the front of one of the pair of pants that came with his cheap two-pants suit.

“Officer Brown-Suit, I think this boorish behavior on the part of your colleague constitutes sexual harassment and assault, and I’d like to file a complaint. Could you please call a second evidence team, as well as Internal Affairs, to collect the evidence from your abusive companion and document the grounds for my complaint?”

Now both men were staring at the front of his grey pants.

“Oh, Jesus, Hamilton, what the fuck happened here?”

“I don’t know, Cecil. I was pushing past her to find our perp, and it just went off by itself.”

“I insist, Officer Cecil, whatever your last name is. We have a crime scene here, a culpable party, and evidence to be collected. You will call in an evidence team, and Internal Affairs, or I’ll do my very damnedest to see that neither of you collect your pensions. Now why don’t we all sit down like good boys and we’ll talk about this like civilized human beings.”

“I asked you if Frank Ahtram was here,” Hamilton said defensively, “when all this happened, and I didn’t do nothin’!”

“Yeah, he’s here,” a deep voice, hoarse from sleep, said from behind them.

Instantly, guns were out and pointing at the man standing by the bedroom door. He had a softball-sized contusion on the right side of his forehead that still was still oozing blood, but the bleary-eyed Frank was instantly wide-awake with his hands in the air.

“Frank Ahtram, you are under arrest for the murder of Sylvester DeBauck.”

Jackie watched in shock as the two detectives read Frank his rights, then waited — at her insistence — while he dressed and put some antibiotic on the blood still slowly seeping from the wound before handcuffing him. Then they called in a wagon to haul him off while they all sat and waited for the evidence team and the wagon. The wagon arrived first, and the cheap suit duo were separately pissed off, because some other officer was going to get credit for booking him, and one of them blamed the other while the other wasn’t sure who to blame, except it wasn’t himself.

Frank’s final words as they escorted him away were, “Call my Uncle Hank. He’s a sergeant at the thirteenth precinct.”

While they were waiting, she called to let Frank’s uncle know what was happening, and he promised to look into it, and told her to stop by as soon as she could.

Then she waited some more.

“May I please speak to Sergeant Ahtram?” Jackie’s voice quavered as she tried to hold back the tension and worry in her voice and she danced from foot to foot in her impatience.

“Over there.” The desk officer pointed to a room with a half dozen desks piled high with folders. At one was a hulking grey-haired man in tie and suspenders. Jackie’s high heels clicked loudly on the worn wooden floor, but the man didn’t look up as she approached, or as she stood wringing her hands beside his desk.

“Hello, Jackie. How are you?” He had a deep, rich voice that made you want to trust him. Jackie thought it was a good thing he was a cop because he would have made an absolutely fantastic con man.

“Huh? You know me?”

“You were at the family picnic.”

Jackie fought back the tears that had been threatening to overwhelm her since her arrival at the station house and thought furiously. “Of course! That must have been you I saw just before your cellphone went off. All I remember seeing was your back as you headed for your car.”

“Ah, I see we remember each other perfectly, then.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her at last. Jackie felt she was under a microscope, but then he blinked and it was as if the examination was over and he was looking at a smiling friend. “Before you ask, I’ve got a photographic memory. It helps in my line of work.”

The chair moved back to an upright position. “From the way you’re wringing your hands, you’re worried. Have a seat and tell me exactly what’s been happening. I particularly want to hear your side of the arrest of Frank, and how the officers behaved.”

Jackie sat, but said nothing. Hank watched her lower lip trembling. Without another word, he reached into a drawer to pull out a box of tissues and gave her an encouraging smile. This was the final straw and the dam broke. Through sobs, Jackie explained how Frank had been arrested and how he had asked her to contact him.

He listened quietly without saying a word until she had wound down. “Before you get your hopes up, I need to tell you that this is not my case,” Hank gestured at the pile of folders threatening to topple off the corner of his desk, “and I have more than enough of my own.”

He raised a hand to stop Jackie before she interrupted him. “Let me finish, dear. I can, however, tell you that the detectives who have the case are Hamilton Handelson and his partner Cecil Parmenter.”

“I met them,” she blurted out before he could stop her.

“I’m sure you did. Now let me finish, dear.” He waited patiently as Jackie bit her lip, then nodded her acquiescence.

“Handelson is a big hulk of a man who favors grey suits?”

Jackie nodded.

“And Parmenter isn’t much shorter, but can’t stand still and usually can’t stop poking about. He favors brown suits.”

Jackie nodded again.

“Neither of them is very bright and neither is likely to dig once an arrest has been made. I’ve talked to Handelson, off the record, of course. They’ve got motive and opportunity, but they’re weak on method. Frank is in trouble, but it’s not an open and shut case, and Handlson may have botched the evidence collection, because the DA won’t dare put him on the stand, since a clever attorney could get the jury right on your side with one word about the ‘incident,’ so they’ve shot themselves in the foot, especially if Frank’s attorney introduces the complaint against both officers as evidence of bias. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to worry about, because there always is, but it’s going to raise an element of uncertainty that will make the DA’s office much more cautious, and less anxious to go to trial.

Jackie took a deep, shuddering breath. She hadn’t realized she had been holding it until then and hoped that Sergeant Ahtram hadn’t noticed either, because she had no idea how long it had been since she breathed last and didn’t want the detective to realize she wasn’t human.

“The motive is apparently embezzlement,” he continued, apparently without noticing. “They found the books in your house and they don’t match the books at the site.”

“But Frank was going over them complaining that they didn’t make sense. That’s why they were there. DeBauck had asked him to check them.”

“A fact which no one else knew about, and Frank cannot prove, given DeBauck’s death.”

“But….”

Hank gently placed one of his huge hands over hers to stop her.

“You can explain until you’re blue in the face, but as his girlfriend, you’re not going to be considered a credible witness, although the DA will have to prove that Frank actually doctored the books, which will be difficult, one would think, unless he had been keeping the books all along. Anyway, the opportunity was supposedly when they were together at the construction site. Handelson and his partner found bloodstains there and it matches Frank’s blood type, which makes perfect sense, given the fact that Frank was clearly assaulted somewhere. DNA testing won’t be done unless your lawyer insists on it and you pay for it.”

“But….”

Again he gently hushed her.

“Let me get the good news out. Like I said, they’re weak on method. They tried to do dental comparisons to confirm DeBauck’s identity, but couldn’t, since DeBauck had never had any dental work done, so there were no records. There wasn’t much left but a few bits of bone and ash. This is unusual. Crematoria operate at temperatures above sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit and need special equipment to obtain those temperatures. Even more unusual is that there was only a blackened spot on the cement to indicate where the fire was. Nothing else was damaged. Thus, Hadelson and Parmenter have no idea how DeBauck was incinerated.

“The problem is that Frank’s minor is chemical engineering and they figure he must have the knowledge to pull it off. They’re expecting Forensics to come up with a method that they’ll have no trouble proving that Frank was aware of, and had access to equipment and materials that would have enabled him to accomplish the crime, but it’s all a real stretch.”

“But Frank couldn’t have done it. He just couldn’t have,” she said, “and wouldn’t they have to demonstrate the plausible existence of these putative means at the scene of the crime to make it stick? The DA could claim that DeBauck was incinerated by a Martian raygun, but without a visible flying saucer, it’s difficult to prove.”

“Nor do I believe he did it. I’ve known Frank from the day he was born, and he partly grew up in our home, so I know him like I’d know my own son, if I’d had one, and I need to be a fairly good judge of character in my job.” Hank sighed with a sound like a steam locomotive releasing pressure. “Let me lay it out straight for you. I told you that the evidence is a stretch, but DAs can do a lot to tilt the scale in the direction that gets them elected come November. One or more ‘jail-house informants’ may appear — after payment of a substantial bribe, in the form of a reduced sentence or dropped charges — who will swear on a stack of Bibles that Frank ‘confessed’ to his crime in a fit of either braggadocio or remorse — it doesn’t much matter which — and ‘eyewitnesses’ can be subtly manipulated into identifying Frank ‘behaving oddly’ at the scene of the crime. It’s not that difficult to persuade a witness that they saw the whole thing from start to finish, nor is it all that difficult to coerce a suspect into a false ‘confession,’ through browbeating, sleep-deprivation, and psychological — but perfectly legal — torture. It happens all the time, and people are executed every month, all across the country, on trumped-up evidence produced essentially as a reëlection campaign strategy for the prosecuting District Attorney. I can’t interfere, and I can’t ask a lot of questions with jeopardizing my ability to keep track of what’s going on. Similarly, I can’t investigate on my own without being investigated myself by Internal Affairs. Do you have any money saved up?”

Jackie shook her head.

“Too bad. I can lend you some, but Sarah, Frank’s Aunt, has been ill and the doctor bills have been a real drain. Can you get a couple of thousand dollars from a friend?”

“No, sir, I’m an orphan. The only people we’re close to are George Dombrowski and his fiancée Julie — and they’ve got most of their money invested in their wedding. It’s coming up in two months.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Credit cards? Stocks? Bonds? Annuities? Property? Inheritances?” Jackie just kept shaking her head no, looking more and more solemn and woebegone as he spoke.

“Then my best advice is useless. The idea that cops have this cozy relationship with private detectives and can get them to help for nothing is a myth, to say the least.” The big man gave another huge sigh. “I’ll see if I can scrounge up some money and get a private detective on the case. I know a few that are pretty good, but you’re going to have to help, a lot, or Frank may be spending quite a few years in jail.”

“Save the money. I’m afraid we’ll need it more for the lawyer, unless we’re foolish enough to use an overworked and underpaid public defender. If I do the grunt work, will you tell me what to do to investigate this myself?”

“Girl, that’s crazy. You know what they say about a man who acts as his own lawyer. It applies double to investigatory work.”

“It’s not going to get done any other way, and I have some resources that might surprise you. Will you?”

“Jackie, please don’t do this.”

“Will you?”

“Please….”

“Will you?” This time she leaned on him a little.

Yet another sigh; longer than the others. His response was barely louder than a whisper. “Yes, my dear. I’ll help you.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mister Ahtram.” Jackie threw herself at the older man and hugged him mightily.

“Whoa. That’s some hug you’ve got for a little slip of a girl,” Hank laughed as he carefully disengaged. “Come by our house this evening and we’ll see what we can do.”

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011 by Levanah