Iron Ghost

Iron Ghost Chapter Six

Chapter Five;
Dawn Just’s Car Entering Brooklyn Shack Crime Scene;
August 15th ;  Late Afternoon.

Spiraling red and white strobe lights reflect off the rippling surface of the East River seemingly pulling and peeling off in blotches grey patches splashing between thousands or tiny white caps.
Dawn reviews her Agency mail package focusing one last time on the tabloid headline depicting the French Newspaper, La Tribune, censoring a story regarding executed Rabbinical students and another announcing Syria’s call on the World Bank to fund nano-microbe research to ‘eat’ oil during catastrophic International spills.
As if she were speaking to some spirit on the other side of the windshield she says,“Who wants me to have these headlines?”
She sets the tabloid and remaining mail on the passenger seat and again looks forward.
Brown smog particles refract slender yellow dusk rays, appearing like stalks of autumn hay and creating golden and pink sky strokes, brushing over a heavenly-expanse gray canvas and before her eyes, in cloud form, a seemingly life-like palm emerges with bewitching fingers, complete with a long life palm-line and poised, and ready, and about to, sink into the depth of a far away western horizon.
Dawn stares through the windshield, through the open gate and across the vacant lot into the abandoned construction shack.
People believe what they see…show em’ want you want them to believe’.
Her father’s words to her as a young girl ring through her mind.  She contemplates the one responsible for what she is about to investigate. 
What do you…the elusive one…want me to believe? 
Dusk light falls on her hair amidst a growing faint amber glow as she removes black sunglasses and summons creative focus to wander through her conscious mind.
What you show me…you want me to believe… 
Skyscraper shadows cast from three sides of the city’s skyline and are absent those black shapes emerging from two towers of days past while appearing like an aisle break in tombstone rows of a cemetery.  A Staten Island wind drift slows and settles as the jagged and skewed shadow line grows and encroaches on the vacant, debris woven and weed infested Brooklyn earth surrounding the lonely dwarfed rusting shack inside a perimeter wired and rusted fence. 
What?
Three short harbor freighter horn blasts alert a distant flock of seagulls.  Carrying inland by that wind and that wind causing a loosened and bent sheet of corrugated and rusted steel siding from the shack to creak and moan before releasing into a thundering rattle and that wind, creeping and hanging and holding an invisible pocket of summer harbor trash stench settling and crawling over the lot underneath a New York vacant sky.
She welcomes the feeling as the centers of her eyes begin to enlarge.
The 9mm points nearly into her groin.  Dawn Just looks up to the metal shack in front of her car, blinking her eyes slowly and hoping...and not praying…and breathing in, only through her nose.  She pulls and tugs and curses then clenches down hard on her teeth, still cursing to herself while positioning her backside firmly against the driver’s seat back before she breathes in and reaches for the seat belt release button.  She does not go near the trigger.
Blinking she feels her eyes constrict.
Later…yes, later I will revisit these feelings.
The belt clicks free, releases and recoils when the first four NYPD blue cars bounce and jump forward and bob and weave and squeak across the vacant lot without their sirens on.  Dawn hears herself rehearse her first directive as agent-in-charge of her new commission. She figures her next order will send the cops scouring all local junkies and prostitutes and homeless and others from the boarding houses and tenements, those who do not need to go to jail.  Not tonight, such a peaceful early summer night in the city.  No one needs to go to jail tonight. 
Yeah, I can use that.
She steps into the waning daylight securing her 9mm as Captain Most steps out of the first unmarked car.
“Dawn, what do ya got?”
“I pulled in one minute before you.  Keep your guys in their cars until I get aerial photos and perimeter markings.  Choppers are on their way.  Inform your sergeant to send your best through the neighborhood…the mayor is going to want this guy.”
“I heard.” 
He pulls up his belt and nods to his Spanish looking sergeant who immediately grabs a radio and holds his hand palm out toward his men.
“You heard what?”
She turns squaring off her toes and creating an imaginary line with her folding elbows and fists on top of her ‘no-one will pass across this line’ facial expression.  Her shadow now appears like a hawk opening its wings.
Captain Most stops himself from proceeding and looks to her for a long moment and then curls his caterpillar-like black eyebrows half way over small, sagging brown eyes.
“Word is…”
“Is…what Captain?” 
Her shadow wings expand.
Another three freighter blasts, longer blasts and sounding more like a herd of agonizing animals, dominates the thick air stirring slowly over New York City.
“C’mon Dawn…drop the captain shit.  Word is there is such an animal as the Iron Ghost and he hit us here.”
“You know the Agency’s position on mythology…”
She cuts herself off and looks to the sky and the surreal hand reaching out over her and some clouds and smog and waits for another nautical blast.
His eyebrows remain pressed together as if he were rising from the salty surf on a sunny day.
“Look here.”
She walks around to the back of her car releasing the trunk with a click.  The trunk lid pops open and lifts steadily before Dawn reaches in and gently pulls out a stainless steel electronic gadget.  The piece of equipment is the size of a toaster oven and most notably has a softball sized white translucent sphere suspended in front of a concave shaped white disc mounted on a cushioned and swiveling base.
“What the hell is it?”
“NASA gave it to us. Technology beyond your wildest…” 
She stops herself and glances to the shack.
“It is a…‘detector.’”
“NASA? What does it detect?”
She looks to his eyes and holds there, “NASA.  They call it Ghost Buster”
His eyebrows remain pressed together.
“When I think of NASA I think of….You’re freaking me…I mean we are talking about dead…humans…”
“I am not sure.”
“Yeah, sounds like you got a hunch?”
“No hunch…”
She pulls black sunglasses off her face and squares her eyes into his.
“It is the second time NASA interfered with one of my investigations.”
“No shit?  What was the first about?”
She shakes her head placing her black sunglasses firmly over her green eyes.
A voice emerges from behind them. “It looks a little like an alien Eddy Murphy head.”  The Sergeant with an adolescent sized black mustache steps into the personal space smiling and obviously, very pleased with himself, while he keeps his stare on Dawn…for more than a regulation moment.
“The men are organizing a door to door…” He looks to the Captain and pulls himself into a more attentive posture and smiles at Dawn. “We need back-up…”  He notices the Captain’s stare.  “…um…sir.”
Dawn does not shift when she says, “It’s not the uniform Seargent.” 
DAWN PLAYS WITH EVERY MAN SCOPING OUT HER BREASTS…TIE THIS INTO ‘MOHTERS MILK IS ONLY THING MEN RELY ON’
“Huh?”  The Sergeant shifts when he tilts his head toward Dawn.
“When the center of a man’s eyes enlarge for a lickity-split moment…I know he is interested in…me.  That is when I say, It is not the uniform Sergeant.  Even though I do sometimes wear uniforms.”
The Captain’s eyebrows flatten before he says, “Then call in back up…Sergeant.”
She decides right there who is going to perform the door to door in the junkies tenement.
Sanitini nods at her before he turns, reaching for his radio and barking orders loud enough for her to hear when her beeper sounds off.
Reaching to the back of her belt she pulls a little beeper box and looks to the digital readout and presses one button twice when, she pauses and she feels her eyes drift.
The word  ‘okay’ creeps into her conscious.
Her steady eyes now look back to the Captain.
He laughs.
She looks up to the Captain and notes he is waiting for a response the way all cops do.
“It is my old man…the only number he knows.”
The Captain remains quiet.
“He’s got dementia…kind of like Alzheimers…”
“Sorry to hear that…How old is he?”
“Eighty-six.  My mother passed away in ‘1999’.  He has gone nowhere but downhill since.”
The Captain breaths heavily and says, “You gotta go?”  He exhales, “ …I could handle this until…”
Her head is shaking when she spits out, “I have some time. He gets rough on me if I am late.  His nurse says the only time he remains lucid occurs during the time period he calls me until after my visit.”
“It’s gotta be tough.”
The Captain nods to his own statement and continues.
“At any rate. What do we have?”
She focuses in on the shack and slips her cell phone between her holster and belt back without the Capt noticing.           
“We got a junkie in Bellevue…on our drugs…mumbling… ‘parts…body parts…girls…”  He vomits every time he mentions stench.  His eyes bulge out of his head and he stretches his mouth with all his fingers and then tries to fit both fists in there…he does that as soon as he talks of this one girl.  He tries to say her name…no-one could figure what it is…only that the name begins with the letter ‘L’.”
The freighter horn blasts three long announcements through a now seagull-less sky.
“Body parts? “  He looks to the shack. “…Joy…”
“Get this…his addicted compulsions have not manifested…”
She looks to the captain’s eyes.
“…and he hasn’t even so much as asked for a fix since he has been there…under interrogation”
“Can’t be…not natural.” 
He looks to the pink and gray sky. 
“I once heard of a cop who would hold a little out, every now and again, in front of a junkie…you know…to get some answers.”
“You are missing …” 
She looks to his eyes, squarely.
“…You know that real tall doctor at Bellevue? Works with the Feds a lot. The dark guy with the square head…”
“Yeah…Robbino?  We go back...both of us started with the city the same day.”
She slows her voice a bit.
“He said he never has seen a junkie not threaten or lie or steal or get aggressive in need of a fix.”
“Yeah?”
“I told him they did not bring me in for re-hab lessons.”  He persists. He looks at me…He became a bit spooked.  He told me, ‘This junkie been addicted a long time…’ Robbino figures the junkie would have carved his mother’s heart out if he thought there was a bag inside it.  This junkie has not even asked for a fix.
She watches his face as Most gets a big wiff of that Staten Island wind when he breathes in deeply.
Most continues, “What do you make of that? A junkie that doesn’t even hit on for an orderly for a fix?  What does Robbino say?””
“The junkie’s nervous system has apparently responded to something more powerful than the impulse for a fix…inside of one hell-of-a short period of time…”
He flattens his moustache rolling sausage sized fingers over thick black hair.
Her eyes sharpen her stare. “…at a primal level the junkie’s nervous system is more fearful of what he saw…” 
His eyebrows return to his forehead like they were mounted on springs.
“Robbino said that?  Shit.” 
“No, that is my best guess right now.”
He shifts his weight to his toes and pulls up his chest and takes his eyes off her. 
“Dawn…I haven’t seen even one rat come out since we arrived.”
The Captain’s face became expressionless.
Her eyebrows lift, “Body parts?  It’s got to be loaded?”
“They have one hell of a motive to stay in there.”
She nods.
“… That’s what I figure.”
She turns her attention to The Ghost Buster.
“That is where this comes in.  We set it up inside.  No-one enters for an hour. We leave it stationed for a minimum of one full daylight cycle, we proceed with our investigation as normal, this thing registers all sight, sound, temperature, air density, movement…you name it…everything…all matter, organic and inorganic.  NASA says it can detect all sensory changes energy can create..  It then senses each object within its range comparing all size, weight, shape, texture…etc…It absorbs data constantly and records everything and compares everything within its database for consistencies and inconsistencies.  We are told any discrepancy or distinction the human mind can understand is isolated and recorded.  In 24 hours it will have resonated imagery of hair strands and blood droplets…and eyeliner and on and on.  It will figure out if a speck is a dead tick or a particle of a pebble.”
Her voice quickens.
“ …Inside of  twenty minutes Ghost Buster will give you distinctions between cobwebs…down to broken strands.  Electromagnetism vibrating at slower impulses than sub-atomic particles revolving around each other…those impulses than adjust to flow at a faster rate than the subatomic particles.  The impulses triangulate at contrasting rates of speed until those impulses balance and determine and then lock on to the precise particle speed.  Increasing, to progressively faster rates until the point when greater friction is reached and detected…the impulses will then slow at the same increments and detect the rate friction is lost thereby enabling Ghost Buster to image and project  the shape the particles form.”
She stops herself as Most presses his forefinger along his moustache above a  now open mouth.
He looks at her.
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
A smile emerges and widens a bit under her high cheekbones. 
Her voice pace slows.
“The detector determines if an item is organic or inorganic, or if it is alive or dead…the next generation of Ghost Buster will detect sub atomic activity within micro-organisms the size of which can regenerate by the tens of thousands inside an amoeba.  It will find it, record it and report it.”
“Next time I pick up a amoeba as a perp I know where to go.”
  She smiles before laughing and exposing her smile tilting her head and squaring her eyes off onto his and allowing a chestnut wave of hair to fall off her shoulder, spring and bounce and pop and snap before the locks settle  into a uniform flow resting on top of  the right side of her chest.
“I’ll try to keep that in mind…”  She turns back to Ghost Buster. “…All human DNA sample material is located…isolated…down to the remaining skin fragments from scrubbed hands behind a nail clipping.”
Her green eyes constrict before she withdraws her smile.
“NASA?” 
He pulls his stare off the sky and onto the ground.
She quickens her voice pace.
“That is not all…it is linked to one of NASA’s satellite.  Agency talk has it… databases from us the CIA, old KGB…everyone…with known  DNA…terrorists…you figure it out.”
“Why?  I mean…for a serial?””
The first helicopter of three hovers and chops and thuds and pumps air over the vacant field in a chaotic symphony of honking noises coming from passing Canadian geese.  The noises combine, forming a harmony heard to the human ear like baseball cards poked in a kids spokes.
“You’ve scared me.” 
One chopper descends quite a bit.
He lifts his belt and finds the handle to his revolver placing his palm on it as he looks again to the sky.
She continues to stare into him.
Flocking geese form an outstretched flowing ‘V’ pattern, honking in a frantic and retarded-like response to crawling choppers, thumping, while each sound moves in synchrony, along the same, seemingly time-lapsed, dotted and broken lines superimposed on a pink and gray sky.
Dawn looks down to her belt, presses a four button confirming sequence on her cell-phone, glances at Ghost Buster, smiles and goes on to remove two respirators from her trunk. She hands the large one to the Captain.
“Ghost Buster satellite connection is complete.  Do rats bother you?”
“They sure do… I’ll live…I worked on the Broadway slayings in the early nineties. The first torso we found was in a dumpster for three days.”
“Lou, tell your men to be careful on this one.  We had to get the Ghost Buster from someone…this is someone else’s bright idea and my Dept Head figures it was the NSA herself.  He figures any evidence we miss or…otherwise… will certainly be picked up by Ghost Buster.”
“I got the picture.  Why?  Dawn what is your take on why we need this thing?”
Her eyes shift and then tighten and remain like that as they focus.
“If the murders from Arizona and San Francisco and Minnesota and Rhode Island are connected our best shot is DNA…possibly, our only shot…”
“Is he making a circle?”
“We have not come up with much commonality.  His geographic pattern…his location choice…could be random…could be a circle luring us in and making us look foolish…I am not convinced of anything.”
Captain Lou interrupts, “ They found no link…no matching DNA on any two sites.  They concluded individual killers.”
“They put that word out.  If there is an Iron Ghost he murders multiples within days practically in public and disappears. He is wantonly haphazard and reckless by our standard. He comes and goes and seemingly has no fear of being caught and leaves mountains of evidence all of which has lead us nowhere.  Arizona and Minnesota did not initially call us in because they had the killings pegged as random.  The only consistent aspect of commonality I feel comfortable with is the haphazard and wonton disregard of care. NSA figures DNA is our only shot…who could argue?”
“But if they came up empty on each of those locations…?  May be it is just mythology?”
“What is the possibility there are multiple serials, each one seemingly reckless against our best…and each one successful?”
“When the mob uses a hit-man…the only DNA we find…is not the people we are looking to get.”
“A hit man is motivated for money…a serial murderer for pleasure…gratification.  This guy clearly needs gratification.  He must do his own killing to get it.”
“Yeah.”
The Captain looks back to the pocked marked sky and gazes for a few long moments and for a split second Dawn inwardly giggles. For that split moment she views  Lou as a little boy, chubby with a full time smile hanging beneath his nose and in rightfield for some reason, gazing into the sky during a little league game.
“The question remains, why is the NSA…why is she…interested in the first place…I mean Dawn…they got their hands full right now.  I mean what are we to them?  Chopped liver…”
“We can only guess. Ghost Buster here has been around long enough in the alien world and presumably in the spy world.  It must be time for it to be sanitized…the technology must either be old or look old…They’ll use us like they’ll use anyone for that.”
“You don’t seem convinced.”
“I do not know, I’m guessing they need us to train on Ghost Buster.  We must get proficient with this real soon.”
“Homeland security?”
She nods. 
“They want us knowing what we are doing before the eyes of the public watch us use this thing.  If it works like they say…we’ll bag a few terrorists at different locations with DNA sample logged in from around the world.  America might sleep a little better.”
He looks to the Twin Tower hole.
“Shit.  I’m trained for homicide.” 
The toe of his shoe kicks a little dirt.
“Either we catch terrorists or aliens.”
She likes Captain Most.
They each step forward toward the shack and put on their respirators.  Their shadows move, slowly at first, amidst the light area within the black jagged shadow lines of the skyline cast on the ground in front of them.  The scene creates the ambiance of  two bodies entering the mouth of an ancient and colossal dinosaur.