Nocturnal (episode n. 1) Read online

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  Carmelo Massimo Tidona

  NOCTURNAL

  www.quellidized.it

  Nocturnal

  Copyright © 2012

  Carmelo Massimo Tidona

  Zerounoundici Edizioni

  ISBN: 978-88-6578-206-4

  Cover:

  Free image from FrreDigitalPhotos.net

  Work autonomously proposed by the author, not submitted to selection from the publisher

  NOCTURNAL

  CHAPTER 1

  It was morning.

  Lately it seemed like it was always morning.

  Not like “it's still too early for lunch”, rather like “pull yourself out of that damned bed and try to keep your eyes peeled because you have to go to work”.

  Amanda hated that sensation.

  Although she wasn't used to stay up late at night, recently she felt like she wasn't able to sleep enough. No, not exactly... she wasn't able to rest enough, just as if sleeping made her more tired instead of shedding tiredness off her.

  She rolled in the bed, repressing a yawn and pulling along most of the blankets, letting her bare back uncovered. A shiver ran down her spine, killing the already feeble will she had of getting up, but with a supreme effort she was able to put the blankets aside completely, fighting against the instinct to pull them up again and nestle in the pleasantly warm bed for some extra minute of sleep. She knew all too well that, if she did, those minutes would soon become hours, and she would have to explain the rector of the university the reason why she had skipped work. No one in the world wanted to explain that man anything, and Amanda was no exception.

  After gulping a warmed coffee and washing with some water that couldn't be called just “cold”, she was at least able to keep her eyes open without using her fingers. She put on her glasses and some clothes chosen at random from the chest – doing it all in the wrong order, so that her pullover got caught in the frame of the spectacles, and she had to spend five minutes trying to wriggle it free without launching them on the floor or, even worse, under her feet – then she finally left for the station, cheerfully thinking that she was not too late after all.

  In those days almost everyone had a personal means of transport. She had thought about that too, then decided that, even though she could buy one, she preferred not to have it, all things considered.

  After all, public transports where perfectly fine and not expensive, the only problem was avoiding the most crowded times, which she was able to do... most of the time.

  The station wasn't far from her place, ten minutes at worst using the main streets. Of course she didn't have that much time, so she rather turned into the alleys who cut the block like a network. They didn't have a good repute, but so early in the morning they were almost deserted... then again this should have been an additional good reason not to go there at all. Anyway, so far nothing bad had ever happened to her, and that was the thought crossing her mind when she bumped against an obstacle that shouldn't have been there, and fell sitting on the pavement.

  Thankfully her large bag, mostly full of papers, fell between her and the hard floor, sparing her part of the impact, but still she fell hard enough for her glasses to jump and come to a halt on the tip of her nose. She thought she had to look quite ridiculous like that.

  The first thing she did, however, was not putting them back in place but looking up to try and understand who had decided to place a wall in the middle of the alley. She found out the wall had arms, legs and a quite terrifying haircut.

  The expression on the face of the bloke while he walked toward her left no doubts about the fact that he hadn't bumped into her by mistake.

  «Quick!»

  The voice came from behind her assailant, thus either he was a good ventriloquist or he had an accomplice hidden to her by his size. She chose the second option, which was soon confirmed by the apparition of another boy approaching. This was much slimmer than the first. He actually looked like a badly-assembled scarecrow and walked like he was just going along with the wind, but when it came to the haircut... deciding who had the worst would have been a very hard choice.

  «The bracelet.»

  This time it was the walking wall speaking. Amanda looked down at the simple crystal bracelet around her wrist as if she was seeing it for the first time ever.

  «Are you kidding?» she asked in return. «What would you do with it?»

  Either those two had lived the last fifty years in another world, which was quite unlikely because by their looks they probably didn't sum up forty years put together, or they were unredeemable idiots. This, however, didn't mean they couldn't be dangerous.

  «Shut up and give me the bracelet!» the wall insisted, unsheathing a knife.

  Amanda stared at him. There was no doubt left; they were idiots. Of course she wasn't expecting fireweapons, but that tiny blade was almost... pathetic!

  «Fine, fine, give me a second», she replied meekly. She pushed back her glasses with the tip of a finger, then grabbed the bracelet with her right hand and tried to remove it, pulling hard as if it were stuck and wouldn't let go.

  The wall got closer with a nervous pace, almost touching her. This moved him from the “idiot” category to the “completely dumb” one.

  «So? We've no time to waste!» he grunted.

  «One moment... almost there...» she was trying to look scared, or at least worried, but it was hard to. She gave a last pull and the bracelet, which had never offered any resistance in the first place, slid to her left hand while she used the moment to reach out to the man and grab his balls trough the thin fabric of the sweatpants he had on.

  "If you really want to keep this career, at least wear some strong jeans", she thought, while the knife left the hand of its owner, no longer trying to keep it, and bounced tingling on the street. The big man bent over her hand. Big or small, you only had to know how to handle them...

  «WhoOOOOooooooooooo...» the swearword turned into an howl, dying slowly as Amanda's grip grew stronger and stronger.

  «Language!» she remarked, letting him go and quickly lying on her back, bending her legs. The brute didn't have enough time to rejoice for the liberation of his family jewels before both feet of his supposed victim hit his chin, sending him flying backwards and falling on his pal, who had stood in place, astonished, the whole time, barely understanding what was going on.

  "Deem yourself lucky I don’t wear stiletto heels", Amanda thought as she stood up and tried to dust her trousers.

  «Kill her!» the wall shrieked, keeping both hands below his waist as if he was afraid that his balls could fall and roll away if he didn't keep them in place.

  The scarecrow moved forward. In spite of his menacing look, he didn't seem like he wanted to get too close, and Amanda had no trouble understanding why.

  She moved her hand next to her hip and only then realized that she was missing something. She repressed the instinct of turning to look behind; although those guys
had plainly showed that they weren't so brilliant, she didn't think it was good to give them her back, so she tried to think fast of something to do. She decided to let the strap of her bag slip away from her shoulder and grabbed it at middle length, swinging it slightly. She had to leave the bracelet on the pavement, and for a second she hoped no one tried to steal it while she was busy... but who in the world, apart from those idiots, could be as stupid to even try? She made her bag do a full circle, even though she knew that, after that, she was going to need a detective, at least, to find something in there.

  The scarecrow let go a rough laugh, to show that he wasn't worried by that unlikely weapon. Whom he was trying to show it to was an open question.

  «Either do something or get out of my way, I'm late», she remarked.

  «Are you kidding me?» was his grunted answer.

  «Would you leave if I say I am?»

  That last remark seemed to hit the switch in the boy, who started running at her, shaking his fists in the air. Actually, he gave the impression of falling rather than moving. The bag swung again, and this time it hit the boy full in the neck. He stumbled back, then he shook for a second as if he had been hit by a charge and fell in a heap of slim limbs.

  Amanda stared, amazed, unable to understand what she had just seen. She hadn't hit that hard. Then again, she wouldn't have been able to obtain a similar effect even if she had hit much harder than she had.

  Then she looked up and the mystery was no more. A man wearing a blue uniform walked to her, reaching out with a hand for some reason, as if he thought she needed help walking. «Are you OK, miss?»

  Police. WOW. Someone had really called the police.

  Now she was really going to be late.

  CHAPTER 2

  She was ready for an endless reproach when she left the station to go to the university, half the morning having been lost by then.

  Of course it wasn't her fault, as it would have been obvious for anyone that she couldn't refuse to answer the questions of a police officer just because she was late for work. Anyone would understand. Anyone would accept that justification. What not just anyone would notice, but the rector would for sure, was that if she had left her place a few minutes earlier she would have been able to avoid “such shortcuts” and the whole problem wouldn't have existed at all. Full stop. End of the debate. She would rather confront two or three more smugglers than having to justify even once with Parker. That man had the power to make her feel guilty even when her conscience was perfectly clean. Which admittedly didn't happen that often.

  She was so anxious for the unavoidable confrontation that, although she was going to regret it, when she saw the police marks around the building, and all of her colleagues kept outside by agents, she couldn't help feeling better. It took her a few seconds before she wondered what exactly she was seeing, and why.

  When the doubt that something bad could have happened to one of her friends – though that was too big a word for them – arose, she had already reached the enclosed space, and she was promptly stopped by one of the policemen surrounding it.

  «You can't pass.»

  Dry, quick, authoritarian like a monkey and just as well-mannered.

  «I work in here. I am a teacher.»

  The agent stared at her as if the word “teacher” had just been invented. «Wait here. Detective!»

  He kept staring, as if she could ran away if he dared to stop looking for a split second.

  After a little while, a second man in plain clothes reached them.

  "Plain", actually, was an exaggeration: he was wearing some green-fabric trousers under a turtleneck and a suit jacket of two different shades of brown. Altogether, he looked like an upside-down tree.

  «Who are you supposed to be?» he asked, not sparing a thought for introducing himself.

  Supposed to be? Amanda was reasonably sure that she was, with no conditions, but somehow she managed to keep the thought for herself.

  «Amanda Sheldon. I teach compared biology.»

  «Human?»

  «The biology or me?»

  The detective seemed to lose interest in the answer and carried on with a new question «Did you know Trey Parker?»

  Why was he using the past tense?

  «Of course.» The contrary would have been quite difficult. No one could work for Trey Parker and not know him.

  «When did you see him last?»

  «Yesterday morning. Barely.» They had met in a corridor just once in the whole day, and exchanged nothing more than a greeting. One of the best conversation they ever had, as far as she was concerned.

  «Do you know if he had any enemy?»

  Amanda stopped just short of answering "the whole staff of the faculty", and not only because she realized in time that she was included in that definition. Actually, no one of them could stand Parker, and even more his extreme precision and exaggerated straightforwardness, but enemies was too big a word. They didn't love him, but they respected him and no one hated him, for sure not so much as to... She realized that the information was still in mid-air, like electricity before a lightning. It seemed to her that the answer was obvious, but she needed to hear it out loud.

  «What happened to him?»

  Once again, receiving a question instead of an answer seemed to disconnect the detective from his personal mind processes and make him change the subject of the questioning. Or maybe he just wasn't listening to a single word she was saying. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be ignored.

  «Where were you this morning between eight and ten?»

  Amanda sighed. «Police headquarters.»

  The man seemed to hear at least this answer. He opened his eyes just a bit more, and for the first time he seemed to look straight at her.

  «Doing what?»

  «I was assailed this morning while coming here. I had to go there to testify», she explained.

  «We can check this», he remarked. Amanda glared at him with eyes wide open. She was about to answer "No, see, I was here doing whatever has been done, I just thought that saying I was at the police headquarters was a good excuse no one could deny." She stood silent.

  «You can go with your colleagues. Stay within reach», the detective went on, then he added to the officer who had first stopped her «Let her in.»

  Entering the area, Amanda wondered how she could not be in reach, considering she was going to be less than a hundred meters away. Once again she kept her mental notes for herself.

  While she approached the small group of teachers she had spotted earlier, she couldn't help trying to look behind the uniforms that where surrounding something in the middle of the court. A blank sheet had been thrown on something that was very likely to be Trey Parker, excellent rector of the faculty of Science. The sheet was clean. There wasn't anything odd around, as long as you could avoid considering the large number of strangers in the area, most of which wearing a uniform of some kind.

  She approached Damon, one of her colleagues, mostly because it was the nearest rather than for anything else, and asked the question that so far no one, except evidence, had replied to.

  «What happened?»

  Damon looked down at her, which was unavoidable. Rarely he could look up, or even straight at anyone of his colleagues, unless he kneeled down, considering he was more than two meters tall. That matched his bulky body, which made him look more like a bodybuilder rather than a teacher. Jet-black hair, dark eyes and a short beard where the last touches of the picture, and for some reason he always made her think of the big bad wolf, the one who demolished houses with a breath. At least until he kept silent...

  «Don't you know?»

  That was it. His voice was quite the opposite of all the rest of him. Soft, shrill, but most of all amazingly feminine. If both of them had been talking into a dark room, she would have had more chances to pass as a man.

  «Parker was killed. This morning, or so they said.»

  Yes, that gave a sen
se to the kind of questioning she had undergone.

  «Do they know how?» she asked, not really hoping for a good answer. Damon shook his head to say they didn't. It would have been useless to ask if he knew who was suspected, provided anyone was – which she didn't believe. Police wasn't going to tell him anyway.

  «Do you think they will be upset if I go into my office for a second?»

  He shrugged. «They didn't tell us not to go in. But there is nothing to do inside.»

  Why, is there something to do outside?

  «OK, see you later» was all she answered as she walked to the building, expecting at each step to hear someone call her back and tell her she had to stay with the others. No one did.

  Once inside, she didn't even go near her office, instead she went straight to Parker's.

  The nameless detective had let slip that the man had been killed between eight and ten, something that made little sense to her. With all the people coming and going there in the morning, a corpse wasn't likely to stay in the courtyard more than a few minutes before anyone literally tripped into it. So, whatever was the time at which someone had found it and called for help, she was quite sure the body hadn't been there but for the previous minute or so. And if there really was any logical reason to think he had died between eight and ten, that meant one thing alone: he hadn't died out there. After all, Parker wasn't going to leave the building before lunchtime, and she was quite sure he had arrived long before lessons started. Either someone had lured him out somehow, which she thought was quite unlikely, or he had been killed in a most proper place, so to speak, then brought him where he was now. And the most likely crime scene, considering the habits of the victim, was his office, the place in which he spent most of his days.

  She reached the door cautiously, expecting that the police had sealed it, or that at least there was someone examining the room, but apparently no one was there or even nearby. She tried the handle. The door opened.