Grim Tidings by Caitlin Kittredge

I was being paranoid and ungrateful snooping around, but this wasn’t what it looked like, on a lot of levels. Tanner’s call hadn’t been random bad luck. Lady wasn’t the victim of a run-of-the-mill murderer and when I looked at the box I knew Tanner wasn’t just some burned-out cop chasing said killer.
    The box had held bandages and iodine at one point, I was sure, but now it was crammed with bottles and tablets of an entirely different purpose. I could recognize a warlock’s kit in my sleep, but this required a little more consideration. The black dust was graveyard dirt—the staple of voodoo and folk remedies from back in my home neck of the woods. There were hand-stamped silver coins in there too, the kind Romany put on the eyes of their dead, neatly labeled packets that smelled like a restaurant, and a vial of something dark and sticky that rolled rather than sloshed. Blood, although I wasn’t opening the cork to take a whiff and see if it was human or other.
    I carefully shut everything back up and checked the duffel, which really did just hold a shotgun, a rifle, and a paper bag of shells.
    I looked back at Tanner’s snoring form, and then I got my clothes and shoes and slipped out into the cold. Whatever he was really doing here, Tanner knew too much about the world I inhabited, and that meant he might figure out what I was.
    As an afterthought, I scooped up the file he’d left on the floor and tucked it into my coat. The photos I left where they were. I had plenty of those kinds of pictures inside my skull. I didn’t need any more.
    I walked from the motel to the hospital to get the Packard, my shoes crunching frost-covered grass. I’d intended to just get in the car and drive until I was far away from Kansas, but I couldn’t shake the photos lying on the motel room floor, stark in the white light from the street outside.
    A nighttime road, an abandoned car. Faces obliterated to meat, so that even dental records couldn’t identify their bodies—bodies that were not just mutilated but chewed, as if he’d given up on fists and started using tooth and nail in the depths of rage.
    I climbed into the car, punching on the heater and opening the plain, coffee-stained folio. Nothing in Tanner’s files contained a single clue to the Walking Man’s actual identity. A psychiatrist had even typed up an opinion that took three single-spaced pages to say the Walking Man had feelings of anger and despondency that he acted out on his victims. He left no hair, no fingerprints, just bloody smears on window glass and chunks torn out of flesh with teeth.
    Only one medical examiner, in Tulsa, had even been able to find a definitive cause of death. There, a woman named Marge Taylor, mother of two, had stopped on her way home from the graveyard shift at a tire plant to offer a downed motorist a lift. After a beating that must have taken hours, her neck had been snapped clean as a whistle.
    I sat back, looking toward the hospital. Tanner was tracking the Walking Man, but Tanner also had the tools to track things thatwere much worse. If he hadn’t been a deep-sleeping drunk, I didn’t know if I’d have made it out of his motel room. Maybe he’d already clocked me, and I’d been so desperate to believe somebody didn’t have it out for me I’d fallen for the line.
    My breath made a misty full moon on the Packard’s window, one that froze as I turned off the engine.
    If Tanner thought he was on to something more than a maniac who liked to beat women to death on the highway, what would the harm be in taking a look for myself?
    I got out of the car.
    The hospital was quiet, the orderly with the long hair dozing at the front desk listening to the radio. I didn’t wake him, slipping off my shoes so I wouldn’t make any noise on the hard floors until I got to the morgue.
    Lady’s body was one of two in residence, side by side on