‘May I see the tag label?’ Dr Carpaccia is politely asking Juanita. Juanita turns and leads her and Detective Rambouillet into the walk-in fridge in order to show them the tag label, but once they are inside the walk-in fridge, in which there is enough space for three people to stand quite comfortably, Juanita looks stunned as she stares at a gap in the shelves.
Along the walls glass shelving is fronted with white plastic covering and on the shelves are various tins and jars and plastic evidence bags. Overhead a fluorescent light buzzes and against one wall is a blue filament designed to lure flies to their death.
‘Oh, Dr Crapaccia,’ she wails with a trembling finger outpointing. ‘The evidence! He is gone! Someone must have stolen him! Aiyeee! All is lost.’
Once again Carpaccia slaps the Mexican lady and this calms both of them down somewhat.
‘Have you seen anyone in the suite apart from Detective Rambouillet or myself?’ she calmly asks the weeping illegal immigrant. Juanita shakes her head and continues to sob. Carpaccia instinctively knows that they will get no more information out of her.
‘I left the room,’ Juanita is telling Detective Rambouillet, ‘to go to the little girls’ room for a minute. When I came back the window was open.’
She points across the suite to where a window has been opened. Immediately Rambouillet makes a call on his cell phone.
‘Secure the perimeter,’ he snaps. ‘Don’t let anyone in or out unless I say so.’
He turns to Carpaccia.
‘Let’s go check the security cameras.’
As they walk down the corridor towards the basement and the communications room, their steps ringing on the tiled floor, it occurs to Carpaccia that the confusion over the tagging of the evidence might have worked in their favour. Whoever had broken into the walk-in fridge had taken the wrong evidence. All Carpaccia had to do was find the right evidence. It must carry powerful clues to be worth the risk of breaking in and stealing it. Juanita’s mistake had effectively saved a crucial piece of evidence, although this piece of good luck would not save her, since Carpaccia had already signed her cards and the Immigration Service would be stopping by to take her away in the back of a white flat-bed Ford even before her enchiladas hit the plate that evening.
Rambouillet stops and taps a series of numbers into an electronic access pad set at chest height in the beige-painted cinderblock wall. A red light blinks green and there is the sound of a bolt being withdrawn. Rambouillet opens the door. Inside is the communications centre that Dr Carpaccia’s Creepy Lesbian Niece has devised. It cost more than a successful moonshot, but it allows CSI: Miami to be shown in every room in the Facility.
In addition, it has the most advanced centrally managed PC-based hyperthreading CPU Windows Embedded XP real-time multi-tasking intruder detection operation system in the world. Nothing moves in the Facility without being logged, recorded and, in most circumstances, terminated with extreme prejudice thanks to the banks of M18 Claymore landmines that are sewn through the Facility’s acreage like contour lines on a map of the Rockies.
A man is sitting alone in a darkened section of the room. He is working the mouse of a computer and in front of him is a bank of twelve 22” flat liquid-crystal screens, the picture on each changing apparently at random. The view is somewhat monotonous, however. Although Dr Carpaccia is a nurturing person, who loves plants and gardens and especially hibiscus trees, and who loves it when neighbours pop in unannounced, she is also the sort of person who understands the need for basic security. This is why the land for a range of three miles around the Facility has been converted into a desert in which it is unsafe to walk for mines and pits with spikes at the bottom tipped with Ebola plague and HIV/AIDS and H5N1. Beyond that is a five-metre-high electrified fence. Security is also the reason Carpaccia never travels anywhere but by submarine. She is not interested in letting anyone know what type of submarine she drives, but it is expensive, anonymous and, above all, subtle.
Be that as it may, Rambouillet does not like the look of the man in front of the screens and has a word with him.
‘Yo! Douche bag!’ he calls. ‘Show some respect, huh?’
The man looks up. He is surprised to see Dr Carpaccia in this glamourless part of the building and he jumps to his feet. He is visibly sweating and even from the door Rambouillet can smell the sickly-sweet stench of pineapple.
‘Dr Capadoccia,’ the man incorrectly mumbles, standing up now and bowing his head and removing his baseball cap. Dr Carpaccia is angry with him for deliberately insulting her by not using all her titles. She is, in fact, Dr Faye Carpaccia, The Presiding Genius of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Destroyer of The Nation’s Enemies wheresoever they may be found, be it on Land or at Sea or in the Air, Summoner of Messages from beyond the Grave, Worshipped from afar by those who do not know Her and Adored by those Who Do, Queen of the Inter-Coastal Waterway, Toll Booth Owner of Interstate 64, Great High Judge of Seafood in Richmond, Cynosure of Prying Eye Wherever She goes, M.Phil, PhD, VC, CBE, ECT Etc Etc.
Dr Faye Carpaccia looks at the man and thinks that she might, if she were forced to think about it, come to despise him. She has a shortlist of people whom she appreciates more as live human beings than as dead bodies and this man is not on that list and so she resents having to share time, air and space with him. Rambouillet bundles him out of the door of the Ops room and wipes the chair that he had been sitting on clean with a pack of baby wipes that he keeps in a boot holster.
Dr Carpaccia sits down and begins to manipulate the mouse herself. Despite being fed live feeds from twelve cameras simultaneously, she finds the system easy to use and very soon they are watching the last recorded hour at the Facility. They watch each camera view at high speed with the Movement Sensor switched on. On the eighth camera the alarm pings and the images slow to reveal a man pole-vaulting over the wire fence, making sure the pole does not touch the sensors, and landing with a cat-like ease.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ murmurs the big detective.
To begin with they think it is a cat, but Carpaccia zooms in and they can see that it is in fact a werewolf. I swear. A werewolf.
‘My God,’ mutters Carpaccia. ‘It’s Lou Garroooooooooooooooo.’ She ends his name with a lonesome-pine howl.
‘But he is on death row in Louisiana!’ exclaims Rambouillet. ‘No one escapes death row in Louisiana!’
‘Maybe he is on day release?’ mutters Carpaccia.
She is angry and she is frightened and she is right to be angry and frightened because it was only through her tiresome work that Lou Garrew, to give him his proper name, was incarcerated on death row in Louisiana, rather than in an open prison in Virginia, because they have a zero-tolerance approach to werewolves in Louisiana and the death sentence is mandatory. And now here he was, in Virginia, weaving his way through the intricate field of landmines that her late lover, the FBI one with the strong warm tongue, had devised just before he was killed in a freak clambake accident, precisely to stop this sort of thing.
They watch as the wolf begins a high-speed zigzagging run through the minefield. Neither can believe the mines do not go off and it is as the wolf is approaching the house that it first occurs to Carpaccia that perhaps this is not Lou Garrew, but someone dressed in a werewolf costume hired from CostumeShack™.
‘But the only person who knows the exact layout of the minefield is—’ Rambouillet begins but stops himself.
‘I know what you are going to say,’ says Carpaccia. ‘The only person who knows how to get through the minefield is my ex-FBI lover, the one with the strong warm tongue.’
‘But he is dead!’ exclaims Rambouillet.
‘Or is he?’ Carpaccia rhetorically asks.
They watch him now as he – whoever he is – slides open the window, left open three days earlier by someone they would now have to fire, bundle into a Bell JetRanger helicopter, fly out over the Atlantic Ocean, and drop from 1500 feet with their feet tied to the engine block of an old Hummer.
Carpaccia left clicks the mouse and they get a shot of Lou Garrew from the internal cameras. The werewolf slides quickly across the kitchen while Juanita’s back is turned, opens the fridge, disappears for a second and then re-emerges, carrying a tagged bag of evidence. He exits through the window and is gone before Juanita turns round.
Carpaccia tries the other camera angles and picks him up again by the skips, towards the back of the Facility. The skips contain household rubbish and the remains of all the canvases and picture frames that Dr Carpaccia has been cutting up and destroying in her effort to prove that Beryl Cook, an octogenarian British artist, was responsible for the shot that killed JFK in Dallas. It does not surprise Dr Carpaccia that Lou Garrew heads for the skip with the trashed paintings. It merely confirms her fears that Beryl Cook is not only a werewolf but also a murderer.
As they are looking, the werewolf climbs into the skip and seems to vanish from sight. Dr Carpaccia is reaching for the phone to alert security when it rings. She exchanges another glance with Rambouillet. Carpaccia feels a fist of panic in her stomach. Only one person knows where they are.
‘You answer it,’ she pleadingly asks.
‘I have a frog in my throat,’ coughs Rambouillet.
‘I’ll give you five dollars to tell her I am not here,’ offers Carpaccia.
‘Make it ten,’ counters Rambouillet.
‘Done.’
Rambouillet picks up the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ snaps a voice on conference call. Carpaccia flinches. It is her niece, Creepy Lesbian Niece.
‘Hello, Creepy Lesbian Niece,’ says Rambouillet. He is sure that Carpaccia will not want to tell her about the reappearance of the werewolf in case it brings Creepy Lesbian Niece to the Facility.
‘Is my aunt there?’ asks Creepy Lesbian Niece, without greeting the detective, even though she has known him since she was ten.
‘She has popped out for some milk,’ bluffs Rambouillet.
‘How dare you lie to me!’ snaps Creepy Lesbian Niece. ‘EVERYBODY knows Aunt Faye is lactose-intolerant.’
‘She is getting it for Juanita,’ extemporises the detective.
‘Oh,’ says Creepy Lesbian Niece. ‘That is so like Aunt Faye. I love her! She is so kind to everybody she meets, and not just the dead ones. I am missing her so much, you bet your sweet bippy, that I am going to drive over from my townhome in Snakeskin and come and see her right this minute I am.’
Rambouillet tries to put her off. ‘Oh. Well your aunt is very busy with a case right now.’
‘Well,’ Creepy Lesbian Niece smartly says, ‘In that case she needs my help.’
‘But she has all the help she needs, I promise you.’
‘You are trying to deny me access to my aunt! I can tell she needs my help and that I love her more than you do!’
‘That is not possible, Creepy Lesbian Niece. I love her more than anyone could, apart from that man with the warm strong tongue, and anyway that was different. And think of the dangers, Creepy Lesbian Niece! All those psychopaths and compulsive murderers out there waiting for someone in an expensive car to chase and butcher! You will never make it this far alive.’
‘My love for my aunt will see me through.’
‘But—’
‘Butt-fuck you too!’ she wittily says. ‘I have devised some software that tells me when a caller is telling me untruths.’
Creepy Lesbian Niece breaks the connection.
‘We have to get out of here!’ Carpaccia urgently cries. ‘She’ll be here soon and she is so irritating that I cannot bear to be in the same room as her. Where shall we go?’
Rambouillet scratches his head, all thoughts of the stupid old werewolf forgotten now.
‘What about back to Richmond? We could see what that man from Britain wants?’