Chapter 5: The Sheriff's Deputy and the Ghost-Spotter

Chapter 5: The Sheriff's Deputy and the Ghost-Spotter

The Apple Valley Sheriff's Station was a low, sun-bleached building that looked more like a dental office than a bastion of law and order. It smelled of burnt coffee, industrial cleaner, and the quiet desperation of a Monday morning. For Kael, walking through its automatic doors felt even more nerve-wracking than stepping into the phantom elevator. The Administrator’s brand of cosmic judgment was abstract and bureaucratic. Lena Petrova, he suspected, could see a lie from fifty paces and had a sidearm to back up her opinion.

He approached the thick pane of security glass separating the public from the dispatchers. A bored-looking officer looked up from his computer.

“Help you?”

“Yeah, I need to speak with Deputy Petrova,” Kael said, trying to keep his voice from sounding like he’d just run a mile. “I was a witness at that… incident. At the Stater Bros. a few days ago. I think I saw something that might help.”

It was the truth, just not the whole truth. The officer grunted, picked up a phone, and mumbled into it. A minute later, the secure door buzzed open, and Lena Petrova emerged. In the harsh fluorescent lighting of the station, she looked even sharper and more imposing than she had in the parking lot. Her dark, intelligent eyes swept over him, cataloging his dusty boots, his grease-stained jeans, and the nervous energy radiating off him.

“You have information about the John Doe in Lot J?” she asked, her voice a no-nonsense alto. She didn’t invite him into an office, just stood there in the hallway, arms crossed.

“I do,” Kael said, his mouth suddenly dry. “Can we talk somewhere… less public?”

She arched a skeptical eyebrow but gave a curt nod, leading him to a small, cluttered interrogation room. The table between them was bolted to the floor. She didn't sit, just leaned against the wall, her expression making it clear this was his show.

“My name is Kael Vance,” he started. “I was there when you arrived. The man… the pillar of salt.”

“We’re aware of the victim’s composition,” she said flatly. “What did you see?”

This was the hard part. He couldn’t tell her about the Soul-Tab, about the Administrator, or about being shredded by a scrap-metal monster. He had to give her a piece of the truth, a piece so strange and specific she couldn't dismiss it.

“I saw what was underneath him,” Kael said, pulling out his phone. He swiped to the picture and slid it across the table. “Right on the asphalt. It was glowing.”

Lena picked up the phone, her professional skepticism warring with genuine curiosity. She zoomed in on the image, her eyes narrowing at the faint, shimmering sigil captured so clearly by the cheap phone camera. She was silent for a long, heavy moment.

“It looks like a lens flare,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. She knew as well as he did that a lens flare didn't form perfect, intricate geometric patterns.

“It wasn't,” Kael said, pressing his small advantage. “It was a shimmer, like heat haze, but it was cold. And it was giving off some kind of energy. I think… I think it’s what killed him. It wasn't random. It was a machine, a process. And someone left the instruction manual on the ground.” He used the language he knew, the language of mechanics, hoping it would cut through the supernatural weirdness.

Lena put the phone down and fixed him with a stare that felt like it could peel paint. “I deal in evidence, Mr. Vance. Things I can bag, test, and present in a courtroom. Not… shimmers.”

“And what did the lab say about the pillar of salt?” Kael countered, his desperation making him bold. “What evidence did you bag there? Did you find a single fingerprint? A footprint? Any clue at all who did it or how?”

Her jaw tightened. He’d hit a nerve. He was repeating the same frustrations she’d likely been battling for days.

“That’s classified,” she said, the words clipped.

“Look, Deputy,” Kael leaned forward, his voice dropping. “I know this sounds insane. Believe me, I know. But I think these things are happening more often. And I think I’m the only one who can see the… the trigger mechanism.”

He expected her to call for a psych evaluation, to escort him out of the building, maybe even arrest him for obstruction. Instead, she pushed off the wall and walked to the door, locking it with a decisive click. She turned back to him, her expression unreadable.

“You have no idea,” she said, her voice low.

She left the room for a moment and returned with a single, thick, accordion file. It wasn't an official case file; it was beige and worn, the kind of thing you’d use for personal records. She dropped it on the table between them. The label on the tab, written in her own sharp handwriting, just said: “UNEXPLAINED.”

She opened it. Inside were photos and preliminary reports from at least half a dozen other cases.

“Three months ago,” she began, sliding a photo across the table. It showed a woman, or what was left of her, sitting on a park bench in Hesperia. She’d been turned to glass. Perfectly clear, anatomically correct silica. “Coroner ruled it ‘spontaneous vitrification.’ A one-in-a-billion atmospheric anomaly.”

She pushed another photo forward. A construction worker at a site in Adelanto, slumped against a steel beam. His body was a crumbling statue of rust, his clothes and tools fused into the oxidized metal. “Cause of death: undetermined. The official theory involves some kind of rapid, aggressive chemical exposure.”

One by one, she laid them out. A man who had evaporated from his locked apartment, leaving behind only a pile of fine gray dust and a perfect silhouette on the wall. A woman whose shadow had detached from her body and strangled her in broad daylight, a story pieced together from three hysterical and completely discredited witnesses.

“This is my freak show file, Mr. Vance,” Lena said, her voice tight with a frustration that ran bone-deep. “Cases that make no sense. No leads, no suspects, no logic. They’re officially closed, written off as freak accidents or acts of God. But they’re not. They’re patterns. I just didn’t know what the pattern was.”

Kael stared at the gruesome gallery. The pillar of salt wasn’t the beginning. It was just the latest. “The sigils,” he whispered, a cold dread washing over him. “There must have been sigils at all these scenes.”

“If there were, no one saw them,” Lena said, her dark eyes boring into his. “Except you. How? Why can you see things my crime scene unit, with all their high-tech equipment, can’t?”

Kael took a breath. He had to give her something, but not everything. “I… I’m sensitive to it. To that kind of energy. It’s something I’ve had my whole life. I fix things, Deputy. Machines. And these things… they feel like broken machines to me. They’re not supposed to be here.”

It was a flimsy shield, but it was the best he had.

Lena studied him, weighing his impossible story against her own impossible evidence. For a cop who lived by logic, she had reached the absolute limit of what logic could explain. Kael, as crazy as he sounded, was the only lead she had.

“Alright, Vance,” she said finally, closing the file. “Here’s the deal. Officially, you don’t exist. This conversation never happened. You are a confidential informant. A very, very weird one. You see another one of these… shimmers… you call me first. Not 911. Me. In return, I give you access to what little information I can, and I try to keep you out of a padded cell.”

She scribbled a number on a notepad and pushed it toward him. “That’s my cell. Don’t lose it. Don’t share it.”

Kael took the slip of paper. It felt like a contract, a binding agreement between the law of man and a renegade agent of Death. He was in over his head, allied with a cop who thought he was either a psychic or a lunatic, and hunting a threat his own supernatural employers couldn’t even see.

“One more thing,” Lena said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper as she unlocked the door. “That thing you saw at the junkyard. The ‘machinery malfunction’ that put you in the hospital for a day.” She had clearly done a quick background check. “Was that one of them?”

Kael met her gaze, the memory of the grinding metal and the searing pain flashing in his mind. He just nodded.

A new, grim understanding passed between them. This wasn’t just a puzzle anymore. It was a hunt. And they were the only two people in the entire desert who even knew what they were hunting for.