xp_logs | Dogs of War: "...this foul deed shall smell above the earth..."

Cub report Nick Wood and his photog Franny Morrison (Doug and Marie-Ange) visit the local doctor, who also happens to be the local medical examiner. They gather some more information about the mysterious "werewolf" that Doug read about.

Marie-Ange pulled her coat tighter against the breeze that had kicked up, and looked over at Doug, who was tapping away on his PDA. "I am -still- cross with you." She said, lightly. "I do not see why I could not use Donna Schuldur as an alias. I think it is a perfectly good one."

"For the same reason I was very aware that, as fun as it would be, I couldn't make Clark Kent jokes. Because it'd be too obvious. The doctor would see right through it and you know it," Doug said, slightly crankily. The difference between knowing that Clark Kent jokes would be too obvious and accepting that he couldn't make them were two different things.

"Kent Clarke is far more obvious then Donna Schuldur." Marie-Ange protested jokingly. "Do you have Dr. Kruzberg's address on your PDA?" She asked. "Have the people at google gotten to this part of America? I am not sure that anything else modern has." The motel they'd booked in didn't even have cable. Not that she was going to watch much television, but it was still faintly backwards not to even have -cable-.

"That would be why I didn't pick that as my name," Doug responded. "And yes, I have his address in my PDA. I'd say I have everything in my PDA, but I think that'd be a bit of a stretch. I'd need another memory card for that," he quipped. "Google has surpassed Microsoft as the Big Brother analogue of the twenty-first century. Just look at Google Earth. They can see -everywhere-." He chuckled.

"Lay on then, Macduff." Marie-Ange said, laughing lightly, and making a little bow. "I am just here to listen and take pictures. You are the ace cub reporter for the big city paper." She giggled a little, and patted the outside pocket of her shoulder bag. "I have cameras. I even asked that nice new student at the school who Amanda said had the camera bug which ones were the best. Her father is a professional photographer."

"And cursed be the first who cries nay, hold, enough?" Doug asked with a smile and a shrug. "We should be able to pull this off."

---

The pair sat quietly in the doctor's waiting area, having introduced themselves as Nicholas Wood and Francine Morrison to the young, slightly vapid receptionist. The good doctor was seeing a patient, but it was his last for the day, and he would be free to talk to them afterwards. Doug busied himself by browsing an old issue of Wired that was on one of the end tables.

"Mr. Wood? Ms. Morrison?" The receiptionist had just settled the phone back down on the reciever, and leaned out towards the waiting room. "Dr. Kruzberg is free now."

Marie-Ange let Doug preceed her through the door, mostly because he would be doing most of the talking, and looked around. The office was small, and friendly looking. Not at all what she'd expected from the local medical examiner, although it had made far more sense when she'd learned that he was the local doctor as well.

Dr. Kruzberg stood up as the pair entered his office, and indicated the pair of chairs in front of his cluttered desk. "Don't keep an old man in suspense..." he said, "Take a seat, and you can tell me why the The Tennessean is interested in our little mystery." He sat back down, once Doug and Marie-Ange were both seated. "Paper's gone downhill since the Banner folded. No competetion makes for a lousy paper, I say."

"Maybe some day we'll work for the Tennessean," Doug said self-deprecatingly, "but for the time being Franny and I work for The City Paper. I'm Nick Wood," he said easily, matching Dr. Kruzberg's Tennessee drawl almost perfectly. He reached across the desk to hand the doctor a business card he'd made for the interview. "Are you expecting someone from the Tenneseean?" he asked curiously, trying to project just a touch of nervousness that a bigger newspaper might scoop his story.

Marie-Ange caught herself just before mouthing "Franny?" at Doug. She'd just get him later. Imps would haunt his room and steal his socks. She just sat quietly, and looked around the room.

"Not unless Trisha out there took a message and forgot to give it to me." Dr. Kruzberg said. "I'd be surprised if they came out all this way just for us. Big city paper like that, well, at best they'd make fun of the hicks and their superstitions." He laughed a little. "Or send in the FBI, and as pretty as that Dana Scully is, I don't need UFO's in my backyard. Our local 'chupacabra' is bad enough."

Doug filed away his "I told you so" for later upon hearing the doctor talk about Dana Scully. Maybe it'd get him a little less pain visited on him for the nickname. "Chupacabra?" he asked, unconsciously pronouncing the name in perfect Spanish. "Has this...thing been causing problems with the local livestock, then?"

Dr. Kruzberg laughed. "No, son. Just scaring folks and making them talk." He pointed a finger at his ear, and rotated it in a circle. "I'm not sure I buy into all that goat-sucker talk from down in Mexico. People see some pretty strange stuff on tequila. Here, it's just Jim Beam and Johnny Walker, and truckers seeing regular old crazy stuff, like werewolves."

Doug stifled a shudder at the mention of tequila, and the things that -he- had seen while drunk as a skunk. "Werewolves?" he asked somewhat excitedly. "That's probably why they sent me, then. I guess you'd probably call me the Fox Mulder of The City Paper. Not that I can't cover perfectly normal stories, but I've always had a bit of a yen for the weird and unexplainable. Too much Outer Limits as a kid, probably," he theorized, warming to his role.

Marie-Ange covered her amusement by bending down to rummage in her bag for the digital camera. The bigger one could wait until she felt like she had something to actually photograph.

"That television will rot your brain, son." Dr. Kruzberg said, joking. "Well, I'm sure you already read the article in those trash rags. To be honest, what I've heard isn't too much different. About two weeks ago, I get this call, craziest story I've heard, that some trucker's claiming he hit a werewolf."

He felt sorry for the kid. It was obvious that this Nick was eager, probably a little too eager, and that some reporter had sent him out here on a lark, probably as some kind of hazing. And Dr. Kruzberg remembered being the butt of jokes, being sent to go get a left-handed retractor or daytime X-ray paper. "It depends. Are you going to color me as some backwater hick doctor who wouldn't know Ebola from an elbow sprain?" He asked.

Marie-Ange finally broke her silence, and let out a quick laugh. "Nicholas, promise the nice doctor that you'll be good?" She said.

Hurt pride was the order of the day, and Doug's eyes flashed momentarily while his expression stayed carefully neutral. "I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I would do such a thing, Doctor, because I swear I wouldn't," he said stiffly, also studiously ignoring Marie-Ange's laugh.

"Oh, I didn't think you did son. I'm just smarting a little still from that 'reporter' from last week." Dr. Kruzberg shook his head. "Implying my license to practice came from a box of Cracker Jack." He snorted, and then stood up. "Well, he missed the scoop of his career, I'll tell you that."

Doug breathed a heartfelt (and genuine) sigh of relief. "You mean...?" he asked, eyes widening. "I mean, there -was- a werewolf?" he continued earnestly.

Dr. Kruzberg shook his head. "I don't know about all that, but something was out there, and I can't explain it." He walked around his desk, and pointed a hand out to the hall. "After you. I'll show you." He said, indicating a room just down the hall. "I hope you both have strong stomachs. I don't need any kids throwing up in my X-ray room. It took me a long time to pay for that thing, and I only get the X-ray tech here once a week."

Doug popped up from his chair like a jack-in-the-box, clutching his notepad in one hand. "Fran and I have seen some gruesome stuff," he replied. "I think we'll be okay." He quickly preceded the doctor down to the room and waited for him to open it up.

Marie-Ange honestly wondered when someone had replaced Doug with a ferret, the way he hopped right up. Or maybe a puppy. She lifted up her camera and smiled. "Would it be alright if I took pictures?" She asked. "I can show you them so you can tell me which ones we can use after."

Dr. Kruzberg shook his head. "Miss Morrison, you can take all the pictures you want of me, and my office, but the local sheriff says I have to draw the line at pictures being taken of dead bodies." He opened the door to the room. "At least, not without permission from their families, and we haven't found one for this one yet."

"Besides," He said. "There's nothing much to take pictures of, except other pictures. And those, I'm not allowed to release."

"Other pictures?" Doug asked, a bit confused. "You mean you don't actually have a body or anything like that?" His face furrowed in concentration. "Then how do you know that whatever this thing is is real?"

"I had a body." Dr. Kruzberg said mysteriously. "The outside of one. And then someone broke in and stole it." He reached down and unlocked the bottom drawer of a wide filing cabinet, taking out a large steel box, padlocked shut. "I tell you both, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd think the trucker, and the state trooper who called me were both trying to pull one over on an old man."

Doug was writing furiously on his notepad, keeping up with everything the doctor was saying. He looked up for a moment. "So you're saying all they found was the skin? No body? How does that work? A werewolf that sheds its skin like a snake? 'Curiouser and curiouser'," he quoted.

After unlocking the padlock, Dr. Kruzberg took a manilla envelope from the box, unfolded it, and carefully peeled away the heavy packing tape he'd used to seal it shut. "Right down the rabbit hole, Alice." He said, complete with a cheshire cat like smile, white teeth contrasting against his dark skin. "I'll show you, and you two can tell me if we're all quite mad."

"Oh, I think that's a safe assumption," Doug murmured as Dr. Kruzberg handed him the photo. He grimaced at the sight of a completely whole expanse of skin, without a single tear or hole in it except where the normal eyes and mouth and the like would have been on a living being. "It was completely empty?" he asked. "Just the skin and nothing else?"

"Like a coccoon.." Marie-Ange said, very seriously. "Or a snakeskin. How very odd." She looked closer at the photograph. "The truck driver said that he hit this?" She asked. "Nicholas, is that what the tabloid story said?"

Dr. Kruzberg shook another set of photographs from the envelope, and handed them to Doug. "Now, mind you, I didn't have time to look it over properly. It could be still a fake, some Hollywood makeup studio's idea of a prank, but there wasn't a single thing wrong with it. No injuries, no scrapes, tears, nothing, not like someone had hit it with a truck." He frowned, deepening the lines in his face. "I was going to call and see if someone from the state wanted to come and print it before it got stolen. Figured if it was a hoax, it wouldn't have fingerprints. Now, we don't have much to go on, except a weird tattoo on the back of the skin's neck. You can see it on the last set of photos."

Doug immediately flipped to the last few photographs, closeups of the tattoo in question. It was a harsh, evil-looking rune, and his eyes widened minutely when he realized that it had meaning - it said "door". He kept that knowledge to himself, however, staying in his role as earnest cub reporter. "It's definitely distinctive," he agreed after a moment. "Any luck in tracing it?"

"Not a bit." Dr. Kruzberg answered. "To be honest, I haven't had time to give it much thought, past it getting stolen, and someone breaking into my office. More worried about that then the tattoo." He spread his hands. "I'm not convinced that it's anything more than some elaborate hoax. Trish, out there at my front desk, tells me that there's some MTV program about celebrities pranking other celebrities. It'd be a pretty big joke on someone to find out that the Werewolf wasn't anything more than a trucker someone paid off and some hollywood special effects." He shook his head. "Why else break in and steal the evidence? They didn't take anything else, and believe me, that wasn't the first time someone tried to break into my office. Usually it's the local kids trying to get high."

"Someone broke in and stole it?" Doug asked, taking notes on his pad. "That's definitely odd," he agreed. Flipping the notepad shut, he extended his hand briskly. "Thanks, Doc, you've been a big help. I think there's definitely the makings of a story here, but who knows if my editors will see things the same way?" He shrugged. "You got everything you need, Fran?" he asked Marie-Ange.

Marie-Ange patted her camera case. "I believe so." She had taken a few photographs of the doctor, and thankfully, he wouldn't have to see them, ever. Unlike her alias, photography was not her forte. "I should get some exterior pictures, I think, but I can on the way out.."

Dr. Kruzberg took Doug's hand, and shook it firmly. "Well, if you get your story, send me a copy?" They seemed like good kids, and it was obvious to him that young Nick had more than just a little crush on his photographer friend. "I'd be interested to read a story that doesn't make me look like an uneducated yokel. A yokel I might be, but uneducated I am most certainly not." He grinned again. "Or a moonshine-rotted old man. I've heard that one a time or two as well."

"I promise you I will not make you out to be uneducated or moonshine-rotted," Doug replied, crossing his heart. "Thanks again for your help," he said, shaking the doctor's hand once more before following Marie-Ange out of the building.