The Elaine Investigates index page.
©1 January 2025 Levite
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1.
My new badges arrived in the mail one Tuesday morning. They had the name of the county, and my name, spelled correctly, with the right department seal, and my correct title. After all the drama related to them I expected the pin back to fall off when I put it on my dress uniform jacket. But it didn't.
And I was back to working on the things that I was supposed to work on during the summer on the Island.
Somebody had been impersonating a police officer around Mastic Beach and the Brookhaven Police asked for a plainclothes officer that wasn't a local to come down and try to smoke them out. Of course I was the "volunteer".
They fitted me with a microphone and put a concealed camera in my personal car that faced the rear to record the impostor pulling me over. And off to the former Village of Mastic Beach I went to make turns without signaling and so on.
It took several days, including my becoming quite familiar with the almost endless array of pizza shops down there instead of eating lunch at my desk in the office. But, in the end, I must have been looking very suspicious early one afternoon when I decided to drive out to the St. George Manor estate when a young man pulled up behind me with a flashing light in his front window.
There was nowhere to stop and pull off the road until I got out to the parking area around the museum house and outbuildings.
I called for backup and pretended to be as nervous and concerned as any civilian woman would be in that situation.
He was even polite when he asked me to get out of my car.
"Do you know why I stopped you today?" He said to me.
"No. I have no idea. What did I do?"
"There was a stop sign back there. Did you see it?"
I had to keep him talking, so I played innocent.
Then he asked me to come back to his car to see the video of me running the stop sign.
"Well, OK. I suppose it'll be all right," I said and tried to be as cooperative as I could.
"Just go around to the passenger side." He said and walked back to the driver's door.
"Chok di," I said to myself as I took my breath to steady my nerves as I willingly went to what could quickly be a bad situation. Either he didn't hear me or he wasn't paying attention.
He did have a mounted dash cam, and it did show that perhaps I didn't come to a full stop as I had pulled off the highway and crossed the small street before the lane to the museum.
Then he looked at me kinda sideways and said, "but, you know, you might be able to convince me to not give you a ticket today."
"I don't know." I said and glanced back hoping a marked police car was there. It wasn't.
Then he reached over toward me with his right hand.
One of the names for Thai Boxing is the 'Art of Eight Limbs'. One of those eight being your left elbow.
He got to meet mine.
Twice.
And I got out of the car just as two Brookhaven police cars pulled up behind us.
The lead officer ran up to the driver's door, opened it, then stepped back and shook his head.
"He's out cold. What did you do to him?" He asked me.
"He reached over and tried to grab me. I stopped him."
The officer leaned back into the car and checked on him, "He's still alive, but it looks like he's going to have one hell of a shiner tomorrow. I'll check him out when he wakes up." Then he looked at me and shook his head, "Jen, remind me to never ask her out on a date." He said to the female officer that was walking up from the other car.
"You can ask me, just don't try to grab me when I don't want to be grabbed."
"No problem."
Our pretend cop came to eventually, and although he was still woozy he realized his time as a pretend Mastic Beach police officer was over.
I had to give a statement, and I was prepared to testify when he pleaded guilty to a handful of offenses, and went on to sentencing.
Then I had to put up with the video from the camera in my car playing in the office for awhile.
It did show him leaning toward me and then reaching over. And it showed my two quick elbow strikes and him slumping back in his seat, unconscious.
"Was that a Sok Ti or a Sok Tad?" One of the others asked me after watching it.
"Come here and we'll find out."
"I saw the booking photo of the guy, no thanks."
And then I had to go see a priest.
No, it wasn't because I'd knocked the daylights out of some poor misguided loser, it was because the priest and several congregants had had an encounter with something that a City Animal Control Officer said wasn't one of theirs. And because another County Agency had become involved.
2.
Suffolk County doesn't have a county wide animal control division. Every town has their own, and they cover the areas around their municipality as needed.
And then the case expanded dramatically.
And somebody talked to somebody and then the wind blew it my way.
"These are all reports of the same animal?" I asked Officer Mills from Southampton.
She nodded, "There's reports from all over the south shore."
"Riverhead. Westampton." I read off some of the reports. "Brookhaven... Golf courses, parks. A shrine. Airport."
"Even from Hampton Bays. All over."
"And the descriptions are the same?"
"Close enough," she said, "especially since more than one animal has been seen on several occasions."
I looked down the report from a security guard at the Gabreski airport where a private plane had to be told not to land because several of the animals were on the runway. The guard and an airport worker chased five of the animals, two large ones and three smaller ones, off the runway and into some overgrowth nearby where they lost sight of them. "If they were coyotes, they're the ugliest coyotes ever." The report said.
"And you've got the latest one."
"From Father Irving at the shrine. Yes. I'm meeting him out there tomorrow morning. Wanna come with me?"
"I wish I could, I'm on traffic tomorrow," she said and I believed she really would rather go with me."
Father Irving was a semi-retired priest that was now a volunteer at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Island.
I drove down there that morning and found myself feeling guilty that I had allowed that part of my life to totally lapse. Yes, I was raised in the church. My grandfather was a Methodist lay minister, my mother was a Sunday School teacher and singer. My father did stuff with the church board. My grandmother was a fixture in the church kitchen. I grew up in it, singing, Christmas plays, the whole thing. I did things at church Summer Camp that I still cannot believe I got away with.
But now, it just doesn't seem to be that important to me. I say I am Spiritual, but not Religious.
In fact, the last time I was in a church of any sort it was for the funeral of a retired officer from the department. And that was a Baptist church.
And now here I was in front of the main building for the Shrine. I was supposed to meet the priest in the gift shop. I got out of my car and looked around. It was a very nice facility, but the large religious statues I could see here and there, and the large cross on the front of the sanctuary were serious reminders that I hadn't even said a prayer before bed in years. The last time I remember saying a prayer was before my last belt test in Judo, and I passed the test.
So maybe I should pray more.
The old priest was almost exactly what I expected, as was the gift shop. But even though he was chatty, he said we should go out to where they saw the animals before a tour group arrived.
We walked out and across to their Avenue of the Saints which wound through the trees. He told me about the group he was taking on the walking tour a few days ago when they passed one of the sculptures and there was a large animal standing on the path eating something.
"It wasn't a dog that had gone wild. Or a fox or coyote or anything like that. I've seen those here. We have to take care to keep the area around our dumpster and the trash cans in the picnic pavilion. This animal was heavier in the body than a coyote, with a line of hair on the back of its neck. If I hadn't seen its face I would have called the zoo in Queens and asked them if they were missing a hyena."
"What did it's face look like?"
"Pure evil." He paused and closed his eyes for a second. "I can still see it. Its eyes were larger than you would expect. It had protruding teeth and a slightly upturned nose. It had pointed ears but they were laid back on its head as it hissed at us. It crouched for a second, then it made that snarling hiss at us again. Then it picked up what it had been eating, which I think was a squirrel, and ran off." He took a breath and nodded, "The place is right up here."
The trail wound back and forth slightly, with small clearings and benches and inscriptions to focus one's attention on a particular saint and other religious themes. Then we stopped and he said that it was right there as they came around a slight bend in the trail.
"Like I said, I thought it was one of the local stray dogs. But as we got closer, you could see it wasn't a dog. And then it looked at us."
"Did anybody take a picture of it?"
"Two of them tried, but under the trees, and it moving so quickly once it hissed at us, all they got was a blurry image of something running."
"Which way did it go?" I asked him as we walked to where it had been.
"Off that way. There's houses over there, but the forest gets very dense in places. It could hide almost anywhere in there."
As we walked back to the gift shop I thought of one other question.
"Why did you report it?"
"Like with the group that is coming in shortly, we have a lot of children that come through. If one of them ran off into the woods, and sometimes they do. That thing could harm them. I always say that they are all God's creatures, even the less well behaved of the children are. But with that animal, I have to wonder if perhaps it wasn't sent here by... well, somebody else."
"Thank you for your time. If I can track it down, I will."
"God be with you, my daughter." He said and made the sign of the cross toward me.
"Thank you, I think I will really need His help on this one."
Back in the office I continued a half considered search that I had begun last night looking for unknown wild animals that could both answer the description of the animal seen at the shrine and the airport. At first I thought maybe the old monster known as the New Jersey Devil, which had been reported a few times on Long Island had returned. But so far, nobody had seen wings on the current animal.
The one thing that had turned up last night, and was center stage to my searching today was the Chupacabra. Especially what Father Irving had said about the body having some longer hair along its back and the way its teeth protruded. Those were two things that almost every description of the cryptid contained.
Except the official position of every official agency's opinion I could find said that the chupacabra was a misidentified coyote or other known animal that had a severe case of mange or other deformity. One had gone to some lengths to prove it was a hybrid animal from either a domestic dog or a wolf and a coyote.
But that didn't explain it hissing at the priest.
So then I started trying to find out what other dogs hissed.
And everything changed.
3.
The next day I went out and found the guard at the airport, and the grounds keeper that had ridden with him to clear the runway.
Their descriptions matched Father Irving's except for one point. They were driving a four wheeler and the guard had blown the horn at them, thinking it was a pack of coyotes that had been seen on the property before.
"But they're usually not out on the runway. They tend to hang out over by the garbage dump," the guard said.
Later on the groundskeeper said the same sort of thing. "We could see them from up here, and they looked like dogs. Until we got close enough to make'm run off. Gary was driving, but I got a real good look at the biggest one, and let me tell you. That weren't no dog. No, ma'am."
I had several pictures that I had printed out. Everything from two of the more realistic looking of an artist's recreation of the chupacabra, to a rather unpleasant sketch of a coyote, a photo of what was claimed to be a hybrid coyote-dog, and a dire wolf which hadn't been seen around here since the last Ice Age. And a picture of a living type of dog that makes unusual noises. The images had no identifier on them except for where I had written a number. Two and four were chupacabras from different angles, the others were everything else.
After I talked to the Security Guard I showed him the pictures and asked if he could pick out something that looked like what he saw. I'd say number two, maybe number four. But seven could be it if the ears were different."
The groundskeeper had a more confident response. "That one, that looks like what I'd draw of that big one, if I could draw that is."
He'd picked number seven. An African Wild Dog from the side, with its head looking right at you and its lips back in a snarl.
On the way back to the office I stopped by the shrine and waited until Father Irving came back in from guiding a group that wanted him to accompany them on the Rosary Walk. They said there was a side room off the gift shop I could use. I put my things in there and waited for him to come in.
"Wonderful to see you again, Detective Elaine. But I feel that this isn't a social call."
"No, sir. I've got some pictures for you to look at."
Father Irving looked at the images, and correctly identified the coyote and the Dire Wolf as what they were.
"I've seen things like that around, but that wasn't it," he said of the hybrid. "Now, these two. It looked more like this one, your number seven. It was facing us with its head down over its meal. But the body was more like four."
"Thank you."
"I didn't make the connection to El Chupacabra until after I'd talked to you the first time. Then I remembered a magazine article I'd seen about it."
"That's what two of my images are supposed to be, and you picked number four, which is an artist impression of it. But this one, that's an African Wild Dog. And your description of the sound it made is similar to the call they use during the hunt, which is even described as a sneeze or even a kinda of an odd whistle." I pulled up the information I had on it on my phone, "They can get up to nearly three feet tall and a big male can weigh eighty pounds."
He was looking at the photo and thinking, "Is it possible that this creature has made it here from over there?"
"There's pythons in Florida and there's supposed to be alligators in the sewers in New York City."
He nodded, then he changed the subject. "Detective Elaine, tell me, you are uncomfortable here."
"It shows."
"Yes, my dear. You were religious, and now you are not."
"No, I'm not. I still believe in God, but..."
"Let me finish it for you.... You believe, but all the trappings of whatever faith you had as a child you now find empty and, if I may, rather lame."
"Yes, sir. I was raised a Methodist."
"You were raised in that faith. It is still within you. You may yet find your way back to it."
"I may, yes, sir."
He reached out and took my hands and prayed for me.
I walked out with my pictures in one hand, and tears in my eyes.
4.
I went through all the reports I had, and compared the descriptions, and a few blurry pictures from everything from security cameras to two of the images from one of the people on Father Irving's tour.
Only one of the images had enough detail to even consider it reliable evidence of a living animal. You could tell it was moving because two of the legs were a total blur, meanwhile it was looking at the camera and the eye shine gave it an other-worldly aura.
I dismissed as many reports as I kept. Some were from too far away, others admitted in that they didn't get a really good look at the animal. And so on.
After all that I had over twenty relatively new reports covering about a quarter of Long Island that I considered at least marginally reliable.
Two were from within a mile of each other three days apart. Others were from a few years ago ten miles away. But most were somewhere within a short distance of the same Pine Barrens I had just had a great deal of experience covering, and within the last year or so. And most of them described Father Irving's animal with the occasional variation on the theme.
There were some older reports, scattered all over the Island, the oldest going back about ten years. But even the best of them could have been a coyote seen by somebody who didn't know what a real coyote looked like instead of one from a classic cartoon. But the newer reports had become localized and much more consistent.
I called every zoo and animal rescue outfit on the Island, and several that were nearby, and asked if they had any African Wild, or Painted, Dogs. Nobody did, one pointed me at a zoo in Boston and another said there was a program to breed them in Arizona.
The only conclusion I found even remotely plausible was that a non-native animal had been introduced to the Island as a breeding pair somewhere in the last five or six years.
It could have been something from somebody's illicit private menagerie, or maybe an intentional act.
But it would seem that instead of a famous island monster from the Caribbean, we had something just as exotic, and perhaps even more dangerous because they could interbreed with some of our local canines, and produce....
... and produce a new Long Island Beast.
-end beast-
The Elaine Investigates index page.
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the geographical features of Suffolk County exist, including the Shrine, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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