1 Blood Price (10 page)

“Victoria Nelson, the Private Investigator?”

Vicki considered it a moment before answering and then said slowly, “Yes. . . .”

“I have a job for you.”

The words were delivered with the intensity only the very young can muster and Vicki found herself hiding a smile.

The girl tossed unnaturally brilliant red curls back off her face. “I can pay, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

As the question of money hadn’t even begun to cross Vicki’s mind, she grunted noncommittally. They locked eyes for a moment—
Tinted contacts, I thought so. Well, they go with the hair.—
then she added, in much the same noncommittal tone, “Most people call first.”

“I thought about it.” The shrug was so minimal as to be almost nonexistent and her voice was completely nonapologetic. “I figured the case would be harder to turn down in person.”

Vicki found herself holding he door open wider. “I suppose you’d better come in.” Work wasn’t so scarce she had to take jobs from children, but it wouldn’t hurt to hear what the girl had to say. “Another thirty seconds in the hall and Mr. Chin’ll be showing up to see what’s going on.”

“Mr. Chin?”

“The old man who lives downstairs likes to know what’s going on, likes to pretend he doesn’t speak English.”

Sliding past Vicki in the narrow hall, the girl sniffed, obviously disapproving. “Maybe he
doesn’t
speak English,” she pointed out.

This time, Vicki didn’t bother to hide her smile. “Mr. Chin has been speaking English a lot longer than both of us have been alive. His parents came to Vancouver in the late 1880s. He used to teach high school. He still teaches English as a Second Language at the Chinese Community Center.”

Bright green eyes narrowed accusingly and the girl glared up at Vicki. “I don’t like being patronized,” she said.

Vicki nodded as she closed the door. “Neither do I.” During the silence that followed, Vicki could almost hear their conversation being replayed, each phrase, each word tested for nuance.

“Oh,” the girl said at last. “Sorry.” Then her brow unfurrowed and she grinned as she offered a compromise. “I won’t do it anymore if you’d don’t.”

“Deal.” Vicki led the way through her tiny living room, pushing her leather recliner back upright as she passed, to her equally tiny office. She’d never actually had a client, or potential client, in the office before and there were a couple of unanticipated problems. “I’ll, uh, get another chair from the kitchen.”

“It’s okay. This is fine.” Shrugging out of her coat she settled both herself and it on Vicki’s weight bench. “Now, about this job. . . .”

“Not yet.” Vicki pulled her own chair out from the desk and sat down. “First, about you. Your name is?”

“Coreen, Coreen Fergus.” She continued on the same breath, obviously feeling that her name covered all the necessary details. “And I want you to find that vampire that’s been terrorizing the city.”

“Right.” It was too early on a Monday and the latest death was too close. “Did Michael Celluci put you up to this?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” Shaking her head, Vicki stood. “Look, I don’t know
who
put you up to this but you can go back to them and. . . .”

“Ian Reddick was my . . .” She frowned, searching for a word that would give the relationship its proper weight. “. . . lover.”

“Ian Reddick,” Vicki repeated and sat down again. Ian Reddick, the first victim. The body she’d found mutilated in the Eglinton West subway station.

“I want you to find the thing that killed him.”

“Look, Coreen,” her voice dropped into the professional “comfort tone” that police officers worldwide had to master, “I recognize how upset you must be, but don’t you think that’s a job for the authorities?”

“No.”

There was something utterly intractable in that “no.” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose and searched for a response while Coreen continued.

“They insist on looking for a man, refusing to acknowledge that the paper might be right; refusing to consider anything outside their narrow little world view.”

“Refusing to consider that the killer might actually be a vampire?”

“Right.”

“The paper doesn’t really believe it’s a vampire either, you know.”

Coreen tossed her hair back off her face. “So? The facts still fit. The blood is still missing. I bet Ian would have been drained dry if he hadn’t been found so quickly.”

She doesn’t know it was me. Thank God.
And again she saw him, his face a clichéd mask of terror above the gaping red wound that was his throat. Gaping red wound . . . no, more as though the whole front of his throat had been ripped away. Not ripped through, ripped away.
That
was what had been missing; the incongruity that had been nagging at her for over a week now. Where was the front of Ian Reddick’s throat?

“. . . so will you?”

Vicki slowly surfaced from memory. “Let me get this straight. You want me to find Ian’s killer, working under the assumption that it really is a vampire? Bats, coffins, the whole bit.”

“Yes.”

“And once I’ve found it, I drive a stake through its heart?”

“Creatures of the night can hardly be brought to trial,” Coreen pointed out reasonably but with a martial light in her eye. “Ian must be avenged.”

Don’t get sad, get even. It was a classic solution to grief and one Vicki didn’t altogether disapprove of. “Why me?” she asked.

Coreen sat up straighter. “You were the only female private investigator in the yellow pages.”

That, at least, made sense and explained the eerie coincidence of Coreen showing up in the office of the woman who’d found Ian’s body. “
Out of all the gin joints in all the. . . .”
She couldn’t remember the rest of the quote but she was beginning to understand how Bogart had felt. “It wouldn’t be cheap.”
What am I cautioning her for? I am not going vampire hunting.

“I can afford the best. Daddy pays me a phenomenal amount of guilt money. He ran off with his executive assistant when I was in junior high.”

Vicki shook her head. “Mine ran off with his secretary when I was in sixth grade and I never got a cent out of him. Times change. Was she young and pretty?”

“He,” Coreen corrected. “And yes, very pretty. They’ve opened a new law practice in the Bahamas.”

“As I said, times change.” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose and sighed. Vampire hunting. Except it wouldn’t have to be that. Just find whoever, or whatever, killed Ian Reddick. Exactly what she’d be doing if she were still on the force. Lord knew they were undermanned and could use the help.

Coreen, who had kept her gaze locked on the older woman’s face, smiled triumphantly and dug for her checkbook.

“Michael Celluci, please.”

“One moment.”

Vicki tapped her nails against the side of the phone as she waited for the call to be put through. Ian Reddick’s throat had been missing and Celluci, the arrogant shit, hadn’t thought to mention whether it had been found or if the other bodies were in the same condition. She didn’t really care at this point if he wasn’t speaking to her ’cause she was bloody well going to speak to him.

“Criminal Investigation Bureau, Detective-Sergeant Graham.”

“Dave? It’s Vicki Nelson. I need to talk to Celluci.”

“He’s not here right now, Vicki. Can I help?”

From her brief experience with him, Vicki knew Dave to be, if possible, a worse liar than she was. And if he couldn’t lie convincingly for important things he certainly couldn’t do it just to protect his partner’s ass. Trust Celluci to get out before the heat came down. “I need a favor.”

“Shoot.”

The wording became crucial here. It had to sound like she knew more than she did or Dave might clam up and retreat to the official party line. Although, with luck, the acquired habit of answering her questions could last around the department for years. “The hunk of throat missing from the first body, did anyone ever find it?”

“Nope.”

So far so good. “What about the others?”

“Not a sign.”

“Not even last night’s?”

“Not yet anyway. Why?”

“Just sitting here wondering. Thanks, Dave. Tell your partner from me that he’s a tight-lipped horse’s ass.” She hung up and stared at the far wall. Maybe Celluci had been holding the information back to ensure he had bargaining power in the future. Maybe. Maybe he quite honestly forgot to tell her. Ha! Maybe pigs would fly, but she doubted it.

Right now, she had more important things to consider. Like what kind of creature walked off with six square inches of throat as well as twelve pints of blood?

 

The subway roared out of Eglinton West toward Lawrence and, with the station momentarily deserted, Vicki strode purposefully for the workman’s access at the southern end of the northbound platform. This was now her case and she couldn’t stand working with secondhand information. She’d see the alcove where the killer allegedly disappeared for herself.

At the top of the short flight of concrete stairs, she paused, her blood pounding unnaturally loudly in her ears. She had always considered herself immune to foolish superstitions, race memories, and night terrors, but faced with the tunnel, stretching dark and seemingly endless like the lair of some great worm, she was suddenly incapable of taking the final step off the platform. The hair on the back of her neck rose as she remembered how, on the night Ian Reddick had died, she’d been certain that something deadly lingered in the tunnel. The feeling itself hadn’t returned, but the memory replayed with enough strength to hold her.

This is ridiculous. Pull yourself together, Nelson. There’s nothing down in that tunnel that could hurt you.
Her right foot slid forward half a step.
The worst thing you’re likely to run into is a TTC official and a trespassing charge.
Her left foot moved up and passed the right.
Good God, you’re acting like some stupid teenager in a horror movie.
Then she stood on the first step. The second. The third. Then she was on the narrow concrete strip that provided a safe passage along the outside rail.

See.
Nothing to it
. She wiped suddenly sweaty palms on her coat and dug in her purse for her flashlight, then, with the satisfyingly solid weight of it in her hand, flooded the tunnel with light. She would have preferred not to use it, away from the harsh fluorescents of the station, the tunnel existed more in a surreal twilight than a true darkness, but her night-sight had deteriorated to the point where even twilight had become impenetrable. The anger her condition always caused wiped away the last of the fear.

She rather hoped something was skulking in her path. For starters, she’d feed it the flashlight.

Pushing her glasses up her nose, her gaze locked on the beam of light, Vicki moved carefully along the access path. If the trains were on schedule—and while the TTC wasn’t up to Mussolini, it did all right—the next one wouldn’t be along for another, she checked the glowing dial of her watch, eight minutes. Plenty of time.

She reached the first workman’s alcove with six minutes remaining and sniffed disapprovingly at the evidence of police investigation. “Sure, boys,” she muttered, playing the light around the concrete walls, “mess it up for the next person.”

The hole Celluci’s team had dug was about waist level in the center of the back wall and about eight inches in diameter. Stepping over chips of concrete, Vicki leaned forward for a better look. There was, as Celluci said, nothing but dirt behind the excavation.

“So if he didn’t come in here,” she frowned, “where did he. . . .” Then she noticed the crack that ran the length of the wall, into and out of the exploratory hole. A closer look brought her nose practically in contact with the concrete. The faint hint of a familiar smell had her digging for her Swiss army knife and carefully scraping the edges of the dark recess.

The flakes on the edge of the stainless steel blade showed red-brown in the flashlight beam. They could have been rust. Vicki touched one to the tip of her tongue. They could have been rust, but they weren’t. She had a pretty good idea whose blood she’d found but brushed the remaining flakes into a plastic sandwich bag anyway. Then she squatted and ran the blade up under the crack at the top edge of the hole.

Even as she did it, she wasn’t sure why. Most of Ian’s blood had been sprayed over the subway station wall. There could not have been enough blood on the killer’s clothes to have soaked all the way through a crack in six inches of concrete even if he’d been wearing paper towels and had remained plastered against the wall for the entire night.

When she pulled out the knife, mixed in with dirt and bits of cement, were similar red-brown flakes. These went into another bag and then she quickly repeated the procedure at the bottom edge of the hole with the same results.

The ioar of the subway became a welcome, normal kind of terror for the only explanation Vicki could come up with as the alcove shook and a hundred tons of steel hurtled past, was that whatever killed Ian Reddick had somehow passed through the crack in the concrete wall.