1 Blood Price (11 page)

And
that
was patently ridiculous.

Wasn t it?

 

As the largest producer and wholesaler of polyester clothing, Sigman’s Incorporated didn’t exactly run a high security building. Since the murder of Terri Neal in the underground parking lot, they’d tried to tighten things up.

In spite of four and a half pages of new admittance regulations, the guard in the lobby glanced up as Vicki strode past, then went back to his book. In gray corduroy pants, black desert boots, and her navy pea jacket she could have been any one of the hundreds of women who came through the area every day and he was neither expected nor encouraged to stop all of them. She certainly wasn’t the press—the guard had grown adept at spotting the ladies and gentlemen of the fifth estate and herding them off to the proper authorities. She didn’t look like a cop, and besides, cops always checked in. She looked like she knew where she was going, so the guard decided not to interfere. In his opinion, the world could use a few more people who knew where they were going.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, the underground parking garage was empty of people which explained pretty much exactly why Vicki was there at that time. She stepped off the elevator and frowned up at the whining fluorescent lights.
Why the hell don’t they have security cameras down here?
she wondered as the echoes of her footsteps bounced off the stained concrete walls.

Even without the scuffed and faded chalk marks she could tell where the body had fallen. The surrounding cars had been crammed together, leaving an open area over three spaces wide, as if violent death were somehow contagious.

She found what she’d come looking for tucked almost under an ancient rust and blue sedan. Her lower lip caught between her teeth, she pulled out her knife and knelt beside the crack. The blade slid in its full six inches, but the bottom of the crack was deeper still. The red-brown flakes that came up on the steel had most certainly not dropped off the wreck.

She sat back on her heels and frowned. “I really, really don’t like the looks of this.”

Fishing a marble from the bottom of her bag, she placed it on one of the remaining chalk marks and gave it a little push. It rolled toward the wall, moving away from the crack at almost a forty-five degree angle. Further experiments produced similar results. Blood, or for that matter anything else, could not have traveled from the body to the crack in any way that might be called natural.

“Not that there’s anything even remotely natural about any of this,” she muttered, tucking this third sandwich bag of dried blood in beside the others and crawling after her marble.

Rather than go back through the building. she climbed up the steeply graded driveway and out onto St. Clair Avenue West.

“Excuse me?”

The attendant in the booth looked up from his magazine.

Vicki waved a hand back down the drive in the general direction of the underground garage. “Do you know what’s under the bottom layer of concrete?”

He looked in the direction she indicated, looked back at her, and repeated, “Under the concrete?”

“Yeah ”

“Dirt, lady.”

She smiled and eased around the barricade. “Thanks. You’ve been a great help. I’ll show myself out.”

 

The chain link fence protested slightly and sagged forward under Vicki’s weight as she peered down into the construction site. It was, at the moment, little more than a huge hole in the ground filled with smaller holes, filled with muddy water. All the machinery appeared to have been removed and work stopped. Whether because of the murder or the weather, Vicki had no way of knowing.

“Well,” she shoved her hands down into the pockets of her coat, “there’s definitely dirt.” If there was any blood, it was beyond finding.

 

“No problem, Vicki.” Rajeet Mohadevan tucked the three sandwich bags into the pocket of her lab coat. “I can run them through before I head home tonight with no one the wiser. Are you going to be around the building?”

“No.” Vicki saw the flicker of sympathy across the researcher’s face but decided to ignore it. Rajeet was doing her a favor, after all. “If I’m not at home, you can leave a message on the machine.”

“Same number?”

“Same number.”

Rajeet grinned. “Same message?”

Vicki found herself grinning back. The last time the police lab had called her at home had been in the worst of the fights between her and Celluci. “Different message.”

“Pity.” Rajeet gave an exaggerated sigh of disappointment as Vicki headed for the door. “I’ve forgotten a few of the places you told him to stuff his occurrence book.” She sketched a salute—a reminder of the old days, when Vicki had been an intense young woman in a uniform—and returned to the report she’d been filling out before the interruption.

Walking down the hall, the familiar white tiles of the corridor wrapping around her like an old friend, Vicki considered heading through the tunnel to headquarters and checking to see if Celluci were at his desk. She could tell him about the cracks, find out if he’d been withholding any more information from her, and . . . no. Given his mood the last time they’d talked and given that he hadn’t called over the weekend, if she showed up now she’d just interfere with his work and that was something neither of them ever did. The work being what it was, the work came first and the cracks were added questions, not answers.

She was out of the building entirely when she realized that the thought of seeing another cop sitting at what had been
her
desk had not influenced her decision one way or another. Feeling vaguely like she’d betrayed her past, she hunched her shoulders against the late afternoon chill and started for home.

 

For years Vicki had been promising to buy herself a really good encyclopedia set. For years she’d been putting it off. The set she had, she’d bought at the grocery store for five dollars and ninety-nine cents a volume with every ten dollars worth of groceries. It didn’t have a lot to say about vampires.

“Legendary creatures, uh huh, central Europe, Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stoker. . . .” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose and tried to remember the characteristics of Stoker’s Dracula. She’d seen the play years ago and thought she might have read the book in high schoolonly a lifetime or two back.

“He was stronger, faster, his senses were more acute. . . .” She flicked the points off on her fingertips. “He slept all day, came out at night, and he hung around with a guy who ate flies. And spiders.” Making a disgusted face she turned back to the encyclopedia.

The vampire,”
she read,
“was said to be able to turn into bats, wolves, mist, or vapor.”
The ability to turn to mist or vapor would explain the cracks, she realized. The victim’s blood, being heavier, would precipitate out to coat the narrow passageway. “And a creature that rises from the grave should have no trouble moving through earth.” Marking her place with an old phone bill, she heaved herself out of the recliner and turned the television on, suddenly needing sound in the apartment.

“This is crazy,” she muttered, opening the book again and reading while she paced. Fantasy and reality were moving just a little too close for comfort, definitely too close foi sitting still.

The remainder of the entry listed the various ways of dealing with the creatures, from ash stakes through mustard seed to the crucifix, going on in great detail about staking, beheading, and burning.

Vicki allowed the slender volume to fall closed and raised her head to look out the window. In spite of the street light glowing less than three meters from her apartment, she was very conscious of the darkness pressing against the glass. For a legendary creature, the methods of its destruction seemed to be taken very seriously indeed.

Behind the police barricade, something crouched low over the piece of sidewalk where the fourth body had been found. Although the night could hide no secrets from him and, unlike the others who had searched, he knew what to search for, he found nothing.

“Nothing,” Henry murmured to himself as he stood. “And yet there should be something here.” A child of his kind might be able to hide its tracks from human hunters but not from kin. He lifted his head and his nostrils flared to check the breeze. A cat—no, two—on hunts of their own, rain that would fall before morning, and. . . .

He frowned, brows drawing down into a deep vee. And what? He knew the smell of death in all its many manifestations and laid over the residue of this morning’s slaying was a faint miasma of something older, more foul, almost familiar.

His memories stretched back over four hundred and fifty years. Somewhere in there. . . .

The police car was almost up on him before he saw it and the tiny sun in the heart of the searchlight had begun to glow before he moved.

“Holy shit! Did you see that?”

“See what?” Auxiliary Police Constable Wojtowicz stared out her window at the broad fan of light spilling out from the top of the slowly moving car.

“I don’t know.” PC Harper leaned forward over the steering wheel and peered past his partner. “I could’ve sworn I saw a man standing inside the barricades just as I flipped the light on.”

Wojtowicz snorted. “Then we’d still be able to see him. Nobody moves that fast. And besides,” she waved a hand at the view out the window, “there’s nowhere to hide in that.” That included the sidewalk, the barricades, and an expanse of muddy lawn. Although black shadows streamed away from every irregularity, none were large enough to hide a man.

“Think we should get out and look around?”

“You’re the boss.”

“Well. . . .” Nothing moved amid the stark contrast of light and shadow. Harper shook his head. The night had been making him jumpy lately; exposing nerves and plucking at them. “I guess you’re right. There’s nothing there.”

“Of course I’m right.” The car continued down the block and she reached over to shut the searchlight off. “You’re just letting all this vampire stuff in the press get to you.”

“You don’t believe in vampires, do you?”

“Course not.” Wojtowicz settled more comfortably into her seat. “Don’t tell me you do?”

It was Harper’s turn to snort. “I,” he told her dryly, “have been audited.”

Back on the lawn, one of the shadows lay, face pressed against the dirt, and remembered. The scent was stronger here, mixed a third part with earth and blood, and it brushed away the centuries.

It was London, 1593. Elizabeth was on the throne and had been for some time. He’d been dead for fifty-seven years. He’d been walking back from the theater, having just seer the premiere presentation of
Richard the Third.
On the whole, he’d enjoyed himself although he had a feeling the playwright had taken a few liberties with the personality of the king.

Out of a refuse-strewn alleyway, a young man had stumbled—thin and disheveled but darkly handsome, very drunk, and, clinging about him like his own personal bit of fog, had been that same smell.

Henry had already fed from a whore behind the theater, but even if he hadn’t, he would not have fed from this man. The scent alone was enough to make him wary, the not quite sane glitter in the dark eyes had only added further warning.

“Most humbly, I beg your pardon.” His voice, the voice of an educated man, had been slurred almost beyond understanding. “But I have been in Hell this night and am having some small difficulty in returning.” He’d giggled then, and executed a shaky bow in Henry’s direction. “Christopher Marlowe at your service, milord. Can you spare a few coppers for a drink?”

“Christopher Marlowe,” Henry repeated softly into a night more than four hundred years after that unhappy man had died. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the clouds closing ranks over the stars. Although he had read the play just after its posthumous publication in 1604, he wondered tonight for the first time just how much research Marlowe had done before writing
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus.