1 Blood Price (25 page)

Vicki frowned. It made a certain amount of sense and she certainly wasn’t going to argue for the better natures of her contemporaries. “One of the local stations is showing
Dracula
tonight.”

“Oh, great.” Henry threw up both hands and began to pace again. “More fuel on the fire. Vicki, you and I both know there’s at least one vampire living in Toronto and, personally, I’d rather not have some peasant, whipped into a frenzy by the media, doing something I’ll regret based on the tenuous conclusion that he never sees me in the daytime.” He stopped and drew a deep breath. “And the worst of it is, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.”

Vicki pulled herself to her feet and went to stand beside him at the window. She understood how he felt. “I doubt it’ll do any good, but I have a friend who writes a human interest column at the tabloid. I’ll give her a call when I get home and see if she can defuse any of this.”

“What will you tell her?”

“Exactly what you told me.” She grinned. “Less the part about the vampire actually living in Toronto.”

Henry managed a crooked grin in return. “Thank you. She’ll likely think you’re losing your mind.”

Vicki shrugged. “I used to be a cop. She thinks I lost my mind ages ago.”

Her eyes on their reflection in the glass, Vicki realized, for the first time, that Henry Fitzroy, born in the sixteenth century, stood four inches shorter she did. At least. An admitted snob concerning height, she was a little surprised to discover that it didn’t seem to matter. Her ears as red as the young constable’s had been that afternoon, she cleared her throat and asked, “Will you be going back to the Humber tonight?”

Henry’s reflection nodded grimly. “And every night until something happens.”

Anicka Hendle had just come off an exhausting shift in emergency. As she parked her car in the lane behind her house and stumbled up the path, all she could think of was bed. She didn’t see them until she’d almost reached the porch.

Roger, the elder brother, sat on the top step. Bill, the younger, stood in the frozen garden, leaning against the house. Something—it looked like a hockey stick although the light was too bad to really tell—leaned against the wall beside him. The two of them, and an assortment of “friends,” rented the place next door and although Anicka had complained to their landlord on a number of occasions, about the noise, about the filth, she couldn’t seem to get rid of them.They’d obviously spent the night drinking. She could smell the beer.

“Morning,
Ms.
Hendle.”

Just what she needed, a confrontation with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” They were usually too dense, or too drunk, for sarcasm to have any effect, but she hadn’t given up hope.

“Well . . .” Roger’s smile was a lighter slash across the gray oval of his face. “You can tell us why we never see you in the daytime.”

Anicka sighed; she was too tired to deal with whatever idiot idea they had right now. “I am a night nurse,” she said, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. “Therefore, I work nights.”

“Not good enough.” Roger took another long pull from the bottle in his left hand. His right hand continued to cradle something in his lap. “No one works nights all the time.”

“I do.” This was ridiculous. She strode forward. “Now go back where you came from before I call . . .” The hands grabbing her shoulders took her completely by surprise.

“Call who?” Bill asked, jerking her up against his body.

Suddenly frightened, she twisted frantically trying to free herself.

“Us three,” Roger’s voice seemed to come from a distance, “are just going to stay out here till the sun comes up. Then we’ll see.”

They were crazy. They were both crazy. Panic gave her the strength she needed, and she yanked herself out of Bill’s grip. She stumbled on the porch stairs. This couldn’t be happening. She had to get to the house. In the house she’d be safe.

She saw Roger stand. She could get by him. Push him out of the way.

Then she saw the baseball bat in his hand.

The force of the blow knocked her back onto the lawn.

She couldn’t suck enough air through the ruin of her mouth and nose to scream.

Her face streaming blood, she scrambled up onto her elbows and knees and tried to crawl back toward the house.
If I can get to the house, I’ll be safe.

“Sun’s coming up. She’s trying to get inside.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

The hockey stick had been sharpened on one end and with the strength of both men leaning on it, it went through jacket and uniform and bone and flesh and out into the ground.

As the first beam of sunlight came up over the garage, Anicka Hendle kicked once more and was still.

“Now we’ll see,” Roger panted, retrieving his beer.

The sunlight moved across the yard, touched a white shoe, and gently spread out over the body. The blood against the frozen dirt burned with crimson light.

“Nothing’s happening.” Bill turned to his brother, eyes wide in a parchment pale face. “She’s supposed to turn to dust, Roger!”

Roger took two steps back and was noisily sick.

“All stand for the word of the Lord. We read today from The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Chapter twenty-eight, Verses one to seven.”

“Praised be the word of the Lord.”

“In the end of the Sabbath as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you.
Thus endeth the lesson.”

The Gloria almost raised the roof off the church and just for that moment the faith in life everlasting as promised by the Christian God was enough to raise a shining wall between the world and the forces of darkness.

Too bad it wouldn’t last.

“Back up, please. Move aside.”

Hands cuffed behind them, the brothers were brought out through the police barricade and into the alley. Curious neighbors surged forward, then back, like a living sea breaking against a wall of blue uniforms. Neither man noticed the onlookers. Roger, smelling of vomit, dry retched constantly and William cried silent tears, his eyes almost closed. They were shoved, none too gently, into one of the patrol cars, shutters clicking closed in a half dozen media cameras.

Ignoring the reporters’ shouted questions, two of the constables climbed into the car and, siren hiccuping, maneuvered the crowded length of the back lane. The other two added their bulk to the living wall that blocked the view of the yard.
“No one speaks to the media,”
the investigator in charge of the case had told them, his tone leaving no room for dissension.

The body came out next, the bouncing of the gurney moving it in a macabre parody of life within the body bag. A dozen pairs of lungs exhaled, the shutters closed again, and over it all a television reporter droned in on the-spot coverage. The faint antiseptic smell of the coroner’s equipment left an almost visible track through the damp morning air.

“I seen her before the cops stuffed her in the bag,” confided a neighbor to an avidly listening audience. She paused, enjoying the feeling of power, and cinched her spring coat more tightly over her plaid flannel nightgown. “Her face was all bashed in and her legs were apart.” Nodding sagely, she added, “You know what
that
means.”

Listeners echoed her nod.

As the coroner’s wagon drove away, the police barricade broke up into individual men and women who hurriedly stepped out of the way as Mike Celluci and his partner came out of the yard.

“Get statements from anyone who saw something or who thinks they saw something,” Celluci ordered. At any other time he would have been amused at the reaction that invoked in the crowd as half of them preened and the other half quietly slipped away, but this morning he was far beyond amusement. The very senselessness of this killing wrapped him in a rage so cold he doubted he’d ever be warm again.

The reporters, for whom the
story
had more reality than what had actually happened. surged forward, demanding some sort of statement from the police. The two homicide investigators pushed through them silently until they got to their car, a rudimentary instinct of self-preservation keeping the reporters from actually blocking their way.

As Celluci opened his door, Dave leaned forward and murmured, “We’ve got to say something, Mike. or God knows what they’ll come up with.” Celluci glowered at his partner, but Dave refused to back down. “I’ll do it if you’d rather not.”

“No.” Scowling, he looked out at the pack of jackals. “Anicka Hendle is dead because of the asinine stories you lot have been spreading about vampires. You’re as much responsible as those two cretins we took away. Quite the story. I hope you’re proud of it.”

Sliding in behind the wheel, he slammed his car door closed with enough force to create echos between the neighboring houses.

A single reporter moved out of the stunned mass, microphone raised, but Dave Graham shook his head.

“I wouldn’t,” he suggested quietly.

Microphone still in the air, the reporter stopped and the whole pack of them watched as the two investigators drove away. The unnatural stillness lasted until the car cleared the end of the alley then a voice behind them prodded the pack back into action.

“I seen her before the cops stuffed her in the bag.”

“You still have that friend at the tab?”

“Celluci?” Vicki settled back into her recliner, lifting the phone onto her lap. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“That Fellows woman, the one who writes for the tabloid, are you still seeing her?”

Vicki frowned. “Well I’m not exactly
seeing
her. . . .”

“For Chrissakes, Vicki, this is no time to be coy! I’m not asking if you sleep with her; do you talk to her or not?”

“Yeah.” In fact, she’d been going to call her that very afternoon to see what could be done to ease Henry’s fears about peasant hordes with stakes and garlic. What weird serendipity had Celluci thinking about Anne Fellows on the same day? They’d only met once and hadn’t hit it off, had spent the entire party circling each other like wary dogs looking for an exposed throat. “Why?”

“Get a pen and paper, I’ve got some things I want you to tell her.”

His tone sent Vicki scrabbling in the recliner’s side pocket and by the time he started to talk she’d unearthed a ballpoint and a coffee-stained phone pad. When he finished, she swore softly. “Jesus-God, Mike, can I assume the higher-ups don’t know you’re passing this along?” She heard him sigh wearily and before he could speak, said, “Never mind. Stupid question.”