1 Blood Price (7 page)

“Difficult to come up with a worse one,” she snorted, leaning back to allow their waitress to replace the bowls with steaming platters of food. Grateful for the chance to regain her composure, Vicki toyed with a chopstick and hoped he didn’t realize how much this meant to her. She hadn’t realized it herself until her heart restarted with his answer and she felt a part of herself she thought had died when she il left the force slowly begin to come back to life. Her reaction, she knew, would have been invisible to a casual observer but Mike Celucci was anything but that.

For the first time in a long time, God appeared to be listening.

“Your better idea?” Mike asked pointedly when they were alone with their meal.

If he’d noticed her relief, he gave no sign and that was good enough for Vicki. “It’s a little hard to hypothesize without all the information,” she prodded.

He smiled and she understood, not for the first time, why witnesses of either gender were willing to spill their guts to this man. “Hypothesize. Big word. You been doing crossword puzzles again?”

“Yeah, between tracking down international jewel thieves. Spill it, Celluci.”

If anything, there had been fewer clues at the second scene than at the first. No prints save the victim’s, no trail, no one who saw the killer enter or exit the underground garage. “And the scene was hours old by the time we arrived. . . .”

“You said the trail at the subway led into a workman’s alcove?”

He nodded, scowling at a snow pea. “Blood all over the back wall. The trail led into the alcove, but nothing led out.”

“Behind the back wall?”

“You thinking of secret passageways?”

A little sheepishly, she nodded.

“All things considered,
that
would be an answer I could live with.” He shook his head and the curl dropped forward again. “Nothing but dirt. We checked.”

Although DeVerne Jones had been found with a scrap of torn leather clutched in his fist, dirt was pretty much all they’d found at the third. site. Dirt, and a derelict that babbled about the apocalypse.

“Wait a minute . . .” Vicki frowned in concentration, then shoved her disturbed glasses back up her nose. “Didn’t the old man at the subway say something about the apocalypse?”

“Nope. Armageddon.”

“Same thing.”

Celluci sighed with exaggerated force. “You trying to tell me that it’s not one guy, it’s four guys on horses? Thanks. You’ve been a lot of help.”

“I suppose you’ve checked for some connection between the victims? Something to hang a motive on?”

“Motive!” He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

Vicki stabbed at a mushroom and muttered, “Smart ass.”

“No, no connections, no discernible motive. We’re still looking.” He shrugged, a succinct opinion of what the search would turn up.

“Cults?”

“Vicki, I’ve talked to more weirdos and space cases in the last few days than I have in the last few years.” He grinned. “Present company excepted, of course.”

 

They were almost back to her apartment, her hand tucked in the crook of his arm to guide her through the darkness, when she asked, “Have you considered that there might be something in this vampire theory?”

She dug her heels in at his shout of laughter. “I’m serious, Celucci!”

“No, I’m Serious Celluci. You’re out of your mind.” He dragged her back into step beside him. “Vampires don’t exist.”

“You’re sure of that? ‘There are more things . . .’ ”

“Don’t,” he warned, “start quoting Shakespeare at me. I’ve had the line quoted at me so often lately, I’m beginning to think police brutality is a damned good idea.”

They turned up the path to Vicki’s building.

“You’ve got to admit that a vampire fits all the parameters.” Vicki no more believed it was a vampire than Celluci did, but it had always been so easy to rattle his cage. . . .

He snorted. “Right. Something’s wandering around the city in a tuxedo muttering, ‘I vant to drink your blood.’ ”

“You got a better suspect?”

“Yeah. A big guy on PCPs with clip-on claws.”

“You’re not back to
that
stupid theory again.”

“Stupid!”

“Yeah. Stupid.”

“You wouldn’t recognize a logical progression of facts if they bit you on the butt!”

“At least I’m not so caught up in my own cleverness that I’m blind to outside possibilities!”

“Outside possibilities? You have no idea of what’s going on!”

“Neither do you!”

They stood and panted at each other for a few seconds then Vicki shoved her glasses up her nose and dug for her keys. “You staying the night?”

It sounded like a challenge.

“Yeah. I am.”

So did the response.

Sometime later, Vicki shifted to reach a particularly sensitive area and decided, as she got the anticipated inarticulate response, that there were times when you really didn’t need to
see
what you were doing and night blindness mattered not in the least.

“
Come on, Smith, kick him right in his windswept desire.” Henry Fitzroy leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his temples. Just how much of a shit did he want the captain to be? Should the hero’s better nature overcome his wanton lust or did he even have a better nature? And how much of a hero would he be without one?

“And frankly, my dear,” he sighed, “I don’t give a damn.” He saved the night’s work, then shut down the system. Usually he enjoyed the opening chapters of a new book, getting to know the characters, warping them to fit the demands of the plot, but this time. . . .

Rolling his chair back from the desk, he stared out his office window at the sleeping city. Somewhere out there, hidden by the darkness, a hunter stalked—blinded, maddened, driven by blood lust and hunger. He’d sworn to stop it, but he hadn’t the slightest idea how to start. How could the location of random slaughter be anticipated?

With another sigh, he stood. There’d been twenty-four hours without a death. Maybe the problem had taken care of itself. He grabbed his coat and headed out of the apartment.

The morning paper should be out by now, I’ll grab one and
. . . Waiting for the elevator, he checked his watch. 6:10. It was much later than he’d thought. . . .
and trust I can make it back inside without igniting.
Sunrise was around 6:30 if he remembered correctly. He wouldn’t have much time, but he had to know if there had been another killing. If the load of completely irrational guilt he carried for not finding and stopping the child had gotten any heavier.

The national paper had a box just outside his building. The headline concerned a speech the Prime Minister had just made in the Philippines about north/south relations.

“And I bet he works on the south until at least mid-May.” Henry said, drawing his leather trench coat tighter around his throat as a cold wind swept around the building and pulled tears from his eyes.

The tabloid’s closest box was down the block and across the street. There wasn’t really any need to look for the other local paper, Henry had every faith in the tabloid’s headline. He waited at the light while the opening volley of the morning rush hour laid a nearly solid line of moving steel along Bloor Street, then crossed, digging for change.

“LEAFS LOSE BIG.”

Death of playoff hopes, perhaps, but not a death Henry need worry about. With a sense of profound relief—lightly tinted with exasperation; the Leafs were in the worst division in the NHL, after all—he tucked the paper under his arm, turned, and realized the sun was about to clear the horizon.

He could feel it trembling on the edge of the world and it took all his strength not to panic.

The elevator, the red light, the headlines, all had taken more time than he had. How he had allowed this to happen after more than four hundred and fifty years of racing the sun to safety was not important now. Regaining the sanctuary of his apartment was the only thing that mattered. He could feel the heat of the sun on the edges of his consciousness, not a physical presence, not yet, although that and the burning would come soon enough, but an awareness of the threat, of how close he stood to death.

The light he needed was red again, a small mocking sun in a box. The pounding of his heart counting off the seconds, Henry flung himself onto the street. Brakes squealed and the fender of a wildly swerving van brushed against his thigh like a caress. He ignored the sudden pain and the driver’s curses, slammed his palm against the hood of a car almost small enough to leap, and dove through a space barely a prayer wider than his twisting body.

The sky turned gray, then pink, then gold.

Leather soles slamming against the pavement, Henry raced along shadow, knowing that fire devoured it behind him and lapped at his heels. Terror fought with the lethargy that daylight wrapped around his kind, and terror won. He reached the smoked glass door to his building seconds before the sun.

It touched only the back of one hand, too slowly snatched to safety.

Cradling the blistered hand against his chest, Henry used the pain to goad himself toward the elevator. Although the diffused light could no longer burn, he was still in danger.

“You all right, Mr. Fitzroy?” The guard frowned with concern as he buzzed open the inner door.

Unable to focus, Henry forced his head around to where he knew the guard would be. “Migraine,” he whispered and lurched forward.

The purely artificial light in the elevator revived him a little and he managed to walk down the corridor dragging only a part of his weight along the wall. He feared for a moment that the keys were beyond his remaining dexterity, but somehow he got the heavy door open, closed, and locked behind him. Here was safety.

Safety. That word alone carried him into the shelter of the bedroom where thick blinds denied the sun. He swayed, sighed, and finally let go, collapsing across the bed and allowing the day to claim him.

“Vicki, please!”

Vicki frowned, a visit to the ophthalmologist never put her in what could be called a good mood and all this right-eye, left-eye focusing was giving her a major headache. “What?” she growled through gritted teeth—only incidentally a result of the chin rest.

“You’re looking directly at the test target.”

“So?”

Dr. Anderson hid a sigh and, with patience developed during the raising of two children, explained, not for the first time, her tone noncommittal and vaguely soothing. “Looking directly at the test target negates the effects of the test and we’ll just have to do it all over again.”