Blood Debt (Judah Black Novels Book 2) (9 page)

Reed cautiously took the pen, glanced over the page and affixed his signature on the appropriate line. “I’m sorry, Judah. I don’t.”

“I’m going to find her,” I said quietly to Reed.

“No,” he said, clicking the pen and dropping it on the table. “You won’t.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I stood in front of the precinct’s fax machine, angrily jamming Reed’s signed affidavit into its maw. There was something gummy on the keypad of the machine and I picked up some of whatever it was on my fingers when I dialed in the number only to try and wipe it off on my jeans. The fax machine squealed and an error came up on the screen. I looked around, searching for someone I could go to for help.

The main floor was still crowded, officers answering ringing phones and exchanging reports across desks. A few cops chatted casually among each other. Tenor laughter resonated under the din.

No one talked to me. No one offered to help.

Frustrated, I gave the side of the machine a good smack. The strike didn’t fix the fax machine so I gave it another…and then another. Each strike grew progressively harder, the noise echoing through the cubicles around me. When punching the machine didn’t make the error go away, I resorted to shaking the damn thing.

“Why won’t you fucking work?” I screamed.

It was only as I stood there with my hands on either side of the ancient fax machine, chest heaving with rage and effort, I realized the office had gone silent. The murmur of voices was completely absent. There was no more laughter, no more pecking away at keyboards. A solitary phone rang.

I turned around to face an army of blank faces. “What the hell are you looking at?” I growled. “Don’t you have work to do?”

The normal noise resumed without missing a beat. I turned back to the fax machine, which now sported two new dents. The error was still flashing on the screen. I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slow. Then, I deleted the job from the queue and tried to send the fax again. This time, it went through.

I wonder if Robbie has a glamor to make technology cooperate
, I found myself wondering as the machine sucked in the paper and spat it back out on the other side.
I shouldn’t think things like that. Magick doesn’t fix everything.

I put a hand to my head and briefly closed my eyes.
I must be more tired than I thought if I’m even considering it
, I thought. I knew the danger. Magick was a drug. A lot of young practitioners fell into a trap, thinking magick would fix whatever was bothering them at the time. I’d made the same mistake in the early days after embracing my gift.

Granted, in my case, that didn’t happen until I was an adult. I’d been born into a different world, a world where magick was a sin. My world equated
different
with
evil
. Even at twelve, I understood how bad it was to be different. When the school bullies started picking on me and I put my tiny little fist through a concrete wall like the she-hulk, I knew better than to tell the truth about what happened. Adolescent hormone infused rage, the psychologists told my mother. Never mind I could suddenly outrun the entire track team when, before, I could barely cross the school parking lot without wheezing. Forget I could tell when people were lying or afraid because of the strange halo of colors surrounding their bodies. I was terrified, lost and alone with no one there to explain to me it was just my power waking up.

Of course, my mother didn’t buy it. She took me to church and let the church elders anoint me with holy oil and pray over me, their hands pressing so hard against my forehead it hurt. The preacher and all the church ladies fell into speaking in tongues at such a frightening pace spittle flew from their mouths in a shower. After two exorcisms, an extended diet straight out of the Bible, and a month of being shielded from all demonic influence through music and TV, I learned only one thing: never tell an adult when you’re afraid.

If something like BSI had existed back then, I would have had somewhere to go, people I could have confided in. I would have grown up knowing I was just accessing my magick instead of fighting off demonic possession. For all the organization’s faults, BSI helped more than it hurt. It wasn’t perfect, but what in the world was? I had to believe Reed was wrong. The alternative was my mother’s religious fervor, Alex’s murder, night upon night spent alone in tears believing I was evil. It was chaos. I couldn’t believe in chaos.

That’s why I joined BSI and chose to specialize in demons and the occult. There were too many misconceptions out there on the topic. Occult didn’t mean evil. In fact, the word itself just meant secret. It was used by larger organized religions to refer to those driven underground for fear of persecution. Desperation turned occultists into offenders. Fear and marginalization forced their hands. Every practitioner I arrested could have been me if I hadn’t found BSI.

I pulled the original paper out of the fax machine and trudged back to my office. With or without help, I still had to solve this case and do it quickly. I didn’t have any more time to sit in conference rooms making analogies. I had to hit the streets and start getting answers. I needed to know what I was hunting.

There were a few people in Concho County who could help. Sal was a healer and a helper by nature, bound by the healer’s oath not to dabble in the dark arts. He and Chanter had a lot of combined knowledge concerning the world of spirits and supernatural bad things. But Chanter’s cancer had made him so weak I didn’t want to burden him with work for my sake.

Mara could help
, I thought, and then dismissed the thought. Mara was a spirit sensitive, able to let spirits possess and speak through her. If there was some kind of rogue spirit running around, killing things, I didn’t want her on its radar. While her abilities were useful, they didn’t translate to field work. She didn’t have the chops yet to defend herself from anything nasty. I’d seen her get a nosebleed from trying to read auras on her own.

Kim has to be involved somehow.
It did seem odd she’d pulled all her staff from the club the night of the attack. It was suspicious if nothing else. And, as a co-owner of the club, she had opportunity. The only thing I didn’t see her having was motive.
Unless it has something to do with the debt she’s been paying off. Desperate people, desperate things and all that.

I dropped the paper on my desk and checked the clock on my cell phone. It was edging toward midday. Daytime would be when any vampire was at their weakest and the safest time to challenge one. Still, I’d have to be careful with my questioning now since her dad had endorsed Tindall for sheriff. I didn’t want him filing a complaint with the department.

After checking my files for an address and printing out a set of directions, I picked up my desk phone and dialed the number I had on file for Kim Kelley. A pleasant, masculine voice answered the phone. “Kelley residence. How may I direct your call?”

“This is Special Agent Judah Black with BSI,” I said. “I’m looking into the murders at Aisling and I was hoping to arrange a time to meet with the co-owner, Kim Kelley.”

“I’m sorry,” replied the man. “Mistress Kelley’s schedule is full this afternoon.”

“Clear it,” I demanded. “Or I can get a subpoena and we can do this downtown after I call the press.”

There was a brief pause on the other end. “Hold, please,” said the male secretary, and there was a click. Elevator music came over the line. I waited, tapping my fingers on the top of my desk. After a moment, he came back on. “Mistress Kelley is more than happy to meet with you over lunch, Agent Black. Is one o’clock too late?”

I looked back at the clock. I had two hours to kill and I hadn’t been out to the morgue yet. If traffic was with me, I could make that time without any trouble. “One is fine.”

“She’d like to know if you’d like her to send a car or if you’ll be providing your own transportation?”

“I can drive there just fine, provided all the addresses in her file are up to date.”

“Of course. We’ll be expecting you.”

I hung up without saying goodbye and reached for my keys, accidentally knocking them off the corner of my desk. With a sigh, I bent over to pick them up, pausing as my eyes fell on the lock of the top drawer. There was more than one way to get information out of the evidence in there. If I knew anything about vampires, I knew they prided themselves on being well informed. And it was Marcus Kelley who had supposedly moved several road blocks out of my way in my quest to take down LeDuc. There was no reason to assume his daughter wouldn’t help as well. After all, everyone did say nothing happened in Concho County without going through the Kelleys first.

On a whim, I picked up the keys, unlocked the drawer, retrieved the evidence baggie and thrust it into my purse before heading out the door.

*****

To call the privately owned, for-profit Eden Memorial Medical Facility a hospital would be an understatement. Ten stories high and taking up a whole city block, the place was attached to one of the most up and coming research hospitals in the nation. It was the only hospital I knew of equipped to deal with the unique emergency needs of supernaturals, which meant it enjoyed a whole slew of extra government grants. It was also the only morgue in the tri-county area.

I eased my old car into the parking garage and drove up six dark and dusty levels before I found any parking. Then, I took the garage elevator into the hospital proper. The reception floor was covered in modern circles of pastel tile breaking up the sea of blue between me and the smiling receptionist at the desk labeled Welcome Center.

“Howdy, there,” said the blonde. “Can I direct you somewhere?”

Her smile didn’t crack in the least when I showed her my badge and asked for the morgue.

“Sure thing, sweetie. You’re going to follow the green tiles to elevator B. That’ll take you to corridor G where you’ll need to follow the orange path to the service elevator. You’ll want to ride that down to the sub-basement. That’s level BB. You can follow the signs from there.”

I stared at her. Then, I looked around at the colored circles on the floor, trying to find a string of green ones and coming up empty. “Say what now?”

I wound up with a map and got turned around three times before I finally found the damn service elevator. Hospitals should never be bigger than shopping malls.

I’d rather be in a graveyard than a morgue any day of the week. Graveyards are peaceful. Even though I knew I was walking around on top of decay, there was comfort in knowing death was feeding life. Birds chirped. Wind blew. Somewhere off in the distance, someone was mowing grass or playing a stereo. When walking through a graveyard, I could maintain the illusion of life even though I was very much aware of death.

Not so in a morgue. Morgues are dark, cramped little places with low ceilings. More often than not, they’re in basements or sub-basements where the ambient air is ten to fifteen degrees cooler. The air smells rotten but sweet with a chemical-clean stink underneath. Aside from the sound of my footsteps echoing across the linoleum floor once I stepped out of the elevator and through the swinging doors into the morgue proper, the only sound was coming from the large refrigerator units on either wall. They looked like giant, stainless-steel filing cabinets. Lives here were reduced to pathologies, weights and measures. Mortuaries didn’t look at people. They looked at bodies.

“Oh, I was wondering when I’d see you again.”

I turned my head and saw the ME from the crime scene sitting at a desk in the corner bent over a computer.

“Doctor Kalma, right?” I asked, hoping I got the name right.

“That’s me.”

I walked casually over to her desk, trying to ignore the body on the stainless steel table. She’d placed a sheet over it, but it didn’t hide the fact that it wasn’t Jane Doe. This body was much too small. It was child-sized. I tried hard not to think about the other body while we spoke. “I was wondering what you had on Jane Doe. Did she ever freeze solid?”

Doctor Kalma got up from her desk and walked over to the refrigerated cabinet, searching for Jane’s drawer. “The reaction finally stopped, evening out around thirty degrees, but only after I got her here. I was just about to get started on that one. I know you guys are in a hurry and this is a high profile case, but I’m just swamped at the moment.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Ah, here it is.”

She opened the drawer, slid over a gurney and yanked on the metal tray holding the body, heaving to get it onto the gurney. I offered to help but she waved me away, preferring to fight with Jane’s weight. Once on the gurney, she wheeled the whole thing over to the secondary table, lifted the tray and placed it on the morgue table. Finished, she let out a deep breath and rested her hands on either side of the table. “I don’t remember her being so heavy the first time. Give me a minute.”

“Take your time.”

“Any leads?”

I shrugged and glanced over at the other body for just a moment before forcing my eyes away. “Not really. Not anything solid yet, anyway.”

Doctor Kalma nodded, unzipped the body bag and started pulling it away. Jane looked even worse now. Her face and fingers were blue and the rest of her was a waxy off white. At the sight of her, all the images from the crime scene came back and I thought I would throw up again.

The ME was busy cutting off Jane’s clothes, chatting away into one of those medical recording devices, while I tried to think of a good way to excuse myself. She worked the scissors through the fabric of the corset with no trouble, carefully avoiding so much as bumping the hole in Jane’s chest. When she had the fabric split in two, the stiff garment fell open and I felt a whole new wave of nausea at what I saw.

At the scene, both the doc and I had observed the black, spidery veins resting just under the surface of her skin. They’d extended a few inches away from the hole in Jane’s chest. Now, they went all the way from her chest to under her arms, up into her neck and down below her navel.