“I’ll have you know we have a set of rules we are governed by.
They keep all of mankind safe and out of—
”
“Yeah, you’ve done a bang up job of that so far
,
haven’t you?
Look
,
lady
,
why don’t you bring it down a couple of degrees and let these two talk? You want to make sure I know you’re not a
t
fault when clearly you are
,
and these two want to get to the issue.”
Myles turned his back to Anye and addressed him and Holly.
“I got an email from Gregory last night.
I was coming here to see him when I drove up and saw the circus out there.”
Phil nodded
,
feeling at ease with the human because of his ability to adapt and frankly
,
to keep Anye sputtering.
He glanced at Holly who stepped to the man.
Myles stood when she reached out her hand.
“I’m Holly Force and this is Phil Campbell.
We’ve been assigned to find her and bring her down.
They claim that she’s unredeemable.”
Holly winked at him before continuing with Myles.
“She might be
,
but that’s not my decision to make.”
“What did Gregory tell you in his—
”
“How did you know who I was?
You said earlier that I was the man from the meeting.
How did you know that?
I don’t remember…is it a vamp thing that I couldn’t see you?”
Myles grinned.
“You didn’t follow me up to my room later
,
did you?”
“Most certainly not.”
Phil laughed when he realized the man was poking fun at him.
His respect for the cop was rising by the minute.
“I was there and you didn’t see me because I chose for you not to.
I made you think I wasn’t there.
Gregory had a great deal of the story right
,
but not all.”
“I knew she wasn’t a human.
I didn’t know what she was
,
but nothing human could have not aged like she had nor torn those people up that way without someone, anyone seeing her. And she picked her victims as well. How is that? Or even better yet, why does she do this?
I don’t know anything at all about your…kind
,
but this can’t be the norm.”
He looked at both of them before he looked to Anye.
“Tell me. I have the right to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Yes
,
and if I had the answers for you I’d give them to you.
But we…she hasn’t been on our books long.
And her maker…she killed her maker before anything could have been done about reporting her.”
Anye leaned against the wall as she continued.
“All we know we’ve pieced together from the tales from that era.
The paper, if that is what they called it
,
had very little to say on the girl’s disappearance.
And the only thing that brought us to the small rural town was the death of one of our own.”
“So you have a rogue vamp that you don’t know, running around doing things you aren’t aware of to people you can’t warn.”
Myles stood up and looked back at him and Holly.
“Just tell me how to kill the bitch and I’ll take care of this myself.”
Holly snorted.
“You sound like every television show I’ve ever seen.”
She made a face and raised her voice a few octave
s
.
“Oh, help me
,
big
,
bad policeman.
I think maybe a big old vampire has bitten me.”
“You got a better idea?
If you do then let’s hear it.”
Holly took off her jacket and tossed it on the floor and Myles laughed as he continued
.
“Oh that’ll solve a lot.
Getting down and—mother fuck.”
Holly growled low as she stood before him as her wolf.
Phil laughed so hard at the expression on the man’s face that he nearly fell onto the floor.
Myles tried to climb the wall as Holly got closer to him
,
stood up on her hind legs
,
and licked his face without touching him.
“Down
,
girl.
We don’t want the poor man to have a stroke.”
She backed away and sat on Phil’s feet at his command.
“Good girl.
Now please shift back. We have plenty of work to do yet.”
She shifted and stared at Myles as he sat down hard on the chair again. “You’re one scary bit…woman,” he told her.
“No, you were right the first time, I’m a scary bitch.
And so we’re clear, you call me that again as a human and I’ll bite your dick off and have it for lunch.”
She grinned.
“And that’s how we’re going to get the bitch.”
After the coroner took the body away both she and Phil sat with Myles and Gregory’s granddaughter.
She was so distraught that Holly was worried about her.
The poor woman had practically walked in on her grandfather being murdered and couldn’t keep focused on anything around her for very long.
“He went up to bed early last night.
He said that he wanted to get an early start on the files tomorrow.” She stood up
,
handed Phil an empty cup
,
and sat back down.
“There’s nothing more refreshing than a cup of warm milk.”
“You said that he’d been working hard on the files, Miss Matthews.
Do you know if he kept any more information elsewhere?”
Myles took her hand into his and smiled.
“You’re grandda was a very meticulous man.
I’m sure he had some files put in a cabinet somewhere.”
“His shirts had to be ironed just so.
At first
,
I hated doing them for him
,
but he told me how
G
randma used to iron his shirts every morning for him while he baked.
He said she and him would be in the kitchen for hours just baking and ironing.”
She smiled at the memory.
“He baked me a pie once.
It was the worst thing I’d ever eaten.”
Holly laughed.
“My mother can bake a mean apple pie.
My dad used to say she’d win ribbons for hers if she entered a contest.
She didn’t iron and neither did he.
My mom thought if it didn’t come out of the dryer neat, then you’d iron it yourself.
How long had he been saving information on this case?”
“Years
,
I suppose.
There’s a large box of his stuff downstairs.
He kept everything in neatly labeled files.”
Myles let go of Mary Kathleen’s hand as she continued to tell them what she knew. “He’d set it up there first thing, his office.
He told me that there were things that a woman shouldn’t see.”
She looked at the stairs that led to the bedrooms. “I can understand that more than ever now.”
“Mary Kathleen, what can you tell me about what happened?
Anything.”
She seemed to focus on Phil for a moment when he spoke
,
but looked at the door again before saying anything.
“We were going to email it all to a policeman
,
he’d told me.
Someone he’d met in one of his travels.
He never said his name and if he did
,
I don’t remember it.
Do you think I should call the funeral home and make some arrangements?”
She looked back at Holly.
“I can’t believe he’s gone.
That woman must have come in while I was out seeing to a noise I heard.”
“She might have.
I can have someone call the funeral home for you to make you an appointment if you’d like.
You said there was a noise, what kind of noise?”
Holly knew how to talk to distress
ed
people.
She’d had to learn how to do it
in order
to do her job.
“The doorbell rang.
I thought it was odd because no one around here uses it.
We all pretty much trust…
I went out onto the porch and then there was another noise under the bushes. I thought it was the neighbor’s cat. Delilah Jane
,
if you can believe that.
Who names their cat such a horrible name?”
“Some people shouldn’t have pets
,
I think.
I have never even owned a cat myself.”
Holly didn’t point out that cats usually didn’t get along well with her kind
,
but moved on
to what she was working toward.
“There was a picture in the room.
Did you know who she was?”
Mary Kathleen nodded.
“She was the one he’d had a crush on
,
he’d told me.
She’d been…I think he told me she’d been on his first case.
He said that she’d told him her name was…let me see…it’ll come to me.
But that was a fake name.
Her real name was Theresa Elizabeth Sykes.
Tessie
,
he called her sometimes.”
“Tessie.
What a lovely name.
Did you ever meet her?”
Phil asked quietly
,
but Holly was sure he already knew the answer.
“She doesn’t look all that old to me. He must have been very young himself.”
“She died.
I’m not sure if…I think he told me she’d been killed by someone she didn’t know.
He said he’d have to give the notes to that policeman.”
She looked over at Myles as if seeing him for the first time.
“You. It was you.
I remember now. I have your email address and it was your name attached to it.
He…
G
randda had me put them all in a draft and I was to send them to you all at once when he…I guess he’s finished now.”
She led them to the basement soon after.
Holly had everything there moved to her car and was heading out of the house when Mary Kathleen stopped her.
She handed her an envelope and simply turned and walked back into her house.
The lock clicking home when she went inside her home was
loud
even with all the street noises.
Holly decided to open it when she and Phil were alone.
~~~
Dallas looked over all the information in front of him.
There was a great deal of it too. The man, Mr. Hooper
,
had kept very good notes
,
but the vast amount of it was a little overwhelming even for a neat person like him.
“What do you know so far?”
Dallas glanced up at Phil as he walked into the room.
“Shit, you look horrible.
Maybe you should, I don’t know
,
go for a
midnight
rum or something.”
“You mean run and
,
no
,
I—
”
“No, I meant what I said.
A rum might do you a bit of good.
Might take a little of the edge you have right now.”
Phil laughed as he sat across from him.
“Or a run works too.
But seriously, what have you figured out?”
“Not too much
,
but I do think that Hooper knew a little more than a human should.
I believe by his notes and files that he figured she was something not human
,
but he wasn’t sure what.
There are files on vampires as well as wolves.
There is also a file on mythical creatures that I’ve never heard of.
He was very th
o
rough
,
I’ll give him that.”
Dallas handed a thick file to Phil and nodded to Myles when he entered the room and sat down.
“This one is on vampires.
I will be honest and tell you
,
while I don’t know everything about your kind, this stuff seems to be pretty dead on.”
While Phil read through the file, Dallas looked though another box. There were seven of them all marked with dates.
Myles had told him that they were dates of the killings.
But when he’d done a search
,
he’d found fourteen murders with the same MO.
Dallas compared the ones he had information on to the list that Myles had given him.
The missing seven w
ere
two before Gregory had started and the other five were dispersed between the others almost evenly.