InsistentHunger (19 page)

Paige stopped near the jewelry store and braced her hand
against the cool, rough brick. “And what if I demanded to be part of your
killing squad…what if I’d refused to be a runner?”

“Then I would have pointed you to the same spot and told you
to take out as many of the bastards as you could. You might have taken a couple
before panicking and running. Might not have. Either way, I would have been
left to pick them off your tail. But damn, Silver, you made it hard running
that fast. Next time, slow down some.”

“There won’t be a next time. If I ever see you again, I’m
going to shoot you in the kneecap.”

“Fuck, Silver, don’t be like—”

“I suggest you get out of town. Immediately.”

“How the hell do you think I got into hunting? You think I
don’t know how pissed you are? Damn. I actually took a shot at the man who set
me up.”

“I didn’t choose to be part of your fucking war,” Paige
hissed.

“I made the same choice you did. I told him that I never
went to war without enough information to make a tactical decision about how to
hit the enemy. I wasn’t prepared at all and the cars were a lot farther away. I
survived.” Hunter didn’t sound apologetic at all.

“And you developed such empathy and moral excellence from
that experience.” The sarcasm felt good, but shooting Hunter in the knee would
feel better.

“Fuck you. I get the job done and I’ve never lost a runner.
Well, actually now I have. I couldn’t find you, and I don’t mind telling you,
you scared the life out of me. Luckily you sound pretty damn alive this
morning.”

“Oh I knew you were shooting at the guys coming after me,”
she whispered as she tried to hide her mouth with one hand. She really didn’t
need anyone to overhear this conversation. “Funny enough, after someone lies to
me and sets me up, I’m not going to trust them.”

“You’re a smart one. You’d be a hell of a hunter.”

“Get your ass out of town and take your partner with you.”
She hit the end button and leaned against the brick building as she tried to
stop her hands from shaking. Her body still remembered the terror of last night
and it took her a second to regain her slipping control. This week was quickly
challenging her impression of herself as a strong woman because more and more
she just wanted to crawl in a hole and forget everything she’d seen.

Instead she shoved her cell phone back in her pocket and
headed for the station. The police reports hadn’t been interesting, but maybe
she could find something interesting in the coroner’s report.

Her gut kept telling her that these attacks were linked, and
if she could solve the rape cases, she could figure out what the hell was going
on with their sudden vampire problem. If she couldn’t figure anything out,
she’d track Hunter down and shoot him in the knee. That would definitely
improve her day.

Paige headed back into the precinct station just in time to
hear two patrol officers gossiping about the latest news.

“It must have been a meth house because it went up like dry
kindling.”

“Someone should tear down those old houses,” the second
patrolman commented. “Was anyone killed?”

The first guy shook his head. “They found some bones, but
the coroner says they’re old…like hundreds of years old. I wonder if someone
had stuffed bodies in the attic or something.”

“That’s just macabre.”

Paige sighed. Macabre didn’t cover it. At least they weren’t
looking for the vampires who might have escaped the burning building. Paige
frowned as she remembered the woman standing on the second floor. Now that
terror wasn’t clouding her judgment, Paige felt like she should recognize the
woman. She wasn’t local. However, something nagged at the back of Paige’s mind.

Worrying at a memory never made it come faster though, so
Paige headed back into the station.

Chapter Thirteen

Paige stared at the screen, her skin turning to goose
pimples. John Monagas raped fourteen women in the Memphis area. He’d been shot
by police while fleeing. Paige was going to ignore the fact that the cops were
not supposed to ever shoot fleeing suspects. This guy deserved to have an
overeager officer put a bullet in him.

Most interestingly, the coroner’s report included a long
addendum attempting to explain how the body of John Monagas had vanished. A
week ago, Paige would have said some victim’s family member had stolen the body
to have a good old-fashioned bonfire where they could spit on Monagas’ remains
before letting coyotes eat his bones. Now…now she wasn’t sure.

Pulling up the arrest file, she read about how the sick
bastard had set up in an abandoned house and targeted women who had walked
past. In Memphis, he’d been a garden variety asshole. She looked around,
desperate to talk to someone about the lead. If he was still using abandoned
houses, then they’d probably walked right past him.

Paige hit print on his official mug shot. He had a wide face
and big eyes—he didn’t look particularly dangerous, although he was a large and
muscular man.

“Have something?” The profiler came out of nowhere with his
smile.

“A dead man,” Paige said as she tried to keep from showing
her aggravation. The last thing she needed was the profiler or the captain
demanding answers.

The profiler pulled the picture off the printer. “John
Monagas? He’s dead.”

Paige bit her tongue before pointing out that she’d already
figured that out. The date of death at the bottom gave that away. The profiler
looked at her, confused. Paige gave a shrug. “I don’t know, but something about
this guy is ringing bells,” Paige said, scrambling for some sort of
explanation.

“So you’ve seen him?”

It would be so easy to say yes, but then detectives would be
off chasing some connection between locals and John Monagas. “I don’t know. I’m
probably just imagining things.”

The profiler went over to Paige’s computer and scrolled
through Monagas’ file. “This looks like our guy’s M.O.”

“But this guy’s dead,” Paige pointed out, hoping to get him
off the trail before he started jumping to conclusions. She figured he could
jump for a long time before landing on the same conclusion she had. However,
she couldn’t exactly explain her logic.

The profiler didn’t look as put off by that as Paige had
expected. “Let’s run this by Captain Foley.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Paige protested. However, the
asshole was already on his way to the captain’s office. Gritting her teeth,
Paige trailed along behind him. The captain was on the phone and the profiler
waited, Paige’s printout in hand, until the captain put the phone down. He
didn’t even have time to knock before the captain was gesturing them to come
into the office.

“What ya got?” he asked, leaning forward and reaching for
the printout.

“Officer Silver was looking for homicides and assaults in
the surrounding counties, seeing if our boy had a temper problem with men as
well as women, and she found this.”

Captain Foley scanned it quickly, and his frown made it
pretty clear he didn’t understand why this was a lead. Paige leaned back
against the door when she really just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. From
the captain’s point of view, this was a dumb idea, and Paige did not like being
the bringer of dumb.

“He’s dead.”

“Yes, but he looks familiar to Silver and he has the same
pattern of behavior. We may be looking at a sibling or a partner who still has
Monagas’ picture up on a shelf in his living room as some sort of memorial.
Sometimes these predators will work in pairs, and if Monagas was the dominant
partner, then the junior partner is going to be missing his friend. Continuing
his friend’s pattern of killing is a way to maintain that relationship.”

Captain Foley perked up. “Did Monagas have a partner?”

“Not that Memphis knew,” Paige hurried to say before the
profiler could make her look any dumber. “I don’t know why he looked familiar,
Captain. Hell, I might have seen his picture in the paper.”

“The profiles are so similar—same age preference, same race
and geographical preferences. It seems like too much of a coincidence,” the
profiler disagreed.

The captain looked from Paige to the profiler and back. “You
think we should run with this?”

“Until we get another lead, yeah. It’s a long shot, but it’s
a long shot with a chance of turning something up. David Berkowitz was found
because of a parking ticket. Long shots can pay off big sometimes. Of course,
it could also be a dead end, but at worst, we’ve lost man-hours. Man-hours are
about the only resource we have to spare.”

Captain Foley got that satisfied expression he got on his
face when things were going well. “Then we run with it. Good work, Silver.” It
said a lot about the case that a lead as weak as this one made him feel so
satisfied.

Paige shifted uncomfortably. If the captain believed her,
she wasn’t going to be able to check out any of the abandoned houses. Even
worse, the cops were going to walk in on a vampire thinking they could order
him to the ground and arrest him.

She fought with a dozen different fears. She couldn’t lose
more friends. But if she tried to convince the captain that he couldn’t send
officers up against a vampire, she was going to be on a seventy-two-hour psych
hold with all her friends visiting her in the loony bin. She and Brady had to
get there first.

“Captain, finding this…I really want to go home and…” Paige
waved a hand. Let him assume whatever he wanted.

The self-satisfied expression vanished and he looked at her
with sympathy. “Do you want a ride?”

Paige shook her head. “I can drive myself.”

Captain Foley actually looked more concerned at that. For a
second, Paige thought he might protest, but then he just said, “Call if you
need anything.”

Paige nodded and started to turn.

“Silver?” he called. Paige looked back. The captain leaned
forward. “Matherton thought he could handle anything, and when he couldn’t, he
ate his gun.” He didn’t say anything more, but Paige could feel his words
sinking in. After a second, she nodded and headed for the time clock to check
out. If Hunter or his partner were at her house, she was going to arrest their
asses and let them sort the mess out. Actually, she was hoping they were at her
house. She felt a need to get pissy with someone.

Even after she got out to her car, Captain Foley’s words
still nagged at her. She couldn’t handle everything. And Brady didn’t know much
more about demons than she did. As much as she hated to admit it, she only had
one source of reliable information.

Pulling out her cell phone, she found the record for the
last call and hit redial.

“Hunter,” an annoying cheerful voice on the other end
answered.

“It’s Silver.”

“Yep, there’s this thing called caller ID. You have to love
modern technology.”

Paige gritted her teeth and fought an urge to hang up on the
bastard. “I have a question. If someone was dead and had been dead for a while,
could the body still be used to host a demon?”

The silence lasted long enough to get uncomfortable. “Dead
for how long?”

“A few hours, maybe up to twenty hours.” That’s how long it
had taken for the coroner to notice the body missing. At the very least, they
would have kept track of the body during transport and intake. After they had
it tagged, it turned up missing.

Hunter didn’t answer right away and Paige had the sinking
feeling he didn’t know as much as he liked to pretend. “Not that I know,” he
finally admitted. “Usually demons like the bodies fresh. I worked with a doc
once. He said that the demons were like puppeteers and if the nerves had a
chance to degenerate, then the puppeteer couldn’t pull all the right strings to
run the body.”

Paige tried to imagine the kind of doctor who would get
involved in demon hunting. She thought of the sad creatures like the Cody vamp
and then the sorts of things doctors had a reputation for doing when they
didn’t consider their subjects human. That wasn’t the sort of world she wanted
to be part of.

“So there’s no chance that someone whose body disappeared
might pop up later?”

“You have a specific person in mind?” Hunter was sounding
more cautious now, so Paige was guessing that there was something he wasn’t
telling her. A little voice in the back of her head told her to go back into
the station and have the tech boys trace the other end of the call so she could
go beat the answer out of Hunter, but that wasn’t the best way to keep a
secret. It really wasn’t the best plan when Hunter outweighed her by about
ninety pounds.

“I have a rapist who died in Memphis, shot twice in either
the side or the back depending on whose preliminary report you read. The next
day the body vanished and now our rapist is using the same MO.”

“A rapist? A bad one?”

Paige felt such a flash of anger that she could feel herself
get warmer. “Is there such a thing as a good one?” she demanded.

“Silver, there are degrees of everything and you fucking
know it. So get off your politically correct horse and answer the damn
question.”

Paige took several breaths. “One of the women here was
scared to death. In Memphis, one of the women was tied so tightly that the docs
had to amputate her hands because gangrene had set in.”

“Fuck.” All humor vanished from Hunter’s voice.

“Yeah, so I’d call him bad.”

“There’s a pattern to these things, Silver.”

Paige frowned. She was almost sure that answer didn’t make
sense. “What things?”

“You pass the preliminary test and you get a chance for some
training, a little on-the-job education. If you can hold your own and keep a
secret, you might move a little deeper into the community. You don’t find out
about demons one day and go digging into their society a day later.”