Bad Blood, page 11
part #7 of Jack Dahlish Series
I sniffed a laugh. “Yeah, it was. I took him out to where the Harrison estate is and dropped him off far enough away to be out of range of their security. He’s going to scout around and try to find any information we can use. With a little luck, he’ll encounter this shaman that Uriah brought in.”
“I don’t like how much I was worrying about you today. There has to be some way for you to remind me about Thirteen when we leave Windemere.”
“If you think of one, I’m all ears.”
“What about a note? I could write something explaining about the gray men, so that when I worry you can show it to me.”
“Possibly, but then I’d have to spend ten minutes explaining things to you each time. I have a feeling you’d forget it fairly quickly, too, because of how the gray men work. Their entire existence is built around people forgetting them on the off chance they get noticed.”
I walked over to take her hand and pull her into a hug. “I’ll ask Narise about it the next time I talk to her, and we’ll see if she can come up with any research that might give us an answer.”
We left the armory and walked through the yard to enter the main house. The smell of roasting chicken and potatoes met our nose, and Turvord greeted us happily. “Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”
“Just enough time to wash up,” I said, eying the nisse as we continued out into the hall toward the stairs. He was always doing things like closely anticipating our return or conjuring meals that I’d been thinking about while working on a case. I was increasingly convinced he had some telepathic abilities, despite his continued denials.
SEVENTEEN
A fter dinner, Annie and I returned to the front parlor to read through the copies of the police reports again. I was hoping to find some piece of information that would shed more light on what we’d seen through the day, but it was a fruitless couple of hours.
Both of us were yawning widely by the time I dropped the report I was reading and announced I was heading up to bed. Annie held up a finger, and I waited as she finished reading the page she was holding. When she did, she dropped it and swung her legs off the chaise. “I forgot how much fun reading those reports can be.”
I laughed, then realized she wasn’t being sarcastic. “Which of us is supposed to be worrying about the other’s sanity?” I asked as we made our way up the creaking stairs.
“You just don’t have the right mindset for them, Dahlish. Too many years of reading fairytales and old myths as part of your research.” She smiled at me, bumping her shoulder against mine.
“Maybe, but that dry reading almost put me to sleep half a dozen times. I’m starting the think the reason you cops always eat so many donuts is because you need the sugar rush to stay awake.”
“I haven’t had a donut in weeks, and I’m still awake and full of energy.” Her smile turned wicked, and she grabbed my hand to pull me toward the bedroom. “I’ll show you just how much energy I have left.”
I was enjoying pleasant dreams when a persistent noise brought me awake. My phone was buzzing on the nightstand, the screen flashing with an incoming call. I grumbled as I reached over to grab it. The screen was blurry to my newly awoken eyes, but I knew there could only be one of a handful of people calling for it to ignore my Do Not Disturb settings.
“Hello,” I said as I put it against my ear. I was sure it came out as mushy nonsense.
“Jack, it’s Ollie. There’s been another murder.”
I sat up, instantly awake as adrenaline coursed through my veins. “Where? How long ago?”
“I just caught the report on the radio. A man walking his dog heard loud noises inside a home on his block, and called it in. A unit responded within five minutes, and the patrolmen found the front door cracked open. When they made entry, the body was only a few feet inside the house.”
I rubbed a palm over my eyes, trying to remove the gumminess of sleep. “This person was killed in a house? All our previous donors were killed at their place of business. Are you sure this one is related?”
Ollie’s voice was urgent. “No doubt about it, Jack. The killer left a message this time, written in the victim’s blood.” He blew into the phone. “It was just a number on the wall. 12.”
“Because this is the twelfth victim,” I said, throwing off the covers. I shook Annie’s shoulder, told her we needed to go, and then walked toward the bathroom. “Where are we going?” I asked Ollie.
In less than five minutes, we were dressed and walking across the yard toward the garage. The early morning air was moist and cold, and I could see my breath puffing whitely with each step. The grass was covered in dew, and I couldn’t help thinking that in another month we might be looking at frost on the ground at that hour.
While I drove, Annie did a search on the victim’s name, which Ollie had been able to provide before he hung up. “Real estate investor,” she said, scrolling through a long list of entries. “This guy had a hand in at least a couple of dozen holdings. I bet he got a huge head start from the vampires.”
“That doesn’t automatically mean he was a donor,” I said, wishing I could call Mariah to find out from her if he had been. I was privately just as convinced as Annie that he had to be.
“No, but I’ll be shocked if he’s not. The more I learn about these vampires, the less I trust rags-to-riches stories.” She flipped to a new program on her phone. “The address we’re going to is listed as a primary residence. Purchased seven years ago for eighty-five percent of the asking price.” She shot me a triumphant look.
“Okay, so it’s about ninety-nine percent that he’s a donor. Especially with that number left on the wall. I still don’t get why our killer hit this one at home. Why change their M.O. so suddenly?”
“Maybe they heard Jack Dahlish was back in town, and they didn’t want to risk you staking out the business of the most likely target.”
I scoffed at that. Loudly. “That would presume I had some inside knowledge, since I don’t even know who the vampire donors are. I could make some guesses, but those are more likely to be wrong than otherwise.”
“Sure, but the killer probably doesn’t know that. They may think this Harrison guy is cooperating completely with you, giving you every shred of information that you need.”
“Sure. We’ll mark that as possibility fifty, since there are a ton of other things more likely. Such as our killer being too impatient to wait until the victim went to work tomorrow.”
Annie shrugged. “It’s almost impossible to get into the head of a perp when you know almost nothing about them.”
“We know they hate vampires.”
“Do we?” She looked at me seriously. “If their goal is to hurt vampires, why kill the humans that offer a little blood now and then? How many of these donors will have to die to do more than inconvenience the vampires?”
That was a good question. Mariah had admitted that some others walked away, thinking the dangers had started to outweigh the gains. But she’d also intimated that it would take more losses before the family began to feel the strain.
“Unless this is just the first stage,” I suggested. “Maybe the killer wants the vampires to know that someone is out there stalking their food, to make them come out and try to find him or her.”
Annie shuddered. “I can think of a lot of stupid things, but provoking a group of vampires would be right at the top.”
“Unless you were trying to goad them to act incautiously. If Uriah takes enough losses, he might even leave the estate himself. That’s something that hasn’t happened in all my years as one of the Nine.”
She grunted. “Seriously? He never leaves?”
I shook my head. “Nope, that’s what the clutch is for. The younger members like Mariah go out and do the work that needs to be done, while the older members remain on the compound and monitor whatever schemes they’ve hatched for this century.”
“Hmm.” Annie pressed the button to darken her phone screen as she leaned back in the seat. “So, if you were targeting one of those older vampires, the only ways to reach them is to fight through everyone on the estate or to lure them out somehow.”
“Exactly. Kill enough of the food sources, and a person could possibly achieve their goal of luring the older members of the clutch away from the protection of home.”
“Or at least thin out the number of vampires around the compound, if they go out to start guarding important donors instead.”
It was an interesting line of thought, but I wasn’t sure how much faith we could put in it. Even if there were two or three different Nox involved in these killings, that was about a couple dozen too few to go up against the might of a vampire family.
The man who had worn the coin before me, Albert Placencia, had died trying to clear out a clutch that turned rabid and started attacking humans and Nox alike to drain their bodies of blood. When he fell, alongside the Knights who went into the lair with him, it had taken more than a year for a large group of the Nine and their Knights to gather to finish the job and recover his body. The coin has been lost in the process, turning up years later when the Magpie was trying to sell it.
As we turned onto the street where the crime scene was located, with the flashing lights of several police cars ahead, I had a frightening thought. Why had that clutch turned rabid? Could it have been because some unknown person or group of people began to attack their donors, depriving them of the substance they required, until they were so desperate that they had no choice but to attack anyone to feed?
I decided to keep that worrying thought to myself.
When we walked toward the crime scene, we were stopped by one of the uniformed patrol officers standing outside the house. Annie tried to talk her way past, but the kid reluctantly told her the house was closed to anyone not working the case. Himself included, as it turned out. We watched a detective walk out of the door of the cookie cutter mansion, stroll past us, and then hand a box full of evidence bags to the patrolman. He was ordered to take it back to the station right away.
“Shouldn’t you let forensics sweep the house first?” Annie asked, her eyebrows drawn in with confusion.
The detective shot us a glare, doing a double take as he recognized her. “If it isn’t former officer Anne Bishop. Not so high and mighty now, are you? How about you leave the police work to the real cops? You and your boyfriend here can go watch some husbands screwing prostitutes. It’s all your kind are good for.”
She fumed as he walked back into the house, but I’d heard similar things too many times to let it affect me. Some cops would never understand why people like me went the route of being a private investigator instead of joining the “blue brotherhood”.
Another young cop took the place of the first, keeping us behind a barricade along with other people who were gathering from the neighborhood. Rich or poor, when the cops showed up, everyone wanted to see what was going on.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Annie muttered. “The detectives should never be removing evidence before forensics does their work.”
I looked around the busy street, seeing only the patrol units, a couple of unmarked cars, and an ambulance that must have been called as a precaution. There was no sign of the coroner’s van or any of the trucks for the crime scene techs.
Looking for them sent a shiver down my spine, though. After all, there was one group that could be counted on to arrive at every murder scene. And one of those forensic techs just happened to be a vampire who belonged to the family whose donors were being targeted.
EIGHTEEN
I walked away from the lights and noise as I pulled out my phone. The moon was rising behind the houses in front of me as I pressed buttons and hit Send. The phone began to ring, and I silently urged her to answer.
After half a dozen rings, she picked up. “You know I can’t talk to you.”
“Mariah, please tell me you’re not coming to this crime scene.”
She didn’t even ask which one I meant. “We’re a few blocks away, Jack. Why?”
“Can you turn around and have them send someone else?”
Mariah laughed, a short bark of sound. “I don’t get to pick and choose my assignments. Besides, I’m riding with the boss right now,” she said in a low voice.
I cursed, and again when I saw a black SUV turn onto the street and begin rolling toward me. I ended the call and jogged over to where it parked. An older, heavyset man climbed down from the driver’s side. He gave me an uninterested glance as he headed for the rear of the vehicle, where he opened the doors and gathered his kits.
Mariah joined him, but she shot me a cautious look as she did so. Her movements were purposely slow, so that her boss was ready to go before she was. “I’m going to get in there before those gorillas stomp all over our evidence,” he told her in a gruff voice. “Make sure you grab the extra evidence bags. If this is like the last one, we’ll need them.”
He set off for the house with an aggressive stance, flashing his credentials as he walked past the young cop at the barrier. I hurried over as soon as he was a few steps from the vehicle. “Mariah, we need to get you out of here.”
She shrugged as she continued shoving items into a top-loading case. “This is my job, Jack.”
I grabbed her arm, pulling her around to look at me. I couldn’t blame her for the angry glare, or for baring her fangs in a momentary reaction to the abrupt movement. “Whatever is out there killing your donors is doing so for a reason. I think that reason is to lure vampires out where they can be attacked.”
Her eyes shifted to look around the area, and I could tell she was considering the logic of my intuitive leap. “How many of these crime scenes have you worked?” I asked her. “You said in the Den that you were involved in the first investigation, but have you worked any of them since?”
She nodded reluctantly. “I was pulled in for the fourth and seventh. Jim likes to mix up the teams that work suspected serial cases, to make sure we don’t get tunnel vision and miss something unexpected.”
Annie bumped my arm as she joined us. “Which I could have told you if you’d asked, Dahlish. We were always grousing about that when I was on the force, because those of us working a scene would have to go over every piece of information with whichever forensics techs showed up. We never knew if they’d been involved in previous cases or not.”
Mariah nodded. “It’s saved us from making some big gaffs in the past, though. Assumptions are one of the biggest dangers on this job.”
“Mathis! What’s taking so long?”
I looked over to see her boss standing in the doorway of the house. Mariah waved and turned back to finish packing her case. “Look, Jack, I appreciate that you’re looking out for me, but I have to do my job. If this killer was aiming to attack me, why not do it at one of the previous scenes?” She slammed the doors of the SUV and turned to jog toward the house.
“Because they were watching to find your vulnerabilities,” I muttered under my breath.
Annie grabbed my hand as she looked up at me. “You really think this Nox is hanging out around here, waiting to attack Mariah?”
“I do. It makes the most sense with what we know.”
“Okay, we should probably be doing a circuit of the block then, to see if we can find where they might be hiding.”
We stopped at my car, and I opened the trunk. It looked empty on first inspection, but I’d long ago removed the spare tire that rested under the lining. When I stuck a finger through the small hole and lifted the lid, half a dozen weapons were revealed. They would mean serious problems if my car was ever searched by the cops, but without them I probably wouldn’t have survived this long.
Annie reached for the spare gun she kept there, but then changed her mind and grabbed a wakizashi instead. The short sword had a blade that was just over a foot in length, and it barely fit in the small compartment. “The last thing we need are gunshots drawing all these cops toward us,” she said, jerking her chin toward the crime scene.
There weren’t any batons in the compartment, which were my favored weapons, so I had to settle for a slightly curved throwing stick. It was smooth, as long as my forearm, and had a fist-sized lump of wood on one end. I could use it as a ranged weapon, but it would also serve as a club in a pinch. I slid it into a loop inside of my herringbone, one of several that Turvord had added so I could carry my batons without standing out.
I took a look toward the crime scene as I closed the trunk, grimacing when I saw that there were now at least twenty people standing around the barricade. They were watching cops walk in and out of the house, chatting amongst themselves as they shared theories and speculations about what had happened inside. The press wouldn’t be far behind, and then it would be doubly hard to find someone who didn’t belong.
None of the people in the crowd gave off any essence, so I marked them all as human. I dismissed them, since I was certain we were looking for a Nox as being responsible for the killings. Then I thought of the strange hairs and shifted my gaze lower. “Remember,” I told Annie, “this creature can probably shift into an animal form. Coyote or bear.”
“Or both,” she said grimly.
We set out down the sidewalk, walking slowly away from the crime scene. I scanned one side of the street while she focused on the other, watching for any signs of a lurking attacker or the path they might have taken. I was hoping to find the sickly yellow essence trail, but I hadn’t even caught a scent of the skunk-like odor as we reached the end of the street.
“Left or right?” Annie asked.
I looked both directions, not seeing anything that marked one out as the best choice. “We need to cover both, just in case.”
“Agreed,” she said with a nod, gripping the handle of the wakizashi that was tucked through her belt. “You go right, I’ll go left. We’ll meet up again at the far end of this street after we loop our respective blocks.”
