Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood (9 page)

Chapter 11

I’ll spare you the suspense: Yeah, I did it. I killed Lucius Hawthorne. Don’t look at me like that. He had it coming. Hawthorne was a piece of barely-human garbage, and the world’s a better place without him taking up a penthouse. Trust me. But it wasn’t like I could tell Fuerte that.
Uh, yeah Detective—I, the scarred, scraggly-haired, and non-politically-connected exterminator assassinated one of the most powerful land brokers in the country. But I had a really good reason, I swear.
I’d be in Rikers Island by the end of the day.

I realized Fuerte was talking, because I saw his lips moving, but I hadn’t been listening to a word he’d said.

“...do you think this kid is? Twenty? Twenty-one?”

I furrowed my brow and made a show of hunching over the picture. “Older than that, I’d say. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five.”

Fuerte frowned. “Nah, he’s about twenty. A hard twenty, though. Now, this sketch was made six years ago. How old didja say you were, Mr. Carver?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Hmm.”

I forced a laugh. It sounded more like a cough. “You can’t possibly think I killed him. I wasn’t even in the country six years ago.”

Fuerte took from the box another sheet of paper. He read: “‘...killed with a single cut from an extremely sharp weapon.’ That’s from the M.E.’s report. Off the record, he told me that the cut looked steady. The guy’s hand was strong. He knew what he was doing. Wasn’t his first kill.”

They were right about that. It wasn’t my first kill.

“Now, Mr. Carver, whattya want to bet that Miss Larsen’s autopsy report comes back the same way?”

“This guy looks like me,” I said, “I’ll give you that, but it’s not me. I didn’t kill Hawthorne and I didn’t kill Kim.”

Fuerte studied my face for a long moment. He licked his lips slowly, like a dog washing its face. “Nah. You’re lying. Here’s what I’ve never been able to figure out: Why’d you kill Hawthorne? Pillar of the community, very respected. Nothing stolen from the penthouse. What, he foreclose on your mama or something?”

He sounded so confident, so arrogant. He thought he knew me. The anger exploded out of me, before I knew what was happening. I slammed my hands on the table and snarled, “If you think I’m gonna confess to a crime I didn’t commit, you got another thing coming.”

Fuerte smiled, cocky and self-assured. “There it is. That’s the voice of a killer.”

I hit the table again, hard enough to hurt my palms. I glared at the detective and was gratified to see something like fear flicker across his face. I’ve never studied my own gaze, but I’ve seen enough other people react to it. When I want to I can look pretty scary.

The muscles in my arms screamed for permission to reach across the table, grab the fat cop by his two-sizes-too-small shirt and shake some sense into him. He couldn’t see that there was more going on here than he could understand. No one ever saw it, not unless undeniable proof was shoved directly under their faces. Even then, a lot of people refused to believe. Or they chose to forget. But Fuerte was a cop, a detective. If I could give him a logical argument...

“Is anyone watching us right now?” I asked. “Your partner, your lieutenant?”

Fuerte shook his head and shifted a little in his seat. He was uncomfortable with the question. Maybe this interrogation was off the books. Of course it was—he had no real evidence on me, no justification for holding me here.

I hesitated. This wasn’t the best way to handle this. Technically, it might have been against Table regulations. But I had no choice. I didn’t have time to play around with the human justice system. I needed to be out of this station. Now. I needed to tell Fuerte the truth.

“I’m not admitting anything,” I said. “You understand? This isn’t a confession.”

Fuerte nodded.

“How long have you been a cop?”

“Going on twenty years. I’ve been in Homicide for more than ten.”

“And in that time was Hawthorne the first case you couldn’t close? The first missing person you couldn’t find?”

“ ‘Course not.” Fuerte was frowning now, but he looked intensely at me, obviously interested. “Wasn’t the last one, either.”

“What if I told you that all of those cases do have a logical explanation?” I said. “All of those disappearances, all of those murders. There’s an explanation that makes perfect sense, but we, as a society, aren’t prepared to accept it.”

“What’s the explanation?” Fuerte asked. “UFOs? Mole people?”

“Magic,” I said. “Vampires, werewolves, demons. All of the things you stopped believing in when you were a little kid, and countless things you’ve never even imagined—they’re all real, and they’re all dangerous.”

I kept watching Fuerte’s eyes, expecting some flicker of amusement or annoyance. A smirk, a suppressed giggle. Something.

His eyes were serious when he said, “And there’s no evidence of any’a  this?”

“There’s evidence,” I said, “but most people don’t recognize it when they see it.”

He shook his head, but his eyes were still serious. “Either you’re insane or you’re the best damn liar I ever met.”

“Look at the statistics on child abductions and runaways from seven, eight years ago. In the six months before Hawthorne died, the number spiked more than a hundred percent. In the last month, two or three kids were disappearing a
week
. After Hawthorne died, that number returned to normal.”

“I remember those kids going missing. My nephew...” Fuerte’s eyes drifted off. “You’re saying Hawthorne was...what, raping them? Killing them?”

An image flashed behind my eyes, something that I still saw sometimes in my nightmares: mason jars beneath the floorboards of an apartment, full of blood; a golden knife on a black altar; tiny human skulls arranged in a pentagram.

“They were sacrifices,” I said. “Blood magic. Hawthorne was using them to gain power. By that point, he was too powerful for the NYPD to stop. He’d have killed dozens of people before you guys brought him down. There was nothing you could have done. Some things are just beyond the reach of normal cops.”

Fuerte stared at me for a long time. I could see the struggle on his face. He tried to keep it invisible, but there was no question that he, too, was reliving some painful memory. “So you killed him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Finally, he shook his head. “What about Larsen?”

I shrugged. “I think she was killed by something else that you guys just aren’t prepared for.”

“
Someone
else, you mean.”

“I said what I meant, Detective.”

He shook his head. “This is crap. Still...it sorta makes sense.”

“The thing that killed Kim is still out there,” I said. “And unless someone stops it, it’ll kill a lot more people.”

Fuerte smoothed his mustard-stained tie. “Let me guess: You’re the only one that can stop it?”

“Not the only one,” I said. “But I’m the guy whose job it is to stop it.”

Fuerte closed his eyes and leaned his head against the chair’s backrest. He stayed that way for a few moments. I sympathized with the man. It’s never easy finding out that the distance between the non-fiction and fantasy sections isn’t as long as you thought it was. Against every instinct in my body, I waited and kept my mouth shut. Fuerte needed to make this decision on his own.

His eyes suddenly snapped open and he stood up and began gathering the papers back into the box. He didn’t look at me as he said, “Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Carver, but you’re free to go.”

I blinked. Score one for me. Maybe I wasn’t terrible at this job. I took a business card I’d taken from the reception desk at the office and slid it to Fuerte.

“If you ever have a case like this again—one that doesn’t seem to make sense—give me a call.”

Fuerte took the card, slid it into his breast pocket, grunted, and left the room with his big cardboard box.

I stood in the dark room, savoring the freedom I’d come very close to losing. I’d really thought I was going to jail. But I didn’t take too long. I still had a lot of work to do.

Chapter 12

Emerging from inside the 108th Precinct, I took a deep breath of New York air. God, who knew I’d have missed that smell. I’d been in the interrogation room for a long time, apparently—afternoon had turned into evening, and the sun was settling down, getting ready to disappear behind the skyline. It was almost dark. Whatever the vampires were planning, soon they’d be free to put it into action. I had to get moving.

Krissy was waiting for me on the street, leaning against the hood of Earl James’s car. I nodded to the lieutenant, who was sitting behind the wheel, as Krissy threw her arms around me in a tight hug. I surprised myself a little by squeezing back.

As we got into the car, Earl looked at me. “Back to the office, sir?”

“Are the cops gone?”

“Yes, sir. They packed up about an hour ago. Took Kim to the morgue.”

I nodded. “Let’s get back to the office, then.”

The parking lot was still taped off, but the ambulances and cop cars were gone. The crowd had dissipated. The whole area had a strange vibe to it, like some deflated balloon. All that remained to remind the world that a woman’s life had been extinguished in this parking lot was the dark stain on the pavement. Soon, even that would have faded to the point where passersby would be able to fool themselves into thinking it was just oil, and not a woman’s life blood.

Call me a pessimist, but I doubted that the NYPD would have much luck in catching Kim’s killer. Logically, it had to be the same entity as the one that had killed McCreary, if not the same killer. Mortal justice wouldn’t be coming for this murderer. That meant it was up to me.

Rob and Madison were sitting quietly in the bullpen when I walked into the office. There was a grave silence in the air, suggesting that neither of them had said a word in quite some time. Madison’s mascara was smeared from crying and Rob stared stoically, silently, ahead.

I went into the round table room and sat down. Slowly, the rest of the team joined me.

This was a battered unit. Rob, Earl, and I were the last three combat-ready knights for a hundred miles. Under normal circumstances, that should have been more than enough. But these weren’t normal circumstances. The war had come to New York. Most of the Table’s forces were on the other side of the world, on the front lines. The fighting had been concentrated along the borders of sanctioned vampire territory—South America and Eastern Europe, mostly. The fact that vampires were in motion this far from their borders suggested that they had a plan. And when the vampires had a plan the Table had a problem. I knew that Rob and Earl, at least, weren’t going to like my decision, but I had no choice.

“We need help,” I said. “I’m gonna call the Nomads.”

As I expected, the two other knights reacted poorly. Earl’s eyes snapped to attention and he glowered, but he didn’t say anything. Rob, though, looked at me for a long moment and said, “Are you sure that’s necessary, boss?”

The entirety of my first stint with the Table had been in the nomadic division. The Nomads weren’t attached to any one location. We were the Table’s traveling shock troops, and I knew how little the rank-and-file liked it when we were brought into their territory. Our presence was seen as unnecessary at best. At worst we were glory-hogging, adventure-seeking hot heads horning in on other people’s turf. It stung the pride of a lot of knights, but there was a reason that captains kept calling for our assistance.

And now it was my turn.

“It’s necessary,” I said. “Normally there’re about a hundred knights stationed in North America. Right now, with the war, there’s about a fifth of that—twenty knights. On the whole continent. What do you think happens if the elders establish a foothold on this side of the Atlantic?”

“Nothing good,” Rob admitted.

“The Table’s biggest weakness is that we can’t move large numbers very quickly. We can move a dozen or two at a time, really quickly, but that’s it. When we get where we’re going, we’re beasts, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get that coordinated. If the vamps slip into New York we’re in trouble. We’re the last line of defense, folks. Once the vampires take New York, they’ll be able to spread throughout the rest of the country. They’d create millions of new vampires. London’s not ready for that many enemy combatants. If we don’t stop them here, that’s it for the Table. We’ll lose the war.”

Rob nodded finally. “You’re the boss.”

I gave him a half-hearted wave of acknowledgement. “Okay, so I need a place where I can make a phone call.”

It turned out I had a private office. Madison led me up the stairs, down a short hallway, and into a room at the end. She opened the door and said, “We’ll be downstairs if you need anything, Captain.” Something in her eyes, in her tone, told me that Madison Coburn was afraid.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said before she could make it back to the stairs.

“I hope so,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”

“Were you close with McCreary and Kim?” I asked.

“Everyone was close with Kim.” Madison smiled faintly. “She was like the team mom. The captain, though...he spent most of his time up here. Towards the end he never spoke to any of us. It was like he was obsessed with something.”

“Still, I’m sorry for what happened to them.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Madison said.

I wished I could believe that.

The office was small and functional. A couple of decent sized windows, so I’d get good sunlight during the day. All there was in the way of furniture was a solid-looking desk and a couple of chairs. There was a tall gunmetal filing cabinet in one corner. No personal effects or decoration. McCreary, apparently, had believed in a spartan existence. Either that, or the Table was well practiced at cleaning up after the death of their captains.

There was a black metal rotary phone on the desk, alongside a more modern intercom system. I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I still knew by heart. It rang for a long time, long enough that I begun to wonder whether I’d screwed up the old-fashioned rotary somehow. I was getting ready to try again when there was a click on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Hey, May,” I said, my usual greeting. I liked the rhyme.

“Dave!” I closed my eyes and imagined the way her face would light up when she said my name in happier times. For a moment I pictured her, younger and happier and without the weight of a war on her back. “I’m kind of in the middle of a war briefing here.”

The image vanished, lost like a reflection in a choppy pond. “With the Commanders Council, right? What are you talking about?”

She laughed. “Your name’s come up a few times. Avalon’s been talking for twenty straight minutes, trying to get the rest of the old men to agree that Bill didn’t have the right to appoint you. No one seems to be biting—nobody wants to question the Pendragon—so your job should be safe for now.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “Listen, that’s why I’m calling: I need help.” I quickly summarized the events of the day.

“God, Dave. Ten minutes with a C on your chest and you’ve got the East Coast falling apart.”

“What can I say? I’m helpless without you.”

She laughed again. “I should have been there by now, but Avalon’s been holding the meeting up. I should be there by midnight, your time.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall. About two and a half hours. “You’ll come in with Gwen?”

“Yep. You know where the meeting place in New York is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Great. See you then, Dave.”

“See you later, May. I—” She hung up before the next two words could get out of my mouth. “—love you.”

I scowled at the silent receiver in my hand. Why the hell had I added the last part? I had no idea. Still, it was good she’d hung up when she did. Just imagine the awkward fun that could have been.

There was a knock at the open door. I could see Krissy standing in the hallway, peeking through. Her expression was worried.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She came into the office, adopting a bright, sunny demeanor. “So, ‘love you,’ huh?”

I shrugged. “Old habits, I guess.”

“Do you?” she asked. “Love her, I mean?”

“God, Krissy.” I leaned back in my chair. “I was eighteen when I met May. She was the first woman that ever
really
meant anything to me. Yeah, I guess I still love her. Part of me always will.”

“But do you
trust
her?”

Anger flashed under the surface. I swallowed it and leaned forward. “Of course I do.”

“You said yourself that no one should have been able to find your place, right?” Krissy asked. “So how’d the vampires know where to, like, send me? Did May know?”

“She’s one of the highest ranking knights in the Table,” I said. “Of course she knew.”

“So you do trust her.”

“Completely,” I said. “With my life.”

Krissy was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Junior year of high school, I had this boyfriend, Mark. I also had a best friend, Kelly. It was, like, a TV show kind of friendship. Kelly and I had been totally inseparable since kindergarten.” She looked at me. “See where I’m going with this?”

“May and I aren’t hormone-drunk teenagers,” I said. “I can say with absolute confidence that she wouldn’t try to kill me.”

“Okay,” Krissy said, “but think about it. ‘Cause someone
did
try to kill you, and it had to be somebody who knew how to find you.”

I frowned. She was right. No one but Table personnel knew where the safe house had been. It was possible that the vampires had gotten the location through espionage, but somehow that didn’t feel right. No, my gut was telling me that they’d found me because someone had told them exactly how to get there. Someone in the Table was trying to kill me.

It couldn’t be May, could it? I’d seen the look in her eyes when we were fighting the vampires on the way from the safe house. With a sickening dread, I realized I didn’t really know May, not anymore. Nine months can change a person, especially when they’re spent fighting a war. There was a plunge in my stomach as I realized that maybe, just maybe I couldn’t completely trust May.

And if I couldn’t trust May, I couldn’t trust anyone.