Raw Deal (Bite Back) (13 page)

“Trust me, it’s boring at the moment,” I said. “All my old friends from school are gone or married, and my friends from the army are miles away. I’ve been so busy getting settled back in, I haven’t really had time.”

I hadn’t missed that ‘partner’ he’d thrown in there, but what to make of it? Did he really mean he felt we were partners now, or was it a slip?

There was a call on the radio, and conversation ground to a halt. Between calls it limped along until we finally dropped it. A thick fog rolled in across the city and the number of calls dropped. But Knight didn’t launch into his usual spiel at any time. Something was definitely wrong.

Chapter 16

MONDAY

Even for a foggy 4 a.m., it was quiet.

We’d returned to the station and parked the cruiser.

I needed to find out the details on the murder from last night. The colonel was arriving at midday, and I hadn’t gotten a solid lead for him on the vampires. The best I could do was have all the related information ready.

I switched my cell on, dawdling behind Knight as he strode toward the door.

There were ten missed calls from Dominé, the last one ten minutes ago.

My stomach lurched. This couldn’t be good. What had gone wrong?

She answered immediately, as if she’d been sitting by the phone.

“Amber, please, we need your help.”

“What’s happened?”

“Did you not hear? About Marcel?”

“No, I haven’t heard anything about Marcel. Slow down, tell me what’s going on.”

“There’s no time. The police have been here—”

“Hold it.” I stopped her, the first hints of a sick certainty rising in my gorge. “Mike,” I called to Knight, slipping into using his first name without thought. He stopped and waited while I caught up to him.

“What was the name of the guy killed last night? The one they thought was the same MO?”

He frowned. “Marc Ellis. Why?”

Shit.

“Can’t stop now. I’ll explain later.” I sprinted towards my car.

Marc Ellis. Valery Hawks. Marcel and Valerie. Dominé’s way of making everything sound more exotic.

“Amber,” Knight called out behind me. “Wait! We have to talk. You can’t hold out on your partner!”

Like he had, all this last patrol.

“Dominé?” I said.

“I’m here.”

“Was his real name Marc Ellis?”

“Yes, yes, of course, I’m sorry, I forgot you wouldn’t know.”

I reached the car and slid inside. My mind was linking things up, but it was far too late.

Marcel the artist. Valerie the artist. They worked together at the club. She had paintings of his, in her folder.

“Marcel knew where Valerie lives?” I said as the car started.

“I don’t know, Amber, truly, I don’t, but I am afraid—”

“I couldn’t get an answer from Valerie’s home number,” I said. “I thought that meant she’d gone.”

“She’s not in Nebraska,” said Dominé. “I called her mother. I called her cell. I’ve left messages. There is nothing.”

“Did you go to her apartment?”

“I tried the intercom outside but there was no response. No lights on in her apartment. That was the first time I called you.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”

I ended the call and pulled out of the parking lot, my tires screeching. Knight had been walking towards me, trying to flag me down, but I couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t.

The lights were still off in Valerie’s apartment. Given the time, that wasn’t surprising. Everything was calm and orderly on the surface.

Except when I looked carefully, I could see the outside lock was damaged. It hadn’t been last time. I drew my gun. Anger and frustration boiling over in me, I gave it a hard shove and I was through. I sprinted up the stairs.

I could smell vampire long before I got to her door.

It was locked.

“Valerie!” I pounded on the door until the second smell started to seep into my awareness. Then I took a couple of steps back and kicked right through it.

I flicked on the lights, hoping I was wrong. Anything, anything but what I found.

Pictures hung skew. One penguin painting looked up from the floor, the glass shattered and the frame splintered, the previously happy look distorted into bewilderment.

Leo the cat was against the wall in the hallway, looking like he’d been casually thrown aside. His back was broken.

Chairs in the living room were overturned. There’d been a brief, futile struggle.

Valerie was lying sprawled on her back in the living room, arms above her head and her throat savagely torn. Her clothes were twisted and ripped, as if she’d been held down and struggled wildly. Her face had frozen into a rictus of pain and despair. There was no wide pool of blood, and she was so pale.

I dropped to my knees beside her. Under my questing fingers, there was no pulse beneath her jaw. No life in the wide, shocked eyes.

There was blood and skin under her fingernails. She’d fought and scratched, but she’d trained her hands to paint, not to fight. She’d had no chance against one of them, let alone three.

Looking at her throat, I put my hand to my own. These were not the neat punctures I’d seen on the first victim. This was the kind of savagery I’d experienced in the jungles of South America. Were these vampires losing control?

A scrap of paper dropped on the floor caught my attention. I didn’t need to pick it up to recognize it as the coat check I’d written my number on and asked Dominé to give to Marcel.

They’d gone looking. They hadn’t found Valerie, so they’d found Marcel instead. And before they’d killed him, he’d given them Valerie’s address.

My fingers were numb, fumbling with the radio button.

“Farrell here,” I said, my voice strained. “I need Homicide.”

Chapter 17

CSI and the ME were inside the apartment.

I’d left the station in my own car, so I didn’t have crime scene forms or tape. I was improvising, standing in the doorway with a notebook. Mainly, I was working at not revisiting all the decisions I’d made over the last few days. They kept coming at me like a blurry nightmare.

I’d been awake for over twenty hours. I desperately wanted another patrol car to come spell me. Given the complications of my connection with this case, I would have thought there would have been someone here by now.

Instead of my relief, the next to arrive was Buchanan. He had a second detective in tow, an older guy I hadn’t met before. Buchanan looked at my notepaper crime scene form as if I’d personally insulted him, but he signed. The second guy signed as Nunez, and stayed while Buchanan went into the living room to get in CSI’s way.

“You called it in as the same MO?” Nunez asked.

“Yeah, from what I heard,” I said. “Throat torn up. Not as much blood as expected.”

“Was the body moved here?”

No.
I shrugged the question away. “Ask CSI.”

Nunez looked at the door. “Was it like this when you got here?” He pointed at the damage.

“No. I kicked it.”

Just like that, we were on a slide to questions I couldn’t answer without the colonel’s say-so. If I said I’d smelled vampires, Nunez would call for restraints.

“Why?” Buchanan came back out to join the party.

I couldn’t just stand here and refuse to answer questions.

“I believed the victim was in danger.”

“How did you work that out, Farrell?” Buchanan eyed me coldly.

The anger he’d stoked so well last time came back to the surface, but I kept it in hand.

“The last victim, Marc Ellis, worked with her. There was an incident at their work prior to Ellis’s murder that involved both of them. I received a call from her boss saying she’d hadn’t gone home to Nebraska as expected. I dropped by and the main door downstairs was damaged. There was no response from inside the apartment and I thought I smelled something.”

It sounded thin as tissue.

A couple of uniforms arrived at that point. I handed one of them my makeshift crime scene form and let them take over.

Buchanan and Nunez crowded me to one side.

“You’re familiar with this victim?” Buchanan’s tone was terse.

“Not really.”

“You know where she lives, where she works, you know her travel plans, you know her friends…” Nunez said.

“I gave her a ride home once.”

Nunez and Buchanan exchanged looks.

After a pause, Buchanan nodded. “You’re with us,” he said to me. “We’ll need a statement down at the station.”

“Okay, my car’s outside,” I said. I didn’t want to end up back at the station without a car.

“Give me a lift,” Buchanan said.

It wasn’t a request.

I’d showed up out of nowhere, knew the victim well enough to decide to kick her door down and I discovered a murder that was linked to two more. Just those details were enough to make me a person of interest. Add the possibility of press speculation on top, and the pressure on Homicide would be mounting. They’d want a detailed statement from me and I wouldn’t be able to tell them enough to satisfy them.

As we walked out to the cars, I felt a mounting anger at everything. Why couldn’t the colonel have gotten here sooner? Why did this investigation have to land on Buchanan’s desk? Why did I have to be the damn fuse point all the time?

Not helpful at the moment. I needed to be thinking clearly. I pushed the anger back down.

Buchanan slid into the passenger seat and I pulled out of the parking lot, Nunez following close behind us.

Buchanan let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t gotten to bed either, by the look of it.

“You did okay,” he said finally.

Huh? What the hell?

“Thanks,” I replied cautiously.

“Knight said you lit out like your tail was on fire.”

“There was a chance she was alive.”

And my partner was reporting on me. Frigging fantastic. All those questions on patrol last night. Knight talks to Homicide and all of a sudden he’s interested in what I did on Friday. Yeah.

Buchanan’s shoulders slumped.

“We need more resources,” he said. “You’re half in anyway. We’re going to need you to come on board. Who’s in charge of your duty rosters?”

“Sergeant Carver.” I was having trouble keeping up with him. He wanted me on his team? Yeah. My bullshit meter went into the red zone.

“Okay. I’ll talk to him.” He looked out the window. “The team needs to keep our story straight here. If we start talking about serial killers, the press will be all over us. It won’t look good, and believe me, this case is being watched all the way to the top. If we screw it up, they’ll know who to blame.”

And so convenient for Detective Buchanan if he could redirect the blame downwards.

But I needed to get every last fact out of Buchanan for the colonel. The easiest way would be to pretend I was taken in by his invitation to join his team.

“You transferring me from patrol to your investigation team?”

“Yeah. We’ll sort the details out later. You don’t want to stay in patrol, do you? It’d be a waste.”

“No, I don’t want to stay in patrol,” I said.

But I don’t believe your bullshit that you can shift me around just like that. Or that you’ve suddenly realized I’ve got something to contribute.

“So what’s the official story about these killings?” I asked.

“Gangs. Gangs fighting a turf war over clubs. It’ll make the newspapers happy. They can have plenty to say, and the pictures they’ll be able to use will sell newspapers for a month. The difference is, it’s all infighting between freaks. Normal people won’t get upset. No one gives the mayor much of a hard time over gangs killing each other. ”

“But these last two…they’re not gang members. They’re not freaks, either.”

“In that club?” Buchanan snorted. “People won’t believe that.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything that I felt I could say. Buchanan was trying to lump everything under a convenient heading.

The trouble was, he didn’t really believe it. He’d obviously started to put together enough information to figure out there was something seriously screwy here. Whatever I might think of him, he wasn’t stupid.

The colonel had said he didn’t want lots of people to know about vampires, he wanted one contact. It couldn’t be Buchanan. He wasn’t senior enough.

And I didn’t want to be on this team. Or any team with Buchanan in it. I was going to have a hell of a day until the colonel arrived.

Buchanan wasn’t finished. As we were parking at the station he started speaking again. “As a team, we’ll need to be real close. We’ll need to know everything you know about this case.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve kinda stepped outside the bounds, huh? You’re new at this. Everyone drops a ball or two. The team will look out for you. I’ll look out for you.”

“Of course,” I said. “Nothing matters more than a quick resolution.”

How dumb did he think I was? He was trying to tease information out of me. Would he and Nunez try the good cop, bad cop routine as well?

We got out and walked into the station.

“You probably don’t even realize it, but something in what you know will crack this case,” he went on. “I’ll make sure they know it was your lead.” His hand waved vaguely upstairs where the higher ranks of the police had their offices while he guided me over to his. “Use my system,” he said. “I don’t want anybody reading over your shoulder. I don’t want anybody outside the team in on this.”

I nodded and logged in on his computer to enter my statement.

“I’ll get us some coffee,” he said and went out.

I put my head in my hands. I was so screwed. How the hell was I going swing this? I sighed. I couldn’t lie, but I couldn’t be truthful either.

In the end, my statement was simply a fuller detail version of what I’d already sketched out to Buchanan and Nunez. I owned up to the scrap of paper with my number on it. Forensics would find that out anyway. Nothing about the army and vampires. I wasn’t going to put anything else in a report with being ordered to by the colonel. I glanced at the clock on the screen. Another four or five hours and he would be here. I would gladly pass this mess on to him, but where was that going to leave me?