Stake

by Kevin J. Anderson

  ‘The victim was shot at the door of a motel room where Helsing had apparently holed up. But he was out in broad daylight, standing in the sunshine. Helsing couldn’t possibly have thought the guy was a vampire, but how else to explain the silver pellets? You can’t buy those. He had to make and load that shell himself, and he’s probably got more.’

  Lexi had come up against too many strange theories, coincidences, and concepts that challenged her beliefs. The fact that Lucius and his followers also believed they had encountered vampires still strained her thoughts. She almost told Carrow about the Bastion, but she stopped herself. Lucius had been compelling, earnestly insistent, and Helsing so adamant. There must be some kernel of truth. All those people couldn’t have been fooled.

  Then again, countless people believed the government was using airplane vapor trails for mind control, or that the Moon was a hologram to hide an alien base.

  Seeing her hesitation, Carrow demanded, ‘Have you had any further contact with him? We need to stop him from killing again.’

  ‘Helsing?’ She felt disoriented. ‘No, nothing.’

  Her head still pounded. She had to know. What if there was an answer, and she was the only one objective enough to find out? Was that what Teresa was trying to tell her in the dream? There must be some connection between the motel manager and the other victims … or the other vampires.

  ‘I honestly don’t know why Simon would have killed that man,’ Lexi said. ‘He was so thorough, so meticulous with his evidence. I doubt it was just a crime of opportunity. There must be some link to the motel manager.’

  Carrow glowered at her. ‘Or maybe Helsing was just going for extra credit.’

  FORTY-TWO

  The murder of the motel manager was different from the others – which proved to be a good thing. In the previous killings, Simon Helsing had been meticulous, leaving no trace evidence, no fingerprints, no security camera footage.

  But the shooting at the Rambler Star seemed impulsive. The killer had made mistakes. Witnesses had seen him, caught his license plate. The police were searching for his car right now.

  By the time the detective reached the crime scene, the body had been taken away and Watson was getting ready to leave.

  Mel showed off a big grin beneath his mustache. ‘That room is like a supervillain’s hideout, Detective. Lots of evidence.’

  ‘He’d been holed up there for a while?’ Carrow asked.

  ‘See for yourself. Looks like a base camp – cans of food, a microwave, a cash stash, computer, lots of changes of clothes.’ The tech raised his eyebrows. ‘But here’s the odd thing. It’s women’s clothes, men’s clothes, kid’s clothes. Either our killer has a lot of accomplices, or it’s a whole crime family.’

  Inside the room, Carrow spotted the shotgun-shell reloading press mounted to the table. A bloody trench coat had been tossed on the bed. ‘We’ll find fingerprints, hairs, DNA galore. We need to look at the motel records.’

  ‘Already done.’ Nathan Dodge stepped up to the splintered door. ‘No records for this room. According to the books, no one has ever checked into it, but someone was clearly living here for quite a while.’

  Carrow frowned. ‘Somebody knew the killer was holed up in here. The manager must be connected somehow.’ He gave Orla Watson a wry look. ‘I’m pretty sure that Daniel Gardon was not a vampire.’

  ‘There you go again, Detective – jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘I’m not sure how Alexis Tarada’s involved in this. She may just be collateral damage, duped by her own conspiracy theories.’ He looked at the blood spilled on the concrete step, the pockmarked turquoise door, and mused to the coroner, ‘Just to humor me, run thorough tests on the two new bodies. I want blood evidence that shows they were both human.’

  Watson gave a sarcastic sniff. ‘You think I have a vampire swab test in my medical kit? I wouldn’t even know what to look for.’

  ‘Gotta be thorough if you want to get re-elected,’ he said, letting his own sarcasm shine through.

  ‘As long as I have your vote.’ She brightened. ‘Some friends at the department asked me to invite you to our weekly margarita night. Interested in having a social life? Make friends, relax, have a good time that isn’t work related?’

  ‘That’s what LeAnn was always bugging me to do.’

  The coroner’s face grew pinched. ‘I promise we’re much more fun to be around than your ex-wife.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. I’ll think about it.’

  Mel returned with a report. His grin was even wider now. ‘Plenty of prints, sir. If he’s anywhere in the database, we got him.’

  It was easy for Lexi to use her skills and slip through electronic back doors and access the CSPD case logs. She recalled much of the information in Helsing’s folder, names of suspected vampires, surreptitious photographs of the targets. (And why didn’t that raise a red flag with Helsing? Vampires weren’t supposed to show up on photos, were they? What about mirrors? How many legends and rules were utterly false?)

  Initially, Helsing’s compelling arguments and unexplained coincidences had opened her eyes, but deep down she realized it was all just theoretical, names on pieces of paper. When Detective Carrow told her about the murder of Douglas Eldridge – a name she had just read in the dossier – the possibility suddenly seemed more real. And now Tom Grollin, another name from the list, horribly butchered …

  If Helsing was right in his suspicions and investigations, then the victims were actually vampires. But did she really believe it? She wanted to believe, but that didn’t make the idea true. One of these days …

  Other people considered Lexi gullible, even ridiculous, but her impossible encounter with Teresa had taught her to keep an open mind. She knew that the visitation was real, not like ghostly typing on a disconnected keyboard.

  Her recent dream might have been her subconscious speaking to her, like bubbling froth from the stew of stories she had been immersed in during a highly emotional circumstance, or maybe it was just the blurred after-effects of two different kinds of knockout drugs.

  ‘Teresa, what were you trying to tell me?’ Lexi whispered as she sat at her computer. She stared at the large screen, hoping that a string of keyboard characters would spell out an actual message this time, giving her the answers she needed.

  But nothing was clear.

  Slipping into the CSPD database, she found Detective Carrow’s profile and had full access to the other murder files. Carrow wasn’t thorough in his write-ups, and he had fallen behind on paperwork, but there were lots of documents submitted by the crime scene techs. The coroner added autopsy reports on the first three victims, and even a supplemental file about Douglas Eldridge’s dead German Shepherd.

  Dr Watson had performed careful analyses on the bodies of Stallings, Ryan, and Eldridge, finding no evidence of tainted blood or obvious physical or cellular anomalies, nothing to indicate that the victims had been inhuman. Surely a vampire – an undead creature with fangs to feed on human blood – would exhibit some clear differences. But the victims’ teeth were normal and matched dental records.

  She slumped in her chair and studied the high-res images on her screen, clicking from document to document. She had already seen some of the photos in her earlier work, had gotten over the initial shock, and now she reviewed the evidence until her eyes were blurry. Lexi was reluctant to admit what she already knew deep inside.

  Maybe she was clinging to the irrational hope that vampires were real, because that would satisfy her hunger – or was it an addiction? – to prove that mysteries still existed in the world. Proving the existence of vampires, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or anything at all, would demonstrate that such things were possible, really possible.

  Instead, the deeper she dug for HideTruth, the more she suspected that those ‘strange but true’ tales were just crazy conspiracy theories and fake news.

  If vampires were not real, then Simon Helsing was an obsessive and delusional murderer.


  It was too soon for her to see any records about the two most recent murders, but she began to do her own research on the motel manager. Why did Helsing choose Daniel Gardon as a target? And why switch to using a silver bullet instead of the more violent, more intimate killings with a stake or decapitation?

  She found few details about the Rambler Star manager. The records seemed deliberately doctored. Helsing’s other targets had been suspiciously reclusive, with no friends, family, or other human connections. Gardon had a wife, a nice, normal home. He was even a member of the Chamber of Commerce.

  Helsing could easily have verified that Gardon wasn’t a vampire. How could he have missed that? And if the manager was plainly not a vampire, then that meant Helsing had made at least one mistake. Gardon was an innocent man who had blundered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

  And if Helsing had made such a terrible mistake, then he had murdered a human being, which cast doubt on all the other victims.

  She sat back in her chair and stared at the screen without seeing it. Stoker1897 hadn’t posted recently on HideTruth, but she was sure Helsing would contact her again. He would try to enlist her cooperation, cajole her with his supposed evidence, because he thought she was on his side.

  But now she was almost certain he was truly a serial killer.

  FORTY-THREE

  Not surprisingly, ‘Simon Helsing’ wasn’t his real name. Now that he had a full set of fingerprints from the crime scene at the motel, Carrow checked the criminal database for all fifty states but found no matches. When he went wider and searched all public records, including military service files, he hit the jackpot.

  The story wasn’t good.

  As he read through the VA medical records and disturbing psychological evaluations, he shook his head. ‘Crap almighty, this guy’s life is a parade of red flags.’

  Often after tragic massacres – school shootings, shopping mall rampages, crazed mail bombers with political agendas – the perpetrator’s relatives and neighbors acted like drugged sheep. ‘Gosh, he seemed like such a nice, quiet, normal person. Who would have suspected?’ Then looking at the perp’s history – psycho social-media posts, vitriolic blogs – it was painfully obvious that he was a hand grenade ready to go off.

  The same was true here, but Helsing had fallen through the cracks, lost in an uncaring system. He’d been off the radar for years.

  His real name was David Grundy, and he had served as a medical corpsman for the UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia back in 1995. There, a perfectly normal young man had suffered some extreme psychological trauma, a terrible accident in an ambulance. Severely injured, he had survived in the forest until rescued by an isolated peasant family. He had never been the same since.

  Grundy was diagnosed with PTSD. He had a psychotic break and suffered delusions about vampires. He was bounced from one VA hospital to another, psychiatric ward to psychiatric ward. He was finally discharged to fend for himself – at which point he fell off the grid, swallowed up in anonymity. No one in the VA had the resources, or inclination, to check on him.

  Somewhere along the way, he had created his other identity as Simon Helsing, vampire killer.

  Even though the information was a goldmine, it offered no clues as to what relatives or bolt holes Grundy might have in the Colorado Springs area. Had he come here on purpose, or was the city just a random stop? Did he start hunting vampires here, or had he been killing before that? In her original tip line posting, Alexis Tarada had mentioned other unsolved stake murders from years earlier in other parts of the country. Grundy’s killing spree might not have started with Mark Stallings or Patric Ryan.

  He printed out a copy of the man’s photograph from his service record. Although the picture was twenty years old, at least it was a start. CSPD image-processing software could age the appearance, adding years and weight.

  Carrow suspected the killer’s next big move would be on Saturday at Hugo Zelm’s charity gala. Something about the eccentric philanthropist set off warning bells in Carrow’s mind, too, and he could see why an obsessive vampire killer might concoct a fantasy that the rich old man was king of the undead. Given that Zelm was so reclusive, Helsing couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that.

  Yes, Carrow had to attend the gala, and Alexis Tarada was the only one who had actually seen the killer face to face. He liked the idea of tagging along with her … to keep an eye on both of them.

  With Grundy’s photograph in hand, Carrow left the CSPD offices and headed out to see her.

  Lexi greeted the police detective with another frown. He wore the same dark sport jacket, same white shirt, same tie.

  ‘Detective Carrow, if you keep showing up on my doorstep, you better start bringing chocolate or something.’

  He rolled with the comment. ‘Matter of fact, I am here to ask you out on a date, of sorts. Police business.’

  ‘You’re not my type. At least ten years too old and with no imagination.’

  ‘All part of my charm,’ Carrow said. ‘Hugo Zelm suggested I accompany you to the charity gala tomorrow. Armed and alert.’

  She was taken aback. ‘Why me?’

  ‘You know Helsing suspects he’s some kind of king vampire, and we think he might use the public event to make his move. Zelm has his own security, and I’ll be there as part of a CSPD protective detail.’

  Lexi considered. ‘But you need a wingman?’

  Carrow remained dead serious, all business. ‘You’re the only one who’s seen him, Miss Tarada. But we know a lot more than we did yesterday. Thanks to fingerprints found in the motel room, we have his real name and some background, even an old photograph.’

  Lexi listened as he spilled the details, unfolding Grundy’s tragic story. She began to connect the incidents small and large that had helped him fabricate his belief in the vampire threat.

  ‘Do you recognize him?’ Carrow showed her the service photo of a young man, a normal man – thin, handsome in his own way, the eyes of someone who had seen little in life and had no idea what he was in for. Something about his face, the set of his mouth, his brow, and those eyes …

  ‘That’s him, but he looks different enough now that I doubt the photograph would help anyone else identify him.’ He had sat right across from her, grabbed her arm.

  ‘Zelm suggested that I quietly accompany you, blend into the woodwork, but you can let me know if you spot him. And I can help protect you, if necessary.’

  Lexi felt a knot in her stomach. Even though she hadn’t revealed the strange meeting with Lucius and the Bastion, she hadn’t refused to cooperate with the police, though she hadn’t been enthusiastic either, given his disparaging attitude toward HideTruth. Now, with her own doubts growing stronger after the shooting of the innocent motel manager, could she let Helsing try to assassinate the wealthy philanthropist?

  Zelm was one of HideTruth’s most reliable patrons. If he was a king vampire, why would he support a website that actively tried to expose the existence of vampires? Or was it a double fake? HideTruth promoted so many preposterous ideas, maybe that effectively made vampires seem preposterous, thereby increasing their cover?

  ‘I’ve already got a date,’ she said. ‘Blair is going with me.’

  As if on cue, her housemate came into the kitchen dressed for a late-afternoon shift at Rags to Riches. ‘She does indeed, Detective, and I’m eagerly anticipating the event. A debut in high society.’ Seeing Carrow’s expression, Blair instinctively touched his cheek below his eye, where the bruises had faded.

  ‘If I come alone, I’d stick out like a sore thumb, and Helsing might be alerted. I’ll just tag along, like a third wheel.’

  She was still uncomfortable to have Carrow hovering. ‘Don’t you have someone you can ask? Aren’t you married?’

  ‘Divorced, but it’s been a while. Not quite on the dating circuit yet.’

  ‘Big surprise.’ Blair let out a sigh.

  The more she thought about it, Lexi realized she could follow Hel
sing’s train of thought, especially if he thought Hugo Zelm was the king vampire. ‘I think you’re right, Detective. Helsing might show up, but even if he did manage to slip in to the gala, he’d never get close enough to pound a stake through Mr Zelm’s heart, not with all the security and all the guests. That means Helsing would have to be more blatant, more extreme.’ She felt a chill and caught her breath. ‘Like using a silver bullet!’

  Carrow was startled. ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘Bullets!’ Blair looked alarmed and put a hand on Lexi’s shoulder. ‘Despite all my good intentions, I can’t protect you alone, Lex.’ He swallowed, clearly disturbed. ‘If I were more of a fighter, I could have defended myself against Cesar. But I couldn’t, so the detective better join us. I want you safe more than anything else. All right, Detective, you can be my pretend date.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Lexi was forced to consider Helsing’s victims through a different filter, a rational filter – just as Detective Carrow always had. She struggled to find some irrefutable nugget of proof that would legitimize the vampire killer’s mission. But no matter how much she wanted to believe, she still had nothing.

  And she knew Helsing wasn’t done. She shared Carrow’s suspicion that Hugo Zelm might be the next primary target, but she wasn’t sure Helsing could wait until Saturday to strike again.

  Though Carrow had taken the folder with the list of targets from her, she still remembered a few of the names. One was a night ambulance driver, and it took Lexi only two phone calls to verify that the woman had been switched to the day shift. If Helsing came for her, he would not find her sleeping during the day.

  The other name she remembered clearly was Frederik Lugash, the pizza delivery driver. She’d looked at so many photos while perusing the evidence folder that the connection hadn’t at first clicked, but now she was convinced that he was the same creepy man who had hovered on her doorstep, asking her to invite him in. Something about Lugash had made her skin crawl. What if he was a vampire? Even if Helsing had made mistakes, did that mean they were all mistakes?