“We ran the faces for the ones who had faces, Midnight,” Morley said, a mild rebuke in his words. “Along with prints, DNA, and ident-tats. We got clean, human idents for all of the vics but the one in the dumpster. We’re working on interviews with next of kin and background checks now. Apart from their race, so far nothing jumps out, in terms of a motive. A few of their human partners and family members knew what they were, but weren’t involved in any criminal activity apart from that. So far, all of them have alibis for the killing window… and we’ve done lie detector tests on the ones we brought in, and they all passed.”
“No hits on the killers?” Nick stared between them. “What about the m.o.? Did you run the antique gun? What about the international databases? Did you send them to Interpol? The H.R.A.? Intereb?”
By “Intereb,” he meant the “Interracial Enforcement Bureau.” They operated under the Human Racial Authority and had policing and enforcement jurisdiction over inter-racial relations across all of the different countries that remained following the seer wars.
Vamps mostly called them “The Leash.”
“We sent it,” Morley confirmed, his voice still patient. “No answer yet.”
Nick frowned, fighting to remain silent.
After a few seconds, he lost the battle.
“I should be in the Cauldron,” he muttered angrily. “Running down that artist is the only real lead we have… and I swear to fuck I saw him in there today. You should let me hunt him down, before he evaporates. If the killers really are pros, maybe he knows who hired them. Hell, maybe he hired them—”
“Calm down, Midnight,” Jordan said, his voice back to being annoyed. “We’re looking into it, all right? We’ve got queries out to all of the relevant agencies. Here. Across the country. Overseas. Let us handle that end of things. What can you tell us about your end? Can you see or, you know… smell… anything? Anything we might’ve missed?”
After a pause, Nick grunted.
Then, relaxing his shoulders in what might have been a sigh if he were still human, he nodded.
Donning protective gloves, he began to walk the perimeter a few seconds later.
Unlike last time, he knelt down to examine the actual painting, not quite touching it, but getting close enough to try and see, smell, or sense something with his vampire senses. In particular, he tried to pick up whatever he could about the artist.
The painting had been made too long ago.
Any imprints he might have smelled or sensed here had already dissipated, diluted by foot traffic and wind, garbage and animals, and even more so by smells from the nearby bakery and now the overpowering smell of blood.
Rising to his feet, Nick glanced at Morley and Jordan, who hadn’t moved from their spot between the dead bodies and the artist’s rendition.
“Anything come back on the DNA of the artist?” he said.
Morley shook his head.
“No,” he said. “They said that one might take longer, though. They’re trying to pull fingerprints, too. After they saw he wasn’t wearing gloves in the CCTV footage, they went back and cut out a section of wall in that first location and brought it back for the lab geeks to work on, see if they can get enough for an I.D.”
Nick nodded, not speaking.
Reluctantly, he walked closer to the dead bodies.
Seeing dead kids up close wasn’t much easier as a vampire than it had been as a human.
It also brought back uncomfortable memories of Los Angeles.
The fact that they triggered his hunger reflex, being hybrids, didn’t exactly help.
He was already starting to back away when the wind shifted slightly, and he caught a whiff of something else.
The scent filled his nose… filled his memory…
It made him light-headed.
He forced himself to stand utterly still.
He didn’t turn his head to look in the direction from which the scent came.
He just stood there, smelling it, making sure he wasn’t losing his mind.
He wasn’t, though.
Well, he didn’t think he was.
He could smell it almost clearly now that he knew where to aim his focus.
Seer.
Not hybrid.
Seer.
Nick could smell a full-blooded fucking seer.
But that was impossible. All the seers were gone.
They were dead… or they were gone.
Either way, they weren’t here. They no longer existed on this version of Earth.
They were extinct.
So how the fuck could he be smelling one now—so clearly, he could practically see the scent with his eyes as he went over the intricacies of the fragrance with his nose and tongue?
Female, he was relatively sure.
Young. Maybe a bit older than these hybrids, but not much.
The way seers aged, she’d probably look younger than any of the hybrid bodies lying dead on the pavement. Most hybrids aged roughly the way humans did.
Slowly, as casually as he could, Nick turned his head, looking in the direction from which the scent came. He found himself staring at the red cube sculpture on the other side of the red stick-like figure of the Joie de Vivre. The cube balanced on one pointed corner, with a round hole cut in its center, painted either black or maybe dark silver. It stood around twenty-five feet tall from the pavement to the upper corner, and formed a focal point between the street and a number of shops that surrounded it on two sides.
The smell was coming from there.
The seer he could smell was somewhere on that sculpture… either on top of the damned thing, where he couldn’t see them… or behind it…. or possibly inside that slanted hole through the middle.
Biting his lip with a slightly extended incisor, he tried to decide what to do.
If he told the cops about her, they’d take her into custody immediately.
If she fought back, which she’d likely do, it was unlikely she’d be able to overpower all of them with her mind. That would be true even if she wasn’t a kid. It would likely be true even if she didn’t live on a planet where her training must have been iffy, at best… assuming she’d received any training at all on how to use her psychic gifts.
If she fought back and managed to scare the humans sufficiently, they might kill her.
The lab guys might take her back, try to dissect her, maybe even try to clone her.
Regardless, a little girl seer, maybe the last little girl seer, would be dead.
Where the fuck had she even come from?
She was about eighty years too young to have been born before the Exodus.
Then again, maybe he was wrong about her age. He hadn’t exactly had a hell of a lot of opportunities lately to run intel scans on full-blooded seers.
Still frowning, he found himself edging further away from the cube.
He couldn’t afford to get too close, or the humans around him might wonder if something was up. He could only hope her scent would linger long enough that he’d be able to track her later.
He suspected he would be able to track her.
The thought of risking that, however, of having her disappear off his radar entirely, given what she was, given the danger she was in—just by existing, just by the very fact of her being alive and what she was—felt like more than he could bear.
Seers couldn’t read vampire minds.
He couldn’t even send her a message the way a human could have.
He’d have to get creative if he wanted to speak with her.
Moreover, there was no reason in the world she would trust him.
There were a few hundred, if not a few thousand reasons, why she shouldn’t trust him.
Seers and vampires were natural enemies. They were more than that, too, but above all, they were prey and predator.
Or maybe predator and predator.
Alpha and alpha.
Whatever they were to one another exactly, they were mutually designed to come
into conflict with one another.
Nick saw a lit sign over a building up the street, just past the red cube and its odd round hole.
“I’m going to get coffee,” he announced, glancing at Morley and Jordan. “Anyone want anything?”
The two detectives looked at him like he’d just announced he was going to strip naked and run up and down the length of the cement-floored park.
“No,” Morley said after a pause. He lifted his own coffee cup, which looked like it might have come from the same place. “I’m good.”
Without waiting for them to argue with him, or to ask him any more questions, Nick turned on his heel, aiming his steps for the red cube, and the coffee shop a good fifty yards behind it.
He waited until he was out of earshot of any of the humans before he spoke.
By then, based on the scent and the fact that he could see her nowhere else, he was reasonably sure she was hanging from the inside of that cube inside the cored, round hole in the center of the sculpture. He waited until he was within a few yards of it, then spoke in a low voice, knowing seer hearing was nearly as good as that of your average vampire.
“You’re not safe here,” he told her in a low growl.
“…I won’t tell them about you, but you have to get out of here… before the real forensics team arrives and starts casing the whole park. I’m going to drop my keys on the ground, just under the cube. They belong to my car. It’s the antique parked across the street. Green. Black stripes. There’s a symbol of a cat on the front.
“…If you can push enough human minds to make it to my car, lock yourself inside. The windows are tinted, so once you’re in there, no one will see you. Wait for me. I’ll take you somewhere safe once I finish here.”
Then, without waiting to see if she’d reply, or if she’d even heard him, he lifted his keys causally out of his pocket and let them drop to the ground just under the red cube.
Chapter 9
Stowaway
It took Nick longer to get back to his car than he’d planned.
He walked the crime scene another four or five times before standing with Morley, Jordan, Charlie and Nat, watching the forensics team do their thing.
A part of him wanted to check and see if his car was still there.
Another part of him wanted to check and see if his keys were still there, too.
He now wondered just how much of a fool he was for risking the car he loved, and the only thing of value he might ever own, at least until the planet’s next apocalypse.
Funnily enough, he probably would have asked to leave sooner than he did, if he hadn’t now been paranoid about raising suspicion, or having one of the other detectives follow him back to his car, or have his car followed.
He stayed at least an hour longer than he would have, at least without complaining, before he broached the topic of leaving again with Morley.
“I’d still like to check out the Cauldron,” he said, standing between Jordan and Charlie while all five of them continued to watch the forensics team. “I’m still hoping to track down our artist… assuming he lives there. Or knows someone there.”
“If he lives in the Cauldron, he’s not making these paintings,” Charlie observed, frowning as she watched the forensics team loading one of the young girl-hybrid’s bodies into an opaque, black body bag.
“He wouldn’t be able to get out of there,” she added, giving Nick a sideways glance. “I know you’re new to New York, but you get that, right, Midnight? No ins and outs with the Cauldron, not once you’re placed there. It’s a one-way ticket.”
“Well, maybe he visits,” Nick conceded. “But I saw someone who looked a hell of a lot like him in there today. Near a painting that looks a hell of a lot like this one.” He pointed to the artwork on the pavement, with the hand holding the coffee cup he’d barely drank anything out of. “It’s worth checking out.”
Pausing, he glanced at her.
“Did you see the mural I had the drone scan today?”
She nodded, her eyes back to watching the forensics team. “I saw it. You really think it’s the same guy?”
“Looked like it. To me, anyway.”
“You know art that well, Midnight?” she said, giving him a sideways look and another sly smile. “You can tell, just by looking, the same guy painted it?”
Nick thought about that.
The longer he thought about it, the more doubt nagged at his mind.
Maybe she was right.
Maybe he’d been a little too certain it had to be the same guy. Maybe he’d been a little too certain the silhouette he saw in the Cauldron had to be the same guy as well, meaning the person he saw in the CCTV footage from the Bronx.
He’d definitely seen someone watching him from that bombed out church.
But the light had been shit.
He couldn’t be positive it was the same guy. It was possible he saw what he wanted to see, or took someone who looked vaguely similar and turned him into the artist.
The drone hadn’t gotten an image of the gray sweatshirt or those tats.
Nick got no hits from the routine drone footage from inside the Cauldron, either.
Still, there was a sameness there, with the three paintings he’d seen. He couldn’t nail down what that sameness was, but he could feel it.
And he’d seen that guy. Whoever he was, he’d been staring right at Nick.
The coincidence was damned strange, but it wasn’t inconceivable.
“I don’t know about art,” he admitted after that too-long pause.
“So it’s a gut thing?” she prompted.
He glanced at her, then frowned. “Maybe. A little. Why?”
She laughed, holding up her hands at his defensiveness and grinning at him.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling. “It’s just… you may be a cop after all, Midnight.”
Grunting, he rolled his eyes.
Looking back at Jordan and Morley, especially the latter, who he technically reported to, he nudged them again with his words.
“Well?” he said. “You don’t need me here. Can I run the Cauldron thing down? Or not?”
Morley frowned, then gave him a bare glance.
After a pause, he nodded, exhaling a sigh.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess we don’t need you here anymore. Go ahead. Just report back to us if you find anything.”
“I will—”
“The minute you find anything, Midnight,” Morley warned, giving him a harder look. “No more going off on your own. You’ll get me in trouble. You won’t like me in trouble.”
Nick frowned.
“I called in about the mural, didn’t I? Why all the bullshit warnings all of a sudden?”
“Just strikes me you like working alone a little too much, Midnight,” Morley grunted, taking a sip of coffee that had to be cold by now. “I read your file. None of that vigilante stuff here. I mean it. That shit doesn’t fly in the NYPD.”
Nick fought to keep his expression still.
He was pretty sure he only halfway succeeded.
Morley appraised his expression, aiming a finger at him. “I’m not holding that shit over your head, Midnight, so get that damned look off your face. I’m just telling you. You’re in New York now. Here, you’re part of a team. Like it or not, we’re that team. And if you go off the reservation, you’re not the only one who’s likely to be lit on fire… metaphorically-speaking.”
“Yeah,” Nick grunted. “Except in my case. Then it’s literal.”
Morley only shrugged, not bothering to answer.
As Nick turned to go, the rail-thin African-American man spoke up again.
“Oh, and you’re going to that rich kid school tomorrow,” he said, raising his voice. “Jordan’s going with you. I already got clearance from I.S.F.”
Nick frowned, glancing at Damon Jordan.
The younger detective didn’t hide his own scowl.
“I don’t want to hear a single, goddamned, whining word
from either of you,” Morley warned, turning his pointing finger from Nick to Jordan and back again. “You go together. I want Midnight there with you. I even checked the trains. Union Station. Platform 6. Eight o’clock. Be there. Both of you. Or you’ll hear about it.”
Jordan gave Nick another annoyed look but nodded.
Nick didn’t bother to answer.
Turning, he began walking towards his car.
He probably should have taken the threat at least somewhat seriously.
Truthfully though, he had to fight not to roll his eyes.
He was more annoyed at the prospect of spending the day with Jordan, who clearly hated vampires, hated Nick, and hated pretty much everything about both.
Still, if he was a little more sober-minded, it probably should have worried him that he was already getting death threats from his boss… and less than two weeks into his new posting.
Pushing that from his mind when he remembered what might be waiting for him in his car, he wrapped his coat more tightly around him and lowered his head.
He fell into a deliberately human gait, lowering his crystal-colored eyes, making himself as inconspicuous as he could as he made his way back to his car.
His car was still there.
That was something.
Nick couldn’t help but react with a flush of relief when he saw the green car parked there, by the curb, looking more or less exactly how he’d remembered it looking when he got out of it a few hours earlier.
Apparently, none of the cops decided to be dicks and key it, which he’d been a lot more worried about earlier.
Of course, he still might have to walk back to that red cube sculpture and look for his keys. He doubted he’d find them at this point, at least not there—forensics had been all over that area, just like he’d told the young seer they would be.
If she’d left the keys and bolted, they probably would have been taken into evidence by now. Nick would have to hunt them down via evidence transport, pretend he must have accidentally dropped them when he’d been looking for his credit marker so he could buy coffee.
It might raise a few eyebrows, given that vampires had such good hearing, but he’d rather them think he was an idiot than someone in the process of breaking I.S.F. law.
Vampire Detective Midnight Page 9