Once Bitten

by Willis, Clare

  Her neck was drenched in blood, running from a wound that ran from just below her right ear to the hollow between her collarbones. What had been a rush of blood was now a trickle. I laid my head on her chest to feel for a heartbeat. There was none.

  Another thing I’m sorry for is that I never learned CPR. I lurched to the phone on her bedside table and dialed 911.

  “San Francisco Emergency.” The female voice was brisk and efficient.

  “Someone broke into the apartment. My roommate is hurt.”

  I heard the clicking of computer keys, the sound of the operator tracing my address.

  “Is the intruder still in the apartment? Are you safe at this moment?”

  “Yes, he’s gone.”

  “Your roommate, is she conscious?”

  “No, I think she’s dead.” The last word came out a whisper.

  “Are you all right, Ma’am? Were you hurt?”

  “Oh my God.” I was feeling my neck, looking for the wound that I remembered. I touched my left breast and felt that my T-shirt was soaked in blood.

  “Why didn’t I die?” I whispered.

  “Ma’am, please hold the line. Someone should be there any minute.”

  Thinking I was about to be sick, I ignored the operator’s orders and dropped the telephone on the floor, then staggered to the bathroom and kneeled over the toilet bowl. I was nauseated, like you feel after a car accident when adrenaline has left you shaken and quivering, but I didn’t feel any pain. I stood up warily and looked in the bathroom mirror. My hair was scraggly and my T-shirt hung off me like I had jumped into a swimming pool. It was sodden with my own blood. A rich, salty, mineral smell filled my nostrils.

  But the wound, it was gone. I leaned closer, not believing my eyes. I tried to put my finger into the fissure, but now it was just a flesh wound, a thin little scratch that a cat’s claw could have made. I pulled up the wet shirt and looked at my chest. I almost gagged at the sight of my own breasts coated in blood, but I could see no wound.

  Sirens blared from the street. How was I going to explain the blood? I knew I ought to be dead, in fact I had expected it. I could just imagine the conversation.

  “Well, you see, Officer, it’s this vampire venom. I just heal up quicker than most folks.” Uh-huh, that would go over really well.

  I grabbed a washcloth and scrubbed at my face and neck. Back in my room I pulled off my shirt and grabbed another one out of the drawer. I shoved the wet shirt in the back of my closet and pulled the comforter over the blood-soaked sheets before the doorbell rang.

  An hour later Kimberley’s room looked like a pharmacy after a riot. The bed and floor were littered with IV bottles, syringes, tubes, and pieces of torn paper. The paramedics had made a valiant attempt to bring Kimberley back to life. After all the shouting and beeping from the machines the apartment was now silent as a grave.

  The paramedics checked me out, then left me in the living room with Inspectors Sansome and Trujillo, my friends from Lucy’s house, while various other personnel tramped in and out of Kimberley’s room.

  “Would you like us to call anybody for you, Angie?” This latest event had put me on a first name basis with Inspector Sansome. I thought about calling my parents and decided against it. What could they do now except worry?

  “Yes, I’d like to call my friend Steve.”

  “We need to ask you some questions, Ms. McCaffrey.” Inspector Trujillo was getting bored with waiting.

  “Let’s wait until her friend gets here, Ernesto.” Sansome’s voice was faintly admonishing. “Why don’t you sit down, Angie?”

  He pointed to the sofa. My immediate thought was Kimberley would go ballistic if any blood got on her white sofa, but then I remembered she wasn’t going to be getting angry about anything. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to sit there.

  “Why don’t we go in the kitchen?” I offered.

  Inspector Sansome offered to let me use his cell phone and a minute later Steve was on his way. Sansome and I sat across from each other in the two kitchen chairs. Trujillo leaned over to examine the outside of the kitchen window without touching the sill.

  “He came into the apartment while we were asleep,” I blurted out.

  “It was just one person, a man?” asked Sansome.

  I nodded. “That’s all I saw. Actually I didn’t really see him. He put a pillowcase over my head, one from Kimberley’s room. I just heard and felt him.”

  “So you can’t give us any description?” Trujillo was determined to ask his questions.

  I shook my head, but then I thought about it.

  “He was tall. He was wearing a leather jacket.”

  “Do you have any idea how he might have gotten in? You have to buzz people into your building, right?” Trujillo spoke with his back to me, still checking out the window. He pulled rubber gloves out of his pocket and put them on before trying the lock.

  “Yes, but he might have come in the window you’re looking at. There’s a fire escape that goes all the way down. Well, to the second floor, anyway.” I couldn’t imagine anyone would have the guts to use it, old and rusty as it was. “We always leave that window open a little bit.”

  “What happened next?” Sansome had his note pad out.

  “He came into Kimberley’s room first. I heard noises in there, bangs and crashes, then a scream. I didn’t go in. I was being quiet, hoping he would just go away.”

  I picked at my fingernails, feeling dangerously close to crying. Sansome put down his pen and touched me lightly on the arm. “Don’t feel bad that you didn’t go in there, Angie. No one would expect you to.”

  I thought of my own wound, the slick warm feeling of blood exiting my body. If I’d known he couldn’t kill me, would I have acted differently, would I have saved Kimberley’s life?

  Trujillo was hovering over me now, having finished with the window. I smelled cologne, something spicy and subtle, coming from his overcoat. “What happened next?” Trujillo asked briskly.

  Sansome shrugged at me conspiratorially from behind Trujillo’s back.

  “Then he came into my room. He grabbed me and pushed me on the bed. He had a knife, he was trying to cut me, but I pushed him off.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from fingering the scratch on my neck. Sansome leaned forward a little. “Looks like he got you, Angie.”

  “I guess he was going to cut me, or he did cut me, but I pushed my fingers into his eyes, and he fell over the side of the bed.”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Trujillo. He looked eagerly at my right hand, resting on the kitchen table.

  “We should sample under her fingernails, Andy.” Trujillo hovered over me like he was going to put my hands in an evidence bag and cart them away.

  Sansome smiled at me, ignoring Trujillo. “You washed your hands already, didn’t you, Angie? Face too?”

  Instantly I felt guilty. “Yes, I was feeling sick. I thought some cold water…I’m sorry.”

  Trujillo backed away, his face red with indignation. Sansome just nodded.

  “Of course, you did. That’s perfectly natural. What happened after he fell down?”

  “He ran away, out the front door.”

  “Did you hear the bolt, by any chance? Like he was unlocking the door?” Sansome scratched away in his notebook, not looking at me.

  “I don’t know if I heard the bolt or not.”

  “Don’t worry, we can check on that.” Sansome looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to remember something. “Do you mind if Inspector Trujillo takes a look at the front door, Angie?” Trujillo took the cue and left the room.

  Sansome was flipping pages in his notebook. “Then you went into Kimberley’s room, is that right?”

  “I went in and she was, well, like you saw her. I couldn’t feel any heartbeat. I called 911.”

  “Is there anything else you can remember about the man? Any smells?”

  Instantly I thought about Eric, his sweet, haunting fragrance. “Like
what?” I asked.

  “Sometimes people smell something, even when they can’t see. Like pipe smoke, or a particular aftershave. Caught one perp after the lady told me she smelled pepperoni after her place had been broken into. Turned out to be the pizza delivery guy.”

  I followed Sansome’s gaze to Kimberley’s $700 Illy espresso machine.

  “Do you want some coffee?”

  He laughed and patted my hand. “No, thank you, but aren’t you sweet? Smells, Angie?”

  “Only Kimberley’s perfume, from the pillowcase. It smells like roses.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said ‘Fuck’ when I poked him in the eyes.”

  “Anything distinguishing about his voice?”

  “Not that I can remember. He was kind of grunting. His voice was low.”

  “Angie, after your assailant cut you, did he do anything else to you, anything at all?”

  I remembered the man’s tongue lapping at my neck, his teeth probing the wound. At that moment Trujillo reappeared.

  “No sign of forced entry here or at the lobby. Ms. McCaffrey, did anyone else have a key to this apartment besides you and Kimberley?”

  “Just Kimberley’s parents, the Bennetts, as far as I know. They own the building.”

  Sansome waved at Trujillo, as if swatting a fly. It was the first time I’d seen any discomposure on his part. “Ernesto, could you go and see if Angie’s friend has arrived yet?”

  Trujillo walked away, looking chastised. Sansome pulled on a loose thread holding the first button on his jacket. The button came off in his hand.

  “I can’t sew worth a damn. My wife, she used to take care of all those things.” He sighed and put the button in his pocket, then looked up.

  “So Angie, was there anything else you wanted to add?”

  He knew I had been thinking of something. I remained silent, staring at the swirling pattern in the linoleum under my bare left foot.

  “All right,” said Sansome. “I think it would be better if you stayed somewhere else for a few days. The crime scene team might be returning.”

  “That’s all right, I can stay at Steve’s place. Can I go in my room and get some clothes?”

  “Yes, but I’d like to accompany you, if you don’t mind.”

  We walked slowly, like an elderly couple, back to my room. I went to my closet and grabbed a bag. Moving the door so Sansome couldn’t see what I was doing, I shoved the bloody T-shirt to the bottom, and then put some clean underwear, shirts, and pants on top. When I came out Sansome was waiting silently.

  He was still waiting for me to tell him the information that we both knew I had withheld. My mind was in turmoil. Who was I protecting? I was sure the pathetic monster that had attacked me bore no relation to Eric, except perhaps in his own imagination. No, the problem was that if I mentioned that the man had tried to drink my blood, the trail might lead back to Eric, even though I knew he had nothing to do with the murder. This one, anyway.

  When Sansome and I left the elevator I saw Steve and Inspector Trujillo talking near the fountain in the lobby, their gelled, dark heads close together. Steve’s hair was perfectly arranged, but I could see the checked pattern of a pajama top sticking up from his sweater collar.

  Steve saw me and ran over. He didn’t hug me but instead touched me all over, as if taking inventory. He touched my cheeks, my shoulders, my arms, as tenderly as if he were stroking a butterfly wing. I started crying uncontrollably for the first time that night. Steve put his arm around my shoulders, supporting my now wobbly legs.

  Back at his apartment, Steve gave me the royal treatment, or what would have been the royal treatment if the queen had pneumonia. After a long shower, he put me in his bed with a heating pad on my back, a hot water bottle on my feet, a cup of echinacea tea in my right hand and the TV remote in my left. I had already filled him in on the basic story on the way over, minus the miraculous healing, so I lay quietly and allowed him to minister to me. I felt completely exhausted but also wide-awake.

  Finally Steve yawned. “I’m going to go and sleep on the couch. We can talk in the morning.”

  “Aren’t you going to give me a dose of castor oil?” I asked.

  Steve just gave me a look and fluffed up my pillow.

  The last thing I wanted was to be left alone. “The bed’s plenty big for both of us, Steve.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line before. First time from a woman, though.” Steve lifted the comforter and slid in to the other side of the bed. I flipped through the TV channels with the mute on, just for something to do. There was no way I was going to sleep that night.

  Steve watched the images flitting across the screen. The silence was like a blanket wrapped around the two of us, so I was startled when Steve spoke.

  “Angie, we have to talk. I know you’ve been holding out on me about this Eric. But I have to know, was he the one who did this?”

  I contrasted the erotic, hallucinatory effect of whatever Eric had been doing to me with the pitiful, desperate, all too human actions of my attacker. “No, this wasn’t Eric. This was just a man.”

  “What do you mean just?”

  I had been withholding so much information from Steve about Eric that now was hardly the time to begin telling the truth. Steve already thought I was losing my grip on reality.

  “I think the attacker was trying to make me think that he was one of the House of Usher blood drinkers, but I know it wasn’t Eric.”

  “So who was it then?”

  “I don’t know, Steve. Maybe it was Les.”

  “No, it wasn’t Les,” Steve spoke with surprising conviction.

  “How do you know?”

  “He was here, Angie, earlier tonight. I was letting him sleep on the couch.”

  “You were what?”

  “I felt sorry for him. But listen to what I’m saying. He was here with me when you and Kimberley were attacked.”

  “That doesn’t prove he’s not Lucy’s killer.”

  Steve flipped onto his side and narrowed his eyes. “Angie, do you really believe that?”

  I paused for a moment. “No, I really don’t. If he’d asked to stay with me I’d have let him too. Where is he now?”

  “I dropped him off at another friend’s house when I came to get you. He said you had too many cops following you.”

  He picked up the remote and turned the TV off. “I think we should try to get some sleep.”

  “Sure.”

  Steve turned off the light and I stared at the ceiling. For a long time we lay in the dark, tossing and turning, knowing that the other one was awake. Finally Steve’s breathing became slow and deep. I continued to go over the night’s events in my mind, trying to make sense of them. There was another thing I hadn’t told anyone. When I went to my room with Inspector Sansome to get some clothes, I had also been planning to retrieve the bag I’d brought from the office, the one containing the Tangento file and the knife. But the bag was gone.

  Chapter 23

  I woke up completely disoriented and clueless as to where I was. The curtains at the window were so thick they let in just the barest sliver of light, from which I could ascertain it was daytime. The sun illuminated a Victorian dresser topped with a vase of white flowers whose name I didn’t know, which reminded me I was at Steve’s. I looked over to his side of the bed, but he was gone, the pillow fluffed and his side of the comforter neatly pulled up.

  The digital clock on the bedside table read 10:30. I had finally drifted off to sleep about 4:00 A.M., listening to Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas” in the movie Holiday Inn. It was the most cheerful thing I could find on TV, but it didn’t help me a bit.

  I reluctantly left Steve’s soft bed to go to the bathroom. When I looked at my neck in the mirror I thought I could detect a faint pink line, but when I leaned closer I couldn’t see anything. Last night Inspector Sansome had taken a long, hard look at me, and I’d thought that maybe I’d missed s
ome blood when I washed up. I knew that it would be helpful to his investigation to know that I’d been slashed as well as Kimberley, but I couldn’t bear to give him any information that might lead him, even erroneously, to Eric.

  After putting on the clothes I’d brought from home I went to the kitchen and poured a bowl of Raisin Bran with milk. I chewed, but it tasted so much like sawdust that I spat it out. I pushed the bowl away and laid my arms on the table, then my head. Sadness overwhelmed me and I cried onto the wooden table.

  The sound of Steve singing dried up my tears. Through the window I saw him weeding in his garden, knees on a rubber gardening cushion, iPod speakers in his ears. The day was bright, the sky was blue and his flowers brilliant red. It was a beautiful, sunlit moment, one Eric would never get to experience for the rest of his long life. To never see the sun again, what would that be like?

  It seemed like I was on the way to finding out, as the light was stinging my eyes, even from indoors. Steve had left the Chronicle on the table and I scanned the front page. A wooly mammoth had been hacked out of the ice in Antarctica and scientists were hoping to clone it. I turned to the local news. A venerable printing press was being evicted because a brand new blog-hosting company had bought the building. The press employees were desperately trying to finish printing six hundred copies of an illuminated Bible before they ceased to exist.

  Below the picture of a man laying tiny metal letters into a plate was the next story’s headline: “Autopsy Report on ‘Vampire’ Victim: Blood Loss Cause of Death.” At first I thought the article was about Kimberley, then realized that it had to be about Lucy. There was no way they could have done an autopsy on Kimberley so quickly.

  The autopsy report on Lucy’s body stated the cause of death as massive blood loss from two wounds in the carotid artery, made by a weapon similar to an ice pick. Toxicology had found traces of Rohypnol, the “date rape” drug, in her system. Time of death was estimated to have been between nine P.M. and midnight on Tuesday. I wondered whether the police were still looking for Les.

  The feeling I had then would have been giddy relief if I hadn’t been reading about a dead colleague, but I was still relieved. Lucy had been drugged with Rohypnol. As I could attest, Eric didn’t ply anyone with drugs. He didn’t need to, since his own scent was a drug to humans. Lucy’s murder had been staged to look like a vampire’s handiwork, or more accurately, a fake vampire’s handiwork. So now Eric was exonerated, at least in my mind, of both murders.