by Lyn Gala
The cure to most forms of helplessness was more information. If these guys targeted Brady because of the case, because he’d seen something or someone, she was going to figure out the connection. The rapes were all in the same part of town as both vampire houses, so the theory wasn’t looking too bad right now.
The captain had said that the blue sedan had been at both two of the rapes and Brady’s disappearance. Paige stood next to her car and frowned. Brady had followed her and Hunter without a car. He hadn’t wanted the car this morning. There wasn’t a single car she could remember at either vampire house. Okay, clearly she had some gaps she had to fill.
Locking her car door, she headed into the station.
“Silver,” one of the uniforms from night shift offered respectfully as he headed out while she headed in. Veronica gave her a smile from across the room where detectives where handing out the canvass assignments.
“Silver, you ignored all my calls last night.” Alex came out of the hall that led to the time clock and locker rooms.
“Yes, I did,” Paige agreed. Shouldering him out of the way, she headed to clock in and then change. She needed to make it fast or Veronica would corner her in the locker room, and as much Paige loved the woman, she didn’t want to deal with her today.
“I was worried about you,” Alex called after her.
“I’m fine,” Paige said as she slid her name badge through the time clock and pressed her thumb to the reader. “I needed some sleep.”
“That’s funny, because you don’t look like you slept at all.” Ignoring Alex, she headed into the locker room and made a beeline for her locker. Alex liked to gossip, so maybe someone would distract him from going and getting Veronica and sending her in. She loved her friends and coworkers, but sometimes they drove her a little insane.
Luckily, she managed to get into uniform and out the locker room door before Veronica could trap her. The station was quieter than normal. The raunchy jokes and dark humor that always showed up when a bad case hit was completely missing. At the same time, no one was complaining about bills or the ex-wife or the kids. The room was muffled with the slide of chairs and the clicking of keyboards and the soft sound of the police radio drowning out the voices.
Paige looked around. She was twenty minutes late and the detectives had already handed out the assignments to the people working on the rape case. Even if she’d been on time, she wouldn’t have been allowed to work the neighborhoods.
What she really needed was an excuse to access the computers. The databases would have all the reports. Maybe something had happened at one of the vampire houses. Hell, maybe there was a really good suspect that the detectives had given up on because he was dead. At this point, death would just make a suspect look guiltier in her book. However, uniformed officers didn’t normally use the station search programs.
A young uniformed officer was laughing as he walked in from the garage and his partner caught him by the arm and gave him a solid yank, his head nodding in Paige’s direction. The kid fell silent. Those two would be on the computers. They were traffic. Traffic always entered their own tickets into the system, ever since the fancy portable interfaces had been hacked by the Hawksworth boy. True, they weren’t supposed to be in the search programs, but she was willing to bet she could find some time to snoop around if she could just find an excuse to do the entry.
“Silver, you look like shit.”
Paige turned to find the captain watching her. “Thanks, Captain, that’s just what every woman wants to hear.”
His eyebrow twitched. “Well, you do.” He sighed and crossed his arms. “What are you even doing here, Silver?”
“Working.”
“Silver.” He sighed again, and she could feel the weariness hanging on him.
She wasn’t the only one struggling with this. He had a serial rapist loose in his town, a bunch of out-of-towners trying to show up the department and now a missing cop who everyone thought was dead. She wouldn’t want to be in his shoes any more than she wanted to be in her own.
“Paige, you lost a partner yesterday. No one expects you to be here today.” His voice was soft and yet the noise level in the whole room seemed to drop. People even typed quieter and Paige chafed under the weight of all their sympathy.
“And yet, if I’m not here, that means I’m home staring at the walls. Come on, at least let me go type in parking tickets. It’d be better than sitting around doing nothing.” Paige didn’t add that it would also give her an excuse to access the police database.
“Considering the look on your face, I’d be scared you’d shoot the computer the first time it crashed.”
Paige stood up straighter. “Captain. I am not—”
“That was a joke, Silver, a badly timed joke. I know you wouldn’t do that, but I also know you’re not doing well.” He looked her up and down and Paige prayed that he wasn’t going to send her away. If she had to sit at home and do nothing, she was going to go slowly and inevitably insane. She had a good head start on it now.
“Please, Captain.” She didn’t often beg, but right now she was willing to.
“You can take paid leave, Silver,” he said with sympathy that grated against Paige’s nerves.
“If I wanted to, I would. I can’t sit home. I just can’t, Captain.”
He rubbed his neck and looked out over the people crowding their small station. “I still remember when that first partner of yours ate his gun. Damn. We were all a mess over that, but now you’ve lost a second partner. No one is supposed to come through that without being a little emotionally battered around the edges.”
Paige nodded mutely. Everyone had been shocked that she came out of that shooting without a scratch and when Matherton had come out of surgery still breathing, it’d felt like victory. At least, it had until he’d killed himself rather than learn to live with a few physical limitations.
She’d been so angry at him that she’d come close to quitting, but this wasn’t the same. She needed to be here and she kept praying the captain would let her stay. She planned to outwait the captain, but after several minutes, it was pretty clear that he wanted an answer.
“I’m a lot battered around the edges. Matherton was…I know I did what I could for him, but Brady was my trainee. He was my partner, and when someone came looking for him, I wasn’t anywhere around. Captain, I can’t sit at home and wonder what his last hours were like. I can’t do it.”
He looked at her with concern. “So you’re giving up on him being alive?”
She wanted so badly to just tell him the truth, to drag someone else into this world so she didn’t have to be alone in it. But he was a good man with grandkids and a life that didn’t have room for vampires. She could handle late-night visits from vampire hunters. She could worry about whether her vampire partner was going to kill her in the middle of the night. He didn’t need to live like that.
“You saw the blood. He didn’t survive that, Captain. If he’d shown up in a hospital the first few hours, but now…” She let her voice trail off without sharing Brady’s secret.
He nodded. “We’ll find who did this.”
Paige pressed her lips together as a cold fury washed through her. “We’d better.”
The captain slapped her arm, and for a second, he left his hand there. “I tell you what—play detective for the day. You were working the rape case on the streets, so take a look at the paperwork and see if anything new stands out that the rest of us are missing. I’ve looked through those damn files so many times that I can see the women’s faces in my dreams, but we can’t pin down the perp. Turn some of that nervous energy loose on him.”
Maybe Paige’s shock showed on her face because the captain patted her shoulder. “Silver, you’ve got a sharp mind. You would have made detective years ago if you’d tried for it. So your insight would be helpful. Just don’t leave this station. If you get some lead you want to follow up, you get one of the detectives or me. You are in no shape to follow up on an
ything.”
“Yes sir,” she quickly agreed.
“If you so much as go to the bathroom across the street while hoping to run into some witness you’re interested in, I’ll pull your badge and gun until I think you’re thinking straight again. Because right now you don’t have the right frame of mind to be on the streets, got it?”
Paige nodded. “I got it and you’re right. There’s this part of me that wants to crawl in a hole and let the rest of you deal with this,” she admitted with a little more honesty than she meant to use.
“That’s called being human, Silver. You’re admitting to being human.” The smile he gave her had too much pity for her to feel comfortable, but after a half-second, he turned and headed for his office.
Paige swallowed her bitter emotions before she headed for the bank of computers that had been set up for the taskforce. Most were sitting empty because detectives were out chasing their tails after pulling together reports from yesterday’s canvass. By this afternoon, the room would be full of weary men and women dragging their failure behind them.
Sitting at the end farthest from the bathrooms, since that was where people tended to gather and gossip, she logged in. When she tried to pull up the rape case file from the common server, the computer gave an embarrassingly loud chirp and asked for verification of a password. If the captain hadn’t given her permission to access the file, that would have been downright embarrassing.
“Are you looking for a file?” the profiler asked. Paige was a little embarrassed to realize she didn’t know his name. He’d given her a ride after Brady disappeared and he’d been working the case for a week, but she couldn’t come up with his name to save her soul.
“The captain said to review the files. Maybe Brady and I did see something we didn’t understand the importance of.” She expected him to question that, but he leaned over and typed one-handed.
“Good thinking. If you get logged out, the login is your own ID and the password is 117273. If you run into anything interesting, let me know. Do you want the profile we have so far?”
Paige shook her head. The last thing she needed was a long speech about the rapist’s motivations. She couldn’t care less if he was abused as a child, and if this was a vampire, the rule book probably didn’t apply. “I’m just looking for anything familiar, anything that I might have not recognized the importance of when Brady and I were interviewing people.” Paige kept her eyes focused on the computer in the hopes that the profiler would just wander on his merry little way. Luckily he took a hint easier than Alex or Veronica.
“If you need anything clarified, I’ll probably stay here most of the day.” With that, he left her to wander through the files on her own.
She started with the geographical stuff. The area was the poorest part of town, not far from where Hunter had blown up the house. The smell around there kept most people away, but for those without much money, it was a way to buy or rent a fairly decent house at slum prices. And if the suspect was a vamp, the close proximity to the swamp would make it pretty easy to disappear.
Paige remembered how the eighties vamp had leaped into the air with inhuman power. Yeah, it would be really easy for them to disappear on foot and the swamp wouldn’t leave any trace.
Basic rule of profiling—people generally stayed within their own race when looking for victims. It made sense. A white face was going to stand out in this part of town. Historically, this was a black section, but starting in the seventies, the blacks had moved on to better houses and illegal immigrants started moving in.
At first clay mines and paper mills had hired them, but these days, they seemed to run their own shadow economy of cheap labor for construction sites, landscaping and housekeeping. So the suspect or suspects were probably Hispanic and most likely illegal. Only an illegal immigrant would trust the fear of the police to keep victims quiet. Unless it was a vampire—Paige could imagine that people would keep quiet just to keep from sounding crazy. God knows that’s what she was doing.
If the suspect was a vampire, it would also explain the sheer terror in some of their witnesses. It wouldn’t explain why they didn’t feel the lust Paige did when Brady got too close.
Pushing that aside, Paige focused on the case. Victims two and five were the only ones to die. Number two, Marianna Carriño de Morales, had a heart attack at age forty-two. The coroner found a defective heart valve that she probably never knew about until her rapist scared her to death. Number five, Irena Ruiz, had been an insulin-dependent diabetic and she had slipped into a coma during the attack. She’d lasted hours before dying in the hospital.
On a hunch, Paige pulled up the files on the other four victims. Number one was missing in action. The detectives thought she had gone back home to Mexico. If Paige had been raped by a demon, she’d definitely want to get out of the country, so as much as that made detectives’ work harder, Paige couldn’t blame the woman.
Eldora Fernandez had been admitted to the hospital a week after the attack and she was still in County General. The hospital didn’t say why, but Jim said that people who were touched and escaped still slowly died. Victim number four didn’t have any official entries after the rape, so hopefully she was still alive and well. Same for victim six.
Paige sighed as she realized she had a whole lot of nothing.
However, the detectives wouldn’t have looked at dead people as suspects. That’s where she had an advantage. Maybe the rapist was someone who’d been turned recently. Setting up the search parameters, she searched for any Hispanics who had died violently in the eight-county area. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but hopefully something would stand out and scream “vampire”.
“What’s that?” Paige sucked in a breath and jumped as the profiler sat on the table next to her.
He held his hands up. “Sorry. Hey, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Looking over her shoulder, he studied the computer screen. “Violent deaths? Do you think our rapist has been a busy little boy somewhere else?”
Paige shrugged. “I always think of rapists as insecure assholes who like to push other people around.”
“Good description. As a psychologist, I usually dress it up and make the words a little prettier, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.” He gave her a twisted smile.
“So maybe he tried pushing someone else around.”
The profiler pursed his lips, but he didn’t dismiss her out of hand. That was good because Paige was pulling this shit out of her ass. She was really looking for the rapist in the list of the dead.
“It’s a long shot, but at this point, long shots might be the only new leads around. Let me know if you find anything interesting,” he said with an encouraging smile before he headed over to the detectives’ table.
Paige blew out a breath. She was definitely off her game today. She started searching through the computer files for her own sort of interesting lead. Unfortunately, there weren’t any occult deaths—no strange symbols or mutilated bodies. True, Paige had a pretty limited experience to work from, but no one was standing out as a potential vampire.
Her phone rang and Paige reached in her pocket and pulled it out, thumbing it on without taking her eyes off the computer. Shit. Why wasn’t anything going her way today? These reports were all blindingly normal.
“Yeah, Silver here.”
“Silver. Oh thank God,” a familiar voice said. “If I’d known you could run that fast, I would have set up farther from the cars. Then again, if I’d known you were going to rabbit into the woods, I would have set up closer to them. You worried me, girl.”
Paige could feel her entire body stiffen in anger. “Hunter,” she said, her voice low, but Cindy from records still gave her an odd look, so she was guessing she had her not-happy tone of voice going. Paige hit the logout button on the computer and excused herself with a nod toward the door when the profiler looked at her. He nodded and went right back to his conversation.
“The one and only,” Hunter agreed. “Yo
u can handle yourself, Silver, I have to give you credit for that. You got two kills your first time out. I’ll even try to not hold it against you that you got one more than I did. Of course, no one really expects the runner to take out anyone. That’s the sniper’s job.”
By the time Paige hit the front door and pushed her way through, she could feel herself getting physically hot despite the cool weather. “The runner? The fucking runner?” Paige turned her back to try to shield her conversation from a trio of men coming in. She headed down the street in search of a quieter corner.
“Yeah, well there’s really only one way to know how someone is going to handle terror and it’s best to know up front. Right?”
“No, not right,” Paige hissed. “Right would be giving me a choice.” Paige was trying to whisper, but her voice kept getting louder despite her best attempt to control herself.
“Doesn’t work that way, Silver. If hunters took on every gun-happy idiot who caught wind of vampires we’d never get any work done. And if the idiots weren’t convinced to keep their mouths shut, we’d have a whole lot of panic on our hands. People are morons when they panic and vamps aren’t any better. This way we know who’s worth training, and the rest…well, they’re so frightened that they piss their pants any time someone mentions Dracula. It’s just the cleanest solution.”
Paige stopped near the jewelry store and braced her hand against the cool, rough brick. “And what if I demanded to be part of your killing squad…what if I’d refused to be a runner?”
“Then I would have pointed you to the same spot and told you to take out as many of the bastards as you could. You might have taken a couple before panicking and running. Might not have. Either way, I would have been left to pick them off your tail. But damn, Silver, you made it hard running that fast. Next time, slow down some.”