Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “A barbaric practice,” Charles said, “we of the church are held by our own moral standards not some magical oath.”

  I smiled and motioned around the room. “Hmm, nice standards.”

  Charles blushed, which isn’t easy for a vamp, but it let me know he’d fed tonight, fed a lot. “Who was your feed for tonight?”

  He just glared at me. “Look, guys, it’s 4:30 in the morning. We have less than three hours to get your asses back to your homes. We want you all out of here before dawn, alright?”

  They all nodded. “Then answer my questions. I can tell which one of you has fed and which hasn’t. I need to know what dancers, or donors, you fed on. If they’re in the other room, I need to talk to them. If they aren’t, I need names, and a way to contact them tonight.”

  “The relationship between a vampire and their partner is sacred.”

  “Look, Charles, you’ve got enough blood in you to blush. You want me to start speculating where you got that much blood to waste?”

  “We have already been threatened and abused. You can do no more to us.”

  I turned to the rest. “Who wants to answer my questions and get an I-won’t-tell-Malcolm card?”

  The bald vamp stood up. Charles yelled at him. But Baldie shook his head. “No, you aren’t my master, Charles. We are all free beings in the church, it’s one of the reasons we joined. I’m going to answer her questions, because it’s within my rights to do so.”

  “Let’s find a private room,” I said, and motioned for him to follow me. There was a truly beautiful saltwater aquarium in a little area that was probably meant to be a smoking room, but there were smaller rooms off of it, where normally you could take one of the dancers and get a private dance.

  I took Baldie into the first room. It was actually nice, not tacky in the least, with a small couch, a chair, a coffee table, and area lighting. The room still pulled off that leather and manly den theme, without being obnoxious about it. “Have a seat,” I said.

  He sat, rubbing his hands over his knees, nervous. He was a little plump, and soft. He looked like an accountant, except that when he licked his lips, he flashed a little fang. The new ones do that. “How long have you been in the church?”

  “Two years.” He was shaking his head. “I thought it would be sexy, you know, vampires, the clothes, the romance.” He clasped his plump hands together. “But it’s not like that at all. I’m still a law clerk, just at a different office where they let me work nights. I can’t drink, can’t eat a steak, and dying didn’t make me sexier.” He spread his hands wide. “Look at me, I’m just paler.”

  “I thought the church required six months minimum of study before they let you take the last step?”

  He nodded. “They do, but they made all the moral stuff seem high-minded, you know, we’re better than those other vampires. We aren’t perverts like Jean-Claude and his vamps.” He looked up and was scared, and it showed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I know what the church says about normal vampire society.”

  “It sounded so noble.”

  “Let me guess, there was this woman that happened to be a vampire.”

  He looked up, startled. “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess, and after you made the change, what happened?”

  “She was my partner for the first few months, but after that, she had other duties.”

  That was interesting, and I filed it away for later. If the church deacons were seducing members, that might be called illegal, at the very least questionably moral. “Who’d you feed off of tonight?”

  The question threw him, and he blinked at me like a rabbit in headlights. “Sasha, her name was Sasha.”

  “And you brought her back here?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re a club member?”

  He nodded again.

  “Charles is, too?”

  Nod.

  “Most of the people at the table are members?”

  Nod, then, “It was Clarke’s first time here.”

  “And Clarke is the one with the pillow?”

  “How did you know?”

  I shook my head, smiled, and said, “Do you remember any other girls that people fed off of, names or descriptions.” He remembered a lot. I ended up with four names, two descriptions, and only poor Clarke had not fed. Of course, I’d known that last part, but it’s always nice to have things confirmed.

  With Zerbrowski as my guard, we ventured out into the club and fetched the women in question. We matched up every vamp with at least one girl. Charles had fed on three, and he was a big tipper. Two of the girls were his regulars. Pretty naughty for a church deacon.

  It took me a little more than two hours to match up those who had fed with whom they’d fed on. It didn’t mean they hadn’t snuck out and fed again, but it made it less likely. I suggested that we could compare bite radiuses on the dead girl with the vamps later, if we needed to. We knew their names, and knew how to find them.

  The most interesting bit of information I found out was given up only by the first vamp I talked to and by Clarke, who was so scared he’d have given up his mother. There had been three other church members here earlier in the evening, and they were also part of the crowd that liked to frequent the stripper bars. But none of them were members of the Sapphire Room VIP club. I had their names and an address for the most newly dead of them. Maybe they’d had something to do with the murder, or maybe they just gotten bored and went home early. It wasn’t a crime to leave a place.

  Zerbrowski had actually called in state troopers to back us up, as we escorted the vampires to their cars. None of them was powerful enough, or old enough to be able to fly home. When we’d gotten the last of the undead safely off in their minivans and compact cars, Zerbrowski took me to one side and said, “Did I hear you right? The vamp church makes their members sign a morals clause?”

  I nodded. “Other vamps call them nightshift Mormons.”

  He grinned. “Nightshift Mormons, really.”

  “Honest.”

  “Oh, I will have to remember that one, that’s good.” He looked behind us at the waiting ambulance, fire truck, and all the personnel. “Now that you’ve helped save the vamps, how about looking at the acutal crime scene?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  He grinned, and it almost pushed the tiredness out of his eyes. “I get to go first down the ladder,” he said.

  I frowned at him. “What ladder?”

  “Our murder scene and body dump are in a hole left by some overzealous construction workers. According to the club manager, they broke ground, but didn’t have all their permits in line, so it’s just a big hole. That’s why we need the firemen to help us get the body up out of the hole when you’re done with it.”

  “You are not going ahead of me down the ladder, Zerbrowski.”

  “What are you wearing under that little bitty skirt?”

  “None of your damn business, and if you don’t let me go first down the ladder, I’ll tell your wife on you.”

  He laughed, and a few people looked our way. They were colder than we were, and just as tired. I don’t think they saw anything to laugh about. “Katie knows I’m a lech.”

  I shook my head. “How messy is it down in the hole?”

  “Let’s see, it’s rained, it’s frozen, it’s thawed, and it’s rained some more.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Where are those overalls you used to wear to all the crime scenes?”

  “It’s against company policy to wear crime scene gear to a zombie raising now.” What I didn’t say out loud was that I’d forgotten and worn overalls that had blood on them to a zombie raising. The client’s wife had fainted. Was it my fault that she had a fragile constitution? It wasn’t Bert who said no more, it was a majority vote at Animator’s Inc. So I actually had to pay attention to the rule. “I didn’t plan on climbing into holes and looking at bodies tonight.”

  The
grin faded from his face. “Me neither, let’s get this done. I want to go home and hug my wife and kids before they go off to school and work.”

  I didn’t point out that it was 6:30 in the morning, and his chances of making it home in time to see Katie and his kids before they rushed off to their days was slim to none. Everybody needs a little hope, who am I to take it away?

  47

  THE WOMAN IN the hole was beyond hope, or fear, or whatever had happened to her. Her face looked empty, the way the dead always do. You get an occasional one that looks scared, but it’s just happenstance. The way their face muscles worked at the moment of death. But mostly, the dead look empty, like something essential is missing, something beyond just no breath, no heartbeat. I’d seen enough eyes do that last glaze, to say that something more precious than breath goes with death. Or maybe I was just tired and didn’t want to be standing ankle-deep in mud, staring down at a woman that was probably younger than I was, and now always would be. I get more morbid the closer to dawn it gets, if I haven’t been to bed.

  There were a lot of similarities to the first body. This one was lying on her back, just like the last one. They’d both been strippers. They were both killed just outside the clubs that they worked in. This one was a blonde, and white, which was the same as the first one. There were a set of bite marks on either side of the neck, and one in the bend of her left arm, right wrist, and chest. To see if she had thigh bites I was going to have to kneel in the mud, and I didn’t want to. Simple as that, I didn’t want to. I promised myself I would never again be caught out, anywhere, without a pair of coveralls, and mud boots. I’d had to borrow gloves from Zerbrowski. I’d been thinking about my date, not about my job when I packed the Jeep earlier. Stupid me.

  I stood up and debated on whether I could get away without crawling around in the mud and looking at all the bites. “She’s taller, by almost a foot than the last one. Blond hair but very short, the last one had long hair. Other than that, it looks damn similar.”

  “The bite radiuses are the same.”

  “Who took the measurements?” I asked.

  He told me, and the name meant nothing to me. I was across the river, and I didn’t actually do a lot of crime scenes here. I killed vamps for Illinois, but I didn’t do much actual investigative work. I couldn’t let someone else do it, not if I didn’t know them. If even one bite radius was off, it would mean a change of players in our vampire group. We needed to know if we were looking for five, or six, or more.

  I sighed and fetched my little tape measure out of the jacket pocket. That I’d started keeping in the glove compartment with the baby wipes. I measured the easy-to-get-to bites first and had Zerbrowski take notes. Then I planted my knee carefully in the mud, between her knees. The mud was cold. I spread her legs and found the inner thigh bites. I measured everything I could find. The bite radiuses matched, or ballparked. I was using a different instrument to do the measuring, which I shouldn’t have done. I shouldn’t have let the CSU technician let me use something I wouldn’t have with me next time. What you measured with could make a difference in the field. The field was not a laboratory.

  I got up from the ground carefully, my goal was still not to slide on my ass in the mud. High-heeled boots were not the best thing to wear to guarantee that. So I was careful. “The Sapphire has security people walking their lot. At least one security guy at any given time. It’s the weekend, there should have been two. Did they see or hear anything?”

  “One of them saw the girl come out with her coat on. She was headed home, done for the night. He saw her go toward her car”—he riffled back through his notebook—“then, she wasn’t there.”

  I looked at him. “What did you say?”

  “He said, she was walking toward her car, he waved at her, then something attracted his attention to the other side of the lot. He’s a little vague on what attracted his attention, but he swears he only glanced away, then when he looked back, she was gone.”

  “Gone.”

  “Yeah, why do you have that look on your face, like that means something?”

  “Did he check her car right away?”

  He nodded. “Yes, and when he didn’t find her at the car, he went back into the club to see if she’d gone back inside. When he couldn’t find her inside, he got the other security guy, and they started searching the area. They found her.”

  “How long does he think he looked away for?”

  “He says a few seconds.”

  “Has anyone checked with anyone else inside, who might have seen her leave? I’d like to know what time she left the building, and how long he was really staring off in the other direction.”

  “Let’s just get out of the hole and find someone who saw her leave and actually looked at a clock.”

  He was riffling through his notebook again. The lights that they had directed down into the pit illuminated everything, in fact made it all a little stark, and pitiless, as if she needed to be covered up and not stared at anymore. Maudlin, I was getting positively maudlin.

  “Actually, one of the ladies inside, a customer, had liked the blonde a lot, she and her husband. So she noticed the time when she left.”

  “And how does it tally with the security guy’s statement?”

  He checked the times back and forth. “Ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes is an awfully long time to stare at something he isn’t even sure he saw.”

  “You think he lied?”

  I shook my head. “No, I think he told what he thinks is the truth.”

  “I’m lost. What are you getting at?” Zerbrowski asked.

  I smiled at him, but not like I was happy. “One of the vamps has to be a master, we figured that, but they also have to be able to cloud men’s minds enough to pull something like this off.”

  “I thought all vamps could cloud men’s minds.”

  I shook my head. “They can mesmerize one person with their gaze, and if they bite them, then they can blank their memory. If they’re powerful enough, they can mesmerize with the eyes and blank most of the memory. But the vic will usually have this vague memory of eyes, or sometimes an animal with blazing eyes, or car headlights that were very bright. The mind tries to make mundane sense of what’s happened.”

  “Okay, so one of the vamps zapped him with its gaze.”

  “No, Zerbrowksi, I’m betting it wasn’t eyes. I’m betting it was from a distance with no direct gaze. I’ll talk to him, see what he remembers, but if he’s bite-free and doesn’t have some weird memory, then it was done from a nice safe distance, with no direct contact.”

  “So what?” he asked, and he sounded irritated and tired.

  I didn’t take it personally. “It means that one of the vamps is old, Zerbrowski. Old, and a master vampire. We’re talking fairly major talent here. It’s a limited list.”

  “Names?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s talk to the security guy and get him to strip down for us.”

  He looked at me over the rims of his glasses, before he pushed them back up his nose. “Did you just say what I think you just said?”

  “We’ve got to check him for vamp bites. If he’s clean, then we’re looking for a major player, vampirically speaking. If he’s got a bite, then not so major. Trust me, it’ll make a difference in who we talk to.”

  “Is this Jean-Claude’s people?” Zerbrowski asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “How can you be sure?” he asked.

  How could I be sure? I was tired enough that I let that be a question in my head, let me wonder what Jean-Claude would say. Would he guarantee that this couldn’t have been his people? The thought was enough, he was suddenly in my head. Shit.

  He was seeing what I was seeing, not good at a murder investigation when the vic had been done in by vamps. I started to shield, to kick him out, but I suddenly knew the answer to my question. “My blood oath will hold them from this, because it is against my express orders to bring us to the neg
ative attention of the human police.”

  I thought, Liv broke your oath once, and he heard me. “I was not le sourdre de sang then. My oath is not so lightly shaken off now, ma petite.”

  I’d been quiet too long. Zerbrowski said, “You okay?”

  “Just thinking,” I said. I’d known about blood oaths, but I hadn’t actually understood how important they were, or what they were supposed to mean. “Because all of Jean-Claude’s people have to take a blood oath. It binds them mystically to the Master of the City. He’s forbidden his vampires to do shit like this.”

  “You’re saying the blood oath makes this impossible?”

  “Not impossible, but harder. It depends on how strong the master is that they make the oath to.”

  “How strong is Jean-Claude?”

  I thought about a way to explain it and finally settled for, “Strong enough that I’d bet good money this wasn’t his people.”

  “But you wouldn’t guarantee it.”

  “Guarantees are for major appliances, not for murder.”

  He grinned. “That’s cute, I may just have to use that one sometime.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  The grin faded round the edges. “I still don’t really understand this whole blood oath thing. Maybe I’m just too tired for metaphysics, explain it to me again later.”

  “Let me simplify it.”

  “That’d be nice,” he said.

  “I just learned tonight from the vamps I questioned that Malcolm has abolished the blood oath for the church. It’s too barbaric.”

  Jean-Claude was still in my head and heard what I said. I got a rush of fear from him, fear bordering on panic.

  “Okay, and that means what exactly?” Zerbrowski asked.

  I had to take a deep breath to talk around Jean-Claude’s fear. His voice in my head said, “Are you certain of this, ma petite?”

  I let my out loud voice for Zerbrowski answer Jean-Claude’s question, too. “It means, Zerbrowski, that you have hundreds of vampires in this area that have nothing to keep them from doing shit like this, except their own consciences, and a morals clause they all sign.”