1 Blood Price

by Tanya Huff

  “Like looking for a needle in a haystack.” But it had to be done; a witness could break the case wide open.

  She finished her coffee and checked her watch. There was one thing she wanted to check before she hit the pavement. 8:43. Cutting it close, but Brandon should still be at his desk.

  He was.

  After greetings were exchanged—perfunctory on one side at least—Vicki slid in the reason for her call. “. . . and you and I both know you’ve found things that you haven’t told the papers.”

  “That’s very true, Victoria.” The coroner didn’t even pretend not to understand. “But, as you know very well, I won’t be able to tell these things to you either. I’m sorry, but you’re no longer a member of the constabulary.”

  “But I have been hired to work on the case.” Quickly, she outlined the pertinent parts of Coreen’s visit for him, leaving out any mention of the young lady’s personal belief as to the supernatural identity of the killer as well as the latest phone call.

  “You’ve been hired as a private citizen, Victoria, and as such you have no more right to information than any other private citizen.”

  Vicki stifled a sigh and considered how best to approach this. When Brandon Singh meant no, he said it, straight out with no frills. And then he hung up. As long as he remained willing to talk he remained willing to be conviced. “Look, Brandon, you know my record. You know I have as good a chance as anyone in the city of solving this case. And you know you want it solved. I’ll stand a better chance if I have all available information.”

  “Granted, but somehow this smacks of vigilantism.”

  “Vigilantism? Trust me, Brandon, I am not going to dress up in some silly costume and leap around making the city safe for decent people.” She doodled a bat symbol on her notepad, then hastily crumpled the page up and tossed it away. Under the circumstances, bats were not a particularly apt motif. “All I’m doing is investigating. I swear I’ll hand over everything I turn up to Violent Crimes.”

  “I believe you, Victoria.” He paused and Vicki, fidgeting with impatience, jumped into the silence.

  “With a killer of this caliber on the loose, can the city afford not to have me on the case, even in an auxiliary position?”

  “Think highly of yourself, don’t you?”

  She heard the smile in his voice and knew she had him. Dr. Brandon Singh believed in using every available resource and while he personally might have preferred a less intuitive approach than hers, he had to admit that “Victory” Nelson represented a valuable resource indeed. If she thought highly of herself, it wasn’t without cause.

  “Very well,” he said at last, his tone even more portentous than usual as though to make up for his earlier lapse. “But there’s very little the papers don’t have and I don’t know what use you’ll be able to make of it.” He took a deep breath and even the ambient noise on the phone line seemed to fall silent to listen. “We found, in all but the first wound, a substance very like saliva. . . .”

  “Very like saliva?” Vicki interjected. “How could something be very like saliva?”

  “Something can’t. But this was. What’s more, every body so far, including that of young Reddick, has been missing the front half of the throat.”

  “I’d already discovered that.”

  “Indeed.” For a moment, Vicki was afraid he’d taken offense at her interruption, but he continued. “The only other item kept from the press concerns the third body—the large man, DeVerne Jones. He was clutching a torn piece of thin membrane in his hand.”

  “Membrane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like a bat wing?”

  “Remarkably similar, yes.”

  It was Vicki’s turn to breathe deeply. Something very like saliva and a bat wing. “I can see why you didn’t tell the papers.”

  Celluci hung up the phone and reached for the paper. He couldn’t decide whether the apology had been made easier because Vicki was out of her apartment or harder because he’d had to talk to her damned machine. Whatever. It was done and the next move was hers.

  A second later Dave Graham barely managed to snatch his coffee out of harm’s way as his partner slammed the paper down on the desk.

  “Did you see this bullshit?” Celluci demanded.

  “The, uh, giant bat?”

  “Fuck the bat! Those bastards found a witness and didn’t see fit to let us know!”

  “But we were heading out to St. Dennis this morning. . . .”

  “dealt,” Celluci shrugged into his jacket and glared Dave up out of his chair, “but we’re heading down to the paper first. A witness could blow this case wide open and I don’t want to piss away my time if they’ve got a name.”

  “A name of someone who sees giant bats,” Dave muttered, but he scrambled into his own coat and followed his partner out into the hall. “You think it really could be a vampire?” he asked as he caught up.

  Celluci didn’t even break stride. “Don’t you start,” he growled.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s the police, Mr. Bowan. We need to talk to you.” Celluci held his badge up in line with the spy-eye and waited. After a long moment, he heard a chain being pulled free and two—no, three—locks snapped off. He stepped back beside his partner as the door slowly opened.

  The old man peered up at them through rheumy eyes. “You Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Surely the old man’s eyesight hadn’t been good enough to read that off his ID.

  “She said you’d probably show up this morning.” He opened the door wider and moved back out of the way. “Come in, come in.”

  The detectives exchanged puzzled looks as they entered the tiny apartment. While the old man relocked the door, Celluci looked around. Heavy blankets had been tacked up along one wall, over the windows and the balcony door, and every light in the place was on. There was a Bible on the coffee table and a water glass beside it that smelled of Scotch. Whatever the old man had seen, it had caused him to put up the barricades and reach for reassurance.

  Dave settled himself carefully on the sagging couch. “Who said we’d be here this morning, Mr. Bowan?”

  “Young lady who just left. In fact, I’m surprised you didn’t pass her in the parking lot. Nice girl, real friendly.”

  “Did this nice, real friendly girl have a name?” Celluci asked through clenched teeth.

  The old man managed a wheezy laugh. “She said you’d react like that.” Shaking his head, he picked a business card off his kitchen table and dropped it into Celluci’s hand.

  Leaning over his partner’s shoulder, Dave barely had a chance to read it before Celluci closed his fist.

  “What else did Ms. Nelson say?”

  “Oh, she seemed real concerned that I cooperate with you gentlemen. That I tell you everything I told her. Course I had no intention of doing otherwise, though I’ve got no idea what the police can do. More a job for an exorcist or maybe a pri. . . .” A yawn that threatened to split his face in half cut off the flow of words. “S’cuse me, but I didn’t get much sleep last night. Can I get either of you a cup of tea? Pot’s still hot.” When both men declined, he settled himself down in a worn armchair and looked expectantly from one to the other. “You going tc ask me questions or you just want me to start at the beginning and tell it in my own words?”

  “Start at the beginning and tell it in your own words. ” Celluci had heard Vicki give that instruction a thousand times ar d had no doubt he was hearing her echo now. His anger had faded into a reluctant appreciation of her ability with a witness. Whatever mood Vicki had found him in, she’d left Mr. Bowan well primed for their visit. “Use your own words, we’ll ask questions if we need to.”

  “Okay.” Mr. Bowan rubbed his hands together, obviously enjoying his second captive audience of the morning in spite of his fright of the night before. “It was just after midnight, I know that ’cause I turned the TV off at midnight like I always do. Well, I was on
my way to bed so I turned off the lights, then I thought I might better step out on the balcony to have a look around the building, just in case. Sometimes,” he confided, leaning forward “we get kids fooling around in the bushes down there.”

  While Dave nodded in understanding, Celluci hid a grin. Mr. Bowan, no doubt, spent a great deal of time out on his balcony checking out the neighborhood . . . and the neighbors. The binocular case on the floor by the armchair bore mute witness.

  Last night, he’d barely stepped outside before he knew something was wrong. “It was the smell. Like rotten eggs, only worse. Then there it was, big as life and twice as ugly and so close I could’ve reached out and touched it—if I was as senile as my daughter-in-law seems to think I am. The wings were spread out seven or eight feet.” He paused for effect. “The giant bat. Nosferatu. Vampire. You find his crypt, gentlemen, and you’ll find your killer.”

  “Can you describe the creature?”

  “If you mean could I pick it out in a lineup, no. Tell you the truth, it went by so awfully fast I saw mostly outline. But I’ll tell you this much,” his voice grew serious and a note of terror crept in, “that thing had eyes like I’ve never seen on any living creature and I hope to God never to see again. Yellow they were and cold, and I knew that if they looked back at me I wouldn’t last much beyond the first glance. It was evil, gentlemen, real evil, not the diluted kind of evil humanity is prey to but the cold uncaring kind that comes from old Nick himself. Now, I’m old and death and me’s gotten pretty chummy over the last few years; nothing much scares me anymore but this, this scared the holy bejesus out of me.” He swallowed heavily and searched both their faces. “You can believe me or not—that reporter fella didn’t when I went down to see what the sirens were about—but I know what I saw and I know what I felt.”

  As much as he wanted to side with the reporter, who had described Mr. Bowan as an entertaining old coot, Celluci found himself unable to dismiss what the old man had seen. And what the old man had felt. Something in his voice or his expression raised the hair on the back of Celluci’s neck and although intellect argued against it, instinct trembled on the edge of belief.

  He wished he could talk this over with Vicki, but he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

  “God, I hate these machines.” The heavy, exaggerated sigh that followed had been recorded in its annoyed entirety. “Okay. I’d have reacted much the same way. Probably been an equal pain in the ass. So, I’m right, you’re right, we’re both right, let’s start over.” The tape hissed quietly for a few seconds while background noises—the rumble of two deep voices arguing, the staccato beat of an old, manual typewriter, and the constant ringing of other phones—grew louder. Then Celluci’s voice returned, bearing just enough edge to show he meant what he said. “And stop hustling my partner for classified information. He’s a nice man, not that you’d recognize nice, and you give him palpitations.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  Vicki grinned down at her answering machine. Mike Celluci was no better at apologizing than she was. For him, that was positively gracious. And it had obviously been left before he talked to Mr. Bowan and found she’d been there first. Any messages left after that would have had a very different tone.

  Finding the tabloid’s unnamed source had actually been surprisingly easy. The first person she’d spoken to had snorted and said, “You want old man Bowan. If anyone sees anything around here it’s him. Never minds his own fucking business.” Then he’d jerked his head at 25 St. Dennis with enough force to throw his mohawk down over his eyes.

  As to what old man Bowan had seen. . . . As much as Vicki hated to admit it, she was beginning to think Coreen might not be as far out in left field as first impressions indicated.

  She wondered if she should call Celluci. They could share their impressions of Mr. Bowan and his close encounter. “Nah.” She shook her head. Better give him time to cool off first. Spreading the detailed map of Toronto she’d just bought out over her kitchen table, she decided to call him later. Right now, she had work to do.

  It was easy to forget just how big Toronto was. It had devoured any number of smaller places as it grew, and it showed no signs of stopping. The downtown core, the image everyone carried of the city, made up a very small part of the whole.

  Vicki drew a red circle around the Eglinton West subway station, another around the approximate position of the Sigman’s building on St. Clair West, and a third around the construction site on Symington Avenue where De Verne Jones had died. Then she frowned and drew a straight line through all three. Allowing for small inaccuracies in placing the second and third positions, the line bisected all three circles, running southwest to northeast across the city.

  The two new deaths appeared to have no connection to the first three but seemed to be starting a line of their own.

  And there was more.

  “No one could be that stupid,” Vicki muttered, digging in her desk for a ruler.

  The first two deaths were essentially the same distance apart as the fourth and the fifth; far from exact by mathematical standards but too close to be mere coincidence.

  “No one could be that stupid,” she said again, smacking the ruler against her palm. The second line ran northwest to southeast and it measured out in a circle that centered at Woodbine and Mortimer. Vicki was willing to bet any odds that between midnight and dawn a sixth body would turn up to end the line.

  Just west of York University, the lines crossed.

  “X marks the spot.” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose, frowned, and pushed them up again. It was too easy. There had to be a catch.

  “All right. . . .” Tossing the ruler onto the map, she ticked off points on her fingers. “First possibility; the killer wants to be found. Second possibility; the killer is just as capable of drawing lines on a map as I am, has set up the pattern to mean nothing at all, and is sitting in Scarborough busting a gut laughing at the damn fool police who fell for it.” For purposes of this exercise, she and the police were essentially the same. “Possibility three”; she stared at the third finger as though it might have an answer, “we’re hunting a vampire even as the vampire is hunting us and who the hell knows how a vampire thinks.”

  Celucci was as capable as she of drawing lines on a map, but she reached for the phone anyway. Occasionally, the obvious escaped him. To her surprise, he was in. His reaction came as no surprise at all.

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Vicki.”

  “So can I assume Toronto’s finest will be gathered tonight at Mortimer and Woodbine?”

  “You can assume whatever you want, I’ve never been able to stop you, but if you think you and your little Nancy Drew detective kit are going to be anywhere near there, think again.”

  “What are you going to do?” How dare he dictate to her. “Arrest me?”

  “If I have to, yes.” His tone said he’d do exactly that. “You are no longer on the force, you are virtually blind at night, and you are more likely to end up as the corpse than the hero.”

  “I don’t need you babying me, Celluci!”

  “Then act like an adult and stay home!”

  They slammed the receivers down practically simultaneously. He knew she’d be there and she knew he knew it. Moreover, she had no doubt that if their paths crossed he’d loci: her away on trumped up charges for her own safety. Better than even odds said that, having been forewarned, he’d lock her up now if he thought he could get away with it.

  He was right. She was virtually blind at night.

  But the police were hunting a man and Vicki no longer really believed a man had anything to do with these deaths. Blind or not, if she was there, she might even the odds.

  Now, what to do until dark? Maybe it was time to do a little detecting and find out what the word was on the street.

  “At least he didn’t scream about Mr. Bowan,” she muttered as she shrugged back into her coat.

  “Yo, Victory, long time no see.”
/>   “Yeah, it’s been a couple of months. How’ve you been, Tony?”

  Tony shrugged thin shoulders under his jean jacket. “I’ve been okay.”

  “You clean?”

  He shot her a look out of the corner of one pale blue eye. “I hear you ain’t a cop no more. I don’t got to tell you.”

  Vicki shrugged in turn. “No. You don’t.”

  They walked in silence for a moment, threading their way through the crowds that surged up and down Yonge Street. When they stopped at the Wellesley lights, Tony sighed. “Okay, I’m clean. You happy now? You going to bugger off and leave me alone?”

  She grinned. “Is it ever that easy?”

  “Not with you it ain’t. Listen,” he waved a hand at a corner restaurant, less trendy than most of its competitors, “you’re going to take up my time, you can buy me lunch.”

  She bought him lunch, but not the beer he wanted, and asked him about the feeling on the street.

  “Feeling about what?” he asked, stuffing a huge forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Sex? Drugs? Rock’n’roll?”

  “Things that go bump in the night.”

  He threw his arm up in the classic Hammer films tradition. “Ah, the wampyre.”

  Vicki took a swallow of tepid coffee, wondered how she’d survived drinking it all those years on the force, and waited. Tony had been her best set of eyes and ears on the street. He wasn’t exactly a snitch, more a barometer really, hooked into moods and feelings, and although he never mentioned specifics, he’d pointed her in the right direction more than once. He was nineteen now. He’d been fifteen when she first brought him in.

  “Feelin’ on the street. . . .” He methodically spread the last roll a quarter inch thick with butter. “Feelin’ on the street says, paper’s right with this one.”

  “A vampire?”

  He peered up at her from under the thick fringe of his eyelashes. “Killer ain’t human, that’s what the street says. Sucks blood, don’t it? Vampire’s a good enough name for it. Cops won’t catch it ‘cause they’re lookin’ for a guy.” He grinned. “Cops in this city ain’t worth shit anyway. Not like they used to be.”