by SM Reine
“Fuck me sideways in a pickup truck,” Dana said. “Nobody’s going to know how to fight Dickless based on bloodline because he’s a mixed blood. Because of what you did. Gods. I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Nissa shook her head slowly. “Remember, this doesn’t end with me gone. It ends with you killing yourself. But Il Castrato Senesino goes first. I know one way you can definitely kill him regardless of bloodline.” Her smile split into a fang-baring grin. “You need Garlic Shots.”
Dana’s new OPA badge gave her access to more than their makeshift prison. It also meant she could get into the precinct after hours, even when there was no secretary in attendance. The OPA had upgraded the locks hoping to keep people out. Instead, they’d given Dana access.
She slipped into Charmaine’s office through the hallway, avoiding the bullpen where officers would be working. The OPA badge opened her door too. Dana hoped that Cèsar’s tracking implant wouldn’t be precise enough to show him that she was snooping.
There was nobody in Charmaine’s office. Moonlight shone in bars across the wall, cut into pieces by her horizontal blinds, and Dana stood by the wall for a minute to let her eyes adjust to the dimness. She tried not to remember how quickly her eyes had adapted to darkness as a vampire.
She’d put out the word that she needed Garlic Shots. Lincoln Marshall had made them before; there was a narrow chance he could do it again. But Lincoln must have been gallivanting elsewhere with the Holy Nights Cathedral. He hadn’t responded.
Dana couldn’t sleep yet. She needed to find Dickless to be able to use Garlic Shots if she did get them. She plopped into the chair and logged onto Charmaine’s computer. “Which of you fuckholes stole the venom?” She opened the list of people who worked for the LVMPD.
It would be a man—it was usually men. Ninety percent of serial killers were male. One of Dana’s favorite tidbits to trot out when she was feeling particularly misandristic.
Ninety percent chance of accuracy was good. Dana would put money on that any day.
So she narrowed it down to men first, and then people who would have had access to the Vampire Vegas scene. It still left hundreds of personnel throughout Clark County. She drummed her fingers on the desk. How else to narrow it? Dana couldn’t filter by history of military service. Nor could she search by height and weight.
“The fourth precinct,” she muttered. The first fledgling had been found behind that cop bar—the one frequented by people who worked at the fourth precinct.
The list went from hundreds to dozens.
Dana had no patience to look through them individually, even in such fewer quantities. She punched up the number to the Hunting Lodge.
“Hunting Lodge, Chris here,” the secretary said with his usual mindless cheer.
“Hey Chris, it’s McIntyre. I need Penny to whip together some code for me. I need to do smarter searches of LVMPD personnel information. I’m on their system, I can get Penny in.”
“She’s not here, and neither is Dionne,” Chris said. “I’ve got time to take a whack at it, though.”
Penny hadn’t gone to work? Dana momentarily entertained fantasies of the orc stretched out in bed wearing something strappy and leather and minimalistic.
Then she realized what Chris had said.
“Wait, you can code?” Dana asked.
“Um, yes, I’m the software engineer,” Chris said.
Fuck. She’d always thought he was their secretary. He was so good about answering the phone. “All right, I’ll shoot a remote link to you. Be discreet about it? I’m getting tossed back into prison if the OPA catches me, and you know what happens if I go to prison again.”
“Decaf,” Chris said in a dramatic, gloomy tone. “I’ll ring you back soon. Watch your ass.”
“Happily.” Dana hung up and shot a link to Chris, which left nothing for her to do except sit back and watch him navigate the database remotely. He’d taken Charmaine’s computer over completely.
He clicked around for a moment, then opened some kind of compiler. He typed quickly. It wouldn’t take him long to code what Dana needed.
The door eased open and Charmaine stepped in.
Dana suddenly recalled getting caught stealing food as a kid. She’d loved beef jerky, but her adoptive mother refused to buy it (“Too many nitrates! Not good for a pretty little growing girl!”), so she’d stolen the Hunting Lodge’s jerky supply whenever she visited. Technically, the jerky had belonged to Abram—still a member at the time. And Anthony had walked into the office pantry to discover Dana eating all of it. She’d been a teenager, so when Anthony sat her down for a stern talking-to, she’d still burned with embarrassment rather than giving him the middle finger.
The middle finger was more her style now, but she couldn’t deploy it against Charmaine.
Hence the burning shame akin to being caught red-handed with jerky.
“Oh hey, Chief,” Dana said casually, propping her ankles up on the desk. “What a coincidence, running into you here.”
Charmaine frowned. “This is about as much a coincidence as an assassination. Do you think we don’t have alarms?”
“Why would alarms go off when I’m using OPA credentials to enter facilities where I’m authorized?” Dana flashed it at Charmaine.
“You’re assuming that only the OPA would set alarms for this space. It was my office—I have my alarms too. I assume you’re doing something Cèsar won’t like, so you better have a good explanation for me right now, or I’m turning your ass over to him.”
“You’d turn me over?” Dana asked, batting her eyelashes at Charmaine. “But I’m so cute.”
The chief gave her a stony stare. “The last time I violated Cèsar’s confidence, Anthony ended up dead.”
A low blow.
Dana could go lower.
“Actually, it was Anthony’s confidence you violated by calling the OPA in,” Dana said.
Charmaine’s mouth twitched. “Brianna said you’d do this. She said you would try to pick fights with everyone as a response to the grief.”
“Brianna’s a loud-mouthed know-it-all.”
The chief leaned over the back of the chair so she could see over Dana’s shoulder. “And you are…letting ghosts use my computer? Why is the cursor moving even though your hand’s not on the mouse?”
“I’m trying to do a smart search of your database,” Dana said. “If I find what I think I’m gonna find, I’ll tell you and Cèsar immediately. Just didn’t want you panicking if my suspicions aren’t right.”
“What are those suspicions, exactly?”
Dana’s phone rang. She answered it.
“All done,” Chris said. “Click the last icon and enter whatever parameters you want to search by. It’ll look through every field for every record.”
“Thanks.” Dana hung up. She clicked the icon Chris added to the screen and entered the height/weight she suspected for Il Senesino. “I think Dickless works for you.”
Charmaine paled, which only made her golden eyes seem to glow brighter. “What? How?”
“He’s a vampire that got recently sired, but not by any masters from this region. And someone stole vampire venom from a room that only the LVMPD accessed,” Dana said. “In related news, two plus two is four, four plus four is eight, and you’ve got a psychopath on your payroll.”
The search finished. It came up with five employees who fit the vague measurements of Il Senesino.
“If you had to rank these people from least psychopathic to the most, who’d be on top?” Dana asked.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “We have psychological screening, and…” She trailed off, then bent closer to the screen again.
“Did a name pop out?”
“Officer Jeffreys,” Charmaine said.
The name brought to mind the memory of a square, boring-looking man with a bushy mustache. Dana clicked on his name to bring up his file. His photo was exactly as boring and average as her memory of him. Would he look like Drac
ula if he painted his face?
“Albert’s been on leave for a couple of weeks,” Charmaine said. “His leave should have ended last week, in fact. He called in to extend it. Said he’s sick.”
Dana popped out of the office chair, gesturing for Charmaine to take it instead. “Pull up the logs for who’s checked in at Near Dark. Who specifically has been on the scene, and at what specific times?”
“Albert fell sick prior to the raid on Near Dark. He wasn’t working at that time,” Charmaine said.
But she ran the search.
With the help of Chris’s new script, it took barely a moment to find one particular name amongst the hundreds of employees who’d checked in on the site.
The same day that the OPA had raided Vampire Vegas, Albert Jeffreys had checked in to the crime scene.
“But this is Albert,” Charmaine said. “He’s one of the only people around here that I do trust.” Her mood seemed to sink lower with each word until she was slumped over at the end. She glared at Jeffreys’s file with resolve. Anger. Her hands curled around the edge of the desk until the wood creaked from her lupine strength.
Dana had already transferred Officer Jeffreys’s file onto her phone so that she could read through it. She stopped swiping through at his education history. “He was a College of Southern Nevada graduate in 2024.”
“Yes, Officer Jeffreys was a criminal justice major,” Charmaine said.
“Except that there was no CSN class of 2024,” Dana said. “That was when the daimarachnids tore the place down to the foundation. Don’t you remember it?”
“I’ve never heard of this incident.”
“You probably did. Only CSN administrators know this was a demon attack rather than a fire. Students that year had to go to UNLV, though. And they all got UNLV diplomas in 2024.”
A growl rippled out of Charmaine’s chest. “Which means that Albert definitely didn’t graduate from CSN that year. What else did we miss when hiring him?”
Dana was already skimming through the files again. “I can’t find the psychologist who cleared him for work. Dr. Furlow?”
“He died a couple of years back,” Charmaine said. “December 2030, if I remember correctly. We canceled the Christmas party because of him.”
“Albert Jeffreys’s psych eval was in December 2030.”
Their eyes met.
“Gods fucking damn it all to Hell and a half,” Charmaine said.
Dana held a hand out. “Swear Jar.”
The chief gave her a five-dollar bill.
“Let’s tell the undersecretary we’re going to Albert Jeffreys’s address,” Dana said.
12
Officer Albert Jeffreys lived in an apartment well off the Strip, far enough from the precinct that his morning commute must have taken close to an hour with traffic.
“It’s so cozy,” Cèsar said when they pulled up. He actually looked misty eyed. “It reminds me of my first eighteen apartments. Oh, look at the rats!”
“Eighteen apartments?” Dana asked. She couldn’t believe that this pretty boy in his custom Italian suits would have ever lived in an apartment building like Officer Jeffreys’s, especially one with visible rats on arrival. Dana had to stomp through a pile of Corona bottles to even get to the stairs.
“Swear to the gods, we pay our employees better than this,” Charmaine muttered. She was at the back of a cluster of agents proceeding toward the suspect’s apartment. She was positioned well behind their many magical shields, which seemed ridiculous, considering how much damage a coyote shifter could absorb.
“Doesn’t matter how much money you have when you’re bad at spending it,” Cèsar said.
They’d reached Officer Jeffreys’s apartment. Dana drew the stake, taking a step forward to push through the agents.
Cèsar caught her shoulder. “Agents first.”
“Like at the casino, when letting agents go first meant we almost missed a victim?” Dana asked.
“Women and their elephant memories. That was hours ago. Forgive, forget, let my guys do their job.”
They opened Albert Jeffreys’s door with a battering ram of glittering diamond, which materialized in an agent’s hand. Magic. It was better even than Dana’s stake.
She stepped back so that the agents could pour in.
“This is a perk of being upper management,” Cèsar said. “I used to be the guy kicking down doors and running in like a duck target at a shooting range. Now I let the underlings do it. I get to stand back and watch them do the hard work. Ahh.”
“Lower pay, higher risk of mortality.” Dana was grinning the way Brianna did. Maybe she was going as crazy as Brianna too.
“You’ve got that backwards. Higher pay, lower risk of mortality. That’s the way it goes. I’m too valuable to risk. You work for the OPA permanently, you’ll get to be valuable too. It’s a hell of a lot better than prison.”
Dana somehow doubted that.
An agent stuck her head out. “It’s clear, sir.”
Charmaine was first of “upper management” through the door.
Officer Jeffreys’s apartment was exactly what Dana expected: cluttered, dark, smelly. He hadn’t seemed like a cluttered, dark, and smelly guy at the precinct. His desk was spotless. But nothing about his presentation for the cops had been authentic. Not his diploma, his psych eval, or his cleanliness.
He also wasn’t Il Castrato Senesino.
“Fuck me,” Dana said.
The sidhe agents were standing in a circle around a puddle of blood. Officer Albert Jeffreys’s body was in the middle of it, a needle jammed under his chin.
It looked like he’d been rotting for days.
Murderer or not, Jeffreys was a filthy man. Mold grew in his sinks. An agent had the refrigerator open but the light was off. No power. Jeffreys had been storing blood bags in there anyway. Some were synth, but most were Ziplocs, and Dana suspected those hadn’t come from willing donors.
“He’s got a roommate.” Charmaine shined her flashlight on the wall, highlighting a shot of Jeffreys with his arm around an equally square, boring woman. She had the same hair color. Given a mustache, they’d look like the same person.
“Sister?” Dana asked.
“There was no sister in the files,” Charmaine said. “Jesus Christ, I took this guy to lunch so many times and I didn’t know anything.”
Cèsar found a light switch and flipped it. Suddenly there was light.
“Oh, look, a wall of psychosis,” Cèsar said. The biggest, emptiest wall of the living room to tape news articles printed off the computer. They were connected by pins and red thread. “I love it when killers do this. Makes it so easy to figure out exactly how batshit they are.”
Dana was glaring at the picture of Jeffreys and his sister.
She didn’t fit the profile.
Just the fact that she was a woman didn’t fit the profile. They’d been operating under the assumption that the castrations were a reaction to impotence, and that didn’t fit.
Dana had been so certain. Jeffreys had been perfect for the crime.
Yet here was his body, exsanguinated on the floor of his trash heap of an apartment.
“You’re the resident vampire expert, McIntyre,” Cèsar said. “Take a look around the apartment. Deduce Il Castrato Senesino’s next move. Make all the paperwork involved in borrowing you from prison worthwhile.”
Dana might have been the vampire expert, but she wasn’t a serial killer expert. Everything she saw around the apartment looked like normal psychotic human being stuff. Only psychos kept a jar of toenails in the bathroom—and Albert Jeffreys’s sister.
“There’s mail addressed to Freddie Bloom here,” said Officer Wilson. He wore gloves as he shuffled through a pile of envelopes on the kitchen table, which he appeared to have found between a jug of white vinegar and a moldy cake dish.
“Freddie Bloom, Freddie Bloom,” Cèsar said. “That name’s almost good enough to be sidhe.”
Sidhe, but not
vampire.
Dana glared at Jeffreys’s mustached body.
“It’s not right,” she muttered.
Charmaine plucked a business card for a therapist off of the Wall of Crazy. “Dr. Blumenthal. Jeffreys or Bloom was getting psych help.”
“Must have been the worst therapist ever, but hey, it gives us someone to talk to for information.” Cèsar was inching toward the front door. He’d lost interest in the scene now that it turned out there was a body but no culprit.
“I’ll see about getting an appointment,” Charmaine said.
Dana crouched beside the body. There were no visible wounds on Jeffreys aside from the needle insertion point. The syringe was still hanging there.
He’d died in his underwear, rolled halfway onto his side. She didn’t have to touch him to know that there weren’t any stake marks. If his sister, Freddie, had killed him, then she’d done it before developing a penchant for impalement.
“Gloves,” Dana said, holding out a hand.
Officer Wilson delivered a pair. She put them on before turning the syringe so that she could see inside. A tiny bit of red sludge was smeared at the bottom.
“Any guesses what that is?” Charmaine asked. She waved over a tech to collect it.
“Vampire venom,” Dana said.
“An early victim of Dickless, then.”
Dana didn’t reply. That didn’t feel right, but she couldn’t say why.
Cèsar had moved back to look into the bedroom, and Dana followed him. The undersecretary stopped in the doorway, blocking it with his broad shoulders.
“Move,” Dana said.
“You don’t want to see this,” he said.
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Dana wedged into the bedroom to look at its pair of lumpy mattresses, brown-stained sheets, and broken lamp. Jeffreys and Bloom had been sleeping on twin beds on opposite walls, like children forced to share space.
Turned out that Cèsar was right. Dana didn’t want to see the bedroom.
Pages from books had been ripped out and taped to this wall, much like in the front room. The bedroom was overpowered by the number of news articles flapping gently in the complex’s central air conditioning, though.