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 nightshirt Mormons.”
He grinned. “Nightshirt 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 actual 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 were 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 thi
nk 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, Zerbrowski, 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 negative 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.”
Jean-Claude was cursing in my head in French, and though I caught a word here and there, most of it was too fast for me.
Zerbrowski smiled, and the smile broadened until it was a grin. “You’re saying that the church trusts its members to be good little citizens, and your boyfriend isn’t that trusting.”
“I’ll look at the new masters that have come to town at Jean-Claude’s invitation, but my money is on the Church of Eternal Life.”
“Dolph would say it’s because you don’t want it to be Jean-Claude’s people.”
“Yeah, he would, but I’ll tell you this, Zerbrowski, the thought that all these new little vampires have only their human morals to make them be good, makes me almost agree with Dolph.”
“Agree on what?”
“Kill them all.”
Jean-Claude said, “Do not say this out loud to the police, ma petite. It may come to that, and you do not wish your friend to remember this conversation.” He was right.
“Shit, Anita, some of your best friends are bloodsuckers.”
“Yeah, but there are rules to being a vampire, and Malcolm is trying to treat them like they’re just people with fangs. They aren’t, Zerbrowski, they really aren’t. Even if this turns out to be a bunch of rogues that somehow slipped through everyone’s radar. Mine, Jean-Claude’s, and Malcolm’s, we are so going to have to talk to him about his new policy.”
“Why I do I think when you said, we, just now, you weren’t including me, or any of the cops?” He was looking at me, and the joking, lecherous comments were gone. I was seeing a very intelligent pair of cop eyes.
I sighed and took a step toward the ladder. I’d said too much, way too much. Jean-Claude’s voice in my head, “You must say something to take the sting out of your words, ma petite.”
Out loud, to Zerbrowski, I thought of something to say. “I’m tired Zerbrowski, please don’t tell Dolph that I think all the vamps in the church should be done in. I don’t mean it, not really.”
“I won’t tell anyone, especially not Dolph. He’d probably start with his new daughter-in-law, and wouldn’t that be a shit.”
I nodded. “But if we had hundreds of vamps go bad, all at once, I’m still who gets the call. I so don’t want to ever have to try to take on that many of them. I’m good, but not that good.”
“For a few hundred, even you’d need help,” he said. He let out a long breath. “I can see where the thought would piss you off, and make you tired. Hell, it makes me tired, and nervous.”
“I’ll try to find out how long this no-blood-oath policy has been in effect,” I said.
“And then what?”
I had my hands on the ladder. “I’ll deal with it.”
“Ma petite, you are being uncautious again.”
I whispered, “Get out of my head.”
“What does that mean, Anita? You’re a federal marshal, you can’t do the Lone Ranger shit anymore. You got a badge.”
I leaned my forehead on the ladder, got mud on my face, and jerked back. I told him as much of the truth as I could. “We’ll give Malcolm a choice, either he blood oaths everybody, or Jean-Claude does.” Jean-Claude was suddenly louder than ever in my head. “Stop there, ma petite, I beg you, do not say it out loud.”
What I didn’t say out loud was that any vampire that didn’t want to take the ceremony was probably
dead. I had Jean-Claude’s memory of it now, and I knew the blood oath was one of their most strenuously observed laws. I’d seen what could happen if the oath wasn’t strong enough, what would happen if it wasn’t there at all.
I was actually on the ladder, when Zerbrowski said, “And what if the vamps don’t want to take the oath?”
I stayed frozen on the ladder for a second, then lied, “I’m not sure. I’m hoping that it’s just Malcolm and not every church of their’s across the country that’s doing this. You’re talking about something that’s never been done before, Zerbrowski. As far as I know, no master vamp has ever just allowed vamps to breed like this without securing himself as their leader in more than just name. It’s never been done before. Vamps aren’t big on new ideas.”
“Are you talking about killing the ones that won’t take the oath? Anita, they’ve got rights.”
“I know that, Zerbrowski, better than most.” I was cursing Malcolm, cursing him for the mess he’d started. Even if the murderers weren’t his people, it was only a matter of time. Vampires are not people, they don’t think like people. I realized that Malcolm was trying to do with the Church of Eternal Life what Richard had tried to do with the Thronnos Rokke Clan. Both of them were trying to treat the monsters like they were just people. They weren’t. God help us, but they weren’t.
Jean-Claude whispered, “We will need to send envoys to the church and see how bad it truly is.”
I didn’t answer, because I was pretty sure who one of the envoys would be. Me.
I started up the ladder, and only when Zerbrowski whistled did I remember what I was wearing under the skirt. “Blake, you have a very nice…”
“Don’t say it, Zerbrowski.”
“Why not?”
Anita Blake 12 - Incubus Dreams Page 51