Vega accepted the stapled-together packet and looked it over. I scooted nearer and checked out the photo paper-clipped to the first page. The face above the girl’s collared school uniform was sullen but pretty. Dark auburn hair fell in layers down the front of her shoulders. I tried to line the face up with the creature we’d battled in the storm line, but there was no resemblance. The girl’s full name was Alexandra Mills.
“This is a P.O. Box,” Vega said tapping the sponsor’s information—a Mr. John Smith. “Do you have a physical address for him?”
“No, I’m sorry,” the headmistress said. “That would be the only information.”
“At least there’s a phone number,” I said.
Vega squinted as though my voice were an irritant.
“Are there any other questions I can answer?” Mrs. Poole asked.
I was about to shake my head when Vega surprised me by asking, “Did Alexandra have a roommate?”
“She did. Dominique Easly.”
“I’d like to have a word with her.”
Mrs. Poole looked at her wristwatch. “Right now? The girls are all asleep.”
“It’s important,” Vega said.
23
“Is Alexandra in some kind of trouble?” The colored beads at the end of Dominique’s cornrows clicked as she looked from Vega to me and back.
“We don’t think so,” Vega replied. “We just have a few questions.”
Vega was sitting on the other end of Alexandra’s old bed from me. She hadn’t used we to be inclusive, but to put Dominique at ease. The young woman sitting cross-legged on the bed opposite us was tense, fingers picking at the tassels of a throw pillow.
I glanced around a room that I could have sworn carried traces of spent magic, but nothing suggested that Dominique dabbled. Her room was a hodgepodge of school books, stuffed animals, and posters of inspirational messages, favorite singers, and shirtless hunks. Standard dormitory décor.
“What do you want to ask?” she said.
“How long have you known Alexandra?” Vega asked.
“Since freshman year, but we didn’t really become friends until last year.”
“Is that when you decided to become roommates?” Vega asked.
“Yeah.”
“Your headmistress said she started acting out,” Vega said. “Missing classes. Do you know why?”
Dominique shrugged and dropped her eyes.
“Did you notice any changes?” Vega pressed. “Did she seem like a different person?”
“She just lost interest in some things,” Dominique said, her gaze still lowered.
“When did she start using drugs?” I cut in, a shot in the dark. In my peripheral vision, fury radiated from Vega’s eyes. But when Dominique’s own eyes jumped up, they were large and rimmed with worry.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
She was too young to be a convincing liar. Vega must have seen it, too.
“You’re not going to get anyone in trouble,” Vega said. “Whatever you say stays between us. Not even Mrs. Poole will know. We just want to help Alexandra.”
Dominique glanced at her closed door, as though the headmistress might be standing inside it, then back at us. She sighed and leaned her arms against her thighs. “It was stupid,” she said quietly.
“What was stupid?” Vega asked.
“I was visiting my aunt and uncle in the city this summer. They live in Brooklyn, sort of a junky neighborhood. Wasn’t always that way, but after the Crash…” Vega and I both nodded for her to continue. “Anyway, I ducked over to the corner bodega for some coffee one morning, and I saw this tiny white envelope right outside the door, like someone had accidentally dropped it.”
“Heroin,” Vega said.
Dominique nodded. “I put it in my pocket and brought it back to the school. It was stupid. I could have been expelled, but I’d never done anything like that. I just wanted to understand what it was, how it could destroy lives, whole neighborhoods. But I was afraid to do it alone.”
“So you talked Alexandra into trying some, too,” I said.
“I swear it was only a little bit.” Tears stood in Dominique’s eyes. “Like this much.” She pinched her first finger and thumb together. “And we didn’t shoot it, we sniffed it, and then flushed the rest away.”
Vega frowned. “Then what happened?”
“Well, you know, the drug started working. And yeah, it was strong. Real strong. I felt like I was riding these huge waves. But Alexandra, she turned into some kind of a monster.”
I sat up straight. “Monster?”
“You know, storming around the room, knocking down furniture, throwing things. She cracked the window with her fist. Then she left. It was nighttime, eleven o’clock, and she didn’t come back till the next day.”
“Did she say where she’d gone?” Vega asked.
“She couldn’t remember, but she didn’t want to talk about it.”
I snuck a look at Vega, whose eyebrows were bent in thought.
“But, yeah, she was different,” Dominique said quietly. “She slept all the time, for one. That’s why she was missing so much class. And when she was awake, she just wasn’t there. She had the best laugh. Infectious, you know? But after that night, I never heard it again.”
“Was she going out at night?” Vega asked.
Dominique nodded. “A few times I woke up, and she wasn’t in her bed. I never asked her about it, though. A couple of times I saw blood on her clothes. She was starting to scare me.” Dominique’s lips moved silently before she was able to frame her next question. “Can heroin … can it cause, you know … mental illness?”
“No,” Vega said. “It’s been known to exacerbate existing conditions, though.”
“Oh God.” Tears leaked from Dominique’s eyes, and she wrung the pillow on her lap. “I did it to her.” Her next words came out as sobs. “I made her s-s-sick.”
“If that’s what happened,” Vega said, “you couldn’t have known. It was stupid, but you couldn’t have known.”
Dominique nodded reluctantly and wiped her eyes with the collar of her cotton nightshirt.
“Have you heard from Alexandra since she left?” I asked.
“No. She didn’t even say goodbye. When I left for class one morning, she was still in bed. When I came back after lunch, she was history, half her closet cleaned out.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?” Vega asked.
Dominique shook her head.
“The city, maybe?” Vega prompted.
“Maybe. I have no idea.”
I thought about what Mrs. Poole had said regarding someone paying her tuition. “Did you ever meet the person sponsoring her to attend Hangar Hall?” I asked. “A Mr. Smith?”
“Sponsor?” Dominique said. “I didn’t even know she had one.”
“Alexandra never mentioned him?” Vega asked.
“Nun-uh.”
“Where would Alexandra go on holidays and summer breaks?” I asked.
“She was a foster kid—no relatives—so friends would invite her to stay with their families. She came down to D.C. with me last year. My brother and his wife live there. We had a blast.”
“I’m sure she enjoyed that,” Vega said, standing. “I’m going to leave you my card. If you think of anything else about Alexandra or if you hear from her, I want you to give me a call.”
“I really hope I didn’t get her into trouble,” Dominique said.
As Vega reassured her that she hadn’t, I leaned back until I could touch the floor on the far side of Alexandra’s old bed. I ran my fingers along the gritty junction between floor and wall until I encountered a strand of hair. Pinching it, I sat up again. I cleaned the dust off the dark-auburn strand and placed it into an inner coat pocket.
Might come in handy.
24
“Great,” Vega said into her phone in a way that suggested whatever she had just learned was anything but, and hung up.
Vega returned the phone to her jacket pocket and narrowed her eyes at the highway ahead.
“Look,” I said. “We’re both after the same thing—piecing together whatever it is Arnaud wants us to find so we can get your son back. Wouldn’t it be better if we worked together? I mean, there’s a whole supernatural dimension to this that I know a helluva lot more about than you.”
Vega passed two cars and a semi and veered back into the right lane.
“I screwed up,” I said. “I admit it. You never have to talk to me again, just—”
“John Smith relinquished the P.O. Box last month,” Vega said suddenly. “No forwarding address. The number on file is to a burner phone, untraceable, no longer in use. And there are a couple thousand John Smiths in the five boroughs—if that’s even Alexandra’s sponsor’s real name.”
“What about the payments to the school?” I said. “Checks or wire transfers would lead somewhere, right?”
“He mailed cash.”
“So, whoever was financing Alexandra’s education wanted to remain anonymous,” I said, more to myself than Vega. Why, on both counts?
“Is she the killer?” Vega asked bluntly.
“May I?” I said, reaching for Alexandra’s student file on the dashboard. When Vega didn’t answer, I lifted the packet and examined the photo more closely.
Could that one dose of heroin have triggered a change in the young woman? A transformation into a blood-thirsty creature? I thought of the bone-white monster in the storm line, the protruding jaw, the red eyes and long, muscle-roped limbs. If so, I wasn’t aware of any similar cases. I needed my research books, but Moretti’s men would have eyes on my apartment, dammit.
“Hard to say,” I hedged.
“Thanks for your contribution.”
“I did manage to pick up a hair in her dorm room, though.” I patted the breast of my coat. “When we’re back in the city, I can cast a hunting spell. If it pulls us back into the tunnels, we’ll have our answer.”
Vega knifed her eyes toward me. “You mean the tunnels below Ferguson Towers? Are you trying to kill my kid?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, my face hot with frustration. “We’ll put that on hold for now. If Arnaud expects us to make a connection, and all he’s given us so far is Sonny and the boarding school, then we should pay Sonny another visit, see if he knows anything about Alexandra.”
“I didn’t need you to tell me that.”
“Great,” I said, replacing the copy of Alexandra’s file on the dashboard and sitting back. “The vamp’s place it is, then.”
“Sonny!” Vega hollered. “Open up!”
She waited five seconds, then hammered the paint-chipped door with the side of her fist again. I peeked down the narrow stairwell we’d just climbed, the red lights of Seductions flashing over the sidewalk outside.
“Who’s there?” Sonny demanded from the other side of the door.
“Detective Vega.”
“I already talked to you.”
“We need to talk again.”
“We? Is that screwball wizard with you?”
Vega looked over at me. “It will only take a minute.”
“Unless I’m under arrest,” came Sonny’s receding voice, “take a hike.”
“Sonny!” Vega shouted.
When he didn’t respond, she shook the knob and looked up and down the lock-riddled door.
“Stand back.” I unsheathed my sword and aimed it at the door. “Vigore!”
My goal was to bust the locks, but the force that shoved me into the rear wall ripped the door from the frame and sent the whole thing somersaulting into the apartment. The door upended a couch and crashed into an entertainment center, a television screen exploding in white sparks. Piles of DVDs spilled to the floor.
The door had just missed Sonny, who was sitting at a card table over a plate of food, a towel bib tied around his neck.
“What the fuck?” he cried, hair whipping as he looked from his displaced door to the two of us approaching through the haze of dust.
“Maybe you’ll answer next time,” Vega said.
“Who’s gonna pay for all this?”
We were close enough now that I could see what was on Sonny’s plate: pig parts in a soup of blood.
“I don’t know,” Vega replied. “Maybe you can file a complaint with the NYPD. I’m sure they’ll fall all over themselves to help an upstanding citizen like you.”
As Sonny’s left eyelid jittered faster, his lips pouched out. I imagined his set of retractable teeth emerging through his gums.
“Oh, no you don’t.” The tip of my sword met the center of his bloody bib before he could lunge from the chair.
In the time it took Sonny to shift his red-glinting eyes from Vega to me and back, Vega had drawn her service pistol. He sat back with a sigh. “Come in here and ruin my dinner,” he muttered, yanking his bib from around his neck and spiking it beside his plate. “What do you want?”
Without lowering her pistol, Vega held out the photo of Alexandra. “Do you know her?”
I watched Sonny’s face. For an instant the resistance etched around his mouth smoothed. But only for an instant.
“A lot of girls come through my establishment,” he said, raising his eyes.
“Look again,” Vega said. “This would have been in the last month or so.”
“What’d you say her name was?”
“I didn’t. Alexandra.”
“Don’t know any Alexandras,” Sonny said. “And I haven’t seen anyone that looks like her in the last month.”
“Sure she didn’t come looking for work?” Vega pressed.
“If someone had come to me looking like that, I would’ve hired her on the spot. My clients love the innocent schoolgirl type. Never goes out of style.” His narrow nose leaked a snivel.
Frowning severely, Vega pulled the picture away from him. “Do you keep records of your hires?” She must have seen the same flash of recognition on his face that I had a moment before.
“What if I do?”
“I want to see all of your hires since August.”
“Fine. Get a warrant.”
“The NYPD doesn’t exactly follow the letter of the law anymore,” Vega said, retraining her pistol on his forehead, this time with both hands. “In case you haven’t heard.”
“What? You gonna shoot me?”
“I’d be doing this city a favor,” Vega assured him.
“Oh, some pretty important people would beg to differ.” Though he said it with a grin, his left eyelid was beating furiously. “You’d be surprised at the names my girls entertain.”
I stepped forward. “Well, what if we circumvented your VIP list and called the Financial District?”
“Be my guest.”
I caught the faltering defiance in his voice and leaned closer. “Remember our visit earlier today? Guess who sent us?”
“Think I care?” Sonny picked up a pig’s leg by its pale hoof and sunk his teeth into the meatiest section. Pink blood dribbled down his chin as he sucked and slurped, the pig’s tangy odor making me queasy.
“Arnaud Thorne,” I said.
Sonny’s narrow eyes flicked up at me.
The Arnaud part was true, of course. What I was preparing to say, not so much.
“He thinks you’re mixed up in those messy murders at Ferguson Towers. And he’s—how should I put it?—deeply concerned. So if I were you, I’d be doing everything I could to prove I had nothing to do with Ferguson Towers. Starting by showing us your hires since August.”
“I already told you I don’t turn my girls,” Sonny said.
“Your hires,” I repeated.
“Christ,” he muttered, the shriveled pig leg splashing onto his plate as he stood and scrubbed his mouth with the bib.
Ten minutes later, Vega and I stood behind Sonny in his club office as he hunkered in front of a vertical filing cabinet.
“September,
” he announced, holding up a file behind him. “Aaand October.” Another file appeared, and Vega took that one, as well.
As Vega appropriated Sonny’s desk to examine the files, I wandered the motley collection of filing cabinets against the back wall. Yellowing placards on the drawers listed months and years. Vampires were known to be meticulous, but holy hell—his records went all the way back to the 1980s.
“Impressive,” I remarked.
“Hey, the city might be falling apart,” Sonny said, “but I still get audited, if you can believe that shit.”
“Cost of doing business, I guess.”
“No kidding.” He peeked over at Vega before sidling up to me and lowering his voice. He must have figured me for the good cop. “Hey, were you serious about Arnaud sending you and the detective down here?”
“Serious as anemia.”
“And he thinks I’m mixed up in those slashings?”
I shrugged, which seemed more threatening than a nod. Plus, it was more honest. I didn’t know what Arnaud thought. All I knew—or rather, suspected—was that Arnaud wanted us to discover something that, for whatever-odd reason, he couldn’t spell out himself.
“Christ,” Sonny muttered, dragging his hands through his hair.
“Do all the women apply under their real names?” Vega asked from the desk.
“I make them show ID,” Sonny said, turning toward her. “And I can always spot the fakes. I know you think I’m the scum of the earth, but no way am I gonna hire an underage girl.”
Sure, I thought, only because you know you’d get shut down.
Vega looked over the files again, then closed them with a sigh.
“See?” Sonny said. “Told you I didn’t know nothing about your school girl.”
“But you recognized her,” I said. “When you first saw the photo.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t screw with us,” I warned. “Because when you screw with us, you screw with Arnaud.”
Sonny held up his pale palms. “Look, I just thought she looked like someone who used to dance here.”
“Who?” Vega asked.
Blood Deal (Prof Croft Book 2) Page 13