by J. R. Rain
Eddie nodded once and slowly eased forward. He tapped a few keys at his keyboard, somehow avoiding knocking his coffee over in the process. This time. He wrote down four names and four phone numbers on a mini-sized pad of legal paper. He handed me the paper. His name was on the list.
“At the time of the theft, where were you?”
Eddie looked at me long and hard. I wasn’t getting a guilty hit from Eddie. But I was getting a hostile one. He said, “I was here, manning the desk.”
“The whole night?”
“Yes,” he said, “the whole night.”
“What about bathroom breaks?”
He jabbed a thumb behind him toward the small storage room. A storage room that, I saw, doubled as a small bathroom. “I take my potty breaks in there.”
“Who on this list is working tonight?”
“Just Joey.”
“I’d like to talk to Joey.”
“Of course.”
“Were any other private investigators hired to work the case?” I asked.
He nodded. “You and two other private dicks.”
He grinned and flicked his gaze toward my crotch. He enjoyed being crude in my presence. I wondered if he would enjoy being dropped into a Jacuzzi from a fourth story balcony.
Crudeness aside, it made sense to hire more than one detective. People did it all the time. When a customer found a human finger in a bowl of Wendy’s chili, Wendy’s hired over ten private eyes to break the case, which one of them finally did. The finger belonged to one of the customer’s friends, a finger he had lost in an industrial accident. The friends then cooked up a scheme, no pun intended, and it might have worked if not for the tenacity of one detective, and the foresight of Wendy’s to hire a slew of them.
“Has anyone made any headway?” I asked.
He flicked his gaze at me sideways. Cool as cool gets. “The egg is still missing if that answers your question.”
“Oh, most definitely. I’d like to see the back room now.”
He reached inside his desk and handed me a generic security badge. “It’s a temporary badge. Swipe it, then key in ‘0000’. And I’ll send Joey over, too.”
He showed me on the monitors where to find the back room. I thanked him for his time. Eddie nodded once.
Too cool to nod twice.
Chapter Thirty-three
I could almost feel Eddie watching me as I worked my way through the museum, past exhibits called Native American Art and Ancient Art of China. I wondered what my butt looked like on camera. Probably cute. Maybe a little bubbly, since my daughter called me bubble butt sometimes.
I made my way through the Spirits and Headhunters collections, stopping briefly to ogle at a half dozen shrunken heads.
Real, honest-to-God shrunken heads.
And they call me a monster.
I moved through another room, and entered the Mayan exhibit, complete with a stone sarcophagus and beautifully adorned stelae covered in hieroglyphs. The room was particularly alive with zigzagging light…and much bigger balls of light. I knew now what these bigger balls of light were.
Spirits.
The balls seemed to orient on me. Sometimes they grew bigger and sometimes smaller. Sometimes they hovered just above the floor or shot up to the far corners of the room. One or two of them followed behind me.
They were silent, almost curious.
But they could see me. I felt it. I sensed it. Eyes were on me. Unseen eyes. And it wasn’t Eddie ogling me from the Command Center.
And if the ghosts could see me, what else could they see?
Perhaps a crime?
I thought about that as I found the back door. I swiped the security card and entered the cryptic “0000” code and found myself in a spacious room. Spacious and dark.
I was about to flip on a light switch when one of the balls of light that had been following me slipped under the closed door and hovered before me.
I was standing off to the side of the door, partially facing a vast room with shelves and storage everywhere. I knew that most museums only displayed a small fraction of their exhibits, and that most pieces were in special storage within the museum, usually in basements. The Wharton, it appeared, didn’t have a basement, and allotted this vast room for storage.
The room was pitch black, but that didn’t stop me from seeing deep within it, and what I could see were various glass-walled bays that were probably temperature controlled. The bays contained what appeared to be rolling racks of paintings. No doubt very expensive paintings.
The ball of light crackled with energy. Yes, I could almost hear it now, a steady hum, too low for most people to hear. The hair on my arms was standing on end and I realized that the the ball of light was trying to draw energy from me.
So how much energy did an ice-cold vampire have?
I didn’t know, but the ball of light began taking on shape and as it did so, my mouth dropped open. And the more it took on shape, the more my mouth dropped open.
It seemed to pull in the surrounding particles of light, gathering them together the way cotton candy collects around a twirling stick.
The particles of light blended with the ball of light, which began to take on shape. A human shape. And when my mouth had dropped fully open, the vague figure of a tall, thin man stood fully before me.
And, if I wasn’t mistaken, he bowed slightly.
Chapter Thirty-four
I almost bowed back, but stopped myself.
The hair along my arms was standing on end, and I saw why. A part of his crackling, frenetic, human-like essence had reached out to me. It reminded me of a white blood cell attacking a virus. I wasn’t sure what was happening, until it hit me: he was drawing energy from me.
Amazing.
He wasn’t a composed whole. A few times some of the light energy that composed his body seemed to disperse and scatter like frightened fish, only to reform again into the tall, thin man standing before me.
The entity tilted his head slightly to one side, and as he did so, a brief image flashed into my thoughts. The image was of a kindly old man and his wife. They were standing in front of a small building, smiling happily. I had, of course, seen pictures of this same building, especially during the past few days. It was the original 7,000 square foot site of the Wharton Museum. In the picture, was the same old couple, smiling happily.
The Whartons.
Next, a single word appeared in my thoughts. Honestly, I didn’t know if I thought it or heard it. Either way, it appeared just inside my eardrum:
“Come.”
* * *
With that, the entity that I now thought of as Mr. Wharton drifted away. As he drifted away, he lost some of his shape and looked, more than anything, like a floating, glowing amoeba.
He wanted me to follow him. That much I was certain of.
I obliged, following the amorphous ball of energy deeper into the back room, past rows and shelves of Native American art, African art and Chinese art. In fact, dozens and dozens of rows. The majority of the shelves were filled with wooden and clay sculptures, weapons that still looked like they could seriously do some harm, and what had to be priceless jewelry. The jewelry was behind glass cases, as were some of the more delicate pieces. Not surprisingly, Mr. Wharton seemed to know his way.
We past the small shipping and receiving room, which was lined with metal tables and boxes of all shapes and sizes. Some looked like they were going, and no doubt some still needed to be received. What were in those boxes was anyone’s guess.
He led me deeper. Or, rather, the glowing ball of light led me deeper, as it had now lost all human shape. It was dimmer back here, and there was only a single security camera a few rows down. Eddie would have a hard time seeing me. No doubt he was wondering what the hell I was doing back here. I was wondering, too.
Mr. Wharton hung a left. And by hanging a left, I mean the ball of light that was the ghostly imprint of Mr. Wharton, went through some shelves and entered a side corridor.
I hung the left the old-fashioned way.
He continued on, and so did I.
The camera, I saw, did not reach down this side corridor, which meant that Mr. Wharton and I were alone. And at the far end of the corridor was a massive storage freezer that looked vaguely like a coffin.
I wasn’t sure what the museum would need such a storage freezer for, until I remembered the shrunken heads outside. No doubt the museum kept anything biological in cold storage. At least, that’s what I would do if I had a collection of shrunken heads.
Crackling and spitting energy and doing his best impression of a human torch, Mr. Wharton materialized again. He stood next to the freezer.
As I approached, Mr. Wharton actually stepped aside to give me access.
Ghostly etiquette. Nice.
I reached down and slowly opened the lid. Cool air rushed out, and the stench of frozen meat. And when the swirling mist had subsided, a very dead face was looking up at me from the depths of the freezer. Wearing a museum guard uniform. I think I had just found Thad, the missing guard.
Two dead bodies in two days.
I was on a roll.
Chapter Thirty-five
It was late, and I was sitting in Kingsley’s spacious living room. I had spent the last few hours talking to various Santa Ana homicide detectives. When they were done asking questions and satisfied with my answers, I texted Kingsley and he invited me over.
Franklin, Kingsley’s butler, was noisily preparing our drinks in the kitchen. The kitchen was down the hall and around a corner and through a swinging door. Something banged loudly, or possibly even broke.
“I think Franklin is letting it be known that he doesn’t appreciate my late-night sojourns,” I said.
“Luckily, Franklin doesn’t have much say in the matter,” said Kingsley. “How’s your son doing?”
“Not good.”
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
I nodded and fought through the tears. It was amazing how quickly tears came these days.
The big defense attorney, who had been lounging in a chair-and-a-half across from me, sat forward. The chair-and-a-half was barely big enough to contain him. Kingsley, I could tell, wanted to reach out for me, but stopped himself. Our relationship had cooled noticeably a few weeks ago when I had discovered he’d worked the system to free a suspected killer. A killer who had killed again…the father of my client.
I had serious issues with that. I knew that Kingsley was doing his job. I get it. But it didn’t mean I had to respect it or like it.
To Kingsley’s credit he hadn’t pushed the issue with me. Mostly, he had sat back and waited for me to work through my issues. And to my own credit, I knew enough not to make a rash decision. Too many people act too quickly, end relationships too quickly. Better to be clear about what you want.
I wasn’t clear yet; I was still conflicted.
But now wasn’t the time for that. I had had a long day and an even longer night, and now all I wanted was a warm hug, a warm smile, and a warm body.
It was no surprise that Kingsley came immediately to mind, although I had flirted with the idea of contacting Fang. The idea didn’t stick. Fang was a whole new jigsaw puzzle of confusion that I still needed to piece together, and I just wasn’t up to it, not now. Not with everything else going on. Kingsley, although a bastard, was familiar and loveable and warm as hell.
The banging in the kitchen stopped, and a few moments later Franklin appeared in the living room with a tray of drinks. He set a goblet in front of each of us and stood back. Franklin wasn’t happy. He was also a piece of work. Literally. The man, I was certain, had been pieced together from many different men. Where Kingsley met him, I didn’t know. Why such a creature served as a werewolf’s butler, I couldn’t imagine. But there was a hell of a story here, somewhere. Kingsley had promised he would tell me the butler’s tale. Someday. And if and when I was done being pissed at Kingsley, maybe I would finally hear it.
“Is that all?” asked the butler. His slightly melodic accent was nearly impossible to place. It could have been British, but it wasn’t any British accent I had ever heard. The words Old English came to mind, too. As in old, old English. This, I’m certain, was a psychic hit, but I could have been wrong. Just how old Franklin was remained to be seen.
“Thank you, Franklin. That will be all,” said Kingsley, waving him off.
The butler nodded. “If you and the lady need anything else, please do not hesitate to rouse me from a deep and satisfying sleep.”
“We won’t, Franklin. Now, off you go!”
Franklin bowed and turned and loped off, his legs seemingly not quite working together. Almost as if they had been two different legs from two different bodies. A theory that I was beginning to accept.
Kingsley reached for his wine. “Drink up, dear.”
I reached for my own drink, but it wasn’t wine. It was chilled hemoglobin, and if I didn’t hurry and drink, the surface layer would coagulate.
I picked the cold glass up with both hands and brought it to my nose, inhaling deeply the strong coppery scent. Metallic, rich, alive. I brought the goblet to my lips and that first dribble of blood sent a shiver through me that was akin to a smoker’s high.
It had taken me a long, long time to actually acquire a taste for blood. To actually enjoy it. But it depended on the blood. The finer the plasma, the more I enjoyed it. The purer the hemoglobin, the better the experience. The more pleasurable the experience. The more beneficial, too. Fine blood gave me extra energy, added strength, and a better life experience.
But my blood of choice—or of necessity—comes from a butchery in nearby Norco, where I had a running account with them. Once a week they delivered the stuff to my door, no questions asked, although they believed it was for scientific purposes. The blood was often filled with fur and skin and other floaties that I couldn’t quite place. Didn’t want to place. It was utterly disgusting, but it nourished me and no doubt kept me alive.
This blood was different. This blood was heavenly. This blood, I was certain, was from a human. There were no impurities in it. It was silky smooth and fresh and filled with a life force that absolutely electrified me.
“Thirsty?” asked Kingsley.
I opened my eyes. I found myself staring into the empty goblet, whose interior was coated now with a thin film of blood.
“Very,” I said. “Would you think less of me if I licked the inside?”
“Waste not, want not, I say.”
I ran my tongue inside, licking hungrily, and only then did I realize how ghoulish I looked. “Did that look as ghoulish as I think it did?” I asked.
He grinned. “Worse.”
“Great.” But that didn’t stop me from using my index finger to swipe at the last few drops of blood.
Kingsley watched me with a bemused expression. He was wearing a robe and not much else. His legs were hairy as hell, but also roped with muscle. His toes, I saw, were extraordinarily long. And hairy, too. He wiggled them at me when he saw me looking at them. They looked like ten frightened mice.
“I’m getting more and more used to drinking blood,” I said.
“It was bound to happen.”
“I mean, I’ll always hate the animal blood, but this human blood was nearly orgasmic.”
“Do you feel stronger?”
“In every way, but it’s late, or early, and I feel myself getting tired.”
“No worries. The blood will more than sustain you for a few days. Much more so than that polluted pig and cow crap you drink.”
I had experienced this before. Human blood revitalized me unlike anything else. So much so that I realized that I was meant to drink human blood. I was meant—designed—to kill humans.
“So whose blood is this?” I asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“No. Yes. Shit.”
Kingsley got up, and as he did so, he flashed me the goods. Whether he meant to or not, I don’t know…but holy sweet Jesus. Di
d I really just see that? My God, how did he walk around with that thing?
Kingsley, defense attorney, werewolf—and now, apparently, pervert—sat next to me and gave no indication that he had just given me the mother of all peep shows.
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” he said, and knocked back the rest of his wine like it was booze-flavored Kool-Aide.
“It’s not a secret,” I said. “And it ain’t little.”