Once Bitten - Clare Willis

by Unknown

  “If her death had nothing to do with vampirism, then why was Lucy’s body drained of blood?”

  He made a derisive noise. “You and I both know it wasn’t a real vampire who killed Lucy. But we do make convenient scapegoats. I assumed that it was her boyfriend Les, that it had nothing to do with Tangento and what we were trying to accomplish. It wasn’t until you and Kimberley were attacked that I realized how dangerous things had become.”

  “But Eric, the vampire venom, I can’t be hurt, can I? I mean, I’m converting over…” My fingers found their way up to my neck, feeling for a scar that wasn’t there.

  “Once the venom exchange stops, the symptoms fade. How quickly, I don’t know, because the gene is obviously very strong in you. But as I have no intention of giving you any more venom, you will become vulnerable again, it’s just a matter of time.”

  “But Eric, I’ve changed my mind. I want to be converted. We’re going to finish what we started. You wanted to take down Tangento, right?”

  Eric closed the space he created between us. He grabbed my arms and exerted just enough pressure to make me remember seeing him throw a two-hundred-pound man like a rag doll.

  “Did you hear a word I said to you?” Eric hissed. His lips drew back and I saw a hint of the famous fangs Suleiman had mentioned at our first meeting. Cold fear clutched at my stomach, but as quickly as they appeared they were gone. The pressure from his hands eased. “Go back to Steve’s, lock yourself in for a few days, and by the time you come out I’ll have taken care of everything, in my own way.”

  “Eric, how can you say that to me, after all you’ve said about fighting evil? I want to help you, I want to bring these guys down!”

  “No!” Eric shouted. My mouth snapped shut and I backed away.

  “We are going to let this go! Two people have already died because of me. I am not going to let the woman I love die as well! I can’t protect you, Angela. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. You will let this go, Angela. You will obey me!”

  My fear was swept away. I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck. I closed my eyes and concentrated on projecting my words into his mind. After a moment I felt his arms encircle me. His head fell against my shoulder and I stroked his hair.

  Yes, I love you, Angela. And that is why I must leave, don’t you see?

  “No, I don’t see! I don’t see at all.”

  Eric took one step away from me, and then another. His face became a mask, with his true feelings hidden behind it.

  “Yes. That was also my failing when I was human.”

  He took another step back and the shadow of the ship enveloped him. “Good-bye, Angela. We shall not see each other again.”

  The police took the Caution tape off my door and let me back into my apartment on Friday morning. I went straight to my room and took down my suitcases from the top shelf of the closet. I planned to pack up as much as I could of my clothes and books and take them over to Steve’s. I’d stay there until I found a new apartment, unless I decided to move out of the city. Right now I was too wounded and shell-shocked to be able to think long term. I wanted to leave San Francisco, but there was my mom to think about, helping her through whatever might happen with her cancer. But whatever I did, I knew I wasn’t going to live here anymore, and I wasn’t going back to HFB.

  I had packed about half a suitcase when that now familiar feeling of daytime exhaustion came over me. I pulled the blind and lay down on my bed. As I had done so often in the last few days, I had another long cry. It seemed that every time I slowed down I started to cry.

  The phone rang. There was no one I wanted to talk to, so I let the answering machine pick up. It was a telemarketer calling for Kimberley. Obviously the telemarketers didn’t know yet that she was dead, although death was probably not a criterion they would recognize for putting a person on the Do Not Call list.

  Poor Kimberley. She had been lucky in so many ways, blessed with good looks and wealth and privilege. Yet she had been miserable. Her parents had lavished her with gifts, but they hadn’t given her the one thing she really needed—their love and approval. She had been forced to use thievery and deceit to get ahead at work, because she couldn’t trust that her own talents could carry her anywhere. Instead of marrying Barry Warner, as her parents hoped she might, she had blackmailed him into getting her a position that she could have earned by hard work if she’d had the self-confidence to attempt it.

  Blackmailed him…

  I sat up in bed, fully awake and alert, my mind racing. I had tried to find Eric after he left me at the Balclutha, but the pathways to him were shut down like a mountain road in the winter. Suleiman and Moravia hadn’t seen him. His office was locked. The Tangento case, too, had closed up like a clam. When I called Dick at work he said that Barry had put everything on hold and gone back to Texas when he heard about Kimberley.

  But for Kimberley to blackmail Barry she must have had evidence. And the evidence had to be somewhere. Kimberley hadn’t expected to die, she wouldn’t have had time to hide or destroy it. Maybe it was somewhere in the apartment. It was a long shot, but worth a try.

  I tiptoed into Kimberley’s room. All the paramedic paraphernalia was still strewn around the floor, but the mattress was missing, taken as evidence by the police, for which I was grateful. I looked under the bed and saw a stray earring and some dust bunnies. Her nightstand held a vibrator, eyeshade, earplugs, a bottle of Xanax prescribed to her mother, and a little book called 365 Daily Meditations. I pulled the drawer out and looked behind it at the unfinished wood. I searched her dresser, pawing through panties and bras stacked in Lucite boxes.

  Kimberley’s closet smelled of roses and cedar, with a rainbow of clothes evenly spaced across the rods. I pushed the clothes aside and there it was: a large envelope with the HFB logo thumbtacked to the back wall. Amazed at how simple it had been to find it, I shook the contents onto the box spring. Arrayed across Kimberley’s dust ruffle were several photographs, a videotape, and some folded sheets of paper.

  The first photo I picked up was of a young Asian girl with broad cheekbones and long dark hair, dressed only in a miniskirt, lying sprawled on a bed with a single sheet crumpled underneath her. I’m not a great judge of age in adolescent girls, but from the budding breasts she couldn’t have been more than twelve. She wore an expression of sad resignation, her turned-down mouth looked as if it had never smiled. Her eyes were open, the irises milky and clouded. Her neck was encircled with a ring of purple and red bruises. There was a scarf tossed to the side of the bed, partially hidden by the sheet. On the back of the photo someone had written, “Jinda, Thaniya Road, Bangkok,” in handwriting I didn’t recognize.

  There were several more photos, all the same but heartbreakingly unique in that each was of a different girl. All were naked or partly so, all had been strangled, and all were photographed alone in a bed in some godforsaken dump. I went to the window and took some deep breaths to clear my head, but I knew I would never be able to wipe those images away, not if I lived forever.

  I picked up the videotape and walked into the living room, my steps heavy, like a witness at an execution. After a few moments of scratchy darkness, an image sprung to life. I watched in silence for five minutes, but it seemed like an hour. The sound was almost worse than the picture, the grunting, pig-like sound of the man and the high thin screams of the girl. It was the first girl, I recognized her big eyes and broad rosy cheeks. The man was Barry Warner.

  Chapter 25

  I ejected the tape and sat down on the couch, staring at the tape box like it was a rattlesnake. A prostitution ring was running under Tangento’s auspices, with Barry as its biggest customer. But Barry’s proclivities were so sadistic, so macabre, that only females whose lives were completely expendable could be used. I thought about Eric and Barry. They were both killers, both evil from society’s point of view, and both would be dealt with in the same way if they were caught. Yet they were so different. My parents taught me that
there was no such thing as circumstantial morality, only right and wrong, but experience had now taught me that it was much more complex than that.

  I opened one of the sheets of paper, and then dropped it as if it was a burning match. I ran into my room and pulled out of my purse the letter that Eric had written, telling me he was leaving town. I had known right away it was the same handwriting, but now I had proof. I carried the letter back to the living room. The sheets of paper contained a list of names, all of them Asian, written in Eric’s archaic cursive. This was evidence that Eric had given to Lucy, and Kimberley had stolen it from her.

  I could see what Eric’s plan had been. If he had trusted this to the police, Barry would have found a way to weasel out of it. No bodies would ever be found, and dredging up witnesses in Asia would be impossible. Eric had provided this material to Lucy because of HFB’s access to the court of public opinion, hoping she would expose Barry and Tangento and cause a public scandal from which neither would recover. Lucy hadn’t been interested in being a vigilante, however, but even so what she knew had gotten her killed. Kimberley had tried to use it to her own advantage, to further her obsessive desire to succeed at HFB, and she too earned a spot in the morgue for her efforts.

  Now it was my turn. Perhaps I’d never get to see Eric again, but at least I could finish the job that he had left undone.

  I left my building with two suitcases packed with a few clothes, books, and toiletries. I’d pick up the rest of my possessions later, or maybe I wouldn’t. These trivial things didn’t seem to matter much anymore. I stood for a moment in the portico and looked outside. The day was gray and overcast, with fog thick enough that the houses and apartment buildings across the street seemed wavering and insubstantial, like images on decaying celluloid film. The lack of direct sunlight meant that I wouldn’t need sunglasses, so I simply adjusted the suitcases to make them more comfortable in my hands and walked out the door. Immediately I entered a scene straight out of an old movie: a man in a trench coat and fedora materialized out of the fog, pointing a gun at my chest. The scene was so contrived it took me a moment to get scared.

  “Now what kind of a gentleman would I be if I didn’t offer to help you with those bags?” The syrupy southern accent was unmistakable. Barry Warner had not gone back to Texas, he was right here.

  He gestured with his other hand toward a shiny, silver Mercedes parked in the loading zone. “Are you going to the airport? Let me give you a ride, taxis are so scarce in this town.”

  “That’s okay, my car’s just down the street.”

  Would Barry Warner shoot me on the street in the middle of the day? Was he that crazy?

  “If you’re thinking about running away, don’t try it. I dropped two eight-point bucks last season, and I guarantee they were faster than you are.” He smiled, showing his white, elephant-sized teeth.

  Okay, so he was that crazy. I’d have to come up with a better plan than wildly running down the street.

  Barry opened the trunk of his car with a remote control and gestured that I should put my suitcases in it, so I obeyed.

  “Now get in the back seat,” he said.

  I opened the door but Barry didn’t wait for me to sit down. He shoved me roughly into the foot space below the back seat. Then he kneeled on my spine while he blindfolded me with a scarf and tied my hands behind my back with scratchy rope. I lay in a torment of pain from my wrenched arms and crushed back and listened to him climb into the driver’s seat and start the car.

  “Where are we going, Barry?” I managed to grunt.

  “To your friend Eric’s house, to bring him a little present.”

  I didn’t think my heart could pound faster than it already was, but it surprised me by doubling its rhythm. He knew who Eric was? And more importantly, he knew where he was?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, probably not very convincingly.

  “You aren’t the only one who’s been doing their homework. I’ve been following you for days. Your weirdo friend Nicolai Blaloc was particularly helpful.”

  I was freezing cold, but droplets of sweat were dripping between my breasts. “Who’s Nicolai Blaloc?” I asked, deliberately mispronouncing the name.

  Barry snickered like I’d told a dirty joke. “After the incident in your apartment, when you didn’t die like a good girl should, I started to get a little suspicious. With a little, um, persuasion, Nicolai explained it all to me. When I realized that I had the very knife he was talking about in my possession, well, y’all can’t imagine how happy I was!”

  “How do you know where Eric lives?” I was wiggling my hands, trying to loosen the ropes.

  “Same way I learned about you. Surveillance! For a vampire, he sure is oblivious. Although I guess he figures ain’t nobody gonna hurt him, right?” The more animated Barry become, the more pronounced his accent.

  The car droned. I could feel the wheels turning, but of course I had no idea where we were going. The rough rope chafed mercilessly, but it loosened a little as I rotated my wrists.

  Barry seemed to be in a garrulous mood. “Yep, I’ll tell you, I was more than a little surprised when I saw you again after I left you and Kimberley in your apartment. It was like seein’ a ghost.”

  Hoping to capitalize on the average human’s fear of the supernatural, I said, “If you believe Eric is a real vampire, aren’t you scared to confront him?”

  He chuckled. “Let me tell you a little story. When I was a boy in Mississippi my grandfather used to handle rattlesnakes in church. Every Sunday for twelve years he’d go into a trance and let those damn things crawl all over him like ants at a picnic. One day a snake bit him and he up and died. The question is, does the fact that he handled the snakes for twelve years without being bit mean that miracles exist, or does the fact that he died mean that they don’t?”

  “And your point is…?” I squeezed my fingers together to make my right hand as narrow as possible and pulled hard. The rope was definitely loosening.

  “My point is, I stayed well clear of those rattlers, miracle or no. You might be alive now because I nicked a rib instead of getting the knife in properly. Or this Nicolai fella might be right. Whether Eric is a vampire or just a human nutcase, he’s gonna die when I stick the fancy knife in him. So that’s what I’m gonna do.”

  “Did you know about Eric when you killed Lucy? Is that why you drained her blood, to make it look like he did it?”

  Barry chuckled again. “I didn’t kill Lucy, Angie! That was Kimberley. I didn’t know Lucy had a damn thing on me.”

  “Kimberley?” This time my ignorance was utterly convincing.

  “Kimberley is ambitious, in case you didn’t notice. She went over to Lucy’s house that Sunday, to put a little pressure on her. She had found out that Lucy was planning to fire her and she wanted to, uh, convince her otherwise. She took her to the Bennetts’ and kept her there for a few days. Kimberley was dosing Lucy with drugs and Lucy naturally developed loose lips. She told Kimberley about the vampire coven, about dating Les, and unfortunately, about me.”

  I turned my head so my other cheek could be rubbed raw by the all-weather carpet. “So Kimberley had a scapegoat for murder in the vampire coven and someone else who could help her advance at HFB besides Lucy.”

  There were clues galore that I hadn’t seen: Kimberley’s absence from our apartment at the same time that Lucy was missing; her attempts to steal Macabre Factor from me; the comments her parents had made about her at their party; her obvious blackmailing of Barry. Had I been too obsessed with Eric to pay attention to what was going on around me?

  I smelled smoke. Barry had lit up a cigarette. “So, Kimberley kills Lucy on Tuesday night and dumps her back home, trying her best to make it look like a vampire killing. Then she comes to me and says, ‘Put me in charge of Tangento or you’re gonna find your dirty laundry spread all over Market Street.’”

  “I heard that, actually, at the Bennetts’ party,” I said.

>   “Really, well, you do know too much, don’t you?” Barry said amiably.

  “But why did you decide to kill Kimberley if you’d already given her what she wanted?” At that moment I managed to slip my right wrist out of the rope. I rubbed it quickly against my pants and then put it back inside the loops, so that it looked as if I was still bound.

  Barry clicked his tongue, making a tut-tutting sound. “You’da thought she was my ex-wife, the way she expected me to keep paying out, Angie. She planned to start her own firm, and she was going to get me to persuade, shall we say, certain men at other companies who had dealings with Tangento’s more subterranean commerce to give her their advertising accounts.”

  “Why me? Was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “No, Kimberley told me some snitch had been sending you envelopes, leaking little bits of information about my business to you.”

  “So, two ducks with one bullet, huh, Barry?”

  “Do you hunt, Angie?”

  “Just for the right words,” I answered.

  The car screeched to a halt. The door slammed as Barry exited the car. A new wave of fear prickled my skin and clenched my gut. Had Barry brought me to a quiet place in the woods to kill me? But when he climbed into the back seat, pulled me upright and took off my blindfold I saw that we were still in the city. I didn’t know the street specifically, but I could tell from the houses—a stately mix of Tudor and Arts and Crafts styles—that we were in Sea Cliff, an upscale neighborhood near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was quiet here, but not the woods by any stretch.

  Barry had taken off his trench coat and fedora. In his starched white button-down shirt and Dockers slacks he now epitomized the banality of evil. He pointed out the window.

  “That’s the Count’s castle, right there.”