Forever Hunger

by David Salkin

  Tim’s voice.

  “Nah, I just feel that way. They finally hooked up my phone. I

  woulda’ called and woke your ass up hours ago. I can’t believe you’re

  sleeping and not tracking our psycho.”

  Roy sat up and flipped on his bedside lamp. “How you feeling, Tim?

  No shit—how are ya?”

  “The doughnuts you sent were delicious. You sadistic bastard. I had

  to watch the nurses chew them from the other side of the window.

  That’s fuckin’ cold, Paisano.”

  Roy laughed. It was good to hear Tim’s voice.

  “I’m doing okay I guess. They cracked open my chest. It’s like having

  diarrhea—you’re afraid to cough, know what I mean?”

  “Wear brown pajamas.”

  “No, it’s not that—I’m afraid I’ll shoot my heart and lungs across

  the room. Besides, all I have on is a very large green gown that is open

  in the back. Paints a pretty picture, huh?”

  “Jesus. And I just woke up. And hey, listen, if you do blow your

  organs across the room, I know a guy that would love to eat them.” “Don’t make me laugh, you sick fuck. Oh man, that hurts.” “That’s what you get for calling me so early on my day off.” “Any progress?” asked Tim, now in a quieter, more serious tone. “Well, Doug and I went back to see the witch doctor. I swear, Tim,

  that little fucker gives me nightmares every time I talk to him. Anyway,

  just between us…” he stopped. How do you even say it out loud? “Yeah?”

  206 • David M. Salkin “Man, it’s fucked up.”

  “No shit. Now tell me what’s going on. Whatcha’ got?” “All right—and just listen. Doug and I have been cross referencing

  cases on missing persons, dead bodies that went unsolved, unsolved rape-murders…”

  “He’s raping them now, too? Jesus…”

  “Just listen! This fucking creature, and I do mean creature, has been killing and eating victims for a few decades, Tim. He ingests the DNA of a victim, goes on to his next, and occasionally leaves us that DNA at his next victim. It’s like a game of pass the DNA. We’ve been working backwards all week. If I didn’t see it I wouldn’t believe it. It’s not too easy to comprehend.”

  “Can I talk now?” asked Tim.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s fucked up, Pisano.”

  Roy grunted a “No shit.”

  “That’s really the angle you’re working? That this guy is really some kind of monster that literally ingests blood and DNA, eats people, rapes women, and goes on doing this for decades without getting caught? You fucking with me, Roy? I’m on morphine, but I think I am following you.”

  “You’re following me, Tim. I know. It’s unbelievable. But we have bite marks that span like sixty years, DNA from thirty plus years, and an overlap of cross referenced cases that only make sense when you accept that it’s one guy that is a fucking vampire or some shit. I know. I know…”

  “I’m kind of glad I’m in here on morphine. Otherwise you would have given me a wicked headache. Seriously, Roy, you believe what you just told me?”

  “Tim—Doug and I talked a long time. Here’s what we have come up with. We don’t have to understand it—we don’t even have to believe it—we just have to use the evidence to catch up with this thing and kill it.”

  “And that Fed believes it, too—the whole thing. Vampires?”

  “Yeah. And you remember Father Eduardo. When you listen to him and see the evidence, it’s hard not to believe it. It’s like, we don’t have to understand it, but if we give in to the possibility, then maybe we solve the case. When we try a rational approach, nothing fits. When we accept this crazy vampire shit, it all makes total sense.”

  “Roy, I’m gonna’ hang up now and sleep for a couple of hours. Then I’m going to call you back and see if we had this conversation or if I dreamed the whole thing.”

  “Come on, Tim—you were almost there yourself before you had your heart attack.”

  Tim sighed heavily. “Roy, I

  was there. And I think that’s what gave me the fucking heart attack. Good luck, Pisano. I’m sorry to bail on you.”

  Thirty-Seven

  VWX

  A little getaway

  Friday morning, Adam walked down to his lobby to wait for Sara. Unlike him, she owned a car, something many city dwellers didn’t bother with because parking was so expensive. She pulled up and he walked out wearing blue jeans and a turtleneck under a flannel shirt, trying his best to look like every lumberjack picture he had ever seen. Sara was smiling broadly when he hopped into her little car and kissed her hello.

  “Look at you!” she said with a laugh. “I had no idea you were such the outdoorsman!”

  “And good morning to you,” he said. His color was excellent, and his eyes were deep blue. He felt like he was burning up under his ridiculous costume. The blood of five hard working immigrants was

  • 208 • pumping hard in his beating heart.

  “So where are we going?” she asked with excitement in her voice. “I

  have a GPS. If you give me the address, I can just follow the directions

  off of here.”

  Adam handed her the directions and informational pamphlet he

  had printed out about the B&B.

  “Oh my God, Adam! This place looks amazing! Look at the stone

  fireplace! Look at that Jacuzzi!” She leaned over and gave him a better

  kiss. “We are going to have a great weekend.”

  “I’m sure we’ll never forget it,” he said with a smile.

  Sara pulled away from the curb and drove across town, following

  her GPS out of the city. She updated Adam about Sharon, and thanked

  him a dozen times for saving her life. She pressed him about “how he

  knew”, but he gave vague answers and changed topics expertly, and

  she was excited enough about their road trip that she eventually let it

  go for the time being. She did call Sharon to check on her, and Adam

  smiled as he listened to Sara describe the B&B to her friend. She was

  squealing like a little kid on Christmas morning, and Adam found her

  excitement encouraging. To listen to Sara describe the small resort to

  her friend, one would have thought Adam was taking her to Paris for

  the weekend. Even Sharon, who was still feeling like she had been hit

  by a bus, was smiling on her end of the phone. She reminded Sara to

  thank Adam for her a dozen times, and Sara promised she would call

  and check on her soon.

  They drove for three and a half hours, deep into the Adirondack

  Mountains where the leaves were already burning red, orange and

  yellow. It was spectacular, and the weather report had promised crisp,

  clear autumn days, and frosty nights in front of the fire. The smell of

  the leaves and pines was strong, even inside the car. Adam inhaled it deeply, his mind racing back through time to the woods of Jena. How appropriate that Sara would enter her new life after death in such a similar setting as her creator. Tiny little towns came and went as they drove the winding mountain roads to their destination—a lavish Bed& Breakfast “resort” called Tall Pines. It had been given the coveted Five Diamonds Award in the “Best of the Best” travel guide, and as they pulled in to the small village of chalet-looking cottages, they could see

  why.

  A bellhop, dressed in a long green tuxedo coat and top hat, greeted

  them as they pulled in, and opened their doors with white gloves. He

  formally welcomed them and brought them inside to “the house” as

  he called it, where an older man smiled and immediately offered them

  a choice of coffee, regular or “Irish”, wine, spirits…whatever they

  wan
ted. He informed them that lunch would be served in the house

  from noon to three, or it could be brought to their chalet. Sara hung on every word, and Adam smiled at her excitement. He

  had traveled all over the world—very little impressed him anymore,

  but he could see that Sara was not used to the five-diamond treatment.

  The bellman escorted them personally down a pebble path to their

  A-Frame styled chalet. Adam smiled at the ridiculous architecture that

  tried to mimic Tudor, Swiss Chalet, and log cabin all in one structure.

  It even had stained glass windows. Ludicrous.

  “Oh my God, Adam! It’s amazing!”

  “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?” he lied. “It looks straight out of a Swiss

  Village.” (Or Disneyland, he thought.)

  The bellman brought in their bags and Adam gave him a nice tip

  and told him to return with his best bottle of French red as soon as

  possible.

  After he left, Sara pounced on Adam and gave him a big hug and kiss. “You don’t have to get me drunk to get my clothes off,” she said,

  unbuttoning his flannel shirt.

  Adam smiled at her excitement. She was beaming and he could feel

  her heart beating faster as she unbuttoned her shirt. “Are you sure you

  want to do that already?” he asked. “You don’t want to walk around

  and see this place first?”

  She ignored him and took his shirt off as fast as she could. He

  allowed her to pull his turtleneck off over his head as he kicked off

  his shoes. She was on her knees in front of Adam when the knock

  came at the front door. “Oh shit!” Sara exclaimed, blushing while still

  kneeling in front of Adam. She looked at him, quite naked and hard,

  and said, “I better answer the door! Go hide in the bathroom!” Sara was

  still clothed, and she was laughing at being “busted” by the bellman.

  Adam walked to the bathroom, quite calmly. It would take more than

  being interrupted while having sex with a willing female to fluster

  him .

  “Hurry up!” she yelled after him while she straightened out her clothes

  and opened the door slightly. The bellman didn’t crack a smile, even

  though he saw her lipstick thoroughly smeared across her mouth and

  chin and noticed the obvious difference in the state of her hair where

  Adam had been holding it.

  He handed her the bottle through the door and asked if she would

  like to have him uncork it for them. This wasn’t the first time he had

  showed up at the wrong time in the quiet resort, and he knew how to

  be tactful. When she said she’d open it later, he told her the corkscrew

  was by the wine glasses on the back bar. Sara thanked him and took the

  bottle, pulled a crumpled up five dollar bill from her jeans, and sent

  him on his way. She locked the door behind him, pulled off her own

  clothes and ran to the bathroom where Adam was sitting by the Jacuzzi.

  She walked in naked, holding up the bottle, and asked, “Which would you rather have first?”

  Thirty-Eight

  VWX

  FBI New York Office – Pistol Range

  D

  oug had picked up Roy from his apartment and drove him downtown to the Federal Plaza main office. As they drove downtown, Roy asked where they were going. “Main office for some stress relief,” said Doug. “I’m taking you to the pistol range.”

  “You find shooting relaxing?” asked Roy.

  “No. What I find relaxing is knowing my partner can hit the target every time he fires,” he said without a smile.

  They joked around a bit and talked about the investigation, parked in the garage under the office, and took a secured elevator up to the range.

  “You weren’t kidding,” said Roy as they walked to the range and

  • 213 • signed in with the range officer.

  “I don’t kid about this. I qualify every three months. When was the

  last time you did?”

  “We qualify every year,” said Roy quietly.

  “Once. You want to go a dollar a point?” asked Doug. Roy was a pretty good shot, and had received the expert marksman

  badge most years when he qualified, but he wasn’t going to get suckered

  in by a Fed. He ignored him. They walked to the range, said a few

  hellos, and Doug set Roy up with glasses and ear protection, then

  dialed up the targets. The target of a man’s silhouette moved down the

  range to fifty feet away and stopped.

  Doug told Roy to go first. Roy leveled his Glock 17 nine millimeter

  pistol and closed one eye. He had seventeen rounds in his weapon

  and slowly began squeezing off the trigger. He emptied his gun, yelled

  “clear”, and Doug pressed a button that retrieved the paper target. He

  quickly counted the holes.

  “Fifteen rounds in the coke bottle, three in the heart. Not bad,” said

  Doug. The “coke bottle” was the center part of the silhouette shaped

  like the namesake. In the center of that was a six-inch round circle

  where the heart was located. Roy had hit inside the target’s coke-bottle

  fifteen times, and of those, three were “heart shots”. Two bullets had

  missed the target completely, but overall, it was very good shooting for

  most cops.

  Doug hooked up a new target and sent it down the same fifty feet.

  He picked up his weapon and squeezed off the same seventeen rounds,

  a bit faster. He retrieved his target. Roy couldn’t help but mutter a

  “holy shit”. Fifteen head shots, two in the throat.

  “Practice makes perfect,” said Doug. “I usually hit all seventeen.” “You don’t count the two in the throat?”

  “Only headshots. No fucking around,” he said softly. “Let’s go again

  at a hundred feet, then a few mags at close quarters.”

  Doug and Roy spent almost an hour in the range, and Roy was

  amazed at Doug’s accuracy. When they were finished, they checked out

  with the range officer and Doug signed his targets and stuffed them

  in an envelope for the Range Master to document. While it wasn’t an

  “official” qualification round, it would still go in Doug’s records. “Jesus, man. I thought I was a good shot. That was embarrassing,”

  said Roy as they walked out.

  “We train a little more than you do,” said Doug. “And we train for

  headshots.”

  “Don’t fuck with the FBI,” said Roy.

  “Exactly. Even if you are an undead, bloodsucking, vampire. I plan

  on emptying my full magazine into that thing’s head one of these days

  real soon,” said Doug. “I am relieved to know you will at least be hitting

  the thing with me.”

  They drove back uptown to Doug’s small office in the unidentified

  FBI substation and started pulling out files again. They now had almost

  two hundred cases that overlapped with DNA or other trace evidence,

  linking unrelated people through a seemingly impossible thread of

  common evidence. Once the “handoff theory” of DNA being passed

  along through the various cases was accepted as believable, the string

  of vicious murders and mutilations could be traced back almost sixty

  years with startling similarities.

  Roy leaned back in his chair with his fingers interlaced on top of his

  head and started thinking out loud. “Okay, Doug. So let’s say this is all

  the same killer. How can we use what w
e have to try and get ahead of

  him? The times of day, the days of the week, the intervals between these

  cases—everything is different. Except for the trail of DNA from case to case, we don’t have shit. And we have huge gaps in our timeline, I’m sure. For every case we have here that we can link to this thing, how

  many are we missing?”

  Doug rubbed his tired eyes. “I think about that all the time. How

  many have we missed? How many other victims are out there? This is

  the strangest case I have ever worked, and not just by a little. And to

  answer your question, I don’t know how to get ahead of him yet. We

  need to keep trying to get some names for him. Aliases, anything. The

  print that we found at Goth Girl’s apartment matched another murder,

  but it was never solved, so there’s no ID there. I’m stumped, too, Roy.” “Let’s get inside his head,” said Roy.

  “I tried that for twenty months. I had the best shrinks in the FBI

  doing profiles for me, and they are all over the place. I have no less than

  seven profiles for this guy, and they are all totally different, because

  none of the shrinks would ever accept the idea that we’re dealing with

  something non-human.”

  “You told them it was non-human?”

  “Hell, no. I like my job in the Bureau. But their theories on the type

  of person that would do this are all a waste of time. This guy is not like

  any serial killer we’ve ever seen, because he isn’t necessarily killing them

  in his mind—he’s merely feeding.”

  Roy leaned forward. “Okay—so let’s work it that way. He’s not a

  killer for the sake of killing—he’s merely feeding. So you’re him, and

  you need to eat human blood. What would do for a job? Where would

  you live? How would you pick victims?”

  Doug pulled out a notebook that was filled with his notes. “Roy, I’ve

  got a book full of those questions to myself with my theories. Where

  would you live? You’d live in New York City with seven million people

  in close quarters that wouldn’t miss a few stragglers. How would you pick victims? The way he’s been doing it is smart. He picks people who can go missing easily. Hookers, homeless people, anyone who isn’t easily noticed. Maybe he’s smart enough to grab up illegals from non