Wicked City

by Alaya Johnson

  So I talked. My only hope was that somehow I could convince McConnell I was telling the truth. But even I had to admit the evidence against me appeared damning.

  Soon enough, McConnell returned, bearing a tray with the full tea service. He’d even cut lemon wedges, which surprised me. I busied myself with pouring the hot water and adding liberal amounts of cream and sugar. My hands did not tremble, but only with great effort.

  He drank his black with lemon, and sipped it like penance. “Why don’t we talk about the juvenile vampire.”

  A little tea splashed over my fingers. I took a careful sip and scalded my mouth. “Why?”

  “Do you still deny it?”

  I closed my eyes, and saw Judah pressed against Harry’s window, looking down into the street. Had my police shadow seen my juvenile vampire in an attic window?

  And what reason did I have to lie now? Perhaps telling the truth in this smaller matter would convince him that my denials of murder were truthful.

  “Are you charging me?” I asked.

  He pursed his lips. “We have been instructed not to,” he said.

  “By whom?”

  “Top brass.”

  Good old Jimmy Walker kept his promises, much help they were to me now. “But you’re sure I’m guilty?”

  He set down his cup. “Yes, Miss Hollis.”

  “Do you have evidence?”

  “Enough, I think.”

  “How odd that you hadn’t brought me in already.”

  He nodded. “I thought so. But I was told it would ‘muddy the waters,’ in the matter of the current charges.”

  “So here we are,” I said. I liked the tea: it was strong and sweet, and I hadn’t had real cream in at least a month. I felt fortified, better than I had in hours. “Tea for two and two for tea.”

  McConnell laughed. “Indeed, Miss Hollis. But you must realize how hopeless your situation has become. I can make sure things go better for you if you confess now.”

  “Confess to what? Judah or the murders?”

  “The murd—Judah?”

  I finished the tea, the dregs sweet enough to hurt my teeth. Time to play the ace. “That’s his name, the underage vampire I saved.”

  “You admit it!”

  “Yes.”

  But his triumph quickly muted to anger. “And so you want only endangered the lives of countless people all for—what? You might as well have set off a bomb in Times Square.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’ll note the complete lack of a body count.”

  “That I know of—”

  “Give yourself some credit, officer. I’m sure you’ve looked quite thoroughly.”

  He put his hands flat on the table. “However you managed to avert disaster, the fact remains that you committed a felony, endangered lives and, perhaps most importantly for our purposes here tonight, risked hurting the cause of genuine vampire supporters more than some poor patsy like Bradley Keck ever could.”

  “Mr. Keck might be a patsy, but he’s not mine. I never wrote those letters.”

  “Why did you save the underage vampire?”

  “Because he’s just a boy! A scared, traumatized little boy, of no greater danger to you or I than the newsboys down the street.”

  “I’ve witnessed it, you know. When I was a boy in Raleigh a juvenile vampire drank dry two of his former playmates before the cops could take him down.”

  I shuddered. No wonder McConnell despised me. “The trouble,” I said, softly, “is that at first they have less control than adults. If you can hold them for long enough, they come to their senses. Perhaps there’s some … damage to their mental processes, but nothing to make them any more dangerous than you or me.”

  “I think you’re quite dangerous,” he said.

  “I gathered.”

  “How did you hold him?”

  I decided against mentioning Amir. “In a locked basement.”

  “The boy didn’t hurt you?”

  I couldn’t tell him about my immunity either. I shook my head. “He had barely Awakened when I locked him in.”

  “How did you decide it was safe?”

  “When he asked me for his mother.”

  This shocked him, I could tell, but he pressed on. “Where is he now?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Miss Hollis, do you understand the danger—”

  “He speaks. We have conversations. He is no more blood mad than you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then believe this, Officer McConnell. You can imply all you wish that I’m some Trojan Horse, meant to infiltrate the cause of vampire rights. But I saved Judah because of how deeply I believe in them. Imagine if a human child came down with an illness that caused him to temporarily lash out at his caretakers? Even hit them in his insensate fury?”

  “Human children are harmless. Vampires are not.”

  “Is that their fault? Are we helpless before them? I should think not, given the vast number of suckers laid to rest each year. We rush to kill when perhaps we shouldn’t. We act out of fear. If Judah’s blood madness had proved intractable, I would have staked him myself.”

  “If you’re telling the truth, then you’re a fool.”

  “But I’m not a murderer.”

  McConnell sighed and shook out his shoulders. He reached under the table and pulled out a folder. Inside were a few dozen pieces of paper, covered in neat handwriting.

  I sucked in an involuntary breath. He smiled. “Recognize them?”

  “Not specifically. But I know my own noose when I see it.”

  “It resembles your handwriting,” he said.

  “True.” I wrote in a careful cursive without flourish—a simple, elegant style drilled into me by my mama through painstaking effort. It would not have proved a great challenge for a person with a steady hand to forge. I did not bother to say so. McConnell picked a letter from the top of the pile and began reading.

  “‘I believe Faust was a gift. The moment I heard of it, I understood that I had found the means, finally, of striking a blow against the evil among us.’ Dated three weeks ago. And tonight you attended the mayor’s dinner.” He looked up expectantly.

  “Not because I support Faust!”

  “So you oppose it?”

  “I’m not sure, if you must know. I’ve come to believe prohibition is a mistaken solution to social problems.”

  “You’re still an active member of Friends Against Faust. That makes you a hypocrite by your own admission. Perhaps you’re hypocrite enough to publicly support vampires while secretly murdering them?”

  “If you’re so sure, then why are we speaking? Because you only have those letters, flimsy enough without other evidence. And have you asked yourself why you have been unable to find other evidence, despite, I’m sure, herculean efforts?”

  “Because you manipulated someone else into doing the dirty work.”

  “But how did he do it, officer? With tainted blood. Which I don’t have, and have never had, and certainly never sent to him. If you can’t prove that, I don’t see how you have a case.”

  Honestly, I was far from sure of my accuracy on this point, but his eyes widened with a kind of frustrated self-doubt that heartened me. I was all bluster and fire now; the bravery of a woman with nothing left to lose.

  “We have other evidence,” he said softly.

  “You—”

  “We’ve determined the Blood Bank where the tainted blood originated.”

  My stomach squeezed so tightly I tasted the remains of my tea. Déjà vu overpowered me, as though I knew precisely what I would ask and what he would answer, and yet I did so anyway. “Which Bank?”

  He watched me very carefully as he said, “St. Marks.”

  I closed my eyes and took several deep, calming breaths. I remembered Ysabel’s strange behavior over the past week; the cryptic conversation, the worried looks. Family trouble, she had said. Or perhaps trouble of a deadlier kind? Of blood improperly sor
ted and given out?

  “But how would the killer have known it was tainted?” I asked, mostly to myself.

  “I imagine she had some familiarity with the Bank, having volunteered there for several years. She had probably learned the owners’ system of marking the bags to be discarded. One Hebrew word, discreetly chalked in the corner. Forbidden.”

  I had never known this about Ysabel’s operation, and the knowledge that she had shielded me from something so potentially dangerous frightened me. I started shaking and I couldn’t stop. I had thought she trusted me. I regarded her as I would my own grandmother.

  “Something else is going on,” I said. “There’s more to this. No, I don’t know what, how could I! But consider it from your perspective, officer. Your friend and partner has been murdered. You’re almost sure I did it. But there’s doubt, I’ve seen it in your eyes all night. Why would I write so transparently about my family life? How would I know about the tainted blood when I’ve never seen Ysabel quarantine a bag in all my time there? What if by arresting me, you let the real killer go free?”

  “You can’t always be sure in this business, Miss Hollis. I think I’ve got a solid case.”

  “You’re still talking to me.”

  He slammed his fist on the table, knocking over his teacup. “I wanted your confession!”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “You did!”

  “The more you say it, the less you believe.”

  “You are a goddamned whore.”

  His swearing surprised me more than the overturned china. Had I pushed him too far? Had I lost? I tried one last time.

  “Officer McConnell, do your job and ask. I didn’t write those letters, so they’re bound to get plenty wrong. If you dig a little more, you’ll uncover something different. I know you hate me. I know you think I murdered your friend. But I didn’t, and if you don’t ask, you’ll never be sure.”

  A long, tense silence. McConnell didn’t even look at me, he just buried his head in his hands. Finally, he stood up. “I’ll have an officer escort you to a cell, Miss Hollis,” he said, the veneer of polite conversation painfully reapplied. “Good night.”

  And with that my last, best hope walked out the door and did not look back.

  * * *

  I fell asleep on a cot so hard it made my bed at Mrs. Brodsky’s seem like the king’s repose. I shivered inside the cocoon of my red dress, tears splashing on my hand when I could no longer keep them back. I knew hopelessness then, as though he were sitting in the cell with me and whispering my failures. Eventually, even my misery had to give way to sleep.

  Not many hours later, I was roused by a vigorous banging on the doors of my cage. I leapt to my feet before I could focus properly, and fumbled for a knife before I remembered they had taken it.

  “Do you do that every morning?” said the blurry figure from beyond the bars. McConnell.

  “Only when threatened,” I said.

  “Set your mind at ease, then. I’ve come to ask your parents’ telephone number.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Why?”

  “There are several mentions of them in the letters.”

  This seemed encouraging. I was not in the habit of divulging details of my family life, so perhaps the mysterious letter-writer had gotten something wrong. “Yarrow, Montana, 2R221.”

  He wrote this down and then nodded. “You’ll see me again before long, Miss Hollis.”

  “My lawyer?”

  He had turned to leave, but now paused. “In court on your behalf. It might take him some time to see you; it’s a zoo out there.”

  I had conveniently forgotten that I had surely spawned the scandal of the … well, week, at least. Deep into the doldrums of late July, even Lindbergh’s ticker tape would be looking a little yellow around the edges. I hoped that at least Lily was getting some newspaper inches out of this. She would owe me for years, so long as I stayed out of prison.

  Alone again, I paced up and down the six by six room. There was a tiny metal lavatory in the corner, which I used only after a great internal struggle. My hair felt like straw, my mouth tasted like day old wine. I had never longed for Mrs. Brodsky’s clean, lemon-scented floors more in my life. And to think, McConnell had kept me in relative luxury, in one of the few jail cells actually inside the police headquarters. Had he taken me to the Tombs, or worse, the alimony jail on Ludlow Street, who knew what indignities I would be suffering!

  I wondered what Daddy would do in my place. Jailbreak? More likely yell down the hall for some beer. I started to laugh, but then remembered that Daddy had left the family for parts unknown, Betty had helped kill a golem on our roof, and Mama had cried on the phone yesterday for the first time in my adult memory. Were they all right? I wished Daddy would just come home and sort things out—I didn’t believe Amir’s murderous insinuations for a minute, but how could anyone relax until Daddy explained himself? I hoped that my family would stay safe, even if I ended up in the dock for multiple vampire homicides.

  But I wished …

  “Just one wish,” I whispered to myself. “One to take away this whole horrible week.”

  I had spent so long avoiding making a decision about Amir that the ambiguity of our relationship had come to be a perverse comfort. I couldn’t bear to push him away entirely, but I didn’t dare pull him close. His crass manipulation of my family proved that he had not reformed in the least. He still thought of humans as interesting talking animals, to be turned and twisted according to his whims.

  But today was the fateful Sunday, and I supposed I had made my decision. Sofia was my only option. Amir and I would be free of each other once and for all, assuming I managed to get released before this evening. I continued to pace until the pinched toes of Lily’s borrowed shoes proved too much for me, and I sat back down on the cot. I did not consider walking in my stockings. The floor of this cell looked like its previous inmates had not bothered to aim for the lavatory. I desperately wanted a drink and some food, but when I shouted down the hall, no one came. To distract from thoughts of starving to death in a police oubliette, I contemplated who could possibly have written those letters to Bradley Keck. The letter-writer possessed a disturbing amount of knowledge about my life, but had twisted everything to fit a perverse mold. The reinterpretation of my every move as that of a secret vampire hater indicated a methodical vindictiveness that was nearly as impressive as it was frightening. It felt personal, but if I had done something to make anyone hate me this much, wouldn’t I know it? Shouldn’t I be able to point to my mortal enemy and vow revenge? I could name plenty of people who didn’t like me, but enough to spend months carefully orchestrating a series of murders, with the apparently sole purpose of using me as a fall guy?

  Maybe Nicholas had grieved more for the death of his father than I knew. It was possible; often victims of horrible abuse came to love the ones who had hurt them. But such a slow, methodical plan seemed entirely unlike him. If he wanted revenge, he was far more likely to crawl through my window and rip my throat out. He had been raised with little respect for the law; he’d hardly rely on it to mete out revenge.

  Madison himself seemed far more likely. Indeed, looked at in a certain light, it was ingenious. He wanted vampires murdered systematically, but could not be seen doing so or encouraging it himself. So he adopts a gullible, easily manipulated former indigent, and grooms him with anonymous letters studded with enough references to an innocent person that anyone reading them would assume her to be the real culprit. But why pick me?

  Ideologically we were completely opposed, but I was hardly the most prominent proponent of vampire rights in the city. I certainly wasn’t of a stature to match his dominance of city politics, and I doubted that he had even heard of me before meeting me in his offices.

  But Bradley Keck had acted as though he knew me during both of our encounters, I recalled, though I could have sworn I had never met him before. Perhaps that meant Madison had singled me out months before our forma
l meeting. Keck could have met me at a rally months ago and I wouldn’t necessarily have recalled his face.

  But I could be overcomplicating matters. Surely it was just as likely that Keck had acted as though he knew me because he believed that he did—through the letters he thought I was sending him.

  Madison could be hateful and Keck could be ignorant and someone else could still be plotting my downfall.

  At this moment in my thoughts, a harried police officer arrived, bearing lunch on a tray.

  “I haven’t had breakfast,” I said, taking it. “Do you have any coffee? And a toothbrush?”

  “Sorry, we don’t usually keep prisoners here overnight,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The meal consisted of a limp ham sandwich, vegetable soup, and a can of my favorite variety of ginger beer. Given the range of possibilities, I counted this as good luck, and dipped the bread into the soup. The officer returned a few minutes later with a mug of coffee and an apology for the missing toothbrush.

  “Looks like your lawyer will get you out on bail,” he said, as he was leaving. “But it might take another few hours for the paperwork to go through.”

  This news combined with the food to make me practically cheery. I sipped the coffee and wondered how I could prove that Madison had written the letters, as he was the most likely candidate. A warrant to go through his things ought to turn up plenty of evidence, but that would require convincing the police and a judge of probable cause. And yet I wondered. It would be convenient for Madison to be the author of my misery, but how would he have learned so much about my childhood? I hadn’t kept my daddy’s profession a secret, but not many people knew that I’d been raised to be a demon hunter. This implied someone I knew well, but everything in me recoiled from the idea. No one I trusted would be capable of something like this. I refused to believe it.

  It was well into the evening before I finally heard voices again in the hallway. I recognized them both, to my surprise. Amir was chatting with McConnell, something about a hearing. For a moment, I could have sworn he was glowing like a knight in a fairy tale. I blinked.