Blood Games

by Lee Killough

She wrapped her legs around both him and the chair and worked her hips deeper into his lap. “Oh, I doubt he’s the one, darlin’. Deputy, sugah.” She glanced over her shoulder at Garreth. “Do you have any children?”

  Garreth blinked. What? “A son.”

  “How old?”

  The conversation had been bizarre from the moment the woman entered but this took it a quantum leap beyond. “Twenty-two.”

  Both Wolf and Kreutzer stared at him in disbelief. But the woman nodded, smiling. “I did suspect he’s older than he looks. Now just one more thing, deputy. Why are y’all lookin’ for the Aerostar?”

  Kreutzer’s stare switched to her. “Who are you?”

  “Savannah.”

  “Savannah what?”

  She smiled languidly over her shoulder. “Mercy, sugah, I’ve been married so many times I can’t keep track. But I like Savannah, so I usually keep that.” And as she turned the smile toward Garreth, her eyes reflected red.

  Recognition jolted Garreth. Vampire! Some detective he was. He should have realized the moment she walked in smelling only of perfume, and how could he have kept missing it after the comment about a nice day...and not noticed the old eyes in the young face? She obviously recognized him right away.

  Suddenly unwrapping her legs, she swung to her feet, and Garreth watched her catch Kreutzer’s eyes. “We want to cooperate, sugah, really we do, but...it’s only fair you tell us why you want the Aerostar.”

  She was clearly very old. For all its honey, her voice carried so much power Garreth felt compulsion tug at him even without eye contact.

  Kreutzer never had a chance to resist. “The driver unlawfully restrained and battered a man here in Lincoln and he killed a police officer in Kansas.”

  Wolf sat upright in his chair. “He?”

  Anger flared in Garreth. Had the albino had pretended to be Maggie here, too? “The officer who died was named Margaret Lebekov.”

  Wolf caught his breath.

  Savannah snugged her robe around her. “Darlin’...I think you’d better tell them everything. But,” she told Kreutzer, “you have to understand Wolfie thought he was doing a good deed, helping a lady in distress keep some kids away from an abuser. My knight in shining armor.” She ruffled his hair, smiling. “Even as...negative as some of his contacts with the police have been, he’d never help a cop killer. Hear? Or...” Steel glinted through the honey. “...do we have to wait for his lawyer before he says anything?”

  “All right, we’ll ignore the fact he’s aided a fugitive,” Kreutzer said. “Talk.”

  “Okay.” Wolf took a breath. “Tuesday evening I’m working on the Model A with the doors up to get air inside. This Aerostar pulls into the drive and the tallest woman I ever saw climbs out...legs all the way to her shoulders. She strolls up to the door and says, ‘I see by your sign you welcome hogs. What about pigs?’”

  The hair raised on Garreth’s neck. He and the albino opened the same way? No wonder Wolf looked startled. “And she showed you ID for a Margaret Lebekov.”

  Wolf nodded again. “She said, ‘But I’m not here as a police--’”

  “Darlin’,” Savannah interrupted gently, “they’ll be just as happy with the Reader’s Digest version. She told you she needed help to keep two children--a girl and a boy she brought out of the van--away from an abusive father...a superior officer in her department. No one would believe her story, so she took off with them. She said he had her charged with kidnaping. She traded her car for the van in Grand Island but as an added precaution, needed to change the appearance of the van to make identification of it more difficult. All a pack of lies, it seems now.”

  “I’m surprised he took you in,” Garreth said. Give him a minute alone with her and she could tell him whether the albino was human or vampire.

  She raised her brows. “I never met the ‘lady’, I’m afraid. I was out...shopping when she brought the van in, and then on my way to bed this morning when she came back for it. I only saw her from the loft.”

  “The big question,” Kreutzer said. “What did you do to the van?”

  “Well, she couldn’t afford to wait long so I had to keep it simple.” Wolf swivelled to computer, Savannah staying with him, hands on his shoulders. The screen flashed as he spun the track ball on the mouse, running through several menus.

  Presently Wolf sat back as the Aerostar appear on the screen...white but no longer a delivery van. The panel area now had windows.

  Kreutzer’s brows rose. “You call putting in windows simple?”

  Wolf grinned. “It is when they’re trompe l’oeil. It’s a first rate job if I do say so.”

  “It is,” Savannah said. “You can’t tell they aren’t real until you’re right up to them.”

  The shake of Kreutzer’s head said he cared nothing about the artistic value. “So now we’re looking for an Aerostar with painted on windows.”

  “Well, not necessarily,” Wolf said. “I didn’t paint the windows on the van. A friend of mine down the street does magnetic signs. I did the windows, two for this side, one for the passenger side, on sheets of material I got from him. So she--he could use the windows or not.”

  Kreutzer sighed. “So the Aerostar may or may not have windows.”

  “Or maybe a florist’s sign. My friend had some that never picked up and sold those to her--him, too.”

  Kreutzer rolled his eyes.

  “But I believe you copied down the license number, didn’t you, darlin’...on the check?”

  Dismay twisted Wolf’s face. “Oh, my god. The check. I don’t suppose it’s any good?”

  Garreth shook his head. “It’s probably stolen.”

  “Son of a bitch!” He jerked open a desk drawer and started to reach in.

  Kreutzer blocked him. “Wait.” He reached in the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a plastic bag. “Never leave home unprepared.” Picking up the check by the one corner, he slid it in the bag. “This should give us some prints to compare with Dark’s. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Francis.”

  Wolf snorted.

  Savannah kissed the top of his head. “Let me comfort you. You put yourself in first gear, darlin’, while I see the gentlemen out.” But she hung back, letting Kreutzer leave, dashing through the rain for the car, and lifted a inquiring brow at Garreth. “You look like a man with a question you don’t want to ask in front of Mr. GQ.”

  “Could you tell if this customer had a blood scent?”

  “You mean there’s a chance he’s one of us?” She frowned in thought, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I was too far away this morning or too sleepy to notice.”

  “Thanks anyway.” He started for the door, then stopped and pointed toward the office. “Are you going to bring him across?”

  Her gaze measured him. “Were you going to bring her across?”

  Those eyes saw even more than he thought. Pain twisted in him. “When she was dying I wanted to save her. I had the blood ready. But...she didn’t know about me or anything about this life and--”

  “It’s a perilous decision even when they do know. Living the life being a whole lot different than observing it. And Wolfie...can I do that to him, dear as he is to me? Even if he asks? I don’t know. Coming across rejuvenates, but it doesn’t regenerate.”

  He saw her point. “Well, thanks.”

  She touched his arm. The scent of honeysuckle curled around him. “I’m sorry you lost her. It always hurts. Good luck finding her killer.”

  Driving back downtown, Kreutzer said, “Next to that chick, you don’t seem so weird anymore.”

  Back at the office he headed for Communications to send out the van’s descriptions. He came back with information San Francisco had sent on Cameron Dark’s arrest.

  Garreth stared at the mug shot, feeling that blast of menace hit him again. The scent’s heating up, Maggie! It was the face he remembered...and the one in his visions. “That’s the bastard who ran us off the road.”

  The facts
of the arrest seemed inconsequential by comparison. It occurred almost by accident. The dealer had been the objective and Dark merely caught in the net. He was observed buying crack and arrested along with the dealer. On making bail, he disappeared.

  The tag number Wolf wrote on the check came back as belonging to a white ‘89 Aerostar registered to Jeremy Phillips of Grand Island. Only an answering machine responded when Kreutzer tried calling the telephone number. Garreth was willing to bet Phillips had flown off somewhere and they would find his Aerostar, minus correct tags, in the long term parking lot of an airport.

  Garreth called Bellamy County, only to find Reichert out of the office. So he left a message promising a report. Kreutzer let him photocopy the Dark information and mug shot and use a desk to write up the report and print it out and fax copies to Reichert and Danzig.

  Writing about the fingerprint identification reminded him of the promise to Duncan at Sterling’s. Garreth called Information for the number of a Baumen liquor store, called the store in turn, and ordered a case of Coors for delivery to Duncan. Too bad he would not be there to see Duncan’s expression.

  Then Garreth asked directions to Reece and Sparacino to reclaim his photocopy of the prints taken off the ZX.

  Returning to Kreutzer’s desk, he found the detective on the telephone with eyebrows skipping from frown to arch and back. Kreutzer hung up, stared at the phone for a long minute, then turned to Garreth. “The van’s been spotted.”

  Garreth’s pulse jumped. “Where?”

  “A gas station off the Interstate in Iowa. But the officer who attempted to arrest the suspects is in the hospital--I don’t know how seriously injured--and one of the suspects is dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Rain intensified the night’s darkness, all the blacker for contrast with lightning’s intermittent glare. Midnight paving swallowed light so completely he might never have turned on his headlights. The car felt as though it hydroplaned more often than made solid contact with the highway, but the urgency pounding in Garreth kept his foot hard on the accelerator, pushing the Porsche to the edge of control. He had lost so much time already, almost an hour in Omaha while the local Philos chapter confirmed his identify as a Life Member so he could restock his cooler, then nearly three more outside Council Bluffs, joining two other off-duty officers in assisting Iowa State Patrol troopers and emergency personnel at a twelve-vehicle accident. Ten had piled into each other and/or the eleventh, a semi-trailer jackknifed and overturned across both eastbound lanes, with the twelfth and cause of it all, a Mini Cooper that cut too close in front of the Peterbilt on a downhill grade, wedged between the Peterbilt’s front wheels. By some miracle, in all the nightmare tangle of metal, surreal in the freeze-frame brilliance of lightning and glare of emergency floods, the only fatality was the Mini’s driver. With the scents of blood and gasoline still filling his head, clinging to his jeans and the cheap plastic raincoat he had picked up coming through Omaha, Garreth shoved images of the pile-up aside to concentrate on what lay ahead.

  The teletype gave a few more details of the incident...the name of the town–Edgemoor–that a deputy sheriff had been the officer injured, and the gender of the fatality...female, not the albino, unfortunately. But was she dead? If not, he had make sure of it. The thought made him queasy, remembering his own death. He had no heartbeat, no respiration, no bleeding, no pain response, a flat EEG...and yet...he heard sound, vaguely saw movement. And...he thought. She would feel no pain as he broke her neck, ripping the spinal cord and destroying her nervous system, but she would be aware to the end what he was doing to her. Peering into the rain for the Edgemoor exit, Garreth hoped the girl had died a true death already.

  The exit came almost without warning. Garreth stood on his brakes and steered toward the shoulder to use the rumble strip for slowing down. He still entered the exit ramp almost sideways...then, agilely as a cutting horse, the car pivoted on its haunches, straightened, and rolled to a decorous roll stop at the bottom.

  Across the highway a Conoco sign glowed blurrily though the rain, and below it, Gas 'N More. Garreth eyed the station. That had to be the scene of the incident...but what mattered most right now was reaching the body as soon as possible. A sign to his right said: Edgemoor 1 mile. He turned.

  The highway skirted Edgemoor’s western edge and intersected its Main Street. Garreth followed Main through the two-block downtown area to the police department.

  At the counter inside he shook off water and held up his ID. “I’m here to identify the suspect killed at the gas stop. Can you tell me where to find the body?”

  The young woman on the other side regarded him wide-eyed through the glass. “You’ll need to ask Sheriff Sechrest and I heard her on the radio telling her office she’s at the hospital waiting for Deputy Andersen to wake up from surgery. The hospital is one block back toward the highway and left for three blocks.”

  Cold and an image of Maggie’s Desert Eagle shot through Garreth. “How was the deputy wounded? How serious is it?”

  “The sheriff can tell you more than I can, but it’s my understanding he isn’t critical.”

  Relief washed through Garreth.

  When he reached it, the hospital looked small, fewer than fifty beds. He parked outside the emergency entrance beside a dark brown Crown Vic with Travis County Sheriff on the side. The nurse at the desk inside directed him to the patient wing, and the nurse there sent him across the corridor to a waiting area.

  A pregnant young woman in her early twenties huddled in one of the chairs, hands clasped white-knuckled in her lap, face equally white. The deputy’s wife? If his injuries were not critical, why did she seem so terrified?

  Garreth laid his raincoat across another chair and sat down next to her. “Mrs. Andersen?”

  She looked around, and he saw not just fear but anger in her eyes. “Why are they doing this to him!”

  He blinked at her ferocity. “Doing what?”

  “Crucifying him! Troy didn’t mean to kill the girl. He said so over and over while he was coming out of the anesthetic. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her! Christ, she’s just a kid!’ He was crying he was so upset about it.”

  Garreth could well imagine. Finding yourself responsible for a death hit hard under any circumstances...but especially when it involved a juvenile. He pictured Andersen lying in bed thinking of his own nearing fatherhood and putting himself in the place of the father who had just lost a child. “How long has your husband been on the job?”

  She stiffened. “Eighteen months...but he’s a good officer! Look at the way he pulled those kids out of that farmhouse fire in May. But they won’t remember his commendation for that, will they! They think he panicked when that girl attacked him!”

  “Did someone say--”

  Her eyes flashed. “No...but why else would Stan Householder be in there along with the sheriff? And they made me leave while they talk to Troy.”

  Now he understood. “Stan Householder is with Internal Affairs?”

  She stared at him a moment, then her face slammed shut. “ I don’t know you. You’re not with Travis County.”

  He shook his head. “Bellamy County. Look, its standard procedure for IA to investigate officer-related shooting and fatalities. Just to know exactly what happened.”

  Theoretically...though it never felt like “just” when you were the subject of the inquisition. He had not forgotten one grim moment of his grilling following Harry Takananda being shot.

  Andersen’s wife needed to think about something else. “When’s your baby due?”

  Magic words. She smiled down at the bulge of her stomach and ran a hand across it. “The last part of December. The doctor has an actual date but I don’t believe it. I mean, it isn’t like one of Dad’s Red Devon cows, where you know the exact breeding--” She broke off and pushed to her feet, eyes focusing past Garreth. “Is it over? May I go back in to him?”

  Garreth turned in his chair. At the entrance to the waiting area
a small, stocky woman with salt-and-pepper hair, tan shirt, brown trousers, and a sheriff’s star smiled at the deputy’s wife. “Sure.” As the young woman hurried out past her and a taller, similarly-uniformed man behind her, she raised her brows at Garreth. “I’m Sheriff Sandy Sechrest. You’re the officer Lincoln teletyped about?”

  Garreth stood and handed her his ID. “Garreth Mikaelian, temporarily assigned to the Bellamy SO. How’s Deputy Andersen?”

  “It could have been worse. He has a broken nose and cuts and scratches on his face and arms.”

  “Cuts?” Involuntarily, Garreth glanced down at his own arm. “Knife wounds?”

  “Broken glass.” She returned the ID. “Sorry all we have is one dead suspect for you instead of three live prisoners.”

  “Better that than another dead officer. What happened? And when may I see the body?”

  “We can head that way now.” She pulled on her slicker. “It’s at the coroner’s over in New Prospect, the county seat.” Sechrest paused. “I don’t know that it’s really necessary for you to identify the body. Prints Lincoln sent us, which I understand came from the scene of the assault on your officer and from duct tape on Lincoln’s assault victim, match those of our body. So we have one of your cop killers.”

  Not go to the body! Cold ran through him. Would it seem suspicious if he insisted? If she had not truly died, how much longer did he have to reach her? He checked his watch. Six hours since he heard about her death. For him it had been around eight hours when that first new breath and heartbeat broke the terrible silence of his body. Could he count on the same time period for her? “If you don’t mind, I’d like to see it anyway, since I’m here.”

  Sechrest nodded. “No problem. On the way you can hear the interview with Deputy Andersen. Do you have a cassette player in your car?” When he nodded she turned to the man behind her. “Stan, I’ll take the tape.”

  He frowned. “Sheriff--”

  She arched a brow. “I know, I know. Of course you need it. I’ll return it when we’re done at the hospital.” As soon as he ejected the tape from a portable cassette recorder he carried and handed it to her, she started briskly up the corridor. “Coming, Mikaelian?”