“Ah, there’s a good one, Meg,” Meg’s father said, letting that excitement slip into his voice too. He strode over to a big pile of snow and kicked a snowball about the size of a grapefruit off the top. The snowball skittered across the pavement and stopped. “Let’s see what those little pink crushers can do.” Meg held in a squeal as she started running.
Then Cole heard the voice behind the knocking. “Nick,” the voice called out. “Are you in there?” It was Allie. Cole could hear the fear in her voice. How many times had she already called out to him? Cole had no idea. He leapt out of bed.
“I’m here,” Cole answered as he grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and threw them on. “One second,” he called as he stumbled toward the door. When Cole opened it, he saw that it wasn’t just Allie. Ed was with her.
Cole eyed the two of them, confused. “What are you guys doing here? What are you guys doing together? Do you even know each other?”
“You do realize that it’s almost noon, right?” Allie answered Cole, deducing from his disheveled state that he’d just gotten out of bed.
“I had a late night last night,” Cole said, thinking back to his interrogation of Bon. “I was working. Why don’t you guys come inside?” Cole offered, not wanting to talk about the case out in the hall. Ed and Allie followed Cole into his apartment, and he closed the door behind them. “So how do you guys know each other?” Cole asked again after closing the door.
“We don’t,” Ed answered. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning, but you haven’t been picking up, and your voicemail is full so I couldn’t leave a message.”
“I’ve been trying to focus,” Cole told them. “I still don’t understand what you guys are doing here together.”
“When I couldn’t reach you on your cell, I tried you at home. I pulled your address from the files at work. You still have Allie’s apartment listed as your home address.” Ed glanced around Cole’s apartment. “How long have you lived here, Cole?” he asked his partner.
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “Two years?” He looked over at Allie for confirmation.
“Four,” she corrected him. “You’ve lived here longer than you ever lived with me.”
“Okay,” Cole conceded. “So you found me, Ed. What’s going on? What’s the emergency?”
“This,” Ed said bluntly. He took a folded newspaper from under his arm and dropped it on Cole’s kitchen table.
Cole looked down at the paper. Nobody read newspapers anymore, but everyone on the force knew that headlines still mattered. People still saw the headlines when they were going into the subway or walking into a bodega to grab their coffee. Headlines still had power. So Cole only looked at the headline, but that alone was enough to make his heart skip a beat. It read, in all caps: MEMORY VAMPIRE STRIKES NYC.
“What the fuck is this?” Cole asked, grabbing the paper off the table and flipping to the article inside.
“Somebody leaked,” Ed said to Cole with an angry shrug. “It’s all there. The world knows. I don’t know if everybody’s going to believe the story, but they got almost all of it right.”
Cole looked at the first few sentences of the article. He didn’t need to look any farther. Half the case file showed up in the first three sentences. They knew the number of bodies. They knew where the bodies had been found. They knew that somebody had stolen their memories. “Who leaked?” Cole asked Ed. He didn’t try to hide his anger.
“We don’t know.”
Ed had already had a chance to process what this meant. It was new to Cole. He began running through everything in his head. The killer was going to go into hiding. That was almost a certainty. He’d be twice as hard to catch now. But what else, what other fallout could there be? “Shit,” Cole said out loud when the most immediate danger dawned on him. “I’ve got to go see somebody.” He grabbed his shoes and his coat and headed for the door. “I’ll call you,” he said without looking back. “I’ll call you both. I promise.”
“Nick,” Allie called after him as Cole ran out of his apartment. He didn’t answer her. He just kept moving.
Chapter 40
Nobody answered when Cole hit the buzzer. He waited another minute or so, then hit it again. This time he leaned on the buzzer with his thumb. He tried to convince himself that it didn’t mean anything that nobody was answering. After all, hadn’t it just taken Allie and Ed multiple tries to get him out of bed? Bon had been up almost as late as Cole, and Cole had to imagine that Bon hadn’t slept too well after the conversation they’d had. Bon also worked nights, so he was probably used to sleeping late. After about a minute, Cole took his thumb off of the buzzer and waited. When he got no answer, he pushed the buzzer a third time. He would have kept going, pushing it over and over again, if somebody hadn’t finally come to the door.
It was a young couple, a man and woman, exiting the apartment building. They stopped Cole when he tried to slip through the door before it closed. They asked him if he belonged there. He flashed his badge at them. “Sorry,” the man said when he saw the badge. “We’ve had a few robberies, you know?”
“Do you guys know Bon?” Cole asked them before they walked away. The woman shrugged. “Big guy in 2D?”
“Yeah,” the woman said. “He’s nice.” Then remembering the badge, she asked, “Is he in trouble?”
“No,” Cole lied. The truth wasn’t going to do anybody any good. He wasn’t in the type of trouble that she was asking about, anyway. “Have you guys seen him today?”
“No,” the woman said, “but we haven’t been out much.”
“Thanks,” Cole said as he watched them leave. He waited for the door to close behind them before heading up the stairs.
Cole moved quickly but as quietly as he could. About halfway up the staircase, he reached for his gun. Three steps later, he promised himself that the next time he was back at the station he’d load it. Things had changed. As he neared the top of the stairs, he slowed down. He held the gun in one hand. He tried to listen for strange noises, for anything out of place. The building was deadly quiet.
Cole took a few steps closer to Bon’s door. That’s when he first noticed that the door wasn’t closed all the way. He could see into Bon’s apartment through a sliver of an opening. At first, he didn’t see anything. “Bon,” he called out into the silence. “It’s Cole.” He knew how scared Bon already was. If he was in his apartment, if he was okay, Cole didn’t want to scare him into doing something stupid. Nobody answered. The open door troubled Cole. He ran all the possibilities through his head, doing everything he could to avoid the obvious conclusion, the one that Cole was most afraid of. He remembered the fear on Bon’s face.
“Bon,” Cole called out again. He wasn’t expecting an answer anymore. The best that Cole could hope to find was nothing. Bon’s apartment seemed even smaller in the daylight. Cole walked into the main room. He saw the table where he and Bon had sat the night before. The room was messy but not any messier than it had been when Cole left it. Cole couldn’t see any signs of a struggle. The room was empty. He looked around. He saw a door near the couch. Unlike the door to the apartment, this one was closed. Cole figured the closed door led to Bon’s bedroom.
Cole walked over to the closed door. He didn’t knock or call out when he got to it. He simply reached down and slowly turned the doorknob. The door swung open without a sound. Behind the door was a tiny bedroom, barely big enough for the bed, which was unmade, the sheets strewn half on the bed and half on the floor. This room was empty too. Other than the sheets, nothing seemed out of place. Cole didn’t touch anything. He looked around and then he backed out of the room, relieved that he hadn’t found anything. Back in the main room, he turned around. He only had one more place to look, one more door to open.
Cole walked toward the last door, closer to the stove and refrigerator, the door to the bathroom. Memories began to flood his brain when he was still a few feet away. They were ugly memories, terrifying memories. They flashed through hi
s head like an unwanted horror movie highlight reel, full of fear and blood and pain. They were memories of gunshot wounds and stabbings and hammers. At first, Cole didn’t understand why those ugly memories were suddenly coming to him like that. Then it hit him. His subconscious had recognized the smell even before he did. The smell was emanating from the bathroom, ripe and pungent. As Cole neared the door, the odor became too strong to ignore. All the hope Cole held out that this might still end well died with that smell.
Cole tried to push the door open. It hit something before he could even squeeze his head through. He pushed again, harder, and whatever was blocking the door shifted enough for Cole to peer inside. He stared into the bathroom. It was Bon. Both of his legs were sprawled out on the floor, blocking the entrance. His body was dressed only in a pair of boxers and a ratty white T-shirt. The killer must have surprised him. Bon must have been pulled right out of bed and dragged into the bathroom. Cole’s eyes moved up Bon’s body. The top half of his body was dangling over the edge of the bathtub. His head was hanging low inside it. Cole squeezed through the door and took a step closer to the tub. They’d done a neat job. They’d managed to keep all of Bon’s blood inside the bathtub. That couldn’t have been easy, because there was a lot of blood. Cole tried not to look at Bon’s face. He tried not to look into his open, lifeless, accusatory eyes. The killer had slit Bon’s throat and held him down against the bathtub until he bled out. Cole started to believe that the killer couldn’t have done this alone. Bon was a gentle giant, but he was still a big guy. Somebody had to have helped the killer, somebody would have had to hold him down while the other one slit Bon’s throat. Jerry? Cole thought. It made sense. Cole had dealt with plenty of killers in his time and knew that killers normally kept their inner circles as small as possible.
Then Cole noticed something else in the tub, beneath the pool of blood. He leaned forward and looked down past Bon’s lifeless body. At first, he had trouble deciphering exactly what he was looking at because Bon’s blood covered it so completely. Then Cole realized it was a newspaper. It wasn’t the same newspaper that Ed had brought, but it had the same cover story. It even used the same term to describe the killer. Cole managed to read the headline under the dark red stain of blood: Memory Vampire on the Loose. Whoever did this made Bon stare at the newspaper as they slit his throat. They made him watch as his own blood covered the story. The message was clear. Somebody talked, so Bon had to pay the price.
A chill ran down Cole’s spine. Out of nowhere, he got a strange feeling that somebody was standing behind him. He stood up slowly. He still had the empty gun in his hand. “What do you want?” Cole said out loud without turning around. Nobody answered him. Then he turned his head and looked. Nobody was there. Cole’s mind was merely playing tricks on him again. It happens sometimes when you have so many memories of being murdered.
Then it dawned on him. Not everything was lost. Whoever killed Bon had slit his throat. Bon bled to death. He wasn’t like the others. The other victims had no physical signs of trauma except for the two tiny holes in the back of their throats. The other victims died because their memories were taken from them. What happened to Bon was different. It was horrible, but it left Cole with some hope. Bon still had his memories. The face of the killer, of the killers, was still inside him. Cole knew how unpleasant Bon’s memories would be. Bon’s life had never been easy, which was why the killer had rejected his memories in the first place. His death hadn’t been easy either. It would be a painful thing to remember. Cole didn’t care. He wanted those memories.
Cole took out his cell phone and called Ed. “There’s been another murder,” Cole said when Ed answered the phone. “I need an ambulance to get the body to a hospital. I need it fast. The victim needs to be prepped for a memory transfer.”
“What’s the use?” Ed asked. “Aren’t the memories already gone?”
“Not this time,” Cole told him. “This one is different.”
Chapter 41
Cole made it to the hospital shortly after they dropped off Bon’s body. He walked directly to the memory transfer ward. He could make the walk in his sleep; he’d done it so many times by now. He was ready. Nobody stopped him. Everyone in the ward was used to seeing Cole. Cole was their one and only regular. A nurse whose name he could never remember was sitting behind the desk near the entrance to the ward. Cole gave her a quick nod. He wanted to move fast. He was certain that all the answers to the mystery of the Memory Vampire were inside that dead boy’s head. In only a couple of hours, he would have everything he needed. All he would have to do is figure out how to find it. “Is everything ready?” Cole asked the nurse.
The nurse looked up at him. “Is what ready?”
Cole looked around him again. A few people were sitting in chairs reading magazines. Otherwise, everything was quiet. Cole leaned in and dropped his voice. “They brought a young man in a little while ago. His name was Bon. They were supposed to be prepping him for a memory transfer. I’m ready when they are.” Cole knew that he might be a little bit early, but he’d wait if he had to.
The nurse got a worried look on her face. She typed a few words into her computer. “You’re Detective Nicholas Jones, correct?” the nurse said.
“Yes,” Cole confirmed, relieved that she’d found him in the system. Now they could get on with things. Cole’s relief didn’t last long, though.
The nurse shook her head. “You’re not scheduled for a procedure,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Cole asked, his head swimming with conspiracies. “Maybe it’s just not in the system. Did the body make it here?”
“I’m not allowed to say,” the nurse began. “It’s a personal matter.”
“You know who I am,” Cole said to her. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “but it’s private.”
Cole spoke to the nurse in a whisper. “I don’t remember your name. I’m sorry for that, but you know me. You’ve seen me here before. You know that I’m a cop and that I can be trusted. You can tell me what’s going on. I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“Fine,” the nurse whispered. “But you didn’t hear any of this from me.” Cole nodded. “The gentleman’s body is here,” she continued in a whisper. “It’s scheduled for a memory transplant procedure, but not until first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Why are they waiting?” Cole asked. “I’m ready now. The sooner the better.”
The nurse shook her head again. Cole stifled a desire to reach across the desk and grab her head so she couldn’t shake it anymore. “According to the file, you’re not the recipient of the transplant. They’re waiting until tomorrow morning because the recipient is flying in from New Mexico.”
The shock hit Cole like a small truck. The possibility had never dawned on him. He’d never had to fight for a murder victim’s memories before. “Who is it?” he asked.
“A family member,” the nurse said.
“His sister?” Cole asked.
“I shouldn’t say,” the nurse responded.
“He barely knew her,” Cole argued.
“How well did you know him?” the nurse asked Cole in a moment of unexpected candor. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Look, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s been scheduled. In the absence of clear instructions from the deceased, memories are first offered to the next of kin.” Then she leaned in toward Cole and added, in the strict voice of a schoolmarm, “But you know that.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into,” Cole said.
The nurse shrugged. “There are other people waiting behind you, Detective Jones.” She was right. Cole looked at the small line forming. He didn’t know what else he could do, so he walked away from the desk.
Cole spent the rest of the day working the phones, trying to impress upon people how important it was that he be given Bon’s memories. He tried to explain that Bon’s sister didn’t understand what she was doing, that she would
regret inheriting her brother’s memories. No matter who Cole called, everyone said the same thing. There was nothing they could do. “She’ll be a target,” he told the police commissioner when he was finally able to reach him. “Whoever killed her brother did it because of what was in his head. She’ll be as much of a target as he was. An international serial killer will go after her and will kill her.”
The commissioner seemed confused. “If that’s the case, then why didn’t they make sure the kid’s memories were destroyed when they killed him?” the commissioner asked. It was an obvious question, one that Cole had been doing his best to ignore.
“I don’t know,” Cole admitted. “Maybe they didn’t have time. Maybe they thought it would have been too noisy. Maybe something spooked them and they ran. I don’t know. All I know is that the woman won’t be safe.”
“There’s nothing I can do, Cole,” the commissioner said. “We’re not above the law here.”
“At least let me talk to her before the procedure. Can you arrange that? Don’t let her go in without speaking to me first. I might be able to talk her out of the biggest mistake of her life. She has kids, for Christ’s sake.”
Cole heard a deep sigh come over the phone. “I think I can make that happen,” the commissioner said.
“Don’t just think,” Cole said. “Besides saving this woman, the kid’s memory could lead me right to our killer. Do you want to be the guy who catches the Memory Vampire, or do you want to wait until there’s another dead body on the front page?”
The Memory Detective Page 21