“I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
He shook his head and patted his chest. “No,” he coughed. “I can deal with my problems. I do get some slack because Kate’s my case. It’ll stay that way until you do something that makes me look real stupid.”
We rolled onto the Shoreway and Sam asked, “Do you still need a doctor?”
“I said that I was taking care of it.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I know.” Before Sam could bring up any more questions, I added, “I have enough of an idea of what’s wrong with me to know who to see about it. But it’s not something I can tell you about.”
“Damn it, I was there when you were shot—”
“I know, but please drop it.”
The Oldsmobile plowed east along the Shoreway, streetlights sweeping us like an intermittent strobe. A dusting of snow started to drift down, and I turned on the wipers.
“Okay, but you’re worrying me.”
I nodded. “Sam, Childe is central to this, so I need to know what you were going to tell me.”
He nodded and opened the file on his lap.
For all the effort expended, almost all Sam had on Childe was disappointing. Sam explained that everything they had had come from overseas when he had followed up the suspicion that Childe wasn’t native to this country. Indeed, Scotland Yard had a record of Childe’s alias, and his addresses and activities in and around London from the late forties.
His passport photo looked much younger than that implied, but I had some suspicions why. Childe’s name in London, which remained when he immigrated to this country, was Manuel Deité.
“Five to one it’s another alias,” Sam said.
“Why?”
“Manual Deity—hand of God—I think our Mr. Childe has a high opinion of himself.”
Mr. Deité had been the subject of extensive investigation, mostly under the direction of a Chief Inspector Cross. Why Cross had begun the investigation wasn’t in the papers that Sam had ordered from the Yard. However, it was clear that there were three decades of files on Deité and not one scrap of evidence—physical or circumstantial—that tied him to any crime, real or alleged.
The Yard’s investigation ceased with Cross’ retirement in the mid-eighties. However, with the name, Sam had managed to work forward through immigration and find a passport photo that matched the papers faxed from London. Sam even had an address for Mr. Deité in Cleveland.
Just like London, however, there was no scrap of evidence that connected Childe to any crime here, real or alleged. All I had myself was hearsay evidence placing Childe with Cecilia—and Sebastian had not reported her missing to the police. Considering his desire to keep the police out of things, it was unlikely he ever would.
“That’s it?”
Sam nodded. “I’ve yet to convince a judge that we even have enough to get a warrant for his house.”
“You’re kidding.”
Sam turned to me and said, “Do I look like I kid? What are we looking for? A bunch of missing kids that no one’s reported missing? It’s a fishing expedition—and even if I got a warrant, what I have is so thin that it’d last about three minutes at the hands of a court-appointed public defender, and wouldn’t even get through the door against a lawyer Childe could afford.”
“Thank you for reminding me why I don’t miss the force.”
I pulled off the Shoreway at the tail end of MLK Boulevard and drove around under the highway, pulling into a darkened lot facing the lake. I stopped the car. For a few moments I sat there and listened to the metal knocking.
“I do have something that’s unofficial.”
“What?” I asked, not very hopeful.
“Manuel Deité seems to be missing.”
I sat up, suddenly interested. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I did some unauthorized snooping in his credit and bank records, and called his house a few times. He hasn’t spent a cent since January 26th, when he filled the tank of his car at a Shell station out by the Metroparks. I can’t get hold of him by the phone to his house, or by his two cellular numbers.”
“The 26th wouldn’t happen to have been a Sunday?”
Sam nodded.
That coincided with the last witness I had to see Cecilia. Three weeks ago. All I could think of was that he had gone to ground somewhere when he realized people were looking for him.
But I hadn’t been hired until the first.
There were other people looking for him. I wasn’t sure what Gabriel represented, but it seemed something worth hiding from.
“Okay, what about the van that hit us?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Hit and run. Some sort of warning.”
“What did they take? I thought I saw one kid steal a package out of your back seat.”
Sam looked surprised. “Is that what happened to that? I guess that gives us a bit more circumstantial evidence pointing at Childe, then.” He shook his head.
“What do you mean?”
“I had a lot more from England on this guy. That’s what they took, the bulk of Cross’ files from Scotland Yard.” Sam nodded to himself. “Yeah, this gives me something on Childe I might be able to use....”
“What?”
“Who else would have motive to swipe them? If I get a judge in a decent mood, I might swing a warrant to search for the van and those files. With that, I might turn up something.”
I nodded, wondering. What was in those files? Why take them when all Sam had to do was make another call to Scotland Yard for more copies? The more I learned about what was going on, the less sense it made. I could discern no reasonable motives for what Childe and his people had done in the past three weeks.
That bothered me.
For a while we sat in silence. I stared out, toward the horizon. The sky hung low, its clouds heavy above a black lake frozen into stillness. No moon, no stars, the only lights out there were the small red flashers on the breakwater, and an ice-white spotlight near its end.
Lake Erie was serene, melancholy, and still. It was the kind of stillness that made me wonder what kind of ugliness might lie beneath the surface. If I had not woken when I had, would I have first opened my eyes under that sheet of endless ice?
“Sam?” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“The arrangements for Kate—what are they, who’s handling it?”
“I—uh—her sister came in from Chicago to handle it. I’ve been helping, what I can do.”
“When are the services?”
“Tuesday.”
A half hour later, the Olds was driving up I-90, back the way we had come. Most of the way, we traveled in silence. It was a long time before I asked, “Gail is coming?”
Sam nodded, sighing. It was as if the statement had released a pressure that had weighed on him ever since we’d left the lake.
“Tomorrow?”
“Evening, yes. We were arranging all this while you were missing. I said she could stay at my place.”
“What about police protection?”
Sam looked at me, squinting over the bandage on his nose, “I’m a cop, remember?”
I nodded. “You know, if there was any way she could stay with me....”
“Of course I know. You could let her know—”
“I tried calling.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow, and she wants to see you.”
I didn’t answer. I drove off I-90 filled with conflicting thoughts. I wanted to see my daughter. I needed to see her survive the wound of losing Kate, but I was afraid that she may have already lost me also. How could I talk to her, reassure her, comfort her, when I had passed so far beyond the pale myself?
I felt that if I touched my daughter, some measure of the corruption infecting me would infect her as well. Beside that, the possibility she might reject me for my role in her mother’s death was almost comforting.
“Kane?”
�
�Yes,” I said. “I need to see her, don’t I?”
“Are you all right?”
“No. You’ll be home tomorrow?”
“I sort of have to be, don’t I? I plan to be working around the funeral. All day tomorrow, and then after the funeral.”
“Sorry this is screwing with your investigation.”
“She was my friend, too.” Sam looked out the windows at the black sandstone station emerging from the shadows. “Besides, talking to the survivors goes with the territory. You know me, I’d try to be at the funeral even if I didn’t know her.”
“Yeah, I know.” I pulled the Olds to a stop about a block from the station. As Sam stepped out of the car, I asked, “Can you do me a favor?”
He turned and said, “What?”
“Give me twelve hours before you serve that warrant.”
“Why?”
“Sometime tonight I want to pay Childe a visit.”
“I didn’t hear that, Kane.” He tossed the file folder on the passenger seat. “Just in case you need that information, those are all copies.”
He shut the door. I rolled down the window and shouted after him, “Can I have the time?”
Sam turned around and said, “I didn’t get that.” He looked at his watch. “I got to get back and wait for a judge to wake up so I can get this Childe warrant issued.” He smiled and resumed walking toward the station.
He’d given me my twelve hours. And sitting on the passenger seat was Childe’s address. I wanted to go there now, rush in, and demand explanations from whomever I found there—
However, I felt the need for some sense of caution. If there was a possibility of me confronting Childe, I wanted to know something more of his nature.
Also, I had the gnawing suspicion that—Sam’s warrant aside—there would be little to find at Childe’s residence. I suspected that Gabriel would have information as basic as Childe’s address. If Childe was to be found there, I doubted Gabriel would still be searching.
What was at Childe’s home would be what was left behind when he disappeared with Cecilia. There might be something there useful to me, but if that was so, it would stay there while I met with Gabriel.
13
Waiting for my midnight conference with Gabriel gave me an hour to think. I drove around trying to reason out the unreasonable, attempting to distill some rational sense out of an irrational situation. The unreason went beyond my search for Childe and Cecilia, and the disintegration of my life—
I forced myself to think the word that was at the core of my dilemma.
Vampire.
The farther Tony’s corpse receded in my memory, the more it seemed that all the events I’d experienced, however bizarre and unwarranted, were more than the products of my own derangement. What had happened to me that insisted on that peculiar interpretation?
Fear of the sun, holding my breath....
I was driving the Olds east up Superior, through some of the uglier parts of the East Side. The night turned a blind eye to me, the streets snowbound and empty, the storefronts shuttered in metal or plywood. Ragged men, young ones and old ones, hovered at corners, wrapped in their own secrets.
I felt a need to prove something to myself, before I delved any deeper into something that could just as well be a delusion. I needed some physical proof, some tangible stigmata....
I pulled the Olds over at the corner of E. 55th. At the moment, the only animate things in sight were a few snowflakes dancing in the wind. I stepped out of the car and gathered my coat about myself.
It was closing on eleven, and it felt as if I stood in a world abandoned. In the far distance, I heard a siren. Other than that, the only noise was from the streetlights rocking in the wind.
I crouched and examined the sidewalk. It was a mass of gray slush, but it wasn’t too hard to find what I was looking for. The neck of an abandoned beer bottle stuck up from a mound of grime-spotted snow. I withdrew it and upended it, loosing its unfrozen liquid to splatter the slush at my feet.
Stigmata, I thought. If I had truly died, if somehow some supernatural darkness had claimed my soul, my body should not be as it was. It would not act as a living body would. My breathing, my eating, both showed some physical transformation, if they weren’t symptoms of some derangement.
I stepped to a storefront, and set down the bottle to roll up the sleeve of my left arm. I made a fist and held out my arm, about half of my forearm exposed.
“Going through with this is not going to argue for my sanity.”
I paused a bit after saying that. However, at this point, after all I’d been through, that was no reason not to. The only reason not to was the fear that my hypothesis was wrong, and I was delusional.
I knelt down and grabbed the neck of the bottle with my right hand, while I clenched my left. On my exposed forearm, the veins came into relief under too-pale skin.
I shattered the body of the bottle against the metal cage imprisoning the storefront. Before I could reconsider, I drew the jagged end of the glass in a powerful slash across my forearm. I felt its bite as it tore skin. I felt the sour stab of the alcohol contaminating the glass.
The flesh parted across my wrist, the wound deep enough to sever the veins and slash the tendons. My fist shook and opened and I felt as if a brand had been applied to my wrist.
I saw the lips of the wound, ragged and black, before blood oozed to fill the wound. For a moment I felt an exquisite agony, as if the skin had been torn from the wounded area—
And suddenly the pain was no longer there.
My too-black blood no longer seeped from the wound. The blood sat mute, demarking the line where the insult had occurred, little more than would have been there had I suffered a scratch from an angry kitten.
I dropped the neck of the bottle and wiped the blood from my wrist. Beneath it, the skin was whole. No scar, no sign of injury, nothing but the blood on the fingers of my right hand. I no longer had any doubts that something had changed me.
I stumbled back to the Olds, my mind consumed with thoughts of the undead.
I couldn’t decide when I had first suspected Childe of vampirism. There was a good chance—I was beginning to think—that I might have started suspecting him and his cult before I had lost my memory. I couldn’t be sure of that, because those last days were still one of many black holes in my memory.
But I had seen a blood-drenched ritual, and I had made tapes of it. Damn Sebastian and his people for swiping them.
It was looking more and more as if I had been the one to place the Eucharist upon my own threshold. There seemed to be a peculiar irony to that, since if I was now a member of the undead, the Host seemed singularly ineffective.
I hoped it had at least helped me sleep nights.
Had I had discovered something? The true nature of Childe’s cult? Its location? Childe’s true identity? Had my investigation unearthed something that had prompted them to violence that, according to the absence of police records, was uncharacteristic?
I still couldn’t pin down a motive.
Maybe it’s something about their nature that’s making me miss something....
Undead. Vampire. Ghoul. Zombie. A thing that survives its own demise, to feed on human flesh and blood. A monster, pure and simple.
Unfortunately, pure and simple monsters didn’t accede to logical examination. Pure and simple monsters don’t need motivations to act. And if my experience showed anything, if such monsters existed, they were neither pure nor simple.
As far as I could tell, supernatural manifestations or not, the worst blood-drinking fiend still started human, and that meant that I still dealt with human nature. That meant that Childe, and his followers, were still doing things for reasons and were acting in expectation of some result.
The obvious interpretation was that somehow my investigation was getting too close to Childe, and his followers were reacting violently to protect him.
Because that conclusion was obvious, I distrusted it. I a
lso distrusted it, because if shielding Childe were the goal—if that was why they had killed Kate, and why they’d stolen those records from Sam—their effect was exactly opposite what they intended. If anything, they were calling attention to themselves.
As I pulled into Cleveland Heights, I had one more unanswered question to ponder.
Until Cecilia disappeared, Childe had never excited interest from anyone but Chief Inspector Cross at Scotland Yard. Presumably, Childe had been seducing vulnerable teenagers into his circle for decades. Until now, he had never taken anyone that someone missed.
I don’t know exactly what I expected from the address Gabriel gave me. It was in Cleveland Heights, which I generally thought of as middle suburbia. However, I knew that I wasn’t headed to a typical middle suburban household. Gabriel lived on a street nestled behind Euclid Heights Boulevard and overlooking University Circle.
When I saw the house, I knew it had been there when streetcars rode up and down the hill behind me. This had been here when most of Cleveland Heights had been a golf course.
The house was a massive structure, the front a forest of Doric columns two stories tall, giving the facade the appearance of two Grecian temples set side by side—the house’s entrance set between them. The entrance, the windows, almost everything else about the house was dwarfed by the columns.
Like Gabriel’s dress, the house was white, and its nineteenth-century appearance wouldn’t have been out of place on a plantation. At 11:55 I got out of the Olds and walked up an immaculately shoveled walkway, to the front door of the house.
When I reached the door, it opened for me. The action gave me pause for a moment, and I stopped before I reached the threshold. A figure stood in the doorway, but not one I expected. Gabriel wouldn’t have surprised me, nor would’ve a butler or other servant. Instead, I was greeted by a tall, dark woman dressed in a purple gown that looked as if it could have been worn in the latter half of the previous century.
She regarded me a moment, and said, “You are expected.”
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