by Skye Knizley
Aspen bit into her burrito and savored it. “I can identify it. Beans, cheese, artificial beef flavor and enough preservatives to embalm King Tut. Delicious.”
Raven picked at the nacho chips on the plate. “And these are corn, processed cheese food and refried beans with just a dash of tabasco.”
She swallowed a big bite of food then caught the disgusted look on King’s face.
“Look, it’s all I could find in a pinch, okay? I didn’t expect to have to carry around bags of plasma in this job,” she growled.
King straightened. His effort to keep the disgust off his face was plain. “Now you know. A little B positive would be far more appetizing than convenience store glop.”
He continued down the stairs to a waiting Suburban where a young agent opened the door for him.
“You wouldn’t say that if you had to drink it. Where are you going?” Raven asked.
“Back to work,” King replied. “You don’t need a babysitter and this is not the only case we have in New England. Good day, ladies.”
King climbed into the back of the Suburban and Raven watched it disappear around the corner.
“Is he always like that?” Aspen asked.
“Every time I’ve ever met him,” Raven replied. “He’s like the grouchy grandfather I never wanted. Come on, we need to put a bolo out on Klien and check out his residence. There has to be some way to find this bastard.”
Aspen held out her tablet. An address was highlighted on the screen. “I set up the bolo with Boston PD and got his address from his DMV file.”
“When did you do that?”
“While I was in line getting your nachos,” Aspen replied. “The guy was slow.”
She squatted in front of Raven. “You know this isn’t going to cut it, right? You still need blood.”
“I know. I also need something pointy,” Raven said. “These things are getting harder to kill, the Automag is powerful but I’m chewing through rounds like they’re candy.”
“What did you have in mind?” Aspen asked.
Raven stood, her joints cracking and popping with the motion. “Thad has contacts everywhere. I’m sure he knows someone who has a ‘kill everything in the room’ sword I can borrow.”
“You probably shouldn’t have left the one Francois gave you pinned to the top of a building in The Dark,” Aspen replied.
Raven turned toward the Rapide. “It was holding Strohm’s head in place.”
“Yeah, and wasn’t it and the sword gone later?”
Raven shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
ALPHEUS ROAD
BOSTON, MA. 6:15 P.M.
DR. KLIEN HAD LIVED IN a small blue-grey house in the middle of a residential neighborhood crammed with houses of every style. The nondescript two story cracker box house sat on a small, well-kept lawn with a fenced-in back yard. A black late-model Chevrolet sat in the driveway, but there was no sign that was anyone home. The house looked like it felt: Dead.
Raven parked the Rapide in the driveway, her attention on the small home. “How much did you say this place was worth?”
“Just a little more than half a mil,” Aspen said. “The mortgage is more than both our places put together.”
“Wow. If I ever spend that much on a place that will fit in the trunk like this, slap me. I’ve seen bigger lofts.”
They moved to the door and Raven knocked, not expecting anyone to answer, but sticking to protocol. After a few minutes of silence she used her picks to unlock the door and they stepped through into the warmth of the living room. The heat was on full blast.
Aspen kicked the door shut behind them. “Do you ever worry about the whole breaking and entering deal? I mean, illegal search and seizure is a real thing.”
“I would if we ever had a normal case where I thought there was any chance of actually arresting anyone. Monsters don’t go to trial. Where would you find a jury of their peers, the local sewer?”
“Point taken. I know it’s tiny, but this is kind of a cool place. It seems bigger on the inside.”
The living room took up the entire western side of the house. It had polished hardwood floors, an Aztec-print rug and two overstuffed leather sofas that faced the biggest flat screen television that Raven had ever seen. Next to it was a pair of French doors that led out onto a small deck with a built in barbecue grill.
“Doesn’t look like the kind of place a school teacher could hold down, that’s for sure,” Raven said.
She walked the length of the room to examine the tables and look for anything out of the ordinary while Aspen moved through an archway to the right that led into the eat-in kitchen. Raven took the time to rifle through the pile of mail on a side-table, but found nothing of any real interest in the collection of bills and fishing magazines.
“Ray, you better come take a look at this,” Aspen called from the kitchen.
Raven followed the sound of her voice into the kitchen where Aspen was standing in front of the refrigerator.
“Let me guess, brains, trains and heart-amobiles.”
Aspen moved aside and held the door open. “You got one out of three.”
Inside was more than a dozen jars containing human hearts and thick, viscous heart’s blood.
“Is that parsley?” Raven asked, pointing at one of the jars.
Aspen squinted at the tiny bundle of herbs lying on top of the blood. “Mm, thyme and sage. Are you going to try some?”
Raven tried not to gag. “It’s bad enough drinking it out of a bag, I’m not drinking it by the quart out of some nutball’s fridge. Find anything else interesting?”
Aspen pointed to a smaller jar pushed close to the freezer side. It was full of something milky white that swirled in the cold. “That is either something I don’t want to speculate on, or a jar of snake venom.”
“I’m so glad Rupe isn’t here,” Raven said. “Snap some pics and snag some samples of the blood for typing, just in case. I’m heading upstairs.”
The second floor of the small house consisted of two bedrooms arranged at either end of a small area that contained a potted plant and the staircase. A large fish tank half full with sand sat next to the stairs. A mottled green snake looked at Raven with dead eyes from within, a pile of dead rodents and insects beside it.
Raven resisted the urge to tap the glass and moved deeper into the house. One bedroom was simple, with a queen sized bed, two night tables and a desk covered in high school books. A quick look confirmed this was where Klien put his class schedule together.
Raven donned a pair of purple Nitrile gloves and poked through the contents of the desk. It was mostly school books and school related paperwork showing that Klien had been a mid-semester replacement for a professor who had passed away.
In the bottom drawer was a framed photo showing a tall woman with long black hair and a late 70s style dress. Someone had scratched her face out of the photo with a knife or razor making it impossible to tell who she was.
Raven put the photo back and moved to the other bedroom. She had a feeling it was going to be another dead end, but she hoped to hell she was wrong. It was time for a break before another victim was taken out.
LENOX HOTEL
BOSTON, MA. 7:23 P.M.
LEVAC SET HIS FOURTH CHEESEBURGER plate aside and tapped a sequence of keys on his brand new FBI issued laptop. He’d tried the whole resting thing like Raven had asked, but his neck had begun to itch where it was healing and it kept him from getting any real sleep. Besides, he’d been hungry and the food would help him heal.
It hadn’t taken him long to get into the FBI database, King’s people had issued him access before he’d even landed in Boston. The message had mostly been some nonsense about training once the case he was on was over, but it had included all of his access passwords to systems he didn’t think he was supposed to use until he’d been passed through Quantico.
But a database was a database and he wasn’t going to just sit on his butt with li
ves on the line. An hour of digging into the backgrounds of Quinn, Walker and Casside had turned up interesting parallels. After the fire they’d stayed in school, taking most of the same classes together, avoiding archaeology and history in favor of religious studies. The only history course they’d taken together had been a rare elective concentrating on ancient Maya and legends about the Mayan people. The class had been taught by a very young Dr. Stone, the same contact Levac had gotten from Dr. Anthony.
By graduation the trio, as well as most of the other survivors, had gone their separate ways. The only two together in any sense were Maria Riscassi and Lorne Givens, who were something of an item in the last six weeks of class. Levac had been unable to paint a clear picture of what happened to the couple after graduation, but it appeared to have involve an altercation between Maria and Carole Givens, then Carole Trew. The incident had left Givens with a barely perceptible scar she’d found hideous and Maria had returned to Boston.
Levac had also found something interesting in the financial records, specifically around Carole Givens, who had received a large lump-sum payment from Riscassi and Levine. A call to Riscassi had gone unanswered, but Levac was certain it was what tied the five dead street bosses to the rest of the murders. He’d called Mauser in Chicago and asked the local police to follow up on what the payment was for. Riscassi was the only one who could answer that question, but he had a hunch it was a payoff to save Riscassi’s skin. He was, at heart, a coward.
Levac was getting bored with research and convalescence when a newspaper article caught his attention. It had been printed in the Boston Globe less than a month before. The headline was ‘Missing Archaeologist Found in Guatemala.’ He scanned the page, wondering what about it had piqued his curiosity. He found it about part way down the page.
Dr. Theodore Klien was found alive and well in Guatemala by eminent archaeologist Dr. Lorne Givens while he searched for the Lost City of Lagunita. Dr. Klien was thought lost on a previous dig, however rumors suggest he was trapped within a Mayan tomb. Reports say he survived by eating local plants and drinking water that trickled through the rocks. Read more of his amazing story on page H7.
Givens was the man that Raven had interrogated in Worcester. She’d never asked him about the incident that had put him there in the first place, but if he’d found someone trapped in an old tomb it might have been what sent him down the yellow brick road. The name Klien was also familiar, it was spelled differently than usual which made it stand out. But he couldn’t remember where it came from.
He saved the document to the laptop and closed the lid, a variety of ideas bouncing around in his head. Three years ago he would never have considered things like undead serial killers and curses. Now it was at the top of the list, and that left him with a funny taste in his mouth.
Levac rubbed his healing neck and looked at the fifth cheeseburger tray. He knew that beneath was a five star burger, still warm enough, with a side of fries and some coleslaw that wasn’t half bad.
But somehow he wasn’t hungry anymore.
LENOX HOTEL
BOSTON, MA. 8:45 P.M.
ASIDE FROM THE BLOOD AND venom that Aspen had collected from the refrigerator and a couple of scales found in the guest bed, Klien’s house had been a bust. Whatever he’d been up to, he hadn’t kept it at the house.
Raven and Aspen returned to the hotel just before nine. Aspen headed to their room while Raven stopped in to see how Levac was doing. She could smell the cheeseburgers before he even opened the door. The bruises on his neck had faded to almost nothing and his eyes were clear, much better than he’d been in the hospital.
“Hi Ray, what’s up?” he asked.
“You look good, what did you have, five burgers?” Raven asked.
“Four. I never ate the fifth, I’m not hungry anymore. Did you learn anything at the morgue?”
Raven spent the next ten minutes bringing Levac up to speed on what she and Aspen had learned. When she finished Levac opened his computer.
“I think I can shed a little light on some things,” he said. “Dr. Givens is the one who dug up Klien, he was lost on some kind of dig and Lorne rescued him.”
“Was it the same dig that pushed Givens over the edge?” Raven asked.
Levac pushed another key. “Yep. Killed two people, injured a third who is still in a coma. According to the news photographs, Klien is the one who brought him out of the jungle.”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” Raven said. “How did Klien get trapped in the first place?”
“That part is a little vague,” Levac said. “Some of the reports suggest he was there only a short time. But some of the tabloid rags say he was lost back in, get this, 1977.”
“Wait, was he digging at a place called Tonina?” Raven asked.
Levac scanned the page. “According to the news, yes. He was excavating the rest of some old cave in.”
“That’s where the accident happened in ’77,” Raven said. “I have a feeling the tabloids were right.”
“So this guy was buried for forty years? How did he survive?”
Raven leaned close to look at the pictures of the dead archaeologists. “I don’t think he did. I think he died and came back as some sort of vampire thing. Not a true vampire, but similar enough.”
She pointed at the screen. “Look how sunken their faces are. Givens didn’t kill them, Klien did. He fed on them as soon as he was released. He was starving.”
“But he can come out in daylight,” Levac said. “So can the victims.”
“A lot of vampires can, all it takes is energy and some decent sunblock,” Raven said. “Whatever these things are, they aren’t straight up bloodsuckers. They’re something new, immune to silver, holy water and white oak. Specials only seem to annoy them.”
“You know, hanging around with you is no picnic,” Levac said.
Raven smiled. “Admit it, you missed me.”
“I did,” Levac said with a smile. “But I sure as snot didn’t miss these cases. I’m still waiting for the day we get a plain old murder with no supernatural hocus pocus.”
He opened the cover on his remaining burger and took a big bite. “Klien is in the wind, we’ve got at least three vampire things on the loose with as many as nine if you count the five of Riscassi’s thugs, they’re immune to the specials and we are fresh out of leads. So, what now?”
Raven looked at the rest of what Levac had been doing. The payment from Riscassi to Givens was interesting, but unless Chicago PD picked up something else on him, she didn’t have time to just pick up and go ask questions.
“Did you run financials on Klien?” she asked.
“No, not yet,” Levac said around his cheeseburger. “I didn’t know he meant anything. Do you have a hunch?”
“Not so much a hunch as a prayer,” Raven said. “Finish that thing and make with the computer stuff.”
Levac took the final part of his burger in one big bite. “I don’t do computer stuff, I was bored, this is Aspen’s deal.”
“So why don’t you let me do my thing?” Aspen asked from the door.
She’d changed into a short skirt and long-sleeved tee matched with combat boots. Her hair was still wet from what Raven assumed was the fastest shower in the west and she was wearing the necklace she’d given her on their first official date.
“Hey Aspen,” Levac said. “You’re looking, um, Gothic.”
Aspen tossed her white towel at his head. “I didn’t have much time to pack and this outfit was clean, okay? What are we looking for?”
“I have no idea,” Raven said. “Grab Klien’s financials since he’s been back and see if there is anything we can work with.”
“You got it. Move it, Rupe, let the Mistress at the keys,” Aspen said.
Levac moved away from the desk, giving Aspen access to his laptop.
“Hey, this is nicer than mine,” Aspen groused. “They said since I was a lab tech I didn’t need the new one with full access. I call that b
ias.”
“If this works, I’ll nag King to give you better access, but odds are better access means more work, just like it did in Chicago,” Raven said.
“Maybe not. He likes you, maybe he will just do it out of the kindness of his heart,” Aspen replied.
“I’m not sure he likes me much. He always looks annoyed with me.”
“He likes you,” Levac said.
“How do you know?” Raven asked.
“Because he reassembled your team from Chicago when he really didn’t have to,” Aspen said. “He brought me in and they don’t even have a lab in Seattle, and I knew Levac would be reassigned sooner or later. He either likes you or needs you and he knows you work better with us at your side. You’re less angry.”
“I’d hate to see her more angry,” Levac said with a grin.
“I hardly ever get angry,” Raven said.
Aspen and Levac both looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
“What? I don’t!” Raven said.
“Whatevs, love,” Aspen said. “Bingo, I think have something. Klien deposited close to a million dollars in converted gold into an account at Salem bank in downtown Boston shortly after he got back. He also paid a shipping company in Mexico to send him a crate, a crate that…”
She trailed off, her tongue stuck in the corner of her mouth as she typed.
“…arrived in customs the day before Father Cleary was killed in Manchester, New Hampshire.”
Her fingers caressed the keys and she brought up another window that contained Klien’s bank statement. “Where Klien had a hotel room for a single night.”
“So we can place him in New Hampshire the day Cleary was killed?” Levac asked.
“Looks that way. I can also place him in Los Angeles the week Father John Butler was found dead. It’s where Klien and Givens were sent to recover,” Aspen said.
“Which confirms our suspicion that he’s behind the murders, at least some of them, but doesn’t help us find him, or explain how his victims are rising from the dead,” Raven said.