The Prescient: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 3)

by JC Andrijeski

  Hannah broke out the last of the peppermint schnapps, handing around the bottle by the neck. Shivering and pulling her down jacket tighter against the wind, Janine took a long drink, choking a bit. The warmth of the burn was welcome.

  She thought about school on Monday, and telling the other kids about their night.

  Hannah was right. This was so going to blow Kristi’s mind.

  Cheered at the thought, Janine grinned, taking another slug of the schnapps and shuddering when it wanted to come back up her throat.

  “I think I’m done,” she said, handing the bottle to Keeley and wiping her mouth.

  “I soooo want to get married here!” Keeley said, after taking her own drink.

  “Me too!” Hannah seconded.

  The three of them wandered the asphalt path between orange-lit columns. The path led to the rotunda, but would also spit them out through the row of columns on the other side, and back to the lawn that would eventually let them off at the edge of the Marina District.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a bad short cut after all.

  The columns looked way bigger and taller up close, like something really and truly old. Janine gawked up with her two friends, despite the dozens of times she’d walked here with her parents or during school trips or whatever.

  Pulling out her smart phone, she took a few pictures, first just of the columns themselves, then of Keeley and Hannah as they posed, hanging on the base of pillars and stone urn.

  “We should send these to Kristi now!” Hannah squealed, laughing with her arm slung around Keeley’s neck. “She will be sooo pissed!”

  “No, her mom checks her phone, like, every day,” Janine warned. “She would totally bust us if she saw what time we’d sent these.”

  Hannah’s expression sobered.

  Before she could answer, they all came to an abrupt stop.

  Keeley saw it first.

  She smacked Janine, who came to a dead stop, right before Janine grabbed Hannah, gripping her friend’s peacoat jacket in a tightly-clenched fist.

  Hannah froze.

  Before them, a woman wearing a white, flowing dress lay in a strangely elegant pose on the ground. Something about the way her legs and arms were positioned struck Janine as broken-looking, despite the precision...like a store mannequin that had been accidentally knocked over and lay facing the wrong direction.

  The woman’s legs were almost in a running or leaping pose. Her arms curved up over her head, the wrists and fingers positioned inward like a ballerina’s. Her chin and face tilted up, towards the lake, as if to look between her delicately positioned hands.

  Whatever caused the position, it didn’t look right.

  The woman’s face didn’t look right, either.

  It belonged to a porcelain doll. Someone had slathered so much make-up on her cheeks and eyes that they appeared bruised.

  Those details, however, Janine remembered only later.

  In those few seconds, all she could see was the blood.

  The woman’s dress from waist to bust-line was soaked a dark red that looked purple in the orange light under the dome. That same splash of red covered her all the way to her thighs, past where the dress bunched up and flared out like the dress of a princess in fairytale.

  It was a wedding dress.

  The teenagers just stood there, all three of them breathing hard now, like they’d been running. They stared at the woman under the Palace of Fine Arts rotunda as if the sight put them in a trance. Janine found herself unable to look away.

  Then she realized they weren’t alone.

  Next to the woman in white, a man crouched, staring down at her.

  Janine must have seen him there.

  She must have been staring right at him, along with the woman. Even so, his form seemed to jump out at her all at once.

  Her first, irrational thought was: He must be the groom.

  Then Janine saw his hands reach for the mid-section of the woman on the ground.

  He was touching her.

  His face remained in shadow. Black hair hung down over his eyes. He straightened in a single, fluid motion and like the woman in white, blood streaked his skin like glistening paint, all the way past his elbows to the edges of his black T-shirt.

  His face and neck wore dark and shining splotches of the same.

  He turned his head, staring at the three girls.

  For the first time, the angles of his face caught the light, displaying high cheekbones and a distinct lack of expression in the sunset-colored flood lamps aimed at the dome. Those almond-shaped eyes looked oddly yellow—almost gold—under that glow of the rotunda.

  Janine saw those feral-looking eyes focus on Hannah, then Keeley.

  Right before they aimed directly at her.

  Her trance finally broke.

  A loud, familiar-sounding voice let out a piercing scream. The scream echoed inside the hollow chamber of the dome, replicating there.

  It occurred to Janine only later that the scream came from her.

  That was her screaming, Janine Rico.

  In the same instant, a voice rose in her mind.

  This one didn’t sound like her at all.

  Run away, little girl, the voice whispered. Run away now, little one, all the way home, before the big bad wolf decides to eat you, too...

  Janine didn’t have to be told twice.

  1 / Suspect

  “YOU’VE GOT TO get a load of this guy, Miriam,” Nick told me that morning, leaning against the jamb of my office door and grinning. “You really do. He’s a serious piece of work...like...” He made a motion by the side of his head with his fingers, expanding them out sharply, like his own brain just exploded. “...Total head job. Right up your alley.”

  I scowled.

  It was seven in the morning.

  I hadn’t even managed to finish my first cup of coffee yet.

  Inspector Naoko “Nick” Tanaka hadn’t bothered with a hello first, when he showed up at the door of my inner office. He was also there an hour before reception opened, not like that ever stopped him. I knew Gomey was out there too, as in Gomez Ramirez, my so-called administrative assistant and personal pain in my ass. And yeah, I knew Nick was a pushy bastard who never knocked, never asked permission, but it still bugged me that Gomey hadn’t even tried to stop him. He could have warned me at least.

  I combed my fingers through my long black hair and sighed, looking up at Nick with what I hoped was a flat-eyed stare. I hadn’t even put on make-up yet, telling myself I’d do it in the office bathroom before my first client. I could pull off the no make-up thing better than most, I knew—thanks to inheriting my mom’s Native American skin tone and good bone structure and dark eyelashes—but I still felt a little naked without it. I’d left my hair down too, and for some reason, that always made me feel a bit too visibly female at work.

  Truthfully, I felt unprepared to deal with anyone this early, even Nick, who I’d known forever. I hadn’t donned my professional armor yet.

  Nick took his weight off the doorjamb, all five-foot-eleven of him, most of it solid muscle.

  He looked tired, I couldn’t help noticing.

  I assessed his overall mental state out of rote, more occupational hazard than because I meant to do it. Tired, and more stressed out than usual, even if he was doing his usual and hiding it under a grin and his own professional armor, that of the swaggering, b.s.-talking cop. I knew that armor was partly calculated. I also knew it worked, in that people who didn’t know him constantly underestimated him.

  Nick knew I saw through it of course, but he couldn’t help himself.

  He lingered in my doorway for a few seconds more before entering all the way.

  I don’t know if he’d been waiting for an invitation or just letting me get used to the fact he was there. Nick, being a homicide cop, wasn’t dumb about psychology either.

  Technically, that was my bailiwick, though.

  I’m not a forensic psychologist by training, but
somehow I ended up one—a de facto one at least—and most of that was Nick’s fault, too. Technically I’m a clinical and research psychologist, and honestly, I tried my damnedest to stick to the research side of that as much as humanly possible.

  Nick and I had history, though.

  He’d even introduced me to my current boyfriend (now fiancé, I reminded myself)...Ian. Ian was another old military buddy of Nick’s. They met in Iraq, though—not Afghanistan like me and Nick. I’d gone in later than Nick, being over a decade younger.

  Since Ian was British and worked in intelligence, not the regular armed forces, he and I never crossed paths over there. We met after Ian moved to San Francisco over a year ago and Nick took us all out for drinks, thinking me and Ian might hit it off.

  Well, that was Nick’s story, anyway.

  Ian told me that the drinks had been his idea. He claimed he’d pushed Nick for an introduction after seeing a picture of me on Nick’s mantle in his crappy apartment in South San Francisco.

  Either way, Nick and I had history.

  And Nick might be a cop now, but he still thought like a guy in a firefight.

  I watched Nick do his cop-walk into my personal space, wearing a rumpled black suit with a dark blue shirt underneath. Only then did I notice the splattering of stains on the front of his suit, visible under the heavier motorcycle jacket he wore over it.

  I frowned, trying to identify the exact stains.

  They didn’t look like coffee. Even so, the more conscious part of my mind refused to acknowledge the “blood” categorization that popped into my head.

  So yeah, Nick was tired, wound up, and he had blood on him.

  He put his hands on his hips, which rumpled both jackets enough that I saw the handle of his Glock poke out from where he had it in a shoulder holster on his right side. I noticed he’d cut his midnight-black hair shorter than usual on the back and sides, but left it longer in front.

  Even exhausted, he still looked good, did Nick Tanaka. Even at this ungodly hour.

  Unfortunately, he knew it.

  So did the women he burned through on a monthly or sometimes weekly basis.

  Not me, though.

  I’d become part of Nick’s inner circle, one of his go-to people when he was working a case, like an oddly-shaped tool in his tool box that he pulled out when he found the right-sized bolt that needed unscrewing.

  I’d already known something was going on at the station.

  Whatever it was, it had a lot of people excited. I’d heard smatterings on my way into the office, mostly via low-voiced conversations while I stood in line for my daily dose of high-octane coffee from The Royale Blend, the gourmet coffee shop that lived in the storefront directly below my office. Since my office is located just a few blocks from the Northern District police station, I share the same coffee shop with a lot of the cops that work out of there.

  Well, the cops willing to fork over four bucks for a decent cup of coffee.

  Still, even though I knew something was up, I was surprised to see Nick here already.

  Usually he didn’t need me this early.

  “Seriously,” Nick said, grinning at me as he assessed me with his dark brown eyes. “I can’t wait to get your diagnosis, doc.” He gave his head a theatrical shake. The smile didn’t entirely mask the tenser look I glimpsed underneath. “This guy...wow. You’re going to get a kick out of him, Miri. Assuming you can get him to talk to you at all.”

  I arched an eyebrow, giving him my best clinical stare.

  “You think he’s mentally unfit?” I said. “On what diagnosis?”

  As per usual, he totally blew past my sarcasm.

  “On the diagnosis that I think he’s a total nutcase,” Nick said, grinning at me. He pulled a toothpick out the back row of his white teeth, a habit I’d told him more than once was disgusting. I grimaced now as he tossed the frayed piece of wood into my trash can. “...That’s my expert opinion, doc. No charge. But I still want you to talk to him. If I could nail this guy without him dropping down into an insanity plea, I’d sleep better at night.”

  Given that I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, I wasn’t sharp enough yet to get anything but annoyed at the glint of denser meaning in his dark eyes.

  Then again, I’ve always hated cagey, hinting crap.

  It even annoyed me coming from Nick.

  Despite the tiredness I could see around his eyes and the blood on his shirt and suit jacket, Nick looked amped up and almost on edge, even for him. I knew Nick ran every day before work. He left his apartment like clockwork at four a.m.—unless he happened to be working, like today. He also surfed, at least on the mornings he didn’t get called in, and was a member of the same martial arts club as me.

  Unlike me, Nick also lifted weights, went mountain biking, played basketball.

  He was one of those cops.

  He also lived almost entirely for his job. Nick was in his early forties at least, but he’d never been married, which probably helped with the near-singular focus. He was just one of those intense, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of guys.

  Driven, I guess would be the non-clinical word.

  I continued to cradle my coffee cup for a few seconds more, not moving in the half-broken down, leather office chair I still hadn’t managed to get Gomey to either fix or declare dead and replace. Glancing around at the papers strewn across my desk and the filled-to-overflowing in-box with its beat up manilla and dark green folders, I could only sigh.

  My one and only office plant looked like it was screaming silently at me, possibly in its death throes since it had been so long since I’d remembered to water it.

  I knew Gomey hadn’t been doing that, either.

  “Why?” I said finally, when all Nick did was grin at me. “What’s his deal?”

  “Oh, don’t let me spoil it...”

  “Seriously?” I said. “What are we, twelve?”

  “Trust me,” Nick said. “You’ll want to talk to this one in person, Miri. I don’t want to say anything until you see him. I don’t want to...bias anything.”

  Realizing he wasn’t going to let me off the hook, and further, that he was actually waiting for me, expecting me to just drop everything I hadn’t yet started for the day and follow him to whatever piss-smelling interrogation room where they were holding this clown, I sighed again.

  “You can’t give me a few minutes?” I said.

  “No.”

  “I have an appointment coming in at nine, Nick.”

  Frowning, Nick looked at his watch, as if a ticking bomb were counting down somewhere in another part of the building.

  “Any chance you could cancel it?” he said apologetically, shifting his feet. “We’re pretty sure he’s the guy on the thing last week. That mess at Grace Cathedral.”

  I glanced up sharper at that.

  He meant the wedding guy.

  Once more glimpsing the more serious look behind the humor in Nick’s eyes, I nodded my defeat and rose to standing from behind the broken chair.

  Sadly, I guess there’s a reason Nick counts on me.

  I’m a sucker.

  THERE WASN’T A lot of pre-work on this one.

  Well, not yet.

  No one wanted to debrief me on much in the way of details, presumably because Nick told them not to. So I didn’t get handed the usual cobbled-together file of scribbled notes and photos and whatever else from the preliminary interrogations, or much in the way of details of what they’d found at the actual scene.

  Nick gave me the bare bones story only.

  Three fifteen-year-old girls stumbled upon the suspect at the scene of the crime. According to them, he’d been covered in blood. He also looked like he’d just finished—or maybe remained deep in the process of—doing “something” to a woman’s dead body. Their testimony was pretty vague on details, according to Nick.

  He admitted to me that he couldn’t really get a sense if they’d seen anything concrete, apart from the suspect h
imself...as well as the victim, a white dress, a lot of make-up and a lot of blood...all of which were damning enough, under the circumstances.

  Well, that and what had been done to the victim herself.

  I only got the bare bones on that, too, and didn’t ask for more. Truthfully, I’ve never gotten used to seeing that kind of thing, not even in pictures.

  The three girls ran like hell once the suspect spotted them.

  Even so, more than an hour passed before they called in what they’d seen, although they freely admitted they all had smart phones with them at the time. The latter had been confirmed by the presence of photos they’d taken on the walkway leading up to the Palace before they reached the dome where the body had been displayed.

  From what Nick told me, the delay on calling had more to do with the girls’ fears of getting caught by their parents than fear of the suspect himself, who hadn’t bothered to chase them. Something about being out all night and drunk while crashing at the home of an out-of-town parent. Nick said they admitted to arguing amongst themselves about what to do after they arrived back at a Marina residence.

  They finally called it in around five o’clock.

  A black and white had already picked up the suspect by then, as it turned out.

  They saw him crossing Marina Boulevard towards the promenade, presumably to reach the coast. Bad luck on his part, Nick said with a wry grin. He figured the guy had been heading for the yacht harbor north of the Palace of Fine Arts, either to hop a boat or to wash off the blood, or maybe both. If he’d succeeded in either, they might never have got him.

  As it was, they pulled guns on him to get him to comply.

  From what I could tell, they pretty much lifted this guy off the street and parked him in an interrogation room while they called the coroner and forensics to the scene of the murder. I knew someone must have talked to him...and likely cleaned him up...probably Nick and whatever officer arrived first on the scene. But they couldn’t have gone through the whole range of the usual song and dance, either.

  Which meant Nick was bending the rules a little, bringing me in now.