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

by JC Andrijeski

  I knew Nick had a tendency to pull me in when he had a gut feeling, so I figured that must be the case with this guy, too. Despite the overwhelming evidence, at least in terms of the Palace of Fine Arts murder, Nick probably wanted me to help him crawl into the guy’s head, maybe so he could get a sense of his connection to the Grace Cathedral killings, or maybe to build evidence against an insanity plea, like he said.

  Maybe he liked him for other, possibly-related crimes.

  They’d do the DNA testing thing and everything else, of course, but Nick tended to be thorough. He probably wanted me to confirm or deny his working profile on the guy before he started running up blind alleys.

  I peered through the one-way glass of the interrogation room, sipping my now lukewarm coffee and trying to assess the scene before me objectively.

  “So you like this guy for the Grace Cathedral murders?” I said, as much to myself as Nick, who stood right at my arm.

  “I like this guy for Jimmy Hoffa,” Nick said, glancing at his partner, Glen Frakes, who snorted from the other side of him. “I like him for the Zodiac killings...and the death of my Aunt Lanai in Tokyo, God rest her soul.”

  Rolling my eyes, I nodded, getting the gist.

  I continued to look through the one-way glass, trying to get a sense of what I might be in for when I went in there.

  The guy just sat there, not moving.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone sit so still in an interrogation room before. His eyes didn’t dart to either the door or the cameras, which just about everyone looked at, seemingly without being able to help themselves.

  No one liked being watched.

  No one liked being trapped inside a featureless room, either.

  This guy wasn’t trying to be clever, either, staring at us through the one-way glass, which a lot of them did to show us they knew they were being watched.

  Nick’s suspect didn’t seem to care.

  I got nothing. A blank wall.

  That didn’t happen to me very often, truthfully.

  Maybe thirty, thirty-five years old.

  Muscular. Obviously in good shape, but not bulky like Nick with his weight-lifting and kung fu and judo and whatever else. This guy had the lean musculature of a runner or a fighter, not an ounce of excess flesh on him anywhere. I’d seen criminals and even addicts with that kind of body type of course, but I wasn’t getting any of the other signs of career criminal or addiction or living on the street on Nick’s new favorite perp.

  His eyes were clear, as was his skin, which was on the tanned side, but still light enough to be ethnically ambiguous. He looked healthy. He was handsome, actually, if in a feral kind of way. He had black hair, high cheekbones, a well-formed mouth, and some of the lightest, strangest-colored eyes I’d ever seen...so light they looked gold, and strangely flecked.

  Those eyes reminded me of a tiger. Or maybe a mountain lion...or an actual lion...although I couldn’t remember what color eyes either of those had in real life.

  Even those oddly riveting eyes weren’t the most noticeable thing about Nick’s new friend. Not at that precise moment, anyway.

  No, the most noticeable thing about him now was that he was covered in blood.

  Unlike with Nick, I couldn’t even pretend to not know what it was.

  A good portion of his visible bare skin wore a mostly-dry layer of reddish-brown smears and spots. It covered his hands and arms from his fingertips up to his rock-hard biceps, just below the cuffs of the stretchy black T-shirt he wore, which also accentuated the size of his chest. More smears and splatters of the same covered his neck and one side of his face. I could see it on the rings he wore, where his wrists were cuffed together and resting on the metal table.

  I also saw blood smearing the face of his military-style watch.

  I wasn’t an expert of course, but even if Nick hadn’t already told me how they’d found him on the street, I would have known just by looking at him. It was definitely blood.

  He’d practically been bathing in it, this guy.

  It explained how Nick came to have it on his own shirt, too.

  The suspect’s clothes, which included that form-fitting black T-shirt, black pants and black leather shoes, the last of which I could just see under the table, absorbed most of the color and texture of what decorated his bare skin. I’d already been assured by Nick and Glen that blood covered a good portion of his clothes, too, visible or not.

  I was kind of surprised they hadn’t stripped him yet, to pull evidence.

  They’d even left his shoes, rings and watch, which was unusual when they had a suspect cuffed like this and chained to the floor.

  As if he’d read my mind, Nick said, “We’ve got forensics coming up here in an hour. They’re at the scene now. We thought we’d give you a look first...while we wait.”

  I gave Nick a skeptical stare.

  That time, he had the grace to blush.

  “Okay,” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wanted you to look at him, Miriam. He won’t talk to us. I thought you might be able to give me some suggestions. Before we go all Guantanamo on his ass.”

  Frowning, I pursed my lips.

  Then I looked back at Nick’s blood-covered suspect.

  That time, I tried to push aside the emotional impact of the blood and assess the man himself. I still couldn’t get anything off him in the usual way. Even so, his war-paint aside, he had something about him, this guy. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, not in those first few seconds, but I found it difficult to look away from his face. He looked surprisingly calm, and those odd-colored eyes shone with intelligence.

  If anything, he looked alert.

  Not quite waiting, but expectant...even as he seemed to be using the time in some more complex mental exercise I couldn’t see. That sharpness he wore had a calculating quality, as if he were otherwise occupied in some further reach of his mind.

  I also distinctly got military.

  Only after I’d been looking at him for a few seconds more did I realize that the alertness told me more about his demeanor than the calm he wore over it. Something about that calm of his was deceptive, in fact. Behind it, he looked high-strung.

  Like, really high-strung.

  Like he was remaining where he sat through sheer force of will.

  I reassessed my “not a drug addict” summation briefly, but then went back to my original conclusion a few seconds later. What I was seeing didn’t come from drugs. He looked like he wanted to be elsewhere, without looking the slightest bit afraid, or nervous, or even angry. He didn’t look smug, either, like most psychopaths I’d seen.

  Instead, he seemed to view his being here as a colossal waste of his time.

  Once I’d seen that, I couldn’t un-see it. Further, it occurred to me that he didn’t even seem to be hiding his impatience particularly well.

  I might have noticed it before if I hadn’t been trying so hard to read him in other ways.

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  Again, Nick and Glen exchanged a look.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the joke now?”

  “If you can get a name out of that guy, I’ll buy you dinner,” Nick said. Grinning, he gave me a teasing once-over. “Of course, I’d do that for free, doc...just name the day.”

  Glen snorted again, folding his thick arms over his chest.

  Raising my left hand to Nick in what had recently become a running joke with us, I tapped my engagement ring with my thumb. Nick grinned, feigning disappointment, then motioned with his head towards the man sitting in the other room. My eyes followed his stare back to the guy with the flecked, gold-colored eyes, even as Nick’s voice grew more openly cop-like.

  “He won’t give us a name. No ID on him. His prints aren’t in the system.”

  “Mystery guy, huh?” I said.

  I said it casually, even with a lilt of humor. Still, I was puzzled. Television aside, that almost never happened, not anymore
.

  You couldn’t get anywhere anymore without some kind of ID.

  “We’re running facial rec on him now,” Nick said, almost like he heard me. “We’ll give him to Interpol if we don’t find him here. He’s got to have at least an alias...somewhere.”

  “No military record?” I said.

  “Nothing on the books.”

  I nodded, only half-hearing him as I frowned at the suspect.

  Nothing. He really was a blank wall.

  That was pretty rare for me, like I said.

  Not unheard of, but yeah...rare.

  “What makes you think he’ll talk to me?” I said finally, looking back at Nick.

  Nick just smiled, shifting his weight on his feet.

  “He probably won’t,” Glen volunteered from Nick’s other side. “But Nicky here seems to think you walk on water, doc, so he wanted to give it a shot.”

  Shrugging, even as I gave Nick an annoyed look, I tossed my paper cup of coffee in the plastic-lined bin under the desk and made a somewhat overdone motion towards the other room.

  “Well?” I said. “We might as well kill time until forensics shows up, right? I canceled my morning’s slate for this dog and pony show.”

  I added that last part with more bite, giving Nick a harder stare.

  Grinning at me, Glen, who was a good five inches taller than Nick and built like a linebacker, or maybe some kind of throwback to his Viking roots, nodded. Motioning for me to follow, he aimed his feet for the door so he could let me inside the interrogation room.

  As I walked past him, though, Nick caught hold of my upper arm.

  “Don’t fool around with this guy,” he warned.

  The smile vanished from Nick’s face, leaving my friend, the guy I knew behind his schtick.

  I remembered that look from Afghanistan, too.

  “...I mean it, Miri. He’s probably a serial killer. At the very least, he likes dead bodies a little too much. We’ll be right outside that door. If you want out, get out. Right away. Don’t play tough for the cop crowd...hear me?”

  Normally I would have chewed him out for the whole damsel-needing-protection crap, which I thought we were well past, given everything we’d been through together. Normally I also would have thrown in a few cutting reminders about just how many murderers, rapists, child molesters and other pillars of society I’d interviewed for him already.

  Something about the way he said it diffused my anger though.

  “I hear you,” I said, giving him a mock salute.

  As I did, I glanced at the guy on the other side of the one-way glass.

  The suspect just sat there, a faint frown touching the edges of his dark lips.

  For the first time however, he was staring at the one-way mirror.

  It looked like he was staring directly at me.

  Seeing the speckle of blood to the right of where that sharp mouth ended, I felt my pulse rise, in spite of myself.

  Nick might just be right about this guy.

  He usually was.

  Pushing the thought out of my mind, I looked away from the glass, following Glen out into the corridor. As I did, I let my face slide into a blank, professional mask and hoped that this time it would protect me.

  2 / First Interview

  HE LOOKED ME over when I walked in.

  Unlike a lot of people I’d interviewed in this room, suspects and witnesses alike, he didn’t hide his appraisal. He also didn’t do anything to try and get me on his side—like smile, or make his body language more accommodating or submissive.

  He didn’t try to intimidate me either, at least not that I noticed.

  Again, the predominant emotion I saw in his assessment remained impatience.

  He seemed, more than anything, to assume I was here to waste his time, too.

  At the same time, I got the sense there was more there—more in relation to me specifically, I mean. Nothing sexual, at least I didn’t think so.

  What that “more” was exactly, I had absolutely no theories at that point.

  Maybe I simply wasn’t what—or who—he’d expected.

  Maybe my appearance threw him.

  I’m used to that, to a degree. I’m tall for a woman, almost five-nine. My mom was Native American, like I said, and from one of the plains tribes that actually had some real height on them. I’m not sure what our dad was, since I’d been young when our parents died and hadn’t stayed in touch with any of his family... but he was tall too. I’d gotten hints of his bone structure, along with my mom’s. I also got his light-hazel eyes, which people tell me are striking on me but were positively riveting on my father. My mom joked once she could have fallen in love with my father from his eyes alone.

  The rest of me was my mother, according to my aunts. Straight black hair, full mouth, my sense of humor, even my curves, which were slightly less curvy from the martial arts classes, but not fully absent either.

  In other words, even under all of my professional armor, I’m definitely female.

  I can’t exactly hide it, even in suits and with my hair tied tightly back.

  For my part, I didn’t bother to smile at him either, or do any of the usual heavy-handed shrink things to try and convince him I was “on his side” or even particularly friendly towards him. Right off, I got the feeling that those kinds of tactics wouldn’t work on this guy.

  He would see right through them.

  Worse, trying it would probably cause him to dismiss me, too.

  So yeah, I approached him assuming he was a psychopath.

  Of course, the technical term these days, at least according to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (or “DSM” as we shrink-types called it) is “Anti-Social Personality Disorder” or ASPD. Those of us who work in forensic psych know a lot of the specific signs that go with this diagnosis—as well as ways to pick out the truly dangerous ones—but generally, there’s a longer sussing-out period involved.

  The most dangerous types were harder to spot.

  Often highly intelligent, deeply manipulative, glibly charming, uninterested in other people and totally unwilling to acknowledge the individual rights of anyone apart from themselves, the more dangerous individuals with anti-social personality disorder were masters at evading detection by psychs who couldn’t see past the veneer.

  Narcissistic bordering on grandiose. Inflated sense of their own entitlement. Zero compunction about manipulating others. Generally lacking the capacity for love. Generally lacking the ability to feel shame or remorse. They either experienced only shallow emotions or feigned emotion altogether. They had a constant need for stimulation...

  Well, you get the idea.

  Truthfully, I doubted this guy would talk to me any more than he would talk to the cops.

  Well, unless he decided I could help him in some way, or perhaps entertain him...since “short attention span” was often a big issue for the average psychopath. Or perhaps he would treat me differently because he wanted a female audience instead of a male one; I was reasonably certain that only male cops had been tried on him so far.

  Either way, I strongly suspected I wouldn’t win him over by trying to play him for a fool, at least not right out of the gate.

  I seated myself in the metal folding chair across the table from him.

  I did my own quick once-over of the room, even though I’d been in here a few dozen times already—reminding myself of the location of the cameras, looking at the four corners out of habit. My eyes glanced down to where the suspect’s ankles had been cuffed, not only to one another but to metal rings in the floor. His wrist cuffs were also chained to his waist, as well as to those same rings in the floor.

  Glen already assured me that the range of the chains wouldn’t allow him to reach me as long as I stayed in the chair.

  Still, he’d warned me not to get any closer.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. The guy looked a lot bigger from in here.

  He also looked signific
antly more muscular.

  Leaning back in the hard, metal seat, I watched those gold, cat-like eyes flicker over me. They didn’t pause anywhere for long, much less conduct one of those lecherous, lingering appraisals some convicts did in an attempt to unsettle me.

  I sensed a methodicalness to his stare, instead.

  That unnerved me a little, truthfully, maybe because it surprised me.

  Even for a psychopath, that kind of focus was rare. Usually other people just weren’t that interesting to them.

  Then again, captivity may have changed that for him, too.

  My eyes took in his appearance for the second time that day, lingering on the strangely high cheekbones still colored with smears of dried blood. I saw flakes of that blood on the surface of the table too, from where it had been rubbed off by his metal cuffs.

  Wincing, I glanced up to find him staring at me once more, his gold eyes bordering on thoughtful as they took in my face.

  When he didn’t break the silence after a few seconds more, I leaned back more deliberately, crossing my legs in the dark-blue pantsuit I wore.

  “So,” I said, sighing. “You don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  I didn’t bother to state it as a question.

  The man’s eyes flickered back to my face, specifically to my eyes.

  After a pause, I saw a faint smile tease the edges of his lips.

  “I doubt my words would be very convincing,” he said.

  I must have jumped a little in my chair, but he pretended not to notice.

  “...Covered in blood,” he continued, motioning with one cuffed hand, likely as much as he could, given the restraints. Still, something in the odd grace of the gesture struck me, causing me to follow it with my eyes. “...Picked up near the scene of the crime. And you have witnesses, too, I suspect? Or did those three little girls decide it wasn’t worth getting in trouble with their parents by calling the police in the wee hours of dawn?”

  His words surprised me.

  More, the longer he spoke.

  Not only because he said them, but because they came out with a clipped, sharp accuracy and cadence. They wore the barest trace of an accent too, although it was one I couldn’t identify. His manner of speech certainly implied a greater than average amount of education.