Blood Hunt

Hunter
1

Lit by the single light above the sink across the kitchen, the liquid in the cut-glass tumbler had the rich, dark red of Burgundy. Garreth, at the table, turned the tumbler in his hands, wondering sardonically what Marti’s Aunt Elizabeth would think of the end to which her crystal wedding gift had come. The sodium citrate suggested by the Crime Lab tech as an anticoagulant worked. In the refrigerator four half-gallon plastic milk bottles — carried empty to the pier in a backpack — sat filled with still-liquid blood, enough to last him at least a week. A lot of drained rat bodies fed the fishes tonight but the slaughter was worth it.

He sipped the blood almost idly, playing with it as a wine taster might. This Rattus ‘83 is a bold vintage, speaking to the palate with lively authority, while -

Garreth cut off the thought, ending the game. He played not for amusement, he knew, but to delay, to avoid considering the problem he had set himself. Just as he had avoided it yesterday afternoon and most of today by focusing on obtaining the sodium citrate. Now he faced it: how could he hope to find Lane Barber on his own when the combined facilities of the department were failing to? Had his melodramatic resignation been premature?

No, he had no choice. He endangered fellow officers’ lives. Even if he managed to pass a psych evaluation and be allowed to carry a badge again. Besides, as a “free agent” he could spend all his time chasing Lane, and since he knew what she was he might think of leads not considered by humans. Perhaps he could learn how she thought, too.

He emptied the glass, rinsed it clean, and started pacing the apartment.

First question: Where could she go?

Unfortunately, probably anywhere. In forty-odd years of singing, she must have made many connections. She could no doubt travel to any large city in the country, or perhaps even around the world, and through those connections find a new job. She could change her identity, something she must have honed to a fine art.

One thing in his favor: habit. The famous modus operandi. She drew her food supply from customers where she worked…small, intimate clubs which offered ample opportunity for meeting customers. The Barbary Now and several other clubs the agent named where Lane had worked were all that type. How many such bars and clubs existed within the United States? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Garreth sighed. Finding her in North Beach had been simple compared with the task that faced him now. Her bite gave him all the time in the world for hunting her but his bank account did not. He needed to find her before his money ran out. And he knew too little about her to narrow down her possible avenues of escape.

The blinking light on his answering machine caught his eye. Anger flared in him. Someone had been in the apartment today and plugged in the phone he unplugged on coming home from the hospital. Police, he felt sure…admitted by the landlord for a “welfare check” since he left untouched the notes they put on his door yesterday afternoon and evening. The department was looking for him, of course…not out of concern this time but to talk about the shooting. Something he could not endure right now.

As he had yesterday, Garreth unplugged the phone and deleted the messages without playing them back. Even if one concerned Harry. He could not bear to hear if Harry died, nor deserve to know if he lived.

Turning his back on the phone, he resumed considering what he had about Lane. Names, for one. She called herself Barber now, but the name on that envelope had been Bieber, and that on the car registration and driver’s license, Pfeifer. They sounded German. Did she choose those names from familiarity with them? Could she have come from an area populated by people of German descent?

As if an answer to that helped. There had to be hundreds of Germanic settlements across the country. Tomorrow — well, Monday, he needed to find someone who could tell him where large Germanic groups had settled. Maybe one with a 67-something or something-67-something ZIP code.

Or perhaps he could learn all he needed the one place she might shed her facade…home. He still had a couple of hours to daylight, time to search her apartment. Except…could he get in? It was a dwelling and his invitation in came before she killed him. Now…

Every fiber of him recoiled at the thought of facing that fire again. Better to take no chances and get someone to invite him in.

He made himself lie down on his pallet and rest…but not let daylight pull him into sleep. At eight o’clock he looked up the number of Lane’s landlady and called her. “Mrs. Armour, this is Inspector Mikaelian. We met at your home last week.”

“And you’re just as much an early bird today.” She paused. “Some people sleep in on Sunday.”

In the mild tone of reprimand he heard what he had not before, a touch of southern belle. So…give her a touch of gentleman in return. “I know that, ma’am, and I’m so sorry to disturb you…” Though picking up on the second ring revealed she had been awake. “…but this is a murder inquiry and we really need to look at her apartment again. Can you meet me there with the key?”

“I already gave a key to an Inspector Takananda,” she said in a puzzled voice.

“Yes, ma’am, but my partner is out on another case and left the key locked in his desk. It’s an big imposition, I know, but this is important.”

Her sigh came over the wire. “All right.”

He took the bus, leaving his conspicuous car at home. Experimentally approaching Lane’s door confirmed his fears about entering. Fire licked out at him before he even touched it. He backed off to wait for the landlady.

Mrs. Amour drove up minutes later dressed for church. Rolling down her window, she held out the key. “Will you return this as soon as possible? It’s the only other one I have to the apartment.”

Not helpful. Leaning down to the window, he pulled off his glasses, and, despite the searing memory of what this did to Harry, stared her in the eyes. “Please walk through with me.”

“All right.” She climbed out of the car.

He put back on his glasses. “I can see you’re going to church so I really appreciate this. It’s so helpful to have someone along who’s familiar with the apartment.”

She looked simultaneously flattered and impatient. “Will it take long?”

“It shouldn’t.” Once he was in, she could leave any time.

After unlocking the door, she pushed it open.

He kept back. “After you, ma’am.”

She walked in and began switching on lights. When he still hung back, she frowned over her shoulder. “Well, come on in. I don’t have all day.”

The pain vanished. Garreth quickly followed her into the livingroom. “Tell me if you think anything is missing. What she’s taken might give us some idea where she’s gone.”

Mrs. Armour turned around in the middle of the room. “She has lovely things, doesn’t she? She collected them from all over the world.”

Spent good money, too, Garreth judged. Though no art expert, he recognized quality in the paintings and some small pieces of sculpture. Toys resting on the bookshelves between sections of books drew more of his attention, however…several old-looking dolls, a miniature tea set, a cast-iron toy stove. Items from her childhood? He studied a type tray hung on the wall, its sections turned into shelves holding an assortment of small objects that reminded him of the “treasures” he had collected in an old tin tackle box as a boy.

She had no broken pocketknife, but there was a top — wooden, not plastic — and some marbles — more beautiful than any he had, he noted with envy — a big molar from a horse or cow, a tiny rodent skull, and various stones: colored, quartz-like, or containing shell and leaf fossils. He could not identify one group of objects, though. He took down the largest to study.

Held by its flat base, its large central point and two flanking smaller ones reached jaggedly upward, like the silhouette of a mountain range. A mountain dark and glassy as obsidian. Except for size, each object in the group looked identical.

“Shark teeth,” Mrs. Armour said.

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Miss Barber told me those are shark teeth.”

Black? His tackle box had never held anything that exotic.

Garreth put back the tooth and turned his attention to the books. Nonfiction outnumbered the fiction, but of the several hundred volumes covering a wide range of subjects, including extraterrestrial visitors and medical texts on viruses, only music, dancing, and folklore were represented by any substantial number of books.

He glanced through the folklore. All the books contained sections on vampires.

The publication dates as a whole went as far back as 1919. A couple of children’s books — printed with large color plates tipped in and black-and-white drawings, not the large print and easy vocabulary of the books he bought to give Brian — bore inscriptions in the front: To Mada, Christmas 1920, Mama and Papa, and To Mada, Happy Birthday, 1921, Mama and Papa. The ornate penmanship looked familiar.

He went on to check for inscriptions in other books. Those that had them were clearly used books, inscribed with men’s names or pet names that would never apply to Lane and a pencilled or inked price in an upper corner inside the cover. It appeared no one except her parents gave her books.

He searched the desk. Not that he expected Harry or the lab boys to have overlooked anything useful but he wanted to make sure. He found nothing except blank writing paper and some ball-point pens…no checkbooks, canceled checks, credit card records, or copies of tax returns.

Moving on to the kitchen, he found it as bare as Harry and Serruto had described, nor did the bedroom yield information aside from the fact that she bought her clothes all over the world and with discrimination. He pursed his lips thinking of the price tags that accompanied those labels. She had expensive taste. How did she afford them on a club singer’s salary? Did she blackmail some of her “dates”?

“Can you tell me what clothes might be missing?” he asked.

Mrs. Armour frowned. “Now, how should I — well,” she amended as he raised a brow, “I guess I did peek in once. I think there used to be a blue Dior suit and some English wool skirts and slacks hanging at the end there.” She described those and some other items in detail.

The dresser had been cleaned out. So had the bedside table and the bathroom medicine cabinet.

“Can you think of anything usually in the apartment that you haven’t seen here today?” he asked.

From the bathroom doorway, Mrs. Armour considered the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t been here all that often, you know.”

“Keep looking around, will you, please?”

He understood Lane destroying papers but had trouble accepting she just walked away from all her personal belongings, an accumulation she had obviously kept since childhood. She must have a few items too loved or revealing to be left behind.

He headed back for the living room. It had more of her effects than any other room. It also had the desk.

He stared at it, pulled by some magnetism he could not explain. A letter had been on that desk the first time he saw it. If only he had time to see more than the address before Lane turned out the light. He tried visualizing the envelope in his mind, picturing the ornate lettering.

He paused. That was where he had seen the writing on the flyleafs of the children’s books. It had been a letter from Lane’s mother! He ticked his tongue against his teeth in excitement.

“I remember something,” Mrs. Armour said. “There used to be two photographs on that top shelf.”

Photographs. He turned his full attention on her. “Do you remember what they were?”

“One was of her grandparents. She never said so, but I assumed it. It was sepia toned, and the woman’s hair and dress were World War I styles. I have a wedding picture of my parents that looks a lot like it. The other looked old, too…three little girls sitting on the running board of a car.”

An outdoor picture? “Do you remember the background behind the car”

“Background?” She blinked. “Why, just a house, I think.”

“What kind of house? Brick? Stone? Wood frame? Large or small?”

“White I think, with a porch with that gingerbread in the corners between the ceiling and the posts.”

“Was there any landscape visible?”

She stared at him. “Really, Inspector, I never paid that much attention. Is it important?”

He made himself shrug. “Probably not.” A lie. The little girls could include Lane as a child. A close look at the background might help identify where she came from…and where she came from might point him toward people who knew her well enough to suggest where Lane was now.

Garreth walked out with her, as though finished, but once she drove away he steeled himself and pressed against the door.

Wrench!

A passage as painful as ever, no matter how much experience he had accumulated passing through pier gates. Aggravated by the pressure of daylight.

He staggered into the livingroom and sat down at the desk. Was every aspect of vampire existence paid for in pain? Pain of hunger, pain of daylight, pain at dwelling doors, pain of passage, pain he caused others by bending them to his will. Did Lane experience it, too? He hoped something hurt her.

The pain ebbed and he stood to examine the room again. Books, toys, treasures. He fingered the large shark’s tooth again. Everything interesting but not very informative. He wished he could have seen those photographs.

Then again, her situation was like being under cover. One false word might betray her true age, or her true nature. Take him, looking over his shoulder, as Harry put it. Caution must become a reflex.

Not always, he suddenly realized. When booked for that assault in 1941 she gave her name as Madelaine Bieber, the same one on that envelope in her apartment. So it could be her righteous name. The assault itself suggested a woman with more temper and less caution than the one he met. Perhaps she talked about herself back then. He needed to find people who knew and remembered her.

The victim of that assault had good incentive to remember her.

He wished he had the file to study again, or at least his notebook, where he had written down some of the file details. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the file. Oh yeah…the victim had been one Claudia Darling.

He smiled. So maybe he did not need the file after all. The name and the assault date might be enough to let him pursue other avenues to the information he needed.