Bloodless

11

Commander Alanna Delaplane walked across Chatham Square with homicide detective Sergeant Benny Sheldrake by her side. It proved quicker to park on the far side of the square and walk across, instead of trying to drive around. She could see flashing lights in the park, amid teams of CSIs in monkey suits and blue gloves moving around.

Twenty minutes before, a gardener with a city subcontractor had reported the grisly find, and the whole machinery of police investigation was now clanking into operation.

In her twenty-year career with the Savannah PD, Delaplane had seen plenty of so-called paranormal stunts. There were a lot of weird people out there claiming special powers, and most of them seemed to pass through Savannah. She wondered if this was just another hustle, some joker capitalizing on the Savannah Vampire thing. On the other hand, two people were dead, their blood sucked out — and that was no stunt. Neither was the perp a fool, having left precious little evidence behind on the victims or at the crime scenes.

They approached a couple of cops stringing tape, while others were working crowd control, trying to keep people back.

“Sergeant Rollo?” she said, stopping at the tape and addressing one of the cops. “Where’s the gardener who called it in?”

“Right over there, Commander.”

She turned and saw a man sitting on a bench, dressed in blue work overalls, hugging himself. A uniformed cop sat next to him. Delaplane and Sheldrake walked over.

“Hello,” said Delaplane to the gardener, who looked up at her. He was an older Black man with white hair, deeply wrinkled face, and frightened eyes. She was a little surprised to see how affected he seemed to be. It was, after all, only a severed finger. “I’m Commander Delaplane. Can I sit down and ask a few questions?”

The uniformed cop rose as Delaplane took a seat, Sheldrake on the other side. The detective took out a tape recorder and turned it on, setting it down on the bench.

“Do you mind?” she asked, nodding at the recorder.

The man shook his head.

“May I ask your name?”

“Gilbert Johnson.”

“Thank you, Gilbert.” Delaplane tried to make her voice sound kindly. She’d been told more than once that she came across as brassy and intimidating. “Tell me what happened, in your own words, starting at the beginning.”

Johnson nodded. “I was working fertilizer into that bottlebrush hedge.” He nodded toward where the CSI team was clustered. “Someone had been smoking, and there were a lot of butts in there that I was picking up. Then I saw the finger. I was working fast and thought it was a cigar butt at first, because it was kind of black, but it smelled bad and then I realized what it was. So I threw it back down. And then I saw the hair.”

“Hair?” This hadn’t been in the brief initial report she’d received.

“Like someone was scalped. A long curl of scalp with hair. And there was blood, too.” He paused, breathing hard. “A lot of blood.”

“That’s okay, just take a moment.” She waited until he had collected himself, then asked, “And what did you do then?”

“I backed up and out of that hedge and called 911. That was about half an hour ago.”

Delaplane looked past the tape. She could see the forensic team going over the hedge with a fine-tooth comb.

“What happened to the cigarette butts?” she asked.

“I put them in the garbage bag.”

“Were they different brands or all the same?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Where is the garbage bag?”

He pointed to a flaccid black bag lying next to the hedge.

Delaplane nodded to Sheldrake. “Make sure that’s taken in as evidence.”

The detective nodded back.

“Anything else you remember?”

“I’ve just been sitting here since.”

“Thank you, Gilbert,” she said, rising and looking around. It was a picture of good crime scene investigation. She wondered if the FBI was going to show up. Once again, she felt annoyed that the feds had gotten involved. There was nothing about this case that justified it. And the senior agent they’d sent down, what a strange one he was. He looked almost like a vampire himself, pale and thin and clad all in black. And when she heard him speak — in that honeyed, upper-class New Orleans accent — it made her skin crawl. She’d met his type before, and in her experience, all that southern gentility sometimes concealed a hard-core racist mindset. Maybe even a family history of slave ownership.

The other one, Coldmoon, was the opposite. Recently he’d been looking every inch the fed with his sidewall crew cut, mirrored sunglasses, blue suit, white shirt, and spit-and-polish black shoes. He, at least, had a pleasing, soft-spoken manner.

She reminded herself not to make assumptions, to keep an open mind. She’d handle the FBI intrusion by simply going forward with her investigation in the usual manner. Detective Sheldrake was the nominal head, and she’d given orders for him to liaise with Carracci and the rest of the feds on a twice-weekly basis. But she intended to lead the investigation herself. Not that she didn’t have trust in Sheldrake, but this was going to be a high-profile case, and when the shit hit the fan — which she knew it would — at least she would be the one with the finger on the switch.

Delaplane turned to Sheldrake. “I’m going to look around a bit. Maybe you could circulate, make sure everyone’s doing what they should be.”

“Will do.”

He went off and, moments later, she heard him issuing a short string of quiet orders.

She circled the perimeter and found the M.E., George McDuffie, carrying a Yeti evidence cooler to his vehicle. It was hard to believe he actually had a medical degree — he looked more like a college freshman, thin as a rail, nervous and awkward. She hadn’t worked with him much and didn’t know yet if he was any good.

“Hey, George,” she said. “Got a minute?”

“Certainly, Commander,” He placed the cooler in the back of his vehicle and turned to her.

She nodded. “Have a look?”

“Um, sure.” He unhooked the Yeti and opened the lid. Delaplane peered in. In a large test tube nestled in ice was the finger. Next to it, in another tube, was a long, thin strip of bloody scalp, with the hair attached. She recognized right away that the finger must be from the first victim, found washed up on the riverbank, who was missing one. That body also had a scalp wound that was probably going to match this bloody strip. Several other test tubes contained swabs of blood, flesh, and bloody bits of clothing.

“Looks like Ellerby,” she said.

“Yes, I believe so. As soon as I get this finger and piece of scalp back to the lab I’ll match them to the cadaver.”

“You think this is where he was killed?”

“Possibly. There was quite a lot of blood in the bushes.”

“And the finger? Cut off or what?”

“Bitten, I think.”

Delaplane grunted. She turned and saw Sheldrake coming over.

He peered in. “The guy from the Chandler House?”

“Yup.”

Sheldrake straightened and looked around at the buildings facing the square. “Christ almighty, you’d think someone would have heard something.”

“Right,” said Delaplane. “Ellerby was alive at eleven, because folks at the hotel said that’s when he went out and didn’t come back. Pretty sure he went out for a smoke. Let’s get some DNA off those cigarette butts, see if this hedge was Ellerby’s habitual smoking spot.” She grinned. “Sheldrake, I’ve got a pain-in-the-ass assignment for your team. You need to interview everyone in those buildings within earshot — say, three hundred yards on either side — about what they heard between eleven and midnight that night.”

“Right. But I wonder: how the hell did Ellerby’s body get from here to the river?”

“Good question. Probably dragged to the street and loaded in a car. We need dogs here, and we need ’em along the riverbank, to see where he was dumped in.”

She heard a commotion at the other end of the crime scene and saw a film crew trying to push their way past the police barriers. She came striding over. It was a big crew, with two cameras — one of them a Steadicam — a sound man, and a couple of others, surrounding a little fat man holding a mic, with a tall, gloomy guy next to him carrying what looked like a big old-fashioned box camera. The videographers were obviously shooting. The tall man was taking weird gadgets out of a suitcase with foam cutouts and laying them on a piece of velvet.

“What’s going on?” Delaplane boomed out.

“I’ve told them, Commander, that this is a crime scene,” said a uniformed officer.

“Hello, I’m Barclay Betts,” said the short round man with the mic, as if she should know who he was. The cameras were still rolling. The name and face were sort of familiar, but Delaplane didn’t give a shit enough to try to remember.

“Well, Mr. Barclay Betts, we’ve got a police barricade here, in case you didn’t notice.”

“We just need to get a little closer,” the round man said. “We’re taking some photographs with this Percipience Camera here. It’s quite remarkable, Officer. You see, it can capture paranormal activity. It could be a great help to the police.”

Delaplane put her fists on her hips and grinned. “Paranormal activity? Like ghosts?”

“In this case, possibly a vampire.”

At this she exploded into laughter. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll tell you what. You take one step over that barrier, and I’ll confiscate your vampire camera. Could be a bomb, for all we know. We’ll have to take it apart to find out, and our technicians might, you know, oops!, kind of break it in the process. Or you can just stay where you are and tune in to your vampire vibes from afar.”

The tall man, frowning deeply, put the cover back on the camera and latched it up, while Betts yelled “Cut!” Delaplane could see a young lady behind a camera trying to stifle a laugh.

She walked off, shaking her head. “Vampires!”