1 Blood Price (13 page)

“God, I hate these machines.” The heavy, exaggerated sigh that followed had been recorded in its annoyed entirety. “Okay. I’d have reacted much the same way. Probably been an equal pain in the ass. So, I’m right, you’re right, we’re both right, let’s start over.” The tape hissed quietly for a few seconds while background noises—the rumble of two deep voices arguing, the staccato beat of an old, manual typewriter, and the constant ringing of other phones—grew louder. Then Celluci’s voice returned, bearing just enough edge to show he meant what he said. “And stop hustling my partner for classified information. He’s a nice man, not that you’d recognize nice, and you give him palpitations.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

Vicki grinned down at her answering machine. Mike Celluci was no better at apologizing than she was. For him, that was positively gracious. And it had obviously been left before he talked to Mr. Bowan and found she’d been there first. Any messages left
after
that would have had a very different tone.

Finding the tabloid’s unnamed source had actually been surprisingly easy. The first person she’d spoken to had snorted and said, “You want old man Bowan. If anyone sees anything around here it’s him. Never minds his own fucking business.” Then he’d jerked his head at 25 St. Dennis with enough force to throw his mohawk down over his eyes.

As to what old man Bowan had seen. . . . As much as Vicki hated to admit it, she was beginning to think Coreen might not be as far out in left field as first impressions indicated.

She wondered if she should call Celluci. They could share their impressions of Mr. Bowan and his close encounter. “Nah.” She shook her head. Better give him time to cool off first. Spreading the detailed map of Toronto she’d just bought out over her kitchen table, she decided to call him later. Right now, she had work to do.

It was easy to forget just how big Toronto was. It had devoured any number of smaller places as it grew, and it showed no signs of stopping. The downtown core, the image everyone carried of the city, made up a very small part of the whole.

Vicki drew a red circle around the Eglinton West subway station, another around the approximate position of the Sigman’s building on St. Clair West, and a third around the construction site on Symington Avenue where De Verne Jones had died. Then she frowned and drew a straight line through all three. Allowing for small inaccuracies in placing the second and third positions, the line bisected all three circles, running southwest to northeast across the city.

The two new deaths appeared to have no connection to the first three but seemed to be starting a line of their own.

And there was more.

“No one could be that stupid,” Vicki muttered, digging in her desk for a ruler.

The first two deaths were essentially the same distance apart as the fourth and the fifth; far from exact by mathematical standards but too close to be mere coincidence.

“No one could be that stupid,” she said again, smacking the ruler against her palm. The second line ran northwest to southeast and it measured out in a circle that centered at Woodbine and Mortimer. Vicki was willing to bet any odds that between midnight and dawn a sixth body would turn up to end the line.

Just west of York University, the lines crossed.

“X marks the spot.” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose, frowned, and pushed them up again. It was too easy. There had to be a catch.

“All right. . . .” Tossing the ruler onto the map, she ticked off points on her fingers. “First possibility; the killer wants to be found. Second possibility; the killer is just as capable of drawing lines on a map as I am, has set up the pattern to mean nothing at all, and is sitting in Scarborough busting a gut laughing at the damn fool police who fell for it.” For purposes of this exercise, she and the police were essentially the same. “Possibility three”; she stared at the third finger as though it might have an answer, “we’re hunting a vampire even as the vampire is hunting us and who the hell knows how a vampire thinks.”

Celucci was as capable as she of drawing lines on a map, but she reached for the phone anyway. Occasionally, the obvious escaped him. To her surprise, he was in. His reaction came as no surprise at all.

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Vicki.”

“So can I assume Toronto’s finest will be gathered tonight at Mortimer and Woodbine?”

“You can assume whatever you want, I’ve never been able to stop you, but if you think you and your little Nancy Drew detective kit are going to be anywhere near there, think again.”

“What are you going to do?” How dare he dictate to her. “Arrest me?”

“If I have to, yes.” His tone said he’d do exactly that. “You are no longer on the force, you are virtually blind at night, and you are more likely to end up as the corpse than the hero.”

“I don’t need you babying me, Celluci!”

“Then act like an adult and stay home!”

They slammed the receivers down practically simultaneously. He knew she’d be there and she knew he knew it. Moreover, she had no doubt that if their paths crossed he’d loci: her away on trumped up charges for her own safety. Better than even odds said that, having been forewarned, he’d lock her up now if he thought he could get away with it.

He was right. She was virtually blind at night.

But the police were hunting a man and Vicki no longer really believed a man had anything to do with these deaths. Blind or not, if she was there, she might even the odds.

Now, what to do until dark? Maybe it was time to do a little detecting and find out what the word was on the street.

“At least he didn’t scream about Mr. Bowan,” she muttered as she shrugged back into her coat.

 

“Yo, Victory, long time no see.”

“Yeah, it’s been a couple of months. How’ve you been, Tony?”

Tony shrugged thin shoulders under his jean jacket. “I’ve been okay.”

“You clean?”

He shot her a look out of the corner of one pale blue eye. “I hear you ain’t a cop no more. I don’t got to tell you.”

Vicki shrugged in turn. “No. You don’t.”

They walked in silence for a moment, threading their way through the crowds that surged up and down Yonge Street. When they stopped at the Wellesley lights, Tony sighed. “Okay, I’m clean. You happy now? You going to bugger off and leave me alone?”

She grinned. “Is it ever that easy?”

“Not with you it ain’t. Listen,” he waved a hand at a corner restaurant, less trendy than most of its competitors, “you’re going to take up my time, you can buy me lunch.”

She bought him lunch, but not the beer he wanted, and asked him about the feeling on the street.

“Feeling about what?” he asked, stuffing a huge forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Sex? Drugs? Rock’n’roll?”

“Things that go bump in the night.”

He threw his arm up in the classic Hammer films tradition. “Ah, the wampyre.”

Vicki took a swallow of tepid coffee, wondered how she’d survived drinking it all those years on the force, and waited. Tony had been her best set of eyes and ears on the street. He wasn’t exactly a snitch, more a barometer really, hooked into moods and feelings, and although he never mentioned specifics, he’d pointed her in the right direction more than once. He was nineteen now. He’d been fifteen when she first brought him in.

“Feelin’ on the street. . . .” He methodically spread the last roll a quarter inch thick with butter. “Feelin’ on the street says, paper’s right with this one.”

“A vampire?”

He peered up at her from under the thick fringe of his eyelashes. “Killer ain’t human, that’s what the street says. Sucks blood, don’t it? Vampire’s a good enough name for it. Cops won’t catch it ‘cause they’re lookin’ for a guy.” He grinned. “Cops in this city ain’t worth shit anyway. Not like they used to be.”

“Well, thank you very much.” She watched him scrape his plate clean, then asked, “Tony, do you believe in vampires?”

He flicked a tiny crucifix out from inside his shirt. “I believe in stayin’ alive.”

Outside the restaurant, turning collars up against the wind, she asked him if he needed money. She couldn’t get him off the street, he wouldn’t accept her help, so she gave him what he’d take. Celluci called it white-middle-class-guilt-money. While admitting he was probably right, Vicki ignored him.

“Nah,” Tony pushed a lock of pale brown hair back off his face. “I’m doing okay for cash.”

“You hooking?”

“Why? You can’t arrest me anymore; you wanna hire me?”

“I want to smack you. Haven’t you heard there’s an epidemic going on?”

He danced back out of her range. “Hey, I’m careful. Like I said,” and just for an instant he looked much, much older than his years, “I believe in stayin’ alive.”

 

“Vicki, I don’t care what your curbside guru says and I don’t care what the ‘feeling on the street is’; there are no such thing as vampires and you are losing your mind.”

Vicki got the phone away from her ear before Celluci slammed his receiver down. Shaking her head, she hung up her own phone considerably more gently. All right, she’d told him. She’d done it against her better judgment and knowing full well what his reaction would be. No matter what went down tonight,
her
conscience was clear.

“And it’s not that
I
believe in vampires,” she pointed out to the empty apartment, pushing back to extend the recliner. ‘
I
believe in keeping an open mind.”
And
, she added silently, grimly, her mind on Tony and his crucifix,
I
,
too, believe in stayin’ alive
. Beside the chair, her bag bulged with the afternoon’s purchases.

 

At 11:48, Vicki stepped off the northbound Woodbine bus at Mortimer. For a moment, she leaned against the window of the small garden store on the corner, giving herself time to grow used to the darkness. There, under the street lamp, her vision was functional. A few meters away, where the overlap of two lights created a double-shadowed twilight, she knew she wouldn’t be able to trust it. It would be worse off the main street. She fished her flashlight out of her bag and held it ready, just in case.

Across a shadow-filled distance, she saw a traffic signal work through its tiny spectrum and decided to cross the street. For no reason really, the creature could appear on the east side of Woodbine just as easily as on the west, but it seemed like the thing to do. Moving had always been infinitely preferable to waiting around.

Terry’s Milk Mart on the north side of Mortimer appeared to be open—it was the only building in the immediate neighborhood still brightly lit—so she crossed toward it.

I can ask a few questions. Buy a bag of chips. Find out. . . . SHIT!
Two men from homicide were in the store talking to a surly looking teenager she could only assume was not the proprietor. Eyes streaming from the sudden glare of the fluorescents, she backed down the six stairs much more quickly than she’d gone up them. She spotted the unmarked car south across Mortimer in the Brewers Retail parking lot
—trust the government to light a square of asphalt at almost midnight—
and headed in the opposite direction, willing to bet long odds that Celluci had included her in his instructions to his men.

If she remembered correctly, the houses that lined the street were small, virtually identical, detached, two-story, single family dwellings.
Not the sort of neighborhood you’d think would attract a vampire.
Not that she expected the creature to actually put in an appearance on Woodbine; the street was too well lit, too well traveled, with too great a possibility of witnesses. No, she was putting her money on one of the quiet residential streets tucked in behind.

At Holborne, for no reason she could think of, she turned west. The streetlights were farther apart here and she hurried from one island of sight to the next, trusting to bureaucracy and city planning to keep the sidewalk under her feet. She slipped at one point on a pile of dirt, her bag sliding off her shoulder and slamming hard edges against her knees. Her flashlight beam played over a tiny construction site where a skinny house was rising to fill what had once no doubt been a no larger than average side yard. The creature had killed under circumstances like these once before, but somehow she knew it wouldn’t again. She moved on.

The sudden scream of a siren sent her heart up into her throat and she spun around, flashlight raised like a weapon. Back at the corner, a fire engine roared from the station and, tires squealing, turned north up Woodbine.

“Nerves a bit shot, are they, Vicki?” she muttered to herself taking a long, calming breath. Blood pounded in her ears almost loud enough to echo and sweat glued her gloves to her palms. Still a bit shaky with reaction, she made her way to the next streetlight and leaned back against the pole.

The spill of light reached almost to the house, not quite far enough for Vicki to see the building. The bit of lawn she could see looked well cared for—in spite of the spring mud—and along one edge roses, clipped short to survive the cold, waited for spring. It was a working class neighborhood, she knew, and, given the lawn, Vicki was willing to bet that most of the families were Italian or Portuguese as both cultures cared about—and for—the land. If that was the case, many of the houses would be decorated with painted icons of saints, or of the Madonna, or of Christ himself.

She wondered how much protection those icons would offer when the killer came.

Up the street, two golden circles marked a slow moving car. To Vicki, they looked like the eyes of some great beast for the darkness hid the form that followed and the headlights were all she could see. But then, she didn’t need to see more to identify it as a police car. Only police on surveillance ever drove at that precise, unchanging speed. She’d done it herself too many times to mistake it now. Fighting the urge to dive out of sight, she turned and strode confidently up the walk toward the house, digging in her bag for an imaginary set of keys.