Blood Bank (29 page)

"Did I say you were? You have special abilities."

"Special abilities?" Her smile was both threat and invitation.

He cleared his throat. "And," he continued emphatically, ignoring the invitation and disregarding the threat, "you may be an undead creature of the night, but you were a cop, and a good one, for years. Use
those
skills for a change. Find out who's threatening him. Do some detecting. While you're there, see that no one beats his head in with a bat."

*

Raymond Carr lived on Bloor Street in a third-floor flat over the Korona Restaurant. As Vicki made her way up the steep, narrow stairs, she avoided touching the grimy banister and wondered if he could afford her services. Mike sometimes forgot she wasn't on the public payroll anymore. Or he was indulging in some weird passive-aggressive "let me take care of you" macho thing. She wasn't sure which.

The apartment door had been painted a deep blue sometime in the distant past. It wore a grimy patina of hand-shaped smudges fading down into black scuff marks probably caused by shoving it open with a booted foot.

Hand raised to knock, Vicki paused and frowned. With millions of lives surrounding her—and, more specifically, with the half a dozen lives close at hand behind inadequate walls of ancient plaster and lath— it was difficult to separate out the sounds coming from inside Carr's apartment. Sifting sound, disregarding everything that wasn't life, focusing, she picked out a heartbeat. It was slower than it should be. Struggling.

Not even burning onions on the second floor could mask the smell of blood.

The door had a deadbolt on it and a security chain. Both were screwed into a doorframe that had probably been installed at the turn of the century. The wood gave way with a sound like a dry cough. The multiple layers of cheap paint hung on a moment longer, then Vicki was in the apartment and racing down the long hall toward the front room, following her nose.

This door was also locked.

And was unlocked just as quickly.

A young man—blond hair, pale skin, late twenties, approximately six feet tall and a hundred and seventy pounds—lay sprawled on the linoleum, blood spreading out from under his head along the artificial watershed of the uneven floor. He was alone in the room.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Vicki knelt beside him, his head cradled in one hand, a folded towel from the bathroom in the other. Had any assailants still been around, they might have wondered when she'd had time to get back down the hall but had they still been around, she'd have dealt with them first, so the question would have been moot. The room was empty except for the injured man. No one was hiding under the desk. No one lurked in the tiny turn- of-the-century closet.

A couple of mouthfuls of spit on the towel—easy enough to work up under the circumstances, the smell of blood was making her mouth water—and then both spit and towel applied to the wound. As the coagulant in her saliva went to work, she pulled her cell phone from her pocket, flipped it open, and dialled one- handed.

*

"So you broke down the door?"

"That's right."

"Because you could smell the blood?"

"Yes."

"From out in the hall?"

"That's what I said."

"Just trying to get my facts straight, Ms. Nelson."

Vicki forced her lips back down over her teeth as the earnest young constable went over her statement for the fourth time.

"And then you broke down the inner door as well?"

"Yes."

He gave her what he probably considered an intimidating stare. "You forced the lock right out of the wood. Splintered the wood. So not only do you have a rather unbelievable sense of smell, you're unusually strong."

"I work out." While she appreciated he was just doing his job, enough was enough. Locking her eyes on his, she smiled. "Now go away," she said softly, "and stop bothering me."

"I... I think that's all I need to know."

"Good." A more normal tone. A slightly more normal smile.

He backed up two steps, then turned and scuttled down the hall toward the apartment door, nearly bouncing off Mike Celluci.

"Vicki..."

"I was cooperating."

"You terrified him."

"So? Back in the day, I used to terrify the uniforms all the time." She sighed as they fell into step heading toward Carr's tiny office. "When did they start hiring children?"

"About the time I started going gray."

They paused to allow the crime scene team to leave, and Vicki reached up to push the curl of hair back off his face. She'd gotten rather sentimental about his scattering of gray hair—after she stopped being furious at it. Raging at the years that took him farther and farther away from her. She would age, but slowly. She'd changed at thirty-four. It would be centuries before she saw forty.

Sunlight and the occasional idiot Van Helsing clone allowing.

She stepped aside so the head of the crime scene unit could have a talk with Celluci and, well beyond normal eavesdropping distance, eavesdropped shamelessly.

"So," she said when they were finally alone in the apartment. "The door was locked from the inside, the window was painted shut, and they think they've only got one person's prints, although they'll have to get back to you on that. Didn't I once read a Miss Marple book with this plot?"

"You read a book?"

"Funny man."

Celluci shoved his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and scowled at the room. A battered office chair, more duct tape than upholstery, lay on its side against the outside wall. "He could have just tipped over backward and hit his head."

"With the chair over there and this kind of a spatter pattern? Stop playing idiot's advocate, Mike. Looks to me like he pushed away from the desk, spun the chair around..." Vicki sketched the arc in the air. "...leaped out of it, and was on his feet when he was hit. Whoever it was came in through the door..."

"The locked door."

"We don't know for certain that the door was locked when the assailant
arrived.
Came in through the door," she repealed when Mike nodded reluctantly. "Walked very, very quietly around to about here..." She indicated a spot by the desk.

"It didn't have to be that quiet. If Carr was writing, he could have been distracted. Lost in his own world."

"Fair enough. But the assailant didn't just sneak in and attack him from behind, or he'd have fallen forward, over the keyboard. He got Carr's attention first. There must have been a fight. Maybe the neighbors heard something."

"Gosh, Vicki." Celluci's voice dripped heavy, obvious sarcasm. "I would never have thought to ask the neighbors if they heard anything. It's a good thing you're here. And frankly, I'm more concerned with how the guy got out, not in." A long stride took him to the other side of the red-brown puddle. He frowned at the window and the layers of paint that had clearly not been cracked. "Last time this was opened, Trudeau was prime minister."

"No one here but Raymond Carr when I broke in. No one passed me on the stairs, and no one came out of the building with a bloody weapon while I was close enough to see the door."

"Would you have seen the weapon under a winter coat?"

She smiled at him. "If it was bloody, I'd have known it was there."

"If. He could have left before you got close."

"Not at the rate Carr was bleeding out. It had to have happened just before I got here or the coroner'd be slabbing him right about now."

He shrugged, accepting her explanation. "Don't these apartments have a back exit into a courtyard?"

"The uniforms checked it. Locked. Three bolts thrown. Impossible to do from outside. And the window in the kitchen has as much paint on it as this one. Plus a layer of grease."

"I hate this kind of shit." Celluci dragged both hands back through his hair, dropping the curl over his forehead again. "I don't suppose our perp turned to mist or smoke, or there's a bat hiding out in a dark corner that we missed?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"You telling me vampires don't exist?"

"I'm telling you that even if Hollywood didn't have its collective head up its ass, we wouldn't have wasted the blood." Carefully avoiding the splatter trail, she moved to the desk and looked down at the monitor. It was a new model, one of the liquid crystal screens made by a company she didn't recognize. From across the room, it had looked blank. Up close, there was one word, dead center on the screen.

"Mike."

He leaned in for a closer look. "Die."

"It's not an e-mail. They had to have typed it when they were in the room."

"I'll make sure they dust the keyboard when they bring the machine in. What are you doing?"

She frowned at an oval of drying blood nearly invisible on the black plastic of the monitor housing. It was shaped like a thumbprint, but she couldn't see a pattern.

"So you're eyeballing hills and valleys now?" he snorted when she pointed it out to him. "Good work, Vicki, we've got the son of a bitch. Our bad guy had to have left it there when he was typing. Left hand holding the monitor, typing with his right. If you can find another one of these, we might be able to piece together how the fuck he got out of the room."

"If I can find another one?"

"You know, sniff it out."

"Sniff it out?"

He turned to scowl at her. "Would you quit repeating everything I say?"

"I'm not repeating everything," she told him, "just the stupid parts. This room is saturated in blood scent, Mike. And before you ask," she cautioned, "I can't track the bad guy. I'm not a bloodhound."

One dark brow rose.

"Not funny."

"You're right. I'm sorry." Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he looked around the room. "So, what do we have?"

"You have an unsolved assault. And I have to find another client."

"He's not dead."

"You want me to guard him in the hospital?"

"That's up to you."

"I hate hospitals."

*

Vicki'd disliked hospitals before she changed and she'd started disliking them even more after. Light- sensitive eyes found them far too bright and no amount of disinfectant could keep them from reeking of death. That they also reeked of disinfectant was not a selling point.

Raymond Carr was in a private room at the far end of a quiet corridor, the room the hospital unofficially kept for ongoing criminal cases. Sometimes it held the criminals. Sometimes the cases. With budgets cut and then cut again, the police department hadn't the manpower to guard an unsuccessful writer from an unknown enemy. They'd do their best to turn the unknown to a known, but as long as Carr seemed safe in the hospital, he'd remain unguarded.

Vicki stood in the room's darkest corner and watched the pale man on the bed draw in one short, shallow breath after another. He was sleeping—not entirely peacefully. Long fingers twitched against the covers and his eyeballs bounced behind his lids. Vicki wondered what he was dreaming about.

He'd told the police he couldn't remember what had happened. That one moment he'd been writing and the next he was in the back of an ambulance staring up at a pair of EMTs. It was all still in there, though. Trapped in the dark places.