Blood Bank (30 page)

Vicki did some of her best work in dark places. Unfortunately, Carr was wired—she wouldn't be able to question him without setting off the bells and whistles.

"Who's there?"

Might as well try it the old-fashioned way.
The Hunter carefully masked, she stepped out of the shadows. "My name's Vicki Nelson. Detective Sergeant Celluci told you I was coming over tonight."

"What happened to me?"

"You got hit on the head."

His eyes widened and he stared up at her with dawning comprehension. "You're the one he was sending to protect me!"

"Sorry; I got there a little late." And anyone else would have knocked and gone away. "For what it's worth, I kept you from bleeding to death."

"My computer!"

Apparently, it wasn't worth much. "The police have it."

"My book! My God, they have my book!"

"Calm down." A quick glance at the monitors showed a rise in heart rate. "You'll get it back when they finish the investigation."

"It'll never be finished."

She wasn't entirely certain if he meant the investigation or the book. "You must have back-up copies."

"It's on disk." The bandage whispered against the pillowcase as he rocked his head from side to side. "I meant to burn it, but..." The rocking stopped. His pupils were so dilated his irises had nearly disappeared. "Why do you want my copy?"

"I don't. I was just reassuring..."

"You're trying to steal it!"

"No, I'm not." She let her eyes silver just enough to force him calm.

He panicked instead. The heart-rate monitor screamed as he tried to scramble back through the head of the bed.

Vicki was in the stairwell before the nurses left their station. She waited, the door open a crack, listening as they tranquilized him and strapped him down. He kept yelling that his book was in danger.

"Quite the imagination on him," one nurse muttered to the other as they left the room, her tone suggesting that "quite the imagination" could be translated as "total paranoid nutcase."

As Vicki slipped away, she thought it might be time to find out what else "quite the imagination" might mean.

*

The yellow crime scene tape remained across the door, but in the still, dark hours of the morning when Vicki returned to Raymond Carr's apartment, the police were long gone. Because of the manner of Vicki's original entrance, the apartment couldn't be secured, so they'd taken the trouble to put a padlock in place— a lot cheaper than keeping a uniform around until the landlord could arrive and make repairs. It was a good lock. It took Vicki about two minutes to pop it.

As well as the computer, the police had cleared Carr's desktop and taken all the drawers, hoping for a clue amid the debris. While she appreciated their thoroughness, she was a little annoyed by the need to pry a copy of the book out of official channels. Official channels were notoriously narrow.

And speaking of narrow... Since she was there, she leaned her laptop case against the wall and stepped into the closet to check the ceiling for trapdoors leading to a closed-off and forgotten attic. Nothing. The cheap linoleum was solidly attached in all four corners, so there was no chance of a trapdoor to the apartment below.

On her hands and knees, peering under the desk at a floor unmarked by secret passageways, she snickered, "Who's the paranoid nutcase now?"

Paranoid nutcase...

Carr had thought she was going to steal his book. Had believed it so strongly, the hysterics had protected him from her ability to get into his head.

Vicki twisted and looked up at the bottom of the keyboard slide.

The masking tape that attached the square mailing envelope was almost the same color as the pale wood of the desk. The label on the single disk inside simply said,
Book.

*

"The blood on the monitor wasn't a print."

Vicki glanced up from her laptop as Celluci came into the living room and dropped down beside her on the couch. "I'm sorry, Mike."

He grunted a noncommittal response to her sympathy. "What are you reading?"

"Raymond Carr's book. It's weirdly good. He starts off by massacring almost an entire village just so the hero—Harticalder—can go off and kick ass, so the plot's mostly a series of violent encounters strung together on a less-than-believable travelogue, but even doing the most asinine things, the characters are strangely believable. These guys read like real people."

His hand closed around her shoulder, warm even through the fleece of her sweatshirt. "Where did you get that?"

"Calm down, I left the original where it was." She popped the disk out of the side of her computer. "
This
is a copy." Pushing it back into the drive, she set the machine aside and pivoted in place until she faced him. "There's something else."

"What do you mean?"

"I know that look. It's your
I've come to a conclusion
expression."

He sighed and ran his hand back up through his hair. "The lab says there's no weapon, that the floor was the point of impact. One bang."

Vicki snorted. "No one hits their head that hard on a floor. It's a flat surface. Essentially flat," she amended, remembering how the blood had spread.

"And there's no indication of anyone else ever being in that room."

"Except for the blood on the monitor," she pointed out, poking him in the thigh with her bare foot.

"A random splatter. Raymond Carr got tangled up in his chair, fought to get free, and fell. That's why the chair was over by the window. No one pushed him, no one slammed his head down—there isn't another mark on his body."

Carr's skin was so pale that bruises would show almost instantly, blood from crushed capillaries pooling under the surface. "What about the threats?"

"We did a little background check, and it turns out that Raymond Carr is a paranoid schizophrenic. If he was off his medication, the odds are good he was writing the threats to himself."

"And?" Vicki asked pointedly.

"And what?" His hand closed around her ankle before she could poke him again. They both knew he couldn't hold her, but that wasn't the point.

"And you've had all day; is he off his medication?"

"Doesn't seem to have been. But..." He sketched uncertainties in the air with his free hand.

"But even paranoids have enemies."

He smiled then and pulled her close enough to kiss. "I knew you were going to say that."

"What about the blood on the monitor?" she asked when they pulled apart.

Celluci's turn to snort. "You know as well as I do that sometimes not all the pieces fit. You know better than I do that weird happens."

That was an impossible point to argue with, so she didn't bother and later, after he fell asleep, she checked that the bite on his wrist had closed over and slid out of bed to finish the book. Or at least to finish all of the book there was.

The fight scenes continued to be contrived, but the dialogue rang true and as she closed the last file, Vicki had to admit she believed in ol' Harticalder and his people. Almost buried under the preposterous plot, Carr had real talent.

On a whim, she went online and ran a search on the brand of monitor on Carr's desk. Her laptop was almost five years old and, even with the monitor dimmed down as far as it would go, it was still hard on light-sensitive eyes. Odds were good that new ones like Carr's had new features.

According to the official Web site, they did everything but make toast.

It seemed that Quinct, the company, had developed an amazing new technology for manufacturing the liquid crystal screens. They'd produced them for almost a year, claiming the new screens provided a viewing surface a minimum of 60 percent sharper than the competition. And then, they'd gone bankrupt.

A bankruptcy sale explained how Raymond Carr had managed to afford one.

The site gave no reasons for the company's fall, and the best Vicki managed to find elsewhere on the Web was a LiveJournal thread discussing the monitors. Apparently, they weren't just 60 percent sharper— according to the half dozen people in the thread who'd owned them, they made images so clear new details came into focus in the background and even the written word seemed somehow real.

Real. There was that word again.

As she shut down her machine, she decided not to repeat the word to Mike. Although forced to become more open-minded than he'd been, speculation outside the boundaries covered by the crime lab and some good old-fashioned legwork still annoyed him, and an annoyed Mike Celluci was no fun to live with.

Besides, no one knew better than she did that reality came with qualifiers.

But she popped the copy of the book out of her laptop just to be on the safe side.

*

No one attacked Raymond Carr in the hospital, and the day he was released, the police handed back his computer.

"There was no crime committed," Celluci explained that evening when Vicki commented on the speedy return. "Just a man who slipped off his meds and had an accident."

"You told me it looked like he was taking his meds."

"Let it go, Vicki." Elbows braced on the kitchen table, he rubbed his temples. "I've got two teenagers dead because some asshole in a car thought it would be fun to shoot at strangers. I don't have time to protect Raymond Carr from himself. You think he needs supervision, you do it."

She thought it wouldn't hurt to drop by.

This time the door was unlocked and the blood scent was stronger.

Carr hadn't had time to put a new lock on his office door and his landlord's rudimentary repairs hadn't included replacing the latch mechanism. When Vicki laid her palm against it, it swung open, unresisting.

The only light in the room came from the monitor, but even before the change that allowed her to miss his heartbeat and the song of his blood, she would have known Raymond Carr was dead. The living were never so completely still.

His chair had been tipped back—flung back considering the distance from the desk. He was still in it, his arms outstretched, fingers curled. His feet in old-fashioned, scuffed, leather slippers were in the air, his head rested in a puddle beginning to dry to a brackish brown around the edges. It was difficult to tell for certain without moving the body, but the back of his head looked flat and there were three distinct points of impact.

The police would assume they'd been wrong. That there'd been an assailant the first time. That this mysterious assailant had somehow gotten into and then out of a locked room in a locked apartment and that today—late afternoon by the smell—he or she returned and finished the job. If they'd found no evidence of a second person in the room, they had to have missed something and, blaming themselves for Raymond Carr's death, they'd work like hell to make up for their mistake.

Except...

Vicki pulled a latex glove out of her pocket—even the bloodsucking undead left fingerprints—and walked to the desk. There was a single word in the center of the monitor.

Dead.

She moved the cursor down to the next line and typed
Harticalder?

Then she felt a little foolish when nothing happened.