Blood Groove (7 page)

She had no desire to move up any higher, because the top spot was mainly an administrative one, and Francisco filled it admirably, always ready to answer the media’s insistent questions. She lacked the patience for such nonsense, something she and everyone else in the department knew full well. She liked it in the trenches, liked being the expert, liked the way people came to her to solve the enigmas when everyone else had failed, and
really
liked the way respect lit up in their eyes when she did it.

And now this damn twenty-seven-year-old-who-looked-seventeen crew-cut
bozo
was going to destroy all that.

It’d be a subtle change, she knew. The admiring looks wouldn’t be as intense, and no matter how many times she got it right after this, she’d always be less than perfect. Eventually, some new hotshot would come along, blithely solve the old case (probably known by then as “Roseberry’s Folly”), and replace her as the department golden child. It would probably be a man, able to navigate the good-ole-boys network and advance far more rapidly than she’d done. God, what would she do then?

She took another drink. It was the weekend, she was
alone thinking of dead people, and it felt perfectly normal. On TV, part-mechanical Lee Majors applied his bionic charms to a California lovely; was Danielle’s life missing something? She hadn’t had sex in a year and half, but she hadn’t really missed it, either. She’d never had what she would call “good” sex, the kind she’d read about where you writhe and scream and sweat. She was no women’s-libber interested in one-night stands for the fun of it to prove her equality with men. And she was so settled now, she couldn’t see rearranging her whole life just so some guy could spend fifteen minutes on pointless copulation.

No, as weird as it would sound to anyone else, she knew the truth. Her work was her life, the autopsy was her sex, and the moment when she pinpointed the cause of death was her climax. If it was a simple matter, like a bullet wound to the head, it was a quick and insignificant one; if it was more complicated, then there was the exquisite buildup, the total submergence in the act to the exclusion of all else, and then the gorgeous release when it all became clear. It was odd, but it was her.

And suddenly she sat up straight. She knew, in a flash of scary personal insight, why Todd Crealey’s death gnawed at her. She was
horny
for it. This was the ultimate fuck for her, the one with a buildup so prolonged, so sweetly torturous that it was as much agony as pleasure. And, waiting at the end along with Todd Crealey’s cause of death, was the sweetest professional orgasm ever. It was, as Skitch would say, motherfucking
necrophilia
, plain and simple.

She fell back against the cushions and laughed. God Almighty, what would her coworkers think of that? She knew they considered her quiet, virginal, the spinster librarian of the M.E. world; could they imagine her dripping with lust, sweaty and trembling with desire? Did any of them harbor desires as dark as her own, needs they could barely fathom and never articulate?

The beer spread its wooziness through her.
Fine
, she thought. She’d find out what had killed the little bastard, all right. And then she’d lay back, smoke a cigarette, and mutter to the corpse, “Was it good for you, too?”

T
WO HOURS BEFORE
dawn, Mark twisted the padlock off the warehouse door. The protesting metal echoed his own simmering fury. Then he shoved the door aside so hard it flew off the end of the sliding track, balanced for a moment, then hit the floor. Birds in the rafters, startled awake, chirped and fluttered about to new roosts. Rats and other vermin scurried in fright.

“Goddam, boy, what’s the matter with you?” Leonardo called from the darkness.

Mark lifted the door and slammed it back into place, bending the track so that it was jammed shut; he’d fix it later. “Where’s Fauvette?”

Leonardo dropped from the shadows near the ceiling, stroking a rat held in his fist. He wore an orange Tennessee Volunteers jersey and blue jeans, and might’ve been any athletic black boy from any Memphis neighborhood. He was the oldest of the warehouse vampires, born around 1900, but he’d never been more specific and it was against Mark’s nature to pry. At least Leonardo took care of himself and made a serious effort to pass when he went onto the streets. “You make a lot of noise.”

“Where . . . is . . . Fauvette?” Mark said through his teeth.

“Whoa, honky bro. The walking ant farm is down in her box, far as I know.” He grinned. “Damn if that don’t rhyme.”

Mark pulled the clipping about Toddy from his pocket and pressed it into Leonardo’s free hand, then went toward the door marked
BOILER ROOM
—
CAUTION
. He slammed the door behind him just as he heard Leonardo exclaim, “Aw, man, no
way
!”

Debris, including some old office furniture they’d found in the weeds out back, filled the stairwell to the boiler room where Fauvette, Toddy, and Leonardo kept their coffins. Passage would be monumentally difficult without a vampire’s natural grace and strength, and stealth would be impossible. The drawback, and the reason neither Mark nor Olive slept down there, was the lack of any rear exit. Mark’s reasoning was practical: he didn’t want to be pinned in, like Praline had been. Olive had never shared her reason.

The boiler room was a large, dark cavern of broken pipes, wiring, and concrete. Mark’s vampire eyes saw it clearly, though, and again he was astounded at just how immature creatures could be that had existed for half a century. Leonardo’s coffin was shiny and black, lined with red silk. A Tennessee Vols sticker decorated one end, and a poster of Donna Summer, with vampire fangs added, hung to greet him upon awakening. Two dozen sports-related T-shirts lay neatly arranged on a horizontal pipe, and his sports card collection filled three narrow white boxes. Given how long he’d been collecting them, they probably
were
pretty valuable.

Still, his little nest was a model of maturity next to Toddy’s. The sides of his simple pine box were painted with the Confederate battle flag. Clothes stolen from Laundromats were piled on the floor, and three sets of army boots waited for feet that would never return. Worst was the severed lower leg of his former girlfriend, hung by the ankle above the coffin and currently home to half the Southeast’s
maggot population. The toenails were still painted sky blue.

Fauvette had found the warehouse, so she had the best spot, inside the shell of the old boiler. Her coffin was simple brown mahogany that was once very expensive, but had dried and mildewed over years of neglect. The metal strips peeled away at the corners, and the lid was no longer attached. It lay askew, covering Fauvette’s face but exposing her legs from knees to toes. Around the coffin, shoved into the holes where pipes once carried steam from the boiler, were the shreds of her clothing.

Fauvette had once been a beauty, and when Mark first moved into the warehouse she enjoyed parading as a princess of the night, enticing only the most beautiful boys (never any girls, to Mark’s knowledge) to their doom. But sometime during the last two years she had lost the drive, the desire to feed, and lately had become, as Leonardo said, “a walking ant farm.” That is, when she bothered to walk at all.

Mark tried valiantly to control his fury, but he knocked the lid from Fauvette’s rickety coffin out the door and halfway across the boiler room. She lay on her back, naked, her skin drawn so tight that her ribs and hip bones were plain. Her closed eyes were sunk deep into their sockets, and her lips were drawn back from her teeth as if the skin had shrunk away. For a moment he actually thought she was really dead. Then she turned her head slightly, a roach scurried from her ear, and she opened her eyes a slit. “What?” she rasped.

Annoyed that he’d been concerned even momentarily, Mark kicked the coffin. “Get up,” he snarled.

“Go away,” she said diffidently, and closed her eyes again. He wondered how long it had been since she’d fed. Blackish dried blood stained her thighs; she’d recently had sex, which usually meant she
had
to hunt. How could she resist the hunger for fresh blood once she’d lost some of her own?

“Don’t play possum with me, Fauvette. Toddy’s dead.”

Slowly, Fauvette’s eyes opened again. She blinked, trying to comprehend. “What?”

Mark grabbed her by her slimy hair and yanked her from the coffin; the beetles that nested under her skittered away. The box fell over with a crash, and scurrying creatures of all sizes ran from the tattered lining. Mark held her by the shoulders and shook her with all his considerable fury. “You heard me. He’s
dead
, really-not-coming-back dead. I know he had a crush on you and would’ve bragged about anything that he’d gotten into. So tell me.”

She feebly struggled in his grip, and couldn’t meet his eyes. “Mark, please, I don’t—”

He grabbed her by the throat, and had to squeeze extra hard to grip her greasy skin. “Fauvette, I am one one-thousandth of a second from locking you up on the roof so the sun can just finish what you’re trying to do the slow way. I
know
you saw Toddy a few nights ago.” He glanced down at her bloody legs. “And I have a pretty good idea of what the two of you did. Now what did he tell you?”

She grabbed his wrist helplessly with both hands. She weighed nothing, as insubstantial as misery. “We fucked, and he left,” she wheezed. “That’s all, Mark, I swear.” Her feet kicked feebly against his legs.

“Uh-huh.” He dropped her, and she fell in a heap, unable to stand. Her legs sprawled out awkwardly, and she pulled them slowly up to her chin. She still wouldn’t look at him.

He couldn’t stay angry at this pathetic stick girl. He sighed, kicked the coffin again, and turned away. “They identified his body, you know that? I’m sure somebody somewhere is wondering why a seventeen-year-old kid hasn’t aged in ten years; personally, I’m wondering why those ten years didn’t catch up with him like they should have. Would you have any ideas about that?”

“No,” she said in a small voice.

Mark stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets. His anger, slow to start, was conversely quick to fade. Now he was just weary and sad. “All right. If you say so.”

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, so softly no one but another vampire would’ve heard her.

He sighed. Child care, that’s what it was. Unending, eternal child care. “Get up, Fauvette. You’ve moped around here long enough, you need to eat.”

Fauvette sighed. “I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care. You need to hunt.”

She brushed her hair back, trying to regain a little dignity. “I said I’m not hungry, Mark. I’ll hunt when I’m ready.”

“All right,” he sighed. She sat immobile, hands around her knees, covered in dried blood and slime and filth. “Fauvette,” he said quietly, “aren’t you tired of this?”

“Yes,” she agreed, a sigh barely heard. “I’m very tired . . .”

“Then maybe this’ll get your skinny ass in gear.” Just as she’d done to Toddy, he reached out with his vampiric power.

She looked up sharply as her loins suddenly pulsed, her nipples tightened, and she felt the rush of carnal heat through her ice-cold body. Mark had never done this to her before, and she stared, unable to speak, trying to marshal some defense. But he was well fed and strong, and she had no reserves to draw on.

“Go hunt, Fauvette,” Mark said. “Or I’ll fuck you.”

She stared. Mark knew what losing her virginity again would mean, and certainly so did she. But at the moment she wanted more than anything to feel his weight on her, his cold prick entering her, pushing through her eternal barrier, and finally filling her with his chilled seed. “You know how much that hurts me,” she raggedly gasped. One hand sought her breasts, squeezing in oblivious response. If she’d had the strength, she would’ve crawled to him and clawed him down to the floor with her.

“I don’t care, Fauvette. I’m not taking a chance on you dropping dead in public, too, and maybe leading people to the rest of us. Now will you hunt?”

She was too weak to fight it, too malnourished and blood-starved to resist. “All right, yes, I promise. Just . . . either fuck me now or stop doing this.”

As quickly as she felt it, the arousal went away. She sobbed, her body still responding even though the source of the desire was gone. She took a moment to gather her strength, then stood. She held her back straight, shoulders squared, and glared at him defiantly. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, Mark. I mean it.”

Mark was not intimidated. “Then don’t ever let yourself get in such crappy shape again.”

She grabbed a ratty T-shirt from the pile of rubble behind her and pulled it over her head, then found a pair of threadbare denim cutoffs. Once they’d highlighted her curves; now the ragged cuffs billowed around her bone-thin thighs.

“It’s nearly dawn,” he said. “Just so you know.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, running her fingers unsuccessfully through her matted hair.

“Are you gonna clean up first?” he suggested.

She sighed. “I’m a creature of the shadows, Mark. Whoever I take won’t need to see me. And I’ll be careful.”

He nodded, started to leave again, and again paused. “Fauvette,” he began, then stopped.

“What?”

He sighed; now he was committed. “I was thinking . . . after tonight, maybe we could all go hunt together. You, me, Leonardo, Olive. Be a gang again. Like we used to.”

“Without Toddy?”

“We quit
because
of Toddy, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” Then she smiled, the first smile he’d seen from her in months, and in it was the glimmer of the old
princess of the night. “We’ll see. Maybe that’d be nice.” She walked past him into the stairwell.

He stood in the boiler room for a long time, thinking of that day on the prairie so long ago.

   Juvenile Crimes detective Leslie McCammon yawned and picked at her salad. She’d been on duty since 5:30
A.M.
; it was now fifteen hours and counting since she’d gotten any sleep. She accepted Danielle’s invitation that morning without realizing she’d be so tired by dinnertime. She tried to be good company, but she was fading fast.