The Book of Death (7 page)

Harker liked the fact that his
colleague seemed to care as much as him. ‘I’ve got a theory on that. I think De
La Cruz was protecting the killer.’

‘I can believe that, but why?’

‘I suspect it was another
vampire.’

Clay screwed his forehead into a
contorted frown. ‘That would actually make sense. The evidence would back it up
too.’

‘Good. So what have you got? Any
DNA or anything?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Clay turning
back to his computer. He started tapping away at the keyboard as he spoke.
‘However, there’ve been seventeen murders that I know of.’

‘Actually it’s more like eighty
six.’

Clay raised an eyebrow. ‘Like I
said, seventeen that
I
know of. But in terms of DNA we’ve got nothing,
no saliva, blood traces or anything like that. What we do have to link all
seventeen of the murders i—’

Harker interrupted. ‘A green
tongue and bite marks on the neck?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Like I said, I’ve been going
through De La Cruz’s files. The bite marks yells vampire at me, but I don’t get
the green tongue part.’

‘It’s a kind of poison. All
these kids were drugged by an unidentifiable green solution. It causes almost
instant paralysis.’ He paused and peered over his glasses once more, no longer
tapping on his keyboard. ‘But there’s something else. Something that De La Cruz
dismissed out of hand as coincidence, but quite clearly it’s a huge clue in the
case.’

Harker perked up in his seat.
‘What?’

‘For twelve of the seventeen
victims we found something else. Grey hairs. Usually only one, sometimes two or
three, but on several occasions the victims had the grey hairs underneath their
fingernails.’

‘Like they fought back before
the paralysis set in?’

‘Exactly.’
 

‘Well can you get a DNA match
for the hair?’

Clay grinned. ‘Good question. De
La Cruz was taking away all the hairs away to analyse them himself, but he
never returned any of them. Kept claiming I’d never given them to him and all
kinds of other excuses. But, lucky for you, I kept the most recent one. Never
told him about it. I knew he would make it vanish if he got his hands on it, so
I kept it here and did some analysis.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not human hair.’

Harker raised his eyebrows to
emphasise his surprise at the remark. ‘What?’

‘It ain’t human hair. It’s goat
hair.’

‘Goat hair?’

‘Goat hair.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. It’s goat hair.
You’re the detective, not me.’

‘So, it’s like a trophy or
something? A calling card to identify the killer?’

Clay shrugged. ‘Like I said,
you’re the detective. Personally I would have said the green poison and the
bite marks were a perfectly adequate calling card. No need to leave the goat
hairs intentionally too.’

‘True.’ Harker scratched his
chin. ‘So why goat hair? I guess I can go looking for someone who owns goats.
This could be a fairly useful clue.’

Clay smiled. ‘Yeah, all you
gotta do is find a vampire who happens to be a goat herder in his spare time.’

‘You got any better
suggestions?’

‘
Jesus
, Harker, you’re
slow.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not a goat herder or a
shepherd you need to be looking for.’

Clay turned the monitor on his
computer around for Harker to get a good look. He stared at the screen for a
few seconds, puzzled by the picture of a person he recognised. Then the truth
hit home. He shook his head. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Goat hairs. Sonofabitch.’

Eight

Ulrika Price had encountered
numerous problems during her time as Head Librarian at the Santa Mondega
Library, but right now she had possibly the most serious crisis of her career.
She had lost The Book of Death. Rameses Gaius, her master, had entrusted her as
the keeper of the book with two simple instructions, log names in it when
instructed to and never under any circumstances lose it. The previous day she
had logged three names in it at his request, but then she had carelessly left
the book unattended and it had vanished.

She had suffered a sleepless
night tossing and turning as she tried to cast her mind back to the previous
day’s events. She had wracked her brain trying to work out what could have
happened to it. Eventually in the early hours she had come to the conclusion
that her teenage assistant, Josh, a dimwit of the highest order, must have
stuck it on one of the shelves somewhere by mistake.

Fortunately the following
morning the library was quiet, which afforded her the time to hunt for the
book. For two hours she had searched in vain. It was nowhere to be found. After
one last look around her desk area she gave up and decided to phone Josh to see
if she could get any sense out of him. These were desperate times indeed. She
was relying on Josh, a total idiot, to remember something from the day before.
Normally he couldn’t remember anything from five minutes before.

She sat at her desk and dialled
his home number on the office phone, tapping impatiently on the desk with one
of her long bony fingers. Eventually after about eight rings, Josh’s mother
answered the phone.

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘It’s Ulrika Price at the
library.’

‘Fucking hell. Hang on a minute.
I’ll go get him.’

Josh’s mother knew better than
to waste time making idle small talk with Ulrika. The two of them had exchanged
harsh words in the past after Ulrika had once described Josh as a mindless
baboon in one of her written appraisals of his performance at the library.
Through the phone’s earpiece Ulrika heard some shouting and cussing and the
sound of someone dropping the phone.

Eventually Josh’s irritating
voice came through loud and clear. ‘Hello, Miss Price.’

‘Hello Josh, you moron. I need
to know what you did with The Book of Death yesterday.’

‘The what?’

‘There was a book on my desk yesterday,
it’s called The Book of Death, and it’s gone missing. You must have put it
somewhere, or given it out to a customer.’

‘Oh.’

He sounded as gormless as ever,
much to Ulrika’s annoyance. ‘Well,’ she snapped. ‘What have you done with it?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Try to remember, please.’

A brief silence followed before
Josh replied. ‘Was that the Sesame Street annual?’

‘No. Why would a Sesame Street
annual be called The Book of Death?’

‘That’s what I was wondering
when I put it back on the shelf.’

Ulrika perked up. ‘So you
have
seen it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘It was a big black book, just
said The Book of Death on the cover. You’re the one who said it was a Sesame
Street annual.’

‘Why would I say that?’

‘I don’t know, but you told me
to put it back on the shelves before I went home last night. I remember because
it’s the last thing I did.’

Ulrika breathed a sigh of
relief. ‘Okay, so you thought it was a Sesame Street annual. Therefore is it
safe to assume you stuck it on a shelf in the children’s section?’

‘No. I think I stuck it in
Reference.’

‘Why would you stick it there?’

‘Because I stick all the books
in the Reference section.’

‘Prick.’

‘I did put it under A though,
for Anonymous.’

Ulrika rolled her eyes. Talking
to Josh was exasperating. ‘Well that’s something. Thank you. By the way, don’t
bother ever coming back to work here, Josh, you’re not welcome.’

‘Fine by me. Is that all?’

‘Yes, goodbye and thanks for
your incompetence.’

‘Oh, Miss Price, before you go,
there’s one last thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You smell.’

Josh hung up. Ulrika slammed the
receiver down in frustration. However, in spite of Josh’s rudeness and general
ineptitude, at least she now knew where to find the missing book. She hurried over
to the Reference books and began scouring the section marked A for Anonymous.

There were some pretty decent
books written by anonymous authors, but the only one Ulrika was interested in
was The Book of Death. Unfortunately after scouring the shelves for ten
minutes, she came up empty handed. Either Josh had given her incorrect
information or someone had borrowed the book from the library after he’d stuck
it on the shelf.

The only person who had come
into the library after Josh had left the previous night was Sanchez Garcia, the
bartender from the Tapioca. Ulrika thought back to his appearance. She had
caught him loitering suspiciously in the Reference section, then he had
borrowed a book called The Gay Man’s Guide to Anal Sex, an odd choice of book for
him, she thought. Although Sanchez struck her as being completely inept with
women, he didn’t strike her as a homosexual either. On the contrary, she’d
caught him staring at her cleavage on several occasions, and his dress sense
was shit.

She rushed back to her desk to
check the computer logs to see if anyone else had been in around the time Josh
left. If no one had, then Sanchez might just be the prime suspect in the
disappearance of the important book.

As she sat down at her desk the
telephone rang. She answered it with an impressive level of politeness
considering how irritated she was.

‘Hello, City Library.’

‘Ulrika?’

She recognised the voice. It was
Rameses Gaius. A shiver ran down her spine.

‘Hello Rameses,’ she said, her
voice betraying her anxiety.

‘Did you write those names in
The Book of Death yesterday as I asked?’

‘Of course.’

‘Read them back to me please. I
need to clarify what names you wrote.’

‘Um, oh,’ Ulrika tried to cast
her mind back to the names she had written in the book the previous day.

‘Get on with it,’ Gaius snapped.
‘Have you not seen the news? They’re saying the Bourbon Kid is still alive.
This is important. What names did you write down?’

Ulrika cringed. She couldn’t
remember the names, certainly not under this kind of pressure. ‘One of them was
John Doe,’ she said.

‘That’s correct.’

‘I can’t remember the other
two,’ she said.

‘Well look them up in the book
for goodness sake!’

Ulrika swallowed hard. ‘I can’t
find it at the moment,’ she said softly.

‘What?’

‘I think it’s been borrowed by
someone.’

‘Borrowed by someone? Since when
the fuck did you start allowing people to borrow The Book of Death?’

‘I don’t. My assistant messed
up. But I think I know who has it. I’m just going to track him down. I’ll have
it back within the hour.’

She could tell by the sound of
his breathing that Rameses Gaius was furious. ‘If you don’t get that book back
by lunchtime, I’ll send my daughter Jessica to come help you look for it. And I
gotta tell you, Jessica really doesn’t like you.’

‘Yes sir.’

Gaius hung up the phone. Ulrika
sat still for a few moments, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. The book
was missing and she had less than two hours to find it.

‘Morning Ulrika,’ said a man’s
voice. She looked up and saw Rick from the Ole Au Lait walk past her desk on
his way out. She hadn’t even seen him come in because she had been so engrossed
in her conversation with Rameses Gaius. She didn’t like Rick any more than she
liked anyone else in town, so she ignored him until he was halfway down the
stairs and heading out of the library before she responded with a veiled
“Fuck
off”
under her breath.

Her top priority was to get The
Book of Death back urgently. And her prime suspect was Sanchez Garcia.

Nine

Beth had received an early phone
call from the museum’s new manager, Elijah Simmonds. Although he was only in
temporary charge, he now had the authority to fire her. He had insisted she
drop by the museum even though she had been given the day off by Bertram
Cromwell. Chances were high he was calling her in to relieve her of her
position as a cleaner.

She and JD arrived at the museum
to find a medical crew outside lifting a stretcher up onto the back of an
ambulance. The face of the person on the stretcher was concealed beneath a
green blanket. Beth could tell it was Bertram Cromwell. She didn’t need to see
the gory details. The sight of the blanket pulled over the face of the body was
enough to set her mind racing with all kinds of unpleasant images.

JD put his arm around her
shoulder and squeezed her in tight as they walked up the steps to the front
entrance of the museum. In doing so he shielded her from the sight of the body.
Having his arm around her shoulder made her feel safe, and warm too. She had a
blue cardigan on over her white T-shirt but with the sudden arrival of snow in
Santa Mondega the cardigan wasn’t offering as much warmth as usual. She could
feel the cold around her legs too because her black jeans had a few tears in
them and not for fashion reasons either. They were just bloody old and
knackered and she couldn’t afford a new pair. With her hair down and the wind
blowing it all over the place she actually had a rather cool grungy look going
on. She was quite pleased about that because it seemed to be a look that JD
liked.
 
He was still wearing his
clothes from the night before, blue jeans, black T-shirt and black leather
jacket. Beth was hopeful that they looked like a well-matched couple. And
secretly she was keen for some of her colleagues to see the two of them
together.