They Thirst (38 page)

Dr. Delgado reached the door and felt a clawlike hand grasp at her shoulder. She screamed and struggled away, feeling her flesh tear. Spinning around, she slammed the door behind her, but one of them crashed through the plate-glass window in a silver shower of fragments. Another followed that one through, and they stalked her as she whirled and ran along the corridor. Before she could reach the white door, another of them—a young girl with blood splattered across the front of her shift—came through the doorway, blocking her path. The girl grinned and came shambling forward, her eyes as black as evil itself. There was a closed door to Dr. Delgado's left, bearing the word Storeroom. She burst into the dark room and braced her body against the door as one of the vampires
—
yes,
she thought,
vampires!
—
struck it from the other side, trying to break through. A fist hammered against it; the door began to bulge inward. The doctor whined in terror, keeping her shoulder pressed against the wood but knowing it would only be a moment or so before they got in. She reached out, feeling for the wall switch; the lights came on, and the first thing she saw was Mrs. Browning's open-eyed corpse—
or was it truly a corpse?
—
lying at her feet, its face a shade somewhere between white and yellow. On the wall above Mrs. Browning's head was a square of metal with a handle on it. Dr. Delgado's heart leaped. It was the laundry chute, a metal tube leading down to the basement. She'd opened that chute a hundred times before, and now she prayed that it was wide enough for her. It would have to be.

The door was struck by a tremendous blow. She was knocked backward, her shoulder blazing with pain, and then the things leaped in. She only had time to scratch at the eyes of one of them, then she threw open the chute and tried to squeeze her shoulders in. "Please God!" she heard herself scream, echoed by the tube's metal walls, "Please . .. !"

But cold hands gripped her ankles and calves and prevented her from getting down the chute. She kicked and flailed, still screaming, but as they pulled her back, she realized with maddening certainty that she could not escape.

The vampires fell upon her, clawing and fighting among themselves over who would draw the first draught of blood. When they were finished with her, they cast her aside like an empty bottle and scurried off for more. There were many rooms between them and the street and many patients in Mercy Hospital who would never again awaken as humans.

Daybreak, cold blue shadows running from the sun.

Gayle Clarke tossed uneasily in the bed of her studio apartment on Sunset Strip. Two sleeping pills and a long swig of Smirnoff vodka would keep her knocked out until after noon, but they couldn't entirely erase the hellish memory of a Jack Kidd who looked like leering Death, chasing after her across that apartment courtyard.

In her Laurel Canyon bedroom darkened by heavy drapes, Estelle Gideon sat up suddenly and said, "Mitch?" There was no answer.

Father Ramon Silvera drew cold, rusty water into the sink of his room in East L.A., cupped his hands beneath the spigot, and splashed a few drops in his face. Murky sunlight streamed in through a single window that faced an alley wall of gray bricks. Silvera walked to that window and opened it, inhaling a lungful of air tainted with dust and smog. Down toward the mouth of the alley, he could see the words scrawled in black spray paint in the tough capital letters favored by the street gangs: FOLLOW THE MASTER. Silvera stared in silence, recalling the bloody graffiti on the walls of the Dos Terros apartment building. He remembered the expression on that policeman's face, the abject terror in his eyes, and the chilling urgency of his voice.
"Don't let them out on the streets,"
the man had said.
"Burn them while you can."
Silvera abruptly closed the window and locked it.
What was happening in this city?
The feeling he had now—and had had ever since he'd stepped into that tenement—was one of dread, impending doom, Evil rapidly gaining strength like a cancer running unchecked through a human body. He felt afraid—not of dying because that was a certainty and he had learned long ago to accept the will of God—but of being helpless in a situation where God might call on him to act.

Evil was on the march, an advancing army of the night;

Silvera was more positive of that now than he had ever been in his life. And who could stand in its path?

With these thoughts weighing heavily upon him, he dressed and went out to face the new day.

Wes Richer lifted his head and saw Solange sitting naked before the window, staring out onto Charing Cross Road. He said huskily, "Solange?" She didn't answer. "Solange? What is it?" She didn't move, didn't even acknowledge him.
Christ!
he thought, drawing the sheets around him.
She can really be weird sometimes!
As he closed his eyes again, he recalled the dream he'd had: A little girl standing in the snow beneath his window, beckoning him to come out and play. It had been a good dream, one in which he'd been tempted to step through the window as if it were Alice's Looking Glass, into a childhood world where he could skate and slide and be a kid forever, and not worry about things like tax shelters and house payments and . . . grownup stuff. He returned to sleep, hoping he'd find that little girl again. This time he'd go out.

"I want you to look at some pictures, Benefield," Sully Reece said, taking four black and white prints from a manila envelope. "Examine these very carefully and tell me if you recognize any of them." He dealt them out one at a time onto the table in front of Walter Benefield, then arranged them in a neat row. Reece could see the corpses reflected in the man's thick glasses. Benefield looked at each one in turn, his expression not varying a fraction. He was still wearing the vapid half-smile he'd had on his face since he was brought into the interrogation room. "Well?" Reece asked, sitting down beside the man. "What about it?" 

Benefield said, "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know why I'm looking at these pictures."

"You don't? Well, I'll tell you then. These are on-scene photographs of young women who were strangled to death and then sexually abused, Benefield. Four women in a period of two weeks. If you look very carefully, you can see the bruises on that one's neck. See? Right there at the edge of the shadow. I wonder if your fingers would make marks like that. Do you think they would?"

"Lieutenant," the gray-haired man in the dark slacks and light blue sportscoat said from his chair in the corner; he was a public defender named Murphy, and there was nothing he relished less than having to play watchdog as the cops grilled a suspect.

"I'm talking to Mr. Benefield," Reece barked. "I'm asking him a question. We're not in court now. This is
my
ballpark, right?"

"You don't have to answer any leading questions like that, Mr. Benefield," Murphy said emphatically.

"Okay." Benefield smiled. "I won't."

Across the room Zeitvogel muttered, "Bullshit!" and then he remembered the reel-to-reel tape recorder turning on the table several feet away from Benefield.

"We could do that, you know," Reece said. "We could see if your fingers fit those marks."

"Stop picking on me," Benefield whined, his smile finally breaking a bit. "When can I go home?"

"Picking on you? Man, I haven't even begun! You've been arrested for assaulting a young woman named Vicki Harris, Benefield. She's about the same age as those other women in the pictures. She even looks a lot like that one, doesn't she?"

"I guess she does, yeah."

"Where were you taking her? What were you going to do to her?"

He shrugged. "I was . . . I was going to park right there at the end of Palmero Street. She's a bad girl, you know that. I was going to . . . pay her to . . ."

"Were these bad girls?" Reece motioned to the photographs.

Benefield stared at them for a few seconds and then smiled again. "If you say they were."

"Do you think this is funny? Do you think what you were about to do to Vicki Harris was funny? How often do you cruise Hollywood Boulevard?"

"Once in a while."

"Looking for bad girls?"

Benefield glanced over at the attorney and shifted uneasily in his seat. "Yeah, I guess so." "Have you ever heard of the Roach, Benefield?"

He shook his head.

"It's been in all the newspapers. Don't you read the papers?"

"No."

"But you know how to read, don't you? And you know how to write?"

"Yeah."

Reece nodded and reached for a smaller manila envelope at the edge of the table. He opened it and took out photostats of the Roach letters, placing them over the pictures in front of Benefield. "Have you ever seen those before?"

"No, sir."

"That surprises me. You remember how you wrote your name for us, once with the right hand and once with the left? Well, handwriting doesn't lie even when you try to distort it. You know what a graphologist is, Benefield? Two of them say you wrote these letters with your left hand."

"They're lying," he said quietly.

"Are they? They're experts on handwriting, Benefield. The judge isn't going to think they're lying. Neither is the jury."

"Leave me alone!" Benefield whined. "I never saw those letters before!"

"We talked to Mr. Pietro at your apartment house," Reece continued. "He told us that sometimes he hears you come in late at night and then you leave again. Where do you go?"

"Just. . . out. Places."

"What places? Hollywood Boulevard? Where else?"

"Just around. I like to drive."

"What about your mother? Do you go see her?"

Benefield's head snapped up. "My . . . mother? You leave her out of this, you black bastard!" He was almost screaming.

Reece smiled and nodded. He leaned back in his chair, watching Benefield's eyes. "We've got the evidence, Benefield. We've got witnesses who've seen you cruising Hollywood. We know everything we need to know. Why don't you tell us about those four young women?"

"No . . . no . . ." He shook his head, his face reddening.

"Four women." Reece's gaze sharpened. "Strangled

and raped, thrown away like garbage. And that thing with the roaches, that was real cute. Whoever did that is a very sick man, wouldn't you agree?"

"Leave me . . . leave me . .. alone . .."

"Whoever did that was warped and belongs in a hospital. I've seen your record, Benefield. I know about Rathmore . . ."

Benefield's face went scarlet, his eyes bulging. He grabbed for Reece, snarling like an animal, and Zeitvogel was up in an instant reaching for him. Benefield got one hand clamped on Reece's throat. The three men struggled for a few seconds, then Zeitvogel got the man's arms pinned behind him and snapped cuffs on his wrists. "You . . . filth!" Benefield shrieked. "You dirty nigger filth! I'm not going back there! You're not gonna send me back!"

Reece stood up, his knees shaking. His throat felt bruised and contaminated. "I am going out for a cup of coffee," he breathed. "When I get back, you'd better be ready to talk to me, or I'll make it damn hard on you. Understand?" He stared at Benefield for a few seconds, then glanced over at Murphy. The attorney was sitting bolt upright, his eyes slightly glazed. Reece turned and stalked out of the interrogation room.

Palatazin was waiting outside, patiently going through the contents of another file. When he looked up, Reece could see the deep blue circles under his eyes. "How is he?" Palatazin asked.

Reece shrugged and rubbed his throat. "He's pretty worked up. I tried the line about his mother that you suggested and got a real rise out of him. How'd you know?"

"There's something strange going on. According to this," Palatazin waved the folder, "Beverly Teresa Benefield died in a fall down a tenement stairway in 1964. She was carrying a suitcase with her, evidently about to abandon her fifteen-year-old son, Walter. It was the middle of the night, the neighbors heard some shouting, but the coroner ruled the death accidental. Anyway, Benefield made a reference to his mother to Mr. Pietro not long ago. I figured we could probe that to good effect. Also . . ." He took his notepad from his shirt pocket. "He used a cloth soaked in a combination of chemicals from his extermination work on Miss Harris. The lab says breathing it like that in the close confines of
a
car would be just short of lethal. And an interesting point—they think Benefield had built up a resistance to the fumes, just like real roaches do. But now my question is—why go to the trouble of keeping them alive? If he
is
our man, why did he change his MO?"

"Because he's a nut," Reece said.

"Possibly, but even nuts stick to some kind of pattern. Well, I suppose it's my turn now. Let me borrow your cigarettes and matches."

Reece reached in his shirt pocket and handed him a pack of Kents and a lighter. "Good luck," he said as Palatazin entered the interrogation room.

Benefield was sitting with his chin slumped forward on his chest. Palatazin sat down beside him, pushing away the letters and photographs. He closed the ME's file on the death of Beverly Benefield and laid it on the table. "Would you like a cigarette, Walter?" he asked.