Sallow House

by Phil Malone

  “Drink, Damien Sanger,” the voice told him. “Drink, wake, live.”

  Finally, something warm. He felt it lapping against his lips, fat droplets that seeped into his mouth and trickled down the back of his throat. Warmth bloomed in his chest. Greedily, Sanger sucked down more of the liquid. He could feel a little strength returning, enough to work his throat. Everywhere the warmth touched him erupted in outbreaks of pins and needles, as if his whole body had been asleep.

  Still, the blood was pumping now. Sanger ignored the pain it caused. He wouldn’t stop until feeling returned everywhere, from his head to the tips of his fingers and toes. He kept drinking, his skin raw and sensitive.

  His eyelids fluttered open. It remained dark in the room where they were keeping him, but he could see flickering candlelight from the corners of his eyes. The man who held him kept encouraging him to drink more, drink it all down. Through blurred vision, Sanger saw the white glazed pitcher draining its contents into his mouth. He coughed, sputtered, choked, strained to get away.

  They were feeding him blood. He had never even realized what he tasted; he just needed to banish the cold. Once he saw, though, he couldn’t get the smell out of his nose, or the taste off his tongue. It coated the back of his throat. For a moment, he thought he was going to retch, but soon the feeling subsided. Strangely, the taste wasn’t as bad as he would have thought.

  The man’s hand left the back of Sanger’s head and he took the pitcher away. Not much blood remained in it. He mustered the strength to prop himself up. His arms trembled and his neck hurt from the weight of his head, but he could feel the weakness subsiding. He glanced around. Aside from the man feeding him, no one else was present.

  “Who were you talking to?” Sanger croaked.

  “You, of course. I hoped to explain the transition as you experienced it. You might still have been unconscious when I began. My apologies. Do not feel frightened, Mr. Sanger.”

  The man smiled at him, but it was a meaningless twitch of muscles around his mouth. His eyes were hard, pale, glittering like chips of ice. He had dark shoulder length hair, swept back behind his head in a ponytail with the forelock loose around his eyes. His skin was so pale that Sanger could just make out the web of blood vessels beneath his skin.

  He set the pitcher down on a varnished wood table next to a ceramic washbasin. A white towel rested beside it, which he took, soaked in warm water, and handed to Sanger. “For your face and neck,” he said. “Some of the blood dribbled while you drank, even more of it when you coughed.”

  Sanger took the towel and pressed it against his mouth. It came away with a stain of dark red. “Why did you make me drink blood?” he asked, as he mopped his face and throat.

  “To save your life." The man walked around behind him, disappearing from view. Sanger twisted around on the floor, trying to follow, and found the man rummaging through a standing wardrobe. He produced a pair of shoes and socks, underwear, a folded shirt and pair of pants, even a necktie. They were his, Sanger realized with a start. “I leave you to finish washing,” the man told him. “Join me upstairs when you have dressed and made yourself presentable.”

  With that, the man turned and swept up a flight of stairs at the far end of the room. As soon as he was gone, Sanger looked around.

  He appeared to be in a basement with brick lined walls and a concrete floor. With the man no longer holding him up, Sanger had sprawled on the ground, so he rallied to his knees and waiting for his legs to stop trembling.

  Still dabbing the towel to his face, he stood. There were no mirrors in the basement, and as bloody as the towel was starting to get, it was hard to tell how good a job he was doing of cleaning himself up.

  Aside from the table that held the washbasin and the wardrobe, other tables lined the walls. Fat, burning candles covered them, resting in lumps of old wax. He could smell them now, and feel the flickering warmth of their flames. Tendrils of wax spread across the tables and dribbled over the sides in swift drying stalactites.

  Sanger rinsed the towel in the washbasin and wrung it out, giving his face, neck, and chest another quick once over. No matter how often he sloshed the towel through the water, the red stain ruining it wouldn’t come out. He left it floating in the water and went to get dressed.

  Even his wallet, keys, and cell phone remained where he’d left them in his pants pocket. He made a cursory check of his wallet, but didn’t find anything missing. The battery on his phone was dead. Vaguely, in the back of his mind, it occurred to Sanger that his family might be wondering where he was.

  Snatches of memory started to return. He recalled sitting in his office in the Capitol building. It was late, he remembered, past sundown. He would have started home, but might have stopped somewhere along the way. A bar, perhaps, a place frequented by other members of Congress, by political consultants and lobbyists. They liked to talk shop there.

  But he couldn’t remember actually making it inside. He finished dressing, stuffing the tie in his pocket, then followed his mysterious host upstairs, determined to get to the bottom of this.

  As soon as he emerged on the ground floor of the house, Sanger knew the man had money. Even this back hallway leading to the kitchen was richly appointed, with the walls and floor paneled in cherry wood. A Tiffany lamp hung above him from a chain that glinted gold.

  The kitchen itself was no different. Everything was antique yet functional, and large enough to suffice for a small restaurant. Sanger saw two brick ovens, an array of cast iron cookware hanging from the ceiling, and a walk in pantry larger than the upstairs bedrooms at home. His host waited for him at an antique dining table that would have looked perfectly at home in the palace at Versailles.

  He rose as Sanger approached, warily. “It makes quite an impression, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Where am I? Who are you?”

  “This is one of my homes. We are in McLean, not very far from Washington. I am called Napoleon.”

  Sanger almost laughed. He wondered if the man was insane, but part of him doubted it. People with this kind of money weren’t usually nuts, unless they were born into it.

  Napoleon pulled out a chair and urged him to sit. “Do not look so bemused,” he said. “Back when the name was first given me, it was thought that the notoriety associated with it would have faded somewhat by now. That it never did works somewhat to my advantage among my peers.”

  “Why am I here? Why did you feed me blood, for fuck’s sake?”

  “Was it so awful?" When Sanger didn’t respond, except to look introspective, Napoleon nodded and went on. “I thought not. You shall get used to it. You will even grow to like it. If we forswear our provision of blood, that awful, bone shattering cold reclaims us. We grow so weak that we cannot move. Every moment is agony. Eventually, we die.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’ you keep talking about? I haven’t seen anyone here except you.”

  “‘We’ are a community. I thought you would have deduced this by now, Mr. Sanger. We are vampires.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Detective Kolka, you’re in luck. We’ve already got a suspect for you. All prepped and ready to go. Room one.”

  Andres Kolka glanced up as his captain dropped a folder on his desk. A twinge of disappointment nagged at him. Serial killers were a pretty rare beast; Kolka had barely gotten a chance to sink his teeth into this particular case and someone else had already put a suspect in the box.

  He opened the file to peruse the basics. Mario Lucado, he read. No known employment. Address on file in East Haven, Connecticut. Kolka raised his eyebrow. “This is it?” he said. “Says here he’s been staying in a motel for three weeks. The murders have been happening for at least five.”

  “Staying in that particular motel. Who knows where he was before that?”

  “It’s still pretty thin.”

  “That’s why you get to question the man, Kolka. Thicken it up a bit." His captain grinned at him and walked away.

  Beneath the
paperwork, Kolka found a few crime scene photographs of the cluster of onlookers from that morning. They always took a few shots of the crowd, just in case the killer decided to turn up and see what everyone made of his handiwork. An older man, late fifties by appearance, was circled in red marker. He matched the image and birthdate on the photocopy of Lucado’s driver’s license.

  Another thirty seconds was all it took to reread the scant paragraph of information in the file. Apparently, they caught him in the morgue, poking around with the latest victim’s body. He was disguised in a lab coat. They brought him in for questioning, but no one filed any charges yet. For that, they waited on Kolka.

  From force of habit, Kolka patted his shoulder holster. It was empty, his service weapon safely locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. He left it there, left his jacket thrown over the back of his chair, and took the slim folder down the hallway to the suite of interrogation rooms.

  Inside the room, Kolka’s suspect hunched in his chair, squeezed into a narrow space on the far side of an empty table. Kolka made himself comfortable opposite the man, placed the folder on the table, and extracted a voice recorder from his pocket.

  He pressed the button to record, placing the recorder on the table in front of him. “Detective Andres Kolka,” he said, “initial interview with Mario Lucado.”

  Then he went silent, spent a few moments leafing through the folder’s contents, trying to pretend he had more than he really did while gauging Lucado’s reaction. Finally, he set the folder down. “So, you’re from East Haven?”

  Lucado nodded.

  “Is that near New Haven?”

  “Only a couple of miles away.”

  “Let me guess, to the east, right?" Kolka chuckled. “Have you had a chance to do the whole tour of D.C. since you’ve been in the area? The National Mall, the Washington Monument, the White House, all that stuff?”

  Lucado shook his head.

  “What about the Pentagon? That’s closer. No? Well, I don’t know what your interests are. If you like military stuff, or American history, we have that covered. There’s a lot of science stuff at the Smithsonian, too, but it never really appealed to me that much. Hey, I gotta ask, did you ever play any of those Super Mario games when you were younger?”

  Lucado looked up, frowning. He was nearly sixty years old; maybe he’d never heard of the Mario games.

  “You know,” Kolka prompted him, “it’s-a me, Mario.”

  He still got no response.

  Kolka shrugged. “I guess you were already grown when that first came out. Lucky you. Otherwise you probably would have had all the school kids bugging you about growing up to become a plumber.”

  “I am not a plumber. I’m a private investigator.”

  “Oh?" Kolka closed the folder and set it on the table. He tapped it with an index finger. “Says in here you’re not presently employed. Are you licensed in Connecticut? I can have someone check on that.”

  “No, I…” Lucado fidgeted in his seat. “I am not licensed. The thing I’m investigating… it’s for myself, no one else.”

  “Can’t imagine how you make a living if the only customer you have is you. Whatever you’re investigating must be incredibly important, on a personal level.”

  “It is,” the old man agreed.

  “I get that. A man’s gotta follow his passions. What I don’t understand is, why sneak into a hospital morgue? To me, that just seems unhealthy.”

  “There are things about the crime scene, about the perpetrator." Lucado leaned forward, lowering his voice. The recorder would have no trouble capturing his words, though. “About his methods. I had to get a closer look at the body, to confirm my own suspicions. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Completely,” Kolka agreed, spooling out as much rope as the old man needed to hang himself. “The same thing must have happened in Connecticut, am I right?”

  “Similar, perhaps. Arguably." Lucado shifted his weight. He couldn’t meet Kolka’s gaze. “I made a mistake. This killer you have on your hands, I think I know what motivates him. But he is not the same, not what I expected.”

  It was enough, Kolka decided. The addle-brained old fool had already conceded a connection between his actions and the murders. Lean on him a little, and see what else shakes loose.

  Kolka smacked the folder against the table, making Lucado jump. “Well, I hope you know something useful, because you might just have fucked up our chain of custody on the latest body. Suppose we catch this guy, but we can’t get a conviction because you stuck your nose in?" Kolka stood, palms flat on the table, leaning over the old man. “I can already hear the arguments of some wormy defense attorney. ‘They tampered with victim’s body. They let in some old man off the street and he made it look like my client was responsible.’”

  “No!" Lucado looked up at Kolka, desperately. “I didn’t!”

  “‘He planted evidence. Something with my client’s fingerprints on it. Your honor, you must dismiss these charges.’”

  “I didn’t touch the body!”

  Kolka sat back down. “We’ll see about that. They have security cameras in the morgue, you know. I’ve got somebody pulling the video right now. If you so much as touched that corpse, I’ll be content to charge you with evidence tampering and obstruction of justice.”

  “I never touched the body.”

  “What a relief,” Kolka said, sighing in exasperation. “For a minute there, I was worried you might have some sick fetish you were trying to indulge.”

  Lucado’s face clouded over with anger, but he said nothing.

  “What were you looking for, anyway?” Kolka asked.

  “I was examining the wounds in the throat. I wanted to see if they were consistent with wounds I have seen before.”

  “I’m guessing not, if now you think you made a mistake.”

  “They were not, true. Still, it’s an interesting case. Let me ask you a question, detective. What do you think he does with the blood?”

  Kolka shook his head. “I’m not in the business of sharing information with suspects.”

  That took Lucado by surprise. “Am I a suspect?”

  Kolka pulled the folder towards himself, reopened it, and chose one of the crime scene photos with Lucado circled in red. He shoved it across the table. “It doesn’t look good for you, friend.”

  Lucado picked up the photo. His mouth opened and closed, and he blinked in disbelief. “I was there, yes, but only afterwards. Many people were there. You can see them in the picture.”

  “None of them were caught alone with the body, the way you were. They just happened to be passing by. How did you know to be there?”

  “I set an alert on my computer. Murder victims with their blood completely drained. People saw what happened there, detective. People gossip, and these days, they do it on their computers.”

  Kolka leaned back in his seat. “Okay, I’m kind of impressed. Old guy like you, setting up a Google alert? I know things like that exist, but I’ve got no clue how to actually do it.”

  “Nor do I. A young lady at the electronics store helped me configure it.”

  “She must have thought you were some kind of weirdo.”

  “Perhaps." Lucado gave it a moment’s thought. “Probably.”

  “Where is she? We might need to confirm all this with her.”

  “This was in Connecticut. The alerts were what brought me to Fairfax County.”

  “The computer, then. Where is that? We’ll have to get our tech guys to check it out anyway, so it could only help you out if you really did set it up to send you these alerts.”

  “It’s in my car. A portable computer.”

  “A laptop?”

  “Yes, detective. In my car, in a carrying case, in the footwell on the passenger side. My car should still be at the hospital. I hope it hasn’t been towed. I parked in a handicapped space, which I’m legally permitted to do, of course, but still. You never know.”

  “We’ll check on that as w
ell." Kolka slid the photograph back into the folder and drummed his fingertips against it. He held his gaze on Lucado for a couple of seconds until the old man looked back down at his own hands. “Now,” Kolka went on, “you want to tell me about that murder up in Connecticut that brought you all the way down here?”

  Lucado’s shoulders slumped. His eyes remained fixed on his hands, in his lap. “It was ages ago, so no, not really.”

  “Let’s hear it, old timer.”

  “You would not believe me.”

  “Come on, don’t tease me like that. I’m riveted, now. I’m on the edge of my seat." Kolka leaned forward again, lowering his voice. “Consider it professional curiosity. I love murder mysteries. This is what I do for a living.”

  “She was my wife.”

  Kolka glanced over his shoulder, at the mirror set into the wall behind him. On the other side, he knew, his partner Fitz was taking notes. He might already be calling around, researching the details of whatever happened to Lucado’s wife. Kolka wanted to get the story from Lucado himself, in whatever form it took. “Go on.”

  “They said a dog tore out her throat. It was not a dog. I saw the man who did it.”

  “I see. So you thought, maybe this guy moved down to Virginia and he started killing again. Going for the throat.”

  Lucado hesitated. “I thought it was a possibility. But the wounds were not the same. Your killer uses a knife. He has very steady hands, detective. His victims were killed far more cleanly than was my poor Olivia.”

  Kolka ground his teeth. They had their own medical examiners; they didn’t need Lucado’s amateur opinion. But the man was clearly lost in thought, remembering his wife, still feeling the grief. Kolka decided not to emphasize the point. “And the blood?” he asked. “You set up the alert to look for murder victims drained of blood. Is that what happened to your wife?”

  “For the most part, yes. Eight pints is a lot of blood. My killer was not as fastidious as yours.”

  “What did your killer do with the blood?”