by Phil Malone
Vaguely, in the distance, she heard a door open upstairs. Her brother. A rushing in her ears swallowed the sound.
In the dark, she couldn’t see the man’s face, but she could see his eyes. They glimmered, like the reflection of moonlight on water, staring at her. A gentle calm overcame her. The man said something, a whisper in her ear, but Melody couldn’t quite make it out. Even the stench of blood on his breath faded from her awareness.
And then her eyelids felt too heavy to keep open. More darkness closed in, even blotting out the man’s eyes. It was everything Melody needed at the moment. She drifted off, wholly claimed by a merciful, unyielding sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
At least the police didn’t handcuff him before they forced Lucado into the back seat of one of their cruisers. It was the same car, he noticed, that Detective Wright used to drive him back to Fairfax in the first place. Once he was secure, Wright climbed in behind the wheel and Detective Fitz joined him in the front. He stowed Lucado’s cane in the footwell in front of his seat. With the mesh barrier between the front seat and the back, Lucado had no chance of reaching it.
Fitz turned around to grin at him. “Are we all cozy back there?”
“Please don’t speak to me like I’m a child, Detective.”
The two investigators exchanged a glance. “You see?” Fitz said. “You’d never know he was crazy.”
They emerged into the night from the parking garage, embarking on their trip to the Old Dominion mental asylum. No matter how stridently Lucado tried to convince them he wasn’t crazy, they never listened.
“That’s for the head shrinks to determine,” Fitz told him.
“Besides,” Wright put in, “it’s the asylum, or a jail cell back in Winchester. Sorry, Mr. Lucado, but you can’t just go around burning down houses.”
So this is how it ends, Lucado thought, as he watched streetlights flash by outside his window. No more hunting for vampires. Either I end up medicated into utter somnolence, or I spend the rest of my days in prison. I only ever tried to do the right thing.
Societies, it would seem, had no use for the people who protect them from monsters they don’t even believe in.
Traffic was light. It was just past ten o’clock, and getting darker the further they strayed from all the densely populated suburbs. Finally, they found themselves on a long, lonely road blazing a trail through the woods. Only occasionally did they chance upon an outpost of civilization, a gas station and convenience store, a darkened and deserted strip center, the intermittent house. The rest of the time, they passed nothing but trees.
They reached a rare intersection with a traffic light, blazing red as they approached. Wright slowed, and finally rolled to a stop. He turned to Fitz. “How do you feel about blowing through red lights when no one else is around?”
Fitz laughed, and then something heavy smashed down on the roof of the car.
Steel buckled above their heads. Shattered glass sprayed the front seats like chips of ice. Both cops shouted curses, trying to unhook their seatbelts. Lucado threw his off as well and yanked at the door handle, but of course it wouldn’t open from the inside. In the back seat of the cruiser, he was trapped.
A pale fist punched through the spider web of cracks in the front windscreen. The hand reached in from outside, grabbed Wright by the necktie, and pulled him through the shattered glass, just far enough to smash him face first into the hood of the car.
The sharp, jagged edge of the broken windshield might as well have been a guillotine. Wright’s head rolled forward along the hood of the cruiser, hastened by a spurting stream of his own blood. The body flopped back into the driver’s seat, neck stump still oozing, giving Fitz a face full of spattered blood.
“What the fuck?!” Fitz screamed, high pitched, yanking his gun from its holster. His car door opened from the outside, wrenched so hard that the top hinge sheared apart.
Fitz fired through the open door, three shots that thunderclapped in the enclosed confines of the car. Too late, Lucado covered his ringing ears.
Hands reached through the door, grabbing Fitz by the wrists. He fired again as his arms were forced back, as the gun barrel strayed further and further from its mark. A bullet punched through the roof of the car. Fitz was screaming, refusing to release the gun, no matter how far the attacker twisted his wrists.
His arms were bent further back, shoulder joints straining. The gun barrel roamed in Lucado’s direction.
Lucado’s eyes widened and he threw himself down in the seat. Glass rained down on the back of his neck. A high-pitched whine shrieked in his ears.
He looked up just in time to see Fitz get dragged out of the car. His cane lay below the front seat, a world away. The cramped back seat of the police cruiser, with its sagging roof and locked doors, closed in on him like a coffin. Fueled with white-hot terror, Lucado’s heart raced towards its own detonation. He was defenseless.
Then he realized the last gunshot had smashed the window next to him. He reached through, feeling around on the outside of the car for the maddeningly elusive door handle. Outside, Fitz screamed, blood gurgling in his throat.
Finally, Lucado’s fingers closed on the handle and he yanked on it, pushed the door open, and spilled out onto the blacktop in the middle of the road. He struggled to his feet, staggering on his bad knee, desperate to get away.
He glanced over his shoulder, and quickly wished he hadn’t. The vampire had Fitz’s head in his hands, chalk white thumbs squirming into the detective’s eye sockets. Blood and fluid flowed down his cheeks as he screamed.
All over his body, Lucado felt his skin go cold. There was no way to reach his cane, no way to fight back. He lurched towards the trees on the far side of the road, hoping he could lose himself in the forest before the vampire finished with Fitz.
A forlorn hope, but that was all he had.
Trees closed in around him. His tottering steps crashed through undergrowth and crunched dead leaves and tiny branches underfoot. Behind him, Fitz’s last scream trailed off into a dying burble, finally lost between the wind flurries and the persistent whine in Lucado’s ears.
How far had he come? Twenty yards? Twenty-five? Not far enough. He paused to catch his breath, wheezing, leaning his back against a tree trunk.
“Lucaaado!” he heard, the vampire calling his name in a high, sing song voice.
Lucado froze. How did the vampire know his name?
“Ready or not, here I come!”
He lurched forward again, scattering the carpet of leaves in his wake. Whip thin tree branches sliced across his face. Tree sap coated his hands; he grabbed every sticky trunk he passed, just trying to keep himself upright and moving forward. His lungs burned with the effort.
Stopping meant death, so Lucado kept going. For all he knew, the vampire might be two steps behind him, might reach out at any moment and grab the back of his shirt…
His foot plunged into an unseen hollow filled with leaves and fallen branches. With a sharp, painful twist, his ankle turned. Lucado slid, arms pinwheeling, grabbing for a tree branch, a tree trunk, anything to arrest his momentum. His hands found nothing.
With a cry, he tumbled into a ditch littered with broken tree branches. They scratched him and gouged into the palms of his hands. His clothes tore, caught in the grip of grasping twigs. A thick fallen tree limb punched him in the spine.
By the time he came to rest, Lucado lay flat on his back, covered from his feet to his chest in leaves and limbs. Sap dappled his face. His shoes had sunk into several inches of wet, rotted leaves. Blood welled from cuts and scrapes all over his body.
Laughter burst from the darkened copse just behind him. Lucado looked up. He strove to climb to his feet, but his legs refused to cooperate. The smiling vampire’s face emerged from the shadows, beaming down at him.
“If I were judging your geriatric gymnastics, I might give that a three and a half. I particularly liked all the flailing about." His arms swung out to his sides in
a cruel mockery of Lucado’s fall, jerking as if electrocuted. He laughed again.
The vampire leapt over Lucado, landing lightly. He didn’t even sink into the muck at the bottom of the ditch.
Lucado stopped struggling. His eyes glistened, and his heart pounded, trying to get in as many beats as it could before the end. A part of him felt strangely calm, though. As the vampire knelt next to him, he watched the stars in the sky and let the rustling leaves sift between the fingers of one hand. His other hand found a broken tree branch, as thick as his wrist.
“You know, I should thank you,” the vampire said, patting Lucado on the shoulder. “I was supposed to be in that house you burned, with my maker and my brothers. My luck that I crashed somewhere else that day. Now I’m free, though. My maker is dead, so no one has any hold over me. After I kill you, I get a new name and everything. I get my life. I’m free.”
He opened his mouth, baring his fangs. The wind blew, the leaves rustled. He leaned close, whispering into Lucado’s ear. “Say ‘you’re welcome.’”
Lucado stabbed him with the broken end of the tree branch. It punched through the vampire’s chest and buried itself in his heart.
The vampire jerked back, startled. Faster than the eye could follow, he yanked out the branch and tossed it aside, as though afraid it would bite him. For a second, Lucado thought nothing would happen.
Then the vampire’s mouth started filling with blood. It wept from the wound in his chest, black and thick. His eyes found Lucado’s, pleading with the old man, and shaking his head as if to disagree with the course of events.
His flesh began running off his bones. His eyeballs burst and sank into his eye sockets. He flopped over backwards, body twitching, a stink coming off him like spoiled meat.
By the time Lucado managed to roll over and crawl to his knees, nothing remained of the vampire but bones and pulp, seeping into the forest floor, already crawling with flies. Even that would be gone by morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The protection detail were just beat cops getting overtime, so they radioed for Detective Kolka when they found the crime scene.
He was asleep when they called, but roused himself from bed when they described what they saw. Another body drained of blood. This time, the killer murdered his victim and didn’t bother moving the corpse. There was a good chance he left evidence behind. Kolka hoped so, for the sake of the girl he kidnapped.
After chugging some coffee and throwing his clothes on, Kolka drove to the Sanger residence. It wasn’t hard to find. Already, several patrol cars had their lights flashing outside, and the commotion attracted television news crews. They almost completely blocked the street, setting up lights and doing practice takes on camera.
Kolka pushed his way through them, trying to reach the front door. He kept his badge on a chain around his neck, so the police who didn’t know him by sight wouldn’t get in his way.
A couple of forensic techs had already set up inside the house, taking fingerprint samples from doorknobs, light switches, and the like. They shook their heads when Kolka asked if they’d come up with anything concrete yet.
“The fingerprint analysis will have to wait until we can run them against the database,” one of the techs told him. “They might just belong to the family members, for all we know.”
Congressman Sanger sat on the sofa in his living room with his son, one arm curled around the boy’s shoulders. The kid looked hopelessly lost, his eyes and nose rubbed raw, hair still tousled from sleep. If anything, though, the Congressman looked even paler. His face wasn’t streaked with tears, but he stared into space, eyes glassy and colorless, but rimmed in red.
At first, Kolka avoided them. He wanted an untainted look at the crime scene. Besides, he never looked forward to dealing with the family when there was nothing but awful news to give them.
In the bedroom, a crime scene photographer snapped pictures of Dawn Sanger’s body. The two plainclothes officers assigned to the protection detail hovered by the closet door. Both of them appeared sick with worry. Kolka could understand why, but he didn’t feel the need to take them to the woodshed for such a colossal fuck up. He’d let the police brass take care of that.
“I’m Detective Kolka,” he told them, stepping closer while staying careful not to touch anything. “You two were in the car outside when this went down?”
They nodded. The slightly older cop stared at his shoes, while his partner couldn’t tear his numb gaze away from the body.
“You didn’t hear anything? Didn’t see anyone coming or going the entire night?”
“Everything was quiet until we heard the first scream,” the older cop muttered. “Even that was so far away, we weren’t sure we heard anything. Might have been a bird for all we knew. Nobody ever came out the front door.”
“Nobody went in that way, either,” the younger cop said. “I was watching the whole time.”
“We were about to head up to the door and knock, just to make sure everything was okay. That’s when the kid came running out of the house. He told us what he found.”
“And the girl?” Kolka asked.
The cop shook his head. “Kid said it was her scream. We went upstairs, knocked on her bedroom door. It was open, so we went in. She was gone. No sign of her anywhere.”
“Did the boy disturb his mother’s body at all?”
“Don’t think so. That’s how we found her. The coroner that did the external examination said it looked like all her blood had been drained out. That’s when we called you.”
Kolka nodded and turned to the body itself. Trying to avoid the photographer as best he could, he made note of everything he saw. A cell phone lay on the carpet near the door. The quilt had fallen over the foot of the bed. Clothes and shoes lay half covered beneath it. The sheets were rumpled, pulled down to the dead woman’s waist. Only a few spatters of blood marked the bed or Mrs. Sanger’s nightgown.
More blood had dried around her neck and collarbones, and some of it stained the pillowcase. Not enough to account for all the blood that used to be in her body. Her skin looked pale white, no different from the sheets she lay on. Even her lips were white.
He moved a little closer. This was the first chance he’d had to examine one of his killer’s bodies before it got dumped somewhere else.
Right away, he noticed that the throat wasn’t cut. Frowning, he leaned over the body. Underneath the dried blood, Mrs. Sanger’s neck had discoloration like a wine stain. Teeth marks bit into her flesh. Kolka felt ill. The discoloration, the leaking blood, all of it centered on two deep puncture marks that lined up with where the canines would be amidst all the bite marks.
More than anything, Kolka wanted to believe that a dog had done this. But Mrs. Sanger’s blood was gone, and no dog could kidnap a girl and spirit her away.
He stumbled from the bedroom. The only bodies found in the area with all their blood drained were the work of one killer. Kolka had always believed that. Was this something else, or was the killer escalating?
If this was escalation, then what was the endgame?
Kolka collapsed in the easy chair opposite Congressman Sanger and his son. The boy flinched, noticed Kolka, then buried his face in his dad’s side and wept. Kolka wondered how grave his expression must be to provoke such a reaction.
Sanger stared at him evenly while hugging his son with one arm. He waited for Kolka to tell him what they both already knew.
“It will take time for forensics to complete its sweep and analyze everything,” Kolka said. “This will be our top priority, and we’ll have people working on it around the clock until we have something solid. The good news is that we have the scene, and they always leave evidence behind. We’ll find him.”
“And the bad news?”
“This is a ticking clock situation. He took your daughter. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how long she’s got. If this really is the same serial killer, then he never leaves more than one victim in a week, so your
daughter has at least that much time, we hope.”
“What if it isn’t the same killer?”
Kolka shook his head. He didn’t want Sanger disappearing down the same rabbit hole that threatened to swallow him. “It is. It has to be.”
His cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Breathing a silent sigh of relief, Kolka stood and fished it out. “Excuse me,” he said, turning away from Sanger. He didn’t know who could be calling, but at that time of night, it could only be official business.
He didn’t recognize the number. “This is Detective Kolka,” he said, answering it.
“Detective. I need your help. I still have your card, I… I didn’t know who else to call.”
Even distorted through the wireless network, Kolka recognized the old man’s voice. “Lucado? You’re supposed to be in the Old Dominion institution.”
“They came for me. They knew what I did. I’m so sorry, Detective. It was my fault. He killed your friend, and the policeman from Winchester. They’re both dead.”
At first, Kolka thought that somehow Lucado got loose in the asylum, that he found a phone and, in his delirium, called the one person foolish enough to give him their contact information. On the other end of the line, he heard a crackle of static from a burst of wind and a raging semi truck’s horn blast that sounded small and tinny over the phone. Kolka frowned. “Where are you?”
“I’m at a payphone outside a gas station near some little town. Mosby’s Crossing, the man said. I don’t know where that is.”
A chill crawled up Kolka’s spine. “Wait… did you say Fitz is dead?”
“Yes. Wright, too. I’m very sorry, Detective Kolka. It came for me, but they were in its way.”
Fitz was just a young guy, less than a decade out of college, still eager to work the tough cases. They always joked about what he would say at Kolka’s funeral. Kolka couldn’t picture it the other way around.
