A little while later, they stepped out into bright afternoon sunlight and headed back to their B and B.
But despite the blazing sunlight, Lauren couldn’t shake the feeling that they were surrounded by darkness and shadows.
“Vampires. Plural,” Sean Canady said, looking steadily at Mark.
Mark was surprised that he hadn’t called in the men in the white coats, though he had excused himself for several minutes, then returned.
Maybe the men in the white coats were already on the way.
All right, time to try another tack. “Look, I love New Orleans. It’s like no other place, but there are plenty of cultists and crazies here.”
“True enough,” the cop agreed sagely.
I don’t mean me, Mark added silently, then kept going. “Stephan is a…cult leader. He’s also psychotic, a man who never feels any regret for the pain he causes, and he can mesmerize others and turn them into killers.”
“Well, thank you for your information. I appreciate your coming in.”
“You haven’t filled out any forms.”
“I will.”
“Usually cops take notes while someone is talking.”
“You’re familiar with police procedure?” Canady asked.
Mark hesitated just slightly, then said, “Hey, I watch television. Law and Order.”
“Right,” Canady agreed politely. “And CSI. We always get our guy in just one episode, too,” he said dryly.
“I assure you, you need to find this man, and stop him.” He stood. There was so much more he wanted to say, but if he did, he really would risk being committed.
He frowned, noticing the chain around the lieutenant’s neck. “Cross?” he asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“No reason. Just curious,” Mark said.
He decided to depart quickly, before things became complicated. He’d tried, but he was still on his own against Stephan.
“Thanks for your time. Before I go, I should tell you that I’m certain he has some kind of…lair around here. Probably somewhere in the French Quarter, maybe the Garden District, or even uptown. I’ll be looking for him. If you go looking for him, too, do it carefully.”
The cop blinked but still betrayed no emotion.
“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Mark said, shaking his head. Well, what the hell had he expected? for the lieutenant to form a posse armed with stakes and holy water?
“Back at you,” the cop said as Mark turned and left
Mark knew without looking that the steel-eyed lieutenant followed and watched him all the way out to the street.
The sun was still hot when they made it out to the pool, even though it was four o’clock. They had the place to themselves, the rest of guests apparently having gone off to other pursuits.
Jumping into the water felt delicious, and crawling out wasn’t bad, either.
Many of the lounge chairs around the pool were shaded by umbrella tops and they pulled three together. They chatted about the wedding, the city and their plans for their winnings, but not about the headless corpse that had been dragged from the Mississippi or the tall, dark strangers they had encountered in the course of the weekend.
Heidi stood at last, yawning and stretching. “I’m going to shower, okay? If I stay out here much longer I’ll burn to a crisp.”
“Poor, pale darling,” Deanna teased her.
“Hey, you can burn, too, my copper beauty,” Heidi warned.
“I know,” Deanna assured her. “But you’re by far the most delicate of us.”
“I’m pale and I come in a small package, but I’m fierce,” Heidi told her.
“Of course you are,” Deanna assured her, waving a hand dismissively. “Go on. Take your shower.”
After Heidi went inside, a gentle breeze suddenly arose, not chilly but balmy and, since they were still damp from the water, quite nice. Lauren felt as if she had returned to the world of the normal. She felt relaxed.
Deanna turned to her suddenly.
“Did you feel it?” she demanded tensely.
“What?”
“I could feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“Eyes. Being watched.”
Lauren stared blankly at her friend, then asked slowly and carefully, “Um…do you think Mark Davidson is watching us from his cottage?” she suggested.
“No. He’s not there.”
“How do you know?”
“I knocked on his door while you were still changing to see if he wanted to hang with us at the pool.”
Lauren digested that information. “Maybe he just didn’t answer his door,” she suggested.
Deanna shook her head firmly.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I saw the maid go into his cottage, and she left his door open. He wasn’t there.”
“Okay, so Mark isn’t watching us. But you think someone is?”
“I don’t think. I know.”
Despite herself, Lauren felt her pleasant aura of peace and calm evaporate. She looked around. The breeze was rustling the foliage around the house and pool, but it wasn’t as if they were in a deep, dark forest.
She stood, then walked around the courtyard, around a hibiscus and a croton; she went so far as to head to the parking lot at the rear and check the trees there.
“No one,” she told Deanna, returning to her chair.
Deanna didn’t seem appeased.
“Maybe someone was watching from the main house,” Lauren suggested. “Maybe our hostess, checking to be sure we aren’t throwing a wild pool party.”
“I’m not making you understand,” Deanna said.
Yes, you are. You’re totally giving me the creeps
, Lauren thought.
“Well, Heidi should be out of the shower by now. We can both go in. You can have first dibs. I think I’m going to brew up some coffee before you guys decide to hit the bars again.”
“Okay,” Deanna said and began to gather her belongings.
Lauren did the same, then stopped. “Deanna,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you…do you think it was the man you ran into last night at the bar?”
“The cute guy?” Deanna asked.
“I didn’t really see him. I don’t know how cute he was,” Lauren said.
Deanna frowned in thought, then shook her head. “No. There was nothing…creepy about him. Now, the other guy…”
“What other guy?”
Deanna hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said, puzzled.
“You’re losing me. What are you talking about?” Lauren asked.
Deanna shook her head. “There are two guys.”
“Two guys?” Lauren said, frowning. “Do you mean Mark Davidson, maybe? Mark and the man you met at the bar?”
“No, Mark is your guy,” Deanna said.
“Then who do you mean?”
“I…don’t really know. Maybe I had too much to drink or something, but I can’t exactly remember. But I’m sure I’ve seen…or met…two men. The one at the bar last night. His name is Jonas. I like him. He’s very sweet. And I ran into him today, right when…”
“Right when what?”
“What you said,” Deanna told her. She sounded impatient.
“What I said about what?”
“The carriage ride.”
“You did take a carriage ride?”
“No. But I was tempted to.” She looked at Lauren. “This is crazy. You know what? I’m with you from now on when it comes to fortune-tellers. But…”
“But what?” Lauren persisted.
“There’s someone else,” Deanna said, troubled.
“The second man you’ve seen? Have you talked to him? Maybe you’ve just walked past him a few times or something. Deanna, I wish you made sense. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Neither do I. It’s more like a feeling,” Deanna murmured. “I’m sorry. I know I sound…confused. It must be the sleepwalking.�
��
“It’s okay. I’m just trying to understand.”
Deanna stopped suddenly, looking around. “It’s gone.”
Lauren hesitated. “It?”
“Whatever was watching us.”
“Who ever was watching us, you mean.”
Deanna shivered. “No. Whatever was watching us.” She stared at Lauren with wide eyes. “It wasn’t human. I’m sure of it.”
5
L ooking for Stephan’s hideout was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, Mark thought. He might have chosen a basement in a deserted housing complex almost anywhere. Or an old warehouse. Or abandoned industrial park.
Somehow, he had to get a better sense of where his nemesis was making his home base.
His next self-imposed task didn’t seem to be any easier.
Mark wasn’t at all sure how he was going to gain access to the morgue, and it wouldn’t help him in the least if the attendants brought out Polaroids of the deceased or digital images, as was so often the case these days.
He was pretty good at mesmerizing people, and on someone trusting, like innkeeper Lilly Martin, he could almost guarantee success. But at the morgue, there were clerks, assistants, attendants, gurney pushers…all kinds of people to get past.
Luckily, he started out with a young woman in her mid-twenties, a picture of her husband and baby on her desk.
The entire business world knew that confident, direct eye contact brought about the best results. And she was easy to engage. Without telling too many lies, he convinced her that he had an official reason to be there and got her to agree to let him in to see the body that had been pulled from the Mississippi.
As it happened, the remains were in one of the autopsy rooms. Bad luck. But he was able to get into the back, and put on scrubs and a mask. With a clipboard in hand, he moved down the hallway, knowing exactly where he was going.
To his surprise, there was a roadblock. A human roadblock.
Most of the time that would have meant little, but this roadblock was different. It was the cop. Sean Canady.
Canady looked up, saw him and, despite the mask and the scrubs, recognized him instantly.
Hell. Now, there was a chance he would be arrested. Not good.
But Canady only strode down the hallway to greet him.
No sense playing games. “Hello, Lieutenant.”
“Musician and writer, huh?”
“I swear. You should hear me play.”
Canady studied him for a long moment, looking into his eyes.
To Mark’s amazement, the cop shrugged. “You feel you need to see the body? Let’s go.”
One of the assistant’s brought Canady some gloves. He thanked the assistant, then asked, “Who’s on?”
“Doc Mordock.”
“Great.”
The autopsy room was like every other one of its kind. Sterile. Tile and paint in soft powder blue. Same smell of death, antiseptics and preservatives. Water running to keep the stainless steel tables as clean and germ-free as possible, and to enable the doctors and technicians to work on human bodies, with all their messy fluids and tissues.
Only one of the gurneys in the room held a form beneath a sheet. A man in scrubs and a mask was standing behind it.
“Sean, hey,” he said.
“Doc Mordock, hi,” Sean replied.
Mordock looked at Mark, a question in his eyes. “Mark Davidson,” Sean said in introduction. “He’s seen victims found in a similar situation. He may be able to tell us if we’re looking at a killer who has struck elsewhere,” he went on to explain briefly.
“Hey, he’s with you. That’s good enough for me,” Mordock said as he pulled back the sheet.
There was always something sad and eerie about a naked corpse on a stainless steel gurney. When the head was missing, the effect was intensified.
Mark knew there were things that Mordock could determine from the damage inflicted by the water, and the fish and crustaceans that made the Mississippi their home. He should be able to determine a time and date of death, what she had eaten for her last meal, and much, much more.
None of that mattered to Mark, though he did listen to the conversation between Mordock and Sean Canady.
“You got an ID yet?” Mordock asked.
Canady nodded. “Eloise Dryer. A few petty thefts, soliciting. She’s known in a few of the local clubs, but her address is listed as a Houston hole-in-the-wall.”
“So she was a prostitute?” Mark said.
“Most of the time,” Canady told him.
Mark was inspecting the corpse’s neck.
“Decapitated with an ax,” Mordock told him. “Postmortem. But it was one clean swipe. I’m willing to bet many a man executed on the block would have given a lot to be killed with such a clean stroke.”
“But she was deceased first?” Mark said.
Mordock swept indicated the cut. “Bloodless,” he said.
There, Mark noted. A puncture mark. Not such a perfect way to hide the evidence after all. “Bloodless,” he repeated, and looked at Canady.
The cop was silent. His face gave away nothing.
“She might have been killed as part of some ritual,” Doc Mordock said. “God knows, there are enough kooks out there.” He stared at Mark. “And I don’t mean just in New Orleans. Hell, I was called out to work a case in the back woods of the Midwest, the heart of America, and what those fellows were up to made hardened cops puke. But, yeah, I’ve seen the mark. Right on the jugular. She was drained like a slaughtered hog.”
“That won’t be in the press releases,” Canady said and looked warningly at Mark.
Mark shrugged. “I don’t write press releases.”
“But you do write.”
“I won’t be writing about this.”
Apparently that satisfied Canady. “Thanks, Mordock. Put anything else you can think of in your report and give it to me as soon as you can. You still don’t know where she went into the river?”
“Tech forensics are working on it, ebb and flow, all that,” Mordock told him. “But she hasn’t been dead that long. With the current and the river life, well, a body goes to hell pretty quickly when it’s in the water. But here’s something interesting—whoever tossed her didn’t really care whether or not she was found. She wasn’t weighted down. She was just dumped in the water.”
Canady thanked the ME again and turned to exit the autopsy room. Mark followed him.
In the hallway, Canady stripped off his gloves, staring at Mark. “Did you get what you were after?”
“Yes. Did you?” Mark, too, stripped off his autopsy-room paraphernalia.
Canady studied him. “Not just one vampire but lots of them, eh?”
Mark said cleared his throat. “She was used for some kind of a blood rite.”
When Sean didn’t respond, Mark went on.
“Every cult has some kind of leader, a grand priest, whatever,” Mark said, studying Canady. “I get the impression you’ve dealt with cults before. That you know what I’m talking about.”
“Come in tomorrow. You can have a sketch artist draw up a likeness of this man Stephan for me.”
“Thanks,” Mark said, then hesitated. Canady seemed to be a decent guy treating him with such apparent respect. But he was afraid for the man, as well. “The thing is…okay, these guys really think they are vampires. They go down if they’re hit with holy water, and they back away from crosses, and…unless they’re planning to make a victim rise from the dead, they cut off the head to keep the population from getting out of control. I’m just worried that your people…”
Canady grinned. “My cops won’t know they need to stake the guy, is that it?”
He didn’t know if Canady was mocking him or not.
“Yeah, something like that,” he said.
“I’ll take care of it. Come by the station tomorrow, Mr. Davidson.”
“Thank you. Um, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah?”
; “They may not all be men.”
“Pardon?”
“Vampires. They come in both sexes.”
“Gotcha,” Canady said. “Tomorrow.”
Mark hesitated. “Like I said before, he’s hiding out somewhere. He can move about by day, but it’s a better time for him to rest.”
“I’ve warned local law enforcement to be on the lookout,” Sean told him. “And not just in this parish.”
“Oh? Great. Just so long as they understand that they could really be in danger.”
”I know my business,” Canady told him.
“Right. Well, thanks.”
As soon as Mark left the morgue, he hurried back to the bed and breakfast. As he pulled into the lot, he saw that Deanna and Lauren, wearing bathing suits and carrying bags that he assumed held lotions and magazines, were just going into their cottage.
Lock it, he thought as the door closed behind them. Lock it! And don’t let anyone in….
He decided they were safe enough for the time being and headed back to his car.
Just when the world seemed all nice and normal…
When Deanna and Lauren went into their cottage they found Heidi out of the shower, dressed and on her cell phone. She flashed them a smile and mouthed the word, “Barry.”
They both nodded; then Deanna headed into the shower, and Lauren plopped down on the sofa, turned on the television and found the news.
There was a police officer, a big handsome guy, talking to a sea of reporters, who were all struggling to get their mikes closer to the cop.
“The most important thing for anyone, but especially women, to remember is to use good judgment and common sense,” the cop was saying.
“But the victim was a known prostitute,” one of the reporters called out.
“The victim was a woman,” the policeman said firmly. “And we don’t know yet where she was killed. It might have been anywhere along the Mississippi. Folks, this is a great city. We’ve had our share of trouble, but we always rise back up. Right now, let’s assume we’re having a problem, so let’s handle it intelligently. Go out, have fun. Go to dinner—gamble, if that’s your passion, enjoy everything this city has to offer. Stay in groups. Don’t go down dark streets on your own. Don’t assume that you’re safe just because the last victim was a woman or a prostitute, but don’t spend your lives hiding, either. There’s nothing new about predators. And there’s nothing new to guard against them. Being smart is always the best defense.”
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