Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I know what she meant,” the vampire said. He moved to one side of the open door and was careful to keep his hands where we could see them. Jack Benchely, human, had a record. Minor stuff. A few drunk and disorderlies, an assault charge that started out as a domestic disturbance call. Nothing too serious, and all of it involving too many drinks and not enough common sense.

  When we were inside, he shut the door and went to the couch. From a coffee table that had almost as much crap on it as the backseat of Zerbrowski’s car, he fished out a cigarette and a lighter. He lit up without asking if we minded. How rude.

  There were no other chairs in the room, so we stayed standing. Again, rude. Though the place was so messy that I wasn’t sure I’d have taken a seat if it had been offered. There was so much clutter that you expected it to smell stale, but it didn’t. It did smell like the inside of an ashtray, but that’s not the same thing as dirty. I’ve been in houses that looked spotless, but still reeked of cigarettes. Being a nonsmoker, my nose isn’t dulled to it.

  He took in a big drag on the cig and made the tip glow bright. He let the smoke trickle out through his nose and the corners of his mouth. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why’d you leave the Sapphire early last night?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It was after eleven. I don’t call that early.”

  “Okay, why’d you leave when you did?”

  He looked up at me, eyes narrowed as smoke oozed past them. “It was boring. The same girls, same acts.” He shrugged. “I swear that strippers were more fun when I could drink.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  Zerbrowski said, “What time did you leave exactly?”

  Benchely answered. We asked the usual questions. What time? Why? With whom? Was there anyone in the parking lot that could verify that he got in his truck and didn’t linger in the parking lot?

  “Linger,” Benchely said, and he laughed. Laughed hard enough to flash fangs. The fangs were as yellowed from nicotine as the rest of his teeth. “I didn’t linger, officer. I just left.”

  I debated on whether I could tell him to put out his cigarette in his own house, and if he’d do it if I asked. If I ordered him and he didn’t, we’d look weak. If I grabbed the cig and smushed it out, I’d be a bully. I tried to hold my breath and hoped he’d finish it soon.

  He took another healthy pull on the cig and spoke with the smoke coming out of his mouth. “What did I miss? One of the other vamps get out of hand with a dancer? One of the other upstanding church members trying to frame me for it?”

  “Something like that,” I said softly.

  He fished an ashtray out of the mess. It was an older one, pale green ceramic, with upturned sides and a tray of cig holders in the middle, like dull teeth. He stubbed out his cig and didn’t try to hide that he was angry. Or maybe five years dead wasn’t enough time to learn to hide that well. Maybe.

  “Hell, it was Charles, wasn’t it?”

  I shrugged. Zerbrowski smiled. We hadn’t said yes, we hadn’t said no. Noncomittal, that was us.

  “He’s a member of their damn club, did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t volunteer it,” I said.

  “I’ll bet he didn’t. Damned hypocrites, all of them.” He ran his hands through his hair, made the thickness of it stand up even more. “Did he tell you that he’s the one that recruited me for the damn church?”

  I fought the urge to share a glance with Zerbrowski. “He didn’t mention that,” Zerbrowski said.

  “I’d tried to quit drinking. I tried just quitting, twelve steps, you name it, I tried it. Nothing worked. I’d lost two wives, more jobs than I could count. I’ve got a son who’s nearly twelve. There’s a court order against me seeing him. Isn’t that a hell of a thing, my own son?”

  Zerbrowski agreed it was a hell of a thing.

  “Moffat was at the club one night. He made it sound so easy. I would have to stop drinking, because I couldn’t drink anymore. Simple.” He reached for another cigarette.

  “Can you wait until we’re gone for that?” I asked.

  “It’s the last vice I got,” he said. But he stuffed the cig back in its pack. He kept the lighter in his hands, playing with it, as if even that was a comfort. “I’m what my counselor calls an addictive personality. Do you know what that means, officers?”

  “It means that if you can’t drink, you’ve got to be addicted to something,” I said.

  He smiled, and really looked at me for the first time. Not just like I was a cop come to hassle him, but like I was a person. “Yeah, yeah, my counselor wouldn’t like that definition, no siree she would not. But yeah, that’s the truth. Some people are lucky, and it’s just they’re addicted to drinking, or smoking, or whatever, but for those of us who are just addicted to being addicted, anything’ll do.”

  “The blood lust,” I said.

  He laughed again, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I can’t drink liquor but I can still drink. I still like to drink.” He slapped the lighter down on the table, and both Zerbrowski and I jumped. Benchely didn’t seem to notice. “Everyone thinks you get to be pretty when you’re made over. That you get to be sauve and good with the ladies just because you got a pair of fangs.”

  “You get the gaze with the fangs,” I said.

  “Yeah, I can trick ’em with my eyes, but legally that’s not a willing feed.” He looked at Zerbrowski as if he represented all the laws that had held him down all his life. “If I use vampire tricks, and she comes out of it yelling force, I’m dead.” He looked at me, and it wasn’t exactly an unfriendly look. “It’s considered sexual assault, as if I slipped her a date rape drug. But I’m a vampire, and I won’t see trial. They’ll give me to you, and you’ll kill me.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was true, though they’d amended the law so that you had to have more than one count of gaze-induced blood taking to execute someone. That’s what they called it, gaze-induced blood taking. The far right was crying that it was letting sexual predators loose on our communities. The far left just didn’t want to agree with the far right, so they’d help push for the change in the laws. Those of us in the middle just didn’t like the idea of a death warrant being issued on the say-so of one date who woke up the next morning with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

  “I don’t have the money to throw around that the church deacons do,” Benchely was saying, “I’ve got to get a woman to donate her blood through charm.” He said the last word like it was curse. “I know drink ruined my life, but I am a hell of a lot more charming when I’ve had just a few drinks.”

  “That’s not usually true,” I said.

  He looked at me. “What isn’t true?”

  “A lot of drunks think they’re charming drunk, but they aren’t. Trust me, I’ve been the only teetotaler at a lot of parties. There is nothing charming about a drunk, except maybe to another drunk.”

  He was shaking his head. “Maybe, but all I know is that I’m reduced to feeding off the church. The church makes taking blood as tame as it can. Something that should be better than sex, and they make you feel like you’re at one of those places where you only get your food after you’ve listened to the sermon. It makes the food taste bad.” He picked up his lighter again turning it over and over in his hands, until the gold of it swirled in the dim light, shining. “Nothing tastes good when you have to swallow your pride with it.”

  “Are you saying that Moffat, a deacon of the church, misrepresented what life would be like after you became a vampire?” I tried for as casual a question as I could make it.

  “Misrepresented, not exactly. More like he let me come in believing all the stuff in the books and movies, and when I talked about it like it would be that way, he didn’t tell me different. But it is different, real different.”

  If you were Belle Morte’s line you spent eternity with people lining up to donate. If you were from some of the bloodlines that gave power, but not beauty or sex appeal, then in a country where u
sing vampire tricks was illegal, you were screwed. The only vamp I knew well that was descended from a line like that was Willie McCoy. I had never wondered what Willie, with his ugly suits and uglier ties and slicked back hair, did for food. Maybe I should have.

  The Church of Eternal Life didn’t promise much more than most churches promised, but you could join the Lutherans, and if you didn’t like it, you could quit. Joining the Church of Eternal Life as a full member meant never being able to do anything about regrets you might have.

  Zerbrowski got us back on track. “You didn’t see anyone in the parking lot who could confirm when you left the Sapphire?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you smell anything?”

  Those washed out eyes flicked up to me. He frowned. “What?”

  “You didn’t see anything, or anyone, but sight isn’t the only sensory input you’ve got.”

  He frowned harder.

  I bent down so I could meet him eye-to-eye. I would have knelt, but I didn’t want to touch the carpet with anything but my shoes. “You’re a vampire, Benchely, a bloodsucker, a predator. If you were human I’d just say what did you see, or hear, but you’re not human. If you didn’t see or hear anything, what did you smell? What did you sense?”

  He was looking positively perplexed. “What do you mean?”

  I shook my head. “What did they do, make you a vampire, then not teach you anything about what you are?”

  “We’re the eternal children of God,” he said.

  “Bullshit, bull-fucking-shit! You don’t know what you are, or what you could be.” I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. He was five years dead. I didn’t think he was involved, but he’d walked through that parking lot damn close to the time of the killing. If he hadn’t been such a pititful excuse for the undead, he might have been able to help us catch the bad guys.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, and I believed him.

  I shook my head. “I need air.” I went for the door, leaving Zerbrowski to mutter, “Thanks for your help, Mr. Benchely, and if you think of anything, call us. I was on the cement walkway, breathing in all the night air I could, when Zerbrowski came to find me.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked. “You just decide we stop questioning a suspect?”

  “He didn’t do it, Zerbrowski. He’s too damn pitiful to have done it.”

  “Anita, listen to yourself. That doesn’t even make sense. You know as well I do that murderers can make you feel sorry for them. Some of them specialize in pity.”

  “I don’t mean I felt pity for him, I mean he’s too damn pitiful a vampire to have pulled it off.”

  Zerbrowski frowned at me. “You’ve lost me.”

  I wasn’t sure how to explain it, but I tried. “It’s bad enough that they let him believe that becoming a vampire would fix everything that was wrong with his miserable life, but then they killed him. They took his mortal life, but they’ve done everything they can to cripple him as a vampire.”

  “Cripple him, how?”

  “Any vampire that I know would have noticed things, Zerbrowski. They’re like this hyperfocus predator. Predators notice things. Benchely may have fangs, but he still thinks like he’s a sheep, not a wolf.”

  “Would you really want every member of the church to be a good predator?”

  I leaned my back against the railing. “It’s not that. It’s that they took his life and didn’t give him another one. He’s not better off than he was before.”

  “He’s not getting arrested for drunk and disorderlies anymore.”

  “And how long will it be before he can’t take it anymore and he uses his gaze on somebody, drinks their blood, and blows it? They wake up and decide they were abused. He’s not a good enough vampire for them not to wake up and regret it.”

  “What do you mean he’s not a good enough vampire? Anita, you’re not making sense.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll make sense to you, Zerbrowski, but I’ve seen the real deal. They’re terrible, or can be, but they’re like watching a tiger at the zoo. They’re dangerous, but they have a beauty to them, even the ones that aren’t from a bloodline that makes them prettier after death, even those have a sort of power to them. A certain mystique, or an aura of confidence, or something. They have something that every member of the church that we’ve talked to since last night lacks.”

  “I say, again, would we want them to be powerful and mysterious? Wouldn’t that be bad?”

  “For stopping crime and keeping the peace, yes, but Zerbrowski, the church talked these people into letting themselves be killed. Killed for what? I’ve tried to talk people out of joining the church for years, but I’ve not really talked to many of the members once I can’t save them.”

  He was looking at me funny. I guess I couldn’t blame him. “You still think that vamps are dead. You’re dating one, and you still think they’re dead.”

  “Jean-Claude hasn’t made a new vampire since he became Master of the City, Zerbrowski.”

  “Why not? I mean, it’s considered legal now, not murder.”

  “I think he agrees with me, Zerbrowski.”

  He frowned harder at me, took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, put them back on, and shook his head. “I am just a simple cop, and you are making my head hurt.”

  “Simple my ass. Katie told me you double majored in law enforcement and philosophy. What kind of cop has a degree in philosophy?”

  He looked at me kind of sideways. “If you tell anyone else I’ll deny it, say sleeping with the undead has made you hallucinate.”

  “Trust me, Zerbrowski, if I hallucinated, it wouldn’t be about you.”

  “That is a low blow, Blake, I wasn’t even picking on you.” His cell phone rang. He flipped it open, still smiling about my low blow. “Zerbrow—” He never even got to finish his name, before his smile vanished. “Say again, Arnet, slower. Shit. We’re on our way. Holy items out. They’ll glow if the vamp is close.” He started to run, as he flipped the phone closed. I ran with him.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  We clattered onto the stairs before he answered. “Woman dead at the scene. Vamp missing. Apartment appears empty.”

  “Appears?” I said.

  “Vampires are tricky bastards,” he said.

  I would have argued, if I could have. But since I couldn’t, I saved my breath for running and beat Zerbrowski to his car. If we hadn’t both been afraid of what we’d find when we got to the scene, I would have teased him about it.

  62

  THE APARTMENT WAS so much nicer than the one we’d just come from. It was clean and neat enough to have pleased even my stepmother, Judith. Well, except for the dead woman on the carpet and the blood trail leading back to the bedroom. Other than that, the apartment looked freshly scrubbed.

  I know by now that murder happens in the best of neighborhoods. I know for a fact that economics, or neatness, or niceness are not barriers to violence. I know that, because I’ve seen dead bodies in some of the nicest houses. Everyone wants to believe that violence only happens in horrible places, where even the rats fear to go, but it isn’t true. I didn’t think I had any illusions left about murder and murderers, but I was wrong. Because the first thing I thought when I saw that neat-as-a-pin, well-decorated apartment with the dead woman on the carpet was, the body would have fit in Jack Benchely’s apartment better. Hell, you could have hidden her body in the coffee table debris.

  The body lay so close to the door that they’d had to move her arm just to open the door enough to let Arnet and Abrahams inside. Abrahams had transferred over from sex crimes. I glanced at him across the room, standing near the neat, sparkly kitchen. He was tall and thin with dark hair and an olive complexion. Brown seemed to be his favorite color, because I’d never seen him when he wasn’t wearing it. He was talking to Zerbrowski, who was taking notes.

  So far I hadn’t learned enough to need to take notes. Maybe it was because the bod
y was right at our feet. Arnet’s and mine. Dead bodies can be a real conversation stopper. The body was on its stomach, legs slightly spread, one hand reaching out toward the door, the other arm folded back where Arnet had moved it when she opened the door.

  Arnet was standing beside me, looking down at the body. She looked a little pale around the edges. Maybe it was only the lack of makeup, but I didn’t think so. She was actually wearing a little eye makeup and pale lipstick. But her eyes were a little big, and her skin pale against her short dark hair. Not like pale with contrast, but pale like I was ready to grab her elbow in case she started to faint on the body.

  I wanted to ask her if she was alright, but you don’t ask cops that, so I tried to get her talking. “How did you know she was in here?” I asked.

  She jumped and turned startled eyes to me. She was seriously spooked.

  “Why don’t we step outside and get some air?” I said.

  She shook her head, and I knew stubborn when I saw it, so I didn’t argue. “I saw blood under the door, or what I was almost certain was blood.”

  “Then what?”

  “I called for backup, and we kicked the door open.”

  “You and Abrahams,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “The door bounced into her arm, but we didn’t know it was her until we shoved the door again. I took low, and I was kneeling on the ground, so I saw her first. Saw that we were trying to shove the door through her.” Her voice shook a little at the end.

  “Let’s move over there by the kitchen, okay?”

  “I’m alright,” she said, and was angry suddenly. “Why is it that you think you’re the only woman that can handle this kind of shit?”

  I lifted eyebrows, but didn’t say anything for a count of five. I wasn’t mad, I just wasn’t sure what to say. I finally tried the truth. “I’m not the one that’s pale and looks ready to faint.”

  “I’m not going to faint,” she hissed at me. Angry whispers always sound so evil.