by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
My gut was making me wonder if maybe I could find some answers here. Maybe even clear up the idea that I’d had a fruit-loop moment. No more psych evaluations for me, thank you. Two months at the callback center had been nearly enough to make me lose my mind, so I tried to remain pragmatic.
“There could be an explanation about what happened to Thora.”
“I want you to be right, Shell. I don’t want her to be dead. Only I think she really is. I think they drained her blood. You could find out for sure. You are a detective.”
“Not anymore I’m not. I’m a trainer at the academy,” I reminded her, though in my heart of hearts…
“You just hit a bump in the road. If anyone can find the truth of what happened, you can. Detecting is what you were born to do.”
Who knew me better than my twin?
I was pumped at the idea of getting back into an actual case—one possibly related to my biggest failure. My blood was already rushing through my body so fast I could feel my pulse. But I couldn’t do this through the department. If I made an official report, I’d be headed for Psych City in no time.
I couldn’t let that happen, not again.
Before I went public with this, I would have to make sure I had some kind of evidence that a crime had been committed. A witness who wouldn’t do a disappearing act. Maybe even the murderer himself.
“I just have to get on the inside without anyone being suspicious of my motives.”
“How?” Silke asked.
“We do what we did when we were kids. We fool everyone. We trade places.”
Chapter 3
Trade places. Was I out of my mind? I winced at the reference and tried to convince myself not.
Pretending to be a cop, Silke would last…oh, about thirty seconds. On the other hand, I could probably get away with pretending to be her for a while.
If I decided to do it—how could I not…what would a night or two hurt?—I would see if anyone knew Thora’s whereabouts, make sure she was missing. I’d already called Detective Stella Jacobek, a friend in the department, to get an official update. No Jane Doe found along Lake Street or anywhere nearby. No call to report Thora Nelson missing, either, which didn’t surprise me since Silke had said the girl was from southern Illinois and didn’t have anyone here.
No one but an Elvin Mowry, the head of this bizarre vampire cult.
Assuming Raven came back to the bar, I would talk to her myself. If she didn’t, I would see if I could get an address on her. A phone number. A last name.
Equally important, I would get the lay of the land, see how dangerous this vampire cult seemed to be.
Cults. That was the reason I hadn’t cancelled lunch with Mom. Could I get her to share what she knew without arousing her suspicions?
“Silke, must you wear so much makeup away from your job?” were the first words out of Mom’s mouth.
“Hi, Mom, love you, too.” Silke gave our mother a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
I didn’t move to follow suit. Neither did Mom.
The criticism of my sister was uncalled for, especially since Silke had gone conservative to please Mom. Her hair was neatly coiled at the base of her neck, and she had a pale, languid, smudgy-eyed look, which was nothing like the Halloween mask she’d worn the night before. Mom, on the other hand, had let loose—well, for her—with lipstick and a hint of blush and hair out of its tight confinement.
Me, I went light on the makeup. My pale skin looked decent au natural, and my green eyes were large enough that a simple swipe of mascara brought them out. My chestnut hair was long and thick enough to look good in a ponytail. So I could stick my lipstick and wallet in my pocket and I’d be good to go. Not having a purse simplified life.
I’d picked up Silke and we’d met Mom at the ritzy second-floor North Michigan Avenue restaurant. Our table overlooked the street. The food order settled, my mind drifted back to the Goth bar and vampire cult. “So, Mom, you never told me the results of your meeting with Aniceto.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “He filled me in with the history of cult activity in Chicago. Homegrown religions. Satanic groups.”
“Weird stuff, huh?” I asked, immediately pushing it. “Like sacrifices—have you heard about any kind of bloodletting?”
Silke gaped at me. I’m sure she was horrified that I might tell Mom about the night before.
Mom frowned at me. “You’re not a detective anymore, so why the sudden interest?”
“I’ve always been interested in your work.” Which was the truth. “Maybe you just never noticed.”
“Hmm, seems to me there’s more to it, Shelley. You’re not happy at the academy, are you?”
Also true, but how had this suddenly become about me? It was supposed to be my interrogation. She did know something—I could read that much from her.
“Back to the cult discussion—”
“I knew being away from the action wouldn’t suit you.”
“You mean my doing something that landed me on the psych couch didn’t suit you.”
“Can we all get along just for one lunch?” Silke asked. “We should be supportive of each other.”
Luckily the food arrived, cutting short the quibbling.
Not to mention my third-degree. Apparently Mom wasn’t going to tell me anything. Maybe she thought if she did, I would screw things up…just like with the Sanford case.
Unfortunately, Silke and I had never lived up to our mother’s professional standards, but Silke had the good sense to stay as far away from police work as she could. On the other hand, I had no sense. I’d stepped right into Mom’s arena. I thought my becoming a detective would stir her maternal pride. Hah. I heard more praise from my lieutenant, and that wasn’t saying much.
After being given the crappiest caseload in history for an entire year—mostly simple assault cases where threats never actually turned into violence or called for my investigation skills, but rather generated a lot of paperwork—I’d hooked on to a big multiple homicide as a subordinate to the very male detectives in charge, of course. And just when Norelli and Walker had been ready to blow off the case due to lack of anything to follow, I’d found a key witness through an informant. Thank you, Junior Diaz.
That little gift should have made me the toast of Area 4. Yeah, burned toast. Male coppers didn’t like looking bad. Liked it even less when shown up by a woman. And they hung together. So I was on the outs in the office. Worse, Norelli and Walker got all the credit and media attention because it was Norelli’s case. I could have done without the last, but at least I would have appreciated departmental recognition.
Losing a body had ended any hopes for my career as a detective. Silke was right that detecting was my life. Mom was right that I missed the action. I wanted to be right about something. I wanted a do-over. I wanted to find the creep who’d killed LaTonya Sanford so she would stop haunting me. I wanted to sleep at nights and not have to get up to watch reality TV.
I’d thought it through and I was ready to go back in and find a way to make things right.
After lunch, I insisted on going back to my place to go over everything in my mind.
Alone.
I needed to psych myself before going ahead with my plan.
LaTonya Sanford had gotten to me in the deepest way possible. Guilt. Though her body had disappeared, I knew in my gut the teenager had been murdered. The case had never been dead for me. I knew it would never be until I’d solved it. The similarity between LaTonya and Thora was simply too in-my-face to ignore.
Once inside my apartment, I made over the cats, fed them and put on a pot of coffee.
After which, I stared at the tattered folder still on the low table in front of the couch. I stared down at it for a moment and simply breathed, tried to get that catch out of my chest. I was wound up.
A cup of strong French roast cleared my head.
Feeling renewed, I parked myself on the couch and once more stared at the folder as one of the cats jumped up
beside me. Sarge. I didn’t have to look at him. I knew him by feel and sound. He purred noisily and settled next to my hip. A flurry of fur caught my eye as it landed delicately on the table next to the folder. Cadet. She always tried to get in my way when I was concentrating the hardest. Knowing they were starving for affection, I petted both cats before taking a long slug of coffee.
Then I opened the folder.
LaTonya Sanford stared out at me. She had been a beautiful girl. An innocent girl from all accounts.
A very dead girl.
I would swear to that on a stack of Bibles.
I went over everything in the folder for maybe the hundredth time. I especially concentrated on the cult research I’d done. I’d caught a feature about cults on one of those reality cop shows, and instinct had led me to investigate cults that required blood sacrifice.
Like vampire cults.
One of the stories was about a woman who was led into a room naked and made to lie down on a raised dais draped with bloodred velvet. A nude man poured the contents of a pitcher onto the woman…the mingled blood of the other cult members, who then licked every drop off her. The man who’d poured the blood then sank sharpened eyeteeth into the woman’s neck and drank, after which he slit himself below his groin and made the woman drink from him.
There were other accounts, equally disturbing, combining blood sacrifice with sex.
Is that what had happened to LaTonya? And now to Thora?
The accounts of cult rituals I had gathered didn’t include murder, but accidents happened.
I was as sure that LaTonya Sanford had been dead when I’d checked her vitals as I was of anything.
“What happened to you?” I asked her black-and-white photo.
I had to find out.
Though I was armed, that healthy tickle of fear kept me vigilant as I approached one of the remaining project high-rises in the complex where the Sanford family lived. No one was safe there. Not the residents. Not the police. When responding to a call, a cop I knew had been wounded by a sniper on the roof. Last year, some scum had even thought it fun to shoot at the school in the buildings’ midst. Rather than being repaired as they fell apart, the buildings were being demolished, one at a time, and the residents dispersed to hopefully better living conditions throughout the city.
Ironically, though, LaTonya Sanford had survived the projects only to be killed halfway to the Lake Street area near the bar, in what was considered a safer area.
I’d called ahead to make certain her family hadn’t been moved out, so I went right in. The building’s hallway was dark, a single bare bulb lighting the way to the elevator. I knew that often elevators in these buildings weren’t operational, that residents had to use the narrow, poorly lit stairways where gangbangers sometimes awaited them.
The elevator doors opened within seconds of my pressing the call button.
A few minutes later, I knocked at the apartment door.
Mrs. Sanford herself opened it. She was still a young woman in her early to midthirties, but I swear she’d aged a decade since we’d last met. Losing a child could do that to a person. I’d seen it happen too many times in this city.
“Detective Caldwell,” she said in a soft, musical voice. She stepped back to let me in.
“Mrs. Sanford.”
I inclined my head as I passed her. I couldn’t say it was good to see her, not under the circumstances. I’d been here before, so I was already familiar with the painted concrete-block walls and the scattering of worn furniture. The family’s poverty was evident, but so was the mother’s pride. The room was neat and several plants bloomed in the window. She offered me an iced tea, which I accepted. When she brought two glasses back from the kitchen, we sat opposite each other, me in a chair, her on the couch.
I sipped at the tea. “Mmm, good.” As much as I hated to do so, I had to ask. “You never heard from LaTonya, right?”
“You told me she was dead. You found her.”
“But her body disappeared. You know the department considers her a runaway.”
“Not my LaTonya. She’d let me know if she was alive.”
“I understand. I had to ask.”
“You got new evidence or something?”
“I’m afraid not. But your daughter haunts me, Mrs. Sanford. I wanted to take another look at the case.”
“You so interested, how come you never answered my call? I left a message.”
“I’m sorry, but I never got it. When was this?”
“A couple weeks after.”
At which time I was under psychiatric evaluation. Of course they wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Forget a message that might be important. “Your call—what was it about?”
“I got my baby’s purse back.”
“One she was using that night?”
Mrs. Sanford nodded. “Someone must of found it. Got delivered in the mail in a big envelope. No money. Someone had kindness to return it, though.” Mrs. Sanford rose, saying, “It’s right over here.”
As the victim’s mother crossed to some shelving, I thought about the implication. Someone had found the purse. A potential witness? But my elation deflated when she returned to the couch and handed me the purse, still in a big brown envelope.
No return address.
No note included.
No clue as to the sender.
But Mrs. Sanford watched me with an expectant expression, and I couldn’t bear to let her down by saying what I was thinking, that getting the purse back might be of no help whatsoever. It was highly unlikely that there would even be viable fingerprints.
Instead of discouraging her, I fetched a couple of tissues—I didn’t happen to have plastic gloves on me, of course—and handled the bag carefully so as not to smudge prints if there actually were any that might be identified. Opening it, I turned it upside down and let everything spill out on a table. My gaze quickly swept over the contents, then stalled out. My pulse jumped and my mouth went dry as my gaze connected with a pack of matches.
The cover was black, the letters scarlet: Heart of Darkness.
My own heart was thudding. Hard.
I now had evidence of a connection between the two missing girls.
“Jeez, hold still,” Silke said as she applied a second coat of white makeup over my face and shoulders.
It was early evening and we were back at her place and in the midst of some hocus-pocus that would let me pretend to be her tonight. But the longer it took, the harder it was for me not to squirm. This was torture.
“How do you go through this every day?” I asked, my throat still dry from inhaling the loose powder Silke had dusted me with in between makeup layers.
“It’s a ritual that gives me pleasure. You know, time to think.”
I knew it took her at least an hour to get Goth. And that was in addition to coloring her hair bloodred, which she’d already done to me. Luckily, I’d convinced her that I would strangle her with my bare hands if I couldn’t easily get my hair back to normal, so on the way home, we’d picked up a product that washed out.
“Why don’t you go over the important stuff while I do your eyes?” Silke ordered.
“Okay, okay.” Trying to ignore the thick black pencil about to attack my eye, I concentrated on the people she’d told me about—the major players, so to speak. “Desiree Leath, owner of Heart of Darkness…tall, thin, pale, long blue-black hair. Hung Chung, head security guard of the whole alternative scene, both bar and shops…Asian, the sides of his head shaved. Jake DeAtley, bartender…classic dark and handsome good looks, a small scar on his cheek. Blaise Allcock, tattoo and piercing artist…fair and somewhat effeminate, his arms tattooed from shoulders to wrists. Elvin Mowry, head of the supposed vampire clan and Thora’s squeeze…slender pretty boy with spiked purple hair. Thora Nelson, beautiful, black shoulder-length hair with red streaks. Wait a minute. What about Raven?”
“She looks like a little bird—fragile with short black hair that tufts out like r
uffled feathers. She also has three eyebrow rings.”
“Got it.”
My plan was to work at the bar for a night or two and not only get the lay of the land, but to see what people knew about LaTonya and Thora. I’d never made the connection to the bar before, because that alley where I’d found LaTonya’s body had been several blocks north, and the area that lay between was an old manufacturing district. But now I figured she could have been walking home from the bar. I hoped Raven would show because Silke didn’t have a last name on her. If she didn’t show, then I would try to get someone to tell me where I could find her.
“Your memory has always been right on,” Silke said, switching the black pencil to my other eye. “But just in case, I’ll tune in, make sure you stay on track.”
Though having backup was always a good idea, Silke’s poking around in my head wasn’t. “If I get stuck, I can call you on my cell.”
“We have different strengths, Shell. This one’s mine, so let me do what I can do.”
“You’ve done your part,” I insisted, keeping my voice firm without raising it. “Leave the investigation to me.”
Thankfully, Silke didn’t argue.
When we’d first showed signs of being in synch, Mom had told us we should each be our own person and not draw attention to the fact that we were different or people would treat us…well, like we were different. Even as a kid, the connection had me freaked, and since I’d wanted to fit in, I’d tuned Silke out.
That was the thing about us. We had different strengths. Mine was logic and focus and fearlessness on the street. Silke, on the other hand, got into the woo-woo of life, a place I really didn’t want to visit.
So when she said, “Um, Shell, there’s something I didn’t tell you,” while outlining my lips with that same black pencil, my warning antenna went up.
“Mmph-umph,” I muttered, not wanting that black line to go off and give me a weird smile.
“You know the vampire cult I told you about…” Her expression wary, she stopped the outlining and backed up. “Well, there’s worse.”
