Dead Of Night

by J. D. Robb

  Dark hair framed it. Eyes of wild Irish blue gave her heart just a quick flutter that even after two years of having them look at her, just that way, was a surprise. Those perfectly sculpted lips curved as he said, “Lieutenant,” with the wisp of his homeland in the word.

  “How come you’re not busy buying Australia?”

  “I’m just between buying continents at the moment. I believe Asia ’s up next. And how are you?”

  “Okay. I know we had sort of a thing on for tonight-”

  “Dinner, I believe it was, followed by naked poker.”

  “That was strip poker, as I recall.”

  “You’d be naked soon enough. But I’m thinking that competition’s been postponed. You have Tiara Kent, I take it.”

  “Heard about her already?”

  “Multimillionaire bad girl murdered in her luxury penthouse?” His eyebrows lifted. “Word travels. How did she die?”

  “Vampire bite.”

  “That again?” he said and made her laugh.

  “She was into some kind of vampire cult crap, and it came back to, well, bite her. I’ve got to check out this club where she likely met her killer. It doesn’t open until sunset, so I’m going to run late.”

  “Almost as interesting as naked poker. I’ll meet you at Central by six. Darling Eve,” he continued before she could speak, “you can’t expect me to pass up the opportunity to accompany my wife into the den of the undead.”

  She considered a moment. He’d be useful; he always was. And another pair of eyes, another set of reflexes would come in handy underground.

  “Don’t be late.”

  “I’ll leave in plenty of time. Should I pick up some garlic and crosses on the way?”

  “I think Peabody ’s on that. Later,” she said, and clicked off.

  While she was at her desk, she contacted the lab to give them a not-so-gentle push, then began to research vampire lore. She broke off when Peabody poked her head in.

  “Did you know there are dozens of websites on vampirism, and any number of them have instructions on how to drink from a victim?”

  Peabody cocked her head. “This surprises you because?”

  “I know I say people suck, but I didn’t mean it literally. And it’s not just kids in their I’m-so-bored twenties into this.”

  “I’ve got a couple of names we might want to look at, but meanwhile, Tiara Kent ’s mother just came in. I had one of the uniforms take her to the lounge.”

  “Okay, I’ll take her, you keep digging.” Eve pushed back from her desk. “Roarke’s going to tag along tonight.”

  “Yeah?” Relief showed on Peabody ’s face before she controlled it. “It doesn’t hurt to have more of us when we head down.”

  “He’s an observer,” Eve reminded her. “I’m waiting for a callback from Mira. That comes through, tag me.”

  Eve made Iris Francine the minute she stepped into the lounge with its lines of vending machines and little tables, and chairs designed to numb the ass after a five-minute sit-down.

  Her daughter had favored her, taking the blonde hair, the green eyes, the delicate bone structure from her mother.

  Iris sat with her hand clutched by a man Eve imagined was husband number four, Georgio Francine. Younger than his wife by a few years, Eve judged, and dark and sultry where she was light and elegant.

  But they sat like a unit-she recognized that. Like two parts of a whole.

  “Ms. Francine, I’m Lieutenant Dallas.”

  Iris’s eyes looked exhausted as they lifted to Eve’s, a combination Eve also recognized as grief, guilt, and simple fatigue.

  “You’re the one in charge of…in charge of what happened to Tiara.”

  “That’s right.” Eve pulled up a chair. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. Will I be able to see her?”

  “I’ll arrange that for you.”

  “Can you tell me how she…what happened to her?” Iris’s breath hitched, and she took two slow ones to smooth it out. “They won’t tell me anything really. It’s worse not knowing.”

  “She was killed last night, in her apartment. We believe she knew her killer, and let him in herself. Some pieces of her jewelry are missing.”

  “Was she raped?”

  They would always ask, Eve knew. For a daughter, they would always ask, and with their eyes pleading for the answer to be no. “She’d had sexual relations, but we don’t believe there was rape.”

  “An accident?” There was another plea in Iris’s voice now, as if death wouldn’t be as horrible somehow if it were accidental. “Something that got out of hand?”

  “No, I’m sorry. We don’t believe it was an accident. What do you know about your daughter’s activities recently, her companions? The men in her life?”

  “Next to nothing.” Iris closed her eyes. “We didn’t communicate much, or often. I wasn’t a good mother.”

  “Cara.”

  “I wasn’t.” She shook her head at her husband’s quiet protest. “I was only twenty when she was born, and I wasn’t a good mother. I wasn’t a good anything.” The words were bitter with regret. “It was all parties and fun and where can we go next. When Tiara’s father had an affair, I had one to pay him back. And on and on, until we loathed each other and used her as a weapon.”

  She turned her shimmering eyes to her husband as he lifted their joined hands, pressed his lips to her fingers. “Long ago,” he said softly. “That was long ago.”

  “She never forgave me. Why should she? When we divorced, Tee’s father and I, I married again like that.” Iris snapped her fingers. “Just to show him he didn’t matter. I paid for that mistake six months later, but I didn’t learn. When I finally grew up, it was too late. She preferred her father, who’d let her do whatever she liked, with whomever she liked.”

  “You made mistakes,” Georgio told her. “You tried to fix them.”

  “Not hard enough, not soon enough. We have an eight-year-old daughter,” she told Eve. “I’m a good mother to her. But I lost Tiara long ago. Now I can never get her back. The last time we spoke, more than a month ago, we argued. I can never get that back either.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “Her lifestyle, primarily. I hated that she was wasting herself the way I did. She was pushing, pushing the boundaries more all the time. Her father’s engaged again, and this one’s younger than Tee. It enraged her, had her obsessing about getting older, losing her looks. Can you imagine, worried about such things at twenty-three?”

  “No.” Eve thought of the mirrors again, the clothes, the body work Tiara had done. Obviously, this was a young woman who obsessed about anything that had to do with herself. “Did she have any particular interest in the occult?”

  “The occult? I can’t say. She went through a period several years ago where she paid psychics great gobs of money. She dabbled in Wicca when she was a teenager-so many girls do-but she said there were too many rules. She was always looking for the easy way, for some magic potion to make everything perfect. Will you find who killed her?”

  “I’ll find him.”

  Even as Eve made arrangements to have the Francines transported to the morgue, she saw Mira come in. After an acknowledging nod, Mira wandered to a vending machine.

  She’d cut her hair again, Eve noted, so it was short and springy at the nape of her neck, and she’d done something to that soft sable color so that little wisps of it around her face were a paler tone. She sat, trim and pretty in her bluebonnet-colored suit, with two tubes of Diet Pepsi.

  “Iris Francine,” Mira stated when Eve came over. “I recognized her. Her face was everywhere a generation ago. I always thought her daughter was hell-bent on outdoing her mother’s youthful exploits. It seems she succeeded in the hardest possible way.”

  “Yeah, dying will get you considerable face time, for a while.”

  “Quite a while, I’ll wager in this case. Vampirism. I had a meeting one level up,” Mira explai
ned, “and thought to catch you in your office. Peabody gave me the basics. Murder by vampire proponents is very rare. For the most part, it’s the danger, the thrill, the eroticism that draws people-primarily young people. There is a condition-”

  “Renfield Syndrome. I’ve been reading up. What I’m getting from the people who knew the vic was a predilection to walk the edge, a desperation for fame, attention, a serious need to be and stay young and beautiful. She’d already had bodywork. And you have to add in sheer stupidity. I get her. She’s not unusual, she just had more money than most so she could indulge her every idiocy.”

  Eve paused as she broke the seal on the Pepsi tube. “It’s him. The method of killing was very specific, planned out, and there was no attempt to disguise it. He took jewelry, but that was more of the moment than motive. He went there to do exactly what he did, in exactly the way he did it.”

  “The compulsion may be his,” Mira considered. “A craving for the taste of blood, one that escalated to the need to drain his victim. Have you gotten the autopsy results as yet?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if they’ll find she drank blood as well. If so, you may be dealing with a killer who believes he’s a vampire, and who sought to turn her into one by taking her blood and sharing his own with her.”

  “And if at first you don’t succeed?”

  “Yes.” Mira’s eyes, a softer blue than her suit, met Eve’s. “He may very well try again. The rush, the power-particularly when coupled with sex and drugs-would be a strong pull. And she made it so easy for him, even profitable.”

  “How could he resist?”

  “And why should he?” Mira concurred. “He was able to enter her highly secured building undetected. More power, and again cementing the illusion of a supernatural being. She gave herself to him, through sex, through blood, through death. Held in thrall-whether by his will or chemicals-another element. He removed her blood from the scene. A souvenir perhaps, a trophy, or yet another element of his power. His need for blood, and his ability to take it. You believe she was drugged?”

  “I haven’t had that confirmed, but yeah. Her closest pal states she’d been using, and heavily, the last week or so.”

  “If he drank any of her blood, he’d have shared the drug.” Seeing Eve had already considered that, Mira nodded. “More power, or the illusion of it. From what you know, they’d only met a week or two earlier. It wasn’t eternal love, which is one way of romanticizing vampirism.”

  “I don’t get that.” Interrupting, Eve gestured with her drink. “The romantic part.”

  Mira’s lips curved. “Because you’re a pragmatic soul. But for some, for many, the idea of eternity, that seeking a mate throughout it, coupled with the living by night, the lack of human boundaries is extremely romantic.”

  “Takes all kinds.”

  “It does. However, the way he left the body wasn’t romantic, or even respectful. It was careless, cold. Whether or not he believes he could sire a vampire through her, she was no more than a vessel to him, a means to an end.

  “He’ll be young,” Mira continued. “No more than forty. Most likely attractive in appearance and in good health. Who would want eternal life if they were homely and physically disadvantaged?”

  “This vic wouldn’t have gone for anyone who wasn’t pretty anyway. Too vain. Her place was loaded with mirrors.”

  “Hmm. I wonder how she resigned herself to the lore that she’d have no reflection as a vampire.”

  “Could be she only bought what she wanted to buy.”

  “Perhaps. He’ll be precise, erudite, clever. Sensual. He may be bisexual, or believe himself to be as in lore, vampires will bed and bite either sex. He will, at least for the moment, feel invulnerable. And that will make him very dangerous.”

  Eve drank some of her soft drink, smiled. “Knowing I’m mortal makes me very dangerous.”

  Four

  Eve grabbed the tox report the second it came through. Then she stared at the results. She engaged her interoffice ’link, said only, “ Peabody,” then went back to studying the lab’s findings.

  “Yo,” Peabody said a moment later at Eve’s office doorway.

  “Tox report. Take a look.” Eve passed her a printout while she continued to read her computer screen.

  “Holy crap. It’s not what she took,” Peabody decided, “it’s more what didn’t she take.”

  “Hallucinogens, date-rape drugs, sexual enhancers, paralytic, human blood, tranq, all mixed in wine. Hell of a cocktail.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Peabody glanced over the printout. “You?”

  “Not with so many variables and with this potency. It’s new to me, but let’s run it by Illegals and see if it’s new to them. According to the results, and the time line, she downed this herself, before she disengaged the alarm, or just after. Maybe she knew what was in it, maybe she didn’t. But she drank it down, on her own.”

  “Hard to say, seeing she’s dead, but she pretty much wins the stupid prize.”

  “All-time champ.” Eve paused as her machine signalled another incoming. “And we may have a runner-up. We’ve got DNA.” She scanned the data quickly. “Semen, saliva, and the blood she ingested. All the same donor.”

  “Pretty damn careless of him,” Peabody commented.

  “Yeah.” Eve frowned at the screen. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Another conclusion is he just didn’t care-being a vampire.” Peabody shrugged as Eve glanced back at her. “He doesn’t care if we match his DNA because he’ll just, I don’t know, turn into a bat and fly off, or poof into smoke. Whatever.”

  “Right. A whole new scope on going into the wind.”

  “I’m not saying it’s what I think, but maybe what he thinks.”

  “We’ll be sure to ask him when we find him. Meanwhile, go ahead and run the cocktail by Illegals. I’ll do a standard search for the DNA match. Maybe he’s in the system.”

  But she didn’t think so. He wasn’t careless, Eve thought. He was fucking arrogant. It didn’t surprise her when her search turned up negative.

  “Lieutenant.”

  She glanced over, experienced that quick heart punch when her eyes met Roarke’s. He was dressed in the dark suit he’d put on in their bedroom that morning, one of the countless he owned tailored to fit his long, rangy frame.

  “Right on time,” she said.

  “We aim to please.” He stepped in, eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. “How goes the vampire hunting?”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to call in Van Helsing.” When he lifted his brows and grinned, she shrugged. “I do my research. Plus I’ve sat through some of those old vids you like so much.”

  “And so armed, we’ll venture into the den of the children of the night. Never a dull moment,” he added and flicked his fingers at the choppy ends of her hair. “Your case is all over the media.”

  “Yeah. Bound to be.”

  “I noticed the primary hasn’t given a statement.”

  “I’m not going to play the game on this one, or give this asshole the satisfaction. She drugged her own brains out prior-mix of Zeus, Erotica, Whore, Rabbit, Stunner, Bliss, Boost, along with a few other goodies, including her killer’s blood.”

  “There’s an ugly recipe.”

  “And my money says he provided the brew, pushed on her vanity and stupid buttons, got his rocks off, then drained her like a faulty motor.”

  “For what purpose?” Roarke wondered.

  “Best I can tell, he wound her up because he could. And he killed her because he could. He’ll want to do it again, real soon.”

  “Foolish of him, don’t you think, to have chosen such a high-profile victim?”

  She’d considered that, and had to appreciate being married to a man who could think like a cop. “Yeah, smarter, safer to bite a vagrant off the street. But this was more fun, more exciting. Why snack on street whores or sidewalk sleepers, the nobodies, when you can gorge yourself
on the prime? Plus, it was profitable. A street level LC isn’t going to be sporting blue diamonds. He’s stoked, believe it, watching all the media coverage.”

  “Unless he’s spent the day napping in his coffin.”

  “Ha, ha.” She pushed up, instinctively brushed a hand over the weapon at her side. “Almost sundown. Let’s go clubbing.”

  Peabody was lying in wait, along with her cohab, E-Division Detective McNab. He wasn’t just a fashion plate, but an entire place setting, and was decked out in pants of neon blue that appeared to be made up almost entirely of pockets. He’d matched it with a bright green jacket with streaks of yellow jagged across it and some sort of skinny tank that melded all the colors of the spectrum in a kind of eye-searing cloudburst.

  “I thought we could use another pair of eyes,” Peabody began even as Eve’s eyes narrowed. “You know, strength in numbers.”

  “I did a rotation in Illegals when I was still in uniform.” McNab grinned out of his pretty, narrow face. “And when I worked Vice, we ran into all kinds of freaky shit.”

  “You don’t want to miss a chance to cruise a vampire club.”

  He smile turned winsome. “Who would?”

  She could use him, Eve thought, but she gave him the hard-eye first, just for form. “This isn’t a damn double date.”

  “No, sir.” So he waited until Eve turned her back to walk to the elevator before hooking pinkies with Peabody.

  “Illegals hasn’t worked the combo,” Peabody began once they’d shoehorned into the elevator. “They don’t even have Bloodbath on their list of watch points. But they have worked a combination of Erotica, Bliss, Rabbit, with traces of blood-usually animal blood-in cases of vampire fetishism. They call it Vamp, and the use generally skews young. They haven’t had any homicides as a result of.”

  “Our guy upped the stakes, considerably. Have to wonder why the club hasn’t made their list.”

  “It’s new,” Peabody told her. “Way underground. Hadn’t hit their radar until I contacted them regarding our investigation.”

  “Underground clubs pop up faster than weeds,” McNab put in. “Live or die on word of mouth. Since it’s more than urban legend that people tend to go down and not come back up, they don’t get heavy tourist traffic.”