Not that he would ever consider ascribing a series of murders to vampires.
Unless... Unless he could prove the existence of multigeneradonal medical vampirism within a specific family.
A family of medical vampires that had killed fifteen thousand people?
He had to stop thinking about this. He had to put it out of his mind.
He opened his eyes, stared at his darkened computer screen. One of the reasons his brain was running along this track was the last series of faxes he'd received from that hick police chief in Rio Verde.
Apparently, a housewife claimed that her daughter had been abducted by Elvis. Ordinarily, he would have assumed that the woman was in shock because her daughter was missing or that she was already planning her insanity defense in case her daughter's body was found and she'd done a poor job of hiding her involvement. But the fact that the police had not ordered any psychological tests for the woman and were apparently treating this as an ordinary missing persons case, and the fact that this incident, bizarre as it was, fit cozily into the mainstream of current events in Rio Verde, made Rossiter take it a little more seriously himself.
Could Elvis be a vampire?
That was just too far out to even consider.
He needed to get out of Phoenix, get back over to Rio Verde, and check things out for himself. He'd made a big deal of his jurisdictional authority on his last trip there, but he hadn't been back since. He'd been so absorbed in this computer search that he'd virtually abandoned legwork the past week or so and had given the case back to Captain Hick by default.
He was turning into a petty bureaucrat.
He was turning into Engles.
Working here could do that to an agent.
Rossiter reached into his pocket, took out his key ring, and found the key to the computer. He shut off the monitor, locked the keyboard, but kept the computer on to retain the information he'd accessed. He stood, pocketed his keys, then walked over to the elevators. He was going stir-crazy in here. Outside, the day was overcast] "patch of light gray and white clouds covering the sky over Phoenix, a wall of black storm clouds massing above the desert to the north. Across the street, a small group of cowboy-hatted Indians stood blocking the doorway of a bar, talking among themselves. Next door, a team of well-dressed lawyers were posed on the courthouse steps, addressing a news crew from Channel 10. In the real world, it was business as usual.
But in Rio Verde, people and animals and insects were having the bodily fluids sucked out of them through holes in their necks, and Elvis Presley was kidnapping little girls.
What would J. Edgar do in a situation like this?
Go home crying to mama, a small mean part of him said.
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled a cigarette out of the pack, put it in his mouth, and lit it. He stared up at the sky and wondered if it was going to rain.
It was raining outside, a light drizzle, and though she couldn't hear it on the roof, she could see the mist on the stained glass windows and could feel the cool dampness in the air. Sitting at her desk, opening today's mail, Corrie glanced over at the Pastor Clan Wheeler. He was at his own desk, leaning back in his chair and smiling at her. She smiled back.
For the past week, the pastor had kept her busy doing menial paperwork, filing old invoices, paying bills, reading and answering all mail, even the form letters. He had remained with her at all times, had been so omnipresent as to be suspicious. She began to wonder if he suspected her of something. He definitely seemed to be watching her, keeping an eye on her.
She took the electric bill out of its envelope and put it in her in-box. She hazarded another glance at the pastor. He was still smiling at her. "
She felt happy being here, content in the presence of the pastor, but she was starting to worry about her position in the church. For the past week, the chapel and all other rooms within the complex had been sealed off from the outside, the doors padlocked, and she was confined to the office. If she had to go to the bathroom, the pastor made her use one of the porta-potties set up outside for the construction workers and volunteers. Out of all of the rooms in the growing church, she was allowed only in this one.
All that had been strange enough, but today things were even stranger.
It was nothing that had happened, nothing she could pinpoint. It was a feeling. Things were different today.
She suddenly wished she'd worn the jade necklace. Last week, Rich had tried to bully her into wearing it, telling her that he'd bought it in order to protect her from vampires, but she'd responded that her faith in Jesus was the only protection she needed. She'd made a show of leaving the necklace at home, on her dresser.
Now she wished that she'd worn it. Something within her sensed that the necklace should have been worn to day, that it would have helped her, would have .. . protected her. From what she did not know, but her neck felt bare and naked, like her finger had the time she'd lost her wedding ring.
"Corrie," the pastor said.
" "Yes?" She looked up. In person, in a one-to-one set ting, Wheeler's voice did not have the authority that it had on the pulpit, but what it lost in strength it gained in intimacy, and in many ways that was even more powerful
"Jesus wants to meet you."
A thrill of excitement shot-through her, but she was aware of another feeling, a feeling of apprehension some where deep inside her.
The necklace suddenly seemed very important.
"He wants you to deliver the sacrifice."
Corrie's hands were trembling, and her mouth was dry.
"He wants me to deliver the sacrifice?" The preacher stood. "Yes."
"I'm honored," she said.
"Follow me." Corrie followed him outside into the drizzle, around the side of the building to the locked door of the first addition. Wheeler withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, pulling it open.
They walked into the addition. Like the outside, the inside of the building was painted black. She would have thought that extra lights would be installed to compensate for the darkness, but the illumination in here was purposefully dim, the primitive bulbs a soft yellowish white. In the murky shadowed corner, she saw figures moving, and she heard the sound of sawing. Construction, as always, was continuing.
She followed the preacher through another set of doors and down an unlit hallway. There were windows here, but they were of the darkest stained glass---navy blue and crimsonmand let in very little light.
Then they were in the chapel.
Corrie had wondered why sermons had been held outside for the past two Sundays, and she'd assumed that it was because of the construction and remodeling that were taking place in the chapel.
She saw now that that was not the reason at all. Wheeler stood just inside the doorway, beaming proudly, staring at her, gauging her reaction. Corrie looked into the chapel, awed, impressed, and, above all, enraptured. The church she had known was gone. There was no floor, only board paths over dirt that led toward three huge holes in the ground. Each hole was approximately the size of her bedroom and partially ringed by a small group of men and women. Piles of trash stood behind each group. Wooden bridges, apparently made from the backs of pews, stretched over the tops of the holes. The altar was still in place, but there were bodies lying atop it, leaning against the pulpit, placed in the choir cubicles. The bodies were all mummified, and although they appeared to be ancient, she thought she recognized some of the faces. The windows had all been painted black.
And it was beautiful. "Come with me," Wheeler said, and she followed him into the chapel.
She stared at the people standing next to the openings in the earth.
These, she assumed, were part of the, church's inner circle, those parishioners who had been with the preacher from the beginning and whom he knew to be loyal. Among the first group she recognized Bill Covey.
And Tammette Walker from the bank. Some of the others looked familiarmshe'd seen them in church or around town--but she could no
t put names to the faces.
She wonder, when these people had come in here. how. She did been in the office since eight this morning and had heard or seen nothing, no one going in or out.
They reached the first hole, and she saw that what she had at first taken for trash was actually a collection of small trees and shrubs.
Next to the shrubs were coffee cans, filled with what looked like ultra-black and unusually large coffee beans.
Wheeler noticed the direction of her gaze. "Insects," he explained.
"Snacks for the Savior."
She nodded, looked toward the other openings. Dead animals--cats and dogs and mice and rabbits were piled next to the second hole.
The nude, unmoving forms of two women, a man, and a child were lying behind the third group of people, the child lying lengthwise across the buttocks of the women.
Corrie returned her attention to the first hole. It was the bugs and plants that struck her as the most peculiar, and although she knew that she should be shocked by all of this, particularly by the people, she was acutely aware of the fact that she was not. Her thoughts felt strangely slow, her brain numb. '
Covey smiled at her. "We proffer our offerings to the Lord, and He looks upon us with favor. Are you to deliver the sacrifice today?"
"Yes," Wheeler answered for her. "Where is the infant Corrie looked into the opening. The hole did not continue straight down, as she'd assumed, but sloped, curved, turned into a tunnel some fifteen feet below the rim. It was dark but not black; there was a hazy glow coming from somewhere beneath the earth.
One of the women from the group by the third hole, an old lady Corrie did not know, brought forth a baby and handed it to the preacher. The baby was dead, its tiny eyes staring blindly at nothing as its head flopped from side to side on its too small neck. It had been a boy before the castration.
Covey and another man walked into the gloom beyond the other side of the opening. They returned with a heavy retractable metal construction ladder. Holding the ladder by the top rung, they placed it over the hole. The other sections scoped downward, clanking into place as the ladder expanded. The bottom of the ladder reached the bottom of the hole, or the point where the hole began to curve, and the two men leaned the top of the ladder against the side of the dirt.
"Go down," Wheeler said.
Corrie had always been afraid of heights, had never even liked stairways with gaps between the steps, let alone ladders, but now she had no fear and walked around to the opposite side of the hole, accepting Covey's hand as he assisted her onto the top rung.
She climbed quickly down.
Wheeler came after her, clutching the dead baby in his right hand, holding onto the ladder with his left.
The roof of the tunnel was high, Corrie noticed, and rounded, as though it had been created by the passage of a giant earthworm. The dirt on the floor and roof and sides was smooth. Looking up the way she had come, she could see, around the rim, a ring of joyous faces. They were singing. A hymn. "Shall We Gather At The River," it sounded like, although those words did not seem to correspond to what was being sung.
Wheeler reached the bottom and immediately moved away from the ladder.
There was excitement in his step and also fear. "Jesus is waiting," he said. He did not even look at Corrie but began walking down the tunnel toward the far end, where a pink glow pulsed faintly.
Corrie followed him. That numb sense of emotional disassociation was still with her, but there was a pleasant glow beneath the numbness, a contentment spreading outward from somewhere deep within her being.
Wheeler turned to look at her, and there was joy in his face, rapture in his eyes. "Jesus walks these halls," he said wonderingly. "He lives here now."
He lives here now.
The words made her feel warm and tingly inside. They stopped walking.
Corrie estimated that they were now under the building next door to the church. The preacher handed her the dead baby. She took it from him, entranced by the cold rubbery feel of its skin, by the inert heaviness of its form. Wheeler cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was in the strong oratorical tone of his sermons "We have come to praise Thee, oh Jesus. We have come to pay tribute to the Lord of Hosts."
There was the sound of wind, but there was no wind, the sound of water but no water, and then, out of the pink glow before them, came Jesus.
He glided rather than walked, moving with a fluid smoothness, and His presence was as awesome as Wheeler had said. More so. He was perfection, divinity in human form, the living embodiment of God.
Corrie fell instinctively to her knees, as did Pastor
Wheeler. Tears of joy slid down her face, but she did not wipe them away, she did not want them to stop. She held forth the body of the infant. Jesus stepped up to her and, with tender fingers, took the baby.
She was nearly blinded by His beauty, by the elegance of His being, nearly stunned into silence, but she man aged to whisper, "For you."
Jesus nodded graciously. He held the baby to His lips, bit carefully into it and, with kneading fingers, began to drink.
"Welcome," Wheeler said, "to the Kingdom of God."
Robert walked into his office, tossed his hat at the rack, and missed.
He did not bother to pick it up but sat down, slumping tiredly in his chair.
It was then that he noticed what had been left on his desk: a gun, a badge, an ID card, and one sentence on a sheet of yellow legal paper:
"I cannot serve both God and mammon."
It was signed by Jud and dated yesterday.
Robert stormed out of his office, clutching the note in his hand. "What is this shit?" He strode over to Lee Anne desk, waved the paper at her. "Did you see him do this?" She looked up at him, confused.
"Who?"
"Jud." He dropped the note on her desk, watching as she read it. "Did he talk to you about this?"
"No," she said. "Stu?" He turned toward the other officer. "Were you here when Jud put this on my desk?"
Stu shook his head. " "Shit." Robert reached down, grabbed Lee Anne phone, and dialed Jud's number. The line was busy, and he slammed the receiver in its cradle. "Get him for me," he ordered the secretary.
"Keep trying until he answers and patch him through. I want to talk to him."
"Yes, sir." Robert strode angrily back to his office, telling himself to calm down, not to overreact. He walked over to the window, stared out at the highway, trying to figure out why Jud would just quit like this without first talking to him. The two of them had been friends for years, since they'd both been patrolmen, and they'd never, to Robert's knowledge, had a serious falling out. Even if he made up his mind to quit, Jud still should have talked to him.
What the hell was he going to do with one less man and all this crap going down?
Robert glanced toward the fax machine, grateful for once for its presence. The machine, until now an annoyance and a reminder of the FBI's unwanted interference, suddenly represented a link with the outside world, an anchor to reason and reality.
He needed that right now.
He looked out the window again, noticed how few cars were on the highway. Complaints about the church had tapered off the past two days. Complaints about every thing had tapered off. He didn't like that. It wasn't natural. There were bound to be fights somewhere in town, noisy neighbors, illegally parked cars blocking driveways.
Something. But here at the station, normally command central for all town trouble, it seemed as if Rio Verde was deserted. No phones rang; no people came in.
Lee Anne had noticed it too, he knew. As had Stu. Both of them were less talkative than usual, jumpier, more on edge. Stu was on desk duty and was catching up with his paperwork, but there was a strange, almost desperate quality to his typing, Robert thought. Lee Anne had spent half the morning staring at a single article in People magazine.
He was not feeling so hot himself. Last night, he had been awakened long after midnight by the sound of low laughing, a
sound that grew quickly in power and volume. He had recognized the distinctive tone and pitch of the laughter and had immediately pulled open his bedroom shades, and he'd seen, standing out in the desert in the moonlight, beneath the thin leafless branches of a palo verde tree, what he was afraid he would see. The Laughing Man.
The figure disappeared the second he laid eyes on it, fading back into the blackness, the laughter dissipating into the sound of a light breeze, but the feeling that the Laughing Man was still out there, watching the house-waitingnmade Robert unable to fall back asleep, and he spent the rest of the night watching old Westerns on TNT, his loaded pistol and a clip of extra ammunition on the end table next to him.
Tonight he was going to have two officers stake out the house, armed with guns and jade, holy water and crucifixes. Maybe then he would be able to get some sleep.
The phone rang, an inside call. He hurried over to his desk, picked up the receiver. "Yes?"
It was Lee Anne "Jud's line isn't busy anymore, but he's not answering. Do you want me to keep trying?"
"Keep trying until you get him."
"Gotcha."
Robert hung up the phone. He sat down in his chair, picked up Jud's badge, hefted it in his hand, then threw it against the wall, where it hit with a disconcertingly tiny thump.
Rich stopped by at lunch to deliver copies of the newspaper, laying a stack on the front counter next to the March of Dimes donation can, and bringing one back to Robert's office. He dropped the paper on the desk and pointed to Sue's story beneath the fold on the front page, to the two-deck headline "Vampires Can Be Killed, Chinese Experts Say."
Robert smiled wanly. "Chinese experts?"
"People believe authority. And I think Sue's grandma qualifies."
"So when do we get to meet this old woman? We're sup posed to be following her lead, taking her word as gospel, and we've never even met her. I don't feel right placing my trust in someone I don't know. It doesn't sit well with me."
"I thought we could go over to the restaurant for lunch, meet her now.
I have some things I want to talk to her about, too."
"Now?" Robert shook his head. "I have to wait for Joe
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