Bloodlinks

by Lee Killough

  Girimonte shrugged. “Yes there are differences, but...you’re wrong about him not having position. You see his address? It’s upstairs from the club. He owned Afterglow. Took over from his father, who opened it after the end of Prohibition.”

  Fowler blinked, then grinned. “Really? And he still played the piano like a regular musician.”

  “The manager says his father did the same. But as for not being her kind of victim...” He turned to Garreth. “...you weren’t either, and she tried to kill you.”

  “Because I had knowledge she considered a threat.”

  “Maybe Knight did, too,” Girimonte said. “If he saw her around and recognized her, maybe he made the mistake of letting her know.”

  “Makes sense, Mik-san.”

  Garreth shook his head. “No. If she felt threatened, yes, she’d kill...but Lane’s not stupid. This was a cold case, and she’d know that kind of kill would heat it up again, defeating the whole purpose of silencing Knight.”

  “So you think there’s a copycat?” Now Harry shook his head. “It’d have to be someone with intimate knowledge of the case since you know we never released details like the puncture wounds.”

  “And why copy her now?” Girimonte said. “I think she knows we’ve found the apartment and is taunting us.”

  “But you didn’t identify it until after the murder, when the old case file inspired you to ask how the rent is paid.”

  She frowned. “Holle’s been going by for weeks. Maybe she thought he was a cop.”

  “But Turner told me Holle left a note...presumably telling her all about Steiner’s offer of a singing gig.”

  “Really.” She glanced at Harry. “We hadn’t heard that before. It raises an interesting question. If Holle left a note, wasn’t that all he was obligated to do? Why keep going back? There’s more involved here. We need another crack at the man. In the meantime...” Her eyes narrowed at Garreth. “...what’s your reluctance to believe Barber’s involved?”

  He met her gaze with no attempt to trap it. “I just think you ought to consider other possibilities and not focus everything on what might be a false trail.” Except...the false trail was safer for them than running into the new killer vampire. He turned to Harry. “Is there anyone else who might want Knight dead?”

  Harry shook his head. “Everyone at Afterglow said he was popular with the staff, even being the boss, and really popular with female customers.”

  “Any chance that caused a beef with a male customer.”

  “They say not.”

  Fowler pursed his lips. “What about this possibility: he was killed at random, possibly by a family member of a victim, in order to accomplish what’s happened, renew the hunt for Miss Barber.”

  “That’s pretty extreme,” Girimonte said. “Most people start a letter or phone call campaign.”

  Fowler snorted. “Usually ineffective, from what I’ve observed. There can come a breaking point when frustration drives family members to extreme measures. I have witnessed it. Family members may also know all the details necessary for a copycat killing.”

  Harry and Girimonte exchanged glances...clearly giving the possibility consideration. Garreth liked it, too...give them a human killer the police could deal with. Much preferable to a killer vampire.

  But if that were the case, how was the danger Grandma Doyle saw something only he could handle...and would Irina consider Lane in danger from a mere human?

  “That’s certainly worth— Shit!” Girimonte scowled at her wristwatch. “We’re not going to get this warrant to Judge Kaehler tonight.”

  Harry shrugged. “So we’ll run it up to her first thing tomorrow. One night isn’t going to make a difference.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Garreth followed Harry home. Pulling into the driveway beside his car felt like real homecoming. And why not. After Marti died, he spent more time here than at his apartment. Driving with his mind in chaos after realizing what Lane made him, reflex brought him here again. Though it had been pure chance Lien invited him in before he came close enough feel the dwelling barrier, it felt fitting that this door had never breathed fire at him. But he missed Lien welcoming them home tonight.

  After carrying his suitcase and rolled sleeping pallet up to the guest room and transferring the two thermoses of blood he brought in his carry-on luggage to the refrigerator, he joined Harry in the family room. There oriental touches surrounded comfortable, contemporary American furniture...a Chinese vase here, a Japanese flower arrangement there, a hand-painted silk screen forming a partial divider from the dining area, and Lien’s paintings hanging on the walls...landscapes and flowers with brush strokes as clean and elegantly simple as calligraphy.

  Harry stood at their little bar pouring himself a drink. “Scotch and soda for you, too?” He held up the bottle.

  In Baumen Garreth would have said: “Great. Just hold the scotch.” No one questioned his avoidance of alcohol, assuming he must be a recovering alcoholic. After all, he had been a big city cop. Harry needed a different strategy. “Gin and tonic, I think.” Because leaving out the gin did not show. “I’ll mix it so go on and sit down.”

  Instead, Harry carried his glass to the kitchen. “Let’s check the larder. Lien left enough food to feed an army for a month.”

  “How long is she gone for?”

  “Another week or so.” Harry opened the fridge. “I’m sorry you’ll miss seeing her. Do you want lo-mein or fried— What’s this you’ve brought? Kansas moonshine?”

  Garreth forced himself not to panic, just stroll in with his tonic on the rocks and give his stock reply. “A protein energy drink a local holistic medicine practitioner recommended to me.” In Baumen, he credited a California practitioner.

  Harry rolled his eyes. “You mean those airy fairy types are in Kansas, too...and you believe that stuff?”

  Said the man who solemnly listened every morning to Lien’s report on the hexagrams she threw. But then, the belief in I Ching was Lien’s, and Harry listened because it helped reassure her that he, not Lieutenant Serruto and the department chaplain, would come through the door that evening.

  “I believe in results. Being an archery target left me in pretty rough shape and this cousin of our dispatcher said this stuff would fix me up.” A plausible lie. “She was right and I’ve been using it ever since.”

  Harry uncapped one thermos, peered in, sniffed...tilted the bottle until he could dab a finger in the liquid and taste it. And recoil, grimacing. “Christ! How can you drink that?”

  “You get used to it.” Resigned to it. Garreth took the bottle and chugged down a tasteless third before returning it to the fridge. “Let’s have fried rice.”

  Because a small helping could look bigger spread across the plate, and disposed of by dropping it little by little into his lap on several layers of paper towel.

  After dinner they took new drinks out to the scrap of patio. While Harry sat in one of the chairs, Garreth stretched out in the grass beyond with his glass balanced on his chest. No matter how Harry viewed it, he needed this...night and contact with earth.

  He gave himself to it, breathing in the scents of grass and soil, letting the earth leach away the weariness of fighting daylight. And blunt the urgency to move Lane’s possessions. Time enough for that later. He needed to wait until people were asleep, to avoid being seen. Leaving him free to just enjoy the moment. He and Harry talked periodically on the phone but this was his first visit out since he left for Kansas with Harry still in ICU.

  Harry eyed him with bemusement. “I suppose your hippy doctor recommends that, too?”

  Garreth gave him a peaceful smile. “Some things you discover for yourself.”

  Harry shook his head. “So tell me about chasing down Frank Danner. Did you really follow him without headlights?”

  For the next several hours they traded war stories and relived old times. When Harry called it a night around eleven, Garreth lay on his pallet with the guest room door open, wai
ting for Harry’s breathing down the hall to indicate deep sleep and considering how to move Lane’s things. At Telegraph Hill she had abandoned furniture and clothes, taking only what had personal meaning, jewelry, and a few other portable things of value. Nothing cumbersome or easy to replace. It all ought to fit in some of Lien’s stash of paper bags. Or did he need to come up with boxes?

  No, he realized. In the Telegraph Hill apartment there had been collapsed boxes on a shelf in the bedroom closet. It made sense for Lane to keep prepared for a quick getaway.

  With his gift of falling asleep quickly, Harry’s breathing soon settled into soft snores. Garreth pulled on a dark turtleneck and slipped downstairs. Much as he hoped Lane had handy cartons, to be safe he took some paper bags, also a pair of kitchen gloves from under the sink and a spare house key in the magnetic box on the side of Harry’s gun safe in the hall closet. Then he let himself out the front door.

  Lights still showed in the house next door and across the street. Though the Escort had a quiet engine, he put the car in neutral and let it roll backward out of the drive, then coast down the street half a block before turning the key.

  Caution kicked into high gear approaching Lane’s street. Should he park in front of her apartment and have just the width of the sidewalk to carry things, or park up or downhill where the car was less likely to look associated with Lane’s building. Even though distance to the car upped the risk of being seen.

  A real risk, he saw as he reached the top of the block. Lights visible down the street indicated a number of night owls here...including neighbor/landlord Turner. That ruled out one parking choice anyway. He pulled in beyond a Dodge Caravan in front of the next house down the hill. After putting on the kitchen gloves, he strolled casually up past the Caravan...then ducked sideways with vampire speed down the steps to Lane’s door.

  Wrench!

  Once the pain faded, he searched for boxes, moving quietly as possible to avoid being heard by Turner upstairs. Grateful he could do so without lights. In minutes he found the four banker’s boxes, collapsed flat, on a bedroom closet shelf.

  They reassembled with no problem and loaded quickly, thanks to labels on the end of each: books in two...some children’s books that he knew from seeing them before were inscribed to Mada, others on vampire lore and medical texts on viruses. One box for toys from her childhood...a couple of dolls, a miniature tea set, a cast iron toy stove, a type tray with sections holding collected “treasures”: marbles, a wooden top, a molar from a horse or cow, a rodent skull, colored stones, others with shell and leaf fossils, black fossil shark teeth. One box for some framed prints he removed from the walls, a couple of small sculptures, and a locked tin box he found in a desk drawer. The contents shifted inside when he shook it, like a checkbook perhaps. He put it in the banker box untouched. If necessary, he could always come back and force it open. Her jewelry, he knew, was in Baumen, brought with her on that last visit home.

  With the front door unlocked and the boxes set outside he contemplated how best to load them in the car. With no guarantee of being unobserved and possibly visible even moving at vampire speed, he needed to follow the first rule of stealth: avoid looking stealthy. Appear to belong where he was, doing what he was doing. Nothing attracted attention, and suspicion, like sneaking.

  Give a witness someone other than him to describe, however.

  Lane had a number of wigs. He chose a long black one...maybe the one she wore moving in here — also taking the stand to hide the wig’s absence — and paired it with a coat that reached his ankles.

  Now if only the door were the kind to lock behind him, but no, he had to lock it inside and endure one more round of being ripped atom from atom.

  Wrench!

  Leaning against the door recovering, he imagined Lane laughing at him. Poor baby! Serves you right for robbing me. Be glad I don’t have a burglar alarm.

  When the pain faded, he carried each box to the car, strolling as if indifferent to how odd it looked at midnight, the wig blowing in the night breeze. All four boxes fit comfortably in the trunk and passenger seat. Harry never mentioned Turner saying so, but Lane could have moved by taking a cab from Telegraph Hill. At least there was no problem knowing what to do with them now...take them to the storage facility South of Market where he had stashed his own belongings he left here.

  He parked at the curb outside the office. Though caring more about hitting the road than security when he rented the unit, cop reflexes had noted camera locations in the facility. While not monitoring the sidewalk, they did record what went through the three roll-up garage doors, and one in the office covered the front door and counter. And he suspected it remained active even at this hour. With that in mind, he settled wig firmly and leaned into the door.

  Wrench!

  Then despite pain, he flung himself sideways through the door into the garage.

  Wrench!

  That second passage in a row dropped him to his knees in agony. Thankfully a pillar hid him from the garage cameras.

  Anyone with occasion to review office footage should see just a blur. Slowing it would show what he looked like...though he had no idea how a passage appeared on tape. Mist solidifying into a figure...or just suddenly appearing? The way he felt slammed back together, he favored the latter.

  When he could stand again, Garreth dashed past the offices to the security office — more blur on the tape. To his dismay, he spotted a keypad as he approached the door, and to remain blurred, passed through at speed.

  Wrench!

  Momentum carried him careening across the room into the far wall.

  The guard, sleepily watching his bank of monitors with feet propped on the desk, started and whipped around, feet crashing to the floor. “What the hell...”

  Garreth managed to lift his head and catch the guard’s gaze. “Freeze,” he croaked.

  The guard petrified in his chair.

  Garreth glanced around, and finding no cameras in the office, began studying the monitors. They had cameras at the stair door and elevator for each floor but not every hallway...no doubt thinking that in cases of theft or vandalism, they just needed to see who entered that floor. He could be tracked to the third floor, but not to his unit.

  “How often do you record over the tapes?”

  The guard answered in a flat drone. “Every forty-eight hours.”

  So if there were no occasion to view that footage, in two days evidence of his visit here would vanish. And hopefully concern about it was just paranoia.

  Leaving the guard staring into space, he raised one garage door far enough to duck under and bring in the boxes. A borrowed hand truck toted them up to his unit. Despite all the months since padlocking the unit, he had no trouble remembering the combination he set: the date Lane killed him.

  When he shoved up the door, the lurch of his gut came less from seeing the contents than their similarity to what he brought with him tonight. Like Lane, he had kept only what mattered most to him. Books, photo albums, art glass Marti loved, her jewelry, their stereo with its LP collection, his collection of police shoulder patches, a trunk he remembered packing with hunting gear and his SFPD uniforms, paintings that included two drawings by Lien and a large pastel an artist at the Cannery had done of Marti. Except for some antique pieces that came from Marti’s family and he returned to them, he, too, left all the furniture in the apartment. With no further need for dinnerware, he had Lien sell the fine china, glassware, and sterling silver, and donate everything else — everyday dishes, kitchen paraphernalia, clothes, linens — to a thrift store.

  He set Lane’s boxes down beside his own and started to leave. Then turned back and pulled out Lien’s drawings. His garage apartment had room to hang them...or maybe he would hang one and give the other to Maggie. After a last look, reflecting on the sweet and bitter memories entombed here and wondering if he would ever use this stuff again, he pulled down the door and snapped the padlock closed. The hand truck went back downstairs where he
found it.

  In the security office, the guard had not moved.

  “Walk me out,” Garreth said, “then come back and forget you saw anyone in here tonight.”

  As the garage door rolled down between them, the blankness in the guard’s eyes said he had already forgotten Garreth.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Several blocks away from the storage facility he stopped to wrap Lien’s drawings in a towel originally used to protect one of Lane’s sculptures and stow them in the trunk. At Harry’s he would transfer them to the bottom of his suitcase. The wig and coat he deposited in separate trash bins in separate alleys. Then he sat behind the wheel wondering...what now? Go back to Harry’s and try to sleep? He needed rest to bear up under daylight tomorrow. But he was wide awake. Maybe he ought to check out the rat population of the piers, though the thought of hunting rats again disgusted him. The blood he brought with him would last at most another day or two.

  Baumen had spoiled him...pleasant runs in the hills north of the river instead sneaking around piers dodging night watchmen, placid cattle who did not have to die to feed him, who barely noticed the blood he siphoned into his bottles and went contentedly on with their lives as breeding stock or future steaks. Someone around — maybe in Chinatown — surely sold animal blood. Armed with his holistic protein drink story, he would check that out.

  His gaze drifted north, toward North Beach. Lane’s old hunting ground, now maybe the hunting ground for another vampire. Irina? He ought to have a look around. Not that he expected the killer to be wearing a sign. Could he even recognize another vampire on sight?

  After parking on the Embarcadero, he walked up Broadway toward Columbus, into the show he thought about so often while watching Baumen’s teens cruising Kansas Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights. Baumen must have tempered his memories, though, because the sounds, lights, and smells seemed so much louder, brighter, and stronger than he remembered...a sea of neon, traffic creating jewel strings of head and tail lights, rumbling motors, honking horns, human voices calling and laughing, the raucous voices of barkers shouting the virtues of the shows in their particular clubs. The crowds jostled Garreth, people wearing everything from ragged jeans and torn sweatshirts to evening clothes, smelling of sweat, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, perfume and cologne. And blood. The many odors of blood...from the clean, coppery saltiness of healthy blood to sour, bitter, or occasional sickeningly sweet scents warning of pollution by disease and foreign substances.