Bloodlinks

by Lee Killough

  He glared up at it. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I know it seems that way,” the voice said patiently, “but it’s for your own safety.”

  Garreth extended his fangs and bared them. “I don’t care about safety; I want to catch the bastard!”

  “Isn’t that what got you killed the first time? This time it can be true death. Are you paying attention?” The hand shook his shoulder...gently at first, then with increasing force. “Are you listening, Garreth? Garreth!”

  The voice turned into Harry’s. “Garreth!”

  He pried an eye open and peered at the bedside clock. Ten. “Go away.” He buried his head under the pillow. Despite the closed blinds on the window, light leaking around them suggested another miserably sunny day outside. “I thought we were going to sleep in.”

  “Not now. Leonard Holle’s been murdered.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  As often as he had shaken his head over people greeting news of a death with: “But I just saw him...” ...yesterday, last week — as though that made death impossible — fighting up from sleep against daylight pressure, Garreth found himself reacting to Harry’s statement with just as much disbelief. Actually starting to protest that Holle had been alive last night. Until rational thought kicked in. Instead, he asked, “How? When?”

  “Last night is all I know so far. The woman calling it in — the housekeeper probably — just said she’d found him murdered in his bed. Van will meet us there.”

  She beat them to the scene. A classic fifties Corvette that Garreth remembered seeing outside Evelyn’s place last night sat in the driveway being admired by the uniformed officer at the door — red with white scoops on the side, convertible top up despite a clear sky this morning.

  Inside, Girimonte waited for them at the bottom of the stairs...minus Fowler, Garreth saw without regret, and surrounded by that new-mown hay scent. She kept her voice low as she led the way up. “I took just a look from the bedroom door, and it’s definitely murder.”

  Harry gestured back down toward the sitting room, where two women — both thirty-something, slim, blonde — sat with another uniformed officer at the archway. “The house guests Holle mentioned yesterday?”

  Girimonte nodded. “Toni Osner and Sharona McCall, airline hostesses...one of those friends of friends deals, apparently. The housekeeper’s in the library along with a kid she says is Holle’s god-daughter, also a guest.”

  The voice of one woman downstairs carried to Garreth. “...more to it than dying in his sleep.”

  “The inspectors will have all the details when they talk to you,” the officer replied.

  Upstairs, Girimonte headed around the gallery for an open door two down from the library’s, guarded by yet another uniformed officer. “Holle’s in there.”

  Definitely murdered, Garreth saw as he and Harry peered in. Above covers drawn up just short of his shoulders, Holle’s face had frozen in a pop-eyed, gape-mouthed expression of terror. A gash crossed his forehead and the reek of blood and bowel contents expelled at death overpowered even the house scent...now turned floral. Something looked wrong with the visible pajama top, too.

  Seconds later Garreth realized why and his gut knotted. They looked at the rear of the pajamas. His body lay prone. Whoever killed him had twisted his head completely backward. Someone strong. Vampire strong? Had Holle reached out to his resources and accidentally tapped the killer?

  “Arguing with you is dangerous, Mikaelian,” Girimonte said. “First that hustler and now Holle.”

  Garreth stiffened. “I never argued— ”

  “Just kidding. No need to get defensive...as long as you have an alibi.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or did you go wandering around town after the party?”

  The clatter of footsteps on tile saved him from answering...an Indian-looking Assistant ME unfamiliar to him crossing the hall below, then helping two attendants carry up the stretcher litter-style, the legs folded.

  Harry acknowledged his arrival with a nod. “Dr. Chadda.”

  Leaving the attendants unfolding the stretcher, Chadda came toward Harry and Girimonte. “So...what sad fruit have we collected this fine day?”

  They stepped aside for him. Harry said, “You tell us.”

  “Oh my. Sad indeed.” From the doorway they watched him begin his examination. He laid a hand on the pillow, then tried lifting Holle’s head. When it did not move, he pressed down on the pillow and peered along it. “The pillow is quite damp...perhaps from his hair, which suggests it dried plastered to his head.”

  Harry raised a brow. “The killer caught him after a bath?”

  “The pillow has a diffuse red stain suggestive of blood.”

  The three of them exchanged glances. Meaning Holle had started face down on the bed with his hair wet and forehead wounded.

  “What about time of death?” Girimonte asked.

  After feeling the jaw for rigor mortis Chadda pulled down the covers for access to limbs...and stopped short.

  Garreth heard his own intake of breath echoed by Harry and Girimonte. Holle’s hands were tied behind him...so tightly the thin cord bit deep into the flesh.

  “Brutal,” Harry said.

  “An angry killer.” Girimonte glanced Garreth’s direction.

  He ignored that. Angry killer felt right, though. Holle said a new vampire might hate the one bringing him across so much he hated all vampires. Might that hate extend even to friends of vampires?

  “Lividity is fixed and rigor advancing. Assuming he has accelerated the rigor with struggle, TOD appears to be six to eight hours ago.”

  A chill slid down Garreth’s spine. Six hours put the murder within an hour after he left here. The killer must have been let in — or passed through the door uninvited — almost on his heels.

  More footsteps crossed the hall downstairs and a crime lab crew marched up the stairs with their cases...led by an oriental tech.

  Harry nodded to him. “Morning, Yoshino. Chadda’s on the body. We’ll be talking to witnesses down the hall if you need us. The housekeeper first, I think, Van.”

  He headed for the library. A sea-breeze scent eddied around them.

  As they had on Friday, the heavy drapes shut out every glint of daylight. Leaving the room lit by a Tiffany-looking lamp on the desk and another on a table between two occupied easy chairs. The housekeeper sat stony-faced in one, her feet tight together and hands clenched in her lap. The barefooted pixie hugging her knees in the other chair looked thirteen or so, with a cap of dark hair and large eyes so dark the iris blended into the pupil.

  Harry pulled over a side chair from the desk and sat down in front the housekeeper while Girimonte leaned against the desk and Garreth moved back against the wall by the door. “We’re so sorry for your loss, Ms. Kriss.”

  Her lips thinned still more. “I would rather have the head of Leo’s killer than sympathy.”

  As would most victims’ survivors, and Garreth had to admire her for saying so outright. He also noted the first name use with interest. Was the relationship closer than employer and employee?

  She stared hard from Harry to Girimonte. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong! Leo is like a brother to me. My mother managed the house and I grew up with him and Liz. And with that bit of smut quashed, of course you want to know what happened this morning. My full name is Ariana Kriszcziokaitis. I go by Ms. Kriss for convenience.” She drew a deep breath. “Today Mr. Holle planned to show our guests interesting sites around the city not familiar to most tourists. They planned to leave at ten. When he didn’t come down for breakfast by nine I went up to wake him. He didn’t answer my knock so I went in. Then...” Her hands clenched tighter as her voice caught. “Then I called 911.”

  “According to 911, your call came in at nine-thirty,” Girimonte said.

  “Did it?” She shook her head. “I remember standing there staring at him — what I saw didn’t seem real — but I thought it was just for a minute.”

 
Shock and disbelief could have frozen her for longer, Garreth acknowledged. Memory said he bolted from the morgue the moment he saw Marti’s body, though according to Harry, he clung to the gurney for ten minutes, fighting off anyone trying to pull him away. Yet the flicker of a glance Kriss sent toward the girl made him wonder what she might be holding back.

  “Did you hear anything unusual during the night?” Harry asked.

  Kriss shook her head. “My apartment is upstairs at the front of the house. But even if I were next door or directly over his room, the house is so solid sound doesn’t carry through the walls unless it’s very loud.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “About midnight. I looked into the library to say goodnight before going upstairs.”

  “Where are the guests’ rooms?”

  “At the head of the stairs.”

  “Do you know anyone he had a problem with, who might want to hurt him?”

  “No!” Kriss shook her head emphatically. “Mr. Holle is kind, generous, and selfless. He treats his employees like family. The house is open to guests even when he isn’t here. Philos and Avalon mercy flights have saved dozens upon dozens of lives!”

  “What about someone blaming him for a life that wasn’t saved,” Girimonte said.

  Kriss frowned. “Why would anyone? He has no personal control over the transplant matching, and this isn’t like he was attacked in the street. He’d never let in anyone acting hostile...and if he did...sound in the hall does carry.”

  Angry voices even more than footsteps, Garreth imagined.

  “Would he hear the bell to answer it after going to bed?”

  “I don’t know. Because Mr. Holle has friends who are night owls like himself, we carry these instead of having the bell ring in the hall where it might disturb guests.” She pulled a pager-sized device from a pocket of her jacket. “I turn mine off when I go to bed but Leo might not.”

  “Would that camera outside the door let him see who was there before going down?” Harry asked.

  Her mouth twisted in distress. “I don’t know. There’s a plug-in for a monitor in the bedroom but normally the two we have are left in the kitchen and library. But if someone rang— what is it, Steffie?”

  The pixie had released her knees so she sat cross-legged, and bounced a little in the chair as she leaned forward, making a sequined Eiffel Tower on her t-shirt glitter. In dramatic tones, she said, “I know how the killer got in.”

  Girimonte came on her feet. Harry straightened in his chair. “How?”

  The dark eyes gleamed with delight at the impact of her news. “Upstairs through a window of the old playroom.”

  An attic window? Garreth frowned. Why? A vampire could just pass through the front door.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before!” Kriss said.

  The pixie chin came up. “I was, like, waiting to tell the police.”

  Kriss sighed. “This, by the way is Steffie Brandt.”

  Holle’s god-daughter.

  “She’s with us while her mother, an executive vice president of Philos and an old friend of Leo’s, attends a board meeting in Geneva.”

  Why make a point of that information, Garreth wondered. Maybe a warning that Holle had important friends likely to pressure them to find the killer. But if Kriss knew vampires, she must realize one had to be involved in this murder, and no amount of pressure on human detectives was likely to solve it.

  “Show us the window,” Harry said.

  The girl jumped to her feet and led the way though air smelling of baking bread, past Holle’s room and back along a narrow hall to steep stairs coiling up and down. Clearly built for servants, though now carpeted.

  As the girl went up them on hands and feet, leaving just her jeans visible from below, Kriss halted and pointed at a door beside them. “We have an elevator...which I will be taking. It’s really a remodeled dumb-waiter so there’s only room for two comfortably.”

  Harry opted to join her. Girimonte was already following Steffie.

  Garreth took the stairs, too...but more slowly, not only dragging up them against the weight of day but listening for squeaks underfoot. He heard none...nothing but the hum of the elevator. If the killer had really entered through the attic, the solid construction and carpet let him come down without a sound.

  Upstairs a hallway stretched the length of the house with doors on both sides, fewer on the right. Storage there, he guessed, servants’ rooms across from them. He had arrived last and the nearest door on the right stood open, Steffie’s voice coming through it.

  “When Ms. Kriss started wondering aloud how anyone got in because the burglar alarm was on I remembered seeing this door, like, open a crack when I passed it going to breakfast. My room is up here but I don’t mind because it has, like, such a great view. Since it was closed last night, I came up and found this.”

  Inside to his right, beyond an dusty, ornate rocking horse that looked like one from a carousel, the others grouped at a dormer window. Moving where he could peer over Kriss’s shoulder, he saw a circle had been cut in the glass of the pane above the window’s thumb lock.

  Garreth stared at it. Did this indicate a human killer? But how could a human have killed those vampires? Or...did they have two killers?

  Harry began, “We’ll get someone up to dust...”

  When Kriss pushed up the window and leaned out. “How could anyone reach here? There’s nothing to climb to it.”

  Girimonte swore under her breath.

  Harry sighed. “Ms. Kriss, you’re compromising possible evidence.”

  She started and hurriedly backed away into the room. “Oh. Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

  Steffie padded toward one of the dormers on the adjoining wall and opened that window. “There’s a drain pipe at the corner. See?” Leaning out, she pointed. “You climb that, then cross the roof to the window.”

  Risky, because it was a mansard roof, Garreth remembered. Top section with an easy pitch, breaking over to become nearly vertical around the dormers. Though a good second-story man could probably handle it.

  “Like this,” Steffie said...and swung her feet over the sill.

  “Steffie!” Kriss dived for her, but the girl was already outside. “Get back in here!”

  “I’ll be fine! Watch!”

  Kriss pulled back, hands at her throat. “I can’t bear to watch. If she falls, what’ll I tell her mother!”

  Harry and Girimonte leaned out, however. Garreth moved down to another dormer. And winced as sunlight battered him.

  On the roof, Steffie stood upright, arms spread for balance. Her ankles looked almost dislocated in angling to let her feet match the pitch of the roof. Step by cautious step she moved toward the corner. A distance almost twice as long as the one from the corner to the other dormer. Once her arms waved wildly, but from the grin she sent back over her shoulder, that had been deliberate, to scare them.

  Not a pixie, Garreth decided...an imp.

  Either Harry or Girimonte must have gasped, because Kriss cried out, “What’s happening? Is she all right?”

  At the corner Steffie slid over the edge and onto the drainpipe. When he let his breath out, Garreth realized he had been holding it. By leaning out farther, Garreth watched her shinny down...then stop about eight feet below and start back up. This time she did not shinny but pulled herself hand over hand up the drainpipe while her feet walked up the bricks. Watching, Garreth bet she had done this more than once. Probably clandestinely.

  Minutes later she was back inside, but had her triumphant ta-da pose spoiled by Kriss crushing her in a hug. “Please never, ever...” Kriss began, only to break off in wracking sobs.

  Garreth’s chest tightened in sympathy, watching her emotional control broken by the anxiety over Steffie. As always, he felt helpless, wishing there were something comforting to say.

  Steffie struggled against Kriss’s chest, voice squeaking. “Ms. Kriss! I can’t breathe!”

 
Sometimes shock helped more than sympathy. Kriss jerked as though slapped and released the girl. Taking a deep breath, she scrubbed her eyes with her palms. “I’m sorry. Time enough for tears later.” Another breath. “I need caffeine. Steffie, will you go start coffee? Would you all like some, too,” she added as the girl dashed out.

  “Yes, thank you.” Harry looked like a man being tossed a life preserver. There had been no time for anything but scrambling into clothes after the call came. “We’ll be talking to the house guests downstairs. Can you bring the coffee there? But before you go, what’s the name of Mr. Holle’s lawyer?”

  “His lawyer? Oh, of course...to ask about Leo’s will. I’ll get you his number but I can tell you the broad terms. Leo made no secret of them. Philos benefits the most. This house and the bulk of his money goes to it, with the proviso that the house is maintained to accommodate visiting life members of Philos and the families of patients having transplants locally, with me managing the house until I wish to retire, at which time I will receive a generous pension. Half his share of Avalon also goes to Philos for the control of mercy flights. The other half of his share goes to his sister Liz.”

  “Thank you. Garreth, why don’t you wait here for the tech.”

  Garreth nodded.

  Kriss followed the two out. But as he left after showing the crime lab tech the window, Garreth found her waiting in the open doorway of a room across the hall. She crooked a finger. “We have to talk.”

  His stomach clenched. Did she know about his visit last night? He followed her into the room...clearly once a servant’s from the size, though now furnished with a good quality bedroom suite.

  Her blood scent rose around him as she closed the door. “After Leo let you out, did you come back and kill him?”

  That answered his question...with the directness of a bullet!

  “Before you answer, take off your glasses so I can see your eyes. But do not try hypnosis on me. It is a rule of this house that your kind use none of your powers against us and touch no one without permission.” A hand slid into her jacket pocket. “I am armed if necessary.”