Thicker than Blood (Zoe Bentley Mystery)

by Mike Omer

  He imagined himself buttoning the buttons of his control suit, took a deep breath, and got out of the bedroom. The guest room’s door was shut. He hesitated, almost knocked, then decided to go to the kitchen instead.

  He made himself a cup of coffee—coffee was his new friend, now that he’d left sleep behind. Maybe he should make himself a sandwich. He opened the fridge and scanned the shelves for the cream cheese he’d bought last Friday.

  The five vials, full of crimson blood, immediately caught his eye. He’d managed to collect them from her before Daniel took her. His mouth watered, just seeing the vials. He remembered the metallic salty taste, so invigorating, so different from animal blood, so full of life. Couldn’t he afford to drink just one? Not even the entire vial. Just a small sip to feel better.

  Control. Those vials weren’t for him.

  He found the cream cheese and shut the fridge. A good sandwich and some more coffee could make him feel just fine. It wasn’t like he even needed the blood. He was much better now.

  It had been different just three days ago. He was sick as a dog back then. Headaches, sore throat, nausea, rapid heartbeats. The doctor said he was fine, but Google had told him different. Sepsis or a heart disease, he was almost certain. Not that the doctors cared. Like Daniel said, in this country, if you didn’t have a million-dollar health insurance plan, no one gave a shit about you.

  It was fine. He’d found out the truth long before. They didn’t want anyone to know, of course. But it made total sense when you thought about it. Just a bit of blood from someone else could help almost any malady. It was a way to enrich your own white blood cells, bolster the immunity system. And if the blood was pure, really pure, it was even better.

  If only it could have been someone else. But like Daniel had said, you wanted the purest blood possible, right?

  Besides, it wasn’t just himself he had to worry about.

  And it had worked. Ever since that night he’d been feeling fine. Better than fine, really. He was Healthy with a capital H. He had to sleep a bit less, the dreams became worse, but that was to be expected. And it wasn’t like he had a choice.

  He realized he was standing by the open fridge, one of the small vials already in his hand. Funny, he was so lost in thought he’d done it without thinking. He uncorked it, just to smell the contents. Nothing more.

  It smelled like Life.

  He tipped it gently between his lips. It tasted different cold. Not necessarily worse, but different. And it was fine; he still had four more.

  He washed the vial and then went over to the guest room’s door, knocking on it.

  “Yeah?” Daniel’s voice was distracted.

  He opened the door. The room was dark, the blinds pulled down. Daniel sat by the desk, the laptop in front of him. The monitor’s white ethereal light reflected on Daniel’s face, making his sunken features and pale skin look even sicklier than usual.

  “I wondered if you wanted anything to eat or drink.”

  “Nah, thanks, man.” Daniel glanced at him and smiled, tired. “You’re looking much better.”

  “I’m feeling better.”

  “The treatment did the trick, huh?”

  That was what Daniel always called it. The treatment. He was the one person who understood.

  He licked his lips. “Yeah, it definitely did the trick. Are you sure you don’t want—”

  “Thanks, there’s no need,” Daniel said. “You know I can’t.”

  “You’ll feel so much better if you try.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Okay,” the man in control said after a short silence. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “How are you feeling about what we did?” Daniel asked. “Better?”

  He swallowed. “We did what we had to, right?”

  “It’s not our fault,” Daniel said. “It’s those damn insurance companies, right? If they’d just fund proper health care for people like us.”

  “Right, right.”

  “You sure you’re all right? Because yesterday you were crying, and you said we should turn ourselves in. You freaked me out, man.”

  “It was just a momentary loss of control. I’m fine now.”

  “Uh-huh.” Daniel met his eyes.

  “I’ll, uh, talk to you later.” He shut the door and tried to calm his beating heart. If control was a disguise, Daniel was the only one who could see past it.

  He suddenly felt exhausted. Forgoing sleep altogether wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he should get a good night’s sleep. Just once. Once he slept, he’d have more control. Then he wouldn’t give Daniel such a scare like he did the day before.

  He went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. The pills all waited for him there, in little containers, with the days’ labels on them. He’d skipped almost a week. Maybe he should take only today’s pills and quit the pills after that. He opened the container marked Sunday and pried out one of the pills from the container.

  “What are you doing?” The voice startled him, and he nearly dropped it.

  He turned around. Daniel stood behind him in the bathroom’s entrance.

  “I thought I’d take today’s pills, get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “I think yesterday I was just tired, you know?”

  “Sure, sure.” Daniel nodded. “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  “You think so?”

  “Could be. Sleep’s important. You sure, though? Because you told me you hated how those pills made you feel.”

  “But just one day couldn’t hurt.”

  “And you don’t like the feeling in your throat, right? It feels like the pill is scraping the insides of your throat.”

  That was true. He’d forgotten, but now that Daniel said it, he recalled the ghastly sensation. And he had six pills to take. Six.

  “I thought you looked better. Like you’re in control now,” Daniel said. “But maybe it’s a good idea to take the pills today. Just to maintain control.”

  “I am in control.” He saw the skeptical look on Daniel’s face. Acting on a sudden urge, he emptied the entire container into the toilet and flushed it.

  Daniel let out a short laugh, and the man in control smiled. It was nice to see his friend laugh.

  “You’re something else, you know that?” Daniel slapped him on the shoulder and turned away.

  He watched Daniel return to his room and nodded to himself. He really didn’t need the pills. He was in control.

  CHAPTER 8

  Zoe stared through the window at the far end of the large room. It was a rainy day, giving the street view a somewhat depressing ambience. Then again, the window faced the Cook County Juvenile Center, and that place wasn’t cheerful even when the sun shone and birds twittered in the trees.

  She and Tatum had been allocated two desks on the fourth floor of the FBI’s Chicago field office as soon as they’d landed in the city. When they’d first arrived, they’d been two outsiders, treated with courtesy and suspicion. There were private jokes she and Tatum weren’t privy to. Some of the agents had cryptic nicknames whose origins she didn’t care about. On their second day in Chicago, one of the agents had a birthday. She was about to ignore the whole thing when Tatum dragged her along to join the tedious cake-and-greeting-card formality. She found herself standing there, listening to the agent, whose name she had already forgotten, thanking everyone for a gift she hadn’t participated in paying for. Twenty precious minutes gone. The cake had been mediocre.

  Now, a week later, she was still an outsider. But Tatum wasn’t. He knew all the nicknames. Agents joked with him. He seemed to understand a lot of their discussions. One of the analysts was definitely flirting with him.

  Obviously none of it mattered. They were going to leave in a few days. And she didn’t want to waste her time small-talking about politics, or the weather, or the Chicago Cubs.

  But somehow it was a relief that the room was mostly empty on weekends. That for a couple
of days, it was just Tatum and her.

  She turned back to her work, already annoyed that she’d let her mind wander. Finally, they had a lead. A scent they could chase. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

  First things first, she could use some music. She hesitated, looking at her music library. Taylor, Katy, and Beyoncé all waited for her choice. In a sudden moment of carpe diem, she selected albums from all three. A moment later she added Lizzo’s Big GRRRL Small World and Adele’s 25 to the mix, feeling almost giddy. She set it to shuffle. The first song began playing through her earphones, Katy Perry’s “Peacock.” She let her head bob with the beat, forcing herself not to sing with the chorus. Tatum was within earshot.

  Photos were taped to the low wall of her small cubicle, and she removed them one by one. They were all crime scene photos from Glover’s previous murders, and Zoe wanted her improvised office to be free from Glover’s influence. O’Donnell had been right when she’d said they had to avoid any preconceived notions about the case. The evidence suggested that two men were involved in Catherine Lamb’s murder. Nothing conclusive had been found about their identities yet.

  After taking down all the photos, she collected the papers that were strewn on the desk. Most were transcripts—they’d spent a lot of time interviewing people who’d known Glover, most of them coworkers. There were also various documents that pinpointed his whereabouts—three apartment rental contracts, a speeding ticket for Daniel Moore, bank account records under Daniel Moore’s name. Zoe kept wondering how Glover had managed to stitch up such a solid fake identity. Someone must have helped him.

  But now was not the time to think about it. Fresh case, no assumptions.

  Her phone blipped, a notification from her Instagram app. Aside from a brief two-week foray into Facebook and a barely maintained LinkedIn profile, Zoe never bothered with social media before. She did now. Andrea had an Instagram account, and since she’d moved away, Zoe had created her own account just to follow her sister. She never posted anything, had no profile picture, and her profile name was _____ZBentley. And she followed only Andrea.

  Her sister told her it was creepy, though Zoe didn’t really understand why.

  She tapped the notification, and the app opened, showing Andrea’s new post. She’d taken a selfie and captioned it remembering the old days of sleeping in big-sis room. Zoe blinked, recognizing the poster in the background, a close-up of Winona Ryder’s face from one of her favorite movies, Girl, Interrupted. She’d bought the poster a day after watching the movie, hanging it above her bed. Now the rest of the furniture in the room fell into focus—the familiar desk, the old bed light, the small night table. Andrea smiled in the picture, but her eyes were sad, and she seemed younger, almost a child again. Zoe felt a sudden tug of homesickness.

  She almost responded with a bitter comment, mentioning that Andrea could have been sleeping in “big-sis’s” apartment right now. But she didn’t. Instead, she wrote, Missing you, and added a heart emoji for good measure.

  They had hardly talked in the past two weeks. Zoe wasn’t sure why. Their few phone calls were stunted and slow, with Andrea trying to find topics for conversation and Zoe struggling not to drop the ball of the conversation completely. Was this because of Glover’s attack on Andrea? Did talking to Zoe remind her sister of that night? Or did those conversations actually remind Zoe of how Andrea had almost been raped and murdered because of her?

  Maybe a bit of both.

  She put down her phone and opened her case folder.

  O’Donnell had sent them a digital copy of the current case file, and Zoe had printed the initial report and eight of the crime scene photos. She set them next to each other, two rows of four pictures each. Pictures of Catherine Lamb, covered and uncovered with the blanket. A picture of the bloody footprints. One picture of the bedroom, one of the bathroom, bloodstains on the sink.

  It was a savage act, two men breaking into a woman’s apartment, raping and murdering her. At first glance, that was all it was, a torrent of violence. Surely that was how Catherine had experienced it.

  But looking carefully, she saw it wasn’t one act; it was a series of smaller acts. And each of them had been initiated by one of the men.

  Who chose the victim? Who planned the assault? Who jabbed her with a needle? Each of the acts said something about the attacker. Usually the details of the crime interlocked to create an image of one man. But here, she first had to painstakingly separate the acts into two different groups.

  As a child, she’d had a jigsaw puzzle box she loved. The box contained two different puzzles of Mickey Mouse, each a hundred pieces. Golfing Mickey and Skiing Mickey. But the pieces inevitably mixed together in the box. When she began assembling the jigsaw, she always had to sort them into two separate piles before she could really get to work. The pieces had marks on the back so she could tell them apart. Xs for Skiing Mickey, circles for Golfing Mickey.

  In a way, it was similar here. She couldn’t profile the killers without knowing each one’s role in Catherine’s murder. She had to sort them. Unfortunately, there were no marks to tell them apart.

  She grabbed her notebook and began to make a list.

  Familiarity with victim

  Victim choice

  Plan

  Needle wounds

  Rape

  Murder by strangulation

  Covering victim

  Bloody footsteps

  Trophy

  Necklace

  She looked at the list and thought about the two killers and their relationship. There were several cases of murderers working in pairs. Some were romantically involved, working as equals, but she doubted this was the case. There was too much disparity in the actions. No, in this case, one killer was dominant, and the other was a follower. This was a common rapport between violent criminals who worked together. She named the unknown subjects unsub alpha and unsub beta.

  The plan had been hatched by alpha. Probably not just the plan, but the whole idea. He was the one in charge. He chose the victim, as well. It didn’t necessarily mean he was the one who knew the victim. Maybe the other one, beta, was the one who was familiar with the victim, and alpha chose her to convince his partner or manipulate him.

  Despite her resolve to set her assumptions about Glover aside, she couldn’t avoid noticing the body’s posture and ligature marks were identical to ones she’d seen in Glover’s murder victims. Women who were strangled while being raped. The murder and the rape went together. That was an act that spoke of obsessiveness with power and domination. This was the work of the alpha as well.

  Biting her lip, she circled each of the actions she assumed was committed by the alpha killer. In the background, Adele’s soft voice asked someone to let her down gently. Someone tapped on her shoulder, invoking a flash of irritation. She hated being interrupted midsong. She paused it and turned to look at Tatum. “What?”

  He grinned, raising an eyebrow at her sharp tone. “O’Donnell just called me. The medical examiner did the thingy with the microscope.”

  “The thingy?” Zoe clicked her pen repeatedly, following the unheard rhythm of the now-paused song.

  “You know what I’m talking about. To check for saliva.”

  “Fluorescent spectroscopy.”

  “That’s it.”

  “There’s no microscope involved.”

  “Are you interested to hear what she found? Or do you want to keep mocking my ignorance?”

  “What did she find?” Click-click-click, her thumb kept abusing her pen.

  “Traces of human saliva around the large puncture wound. You were right.”

  Zoe nodded, her thumb pausing. “He sucked her blood.”

  “That’s what it looks like. She said they’re still waiting for the toxicology report, can’t know for sure he didn’t use the needle to inject her with something.”

  “Uh-huh.” Zoe turned to her list and scratched out the words Needle wounds, writing next to them Blood consumption.<
br />
  “Listen, I’m getting hungry. Do you feel like grabbing dinner?”

  “In a bit,” she muttered distractedly. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Don’t wait too long. I might eat my keyboard.”

  A second after Tatum walked away, Adele resumed singing, but Zoe didn’t join her, not even in the chorus. Blood consumption. One of the killers had sucked the victim’s blood. Perhaps extracted some for later use.

  Contrary to what people understandably thought, merely consuming human blood wasn’t a definite sign of insanity. It indicated a very extreme, unconventional fantasy. But there were cases of people who turned to cannibalism or drinking blood but weren’t, medically speaking, insane. And not all of them were killers.

  Depending on who you talked to in psychological circles, clinical vampirism, or Renfield’s syndrome, was either a myth or a real condition. There were definitely several cases of people drinking blood, but many psychologists claimed it was nothing more than a symptom of something else, like schizophrenia, and not an actual separate condition. Though Zoe wasn’t sure where the debate stood and how extensive the documentations of Renfield’s syndrome cases were, she knew a researcher in Atlanta who had studied the phenomenon for the past seven years.

  She found his email address online and drafted a quick message. She explained that she might have run into a case of clinical vampirism in one of her investigations and asked if he was aware of any people who suffered from it in Chicago.

  She returned to her list. So far, she’d attributed all the aggressive acts to unsub alpha. It was possible unsub beta had simply been a spectator, that everything had been done by the alpha, but Zoe doubted it. The man who covered the body, who put the necklace on her, wasn’t the same one who took the trophy. It was someone who felt guilty. And that meant he did more than watch. He participated in the attack. Which probably meant he was the one who drank the blood.

  Albert had told them that Catherine almost always wore the silver necklace. That indicated the person who put the necklace on her was the one familiar with the victim. He’d seen it was missing, went to look for it, and put it on her.