Curcus of the Damned

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "Nice to hear your voice." His voice was smiling over the phone; I could almost feel it.

  "I forgot that I've got a Halloween party to go to Saturday afternoon. They started the party during daylight so I could make an appearance. I can't not show up."

  "I understand," he said. His voice was very carefully neutral-neutral cheerful.

  "Would you like to be my date for the party? I have to work Halloween night, of course, but the day could be ours."

  "And the caving?"

  "A rain check," I said.

  "Two dates; this could be serious."

  "You're laughing at me," I said.

  "Never."

  "Shit, do you want to go or not?"

  "If you promise to go caving a week from Saturday."

  "My solemn word," I said.

  "It's a deal." He was quiet on the phone for a minute. "I don't have to wear a costume for this party, do I?"

  "Unfortunately, yes," I said.

  He sighed.

  "Backing out?"

  "No, but you owe me two dates for humiliating myself in front of strangers."

  I grinned and was glad he couldn't see it, I was entirely too pleased. "Deal."

  "What costume are you wearing?" he asked.

  "I haven't got one yet. I told you I forgot the party; I meant it."

  "Hmm," he said. "I think picking out costumes should tell a lot about a person, don't you?"

  "This close to Halloween we'll be lucky to find anything in our size." He laughed. "I might have an ace up my sleeve."

  "What?" He laughed again. "Don't sound so damn suspicious. I've got a friend who's a Civil War buff. He and his wife do re-creations."

  "You mean like dress up?"

  "Yes."

  "Will they have the right sizes?"

  "What size dress do you wear?" That was a personal question for someone who'd never even kissed me. "Seven," I said.

  "I would have guessed smaller."

  "I'm too chesty for a six, and they don't make six and a halfs."

  "Chesty, woo, woo."

  "Stop it."

  "Sorry, couldn't resist," he said.

  My beeper went off. "Damn."

  "What's that sound?"

  "My beeper," I said. I pressed the button and it flashed the number-the police. "I have to take it. Can I call you back in a few minutes, Richard?"

  "I'll wait with bated breath."

  "I'm frowning at the phone, I hope you know that."

  "Thanks for sharing that. I'll wait here by the phone. Call me when you're done with (sob) work."

  "Cut it out, Richard."

  "What'd I do?"

  "Bye, Richard, talk to you soon."

  "I'll be waiting," he said.

  "Bye, Richard." I hung up before he could make any more "pitiful me" jokes. The really sad part was I thought it was cute. Gag me with a spoon.

  I called Dolph's number. "Anita?"

  "Yeah."

  "We got another vampire victim. Looks the same as the first one, except it's a woman."

  "Damn," I said softly.

  "Yeah, we're over here at DeSoto."

  "That's farther south than Arnold," I said.

  "So?" he said.

  "Nothing, just give me the directions."

  He did.

  "It'll take me at least an hour to get there," I said.

  "The stiff's not going anywhere, and neither are we." He sounded discouraged.

  "Cheer up, Dolph, I may have found a clue."

  "Talk."

  "Veronica Sims recognized the name Cal Rupert. Description matches."

  "What are you doing talking to a private detective?" He sounded suspicious.

  "She's my workout partner, and since she just gave us our first clue, I'd sound a little more grateful, if I were you."

  "Yeah, yeah. Hurrah for the private sector. Now talk."

  "A Cal Rupert was a member of HAV about two months ago. The description matches."

  "Revenge killings?" he asked.

  "Maybe."

  "Half of me hopes it's a pattern. At least we'd have some place to start looking." He made a sound between a laugh and a snort. "I'll tell Zerbrowski you found a clue. He'll like that."

  "All us Dick Tracy Crimebusters speak police lingo," I said.

  "Police lingo?" I could feel the grin over the phone. "You find any more clues, you let us know."

  "Aye, aye, Sergeant."

  "Can the sarcasm," he said.

  "Please, I always use fresh sarcasm, never canned."

  He groaned. "Just get your butt out here so we can all go home." The phone went dead. I hung up.

  Richard Zeeman answered on the second ring. "Hello."

  "It's Anita."

  "What's up?"

  "The message was from the police. They need my expertise."

  "A preternatural crime?" he asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  "To the person who was killed, yeah."

  "You know that's not what I meant," he said.

  "It's my job, Richard. If you can't deal with it, maybe we shouldn't date at all."

  "Hey, don't get defensive. I just wanted to know if you would be in any personal danger." His voice was indignant.

  "Fine. I've got to go."

  "What about the costumes? Do you want me call my friend?"

  "Sure."

  "Will you trust me to pick your costume?" he asked.

  I thought about that for a few heartbeats. Did I trust him to get me a costume? No. Did I have time to hunt up a costume on my own'? Probably not. "Why not?" I said. "Beggars can't be choosers."

  "We'll survive the party and then next week we'll go crawl in the mud."

  "I can't wait," I said.

  He laughed. "Neither can I."

  "I've got to go, Richard."

  "I'll have the costumes at your apartment for inspection. I'll need directions."

  I gave him directions.

  "I hope you like your costume."

  "Me too. Talk to you later." I hung the receiver on the pay phone's cradle and stared at it. That had been too easy. Too smooth. He'd probably pick out a terrible costume for me. We'd both have a miserable time and be trapped into a second date with each other. Eek!

  Ronnie handed me a can of fruit juice and took a sip of her own. She had cranberry and I had ruby red grapefruit. I couldn't stand cranberry.

  "What'd cutesie pie say?"

  "Please don't call him that," I said.

  She shrugged. "Sorry, it just sort of slipped out." She had the grace to look embarrassed.

  "I forgive you, this once."

  She grinned, and I knew she wasn't repentant. But I'd ribbed her often enough about her dates. Turnabout is fair play. Payback is a bitch.

  14

  The sun was sinking in a slash of crimson like a fresh, bleeding wound. Purple clouds were piling up to the west. The wind was strong and smelled like rain.

  Ruffo Lane was a narrow gravel road. Barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. The reddish gravel crunched underfoot. Wind rustled the tall, dry weeds in the ditch. The road disappeared over the rise of a hill. Police cars, marked and plain, were lined up along one side of the road as far as I could see. The road disappeared over the rise of a hill. There were a lot of hills in Jefferson County.

  I was already dressed in a clean pair of overalls, black Nikes, and surgical gloves when my beeper went off. I had to scramble at the zipper and drag the damn thing out into the dying light. I didn't have to see the number. I knew it was Bert. It was only a half hour until full dark, if that. My boss was wondering where I was, and why I wasn't at work. I wondered if Bert would really fire me. I stared down at the corpse and wasn't sure I cared.

  The woman was curled on her side, arms shielding her naked breasts, as if even in death she was modest. Violent death is the ultimate invasion. She would be photographed, videotaped, measured, cut open, sewn back up. No part of her, inside or out, would be l
eft untouched. It was wrong. We should have been able to toss a blanket over her and leave her in peace, but that wouldn't help us prevent the next killing. And there would be a next one: the second body was proof of that.

  I glanced around at the police and the ambulance team, waiting to take the body away. Except for the body, I was the only woman. I usually was, but tonight, for some reason, it bothered me. Her waist-length hair spilled out into the weeds in a pale flood. Another blonde. Was that coincidence? Or not? Two was a pretty small sample. If the next victim was blond, then we'd have a trend.

  If all the victims were caucasian, blond, and members of Humans Against Vampires, we'd have our pattern. Patterns helped solve the crime. I was hoping for a pattern.

  I held a penlight in my mouth and measured the bite marks. There were no bite marks on the wrists this time. There were rope burns instead. They'd tied her up, maybe hung her from the ceiling like a side of beef. There is no such thing as a good vampire who feeds off humans. Never believe that a vampire will only take a little. That it won't hurt. That's like believing your date will pull out in time. Just trust him. Yeah, right.

  There was a neat puncture wound on either side of the neck. There was a bit of flesh missing from her left breast, as if something had taken a bite out of her just above the heart. The bend of her right arm was torn apart. The ball joint was naked in the thin beam of light. Pinkish ligaments strained to hold the arm together.

  The last serial murderer that I'd worked on had torn the victims into pieces. I had walked on carpet so drenched with blood that it squelched underfoot. I had held pieces of intestine in my hand, looking for clues. It was the new worst-thing-I'd-ever­seen.

  I stared down at the dead woman and was glad she hadn't been torn apart. And it wasn't because I figured it had been an easier death, though I hoped it had. And it wasn't because there were more clues, because there weren't. It was just that I didn't want to see any more slaughtered people. I'd had my quota for the year.

  There is an art to holding a penlight in your mouth and measuring wounds without drooling on yourself. I managed. The secret was sucking on the end of the flashlight from time to time.

  The thin beam of the flashlight shone on her thighs. I wanted to see if she had a groin wound like the man. I wanted to be sure this was the work of the same killers. It would be a hell of a coincidence if there were two vampire packs hunting separately, but it was possible. I needed to be as sure as I could that we had just one rogue pack. One was plenty, two was a screaming nightmare. Surely, God would not be that unkind, but just in case . . . I wanted to see if she had a groin wound. The man's hands had shown no rope marks. Either the vampires were getting more organized, or it was a different group.

  Her arms had been glued over her chest, tied in place by rigor mortis. Nothing short of an axe was going to move her legs, not until final rigor went away, which would be forty-eight hours or so. I couldn't wait two days, but I didn't want to chop the body into pieces either.

  I got down on all fours in front of the corpse. I apologized for what I was about to do, but couldn't think of anything better.

  The flashlight's thin beam trembled over her thighs, like a tiny spotlight. I touched the line that separated her legs and pushed my fingers in that line, trying to feel by fingertip if there was a wound there.

  It must have looked like I was groping the corpse, but I couldn't think of a more dignified way to do it. I glanced up, trying not to feel the solid rubberiness of her skin. The sun was just a splash of crimson in the west like dying coals. True darkness slipped over the sky like a flood of ink. And the woman's legs moved under my hands.

  I jumped. Nearly swallowing the flashlight. Nervous, me? The woman's flesh was soft. It hadn't been a moment ago. The woman's lips were halfparted. Hadn't they been closed before?

  This was crazy. Even if she had been a vampire, she wouldn't rise until the third night after death. And she'd died from multiple vampire bites in one massive blood feast. She was dead, just dead.

  Her skin shimmered white in the darkness. The sky was black; if the moon was up in those black-purple clouds, I couldn't see it. Yet her skin shimmered as if touched by moonlight. She wasn't exactly glowing, but it was close. Her hair glimmered like spider silk spread over the grass. She'd just been dead a minute ago; now she was . . . beautiful.

  Dolph loomed over me. At six-nine he loomed even when I was standing up; with me kneeling he was gigantic. I stood up, peeled off one surgical glove, and took the penlight out of my mouth. Never touch anything you're likely to put in your mouth after touching the open wounds of a stranger. AIDS, you know. I shoved the penlight into the breast pocket of the coveralls. I took off the other glove and crumpled them both into a side pocket.

  "Well?" Dolph said.

  "Does she look different to you?" I asked.

  He frowned. "What?"

  "The corpse; does it look different to you?"

  He stared down at the pale body. "Now that you mention it. It looks like she's asleep." He shook his head. "We're going to have to call an ambulance and have a doctor pronounce her dead."

  "She's not breathing."

  "Would you want the fact that you weren't breathing to be the only criterion?"

  I thought about that for a minute. "No, I guess not."

  Dolph leafed through his notebook. "You said a person who dies of multiple vampire bites can't rise from the dead as a vampire." He was reading my own words back at me. I was hoist on my petard.

  "That's true in most cases."

  He stared down at the woman. "But not in this one."

  "Unfortunately no," I said.

  "Explain this, Anita." He didn't sound happy. I didn't blame him.

  "Sometimes even one bite can make a corpse rise as a vampire. I've only read a couple of articles about it. A very powerful master vamp can sometimes contaminate every corpse it touches."

  "Where'd you read the articles?"

  "The Vampire Quarterly."

  "Never heard of it," he said.

  I shrugged. "I have a degree in preternatural biology; I must be on someone's list for stuff like that." A thought came to me that wasn't pleasant at all. "Dolph."

  "Yeah."

  "The man, the first corpse, this is its third night."

  "It didn't glow in the dark," Dolph said.

  "The woman's corpse didn't look bad until full dark."

  "You think the man's going to rise?" he asked.

  I nodded.

  "Shit," he said.

  "Exactly," I said.

  He shook his head. "Wait a minute. He can still tell us who killed him."

  "He won't come back as a normal vamp," I said. "He died of multiple wounds, Dolph; he'll come back as more animal than human."

  "Explain that."

  "If they took the body to St. Louis City Hospital, then it's safe behind reinforced steel, but if they listened to me, then it's at the regular morgue. Call the morgue and tell them to evacuate the building."

  "You're serious," he said.

  "Absolutely."

  He didn't even argue with me. I was his preternatural expert, and what I said was pretty much gospel until proven otherwise. Dolph didn't ask for your opinion unless he was prepared to act upon it. He was a good boss.

  He slipped into his car, nearest to the murder scene of course, and called the morgue.

  He leaned out the open car door. "The body was sent to St. Louis City Hospital, routine for all vampire victims. Even ones our preternatural expert tells us are safe." He smiled at me when he said it.

  "Call St. Louis City and make sure they've got the body in the vault room."

  "Why would they transport the body to the vampire morgue and not put the body in the vault room?" he asked.

  I shook my head. "I don't know. But I'll feel better after you call them."

  He took a deep breath and let it go. "Okay." He got back on the phone and dialed the number from memory. Shows what kind of year Dolph's been having.
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  I stood at the open car door and listened. There wasn't much to hear. No one answered.

  Dolph sat there listening to the distant ring of the phone. He stared up at me. His eyes asked the question.

  "Somebody should be there," I said.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "The man will rise like a beast," I said. "It'll slaughter everything in its path unless the master that made it comes back to pick it up, or until it's really dead. They're called animalistic vampires. There's no colloquial term for them. They're too rare for that."

  Dolph hung up the phone and surged out of the car, yelling, "Zerbrowski!"

  "Here, Sarge." Zerbrowski came at a trot. When Dolph yelled, you came running, or else. "How's it going, Blake?"

  What was I supposed to say, terrible? I shrugged and said, "Fine."

  My beeper went off again. "Dammit, Bert!"

  "Talk to your boss," Dolph said. "Tell him to leave you the fuck alone."

  Sounded good to me.

  Dolph went off yelling orders. The men scrambled to obey. I slid into Dolph's car and called Bert.

  He answered on the first ring; not a good sign. "This better be you, Anita."

  "And if it's not?" I said.

  "Where the hell are you?"

  "Murder scene with a fresh body," I said.

  That stopped him for a second. "You're missing your first appointment."

  "Yeah."

  "But I'm not going to yell."

  "You're being reasonable," I said. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing except that the newest member of Animators, Inc., is taking your first two appointments. His name is Lawrence Kirkland. Just meet him at the third appointment, and you can take the last three appointments and show him the ropes."

  "You hired someone? How'd you find someone so fast? Animators are pretty rare. Especially one who could do two zombies in one night."

  "It's my job to find talent."

  Dolph slid into the car, and I slid into the passenger seat.

  "Tell your boss you've got to go."

  "I've got to go, Bert."

  "Wait, you have an emergency vampire staking at St. Louis City Hospital."

  My stomach clenched up. "What name?"

  He paused, reading the name, "Calvin Rupert."

  "Shit."

  "What's wrong?" he asked.