Clearing the threshold, he surveyed the apartment’s living room. It looked much as if the bulls of Pamplona had run through it on their way to the plaza de toros. A small coffee table lay splintered in front of a small, overturned couch. The plate of food that had been on it scattered over the floor. A few small, dark splotches of blood and other bodily fluids stained the floor and the walls.
The words “MIDNIGHT SNACK” were written in large block letters on the back wall. Forensics had determined that they were written in Corinne Lawrence’s blood.
“So you think the Mealtime Killer’s a real, honest-to-God vampire?” she asked. Then she shook her head. “Good Lord, the ‘Mealtime Killer?’ Seriously? Have you ever wondered who comes up with these stupid names?”
“A bored reporter somewhere, I’m sure. Them and police—they’re the ones who spend enough time around tragedy to be flip about it.” He looked around the room at the various bits of organic debris. “I’d be willing to bet that this is one of the times when not being able to smell is a good thing.”
She turned to face him and rested her hand on the grip of her pistol. “Don’t make me use this thing on you, Doc,” she said, only half-jokingly. “The stench is pretty bad, but not as bad as the first time I was in here.” She looked at him quizzically. “You really can’t smell this?”
He shook his head. “Chemistry accident in high school; can’t smell a damn thing.” He hadn’t moved past the threshold of the apartment; it was like most of the other crime scenes, so he didn’t need to look things over too closely. Not in the physical world, at any rate. He widened his perceptions and assensed the room where Corinne had died.
The room in the astral plane was, if anything, even more of a mess. A dense fog hovered in the room; death struggles frequently left a haze in astral space that could take days to clear away. Absent, though, was the telltale horror show that inevitably followed a vampire feeding on the life energy of a victim’s aura.
His senses returned to the real world, and he walked to the back wall, examining the grisly message and shaking his head. “You ever see Darwin’s Bastards live?” he asked her. He raised his right hand and reached for the letters; he hesitated at a centimeter or so from the surface. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to touch the wall.
That’s it—you’re getting closer, Thomas! We’ll see each other soon!
He stiffened slightly, then dropped his hand quickly to his side.
Lydia joined him at the wall and nodded. “Did an off-duty security gig for them when I was younger to pick up some extra cash. Not really my kind of music.” Turning to face him, she motioned with her head toward the message. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he lied. “Your security gig … did Big Billy and Gristlehide get into it on stage, try to kill each other with their guitars while the crowd went completely apeshit, chanting and screaming until it looked like there was going to be a riot?”
She nodded again. “How’d you know?”
He chuckled. “It was like that almost every show; it’s amazing the band managed one tour, let alone fifteen years’ worth of them.” He turned and motioned around the room. “When a vampire feeds on a person’s aura, it’s an extremely intense, emotional connection. It leaves a mark on astral space for days, even weeks if it’s a particularly intense episode. Astral space in this room, right now, should look kind of like a Bastards concert during a Billy/Gristlehide showdown. And it doesn’t.” He stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and let out a frustrated sigh. “She’s not feeding. I don’t get it.”
Lydia wandered into the small kitchenette and sat down in a kitchen chair, one of the few intact pieces of furniture in the apartment. “You said back at the morgue that Corinne’s aura was weak because of her cyber. You also said she was doing it because she could, not for food. Maybe your lady vampire wasn’t hungry.”
Thomas walked into the kitchenette and plopped down in the other chair, opposite Lydia. “Not likely,” he said. “Even a weak aura has some energy in it. She’d try to take it just to top off the tank, as it were. And she has to be hungry.” He pointed at the wreckage in the living room. “Vampires use that energy to power their abilities. Judging from the fight she and Corinne had in here, Teresa was burning energy like an acetylene torch.”
Lydia gave him a long, hard look. “So this girl from your class went out, got infected with HMHVV, and is now on a killing spree across at least four countries … just to try and impress you?”
“No, she became a vampire to try and do that,” he said. “The killing spree … that’s her trying to send a message, though I’m damned if I can figure out what she’s trying to accomplish.”
Lydia began flipping crime scene photos into her AR display. Each killing had borne the name of a meal, which had led to the stupid media nickname. Lunch. Breakfast. Dinner. Second breakfast. She looked at all nine of the crime scenes and scoffed. “For a man with multiple post-graduate degrees, you can be remarkably dense. She’s trying to remind us that we’re the next link down on the food chain.”
“You sound like my ex-wife,” he said, but he kept his tone light. “I didn’t mean that I couldn’t figure out what the message was. What I meant was that I can’t figure out why she’s sending it.”
Lydia’s commlink chose that moment to signal an incoming message. She brought it up on her commlink, read it, and then gave Thomas a long, incredulous look. “I shouldn’t be surprised by this,” she said, “but for some reason, I am. Is the girl you rejected in your classroom named Teresa Castillo?” He nodded, and she held the commlink up so that he could see it.
Staring out of the picture was an attractive red-haired young woman, with sparkling green eyes and a ready smile. “There’s your DNA hit. Says she died in ’66.”
Thomas nodded grimly. “I thought she had.”
They sat opposite each other in a booth at a small diner not far from Corinne’s apartment. It was already growing dark outside, and the cold rain had begun to fall in earnest. Thomas sipped at a cup of coffee as Lydia contemplated the menu. The ride to the diner had been silent, and Thomas was eager to steer the subject of any impending conversation away from Teresa Castillo, if only for a little while. It occurred to him that Lydia knew a great deal more about him than he knew about her. “Shouldn’t you be a lieutenant or a major or something higher up the chain of command?” he asked her.
She chuckled and ordered a bowl of chili. “You think I want to be responsible for some of the kneecap-smashing knuckleheads we’ve got on the streets?” she asked as she took a sip of her own coffee. “You sure you don’t want something to eat? The food here’s pretty good, and KE’s buying.”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
She shrugged, leaned back a little bit in the booth, and let out a long sigh. It was, he realized, the first time he had seen her relax since they’d been introduced. “I was a sergeant about, oh, twelve or thirteen years ago, I guess,” she said. “Knight Errant has a bad rep in a lot of places; we’re known more as leg-breakers than as cops, and really, all I ever wanted to be since I was a little girl was a good cop. Help people, enforce the law, and sometimes actually get to see justice done.” She drank some more coffee and went on. “I tried from day one to change the image, and it was hard.”
“Especially when so many other people are helping build that image,” he said.
She nodded ruefully. “Yeah, so I got the bright idea to try to change the culture from the top down. Tested for sergeant, made it, had a couple of newbies I was assigned to supervise—and they turned out to be just as bad as the rest of the people around me. The job became less about being a cop, or training them to be better than our corporate culture, and more about corporate paperwork and covering my ass by kissing someone else’s.” She stopped speaking as her chili arrived, and she ate several bites in silence as Thomas accepted a refill of his coffee. He saw that her expression had darkened, but considering how much of his past had been dredged up in the
last couple of hours, he felt a little less sympathetic than he might have normally.
“Is that why Alice Bujold has issues with you? You buck the system, didn’t kiss up to be promoted, that sort of thing?”
She nodded. “She was my supervisor when I got out of the Academy in ’52. Kept me under her wing, but we started drifting apart when I wouldn’t play the game in spite of her advice. When I asked to be returned to officer status and gave up my sergeant stripes, she gave up on me.” She finished off her chili and pushed the bowl away. “I got transferred here, and I never saw her again until the company lost the CAS sector contract and got this one. I moved over here from the CAS sector, she flew in from Detroit one day to take over as the new RC, and life’s been uncomfortable for the both of us ever since.”
Thomas finished his coffee. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll cause you problems?”
She idly checked a few windows in her AR field before answering. “I’m a twenty-one-year veteran with a clean record, and I close a lot of cases. I’m good for the bottom line, so she just gives me static when we’re in the same room. Otherwise she leaves me alone.” She entered a few commands and squinted at one of the AROs before turning her attention back to him. “All right,” she said. “Enough about me. It’s time you told me why there’s a dead girl killing people in my city.”
“You’re very blunt.”
“Comes with the job.”
He leaned back and sighed. “Sometime in 2064, after she’d aced my class and apparently given up on seducing me, Teresa went off and convinced some bloodsucker to turn her. I didn’t hear from her again until the end of 2065, when she started emailing me about what she had become and what she was doing.”
“Which was killing people.” She was actively looking through her AROs again, but she was clearly following his side of the conversation.
He nodded. “I reported it to Lone Star, but there wasn’t a lot they could, or would, do about it. So after three or four months of this, I took it on myself to do something about it.”
Lydia turned away from her AROs, a smirk on her face. “From college professor to vigilante vampire hunter,” she said, “in one fell swoop. What made you think that would work out?”
Thomas felt his face redden slightly. “Sheer determination, youthful enthusiasm, and an almost tragic lack of understanding about the difference between academic theory and reality,” he said quietly. “I tracked her down, and we fought, and she nearly killed me. Her vampirism had Awakened her as an adept; if I hadn’t gotten a couple of spells off to slow her down, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“How’d you manage to survive?” she asked.
He blushed some more. “Her infatuation for me bought me some time. She wanted to turn me, so we could be together forever,” he said. “She started getting ready to Infect me, I cast a stun spell on her, and while she was still dazed, I tackled her and drove a stake through her heart. Which is a lot harder than it sounds, by the way; there’s a lot of bone and cartilage to deal with.”
Lydia’s expression was hard to read, but seemed to be hovering somewhere between appalled and impressed. “That would seem pretty final to me,” she said.
He shrugged and shook his head. “I thought so, too. Classic rookie mistake, as it turns out.” Their waitress had appeared to clear the dirty dishes away and refill their coffee cups. He was quiet until she left. “They regenerate any damage done to their bodies, but they’re allergic to wood. As long as they’re in contact with the allergen, they can’t regenerate. Amateur that I was, I thought that if they were killed with the allergen, they were dead.”
“And this isn’t the case?”
“Not generally, no.”
“And you teach classes on this sort of thing?”
He glared at her. “Theory versus practice, remember? There’s a lot of information out there; sometimes figuring out which is fact and which is fallacy requires going out and testing it yourself. I’m a virologist by specialty; most of my time is spent in a lab looking for a cure for HMHVV, not killing its victims.” He drank some more coffee. “I’ve since revised my curriculum.”
“That’s good to know,” she said, chuckling. “So a stake through the heart turns out to just be inconvenient.”
“Yes. Someone pulls the stake out, the heart regenerates and starts beating again, and you’re left with a pissed-off vampire.”
Lydia pondered that for a moment, studying her AROs, and then asked, “So how do you put one down?”
“Head shot. They can’t regenerate damage to the central nervous system.”
She looked at him incredulously. “You carry a scatter-gun.”
“I’m not a very good shot.” He shrugged. “I’m also a magician; gives me something else to work with.” He watched her gesturing in the air for a few moments, then asked, “What are you working on over there?”
“I started scanning the system for processing entries into the sector once we had a name and an image,” she said. “Haven’t found anything yet for a Teresa Castillo …”
At that moment, an indicator started blinking in her field of vision. “We’ve got ourselves an image match at customs, though, coming in from Las Vegas three days before Corinne was murdered.” She gestured, bringing up the relevant record. “Different SIN, of course, and she’s going by Teresa McAllister.” She gave him an almost pitying look; Thomas just rolled his eyes. Lydia brought up the old ID image and the one from customs and placed them side by side. “Yeah,” she decided after a few moments’ comparison, “that’s her all right.”
Her fingers flew as she changed the search parameters. “Oh, boy,” she said softly. Looking up, she said, “Thomas, I think she might still be in the city.”
“What?”
Lydia rose and sat down next to him in the booth. “Here,” she said, “mesh your ‘link with mine.” He pulled out his commlink, and she let out a low whistle. “Fancy! You don’t see many Ikons in my line of work. Unless they belong to a corpse.”
He gave an almost embarrassed smile. “I like my gadgets.”
“You’re a guy; of course you do,” she said. “My husband was the same way.”
“Was?”
She nodded “He died last year; line of duty.”
Thomas opened and closed his mouth once or twice, trying to get words to come out. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Lydia. I didn’t know.”
She gave him a sideways glance, and said, “Of course you didn’t. How could you?” She smiled, a little more warmly this time. “When you said that, though, you sounded a lot like him.” She made a couple of gestures in her AR window, then said, “Okay, you should be able to mesh your ‘link with mine now.”
He did so, and suddenly a half-dozen AROs popped into his field of vision. She reached up, closed a couple of them, and began pointing at various items in the two remaining windows. “Here’s the entry visa from last week,” she said, “and here’s exit processing from around the time of the killing—based on the emergency call Corinne’s neighbor’s placed during the fight—up to about half an hour ago.”
Thomas scanned the second window. “There’s no exit visa.”
Lydia nodded. “There’s no exit visa. Now, that doesn’t mean she didn’t just jump the border and take her chances in one of the other sectors; believe me, it happens all the time. But considering she had the moxie to just walk in …”
Thomas nodded. “She’s been here a week; she has to be staying somewhere. Can you access hotel registrations?”
“Yeah, I think I can do that,” she said, her fingers dancing. A couple of minutes passed silently, and then she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You and your wife are booked in a very nice suite at the Conner-Westin.”
“They booked me a room at the Holiday Inn, and I’ve been divorced for fifteen years,” he said, his tone suddenly irritated. “You know as well as I do that I haven’t even checked in yet.”
“Well, be that as it may,” she replied, “a
Dr. and Mrs. Thomas McAllister are staying at the Conner-Westin in a 2,000-nuyen-a-night suite with a lovely view of the Rockies.”
He leaned back and stroked his chin with one hand; he really needed a shave, he realized. “She did everything but send up flares.”
“Yeah,” Lydia said, “it’s almost an engraved invitation—which means it’s a blatant trap.”
“Who says you can’t have it all?”
She looked at him with astonishment. “You’re actually thinking of just waltzing right in there?”
He nodded. “I was invited.”
“Were you paying attention when I said, ‘blatant trap’? It’s a setup, Thomas.”
He looked at her and smiled mirthlessly. “Of course it is, Lydia; I’d be surprised if it was otherwise. I killed her, though, remember? She wants to return the favor.”
The lobby of the Conner-Westin Hotel was everything Thomas had ever imagined about luxury hotels. Carpet that caressed your feet running in paths between marble flooring. Leather divans holding men and women in cocktail dress sipping at drinks that cost more than the person serving them made in a day. Subtle AR architecture that made the stones look smoother, the leather richer, and the shadows of the lobby more welcoming.
Thomas felt immediately and completely out of place. He patted himself down again, making sure his weapon was ready and his charms had not managed to vanish in the last five minutes. Unable to stall any longer, he approached the desk, ready to transmit his ID.
He was greeted by a coolly efficient elven woman who was somewhere between twenty and sixty-five years old. “How may I help you, sir?”
Shadowrun: Another Rainy Night Page 2
