by Tanya Huff
The apartment door had been painted a deep blue sometime in the distant past. It wore a grimy patina of hand-shaped smudges fading down into black scuff marks probably caused by shoving it open with a booted foot.
Hand raised to knock, Vicki paused and frowned. With millions of lives surrounding her—and, more specifically, with the half a dozen lives close at hand behind inadequate walls of ancient plaster and lath— it was difficult to separate out the sounds coming from inside Carr's apartment. Sifting sound, disregarding everything that wasn't life, focusing, she picked out a heartbeat. It was slower than it should be. Struggling.
Not even burning onions on the second floor could mask the smell of blood.
The door had a deadbolt on it and a security chain. Both were screwed into a doorframe that had probably been installed at the turn of the century. The wood gave way with a sound like a dry cough. The multiple layers of cheap paint hung on a moment longer, then Vicki was in the apartment and racing down the long hall toward the front room, following her nose.
This door was also locked.
And was unlocked just as quickly.
A young man—blond hair, pale skin, late twenties, approximately six feet tall and a hundred and seventy pounds—lay sprawled on the linoleum, blood spreading out from under his head along the artificial watershed of the uneven floor. He was alone in the room.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Vicki knelt beside him, his head cradled in one hand, a folded towel from the bathroom in the other. Had any assailants still been around, they might have wondered when she'd had time to get back down the hall but had they still been around, she'd have dealt with them first, so the question would have been moot. The room was empty except for the injured man. No one was hiding under the desk. No one lurked in the tiny turn- of-the-century closet.
A couple of mouthfuls of spit on the towel—easy enough to work up under the circumstances, the smell of blood was making her mouth water—and then both spit and towel applied to the wound. As the coagulant in her saliva went to work, she pulled her cell phone from her pocket, flipped it open, and dialled one- handed.
*
"So you broke down the door?"
"That's right."
"Because you could smell the blood?"
"Yes."
"From out in the hall?"
"That's what I said."
"Just trying to get my facts straight, Ms. Nelson."
Vicki forced her lips back down over her teeth as the earnest young constable went over her statement for the fourth time.
"And then you broke down the inner door as well?"
"Yes."
He gave her what he probably considered an intimidating stare. "You forced the lock right out of the wood. Splintered the wood. So not only do you have a rather unbelievable sense of smell, you're unusually strong."
"I work out." While she appreciated he was just doing his job, enough was enough. Locking her eyes on his, she smiled. "Now go away," she said softly, "and stop bothering me."
"I... I think that's all I need to know."
"Good." A more normal tone. A slightly more normal smile.
He backed up two steps, then turned and scuttled down the hall toward the apartment door, nearly bouncing off Mike Celluci.
"Vicki..."
"I was cooperating."
"You terrified him."
"So? Back in the day, I used to terrify the uniforms all the time." She sighed as they fell into step heading toward Carr's tiny office. "When did they start hiring children?"
"About the time I started going gray."
They paused to allow the crime scene team to leave, and Vicki reached up to push the curl of hair back off his face. She'd gotten rather sentimental about his scattering of gray hair—after she stopped being furious at it. Raging at the years that took him farther and farther away from her. She would age, but slowly. She'd changed at thirty-four. It would be centuries before she saw forty.
Sunlight and the occasional idiot Van Helsing clone allowing.
She stepped aside so the head of the crime scene unit could have a talk with Celluci and, well beyond normal eavesdropping distance, eavesdropped shamelessly.
"So," she said when they were finally alone in the apartment. "The door was locked from the inside, the window was painted shut, and they think they've only got one person's prints, although they'll have to get back to you on that. Didn't I once read a Miss Marple book with this plot?"
"You read a book?"
"Funny man."
Celluci shoved his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and scowled at the room. A battered office chair, more duct tape than upholstery, lay on its side against the outside wall. "He could have just tipped over backward and hit his head."
"With the chair over there and this kind of a spatter pattern? Stop playing idiot's advocate, Mike. Looks to me like he pushed away from the desk, spun the chair around..." Vicki sketched the arc in the air. "...leaped out of it, and was on his feet when he was hit. Whoever it was came in through the door..."
"The locked door."
"We don't know for certain that the door was locked when the assailant arrived. Came in through the door," she repealed when Mike nodded reluctantly. "Walked very, very quietly around to about here..." She indicated a spot by the desk.
"It didn't have to be that quiet. If Carr was writing, he could have been distracted. Lost in his own world."
"Fair enough. But the assailant didn't just sneak in and attack him from behind, or he'd have fallen forward, over the keyboard. He got Carr's attention first. There must have been a fight. Maybe the neighbors heard something."
"Gosh, Vicki." Celluci's voice dripped heavy, obvious sarcasm. "I would never have thought to ask the neighbors if they heard anything. It's a good thing you're here. And frankly, I'm more concerned with how the guy got out, not in." A long stride took him to the other side of the red-brown puddle. He frowned at the window and the layers of paint that had clearly not been cracked. "Last time this was opened, Trudeau was prime minister."
"No one here but Raymond Carr when I broke in. No one passed me on the stairs, and no one came out of the building with a bloody weapon while I was close enough to see the door."
"Would you have seen the weapon under a winter coat?"
She smiled at him. "If it was bloody, I'd have known it was there."
"If. He could have left before you got close."
"Not at the rate Carr was bleeding out. It had to have happened just before I got here or the coroner'd be slabbing him right about now."
He shrugged, accepting her explanation. "Don't these apartments have a back exit into a courtyard?"
"The uniforms checked it. Locked. Three bolts thrown. Impossible to do from outside. And the window in the kitchen has as much paint on it as this one. Plus a layer of grease."
"I hate this kind of shit." Celluci dragged both hands back through his hair, dropping the curl over his forehead again. "I don't suppose our perp turned to mist or smoke, or there's a bat hiding out in a dark corner that we missed?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"You telling me vampires don't exist?"
"I'm telling you that even if Hollywood didn't have its collective head up its ass, we wouldn't have wasted the blood." Carefully avoiding the splatter trail, she moved to the desk and looked down at the monitor. It was a new model, one of the liquid crystal screens made by a company she didn't recognize. From across the room, it had looked blank. Up close, there was one word, dead center on the screen.
"Mike."
He leaned in for a closer look. "Die."
"It's not an e-mail. They had to have typed it when they were in the room."
"I'll make sure they dust the keyboard when they bring the machine in. What are you doing?"
She frowned at an oval of drying blood nearly invisible on the black plastic of the monitor housing. It was shaped like a thumbprint, but she couldn't see a pattern.
"So you're eyeballing hil
ls and valleys now?" he snorted when she pointed it out to him. "Good work, Vicki, we've got the son of a bitch. Our bad guy had to have left it there when he was typing. Left hand holding the monitor, typing with his right. If you can find another one of these, we might be able to piece together how the fuck he got out of the room."
"If I can find another one?"
"You know, sniff it out."
"Sniff it out?"
He turned to scowl at her. "Would you quit repeating everything I say?"
"I'm not repeating everything," she told him, "just the stupid parts. This room is saturated in blood scent, Mike. And before you ask," she cautioned, "I can't track the bad guy. I'm not a bloodhound."
One dark brow rose.
"Not funny."
"You're right. I'm sorry." Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he looked around the room. "So, what do we have?"
"You have an unsolved assault. And I have to find another client."
"He's not dead."
"You want me to guard him in the hospital?"
"That's up to you."
"I hate hospitals."
*
Vicki'd disliked hospitals before she changed and she'd started disliking them even more after. Light- sensitive eyes found them far too bright and no amount of disinfectant could keep them from reeking of death. That they also reeked of disinfectant was not a selling point.
Raymond Carr was in a private room at the far end of a quiet corridor, the room the hospital unofficially kept for ongoing criminal cases. Sometimes it held the criminals. Sometimes the cases. With budgets cut and then cut again, the police department hadn't the manpower to guard an unsuccessful writer from an unknown enemy. They'd do their best to turn the unknown to a known, but as long as Carr seemed safe in the hospital, he'd remain unguarded.
Vicki stood in the room's darkest corner and watched the pale man on the bed draw in one short, shallow breath after another. He was sleeping—not entirely peacefully. Long fingers twitched against the covers and his eyeballs bounced behind his lids. Vicki wondered what he was dreaming about.
He'd told the police he couldn't remember what had happened. That one moment he'd been writing and the next he was in the back of an ambulance staring up at a pair of EMTs. It was all still in there, though. Trapped in the dark places.
Vicki did some of her best work in dark places. Unfortunately, Carr was wired—she wouldn't be able to question him without setting off the bells and whistles.
"Who's there?"
Might as well try it the old-fashioned way. The Hunter carefully masked, she stepped out of the shadows. "My name's Vicki Nelson. Detective Sergeant Celluci told you I was coming over tonight."
"What happened to me?"
"You got hit on the head."
His eyes widened and he stared up at her with dawning comprehension. "You're the one he was sending to protect me!"
"Sorry; I got there a little late." And anyone else would have knocked and gone away. "For what it's worth, I kept you from bleeding to death."
"My computer!"
Apparently, it wasn't worth much. "The police have it."
"My book! My God, they have my book!"
"Calm down." A quick glance at the monitors showed a rise in heart rate. "You'll get it back when they finish the investigation."
"It'll never be finished."
She wasn't entirely certain if he meant the investigation or the book. "You must have back-up copies."
"It's on disk." The bandage whispered against the pillowcase as he rocked his head from side to side. "I meant to burn it, but..." The rocking stopped. His pupils were so dilated his irises had nearly disappeared. "Why do you want my copy?"
"I don't. I was just reassuring..."
"You're trying to steal it!"
"No, I'm not." She let her eyes silver just enough to force him calm.
He panicked instead. The heart-rate monitor screamed as he tried to scramble back through the head of the bed.
Vicki was in the stairwell before the nurses left their station. She waited, the door open a crack, listening as they tranquilized him and strapped him down. He kept yelling that his book was in danger.
"Quite the imagination on him," one nurse muttered to the other as they left the room, her tone suggesting that "quite the imagination" could be translated as "total paranoid nutcase."
As Vicki slipped away, she thought it might be time to find out what else "quite the imagination" might mean.
*
The yellow crime scene tape remained across the door, but in the still, dark hours of the morning when Vicki returned to Raymond Carr's apartment, the police were long gone. Because of the manner of Vicki's original entrance, the apartment couldn't be secured, so they'd taken the trouble to put a padlock in place— a lot cheaper than keeping a uniform around until the landlord could arrive and make repairs. It was a good lock. It took Vicki about two minutes to pop it.
As well as the computer, the police had cleared Carr's desktop and taken all the drawers, hoping for a clue amid the debris. While she appreciated their thoroughness, she was a little annoyed by the need to pry a copy of the book out of official channels. Official channels were notoriously narrow.
And speaking of narrow... Since she was there, she leaned her laptop case against the wall and stepped into the closet to check the ceiling for trapdoors leading to a closed-off and forgotten attic. Nothing. The cheap linoleum was solidly attached in all four corners, so there was no chance of a trapdoor to the apartment below.
On her hands and knees, peering under the desk at a floor unmarked by secret passageways, she snickered, "Who's the paranoid nutcase now?"
Paranoid nutcase...
Carr had thought she was going to steal his book. Had believed it so strongly, the hysterics had protected him from her ability to get into his head.
Vicki twisted and looked up at the bottom of the keyboard slide.
The masking tape that attached the square mailing envelope was almost the same color as the pale wood of the desk. The label on the single disk inside simply said, Book.
*
"The blood on the monitor wasn't a print."
Vicki glanced up from her laptop as Celluci came into the living room and dropped down beside her on the couch. "I'm sorry, Mike."
He grunted a noncommittal response to her sympathy. "What are you reading?"
"Raymond Carr's book. It's weirdly good. He starts off by massacring almost an entire village just so the hero—Harticalder—can go off and kick ass, so the plot's mostly a series of violent encounters strung together on a less-than-believable travelogue, but even doing the most asinine things, the characters are strangely believable. These guys read like real people."
His hand closed around her shoulder, warm even through the fleece of her sweatshirt. "Where did you get that?"
"Calm down, I left the original where it was." She popped the disk out of the side of her computer. "This is a copy." Pushing it back into the drive, she set the machine aside and pivoted in place until she faced him. "There's something else."
"What do you mean?"
"I know that look. It's your I've come to a conclusion expression."
He sighed and ran his hand back up through his hair. "The lab says there's no weapon, that the floor was the point of impact. One bang."
Vicki snorted. "No one hits their head that hard on a floor. It's a flat surface. Essentially flat," she amended, remembering how the blood had spread.
"And there's no indication of anyone else ever being in that room."
"Except for the blood on the monitor," she pointed out, poking him in the thigh with her bare foot.
"A random splatter. Raymond Carr got tangled up in his chair, fought to get free, and fell. That's why the chair was over by the window. No one pushed him, no one slammed his head down—there isn't another mark on his body."
Carr's skin was so pale that bruises would show almost instantly, blood from crushed capillaries pooling under th
e surface. "What about the threats?"
"We did a little background check, and it turns out that Raymond Carr is a paranoid schizophrenic. If he was off his medication, the odds are good he was writing the threats to himself."
"And?" Vicki asked pointedly.
"And what?" His hand closed around her ankle before she could poke him again. They both knew he couldn't hold her, but that wasn't the point.
"And you've had all day; is he off his medication?"
"Doesn't seem to have been. But..." He sketched uncertainties in the air with his free hand.
"But even paranoids have enemies."
He smiled then and pulled her close enough to kiss. "I knew you were going to say that."
"What about the blood on the monitor?" she asked when they pulled apart.
Celluci's turn to snort. "You know as well as I do that sometimes not all the pieces fit. You know better than I do that weird happens."
That was an impossible point to argue with, so she didn't bother and later, after he fell asleep, she checked that the bite on his wrist had closed over and slid out of bed to finish the book. Or at least to finish all of the book there was.
The fight scenes continued to be contrived, but the dialogue rang true and as she closed the last file, Vicki had to admit she believed in ol' Harticalder and his people. Almost buried under the preposterous plot, Carr had real talent.
On a whim, she went online and ran a search on the brand of monitor on Carr's desk. Her laptop was almost five years old and, even with the monitor dimmed down as far as it would go, it was still hard on light-sensitive eyes. Odds were good that new ones like Carr's had new features.
According to the official Web site, they did everything but make toast.
It seemed that Quinct, the company, had developed an amazing new technology for manufacturing the liquid crystal screens. They'd produced them for almost a year, claiming the new screens provided a viewing surface a minimum of 60 percent sharper than the competition. And then, they'd gone bankrupt.
A bankruptcy sale explained how Raymond Carr had managed to afford one.
