Blood Game: An Eve Duncan Forensics Thriller

by Iris Johansen

  Joe. Safe. Alive. Her arms closed around him.

  “Keep her out of the way.” Caleb’s gaze was fastened on Jelak. “Put the gun down, Jelak.”

  Two shots plowed erratically into the altar to the left of Caleb.

  “Missed again. Give up, Jelak.”

  “I won’t give up. I’ll be as strong as you. Stronger.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t matter if you gave up anyway. I’d actually prefer that you didn’t. But you know what’s coming, don’t you? Your teacher Donari told you what to expect if I caught up with you. That’s why you’ve been on the run.”

  “It won’t happen.” He fired again at Caleb. “That was a lie. Even if it wasn’t, I’m too close to resurrection for you to be able to—stay back!” It was a scream.

  Caleb kept coming. “It wasn’t a lie. Donari told you many lies, but that wasn’t one of them. I knew the night that you killed Maria Givano that was the way you were going to die.”

  “I won’t die. I’ll be a god.”

  “No, you played the Blood Game all these years, and now you’ve lost. It’s time to give the blood back.” He was within a few feet of Jelak now. “No resurrection. Never.”

  “No!” Jelak jumped to his feet and started running toward the anteroom. “I’ll get away from you. Just a few more kills. I’ll start again and—” He stopped, his hands going to his throat.

  He screamed.

  Eve wanted to scream, too, as she saw his face. It was contorted, flushed, and, as she watched, blood began to trickle out of his eyes like dark tears.

  “Just a little blood now,” Caleb said. “I want the pain to start. Convulsions, I think. Do you know that convulsions can break your bones?”

  Jelak was falling, his whole body shuddering, shaking with the force of the convulsions.

  “Did any ribs break yet?” Caleb asked. “They will, Jelak.”

  Jelak was trying to crawl away, but he started howling with pain as the convulsions increased. “Make it—stop.” He looked pleadingly back over his shoulder. “I’ll do anything to—”

  “Yes, you will,” Caleb said. “And it will stop soon. I’ve no intention of a having a broken rib shatter and pierce your heart. It would be too easy. Just a minute more.”

  Eve flinched as Jelak screamed again. She could almost feel his agony.

  “Now it’s time for the blood,” Caleb said.

  The convulsions abruptly stopped.

  “Give it all back,” Caleb said softly. “All the blood you stole. All the kills, all the lives. First the blood tears, then the rush to the brain that will cause massive strokes.” He was moving slowly toward him again. “Do you feel it? Oh yes, I see that you do. They’re coming. Your eyes are rolling back in your head.”

  Jelak was whimpering.

  “But you haven’t given up all the blood you took. It has to be everything. Now it’s the end of the game.”

  Jelak began to gasp as blood began to pour out of his mouth.

  He was choking painfully on the blood, Eve realized. He couldn’t get his breath. She wanted to look away but she couldn’t take her eyes from his face.

  He was trying to speak, his gaze fixed on Caleb, blood pouring from his lips. He tried to scream.

  “That should do it,” Caleb said. “How’s your resurrection going, Jelak?”

  A gurgling, a gasp, and Jelak’s body was jerking, shuddering with the force of the blood leaving his body.

  Caleb bent over him and looked deep into his eyes. “It’s over. You’re dying. No power. No immortality. You know that, don’t you? I want you to know that you’re nothing.”

  And that desperate realization of final defeat was in Jelak’s eyes.

  Caleb straightened. “Burn in hell, Jelak.”

  Jelak arched upward, then he was still.

  Caleb stood looking down at him for a long moment.

  Then he turned and walked out of the cathedral.

  “DEAR GOD,” EVE WHISPERED, her gaze on Jelak’s body. “What happened? What did he do to him?”

  “I don’t believe there’s any question what he did to him,” Joe said. “Just how he did it.”

  She shuddered. “No wonder Jelak was running from him if he thought he could do that to him.”

  “Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of it.” Joe got to his knees. “I wanted him dead, and Caleb obliged. Though I’d rather have done it myself.”

  “Joe . . .” She had suddenly become aware of the multitude of dagger cuts all over his torso. She put her hand out to touch one on his shoulder. “He did that to you . . .”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay.” She saw a two-inch cut in the flesh on his upper back that looked as if it had been hacked out. Just the pain he’d undergone for that wound alone must have terrible. “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  He nodded. “Let’s get it over with. Those stitches may hurt as much as Jelak’s carving.”

  “I don’t think so.” She was suddenly not feeling nearly as full of horror as she stared back at Jelak. “Bastard. I wish Caleb had made him suffer more.”

  “It was probably sufficient. Stroke, brain hemorrhaging, and suffocation.” He took her arm. “And none of it can be proved in any court of law.”

  “But we saw it.”

  “Even if we testified, which neither of us is inclined to do, we’d be laughed out of court. Jelak died of natural causes.”

  “Blood,” Eve said. “The blood killed him.”

  “That’s apparently the way Caleb wanted it. The final irony.”

  They had come out of the church, and Eve took a deep breath of the cool night air. Only a short time had passed since she had entered the cathedral, but she felt as if she had been in there for a century.

  But Joe was safe. Jelak was dead. There would be no more deaths, no more danger from a man who thought he was destined to be a vampire god.

  “Okay?” Joe was looking down at her.

  She nodded. “You’re the one who is all cut to pieces. I’m going to call Jane and tell her you’re alive and functioning and to meet us at the hospital. I know you have to call the precinct and tell them about Jelak.” She took his hand. “But then can we just go home?”

  “That sounds good to me. I’m afraid they’ll find more bodies in that cathedral than Jelak’s, but someone else can do that investigation. They can get our statements tomorrow. I’ll have them send someone to the cottage.” He smiled. “After all, I have an excuse. I’ll have the hospital tell the department to put me on sick leave.”

  THE SUN FELT WARM AND soothing on Joe’s bare back as he stretched out on the bank of the lake. He smelled the fresh scent of pine and the good clean earth. It was a day when it felt good to be alive.

  “Your back still looks terrible,” Nancy Jo said. “Maybe you should have plastic surgery or something.”

  “I don’t care about whether I’m a pretty boy or not.” He rolled over to see her sitting a few feet away. “But I might have to have something done to keep Eve from flinching for me every time she sees them. It’s only been a few days. The scars will fade.” He smiled. “It feels really good to get some sun on them.”

  She nodded. “I can’t feel sunlight yet. Bonnie says it will take a while.”

  “If you decide that you want to stick around. Are you sure there’s not something better around the corner?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know. But I don’t think I can leave Daddy yet. He needs me.”

  “I needed you,” Joe said quietly. “And you came through for me. Thank you, Nancy Jo.”

  “I couldn’t let you die.” She shook her head. “And I couldn’t let Jelak win. It would have been horrible. I just had to think of a way to do it. It was Bonnie who showed me how.”

  “Bonnie, again.”

  Nancy Jo nodded. “She said you had to live.”

  “I’m glad the two of you agreed on that point.” He put on his shirt but didn’t bother to button it. “Are you sure your father sti
ll needs you? Or is it that you need him?”

  “Probably both. But I wouldn’t stay if I didn’t think that it was the best thing for him. He can’t find his way right now. It’s important that he not go down the wrong path.” She smiled. “He wanted to be president. He thought he could help people. I know he can still do it. He just needs someone to nudge him along and keep him from being lonely.”

  “That’s an important job, but I can’t think of anyone who could fill it better than you, Nancy Jo.”

  She smiled impishly. “I can’t either. With a little help from my friends. But I might get lonely too. Do you mind if I drop in now and then to see you?”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  Her smile faded. “You mean that?”

  He nodded. “My extreme pleasure.” He chuckled. “After all, you’re the perfect friend. You have very few demands.”

  “I demanded you get Jelak.”

  “That was an understandable exception.”

  “I can’t promise I might not ask something again. I can’t just stand around and watch something go wrong.”

  “Then we’ll worry about it when you do.”

  She nodded. “You’d be much better off having Bonnie for a friend. But she says that there’s something standing in the way.” She looked at him searchingly. “And I think she’s right. You’re closing up, Joe.”

  “Am I? Then maybe she’s right, and there are a few obstacles that are difficult to overcome.”

  “Not for her. She’s a great problem solver. She’s helped me along any number of times.”

  “Then it must be me.” He got to his feet. “I’m going back to the cottage.”

  “Because you don’t want to talk to me about Bonnie.” Nancy Jo was frowning. “Why not? I’d think you’d want to talk to—”

  “Nancy Jo, stop being pushy.” He strolled back toward the cottage. “You know the trick. It’s time to do your vanishing act.”

  CALEB WAS GETTING OUT of his car when Joe arrived back at the cottage. He stood waiting as Joe walked up the path. “You’re looking better than the last time I saw you. No permanent damage?”

  Joe shook his head. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to say good-bye. I’m going to go back to Scotland.” He paused. “And I wanted to express my appreciation for your discretion in making your report. It could have been awkward.”

  “Discretion? I only told the truth. Jelak attacked you, but you didn’t try to defend yourself. Then Jelak had a massive stroke and hemorrhage and died. The captain thought it was a bit convenient, but the autopsy bore it out.” He paused. “Otherwise, I would have hung you out to dry. I won’t have Eve being under suspicion for making a false statement.”

  He nodded. “You had to protect her.” He glanced at the wounds on Joe’s body. “From Jelak, from me, from the whole damn world. I respect that quality in you.”

  “When you’re not trying to shoot me.”

  He smiled. “You got in my way. I was in hunt mode. I told you I wouldn’t have given you a serious wound.”

  “Hunt mode,” he repeated. “That’s quite an arsenal you used on Jelak.”

  “A small talent, but my own. Not anything as interesting as communing with spirits.”

  “Not a small talent. Very deadly. Was Jelak special, or is it your common modus operandi?”

  He was silent. “I think I’ll let you work that out for yourself.”

  “I’ve already started. I contacted the Italian police. In the last ten years there have been a number of massive strokes among the cult group that originated in Fiero. What a coincidence.”

  “But none that appeared to be anything but natural deaths. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you have your answer.” He smiled. “And now, with your permission, I’d like to go inside and say good-bye to Eve and Jane. I feel as if I’ve grown very close to them.”

  “When you weren’t using them.”

  He nodded. “When I wasn’t using them. I had to strike a delicate balance.”

  Joe stared at him in disbelief. “You actually mean that.”

  “Of course. You’re a man who sees only one path and forges forward on it to the end. I have to walk many paths, and when I see quicksand, I have to skirt around it.”

  “And do a balancing act.”

  He smiled. “Exactly. Now may I go in and see Jane and Eve?”

  Joe stared at him for a moment, then turned and strode up the steps. “If they want to see you. I’ll ask them.”

  “They’ll want to see me.” Caleb leaned back on the door of his car. “They’re two women who like to put a period at the end of an episode. Good-bye is a period.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “I’LL MISS SITTING HERE and looking at your lake.” Caleb took the cup of coffee Jane handed him and leaned back against the post railing, his hand lazily stroking Toby’s head. “I don’t think that I’ve ever felt quite so peaceful as I have in those moments.”

  “Peaceful? You?” Jane crossed to the swing and gave Eve her coffee before dropping down beside her. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I have my moments.” He took a sip of his coffee. “There’s a lake near Fiero that I visited when I dropped in to see Maria. It was a peaceful place too.”

  “Maria Givano?”

  “Yes.” He gazed out at Joe, who was standing on the bank of the lake several hundred yards away. “Quinn is distancing himself from our little coffee klatch. I wasn’t sure he’d even let me in the cottage.”

  “Did you expect anything else?” Eve asked. “He still doesn’t trust you.”

  “But you trust me.” Caleb’s brows lifted. “Amazing. Since I haven’t done anything to persuade you.” He paused. “And what you saw in the cathedral wasn’t something that would inspire you to want to draw closer to me.”

  “No.” Eve would never forget that horrible scene. Caleb had been like someone who had stepped out of a horror story, the stuff of which nightmares were born. Yet she could not keep herself from separating that man from the Caleb she had grown to know. “And you don’t want me to draw close to you. You want to stand apart. Have you ever been close to anyone, Caleb?”

  He shrugged. “When I was a child. My uncle, my parents, my sister. It didn’t seem worthwhile to make the effort with anyone else.”

  Jane leaned forward. “Because you couldn’t be sure it would have been a genuine closeness? It was too easy for you to make people like you, even love you. You told me that you had trouble withstanding temptation.”

  “What is this?” He tilted his head. “Am I having some kind of psychological evaluation?”

  “Yes,” Eve said. “Because you barged into our lives and made a handprint that we can’t erase. Jane and I discussed it, and we decided that we had to get a grip on you before you slipped away.” She smiled faintly. “So I called Megan and asked her questions. She didn’t know the answers but she phoned Renata. She knew if anyone could tell us about you, it would be Renata.”

  Caleb nodded. “Yes, our Renata’s a storehouse of information. But she usually keeps everything she knows confidential.”

  “Megan and she are very close,” Eve said. “Renata trusts her.”

  “And just what did Renata tell Megan?”

  “Only what we asked her to find out,” Jane said. “The killing of Maria Givano seemed to be the beginning of everything. We asked why her death was the trigger that set you hunting Jelak.” She paused. “She was your half sister.”

  “You could have asked me.”

  “But you might not have told us.”

  He nodded. “Possibly. Because one question might have led to another.”

  “And it did,” Eve said. “She’d married a year earlier and taken her husband’s name of Givano. But her birth name was Caleb.” She shook her head. “But even that wasn’t totally correct. Because the family had changed their name when they’d moved away from Fiero. She would have been Mar
ia Ridondo.”

  “Indeed?” Caleb asked mockingly. “Then you’ve put two and two together and come up with the brothers who were the scourge of Fiero, the wicked purveyors of the dark arts, who held the village in thrall for decades.”

  “Yes,” Eve said. “How dark were their arts, Caleb?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. “Very dark. Jelak wasn’t far off about the vampire gods.”

  “And the power,” Jane said. “I was thinking about what you said about Jelak believing that invisibility was part of the powers he’d attain after resurrection. That was too over-the-top for me to accept. But then I started to think about the way you could move around wherever you wanted. If anyone stopped you, then you just changed their perception. That’s a form of invisibility.”

  “Legend has a habit of twisting truth,” Caleb said. “But Jelak had enough truth mixed with legend to fuel that ambition.”

  “You’re a member of the Devanez family Megan told us about?”

  “Yes, the Ridondo brothers fled Spain during the Inquisition and settled in Fiero. They decided that the only way they could keep themselves safe from informers to the Church was to keep the villagers terrified of retribution.” He shrugged. “It worked, but how much blackness can a soul take? When they decided that they would leave the village and try to start a new life, it was almost too late. They settled, they had children, grandchildren, time passed.” His lips twisted. “With only minor episodes that could be called totally wicked. But the call of the blood never entirely goes away. Neither does the knowledge that the power is there ready to be tapped. Most of the Ridondo descendants found it was safer to become hunters to expel some of that passion and leach away the darkness.”

  “As you did.”

  “As I did.”

  “Your sister,” Eve prompted.

  “I was never home much. I was always away from the time I was a teenager. My parents sent me to live with my uncle because they decided that he could handle me better than they could. He was a hunter.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame them. I was showing signs of being a throwback to the first Ridondos and that would have been awkward for them.”