Time of Death

by Robb, J. D.

  “Holy crap. It’s not what she took,” Peabody decided, “it’s more what didn’t she take.”

  “Hallucinogens, date-rape drugs, sexual enhancers, paralytic, human blood, tranq, all mixed in wine. Hell of a cocktail.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Peabody glanced over the printout. “You?”

  “Not with so many variables and with this potency. It’s new to me, but let’s run it by Illegals and see if it’s new to them. According to the results, and the time line, she downed this herself, before she disengaged the alarm, or just after. Maybe she knew what was in it, maybe she didn’t. But she drank it down, on her own.”

  “Hard to say, seeing she’s dead, but she pretty much wins the stupid prize.”

  “All-time champ.” Eve paused as her machine signaled another incoming. “And we may have a runner-up. We’ve got DNA.” She scanned the data quickly. “Semen, saliva, and the blood she ingested. All the same donor.”

  “Pretty damn careless of him,” Peabody commented.

  “Yeah.” Eve frowned at the screen. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Another conclusion is he just didn’t care—being a vampire.” Peabody shrugged as Eve glanced back at her. “He doesn’t care if we match his DNA because he’ll just, I don’t know, turn into a bat and fly off, or poof into smoke. Whatever.”

  “Right. A whole new scope on going into the wind.”

  “I’m not saying it’s what I think, but maybe what he thinks.”

  “We’ll be sure to ask him when we find him. Meanwhile, go ahead and run the cocktail by Illegals. I’ll do a standard search for the DNA match. Maybe he’s in the system.”

  But she didn’t think so. He wasn’t careless, Eve thought. He was fucking arrogant. It didn’t surprise her when her search turned up negative.

  “Lieutenant.”

  She glanced over, experienced that quick heart punch when her eyes met Roarke’s. He was dressed in the dark suit he’d put on in their bedroom that morning, one of the countless he owned tailored to fit his long, rangy frame.

  “Right on time,” she said.

  “We aim to please.” He stepped in, eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. “How goes the vampire hunting?”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to call in Van Helsing.” When he lifted his brows and grinned, she shrugged. “I do my research. Plus I’ve sat through some of those old vids you like so much.”

  “And so armed, we’ll venture into the den of the children of the night. Never a dull moment,” he added and flicked his fingers at the choppy ends of her hair. “Your case is all over the media.”

  “Yeah. Bound to be.”

  “I noticed the primary hasn’t given a statement.”

  “I’m not going to play the game on this one, or give this asshole the satisfaction. She drugged her own brains out prior—mix of Zeus, Erotica, Whore, Rabbit, Stunner, Bliss, Boost, along with a few other goodies, including her killer’s blood.”

  “There’s an ugly recipe.”

  “And my money says he provided the brew, pushed on her vanity and stupid buttons, got his rocks off, then drained her like a faulty motor.”

  “For what purpose?” Roarke wondered.

  “Best I can tell, he wound her up because he could. And he killed her because he could. He’ll want to do it again, real soon.”

  “Foolish of him, don’t you think, to have chosen such a high-profile victim?”

  She’d considered that, and had to appreciate being married to a man who could think like a cop. “Yeah, smarter, safer to bite a vagrant off the street. But this was more fun, more exciting. Why snack on street whores or sidewalk sleepers, the nobodies, when you can gorge yourself on the prime? Plus, it was profitable. A street level LC isn’t going to be sporting blue diamonds. He’s stoked, believe it, watching all the media coverage.”

  “Unless he’s spent the day napping in his coffin.”

  “Ha-ha.” She pushed up, instinctively brushed a hand over the weapon at her side. “Almost sundown. Let’s go clubbing.”

  Peabody was lying in wait, along with her cohab, E-Division Detective McNab. He wasn’t just a fashion plate, but an entire place setting, and was decked out in pants of neon blue that appeared to be made up almost entirely of pockets. He’d matched it with a bright green jacket with streaks of yellow jagged across it and some sort of skinny tank that melded all the colors of the spectrum in a kind of eye-searing cloudburst.

  “I thought we could use another pair of eyes,” Peabody began even as Eve’s eyes narrowed. “You know, strength in numbers.”

  “I did a rotation in Illegals when I was still in uniform.” McNab grinned out of his pretty, narrow face. “And when I worked Vice, we ran into all kinds of freaky shit.”

  “You don’t want to miss a chance to cruise a vampire club.”

  His smile turned winsome. “Who would?”

  She could use him, Eve thought, but she gave him the hard-eye first, just for form. “This isn’t a damn double date.”

  “No, sir.” So he waited until Eve turned her back to walk to the elevator before hooking pinkies with Peabody.

  “Illegals hasn’t worked the combo,” Peabody began once they’d shoehorned into the elevator. “They don’t even have Bloodbath on their list of watch points. But they have worked a combination of Erotica, Bliss, Rabbit, with traces of blood—usually animal blood—in cases of vampire fetishism. They call it Vamp, and the use generally skews young. They haven’t had any homicides as a result of.”

  “Our guy upped the stakes, considerably. Have to wonder why the club hasn’t made their list.”

  “It’s new,” Peabody told her. “Way underground. Hadn’t hit their radar until I contacted them regarding our investigation.”

  “Underground clubs pop up faster than weeds,” McNab put in. “Live or die on word of mouth. Since it’s more than urban legend that people tend to go down and not come back up, they don’t get heavy tourist traffic.”

  “Tiara Kent found out about it somewhere.” Eve strode off the elevator and into the garage.

  “Crowd she runs with.” Peabody jerked a shoulder. “New place with a jagged edge? It would be right up her alley.”

  “And in less than two weeks from the first time she goes down, she’s guzzling a new, exciting illegals cocktail, and dies from a neck wound.” Eve slid behind the wheel of her vehicle. “That’s fast work, smooth work when you consider the security in her building never made him.” She glanced over at Roarke. “How much would a few pints of human blood net on the black market?”

  “A few hundred.”

  “What about famous human blood?”

  “Ah.” He nodded as she drove out of the garage. “Yes, that might drive up the price to the right buyer. Are you thinking she was specifically targeted?”

  “It’s an angle. She’s known, and she’s known to take risks, to slut around, to live wild. Her best friend hadn’t heard of the club before Kent clued her in. So maybe the idea or an invitation got passed straight onto the vic. In any case, she hooked up with her killer there, so someone saw them together. Someone knows him.”

  “You know,” McNab speculated, “if you factor out the blood-sucking, soulless demon angle, this should be a slam dunk.”

  “Good thing none of us believe in blood-sucking, soulless demons.” But Peabody’s hand crept over and found McNab’s.

  Eve caught the gesture in the rearview, just as she caught the way the fingers of Peabody’s free hand snuck between the buttons of her shirt to close over something.

  “Peabody, are you wearing a cross?”

  “What? Me?” The hand dropped like a stone into her lap. Her cheeks went pink as she cleared her throat. “It just happened that I know Mariella in Records, who just happened to have one, and I happened to borrow it. Just for backup.”

  “I see. And would you also be carrying a pointy stick?”

  “Not unless you mean McNab.”

  McNab smiled easi
ly as Eve stopped at a light, turned around in her seat. “Repeat after me: Vampires do not exist.”

  “Vampires do not exist,” Peabody recited.

  With a nod, Eve turned back, then narrowed her eyes at Roarke. “What’s that look on your face?”

  “Speculation. Most legends, after all, have some basis in fact. From Vlad the Impaler to Dracula of lore. It’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  “It’s interesting that I’m in this vehicle with a trio of lamebrains.”

  “Lamebrained to some,” Roarke replied equably, “open-minded to others.”

  “Huh. Maybe we should stop off at a market on the way, pick up a few pounds of garlic, just to ease those open minds.”

  “Really?” Peabody said from the back, then hunched her shoulders as Eve sent her a stony stare in the rearview mirror. “That means no,” Peabody muttered to McNab.

  “I translated already.”

  Eve had to settle for a second-level street slot five blocks from the underground entrance. The sun had set, and the balmy April day had gone to chill with a wind that had risen up to kick through the urban canyons.

  They moved through the packs of pedestrians—heading home, heading to dinner, heading to entertainment. At the mouth of the underground entrance, Eve paused.

  “Stick together through the tunnels,” she ordered. “We can work in pairs once we get to the club, but even then, let’s keep visual contact at all times.”

  She didn’t believe in the demons of lore, but she knew the human variety existed. And many of them lived, played, or worked in the bowels of the city.

  They moved down, out of the noise, out of the wind, into the dank dimness of the tunnels. The clubs and haunts and dives that existed there catered to a clientele that would make most convicted felons sprint in the opposite direction.

  Offerings underground included sex clubs that specialized in S&M, in torture dealt out for a fee by human, droid, or machine, or any miserable combination thereof. In the bars, the drinks were next to lethal and a man’s life was worth less than the price of a shot. The violent and the mad might wander there, sliding off into the shadows to do what could only be done in the dark, where blood and death bloomed like fetid mushrooms.

  She could hear weeping, raw and wild, echoing down one of the tunnels, and laughter that was somehow worse. She saw one of the lost addicts, pale as a ghost, huddled on the filthy floor, panting, pushing a syringe against his arm, giving himself a fix of what would eventually kill him.

  She turned away from it, passed a sex club where the lights were hard and red and reminded her of the room in Dallas where she’d killed her father.

  It was cold underground, as it had been cold in that room. The kind of cold that sank its teeth into the bone like an animal.

  She heard something scuttling to the left, and saw the gleam of eyes. She stared into them until they blinked, and they vanished.

  “I should’ve given you my clutch piece,” she said under her breath to Roarke.

  “Not to worry. I have my own.”

  She spared him a glance. He looked, she realized, every bit as deadly as anything that roamed the tunnels. “Try not to use it.”

  They turned down an angle beyond a vid parlor where someone screamed in a hideous combination of pain and delight.

  She smelled piss and vomit as they descended the next level. When a man with bulging muscles stepped out of the dark, turned the knife he held into the slant of light so it gleamed, Eve simply drew her weapon.

  “Wanna bet who wins?” she asked him, and he melted away again.

  From there, she followed the strong vibration of bass, the scent of heavy perfume, and the ocean surf roar of voices.

  The lights here were red as well, with some smoke blue, fog gray shimmered in. Mists curled and crawled over the floor. The doorway was an arch, to represent the mouth of a cave. Over the arch the word BLOODBATH throbbed in bloody red.

  Two bouncers, one black, one white, both built like tanker jets, flanked the arch, then stepped together to form a wall of oiled muscle.

  “Invitation or passcode,” they said in unison.

  “This is both.” Eve pulled out her badge, and got twin smirks.

  “That doesn’t mean jack down here,” the one on the left told her. “Private club.”

  Before she could speak again, Roarke simply pulled out several bills. “I believe this is the passcode.”

  After the money passed, the bouncers separated to make an opening. As they walked through, Eve shot Roarke an annoyed look. “I don’t have to bribe my way in.”

  “No, but you were going to hurt them, and that’s a lot messier. In any case, it was worth the fee as you take me to the most interesting places.”

  The club was three open levels, dark and smoky, with the pentagram bar as the center. A stage jutted out on the second level where a band played the kind of music that bashed into the chest like hurled stones. Fog crept over it like writhing snakes. Patrons sat at the bar, at metal tables, lurked in corners or danced on platforms. Nearly all wore black, and nearly all were well under thirty.

  There were some privacy booths and some were already occupied with couples or small groups smoking what was likely illegal substances inside the domes, or groping each other. Eve’s gaze tracked up to note there were private rooms on the third level. The club had a live sex license, and no doubt all manner of acts transpired behind the doors.

  She approached the bar where a man or woman worked at every point of the pentagram. Eve chose a woman with straight black hair parted in the center to frame a pale, pale face. Her lips were heavy and full and dyed deep, dark red.

  “What can I get you?” the woman asked.

  “Whoever’s in charge.” Eve set her badge on the slick black metal of the bar.

  “There a problem?”

  “There will be if you don’t get me whoever runs this place.”

  “Sure.” The bartender drew a headset out of her pocket. “Dorian? Allesseria. I’ve got a cop at station three asking for the manager. Sure thing.”

  She put the headset away again. “He’ll be right down. Said I should offer you a drink, on the house.”

  “No, thanks. Have you seen this woman in here, Allesseria?” Eve drew out Tiara’s ID photo.

  She saw recognition immediately, then the quick wariness. And then the lie. “Can’t say I have. We get slammed in here by midnight. Hard to pick out faces in the crowd, and with this lighting.”

  “Right. You got anything on tap here but beer and brew?”

  Once again, Eve saw the lie. “I don’t know what you mean. I just run the stick at this station. That’s it, that’s all. I got customers.”

  “She’s not only a poor liar,” Roarke observed. “She’s a frightened one.”

  “Yeah, she is.” Eve scanned the crowd again. She saw a man barely old enough to make legal limit actually wearing a cape, and a woman, nearly a decade older, all but bursting out of a long, tight black dress, who was wrapping herself around him like a snake on one of the dance platforms.

  Another woman in sharp red sat alone in a privacy booth and looked mildly bored. When a man wearing mostly tattoos glided up to the bar, ordered, A llesseria poured something into a tall glass that bubbled and smoked. He downed it where he stood, throat rippling, then set the glass down with a snarling grin that flashed pointed incisors.

  Eve literally felt Peabody shudder beside her. “Jesus, this place is creepy.”

  “It’s a bunch of show and theater.”

  Then Eve saw him coming down the corkscrew of steps from the top level. He was dressed in black, as would be expected. His hair, black as well, rained past his shoulders, a sharp contrast to the white skin of his face. And that face had a hard and sensual beauty that compelled the eye.

  He moved gracefully, a lithe black cat. As he reached the second level, a blonde rushed toward him, gripped his hand. There was a pathetic desperation about her as she leaned into him. He simply traile
d his fingers down her cheek, shook his head. Then he bent to capture her mouth in a deep kiss as his hands slid under her short skirt to rub naked, exposed flesh. She clung to him afterward so that he had to set her aside, which he did by lifting her a foot off the ground in a show of careless strength.

  Eve could see her mouth move, knew the woman called to him, though the music and voices drowned out the sound.

  He crossed the main level, and his eyes locked with Eve’s. She felt the jolt—she could admit it. His eyes were like ink, deep and dark and hooded. As he walked to her, his lips curved in a smile that was both knowing and confident.

  And in the smile she saw something that didn’t cause that quick, physical jolt, but a deep and churning physical dread.

  “Good evening,” he said in a voice that carried a trace of some Eastern European accent. “I’m Dorian Vadim, and this is my place.”

  Though her throat had gone dry, Eve gave him an acknowledging nod. “Lieutenant Dallas.” She drew out her badge yet again. “Detectives Peabody and McNab. And . . .”

  “No introduction necessary.” There was another quality to him now, what seemed to be a prickly combination of admiration and envy. “I’m aware of Roarke, and of you, Lieutenant. Welcome to Bloodbath.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She knew what she saw when she looked at him. She saw in those pitch-dark eyes her greatest single fear: She saw her father.

  There was no physical resemblance between the man before her and the one who had tormented and abused her for the first eight years of her life. It went, she understood, deeper than physical. Its surface was a calculated charm thinly coated over an indifferent cruelty.

  Under it all was utter disregard for anything approaching the human code.

  The monster that had lived in her father looked at her now out of Dorian Vadim’s eyes.

  And he smiled almost as if he knew it. “It’s an honor to have you here. What can I get you to drink?”

  “We’re not drinking,” Eve told him, though she would have paid any price but pride for a sip of water to cool the burning in her throat. “This isn’t a social call.”