by Chris Culver
“Hey,” I said, glancing at my alarm clock. It was a quarter to eight. “How are you?”
“We’re fine. I wanted to call and make sure you were okay.”
“Made it in late last night, but I’m fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it, dear,” she said. “I wasn’t going to call you this morning, but Megan insisted. She’s been up for a while.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yasmina gave her coffee with cream and sugar this morning. She hasn’t stopped running since. I think she wants to talk to you.”
Despite my headache, a smile formed on the corner of my lips unbidden.
“Put her on.”
Megan’s voice was so shrill and so fast that I could hardly understand her.
“Baba, Baba, Baba,” she said. “Aunt Yasmina and Uncle Jack took me to McDonalds for breakfast. They had an indoor playground, and they let me go down the slide.”
“Really?” I asked, shaking my head and blinking to clear my vision of fog. “That’s really exciting. What else did you do?”
I talked to Megan for another two or three minutes before she dropped the phone mid–sentence and squealed. It sounded as if she was having a good time if nothing else. Hannah grabbed the phone and told me she had seen a deer outside. It’s hard to compete with furry woodland creatures for a toddler’s attention.
“Have you considered putting her on a treadmill?” I asked.
“If Yasmina and Jack had one, she’d probably already be climbing all over it,” said Hannah. “We’re going to the zoo today. You want to come?”
I grunted.
“I’d like to, but I’ve got stuff to do. Maybe we can go this weekend.”
“Sure, that’d be fun,” she said. “I need to grab Megan before she starts jumping off the furniture again, so I’ll let you go.”
“Good luck.” I said.
“I’ll need it.”
Hannah hung up after that, and I threw the cell phone on the bed and rubbed my eye sockets with the palms of my hands. I didn’t drink a lot the night before, but my mouth felt as if I had stuffed myself full of cotton balls before going to bed. Maybe I was getting sick. I poured myself orange juice in the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee before going to the living room and having morning prayers. Before rolling up my prayer mat, I made a special prayer, asking God to watch over Hannah and Megan. Hopefully He was listening.
I grabbed a cup of coffee after prayers and went to my office. I had a meeting at ten with Mack Monroe, but I had time to kill before that. I didn’t want to waste it, so I grabbed my notebook and flipped through it to the page I had written the night before. Azrael’s BMW was registered to Sunshine Blood Products, Inc. I hadn’t heard of the company, but that wasn’t too surprising. Drug fronts typically maintain a low profile.
Since the company was incorporated, there had to be records somewhere. I opened a web browser on my computer and navigated to the Indiana Secretary of State’s website. When I first became a detective, I would have had to put in a formal request with a clerk at the Secretary of State’s office to retrieve those records. It’d take about a week, and there’d be a pretty good chance we wouldn’t find anything. Technology has come a long way since then.
I ran a business entity search for Sunshine Blood Products and got a partial listing. The company’s actual articles of incorporation weren’t available online, but the site gave me a summary, including the name and home address of the company’s initial CEO and registered agent, Karen Rea. I doubted Azrael and Karen were related, but at least I had a real name. Karen was probably a dupe, just some sucker Azrael and his buddies used to start a company. I wrote her information down anyway, thinking I might be able to use her.
After that, I rubbed my sinuses, hoping to quiet my headache. IMPD is a pretty big organization, but sometimes it feels like a small town. Gossip travels fast and wide, so there was a fair chance that my drunk driving was a topic of conversation that morning. If it had made its way to Susan Mercer, there was a pretty good chance my vacation would be extended indefinitely.
I logged into my department’s webmail server to check my e–mail. Most of it was junk, but there was one letter from an e–mail address I didn’t recognize. The subject was ‘from a friend.’ I almost deleted it because most e–mails with that sort of subject turned out to be advertisements for penis enlargement pills or investment schemes. At the same time, Olivia had anonymously sent me the results from Rachel’s preliminary autopsy with the same note attached, so it could have been from her. I opened it. It was a link to a blog called fangporium.com. I rubbed my eye sockets with my left hand and clicked the link with my right.
On first glance, the page looked like every other blog on the Internet. As my eyes focused, I could see that it wasn’t. Fangporium.com was the official website of the Indianapolis Sanguinarian Society and platform of Mistress Karen, the society’s founder and self–professed vampire. Maybe Karen Rea wasn’t a dupe after all.
Like most blogs, fangporium.com was set up as a series of articles with public comments beneath. The first article was titled, ‘Murder in our community.’ I skimmed it, and although names weren’t mentioned, it was clearly about Rachel and Robbie. Karen claimed their deaths were the first salvo in a war between vampires and slayers, religious fanatics bent on eradicating vampires everywhere. She designated her lieutenant, Azrael, to form a response to the threat. About fifty people had commented, including Azrael. He said he’d be proud to serve and even had a plan to eradicate the threat.
I printed the article and read through it twice to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The site had pages and pages of similar postings. They were mostly delusional garbage and melodrama, but they told me something important. Azrael was only a soldier taking orders. Karen was the shot caller, and if her posts were any indication, she was bat shit crazy. Combined with the seeming loyalty of her followers, that made her extremely dangerous.
That’s all I need.
I rubbed my sinuses and looked at my computer’s clock. I still had almost two hours before my meeting. My house felt empty without Hannah and Megan, and I didn’t like that. I hopped in the shower, got dressed, and called my wife back. It wasn’t as exciting as an afternoon at the zoo, but I met them at a park near my sister–in–law’s house. I pushed Megan on a swing and sat with Hannah on some picnic tables. We didn’t say anything important, but it was nice to be with them.
I left at twenty to ten for my meeting. That should have been ample time, but there was a fender bender about three blocks from the hospital, which meant I ended up being twenty minutes late. I grabbed the Styrofoam cube I had taken from Robbie’s safe from my trunk and ran inside. The lobby was bright, airy, and vibrant enough that it looked more like the front atrium at a nice hotel than a children’s hospital. There were flowers everywhere and play sets for kids waiting to see their doctors. I took a lap around the room, but I couldn’t find Mack anywhere. As late as I was, that was expected.
I slipped through the crowds and walked to the information booth beside the front door. A woman about my age in a pair of hospital scrubs adorned with Sponge Bob Square Pants smiled at me when I arrived. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a pony tail, and she had a headset on for the phone system. She was pretty.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I hope so. I’m supposed to meet Dr. Monroe. Can you page him or call his lab for me?”
Her face flushed red for a moment. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.
“Mack was here earlier,” she said. She breathed in through her teeth. “Uhm, are you Ash Rashid?”
I nodded. She bit her lower lip.
“He left you a message and asked me to deliver it word for word, but I’m not comfortable saying it.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Can you paraphrase?”
“I’ll just give it to you,” she said, plucking a Post–it note from her desk. She held it to me, blushing. “I think it’
d be best if you read it. Silently.”
I took the note from her hand.
Ash,
Fix my goddamn parking tickets or go fuck yourself.
–Mack Monroe.
I looked up. The receptionist blushed again and shrugged as if she were apologizing. If nothing else, I was reasonably sure the note was authentic. I crumbled it and put it in my pocket.
“I was supposed to meet him for coffee. Do you have an employee cafeteria or break room where I might be able to find him?”
“He was in the coffee shop earlier,” she said, standing up. She pointed across the atrium at what looked like a bar. “It’s right over there. I didn’t see him leave.”
I nodded.
“Thanks.”
I passed about three dozen kids on my way to the hospital’s combination deli and coffee shop. It had a brass espresso machine on the counter in front and an L–shaped wooden bar behind it. A line of physicians, nurses, and hospital patrons snaked all the way outside. I walked past them and into the dining room. It smelled like coffee and bleach. Mack had a corner table and most of the surrounding floorspace to himself. He was reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee large enough that it could have been a soup bowl. I crossed the room and plopped down across from him on a solid oak chair.
“Did you get my message?” he asked, not bothering to put down his paper.
“I think so,” I said. “The receptionist was a little embarrassed to say it aloud.”
“Really?” asked Mack, his voice suddenly high. He folded his paper and put it on the table in front of him. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a week, and he wore a T–short sporting the logo for Viagra. If not for his lab coat with ‘Dr. Monroe’ stitched on the breast, most of the visitors probably would have thought he was a janitor. “I took her out a couple of years back. You get a couple of shots in her, and she’s got a mouth like you wouldn’t believe. Says the sort of things you usually only hear if you pay four bucks a minute to a phone sex operator.”
“She sounds like quite a girl,” I said. I glanced to my right. A young couple was hastily gathering the remains of their breakfast while simultaneously shooting Mack the dirtiest looks they could probably muster. For his part, Mack stared right back, shrugged, and mouthed ‘What?’ I could see why he drank alone. I cleared my throat, getting his attention. “Are you ready to look into my problem?”
“Depends if you looked into my problem,” said Mack.
“I haven’t yet, but I will as soon as I can. You’ve got my word.”
Mack leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head.
“I don’t have a lot of free time, and you told me you’d meet me at ten. Now it’s what, ten–thirty? I don’t know if I can work with somebody who’d leave me hanging like that.”
“What else do you want, Mack?”
He winked at me and smiled.
“Do you know anybody in Goshen, Indiana? Elkhart county has a warrant out for Aleksandra’s arrest, and I’d like that taken care of.”
Goshen was a small farming community in northern Indiana. It had a Mennonite college and a factory that made RVs, but not much else.
“She beat up some Amish people or something?” I asked.
“Close,” he said. “She was buying Amish furniture for our place on Lake Michigan. Anyway, she was drunk, and some county sheriff took her in. When she didn’t show up for her court date, the judge issued a warrant for her arrest.”
“Why didn’t she show up for her court date?” I asked.
Mack wrinkled his forehead and looked at me as if I were an idiot.
“Goshen’s three hours away. I can barely get her to sit still long enough to give me a lap dance, partner. You think she’d drive all the way up there for court?”
I closed my eyes and tried to think of any other forensic pathologists in the area who might help me out. Unfortunately, I came up blank.
“Okay,” I said, nodding and opening my eyes. “I’ll make some calls and see if I can get the arresting officer to drop the charges.”
“All right. That’s what friends are for. Let’s get out of here. These kids give me the creeps.”
I thought that was a joke, but it was hard to tell. Mack had an odd sense of humor. I think he liked kids. Or at least he liked fathering children. He had two of his own that he knew about.
We left the deli, and I followed him to a bank of staff–only elevators where he swiped his keycard while simultaneously informing a little boy standing beside us that if he ate his boogers, tomato plants would start growing in his stomach. The kid’s finger immediately shot out of his nose and to his side. Thankfully the elevator arrived before Mack extolled more medical advice.
The pathology lab was in the basement, just one story beneath the lobby, but it was like another world. The walls were cinder blocks painted white, and the overhead lights thrummed and cast an artificial, bluish–white hue. Goose bumps formed up and down my arms. Knowing Mack, I’m sure it was a state–of–the–art facility, but it didn’t look very impressive. Unlike the forensics labs on TV, there were no flashing lights or attractive women with flowing hair. The most high–tech piece of equipment in the room was a microscope beside a computer in one corner. Mack moved a tray of specimen cups from the island in the center, clearing a workspace.
“Tell me again what you want me to test,” he said, washing his hands at a sink along the wall. I popped the top off the Styrofoam block I brought and laid it in the center of the space he had cleared.
“I picked these vials up at a crime scene. I want to find out if there’s a high enough concentration of cocaine in them to kill somebody.”
He dried his hands on his lab coat and squinted at my vials and then to me and back again. He reached into his coat for a pair of glasses and then pulled out a test tube. I hadn’t pulled the tubes out like that before, and nor had I handled the one Rachel drank from. The liquid inside was thinner than I had anticipated; light pierced it fairly easily, which meant it wasn’t blood. I shifted as Mack furrowed his eyebrows at me.
“I need you to fill me in,” he said. “Are you telling me these were actually packaged like this at a crime scene?”
“I pulled these tubes out of a safe. They were filled and sealed before anyone from IMPD touched them.”
Mack turned the vial over. The liquid cascaded down.
“Since I don’t have a mass spectrometer, I can’t tell you what’s in here definitively. That said, we can at least run a Scott test to see if it has cocaine in it. That cool with you?”
I had no idea what a Scott test was, but I trusted Mack knew what he was doing.
“This going to cost me extra?” I asked. “Maybe you’ve got a dead hooker in a trunk you need taken care of?”
“No, but I like the attitude,” he said, putting my tube back in the Styrofoam container. He walked to a gold supply cabinet along one wall, and I heard glass clink on glass as he moved things around. When he came back, he carried a tray holding two liquid–filled beakers, a couple of test tubes, and a number of eyedroppers. He had also put on some latex gloves.
“This is a simple test. We take a cobalt thiocyanate reagent, mix it with whatever’s in your vial, and see what happens.”
I didn’t know what a cobalt thiocyanate reagent was, but I nodded as if I did. He popped the top of one of my vials. The smell was light at first, but it grew in strength. Wintergreen breath mints. I shifted in my seat. Mack raised his eyebrow at me.
“You said somebody drank this?” he asked.
I nodded. He shook his head and muttered something about ‘fucking weirdos’ before reaching for an eyedropper from his tray. He put a measured amount of my mystery substance in a clean test tube. He then laid the eyedropper to the side and used a clean one to put about twice as much of one of the liquids he brought over into the same tube. After that, he put a stopper on top and shook it up. A bright–blue mass formed at the bottom of the vial.
“Does that mean anyt
hing?” I asked.
“Just the first step of the process,” he said, reaching for a third eyedropper. He put a couple drops of another liquid into the test tube he was working with. The mass at the bottom turned pink. He looked at me over the top of his glasses as he shook the test tube. “I hear Hannah’s pregnant. It’s your first, isn’t it?”
I shook my head.
“No, we have a little girl,” I said. I looked up. “And Hannah’s not pregnant.”
Mack stopped moving. I waited for him to say something, my stomach tightening slightly.
“Wow,” he said. “This is awkward.”
My stomach felt like it had dropped about ten stories. Mack stayed silent as I thought. I love being a father; it’s the most rewarding thing in my life. That didn’t mean I was ready to have another kid, though. At least not right then. I closed my eyes.
“Sorry,” said Mack. “I tested her blood a week ago. I thought she would have told you.”
I swallowed and tried to force the thought out of my head.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Can we focus on this?”
“Sure,” he said, taking the test tube he had been working with to a supply closet in the corner. I’m not sure what he did, but I heard glass bottles clink together. After that, he turned on some sort of tool that sounded like a dentist’s drill.
“I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you,” he said, shouting to be heard over the machine. “I bet you’re a good father. You’re calm.”
“Thank you,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.
“Anytime,” he said. He flipped off whatever machine he had been using and carried the tube back to our center island. The liquid inside had separated into two parts. It was clear on top, but the mass on the bottom had returned to a bright blue.
“It’s a boy,” he said. He pointed to the tube when I didn’t laugh. “It’s blue, you know,” he said again. He paused and smiled slightly. “I guess that’s still a little early, huh?”
