by Lisa Edmonds
“We all know what’s happening,” Sarah snapped. “The fangheads are taking girls off the street and keeping them until they drain them dry.”
“Why do you think it’s vamps?” I asked.
“Of course it’s the vamps.” Sarah lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my face. “Who else could be so invisible? Who else could get away with this shit for this long without getting caught? The vamps own the cops—everybody knows that.”
“The cops believe vamps are taking the women,” I pointed out. “Amanda and Mark can’t get them to even consider any other ideas.”
“Yeah, but they haven’t actually arrested anyone, have they?” Sarah countered. “Like I said, they own the cops.”
I didn’t think arguing with her was going to help the situation, so I moved on. “In any case, I would like to know what happened to these women and I want to bring them back alive if I can, so I’d like to ask if you saw any of them before they disappeared.”
I dug the list out of my bag and handed it to Danielle. The women, except for Sarah, gathered around her under the streetlight. They looked over the list and Sarah smoked in sullen silence.
As I waited, I sensed a passing spirit and shivered. The trace felt like a poltergeist—cold and deranged. Usually the sensation was fleeting, but this one lingered on the edges of my senses, almost hovering. I strengthened my shields and tried to ignore the nagging feeling of wrongness.
“Why are you out here?” Sarah asked, flicking her ash onto the sidewalk.
“Mark asked me to help. With this many women missing, it seems like the more people there are working on it, the better.”
She shrugged. “The cops don’t even think half of ’em are missing. You ask me, they don’t care much about the ones they did put on their list. I’ve only seen someone from the police down here maybe two, three times in the past couple months. Amanda says there’s a ‘task force,’ but you’d never know.” She put air quotes around task force. “Besides, Amanda said Dunlap works for the fangheads, so there ain’t no way I’m gonna trust him.”
“Mark’s being paid by the Court to find out who’s responsible for this, whether it’s vamps or someone else. They want the perpetrators found more than anyone.”
Sarah snorted.
“Besides that,” I continued, “I’ve known Mark for five years. I can promise you that he may work for the Court but they don’t own him. If it turns out a vamp—or a group of them—is involved, he’ll see that they face justice for it.”
“And you?” Sarah challenged me. “Do you work for the fangheads?”
“I have for several years. Mark is paying me to help him with this case.” No sense denying it; they’d find out sooner or later. “But ask me who I’m working for right now.”
Sarah looked at me silently.
I leaned toward her, my eyes on hers. “I’m working for Carrie.”
The other women had grown quiet and were listening to us. Sarah took a drag off her cigarette, eyed me, then blew the smoke up toward the streetlight.
Danielle spoke up. “I’m not sure if this helps or not, but there’s a mistake here.” She pointed to a name on the list: Missy Daniels, second from the bottom, missing for almost two weeks. “This says she was last seen on the fourteenth, but I saw her on the night of the fifteenth.”
I pulled my notebook out. “Do you remember seeing her leave with anyone?”
“Yeah, actually.” Danielle pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I remember because it was a BMW and we don’t see that kind of car down here very often.” The other women nodded in agreement.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Next block down,” Danielle said, pointing. “Between Eleventh and Twelfth. The car pulled over right in front of Missy. She talked to the guy through the window for a minute, then got in. They went down the street and turned left onto Fourteenth. That was the last time I saw her.”
I wrote in my notebook. “How sure are you that this was the fifteenth and not the fourteenth?”
“I was in jail on the fourteenth,” Danielle said. The other women laughed.
“What was it this time, Dani?” Becca asked, bumping the older woman’s hip with hers.
Danielle rolled her eyes. “Shoplifting. The owner ended up not filing charges, so they let me out the next day, the fifteenth. I saw Missy get in the BMW that night.” She was quiet, then added softly, “I was mad she got a rich client.”
“Do you remember what color the car was?” I asked.
“Black,” she said instantly. “All black, tinted windows. I couldn’t see into the car until she opened the door and the interior light came on.”
“Could you see the driver?”
“Yeah. I mean, not real well, but good enough, you know? It was an older guy, gray hair, wearing a suit.”
“Older man, gray hair, suit, black BMW.” My stomach was sinking. “If we were able to identify a potential suspect and I came back down here with some pictures, do you think you would be able to recognize him if you saw him again?”
Danielle shrugged. “Maybe. I could try.”
I glanced around at the other women. “Can anybody else add anything?”
Rachel and Shonda volunteered some information on two other women from the list, but it was secondhand and didn’t sound promising. I wrote it down anyway, just in case, but my mind was on Danielle’s description of Missy’s customer.
I handed each of them one of my cards with my cell number on it. “Please call me if you think of anything or if you hear anything. Even something that seems unimportant might be the key to finding out what happened to your friends.”
Sarah tossed her cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out with her boot. “The cops aren’t going to do shit. We figured that out a long time ago. If you and Amanda—and Mark Dunlap, I guess—don’t find out what happened to them, no one will.”
“It could be one of us next,” Shonda said. “Any one of us.”
I felt helpless in the face of their fear and hated it. “You all be careful.”
Danielle handed me the list. “Thank you for helping us.”
“Do you want me to walk with you back to your car?” Zara asked.
I shook my head. “No, I’ll be fine. You staying?”
“Yep. Time to clock in.” Zara grinned. The other women laughed.
The group split up and I headed back toward Ninth. Malcolm drifted along next to me as I walked. “Alice,” he said quietly, his voice coming from my right. “Black BMW.”
“I know, but there are a lot of black Beemers in the city. It’s not enough to go on by itself. It might not be him.”
“The reporter thinks it’s a harnad,” Malcolm pointed out, as I turned the corner and approached the convenience store where I’d parked my Toyota. “Harnad plus old guy in a black BMW equals—”
“Shit.” I stopped short.
A tall, blond man in jeans and a leather jacket leaned casually against the driver’s side of my car, arms crossed. A familiar black truck was parked three spots away from mine. Ours were the only two vehicles in the lot.
I didn’t wait for Malcolm to figure out he needed to be gone. I covered my mouth with my hand and coughed. “Home,” I muttered behind my hand.
My skin tingled as the spell sent Malcolm to the safety of my basement. I coughed again, then resumed walking and reached into my bag for my keys.
“Sounds like you’ve got a cold, Ms. Worth,” Special Agent Trent Lake said. “Or is it allergies?”
“Don’t you have cases to solve?” I asked irritably.
Lake gave me one of his annoyingly charming smiles. “Always. Never a shortage of crime in the city.”
“Then why are you loitering in a convenience store parking lot, instead of off somewhere solving them?” I mimicked his pose, folding my arms and glaring at him.
Instead of moving, he settled in more comfortably against my car. “I’m off the clock. Even SPEMA agents get time off.”
“So
this is how you’re spending it? You need a hobby, Lake. Something other than harassing me. Have you tried coin collecting or bonsai?”
“That sounds far less interesting than keeping up with your activities. What brings you down to the Stroll tonight?”
“What brings you down here?” I countered.
“You must be working on a new case,” he continued, ignoring my question. “I understand you found Mrs. Yates’s long-lost family heirloom. How did a pocket watch destroy part of her house?”
“It’s a very temperamental watch, and it’s very particular about how you phrase your requests. And as I told you the last half-dozen times you just happened to run into me in the past few weeks, I have nothing to say to you. You aren’t going to get anything on me by stalking me, so you might as well give up.”
“I never give up. It’s one of my finer qualities.”
“Be that as it may, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re wasting your time following me around.” I jingled my keys. “Now, if you don’t mind, it’s late and I’m tired. Please stop leaning on my car.”
His smile faded. “I asked why you’re down here this evening.”
“And I said I have nothing to say to you,” I shot back. “I thought I was pretty clear about that, but maybe all that time on the gun range has damaged your hearing.”
“Maybe it has,” he agreed. “Help me out. What have you been hearing around here lately?”
I shrugged. “The usual. Times are tough. Weeknights are slow. There’s apparently a new drug on the streets causing some problems.”
He sighed. “You can’t help being difficult, can you?”
“Nope. It’s one of my finer qualities.”
We eyeballed each other.
“Alice, you are one of the most frustrating people I have ever met,” he said finally.
“Right back at ya, Lake. Now, seriously, would you move so I can leave? I’ve got a bitch of a headache and—wait, did you just call me Alice?”
His smile reappeared, looking more shark-like this time. “You can call me Trent.”
“I don’t want to call you Trent,” I told him, scowling. “I want to go home and you’re in my way.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” Lake gestured at the all-night diner down the street from the convenience store.
“No freaking way am I having coffee with you.”
“Why not?”
“I can think of at least a dozen reasons. Besides, what part of ‘It’s late and I want to go home’ do you not understand?”
“Jenny Alvarez.”
“Who?”
“Missy Daniels.”
I stared at him.
“Angie Clayton. Breanna Howell. Tara Fuller.” He studied my face. “These names mean something to you.”
I shrugged again. “A couple of them sound vaguely familiar.”
Lake moved to stand in front of me. When I started to walk around him, he held out his hand. “I think we might be down here for the same reason. Am I right?”
I threw up my hands in frustration. “I have no idea why you’re here, unless it’s to continue your campaign of annoying me to death.”
“One cup of coffee.”
“No.”
“Five minutes.”
“No.” I moved around him and unlocked my car.
“I’m trying to find out what’s been happening,” he said as I reached for the door handle. “And I think you want to know too.”
I sighed. “Lake, I—”
“Five minutes, Alice. Not for me. For them.”
I’m working for Carrie.
Damn it.
I hit the button to lock my car. “Fine; five minutes. And you’re buying the coffee.”
5
I made him buy me a piece of apple pie, too. With a scoop of ice cream.
Lake and I sat at a booth in the back of the Midnite Café. He leaned back, sipped his coffee, and watched me eat. I ignored him and made quick work of the pie.
When I scraped my fork on the plate to get the last of the crumbs, Lake raised his eyebrows. “You want another piece?”
I glanced longingly at the glass-covered pie stand on the front counter. “No.”
Lake snorted. “You lie so well. It’s as easy for you as breathing.”
I poured two packets of sugar into my coffee, added some cream, and stirred it. “That sounded almost like a compliment, Agent Lake, albeit a strange one.”
“More of an observation. I’m trying to figure out why your first instinct is always to lie.”
Was my first instinct always to lie? I thought about it and realized Lake might have a point. “My life hasn’t always been the wonderland of sunshine and kittens you see today,” I told him mildly, sipping my coffee.
“I suppose not, though you started out pretty well. Born in Chicago, only child of Henry and Laura Worth, educated at one of the top prep schools in the city.”
Slowly, I lowered my cup to the table.
“Attended the University of Chicago as an undergrad, pre-med,” he continued. “Solid 4.0 GPA until your parents died in a boating accident when you were twenty-one. You dropped out of college, fell in with a rough crowd for a couple of years, partied too much, blew most of your inheritance, then disappeared for a while. Somehow, you ended up here, two thousand miles away, leaving all of that behind to become an MPI with a modest salary and an uncanny knack for getting involved in big cases.”
“Congrats; you can use Google.”
To my annoyance, he seemed immune to my sarcasm. “I was curious about you.”
I was gratified my appropriated identity had held up under Lake’s scrutiny. “Well, I hope you were able to satisfy your curiosity. I’d appreciate it in the future if you wouldn’t dredge up ancient history. Now, you’ve got five minutes to say what you need to say and then I’m going home to bed.”
Lake reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He flipped it open, found the page he was looking for, then pushed it across the table. Reluctantly, I read it over.
Twenty-eight names: the twenty-six I had, plus two more. He’d put check marks next to the thirteen who were on Diaz’s list. I looked up at him. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“Are you going to be a complete hard-ass about this, or can we skip to the part where you tell me what you know about the missing women?”
“How about we skip to the part where you tell me what you know?”
He raised his hands apologetically. “I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
I shrugged. “Ditto.”
We drank our coffee. He topped off both our cups from the pot the waitress had left on the table. I added some cream to mine and stirred it noisily.
Lake caved. “Let’s talk hypotheticals.”
I gave him a bright smile and put down my spoon.
“Hypothetically, we’ve got at least twenty-eight women going missing over the past fourteen months. No apparent connection other than the fact they’re all prostitutes, and there are no viable leads, which suggests a highly organized killer or group of killers.” Lake dropped his voice. “It’s possible we have a Green River-type serial killer in the city, averaging two victims per month. Many people suspect a vampire, or a group of vampires, of course. Those seem to be the two most likely scenarios, but no bodies have turned up.”
“The police certainly seem to think it’s vamps. I heard the detective in charge of the case isn’t interested in any other theories.”
“Our bureau chief shares Detective Diaz’s opinion,” he commented. “As does my partner.”
As much as Lake irritated me, I disliked his partner even more. “Is that why you’re down here without Agent Parker?”
“I doubt she’d care about any theories that don’t involve vampires.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And what about you, Agent Lake?”
“I think focusing on a suspect before we have evidence leads to tunnel vision.” He
eyed me over the rim of his coffee cup. “I’m curious to hear your thoughts.”
“I agree there’s too much on the line to assume anything right now.” I finished my second cup of coffee, then put my hand over it when Lake picked up the pot to refill my mug. “No more for me. I want to be able to sleep at some point tonight.”
He filled his own cup and put the pot down. “Who do you think might be responsible?”
“Why do you care what I think?”
“I’m always interested in fresh perspectives. Plus, rumor has it you’re pretty good at your job.”
“Be careful; such flattery will go to my head,” I said wryly. “But I thought I only ended up involved in big cases because I have an ‘uncanny knack’ for it.”
“I take it back.” Out came his charming smile again. “At this point, I have to accept that it’s skill, not luck, since here we are again comparing notes on a case. And like the last two times, I have the sneaking suspicion you might know at least as much—if not more—about the situation than I do.” Lake tapped the list of names. “Who’s taking them?”
I thought about what I wanted to say. I couldn’t tip him off to my suspicions about West, but I could at least nudge him in a productive direction. “Like you said, it could be a serial killer, or it could be vamps, but it would be a bad idea to jump to any conclusions at this point.”
He looked annoyed.
“But hypothetically speaking,” I continued, “there might be a door number three.”
“Which would be…?”
“A harnad.”
Lake studied me. I gave him a bland look and sipped my water.
“The official police position is there are no active harnads in the city, unless you know differently?”
“I’ve heard things,” I said noncommittally.
“Seen things?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Lying again.”
I shrugged. “Believe what you want. My point is that I don’t think anyone should be so quick to dismiss the harnad theory or to blame vamps until they’ve investigated all the angles.”
