Anyway, that's a part of why I should have just melted away and not drawn attention. Attention is the very last thing any of us wants. The records might not hold up on close examination. The paperwork might not have ever been done in the first place if you didn’t ride the fixer pretty hard. Then there are the usual concerns, the ones you probably thought of first: getting stuck in a cell with a window; getting caught feeding; getting jumped by a rent-a-cop in the bushes out behind a nightclub when you're half crazy from starvation; being unpleasantly surprised when you show up in a photograph on display in a historical exhibit down at Town Hall; that kind of stupid stuff. All that used to happen a lot but it's mostly the oldsters who get caught with their pants down in those circumstances. If you got turned in the 20th century you're pretty good at living in the modern world. If you're pre-World War I, you're pretty screwed if you're not a fast learner, especially if you've been taking a dirt nap for a while. I've heard tell of vampires who bedded down in immigrant communities peopled entirely by their personal herds and never been seen again. I'm forced to wonder if they sometimes hear the heavy machinery of urban redevelopment rumble by up top and stir in their sleep. I try to imagine what would happen if any of them found their coffins unearthed in the middle of the afternoon. It wouldn't be pretty. It would probably get labeled terrorism and hushed up.
People: always the same, always ready to bury a problem and forget it existed.
You're probably wondering right about now why on Earth I was out meeting a friend from high school, then, if I was so shy about the long arm of the law. Clyde, well, he was a friend I couldn't easily escape. He asked around about me if I wasn't seen much. His job as a fancy state cop left my maker shy about eliminating him, I think. He knew, eventually. He couldn't help noticing that I was staying late 20's and he was pushing retirement, could he? We never much talked about it. We did talk, mind you, but not much. I don't know if he ever told Edith. He'd always tell me she said hello. I was so proud of setting the two of them up, and I guess over the years maybe they turned into something I felt I'd done that was good in the midst of all I've had to do that wasn’t.
Enough of that, though; more than enough. I'd thought myself half to death by the time I pulled up in the driveway back in Hardisonville and parked the Firebird right in front of the front door so I wouldn't have far to go in the rain. I hadn't minded it earlier but now I couldn't be fussed with it. I'd been too wet tonight, too cold, too old and too much had changed. I wanted to be inside. I wanted to turn on the old baseboard heat and pull up a chair by the window and read a week's worth of newspapers and not think about my friend.
The newspapers – the Times-Report – didn't hold a lot of comfort for me. I couldn't focus myself enough to do any puzzles, not even the crossword, and when I flipped to the front page of the paper from a week before all that had greeted me had been news of a single-car accident up around the country club. I looked at the pictures, taken as they were from a discreet distance, and sighed at all that death and destruction. Big deal. Another day in the mortal world: something burned, someone suffered, somewhere was the setting for starvation and sadness. I read a little further down and then arched an eyebrow at a detail mentioned in the story: Dwayne Sherill, retired SBI agent.
That made me sit up straight in my chair. Not a good week to be SBI, some colder, more calculating part of me thought to itself. I kept reading and saw a pretty generic quote along the lines of “He was a great officer, a great friend,” all the usual stupid bullshit and arched the other eyebrow at to whom it was credited: Clyde Wilfred. My friend Clyde had been this guy’s partner.
I whistled long and low and then set that paper aside and moved on to the one after it. No especially scary headlines in this one. I read it for a while, then moved on to the next. In its obituaries section I saw something that made me actually stand up from my chair in silent surprise: Edith Wilfred, 83. Cardiac arrest. Clyde's wife died four days before the night I arrived.
Now was not the time to stand around wondering at coincidences. I flipped open my phone and dialed the last number that called me.
“Cousin?” Roderick sounded amused by something.
“Cousin,” I said. “I think you'd best come over tonight.”
Roderick didn’t hesitate or ask why. “I'll be there in thirty minutes. I'll bring an overnight bag.”
Roderick arrived in twenty minutes. He was driving a flashy little sports car manufactured someplace with a lot of sun and beaches. It was a rental and it probably cost a fortune a day. Back home in Seattle, he drives a Caddie from the '60s. It's a convertible coupe, gold colored, overstuffed leather seats. It looks like a jar of honey spilled in the middle of the road. Roderick is sort of trapped in 1969. Lucky for him, that's in fashion again. I told him the short version of finding Clyde out in the field.
“What’s a Steeplechase?” He wasn’t looking at me, but he was clearly synthesizing that he’d heard.
“The state senator who got the law through was named Steeplechase.”
“That’s from the zombie thing?” His head turned towards me but not all the way.
“Right. They give a tax credit to people who’ll cremate the dearly departed instead of embalming them and hoping for the best.” I shrugged. “Can’t require it, because of religious freedom bullshit, but they can incentivize the hell out of what they want people to do. The cremation becomes a massive write-off on your state taxes. Pays for itself, basically, and nobody has ever turned into a zombie once they were a pile of ash. Sometimes the fundamentalists don’t do it, though, because they think death is just a dirt nap while they wait for Judgment Day and they’ll need their bodies in heaven or some shit. Some people opt to have Dear Auntie discreetly beheaded by the mortician and hide the wound with a high collar. That seems to work just as well.”
“Are there still zombies, then?”
“There haven’t been in a long time, but right after that first time there were a few who were found in, like, people’s attics and shit, being tended to. Sort of. For all anybody can tend to a dead person who just won’t get back down no matter how much you cajole them.” I shuddered. The talk shows all had their rounds of interviews with Keepers after the fact. It was too much to watch. Mostly they were just sad, desperate people trying to hide something unable to be hidden. I marveled that Roderick had never heard this. How disconnected was he? On the other hand, I suppose we’re all disconnected from the world of the living: it’s just a question of where our experience fails to overlap theirs. Maybe his was talk shows.
We were silent for a while and then Roderick went on.
“Your last living friend?” Roderick was facing a window in the musty old living room of the random, sufficiently private house I’d bought in the 1970’s to use as my local home base. There were huge windows overlooking a back yard I’d let go to waste. I'd left the house dark for no real reason other than that I didn't need the light and I wanted to be able to look out into the night. He turned and leaned his back against the glass. Smiles was curled on the old couch, snuffling in his sleep. I sat at the writing desk against one wall, the chair turned around and my bulk leaning forward against its back. Roderick's face was mostly invisible in the shadows. “That's a long time to wait for your Last Gasp.”
“Just lucky, I reckon.”
Roderick quirked up one side of his mouth. I could see the jut of his smiling cheek.
“Don't give me a bunch of shit,” I growled.
“I've no idea what you mean, cousin.”
“You were about to suggest I'd be luckier if it had happened ages ago.”
Roderick produced a noise like a soft chuckle. “Blood does know its own.”
I was silent for a little bit before I drew a confessional breath. “So here's the thing. I called the cops to report Clyde's body.” I put up a hand when Roderick opened his mouth. “I was careful. Trust me. Regardless, they're going to be all over this. His partner? Tragic accident. Wife? Old age. Throat slit and his
body dumped at the scene of the most famous crime he investigated?” I trailed off then swallowed in what I hoped was silence. “Sheriff's deputies are probably there now. The crime scene investigator has been paged. They start with the dogs first, then they bring in a photographer, then some bright lights and the lab guys.” I stood up, tucked my hands in my pockets and made for the door onto the screened back porch. I wanted to feel some breeze, and a cold, wet autumn was happy to give me that and then some. “They're going to draw the same conclusion I jumped to, and I assume you did, too.” I opened the door, stepped through, and settled into my chair. Roderick followed, leaning on one of the posts that hold up the roof of the porch. Roderick does that a lot: leaning. “They're going to assume this is connected to a murder Clyde investigated fifty years ago.”
“The problem?” Roderick had produced a cigarette from somewhere with an illusionist's flourish. Almost all vampires smoke. I don't know why. Fire's one of the few ways to take us out, and maybe that's what fascinates us. I eventually gave it up when it became so socially suspect it drew more attention than it was worth. Agatha rides my ass about using my real name, of course, but at least I don’t sit around in tweed knickers smoking cheroots and asking about the buggy whip business.
“That murder was committed by a vampire. I felt it in my bones then and I'm just as sure now.”
“Some signature makes you think that? Some tell-tale sign?” Roderick never speaks with smoke in his lungs. He would take a drag, then exhale long and focused, then breathe in again and speak. He is not a natural multitasker.
“No.” I shook my head. “Well, yes. I smelled vampire at the time, but more importantly, it's a question of physics and fitness. Anyone who could kill three people then would be at least seventy-something now. No one that old could slit Clyde's throat, carry him out there and get back out without his car.” I shrugged.
“And you'd like to solve the mystery Clyde never could?” Roderick's voice was soft.
I shifted in my seat and made a noise of contempt in my throat, though I didn't indicate for what. “No. There's a vampire out there I don't know about and it's my job to know them all.” I lifted one shoulder. “It's my state. This is my yard. All of it is my yard. It’s that simple.”
Roderick watched me for a few moments and then smiled. “Sure.”
I looked over at Roderick and wondered what was going on in his mind, but that wasn’t a power I had developed. Yet.
3
“Nice night for it, eh?” Deputy Hendricks was standing with his thumb hitched in his belt and a potbelly still in its infancy poking over the buckle. He'd been the first officer on the scene and had put up tape everywhere at first, then realized he was going to run out of black and yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS way before he got all the way around the clearing so it was down to a few stakes in the ground in a ten yard perimeter around the body. He had tramped and stomped all over everything before anyone else had arrived, so that H'Diane, her huge flashlight trained at the mud, could tell she wouldn't find a good goddamned thing on the ground. She turned the light up towards him briefly then swung it in an arc.
“As good as any,” she said. God, but she was nervous. This was her first crime scene as a detective in her first job as a detective. She'd been a cop long enough to know the drill, been the first one on the scene more than once, knew better than to walk everywhere and screw up everything like this. That had been a long time ago, though, in a city with a – she stopped herself.
These are real cops, too, she thought. I can't think of them as nothing but bumpkins if I'm ever going to cut it in this job.
“The wagon's twenty minutes out.” She drew a breath and started to run through her personal checklist. “I need a media containment area somewhere out of sight of the body in case anyone catches wind of this. I need someone directing traffic down at the main road and I need someone to call the dog handler.”
“Smith and Jeffers are on their way,” Hendricks drawled in reply.
“Great, go down to the main road and pick a spot for their cars, then start handing out assignments. I want total coverage of the site. I want twenty minutes in this clearing and then I want a deputy with a drawn sidearm patrolling the edge of the trees. Anybody caught spying, book them for trespass and see if they piss down their own leg.”
Hendricks arched an eyebrow. This lady detective was different beyond being some Chinese type. He reached up to scratch under his Sheriff's Department cap and opened his mouth. “We'd need to call in some extra deputies if you want all that.”
“So somebody manages to do sixty in a fifty-five tonight,” H'Diane shot back. “Don't you read the paper?”
Hendricks blinked owlishly at her.
“This guy,” H'Diane said, and she pointed at the body of Clyde Wilfred, “Is one of us.”
“All due respect,” Hendricks said after a moment, “But he weren't with the Sheriff's Department. He was SBI.”
“Which makes him a cop.” H'Diane kept her voice even. “I want to do this right.” She paused, and tried another tactic. “He lived here all his life.”
Hendricks ran that through his own personal loyalty determination subroutine and then nodded slowly. “I'll head on down to the highway, wave Smith and Jeffers in, hand out some assignments. You alright up here by yourself for a few minutes?”
“Yes.” H'Diane tried not to get angry. Getting angry her first time out wouldn't make her any friends, and this was a department where everything was based on friendship and subtle tests of loyalty. “Thank you, Deputy Hendricks.”
“Just, y’know, if this feller gets back up in a bit…” Hendricks gave her a look with both his eyebrows raised a little.
“Thank you, Deputy, but someone seems to have taken care of that for us already.”
Hendricks nodded and started to stroll away, one hand still hooked in his belt, one hand swaying. He looked like Elvis, H'Diane thought to herself. Old Elvis, but Elvis. Weird.
Twenty minutes later, she had gone over the crime scene as thoroughly as she could while standing back ten feet from the body. Her flashlight was a monstrous sun in her hand, blinding white light so bright it bleached everything in its beam; she ran it slowly back and forth over the form of Clyde Wilfred and then the ground around him in a slow spiral that ran out to her own feet over time. There were mangled prints, no blood, not even the smell of blood. No stains on his shirt, very little dried at the gaping wounds on his throat, one a cut and one a tear. He hadn't been hung up and bled or there'd be crusts in his hair. On the other hand, it had pissed down rain for hours and just let up in the last forty minutes or so. It might have all washed away. It was cold that night, her breath misting in front of her, thick gloves on her hands, so that would screw with the time of death. Being planted out here all night was no better than being shoved in a refrigerator. They'd need a full autopsy to sort that out.
Deputy Smith – young kid, eager, helpful, H'Diane liked him – walked up making plenty of noise so she'd know he was there. “Got an ID?” he called.
“I recognize him from the paper,” H'Diane called back, “But I haven't gone into his wallet yet. Waiting on the photographer.”
“That's me, ma'am. Detective. I mean, Detective.” He produced a big old Polaroid from a bag. “Got the digital, too, if you want that instead.”
“Plenty of both,” she replied. “Document everything. If you need the lights set up, radio down to Jeffers. I assume he's setting up the media area?”
Smith nodded and pointed off into the night. “Other side of the private road, no sight lines to here.”
“Good work,” she nodded. She didn't smile. H’Diane had a feeling detectives shouldn't smile next to dead bodies. She kept walking in a slow circle around the body. There was some mottled skin around the wrists and neck. The face was locked in an expression of fear. You can, of course, attempt to rearrange someone’s expression after death but the killer had either not even tried or was the master of it. They were in a
hurry, they were sadistic or both. She pondered that one in silence, crouched close to the ground, looking into his glassy eyes, when she heard someone clear her throat behind her.
H’Diane stood and turned. “Jeffers,” she said halfway around, “I’m going to need a perimeter patrol - “ but she stopped when she saw that it was LaVonde. LaVonde smiled a little, produced a miniature digital tape recorder and held it out.
“Comment for the Citizen-Times?”
LaVonde and H’Diane had been together for four years. Four weird years that started with them running into each other at the scene of a meth lab that had been burned in a murder/arson. LaVonde liked to joke that it was their first date. H’Diane figured she’d probably been awakened by the phone but hadn’t counted on her staying awake, hearing her side of the conversation, and coming down here to write a story.
H’Diane wasn’t out at work. Well, not yet. It was one of those weird things about being a woman, a cop, a professional, a lesbian, an out gay woman in the twenty first century: you don’t really come out anymore. It just happens in time. Or...it doesn’t. Sometimes it feels as though there’s no real way to engineer either outcome without seeming like you have an agenda or a problem with yourself. The world had changed so much in H’Diane’s life and so much of it was scary still, but a lot of it also seemed to be for the better. This was one of those things. Being out at work didn’t have to feel like a very special episode of Law & Order anymore. On the other hand, that it didn’t have to meant the ‘phobes could make sure it was kind of frowned upon to force one anyway.
H’Diane sighed a little, drew a breath. Smith, bless his heart, he just didn’t know what to think. There was a sort of electric tension in the air between the new detective and the reporter. He just stood there for a second. “We’re setting up a media area,” he blurted out, pointing... well, somewhere else. LaVonde looked at him for a moment, then very obviously leaned her head to one side to peek around H’Diane at the corpse.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 4
