Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  “A murder?”

  H’Diane didn’t let herself smile. “Deputy Smith,” she said, very calm, “Please show Ms. Burke to the media area.” She turned back. She didn’t cross her arms, didn’t shift her weight to one hip, just stood there with her hands by her side and her face as blank as a bedroom wall in an empty house. “The Sheriff’s Department will issue comment, as appropriate, as soon as we can.”

  LaVonde smiled. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t say anything, though, just nodded once, clicked off the recorder, put it in her jacket pocket. “Deputy Smith,” though she pitched it more softly so it didn’t quite mock H’Diane. “Please do as the detective asked.”

  “Yes... ma'am?” Smith scratched his forehead, cap lifted, then tugged it back on and started squelching away through the mud.

  Do they all do the cap thing? H’Diane smiled, finally, when they were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear her face crack. She was going to kill LaVonde for this. They had talked about it already, after all.

  In the end, the Sheriff himself showed up, lights going, siren blaring, like a clown car late for the circus. He got out and did a meaningful and photo-friendly walk around the site. There were only a few media people there at that hour, with the sun just about to rise. By six in the morning there would be TV trucks down the road but the owners of the property wouldn’t let them on their land to broadcast so all they had were shots of grey, autumnal countryside and news readers repeating the same “breaking” news over and over again. LaVonde went back home and wrote up a story to go on the Citizen-Times site, then started on something longer for the print edition.

  H’Diane stayed at the scene to brief the Sheriff, then the dog team, then observe them working. They caught a scent and spooked immediately. They didn’t at all like what they’d picked up. They followed it out of the clearing, through some brush and to some tire tracks that had either been driven over or messed around with to disguise the treads. They sniffed it around the victim’s car, too, and the handlers thought they’d picked up a different scent in the cars but it didn’t lead much of anywhere. The rain had ruined a lot of the tracking they could do. The handlers weren’t any happier to be out in the middle of nowhere at goddamn o’clock in the morning, either, and continued sweeps of the woods around the scene didn’t turn up a damned thing.

  H’Diane - Detective Bing - went straight to the station, drank three cups of coffee and started going over crime scene photos. The coroner was working the body, the scene evidence was being bagged and tagged to go to the Asheville SBI office, the digital photos were coming out of the printer and the Polaroids were up on the wall in a conference room. She did a quick debrief with each of the deputies, focusing on Hendricks as the first one on the scene. She didn’t tear him a whole new one for having fucked up the scene by walking all over it so much as she pointed out where, exactly, the new one would be torn if he messed it up again. She did some reading on the victim’s history, re-read all the stories about his partner being killed in a car crash and his wife dying of a heart attack, assigned some deputies on day shift to start interviewing the neighbors.

  Then she finally - finally - got the recording of the 911 call.

  “I didn’t do it,” the voice drawled. She wound it back, played it again.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  She started making notes. Male, sounded to be, well, his voice was odd. He sounded sort of young, but not young, not a kid. There was something in it, though; there was something old there. He was so calm as he said it, but H’Diane knew the sound of creepy calm, the sound of someone who’d just shot their whole family dead and called 911 so there would be someone to find and bury them after the shooter killed himself, and it wasn’t that. Was it? She shook her head and listened to the whole thing again. He’d been there. He knew exactly where it was. He drove a long way across the county to use a pay phone that wasn’t supposed to work anymore - caller ID and modern telecommunications infrastructure long ago put the lie to the television trope that a call has to run for a while before it can be traced - and then called it in as pretty as you please. Of course there weren’t security cameras at Appleton. The place hadn’t been a school in fifteen years at least, according to Deputy Smith. It was a place where kids went to get high because the county couldn’t afford to tear it down.

  H’Diane played the recording for what seemed like an hour. White, male, young but not that young, knew what happened, left the scene and didn’t want trouble with the law. Someone who’d found the body with its throat slit and cared enough – about the deceased, about himself, about the neighbors, somebody – to tear the head off to make sure he didn’t turn into a Steeplechase. Someone strong enough to do that with their bare hands. H’Diane had been at the top of her class when she finished that degree in Criminal Justice and trained to be a detective. Most leads dissolve in the first forty-eight hours after a case. Investigators have to work fast and be thorough if they can track down enough information to actually produce an arrest or, to be honest, even a serious questioning.

  She needed to find out who made that call, and fast, before he was gone forever.

  “You know that’s where that old murder happened, right?” This was LaVonde’s greeting to H’Diane when she walked in the door that night feeling stiff, sore, too caffeinated, too tired.

  “Yeah, my day was a bitch,” she sighed. They kissed hello, then H’Diane slid into a chair at the kitchen table.

  LaVonde waited a moment before diving right back in. “That old murder. Fifty-five years ago. The double homicide down off Green River Road.” She pulled open the phone book, an absurdly quaint item she refused to surrender to her smartphone. Nobody was in any shape to cook and delivery pizza seemed like a good idea to the desperate. LaVonde paused in flipping pages and then said, pointedly, “Where we were this morning?”

  “Triple homicide?”

  “Yes, sugar, triple homicide. Did no one in the department mention this to you?”

  H’Diane blinked and shook her head.

  LaVonde scowled a little, but not unkindly. “Figures,” she said. “Bunch of good ol’ boy crackers. Wanted to know if you’d figure it out yourself.”

  “Great, so what’s the story?”

  LaVonde picked up the phone, dialed, ordered, and hung up. In that time, H’Diane sat there, stretched back, and leaned against the wall, crossing her feet at the ankles. The cold outside felt like it could creep right in through the walls and she hunched her shoulders closer and crossed her arms.

  “Con man comes into town, shacks up with a rich orphan, lures the kid and a little old lady from out near Brevard into the woods somehow and kills them both. Never seen again. Hell, hardly seen when he was playing Daddy May I with the kid.” H’Diane arched one eyebrow and LaVonde arched hers back in confirmation. “That was the rumor at the time. Anyway, their bodies were found right there. Same spot. Clyde Wilfred was the lead investigator. It was the first case he and Dwayne Sherrill worked together in their time at the SBI. Still technically an open case but no one’s pursued anything in decades.” LaVonde shrugged. “Might be of interest to you so I printed some scans from the morgue at the Citizen-Times.”

  “And nobody told me at the station,” H’Diane mumbled.

  “Don’t think of it as them trying to trip you up, honey,” LaVonde cooed as she walked over to plant a kiss on H’Diane’s sharp cheek. “Think of it as them believing you’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.”

  “Sure,” H’Diane sighed, but she reached for the printouts and started reading. Much later, pizza half-eaten, she set the papers aside and turned to LaVonde. “You can't write about this case, you know.”

  “I know,” LaVonde sighed. “Conflict of interest. But I'm an editor now. I don't get to write about it anyway.” H'Diane cocked an eyebrow: there was no such animal as an editor who did not also write for their paper. LaVonde had the goo
d grace to look a little mollified to be caught in such an obvious lie. “Okay,” LaVonde went on, “I won't write about it.”

  That doesn't mean I can't investigate. Or encourage. It was written on her face but H’Diane said nothing.

  “You know, Clyde Wilfred has a son.” LaVonde added it as mildly as she possibly could.

  “No comment.” H'Diane smiled a little as she replied.

  “From what I've heard, nobody can find him...”

  “No comment.” This time, H'Diane didn't smile as much.

  4

  Roderick had asked me if I was going to call Agatha in on this. No, I'd told him. I have to handle this myself. I had no desire to sew those apron strings back together.

  “Maybe I can help?” Roderick asked.

  “Maybe,” I'd said. No promises. No guarantees.

  The thing is, I took over North Carolina a few years back. The old boss, Bob the Third, he was this good ol' boy from a long line of Bobs just like himself. They'd run the state – him and his maker before him and his before him – for so long nobody was around who remembered a pre-Bob era at all. At least, no one who'd admit to being that old. You might expect that age would be a status symbol amongst our kind, and for some it is, especially in Europe. Here in the States the current vogue is to seem as young and precocious as possible. I'd had reason to believe Agatha was at least a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty years old as a vampire, plus twenty or thirty years tacked on at the beginning, but she'd never say. Asking point blank would be the worst possible offense, so no dice there. Anyway, the deal is, a lot of us like to claim a youth long lost to us, especially the ones who stake out some territory as their own and make themselves boss. I think it's in part because we're American vampires and American culture has been youth-oriented since at least the second half of the nineteenth century and youth-obsessed since at least the 1920's.

  Anyway, I just barely make the cut on having been born in that era of youth-oriented culture and you know what? I'm fed up with it. Vampires have adopted it as some sort of peg to hang their hat on like demure society types, so eager to prove a virility that's been lost to them for as long as they can remember. When the Big Flush & Fill happens, we're stuck. That's it. We learn new stuff, sure. I can drive an automatic, I can use a cellular phone, I can do a Sudoku puzzle. I'm not young, though. I'm not who I was then. I don't have the same capacity to learn and adapt that I used to have, and that's the thing with proxies and thralls and servants and fixers: they don't help with that. I suspect they accelerate the loss of those abilities. They free up people like Agatha from the complicated work of learning how the world functions these days so that she can devote her time to pretending to understand. She mimics. She apes. She doesn’t deeply comprehend. It drives me crazy.

  So what does this have to do with Roderick? Roderick got stuck – got turned – in 1969. Like I said, lucky for him that's back in fashion right now, but what happens when it isn't? More important to me at the time was this: what did it mean about him now? Three days before he got turned, he was arrested in a drug bust. His daddy got him out – we had money despite what you’d think from my mother’s compulsive penny-pinching, sure, but my father's brother had money – and then turned up dead the same night Roderick became a vampire. I've always had to wonder about that. It's traditional for our families to get eliminated after we're turned. Their sudden absence from the scene prevents a lot of uncomfortable questions. It doesn't happen as much these days as it used to, but it still does sometimes. It's something that's getting harder to do, I suspect, in the age of forensic science. Regardless, I'm left wondering this: did Roderick kill his father? I’ve never known a thing about his mother, and he already had no relatives left except for me, but he didn't know I was still around in any meaningful sense. Did his maker – whoever that was – do it for him? Was it coincidence? And if it was Roderick, well, let's just say he's always been a little screwy. Tie that in with the culture of rebellion in which he’d gone native at the time he got turned and you get somebody who might be a fearsome vampire, indeed. There’s a theory that goes around, a sort of vampiric old wives’ tale, that the emotional or psychological state in which we get turned also sticks around forever in some way: leaves an imprint, if you will. I don’t buy it because if that were true we’d all be screaming paranoiac everything-phobes all the time. Being turned is the most terrifying experience a body can ever have. Still, I look at Roderick – or at another vampire with some overwhelming sense of oddity about them – and I wonder.

  And that's why Emily, the local boss in Seattle, keeps an eye on him for me.

  Just as an aside, vampires hate the idea of mortal relatives both being turned. It's kind of perverted, somehow. That biological tie lingering after biology stops being an issue and mortal ties and meanings are supposedly washed away? It makes us uncomfortable. Maybe that's why I'm always sort of scared to hang with Roderick and always sort of eager. It gives Agatha the creeps that he's still around and that we're still in touch. That discomfort on her part, despite, or perhaps in addition to, everything else, is an excellent reason to have these little family reunions every once in a while. It never hurts to remind her I’m my own vampire now.

  As to the question of what to do about Clyde's murder and the chance a vampire had done it, I was fairly in the dark. I could come up with all sorts of situations to explain it: a vengeful child of the murderer from back then, a vampire who'd done the deed and was trying to clean house for some reason or another, someone who wasn't at all related but got put away by Clyde and Dwayne back in their past. The only thing I could do was start nosing around without tipping my hand. Last Gasp is supposed to be a tender time for my kind, half meditation and half Bar Mitzvah, as we experience the severing of the very last tie we had to our mortal lives. There’s more to it than that – a lot more, and I wasn’t sure I believed half of what I’d been told – but it boils down to entering the last phase of a vampire’s transformation. There are crazy stories of vampires gaining special powers, of being able to feel it deep inside when the last person who knew them as a human, as a creature of daylight, passes from the world. There’s a lot of big talk. I hadn’t felt any of that when Clyde died and the discovery of his death had generated feelings that were purely human. That wasn’t a word I expected to use much again, but it was true. If a vampire did this, there was just as good a chance that they did it purely to throw me off balance, psychologically And if they did that then they must be making a play for power of their own. I couldn’t imagine who would know about Clyde, but it was a possibility I had to consider.

  Yes, now was a good time to start visiting other vampires – which is why I was here anyway – and to seem very, very nonchalant. First on the list: a kid named Marty Macintosh.

  Marty lived in some anonymous apartment complex in Arden. Arden is a non-town between Hardisonville and Asheville, a series of shopping centers and apartment developments on a multi-lane highway. It was where the first megaplex went in, long years ago. When that happened, followed by a Wal-Mart next door, I knew it was over for Arden. Forever could pass and it would stay a bunch of rental condos and strip malls. Way back in the day, Arden had grown up around the railroad tracks that ran south out of Asheville towards the upstate and everything else downhill from the city. It had been a place where factories went up and warehouses were built. The presence of industry was long since a thing of the past. Now it's endless suburbia. The passenger trains went first and then most of the shipping lines. The tracks are grass-covered skeletons these days. Sometimes a train will rattle past on them but it's a rare thing and it sounds like a ghost drumming skeletal fingers against an old desk.

  I drove north on NC 280, still finding it weird to take the new Boylston Highway through what used to be fields and meadows, a straight shot rather than the old way around on Airport Road past the state research farm. What had to be the last plane of the night was coming in for a landing at Asheville Regional as I scooted around the turn at
the end of the runway. It was a big jet covered in lights. I remembered when the biggest, best plane that flew into or out of there was a refitted puddle-jumper that had started life as a Yugoslav transport plane in World War II.

  That's one of the hard things about being a vampire; our eyes are so good we sometimes see the past superimposed on the present and all that clutter gets in the way of seeing the future.

  I drove on past the airport and past where there's a Target and a Best Buy now – just so damned insane to me – and where the Huddle House used to be until it got turned into a Starbucks. The road ran along beside a branch line of those railroad tracks until it hit US 25 and turned left/north into Arden. I was halfway to Biltmore when I saw that damned megaplex and knew I was nearly there. It'd been a couple of years since I'd last seen Marty – he wasn’t there last time – and I'd lost the directions I got out of Bob's files after he died, but I'm pretty good at remembering that sort of thing so I caught the next left after the Asheville Racquet Club and then took the series of twisting turns that put me in the back corner of a complex of apartment blocks called Tournament Landing.

  It's funny, names like that. I read a story – a news story – about a guy who made up a housing development name generator on a webpage somewhere, just as a gag. It would spit out combinations like Deer Hunt Trails and Creek's Edge Estate and whatnot based on a simple formula of, if I remember correctly, (Animal or Geographic Feature) plus (Activity or Geological Feature) plus (Landscaping Term). Clever enough idea to get a chuckle, sure, but then he started getting calls from real developers who wanted to know if they could use the names they'd generated playing around with it. When a real estate mogul is ready to let some webpage somewhere name their new neighborhood rather than name it something meaningful to the land or the people on it, I don't know what to think.