I got up, but the second assailant was attached to my back. He bit me! Oh Jesus, no!
I cursed and slammed him into the wall. I did it again. Who the hell were these fantastic madmen? Who was the leech riding my back?
He finally let go, the son of a bitch! I spun around at him. I clipped the side of his head with my gun. I hit him again with a solid left hook. He went down like a sack.
I was breathing hard, still full of fight, though. Neither of the assailants was moving much now. I kept the gun on them while I lit another candle on the wall. That was better; light always helps.
I saw a male and female, probably no more than sixteen or seventeen. Their eyes were like dark holes. The male must have been six foot six or more.
He had on a dingy white T-shirt with “Marlboro Racing First to Finish” printed on it and baggy, scungy black jeans.
The girl was around five two, with wide hips, wide everything. Her black hair was stringy and greasy, with reddish highlights.
I touched my neck and was surprised that the skin wasn’t broken. There was no blood on my hand.
“You’re under arrest,” I yelled at the two of them. “You goddamn bloodsuckers.”
Chapter 77
VAMPIRES? If that’s what these twisted creeps were.
Assassins? Murderers?
Their names were Anne Elo and John “Jack” Masterson, and they had attended Catholic high school in Baton Rouge until about six months ago, when they had dropped out and run away from home. They were both seventeen years old. They were just kids.
I spent three hours attempting to question the suspects that night, then another four hours the following morning. Elo and Masterson wouldn’t talk to me or anyone else—not a word. They wouldn’t say what they were doing inside the mansion in the Garden District. Why they had attacked me. Whether or not they had placed the sinister effigies in the closet of the dead men.
The teens simply glared across the plain wooden table in one or another of the interrogation rooms at police headquarters. The parents were notified and brought in, but Elo and Masterson wouldn’t speak to them either. At one point, Anne Elo finally addressed her father with two words: “Blow me.” I wondered how the cult of the vampires had satisfied her needs, her incredible anger.
In the meantime, there were lots of others from the fetish ball to talk to. The commonality among most of them was that they held “straight jobs” in New Orleans: They were bartenders and waitresses, hotel desk clerks, computer analysts, actors, and even teachers. Most were afraid to have their alternative lifestyle come out at work, so they eventually talked to us. Unfortunately, no one told us anything revealing about Daniel and Charles, or their murderers.
It was an extraordinarily busy night at the precinct house. More than two dozen homicide detectives and FBI agents conducted reinterviews. We exchanged notes and bios with highlighted inconsistencies. We went hard at the most obvious liars in the group. We also kept a list of the witnesses who seemed most likely to break under pressure. We switched interviewers on them; sent them to their cells, then summoned them back before they could sleep; we doubled up on them.
“All we need is a few rubber hoses,” one of the New Orleans detectives said while we were waiting for Anne Elo to be fetched from her cell for the sixth time that night. His name was Mitchell Sams, and he was around fifty, a black man, hugely overweight, tough, effective, cynical as hell.
When Anne Elo was brought back into the interrogation room, she looked like a sleepwalker. Or a zombie. Her eye sockets were incredibly deep and dark. Her lips were chapped and caked with dried blood.
Sams went at her. “Good morning, glory. It’s nice to see your pasty-white face again. You look like total shit, babe. I’m being kind. Several of your friends, including your pathetic boyfriend, have broken down already tonight.”
The girl turned her vacant eyes toward a brick wall. “You must be mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit,” she said.
I decided to try an idea that had been weaving through my mind for the past hour or so. I had used it on a few of the others. “We know about the new Sire,” I told Anne Elo. “He’s gone back to California. He isn’t here for you. He can’t help you, or hurt you.”
Her face remained blank and unresponsive, but she folded her arms. She sagged a few inches in her chair. Her lips were bleeding again, possibly because she’d bitten into them. “Who gives a shit? Not me.”
Just then, a bleary-eyed NOPD detective hurried into the interrogation room where Mitchell Sams and I were working on Elo. The detective had dark sweat stains under both arms of his pale blue sport shirt. Heavy stubble covered his chin and cheeks. He looked about as exhausted as I felt.
“There’s been another murder,” he told Sams. “Another hanging murder.”
Anne Elo slowly, rhythmically clapped her hands. “That’s great,” she said.
Chapter 78
I DROVE to the crime scene alone, feeling increasingly more distant and unreal. The wheels in my head were turning slowly and methodically. Where did we go from here? I had no goddamn idea. Jesus, I was beat.
The house was an outbuilding for one of the Garden District’s historic homes, a small carriage house with a second-story balcony. It looked like it could have been a cute, cozy B&B. Magnolia and banana trees surrounded it. So did an intricate wrought-iron fence, the kind I had seen everywhere in the French Quarter.
About half of the New Orleans Police Department was already at the scene. So were a couple of EMS trucks, their roof lights spinning and blazing. The press was beginning to arrive as we did—the late shift.
Detective Sams had gotten to the murder scene a couple of minutes before I did. He met me in the hallway outside the upstairs bedroom where the killing had taken place. The interior of the place had fine detailing on almost every surface—ceilings, banisters, moldings, doors. The owner had cared about the house, and also about Mardi Gras. Feathers and beads, colorful masks, and costumes were tacked up on most of the walls.
“This is bad, even worse than we thought,” Sams said. “She’s a detective named Maureen Cooke. She’s in Vice, but she was helping out on Daniel and Charles. Most of the department is pitching in.”
Sams led me into the detective’s bedroom. It was small but attractive, with a sky blue ceiling. Someone had once told me that color was supposed to keep winged insects from nesting there.
Maureen Cooke was a redhead, tall and thin, probably in her early thirties. She had been hung by her bare feet from a chandelier. Her nails were painted red. The detective was naked except for a delicate silver bracelet on her wrist.
Blood streaks were all over her body, but there was no sign of blood pooling on the floor or anywhere else.
I walked up close to her. “Sad,” I whispered under my breath. A human life gone—just like that. Another detective dead.
I looked at Mitchell Sams. He was waiting for me to talk first.
“This might not have been done by the same killers,” I said, and shook my head. “The bite wounds look different to me. They’re superficial. Something’s changed.”
I stepped back from the body of Maureen Cooke and took in her bedroom. There were photographs that I recognized as part of E. J. Bellocq’s study of Storyville prostitutes. Strange, but fitting for a vice detective. A couple of Asian fans had been framed over the bed—which looked as if it had been slept in. Or possibly the bed hadn’t been made the previous day.
My cell phone rang. I hit a button with my thumb. I felt out of it. Numb. I needed sleep.
“Did you find her yet, Dr. Cross? What do you think? Give me your best guess on how to stop these terrible murders. You must have it figured out by now.”
The Mastermind was on the line. How did he know?
Suddenly I was yelling into the phone. “I’m going to take you down. I’ve figured that much out, asshole!”
I hung up on him, then I shut the phone off. I looked around the bedroom. Kyle Craig was watching me
from the doorway.
“Are you all right, Alex?” he whispered.
Chapter 79
WHEN I got back to the Dauphine Hotel it was ten-thirty in the morning. I was too tired and too worked up to sleep. My heart was still racing. There was a message for me: Inspector Hughes had called from San Francisco.
I stretched out on the bed and called Jamilla back. I shut my eyes. I wanted to hear a friendly voice, especially hers.
“I might have something good for you,” she said when I reached her at home. “In my spare time, ha-ha, I’ve been taking a close look at Santa Cruz. Why Santa Cruz? you might ask. There have been several unsolved disappearances there. Too many. I plotted them out myself. Alex, something is happening down there. It fits in with the rest of this case.”
“Santa Cruz was on our original list,” I said. I was trying to focus on what she had just told me. I couldn’t remember exactly where Santa Cruz was located.
“You sound tired. Are you all right?” she asked.
“I just got back to the hotel a few minutes ago. Long night.”
“Alex, go to sleep! This can wait. Good night.”
“No, I can’t sleep anyway. Tell me about Santa Cruz. I want to hear it.”
“All right. I talked to Lieutenant Conover with the Santa Cruz PD. Interesting conversation. Annoying too. They’re aware of the disappearances, of course. They’ve also noted house pets and livestock disappearing in the past year. Lot of ranches in the area. Nobody believes in vampires, of course. But—Santa Cruz has a certain reputation. The kiddies call it the vampire capital of the U.S. Occasionally, the kids are right.”
“I need to see what you have so far,” I told her. “I’m going to try and get a little sleep. But I want to read whatever Santa Cruz sends you. Can you send it to me?”
“My friend Tim at the Examiner promised to send me the relevant files. Meanwhile, today’s my day off. I might just take a ride.”
I opened my eyes wide. “If you go, bring somebody along. Bring Tim. I mean it.” I told her about the murder of the vice detective, Maureen Cooke, here in New Orleans. “Don’t go there alone. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
“I’ll take somebody along,” she promised, but I didn’t know if I could believe her.
“Jamilla, be careful. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“You’re just tired. Get some sleep. I’m a big girl.”
We talked for a few more minutes, but I wasn’t sure if I had gotten through to her. Like most good homicide detectives, she was stubborn.
I shut my eyes again, and started to drift away, then I was gone.
Chapter 80
JAMILLA WAS remembering a line from a favorite Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which had been made into a really disappointing movie. “Whatever walked there, walked alone,” Jackson had written. That pretty much summed up how she felt about the murder case. And maybe even about her life lately.
She drove her trusty, dusty Saab toward Santa Cruz. She gripped the steering wheel a little too firmly most of the way, and her hands felt numb. The kink in her neck was getting worse. This was a disturbing case, and she just couldn’t let it go. The killers were out there somewhere. They were going to keep murdering until somebody stopped them. So maybe she should stop them.
She had tried to get her current boyfriend to go with her, but Tim was covering a bicyclists’ protest for the Examiner. Besides, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to spend the whole day with him. Tim was sweet, but, well, he wasn’t Alex Cross. So here she was getting off Route 1, entering Santa Cruz all by her lonesome. All by her damn lonesome again.
At least she had alerted Tim that she was going to Santa Cruz, and of course she was a big girl, and armed to the teeth. Ugh, teeth, she thought. She cringed at the thought of fangs, and the horrible deaths of all those who had been bitten.
She had always liked Santa Cruz, though. Maybe because it was practically the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake back in ’89—6.9 on the Richter scale, sixty-three dead—but then the area had come back. The gutsy little town and the people there had refused to fold. Lots of earthquake-proof construction, nothing higher than two stories. Santa Cruz was pure California, the best.
As she drove, she watched a big blond surfer climb out of a VW with a surfboard strapped to the roof. He was finishing off a drippy slice of pizza, heading into the Bookshop Santa Cruz. Pure California.
There was quite a mix of people here—post-hippies, high-tech start-up folks, transients, surfers, college kids. She liked it an awful lot. So where were the goddamn vampires hiding? Were they here? Did they know she was here in Santa Cruz, looking for their gnarly asses? Were they among the surfers and post-hippies she was passing on the street?
Her first stop was the town’s police department. The lieutenant, Harry Conover, was totally surprised to see her in the flesh. She guessed he couldn’t imagine any detective going out of his or her way on the job.
“I told you I’d pass along everything I found on the Goths and wanna-be vamps. Didn’t you believe me?” he asked. He shook his head of longish blond curls, rolled his soft brown eyes. Conover was tall, well built, probably in his mid-thirties. Around her age. Jamilla could tell that he was a big flirt, and that he had a high opinion of himself.
“Sure, I believed you. But I had today off, and this case is burning a hole right through me. So here I am, Harry. Better than E-mail, right? What do you have for me?”
She sensed that he wanted to tell her to get a life, to enjoy her day off. She’d heard it all before, and maybe he was right. But not now, not with this case still on the boards.
“I read in a couple of the reports that some of the local ghouls might be living together commune style. You have any idea where?” she asked.
Conover nodded and even pretended to be concerned. He was also checking her out, she could tell. Obviously, he was a breast man. “We never got any confirmation of that,” he said. “Kids crash together, of course, but I don’t know about any commune. There are a couple of hot clubs—Catalyst, Palookaville. And lots of kids share cribs on lower Pacific Street.”
She didn’t give up. Never. “But if a lot of kids were living together—any ideas where that might be?”
Conover sighed and actually looked a little annoyed with her for asking. Jamilla could tell he wasn’t the kind of cop who put too much of himself into his work. She would have transferred him in a second if he worked for her, and Conover would have sworn it was a gender thing. It wasn’t. He was a lazy, half-assed cop, and she hated that. Lives depended on how well he did his job. Didn’t he understand that?
“Maybe out in the foothills. Or north around Boulder Creek,” Conover finally volunteered in a soft drawl. “I really don’t know what to tell you.”
Of course you don’t, Harry. Duh.
“Where would you look first?” she persisted. If you were worth jack shit as a cop.
“Inspector, I just wouldn’t be chasing this one too hard. Yes, there have been some curious disappearances around here. But that’s true of just about every town up and down the coast of California. Kids are more restless now than they used to be when we were growing up. I don’t believe anybody’s getting seriously hurt in Santa Cruz, and I sure don’t buy that this is the freaking vampire capital of the West Coast. It isn’t. Believe me on that. There are no vampires in Santa Cruz.”
She nodded, pretended to agree. “I think I’ll try the foothills first,” she said.
Conover saluted her. “If you’re finished chasing ghouls before seven or so, give me a call. Maybe we could have a drink. It is your day off, right?”
Jamilla nodded. “I’ll do that. If I’m finished before seven, Harry. Thanks for all your help.” Jackass.
Chapter 81
SHE WAS pissed now. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be? Here she was, working her butt off in somebody else’s town. She parked the Saab on a funky side street in town, near the Metro C
enter, right across from the Asti bar. She had lost track of the San Lorenzo River while she was driving, but it was around here somewhere. She could smell it, anyway.
She had just gotten out of the car when two men appeared. They walked up quickly and flanked her tightly on either side.
Jamilla winced. They almost seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Blond ponytails, she thought. College kids? Surfers? She sure hoped so.
They were well built, but they didn’t look like weight lifters. More like they came by it naturally. Images of Eros, Hermes, and Apollo came to mind. Muscles that were extremely well defined. Virility. Chiseled marble.
“Can I help you fellows out?” she asked. “Looking for the beach?”
The taller of the two spoke with tremendous confidence, or maybe it was cockiness. “Doubt it,” he said. “We’re not surfers, actually. Besides, we’re from around here. How about you?”
Both of them had the deepest blue eyes. They were incredibly intense. One looked no older than sixteen. Their movements were deliberate and controlled. She didn’t like this. There was no one else around to intervene on the side street.
“Maybe you could tell me where the beach is,” she said.
They were crowding her physically, standing too close. She wouldn’t be able to get her gun out. She couldn’t move without bumping into one or the other. They wore black T-shirts, jeans, rock climber’s shoes.
“You want to back off a little?” she finally said. “Just back off, okay?”
The older one smiled. The dent between his lip and nose was a sexy, round hollow. “I’m William. This is my brother, Michael. By any chance were you looking for us, Inspector Hughes?”
Oh no, oh Jesus. Jamilla tried to reach for her sidearm in the holster strapped to her back. They grabbed her. Took away her gun as easily as if she were a child. She was astonished at how fast they moved—and how strong they were. The two of them pushed her down on the sidewalk and handcuffed her. Where did they get cuffs? In New Orleans? The murdered detective?