There it was: Kyle’s agenda for the meeting. He wanted me at Quantico with him.
I roared with laughter, and then he did too. “To tell you the truth, I don’t feel close on this one, Kyle. I feel lost,” I finally admitted.
“It’s still early in the game,” he said. “The offer stands, win or lose out here. I want you to come to Quantico. I want you working close to me. There’s nothing that would make me happier.”
Chapter 26
THIS WAS a good break. Better than they could have expected or hoped for. William and Michael followed the two hotshot police dicks from the station house in Brentwood. They stayed a reasonable distance back in their van. The brothers didn’t particularly care if they lost them. They knew what hotel they were staying at. They knew how to find them.
They even knew their names.
Kyle Craig, FBI. A DIC from Quantico. A “big case” man. One of the Bureau’s best.
Alex Cross, Washington PD. Forensic psychologist to the stars.
There was a saying William wanted to whisper in their ears: If you hunt for the vampire, the vampire will hunt for you.
That was the truth, but it also sounded too much like a rule. William fucking hated rules. Rules made you predictable, less of an individual. Rules made you less free, less authentic, less yourself. And in the end, rules could get you caught.
William touched down lightly, tentatively on the van’s brake pedal. Maybe they shouldn’t hunt the two cops down, then kill them like dogs, he was thinking. Maybe they had a lot better things to do while they were in L.A.
There was a special place here where he and Michael often went. It was called the Church of the Vampire, and it was for those who were “searching for the dragon within.” It actually was a church: vast, high-ceilinged rooms filled with funky old Victorian furniture, elaborate golden candelabras, human skulls and other bones, tapestries that portrayed stories of famous old blood seekers. The usual dreaded role-players came to the church, but also real vampires. Like William and Michael.
Exciting, very exotic, sado-erotic things happened inside the Church of the Vampire. Excruciating pain was transformed into ecstasy. William remembered his last visit, and it sent electricity shooting through his body. He had found a blond boy of seventeen. An angel, a prince. The boy was dressed in all black that night; he even had black contact lenses—absolutely gorgeous from every angle. To show William that he was a real vampire, the darling boy punctured his own carotid artery and then drank his own blood. Then he asked William to drink, to be one with him. When he and Michael hung the boy to drain him completely, it was out of love and adoration of the angel’s perfect body. They were merely fulfilling their nature—to be sado-erotic.
William came out of his delicious reverie as the two cops entered a bar called the Knoll. It was just off Sunset Boulevard. Very mundane, a nothing spot. Perfect for the two of them.
“They’re going drinking together,” William said to Michael. “Cop camaraderie.”
Michael snickered and rolled his eyes. “They’re just two old men. They’re harmless. Toothless,” he said, and laughed at his joke.
William watched Alex Cross and Kyle Craig disappear inside. “No,” he finally said. “Let’s be careful with them. One of them is extremely dangerous. I can feel his energy.”
Chapter 27
I FINALLY had a lead, courtesy of Tim, Jamilla’s contact at the San Francisco Examiner. The chase was on, or so I hoped. The next morning I drove up Route 101 to Santa Barbara, which is located approximately one hundred miles north of L.A.
It was sobering and a little depressing to watch the sky actually grow bluer as I traveled away from Los Angeles and the copper-gray cover of smog spread thickly over the city.
I was to meet a man named Peter Westin at the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The library was supposed to contain the most extensive collection of books on vampires and vampire mythology in the United States. Westin was the expert who had been recommended by Tim. She warned me that Westin was thoroughly eccentric but a definitive source on vampires past and present.
He met me in a small private sitting room just off the library’s main reading room. Peter Westin looked to be in his early forties and was dressed completely in deep purple and black. Even his fingernails were painted a shade of mauve. According to Jamilla, he owned a clothing and jewelry shop in a small mall called El Paseo on State Street in Santa Barbara. He had long black hair streaked with silver, and he was dark and dangerous looking.
“I’m Detective Alex Cross,” I said as I shook hands with Westin. His grip was strong, lacquered fingernails or no.
“I am Westin, descended from Vlad Tepes. I bid you welcome. The night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest,” he said in overly dramatic tones.
I found myself smiling at the prepared speech. “Sounds like something the count might have said in one of the old Dracula movies.”
Westin nodded, and when he smiled I saw that his teeth were perfectly formed. No fangs.
“In several of them, actually. It’s the official invitation of the Transylvania Society of Dracula in Bucharest.”
I immediately asked, “Are there American chapters?”
“American and Canadian. There’s even a chapter in South Africa, and in Tokyo. There are several hundred thousand men and women with an avid interest in vampires. Surprise you, Detective? You thought we were a more modest cult?”
“It might have a week ago, but not now,” I said. “Nothing surprises me much anymore. Thanks for talking to me.”
Westin and I took seats at a large oak library table. He had selected a dozen or more volumes on vampires for me to read, or at least leaf through.
“I especially recommend Carol Page’s Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires. Ms. Page is the real deal. She gets it,” he told me, and handed over Bloodlust. “She has met vampires, and records their activities accurately and fairly. She started her investigation as a skeptic, much like yourself, I expect.”
“You’re right, I’m very skeptical,” I admitted. I told Peter Westin about the most recent murder in Los Angeles, and then he let me ask whatever questions I wished about the vampire world. He answered patiently, and I soon learned that a vampire subculture existed in virtually every major city as well as some smaller ones, such as Santa Cruz, California; Austin, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Batavia, New York; and Des Moines, Iowa.
“A real vampire,” he told me, “is a person born with an extraordinary gift. He, or she, has the capacity to absorb, channel, transform, and manipulate pranic energy—which is the life force. Serious vampires are usually very spiritual.”
“How does drinking human blood fit in?” I asked Peter Westin. Then I quickly added, “If it does.”
Westin answered quietly. “It is said that blood is the highest known source of pranic energy. If I drink your blood, then I take your strength.”
“My blood?” I asked.
“Yes, I would think you’d do nicely.”
I recalled the nocturnal raid on the funeral parlor north of L.A. “What about the blood of corpses? Those dead for a day or two?”
“If a vampire, or a poseur, were desperate, I suppose blood from a corpse would suffice. Let me tell you about real vampires, Detective. Most of them are needy, attention seeking, and manipulative. They are frequently attractive—primarily because of their immorality, their forbidden desires, rebelliousness, power, eroticism, their sense of their own immortality.”
“You keep emphasizing the word real vampires. What distinction are you trying to make?”
“Most young people involved with the underground vampire lifestyle are merely role-players. They are experimenting, looking for a group that meets their needs of the moment. There’s even a popular mass-market game, Vampire: The Masquerade. Teenagers especially are attracted to the vampire lifestyle. Vampires have an incredible alternative way of looking at the world. Besides, vampires party late into t
he night. Until the first light.” His lips curled into a smile.
Westin was definitely willing to talk to me, and I wondered why. I also wondered how seriously he took the vampire lifestyle. His clothing shop in town sold to young people looking for alternative trappings. Was he a poseur himself? Or was Peter Westin a real vampire?
“The mythology of the vampire goes back thousands of years,” he told me. “It’s present in China, Africa, South and Central America. And central Europe, of course. For a lot of people here in America it’s an aesthetic fetish. It’s sexual, theatrical, and very romantic. It also transcends gender, which is an attractive idea these days.”
I felt it was time to stop his spiel and focus on the murders. “What about the murders—the actual violence taking place here in California and Nevada?”
A mask of pain came over his face. “I’ve heard Jeffrey Dahmer called a vampire-cannibal. Also, Nicolas Claux, who you may not be familiar with. Claux was a Parisian mortician who confessed to murders in the mid-nineties. Once he was captured he took great pleasure in describing eating the flesh of corpses on his mortician’s slab. He became known all over Europe as the Vampire of Paris.”
“You’ve heard of Rod Ferrell in Florida?” I asked.
“Of course. He’s a dark hero for some. Very big on the Internet. He and his small cult bludgeoned to death the parents of another member. They then carved numerous occult symbols into the dead bodies. I know all about Rod Ferrell. He was supposedly obsessed with opening the gates of hell. Thought he had to kill large numbers of people, and consume their souls, to be powerful enough to open up hell. Who knows? Maybe he succeeded,” Westin said.
He stared at me for a long moment. “Let me tell you something, Detective Cross. This is the absolute truth. I believe it’s important for you to understand. It is no more common for a vampire to be a psychopath or a killer than it is for any random person on the street.”
I shrugged. “I guess I’d have to check your research statistics on that one. In the meantime, one or more vampires, real ones or maybe just role-players, have murdered at least a dozen people,” I said.
Westin looked a little sad. “Yes, Detective, I know. That’s why I consented to talk with you.”
I asked him one final question. “Are you a vampire?”
Peter Westin paused before he answered. “Yes. I am.”
The words cut through me. The man was completely serious.
Chapter 28
THAT NIGHT in Santa Barbara, I was just a little more afraid of the dark than I had ever been before. I sat in my hotel room and read a touching novel called Waiting by Ha Jin. I was waiting as well. I called home twice that night. I wasn’t sure if I was lonely, or still feeling guilty about missing Damon’s concert.
Or maybe Peter Westin had frightened me with his vampire stories and books, and the haunted look in his dark eyes. At any rate, I was taking vampires more seriously now that I had met him. Westin was a strange, eerie, unforgettable man. I had the feeling that I would meet, or at least talk to him, again.
My fears didn’t go away that night, and not even with the first light of morning shining brightly over the Santa Ynez Mountains. Something quite awful was happening. It involved twisted individuals or maybe an underground cult. It probably had something to do with the vampire subculture. But maybe it didn’t, and that was even more disturbing to think about. It would mean we were in a totally gray area with the investigation.
By seven-thirty in the morning, my rented sedan was easing into soupy fog and then the morning traffic. I was singing a little Muddy Waters blues, which nicely matched my mood.
I left Santa Barbara and headed toward Fresno. I had another “expert” to meet.
I drove for a couple of hours. I got on 166 at Santa Maria and continued east through the Sierra Madres until I reached Route 99. I took it north. I was seeing California for the first time and liking most of what I saw. The topography was different than back east, and so were the colors.
I fell into a comfortable driving rhythm. I listened to a Jill Scott CD. For long stretches of the road trip I thought about the way my life had been going over the past couple of years. I knew that some of my friends were starting to worry about me, even my best friend, John Sampson, and I wouldn’t exactly classify him as a worrier. Sampson had told me more than once that I was putting myself in harm’s way. Sampson even suggested that maybe it was time for a career change. I knew I could go with the FBI, but that didn’t seem like much of a change. I could also go back into psychiatry full-time—either see patients or possibly teach, maybe at Johns Hopkins, where I’d gotten my degree and still had pretty good connections.
Then there was Nana Mama’s favorite tune: I needed to find someone and settle down again; I needed somebody to love.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. My wife, Maria, had been killed in a drive-by shooting in D.C. that had never been solved. That happened when Damon and Jannie were little, and I guess I never really got over it. Maybe I never would. Even now, if I let myself, I could get torn up thinking about Maria and what happened to her, to us, and how goddamn senseless it had been. What a terrible waste of a human life. It had left Damon and Jannie without their mother.
I had tried hard to find someone, but maybe I just wasn’t meant to be lucky twice in my lifetime. There had been Jezzie Flanagan, but that couldn’t have turned out worse. And then Christine Johnson, little Alex’s mother. She was a teacher and now lived out here on the West Coast. She was doing well, loved Seattle, and had “found someone.” I still had terribly mixed feelings about Christine. She’d been hurt because of me. My fault, not hers. She had made it clear she couldn’t live with a homicide detective. And then, not too long ago, I had started to become involved with an FBI agent named Betsey Cavalierre. Now Betsey was dead. Her murder remained unsolved. I was afraid to even have drinks with Jamilla Hughes. The past was starting to haunt me.
“Some detective,” I muttered, as I spotted the overhead sign: Fresno. I had come here to see a man about some teeth.
Fangs, actually.
Chapter 29
THE TATTOO, fang, and claws parlor was located on the fringe of a lower-middle-class commercial district in downtown Fresno. It was a ramshackle storefront with an old dentist’s chair prominently displayed in the window. In the chair was a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. She sat with her skinny, pimpled neck bowed toward her lap, wincing with each needle puncture.
On a tall stool beside her sat a young guy with a bright blue-and-yellow bandanna wrapped tightly around his head. He was applying the tattoo. He reached for a bottle of ink. The array of tattoo inks beside him reminded me of the spin-art booth at a school fair.
I watched the tattoo process from the street for the next few minutes. I couldn’t help thinking about the role of physical pain in getting tattoos, but also in the murders so far.
I knew the basic tattoo process and watched as the resident artist adjusted a gooseneck lamp toward the nape of the girl’s neck. The artist used two foot-operated tattoo machines: one for outlining, the other for shading and coloring. The round shader between the machines held fourteen different needles. The more needles, the more colorful the flash.
A middle-aged man with a crew cut was passing by on the street, and he paused just long enough to mutter, “That’s nuts, and so are you for watching.”
Everybody’s a critic these days. I finally went inside and saw the tattoo master’s art, a small Celtic symbol, green and gold. I asked him where I could get fangs and claws. He moved his head, his chin, actually, to indicate a hallway to his left. Never said a word.
I walked past display cases: tongue and navel studs, including glow-in-the-dark studs, massive knuckle rings, sunglasses, pipes, beaded thingees, a poster for two popular claws—Ogre and Faust.
You’re getting warmer, I thought as I entered the hallway, and then I met the fang master face-to-face.
He was expecting me, and he jus
t started talking as soon as I entered his small shop.
“You’ve finally arrived, pilgrim. You know, when you go to the most interesting, and most dangerous, vampire clubs, the ones in L.A., New York, New Orleans, Houston, you see fangs everywhere. It’s the scene, and what a scene, my man. Goth, Edwardian, Victorian, bondage apparel, anything goes. I was one of the first to custom-make fangs out here. Started in Laguna Beach, worked my way north. And now here I am, the Fresno Kid.”
As he spoke, I became aware of his teeth, his elongated incisors. Those teeth looked as if they could inflict severe damage.
His name was John Barreiro, and he was short, painfully thin, and dressed mostly in black, much like Peter Westin. He was probably the most sinister-looking person I had ever met.
“You know why I’m here—the Golden Gate Park murders,” I said to the fang maker.
He nodded and grinned wickedly. “I know why you’re here, pilgrim. Peter Westin sent you. Peter’s very persuasive, isn’t he? Follow me.” He took me into a small overcrowded room in the rear of the store. The walls were dark blue, the lighting crimson.
Barreiro had a lot of nervous energy, and he moved around constantly as he spoke. “There is a fabulous Fang Club in Los Angeles. They like to say it’s the only place where you can meet vampires and live to tell about it. On weekend nights you might see four, five hundred people there. Maybe fifty of the fuckers are real vampires. Almost everyone wears fangs, even the vampire wanna-bes.”
“Are your teeth real?” I asked him.
“Let me give you a little nip and we’ll see,” the fang maker said, and laughed. “The answer to your question is yes. I had my incisors capped, then filed to a sharp edge. I bite. I drink blood. I am the real-deal bad dude, Detective.”
I nodded, didn’t doubt it for a second. He looked and acted the part.
“If I might take a simple cast of your canines, I could make a pair of fangs just for you. That will really separate you from your detective peers. Make you peerless.”