30 Days of Night: Light of Day (13 page)

He kept firing, kept trying to bring the light up, to drive the bloodsucker off him with the UV rays. But it was on him already, the smell gagging him, claws jabbing into him, tearing through the leather jacket like it was paper, slicing skin. Barry kicked and bucked and tried to hit it with the gun, but the strength was flowing out of him so fast now that he couldn’t even lift the thing.

Finally the thing, the vampire, he knew now—
real after all, and ain’t that a bitch? Because really, who would have figured it?
—reared back, and he saw that huge mouth open wide, all those teeth pointing every which way, lines of saliva dangling off them like waterfalls after a storm, and he wished he had never put on the
goggles at all, wished he had just poked his eyes out with his fingers, because the only thing worse than dying this way was seeing it happen….

Marina blasted the undead sonofabitch drinking from Barry’s throat. It fought for a moment but the combination of phosphorus cooking it from inside and UV burning it from outside was too much for it and it tried to scramble into one of the shelving units, then just lay there on the bottom shelf, curling like a bug under a magnifying glass on a sunny summer day.

A third one tried to get the drop on her from behind, but she heard it despite the ringing in her ears from her own gunfire and she blew its head to pieces before it got close. She swept the place quickly. The roof was on fire, bits of flaming debris falling like space capsules on reentry, and she had to get out of there.

It was too late for Barry Wolnitz. She picked up his gun, took the goggles off his head, and scanned him quickly to see if there was anything else that could point back to her. The extra clips in his pockets. She plucked those out and dropped them in with hers. He was still alive, but barely, his feet tapping softly on the floor and blood still gurgling from his ruined throat. He wouldn’t last long enough for medical help to get there.

Good thing she had instructed him not to tell anyone where he was going. She didn’t want him coming back, so she swallowed hard, held the barrel of his own gun against his head, and squeezed the trigger.
The gun roared and kicked and pieces of his skull and brains skidded across the floor like a disintegrating hockey puck on fresh ice.

Marina went out the front door, ran to her car. Neighborhood like this, she had maybe three or four more minutes before first responders made the scene.

Plenty of time.

She put the guns in their lockbox, dropped the goggles in the trunk, slid behind the wheel and drove away.

Three bloodsuckers down. If there were more, the fire would drive them out, and they would have to find new digs. Not a bad night’s work for a solo mission. Effectively solo, anyway.

It was too bad about Barry Wolnitz, though. Whoever Senator Harlowe hired to be his next policy aide might be less enthusiastic about her cause. And she had sort of liked him, had been looking forward to his company on the flight home. All that nervous energy would have had to go somewhere. Worse, she felt the same way killing him that she had when Spider John died. He hadn’t done anything to deserve such a horrible death.

But he had pestered to go. And, who was she to turn down a senator’s senior policy advisor?

Three for one wasn’t the greatest score, but for tonight, it would just have to do.

L
ARISSA
D
IXSON WAS THE
daughter of cops—her mother had been one of the first female homicide detectives in the history of the Chicago Police Department, and her father made it to Captain before he retired—and her grandfather and great-grandfather had been cops as well. Police work ran in her veins instead of blood, she often said.

But her brand of police work, learned as a child when her parents told her war stories at bedtime instead of nursery rhymes or fairy tales, didn’t leave room for modern ways. So when Felipe Ruiz of the crime lab brought Alex Ziccaria and Larissa the results of Chantelle Durfey’s autopsy, Larissa sighed and rolled her eyes and fiddled with a pen on her desk the whole time Felipe spoke. Alex was used to it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little embarrassed. Felipe didn’t seem to let it faze him, but he was a guy who let things roll off him pretty easily. Alex figured that was a healthy trait in someone who spent most of his time talking to corpses.

Alex kept his seat when Felipe approached; at a skinny six-four he towered over Felipe and Larissa, but his height wasn’t so noticeable when he was sitting
down. He had never been undercover, because although his face wasn’t particularly noteworthy—just a face, he liked to say—people noticed his build and remembered him. He wore his hair on the long side, for a cop, lying over his ears and curling in at the neck. He was forty-three, the hair showing silver here and there, and he wore glasses to read. He had never married and always figured if he did settle down it would be with someone like Larissa who understood the demands of the job.

Felipe was holding an orange paper folder, glancing down at it as he spoke. “COD was blood loss due to the neck wound.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Larissa said.

“Yeah, that part’s no surprise. What
is
a surprise is that there was some weird perimortem bruising around the wound.”

“What kind of bruising?” Alex asked quickly, before Larissa could say anything. He liked letting the experts do their work, even enjoyed doing the paperwork that most cops despised. It let him organize his thoughts, which was key to figuring out the puzzles confronting him. In the field, there was always the possibility that someone would point a gun at him. That had happened twice, and both times he had frozen, once even pissing himself a little, although since it had been during one of those punishing summer thunderstorms Chicago enjoyed, no one had really noticed but him. He wasn’t a physically courageous man, that was the point, but he was a smart detective with a good conviction record.

“A circular pattern of some kind,” Felipe said. “As if something was pressed up against the wound.”

“Something round?” Alex asked. “Like an impact bruise?”

Felipe consulted the orange folder and shook his head. “ME thinks it was some sort of suction device.”

“Somebody cut her throat and then pumped her out?” Larissa asked. She was interested in spite of herself, Alex noted.

“There were less than two quarts of blood left in her body when we got her,” Felipe said.

“So somebody took about four quarts out,” Alex said.

“That’s the general rule,” Felipe said. “Six quarts is the norm.”

“See?” Larissa said. “Vampires.” She was smiling— she might not have believed in forensic science, but she sure as hell didn’t believe in vampires.

“No tooth marks on the victim,” Felipe reported. “But if vampires use blades and pumps, then maybe.”

“Why take that much blood out of someone?” Alex wondered. “What’s the point?”

“Killer has pet vampires at home,” Larissa said.

“Make the kill, take the blood, feed the pets.”

“That still requires believing in vampires, doesn’t it?” Alex said. “I don’t buy it.”

Newt Lofgren came out of the break room stirring a paper coffee cup with a plastic stick. “Say, Ziccaria,” he said.

“Yeah?”

Newt gave him a worried look. “My daughter’s dating a pale kid with stupid hair and sparkly skin. Maybe you should check him out.” He broke into a wicked laugh.

“I would, Newt, but the way I figure it, all she wants is a way to move out of the house so she doesn’t have to look at you every morning.”

Newt kept chuckling as he walked away. “Better requisition some wooden stakes,” he said. “I think you’re gonna need ’em!”

Felipe watched him go, then continued as if they hadn’t been interrupted. “One more thing working against the vampire hypothesis. If anyone had taken a drink directly from the wound, they would most likely have left trace evidence around it. DNA, skin cells, or something. We got none of that, just the bruising from the pump or whatever.”

“So our ‘vampire’ doesn’t drink from the victim, just takes the blood away from the scene?” Alex asked.

“Right.”

“You get anything else helpful?” Larissa asked. She spun the pen around on the desktop.

Felipe looked down at the open folder. “I guess that depends on your definition of ‘helpful.’ There probably was someone hanging around outside the apartment for a while before the vic got home, like Alex thought. We found scuff marks in the dirt, a partial footprint that didn’t tell us much—Nike athletic shoe, very
common, size nine and a half, also common. Nothing really useful inside the place. I don’t think the killer stuck around there for long. Got what he wanted and took off.”

“That’s the impression we got,” Alex said. “Nothing was taken, closets and drawers weren’t disturbed as far as we could tell.”

“Just makes it worse,” Larissa said. “Killing for the sake of killing. Not stealing anything—”

“Except blood,” Felipe interrupted.

“There any value on the open market for blood?”

“Plasma banks pay for it. Not a lot, though. And they prefer to extract it from the donors themselves.”

“So we’re looking for a dirty plasma bank?” Alex asked. “One that buys through the back door?”

Felipe shrugged. “That’s one possibility.”

“And the other one possibility is vampires?”

Larissa tossed the pen onto the desk with a clatter. “Some days, I wonder why I bother to get out of bed.”

That night, Alex sat in his leather easy chair, feet up on an ottoman that sagged in the middle like a broken-down plow horse’s spine, watching Cecil B. DeMille’s silent epic
The King of Kings
. He watched not for the religious aspects, although those didn’t bother him, but for the spectacle. And he liked silent movies when he was embroiled in a homicide case. He had to pay attention to the exaggerated facial expressions, to gestures, had to try to interpret the layers of meaning on the
title cards. A movie like this, with a sweeping narrative to it, took close study to really appreciate.

That study drew his mind away from his immediate problems. The flickering black-and-white images were like ghosts stalking through his living room, but watching them was easier than closing his eyes and seeing the ghosts that haunted him then: the faces of Chantelle Durfey and Gina Hooper, the first victims of the “vampire” killer.

It was always this way for him. If he could close a case within the first day or two, then the ghosts didn’t stay with him. But if someone’s killer—particularly the murderer of a child or a young woman—stayed on the loose, killed again—then they came more frequently. His sleep was affected, his appetite. Every time he looked out a dark window he saw a victim, not his own reflection, staring back. The same for pools of water. It got so he was afraid to look into a mirror. He heard their voices, too, even when he never had during their lives, speaking snatches of imagined dialogue that almost seemed to make sense, pretended to drive him toward solutions that weren’t really there at all.

Modern movies, the kind with color and sound, didn’t involve Alex enough, didn’t take his mind anyplace new. They were facile, too easily understood. He needed the challenge of the silents, or foreign films at the very least, with subtitles and some emotional complexity to them.

Only those could put the ghosts to rest. And then
only for a short while, the duration of the film or maybe a little longer.

Of course, even when he didn’t have murder victims haunting him, he saw a woman’s face in his sleep and during most of his waking hours, heard her voice through the long hours of dark morning before the sun came up. That face, that voice, belonged to Larissa. Obsessed? He supposed he was. That knowledge didn’t help him, though, didn’t do anything to break the cycle. He worked beside her during the day and at night hungered to feel her lying next to him.

Some nights he almost welcomed the murdered ones, because as much as they tore at what remained of his heart, he didn’t have to face them the next day, didn’t have to listen to them talking about lives that only contained him during a working shift.

He realized his attention had strayed. He picked up his glass—one Glenlivet, neat, each night, any more than that would make him a cliché that he didn’t want to be—and returned his focus to the screen, where the ghostly figures in shades of gray postured for him and him alone.

W
ALKER HAD BOUGHT A
cargo van, a white beast with no windows on the sides or rear. He and Mitch tacked up a curtain behind the front seats and covered the rear walls and floor with thick shag carpeting from a remnant store. They also rigged up a huge roll of plastic sheeting with a rope running through the middle, lashed around the seats, so they could easily unspool enough to stretch over the cargo area, front to back. He got the thing from a used-car lot in Gary, Indiana, hoping that the out-of-state sale would make it harder to trace if it was somehow tied to their murders. Of course, he didn’t have any fake ID, so even though he paid cash—a
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
attaché case auction had heated up at the end and paid off nicely—he had to use his real name for the purchase, and the Illinois registration and license plates.

He liked the anonymity it gave them when they drove around, and the space to toss a body if they didn’t have the privacy, wherever they happened to take her, to finish the job. His old car was too well known in Harvey and some of the other local suburbs around there, and they had decided they were better off
back in the ’burbs. In the city there were plenty of prospective victims, but the easiest ones to find and take, the hookers and drug addicts and homeless people, were also the ones likeliest to be carrying blood-borne diseases. So it was the suburbs for them, only Walker was worried about being recognized in his usual ride, and nothing Mitch could say made him feel more at ease about it.

It was a trade-off, but the van helped make the decision palatable.

Now they were sitting in the parking lot of a mall in North Riverside. It was nine o’clock, and the stores were closing, lights shutting off inside the Old Navy and Carson Pirie Scott, final shoppers trickling out to their cars. Mitch indicated a woman loading four bags into a Toyota Camry. She was African-American, maybe thirty, with a body that would have caught Walker’s attention under any circumstances. “How about her?”