Blood Moon (21 page)

Taking in everything she told me, I nodded.
“What happened next?”

“The woman came back. She seemed on edge
about something—pissed off, actually—and her eyes were searching
the room frantically as she took her boyfriend’s hand again. I
don’t think she intended for me to hear anything, but she muttered
something about
The Dungeon
being compromised by mongrels.
That their scent polluted the air.”

The information that Raven gave us so far
confounded me. What did they mean by mongrels? She couldn’t
possibly have meant the police, could she? We hadn’t been there in
days—mainly because Donovan had been so cooperative and was sure to
give us any information we needed whenever we asked for it—so how
could she have known?

I didn’t get a chance to formulate a theory
before an even more relevant question came to mind: if she did know
that the police had already infiltrated
The Dungeon
, why was
it such a big deal? Perhaps she had something to hide, after all.
Maybe she did have a hand in these murders—and Bobby’s.

“Did you get the address?” I blurted out,
desperate to follow this lead as far as I could.

Raven’s head bobbed unsteadily as she
reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. “Y-yeah. He
didn’t say anything else after she came back. He only handed me
this card and told me to stop by later last night.”

“And did you?” David asked, glancing down at
the glossy black card as I took it, careful to hold it by the edges
so we could dust it for prints in hopes of getting an ID on these
two.

I stared at the card, struggling to make a
connection that felt so obvious. There was something familiar about
it, and yet I struggled to place it…
Why?

“No. I mean, I was going to, but Lucia and
Astrophel didn’t think it was a good idea. They suggested I call
you. They’d heard Donovan talking with one of your officers about
some pretty hairy activity going down and figured this was worth
reporting.”

I turned the card over in my hand, where I
found only an address in the Warehouse District of Phoenix printed
in a basic white font in the lower right corner. The memory slammed
into me, shining bright like a lightbulb in a dark room. I’d seen
this card before…

At Samantha Turner’s apartment, right there
on her coffee table amongst several others. I remembered bagging it
myself before we left that day, but didn’t think it really meant
anything.

A smile played at the corners of my lips
upon realizing that this could very well be the beginning of the
end for this case, and a strange feeling swelled within me. It was
a strange combination of relief and elation at having gotten what
was probably a vital piece of information after chasing our tails,
but there something else crouched just below the surface.

Something
hungry
.

A
fter thanking
Raven for the information, we had her prints taken. She was
confused at first, until we explained that it was to eliminate hers
on the card from any others we might find. Once processed, we took
her to the elevator and watched her leave before heading back to
our desks to fill in our team.

O’Malley was just hanging up his phone when
we approached, and he informed us that Donovan agreed to come down
to talk to us. There was one problem, though; he apparently didn’t
remember much from the night in question and wasn’t sure he’d be
much help. O’Malley requested copies of any surveillance footage
The Dungeon
had, though. Hopefully it was useful.

Even though I was unsure what to make of
Donovan’s sudden bout of amnesia, we needed to get as much
information as possible. While we waited for Donovan to arrive,
David called the Phoenix precinct to see if he could get
jurisdiction to investigate the address on the card. It turned out
they were investigating a couple of murders that sounded very much
like ours. When I told them about the card, they sounded as
ecstatic as I was about it. Once we had the approval we needed, I
hung up the phone and saw Donovan approaching my desk.

“We really need to stop meeting like this,
Detective Leighton,” he greeted.

Laughing, I gestured toward the chair across
from me, and Donovan took a seat, handing me the disc. “You really
do spoil me.”

“Flowers are so cliché,” Donovan quipped,
relaxing back into the chair. “So, I’m told you wanted to talk
about my visitors last night?”

David joined our conversation, standing next
to me. “We do.”

“Well,” Donovan replied, “as I told the
detective on the phone, I’m not sure how much help I’ll be. It’s
all kind of a blur.”

“Had a little too much to drink last night?”
I inquired, equal parts teasing and seriousness.

Donovan quickly shook his head. “Not at
all.”

“How can you be sure? You did say you can’t
remember anything,” I reminded him, and he shrugged.

“I realize how sketchy it sounds to say I
don’t remember what happened—believe me, I do—but my bartender,
Adam, assures me I hadn’t had anything to drink the entire night.”
I recognized the name of the bartender as the one I spoke to when
we were last here. Would he remember anything from last night? I’d
have to remember to give him a call to find out. In fact, it might
not be a bad idea to pay another visit to
The Dungeon
just
to be sure.

“So you don’t even remember what happened
before
they came into your club?” I asked. “How is that
possible?”

Donovan looked frustrated, but I was
confident my line of questioning wasn’t the cause. He hated that he
couldn’t remember. “I don’t know.”

“Well, one of your club-goers said she saw
you approach them,” I told him. “Did you?”

Donovan fell silent, his eyebrows pulling
together as he thought back. “I vaguely remember sitting near the
stage in my usual seat, and then seeing them.” He clenched his eyes
shut, possibly in an attempt to jog his memory. “At first, I had no
idea how they even got in—I’d never seen them before, and I hadn’t
approved any new members or potentials for last night.”

“So you approached them?”

Eyes still shut, Donovan nodded. “That’s
what the surveillance video shows. Honestly, I vaguely remember
speaking with the woman, but, for the life of me, I don’t recall
what it was about.” Frustrated or weary, he rubbed his hands over
his face. “It feels like it was a dream, to be honest. One that’s
quickly fading away.”

Things just kept getting weirder by the
second. Either he was lying about not remembering, or he had the
worst memory in the world, because how could he not remember a
conversation with an uninvited guest in his
exclusive
club?
What did she do? Hypnotize him? And his doorman? A ridiculous
theory. The only way I would know for sure was if I located this
woman and her companion and figured out exactly what went on at
this club they were advertising.

After watching the surveillance video that
Donovan brought over, we were no closer to identifying this couple.
One camera showed them entering the club, but they seemed aware of
it, keeping their faces hidden. The woman was dressed in a tight
black dress, showing off as much skin as possible, even with the
cooler evening temperatures, and the man wore jeans, a basic black
shirt, and a leather jacket. Nothing about either of them really
stood out to me, except when I saw what Raven was talking about:
they moved with confidence and purpose, and all eyes were on
them.

While I continued to study this couple,
trying to see anything that could help me figure out who they were,
Donovan approached the couple. The woman talked to him, leaning in
as though whispering to him, and then he disappeared, presumably
back to his office since we didn’t see him again. Even watching the
recording with us frustrated him. The other cameras showed the
mystery couple walk the floor—still being sure to avoid the
cameras—and then they split up. The woman made her rounds, and,
just as Raven said he did, the male parked himself at the bar until
she approached him. She was right, too; the way she walked toward
him seemed off. Having met her and walked her out, her gait was
completely different in this video. It looked as though she was
locked in some kind of trance, like she was being pulled to him by
some unseen force, and it made no
logical
sense.

Sure, I could keep going with my hypnosis
theory, but what were the chances that was actually valid?

I was starting to lose hope when the woman
reentered the frame. Her posture seemed less fluid than
before—rigid and panicked…
afraid
—as she leaned in to speak
with her partner. His own posture stiffened, and while he glanced
around their surroundings, still sure to keep his identity hidden,
her eyes flashed up at the camera and she bared her teeth for the
briefest of seconds. It all happened so fast that I actually
questioned whether or not it happened at all. While my brain tried
to figure out whether or not I imagined it, my body reacted as
though it was real. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled, my
entire body quivered, and I found myself pulling my own lips back
in a silent snarl. It felt instinctive.

David’s hand touching down on my shoulder
grounded me, and I pushed the defensive feeling aside. “Did you see
that?” I asked him quietly, my voice noticeably lower and trembling
slightly.

“What?”

I rewound the recording to where she looked
at the camera, and we watched it again, but he still missed it. I
didn’t, though, and it brought about the same reaction in me. Time
and time again, I witnessed the absolute look of disgust on this
woman’s face when she made eye contact with the camera. It was as
though she knew we were watching her, and it only further cemented
my theory that she had something to do with these deaths.

We watched this part of the tape at least a
dozen times, and David continued to look at me like he was
questioning whether or not to have me committed. When I finally
froze the feed on the exact millisecond that this woman glared at
the camera, I excitedly pointed at the monitor.

“Aha! See! Right there!” My excitement faded
as I examined the look in her eyes and determined it as
challenging. But who was she challenging? The club’s security
guards? The police? No, the more I let her eyes burn into mine
through the monitor, I felt like she was challenging
me
.

That couldn’t be right. The only reason I
felt that way was because I was on the other side of the video
feed. She meant the look for whoever was watching and no one in
particular. She knew on some level that we’d come into possession
of the security feed eventually, so maybe this was her way of
daring the cops to come find her.

If that was the case, though, why was every
one of my instincts telling me to watch my back?

The thirty-minute drive from the precinct to
the Warehouse District in Phoenix had my stomach in knots and my
heart pounding so hard and fast that it became uncomfortable. In
order to assuage the feeling, I chose to focus on how the color of
the blue sky was streaked with the gold and orange hues of the
setting sun.

When David and I rolled the car to a stop
outside the address on the card, the sun was dipping even lower on
the horizon. My skin hummed, a dull throb beginning in my shoulder
at the point of my almost two-week-old injury. The pulse was hot in
my veins, moving down my arm and throughout the rest of my body,
and I swallowed the warm saliva that gathered in my mouth. I don’t
know why I felt this way, but I tried to push it aside, because now
was clearly not the time.

A Phoenix PD car was here waiting already,
the two male detectives on the sidewalk, having a smoke. We waited
a few more minutes for O’Malley and Keaton to arrive, and when they
pulled up behind us, we stepped out of the car and onto the
sidewalk. The first thing I did—only because it seemed to be my
first impulse now—was sniff the air, picking up faint traces of
something familiar and unpleasant.

I sniffed again in an effort to place the
smells, drawing strange glances from the three men around me,
before I shrugged. “Thought I smelled a hot dog vendor.” A horrible
lie, because my nose told me the nearest vendor was ten blocks
away…

Weird.

Pushing through the mental detour, I turned
and nodded toward the waiting Phoenix detectives. “Come on.”

The taller of the two men tossed his
cigarette butt to the curb and stomped it out. Dressed in a brown
suit, he looked to be about fifty, his eyes brown and his head
bald, and he was no taller than David. His frame was heavier,
though, most of his weight resting in his slightly distended belly.
He reached out his hand toward me. “You must be Detective
Leighton,” he said as I gripped his hand. “I’m Detective
Burns.”