Out of the Night (26 page)

She paused, expecting him to laugh at her or at the very least call her crazy, but he did neither. "Did you tell Mac about this?"

She grimaced. "Yes, and at first he didn't believe me."

Uncle Charles raised an eyebrow and appeared curious. "What changed his mind?"

"Oh, I think it was a combination of several things," she said facetiously.

"Like?"

"Like getting attacked by the chupacabra himself, followed by a run-in with Dad and Burton after they were supposedly dead, watching Burton kill a man by biting his neck, and then watching one of the dead researchers come back to life."

"Mac was attacked by the creature?"

"I'm sorry. We meant to tell you earlier."

"I'm sure." At that moment the waiter appeared with their drinks. He handed them menus and after a moment took their orders and left once again.

"Mac looked to be in good shape when I saw him the other night; he must not have been too seriously injured."

"Actually, he almost died."

"What?"

"I'm sorry, Uncle Charles, to be the one to break it to you."

"Maybe you'd better tell me all of it—and don't gloss over the rough spots, okay?"

She quickly told him everything that had happened since she first arrived in Taribu and found the chupacabra in the cage. The only time she paused in her story was when the waiter brought their food or to answer a question.

When she finished, he knew as much as she did, and while she felt relieved, he looked deeply troubled.

He reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone, quickly dialing a number. After a moment he spoke into the phone. "This is Admiral Winslow. You have one of my men there—a Dirk Adams. I'd like to check on his status." He waited a few minutes and as Lanie watched him, she was impressed again with his calm, cool acceptance of the situation.

"Yes, thank you," he said, breaking into her thoughts. "Can you connect me with his room? Thank you." There was a moment's pause. "Dirk? How are you doing, son? I just heard." There was the sound of a response on the other end, but Lanie couldn't catch what was being said. Finally he nodded. "Of course, we'll get you out as soon as we get a clean bill of health from the physician. No, I'm sure it won't take that long. Just sit tight. Try to relax."

Lanie heard the loud litany of protest coming through the phone's earpiece before Charles, smiling, disconnected the call. He replaced his phone and chuckled to himself. "That boy sure wants out of the hospital." Then he sobered. "There's no way he should have recovered that quickly. The doctor told me that by all rights he should be dead."

"It's the venom," she explained. "He got a lot of it."

"We'll keep an eye on him. Mac, too," he promised her. "I'd like to think they'll be okay, but if not, we'll handle it. You're not alone."

She gave him a grateful smile and then was startled when his phone rang. Judging from his expression and tone after he answered it, Lanie knew the conversation wasn't good. When he disconnected, she thought he looked tired.

"Bad news?"

"Yes. That was a friend of mine with homicide. They found Mark Kinsley's body."

"Where?"

"An abandoned building about twenty minutes from here."

"What about the others? Burton, Munoz, Patterson, Brown, and Harris? And Dad?"

He shook his head. "No sign of them."

Maybe her father was still alive, or undead, or whatever the correct term was. She hid her relief as an image of the researcher at the facility rose up in her mind. "The body will have to be staked."

He stared at her, and for the first time she wondered if he'd really believed her or had only been humoring her. As if he realized what she was thinking, he nodded, then folded his napkin and laid it on the table. "I'm sorry to cut our dinner short, but I have to go ID the body. I'll take care of the, uh, details." He removed several dollars from his wallet and tossed them onto the table. Then he took several more bills and held them out to her. "This should cover your cab ride back to the hotel."

"Keep it," she said, snatching the napkin from her lap and tossing it onto the table as she stood up. "I'm going with you. And we should probably call Mac and tell him to meet us."

"We'll call him on our way."

Once inside the Humvee, Lanie pulled out her phone before realizing that she didn't know Mac's phone number. She was about to call the hotel when Charles stopped her. "Might be better if I talked to him," he told her, pulling out his own phone once more.

The phone's volume was set so high, she heard the ringing as the call went through and then Mac's grumbling voice when he finally answered. He didn't sound happy about being awakened.

"Young man," Uncle Charles said in a deep, authoritative voice, "I'll thank you not to take that tone of voice with me."

There was sudden silence on the other end.

"That's better. Now, here is the situation." He briefly told Mac about the body being found and listened to Mac's reply. "Fine. Lanie's with me. We're already en route and will meet you there." He listened a moment and then smiled, although he kept his tone serious. "Not that it's any of your business, but we were having dinner. Yes, it was quite enjoyable, thank you. We'll see you there."

Charles put away his phone and glanced at her. "He was very upset."

"About Kinsley?" She'd forgotten that Mac used to be his commanding officer.

"Well, Kinsley, certainly, but I don't think that's what upset him the most." He smiled then but didn't elaborate, and Lanie didn't press the matter.

Fifteen minutes later they pulled up near the scene of the crime. Mac stood out front, looking worried, irritated, and paler than usual. When she joined him on the sidewalk, he shot her a look she couldn't interpret, but otherwise ignored her to address Uncle Charles.

"They won't let me in without you."

"Then let's go take a look."

The building loomed before them, about eight stories tall, Lanie guessed. It was made of that faded brownish-red brick that always looked weathered and old. Uncle Charles walked up the front steps and spoke to the uniformed officer guarding the entrance. A few minutes later, a tall, forty-something man appeared and waved them inside.

They stepped into the small foyer with mailboxes for each of the apartments lining the wall to the left and a door to the first apartment off to the right. Straight ahead and to the right was the staircase. The walls had been painted a dull institutional yellow that had long since grayed, and the hard linoleum floor was stained and torn in more places than not. Lanie found it depressing.

"What can you tell us, John?" Charles asked after introducing them to his friend Detective John Boehler.

"We got a report just before dawn of strange lights and noises. By the time a car got here, everything was quiet. A preliminary search of the building uncovered a body down in the basement. We don't know the exact cause of death yet—there weren't any obviously fatal wounds."

Lanie exchanged confused looks with Mac. The neck wounds of the chupacabra would have been hard to miss. Maybe they were wrong, and Kinsley's disappearance had nothing to do with Burton and the chupacabra.

"We also found lab equipment down the hall," the detective said, waving a hand in that direction. "It's too early to draw any conclusions, but it looks like someone was making drugs."

They went down the stairs and walked to the far end of the basement before the detective stopped. "The body is in the corner. My men have finished in here, so feel free to look around. I'd appreciate it if you'd share any thoughts you have concerning what might have happened. Every little bit helps."

Lanie knew perfectly well that they'd never tell the detective anything—it was better if no one else knew about either the vampires or the chupacabras.

They entered the darkened room, now lit with temporary lamps, and Lanie looked in the corner. She wasn't sure what she expected, but it wasn't to see a body contorted as if frozen in the midst of a violent seizure, eyes staring wildly, arms reaching out, fingers bent and curled, and legs twisted to the side.

She moved in for a closer look, conscious of Mac's and Charles's reactions—or the lack thereof. They'd known this man, had worked with him—what were they feeling? Their total lack of emotional response made her wonder just how many times they'd encountered death in their line of work.

She did her best to objectively view the scene before her, but the body's appearance puzzled her. As Detective Boehler had said, there were no obvious fatal wounds, but then, he'd not known what to look for. Stooping for a closer look, she saw that the two dark circles, where the chupacabra had bitten him, were now little more than faint marks on his skin. They'd no doubt healed when he converted, as Burton's and her father's neck wounds had.

Mac bent down beside her. "What would make him contort like this?"

"I don't know," she admitted, whispering. "Maybe there was something in his genetic makeup that reacted badly to the conversion." She stood up and addressed Detective Boehler. "Did you say that you'd found lab equipment?"

He nodded and gestured for them to follow. "It's down the hall here."

The minute she saw it, she knew her father had worked here. He'd been obsessive about how his lab should be set up—refrigerators in the back, test tube racks on the left, because he was left-handed, droppers and reactants on the right. He always kept things in the same order, no matter where he was or what he was working on—and in the freezer, she'd find…

She crossed the room and opened the top door of the refrigerator and looked inside. A duck coating of ice covered the inner walls, but otherwise it appeared empty. A wave of disappointment hit her and she started to close the door. That's when she saw it—a small folded white piece of paper, almost invisible against the ice.

"Lanie?" Uncle Charles asked from across the room. "Did you find something?"

She snatched the paper and palmed it before closing the door. She didn't want the others to see it. "Empty."

Lanie felt Mac staring at her, but she refused to look at him. "Did your men find anything?" she asked the detective.

"Nothing useful. A couple of spent bags of blood, plastic tubing, and a lot of questions."

It was obvious from looking around that there was nothing here that would tell them what her father had been up to, so they left the room.

They climbed the stairs in silence and retraced their steps down the hallway to the foyer, stopping once more before the front door.

"You'll call my office if you discover anything?" Uncle Charles asked.

"I will. Do you know if the deceased had family?"

"A brother. I'll call him and give him your number."

The detective nodded, and as they turned to leave the sound of someone hurrying toward them caught their attention.

Lanie turned and saw a uniformed policeman.

"Sir, we found something else. You might want to take a look."

Detective Boehler nodded, then shook hands with Uncle Charles, promising that he'd be in touch. They waited a heartbeat after he left and then followed him, even though they hadn't been invited.

This time, instead of going back down into the basement, they stayed on the first floor. When they reached the room the detective had disappeared into, they followed him inside, curious about what had been found. A statue of a man lay on the floor, spotlighted by the small amount of fading light filtering in through the window where a board was missing. Curious, Lanie and Mac moved closer for a better look.

Lanie gasped. The statue was an exact likeness of Munoz—so exact that it couldn't be a replica. Munoz had been turned into stone, and with the sunlight filtering in on him, it wasn't hard to guess what had happened. Now they knew what happened to vampires when they were exposed to the sunlight Like the chupacabra, they turned to stone. The question that remained was, what happened when the sun set? Would Munoz come back to life?

She stared at it for a long time, then turned to Mac, who was standing beside her. "What if he wakes up?" she whispered. "It'll be dusk soon."

"Higgins, dust that thing for prints," Detective Boehler ordered, unaware of the danger.

Mac held out his hand. "Not yet." The detective looked like he wanted to ask questions, but then thought better of it. He nodded to the uniformed man who had come when he called, and the man remained standing off to the side.

Lanie wasn't sure how long they stood there, watching the statue, but it seemed to be forever. Someone behind them turned on a couple of high-beam flashlights so they could see after the sun completely set, and still the Munoz statue did not move. Finally, it was obvious to Lanie that Munoz was not going to be waking up—ever again.

Mac must have reached the same conclusion because he gestured for the man with the black case to come forward. The man knelt by the statue, took powder and brush from the case, and dusted the statue for prints. There wasn't a single one to be found. He shook his head and packed his gear.

"Send in a couple of guys to carry this thing back to the station," the detective instructed them as he left the room.

Two men arrived shortly and took up positions on each end of the statue, but when they tried to lift it, the stone crumbled in their hands, sending forth a small explosion of fine dust. Lanie grabbed Mac's arm, stunned, as she watched the dust settle. Next to her, Mac silently extracted his arm from her grasp, turned, and walked out.

With a final look at what had once been Munoz, Lanie raced after him.

Outside, the night air was warm, but not uncomfortably so as she stood on the front steps, looking for Mac. She spotted him a short distance down the street, pacing back and forth, and hurried to join him.

He stopped and dragged a hand down his face in obvious frustration. "Is that what I have to look forward to? Are these changes going to keep on until one day, I go outside—and turn to stone? That's some future. Put me in a park and let the birds crap on me—until the first hard rain, and then I crumble?"

"I don't think that's going to happen to you, Mac." But she wasn't sure, and he heard the doubt in her voice.