Overbite (6 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous, Alaric,” Holtzman said. “Dr. Fiske seems to be impressed with your progress . . . when you show up. You just need to show up more often.” He held out his hand for the files Alaric was holding. “One thing you might want to consider discussing with him is the hostility you feel toward Father Henrique. Have you ever considered that it might be rooted in jealousy?”

Alaric rolled his eyes, surrendering the files. “Yes, Abraham. That’s exactly it. I’m jealous of a pretentious blowhard who’s so in love with himself that it doesn’t bother him at all that one of the requirements for his job is that he’s not allowed to have sex.”

“The Church is expecting to get quite a lot of press—and some sizable donations—out of this show at the museum,” Holtzman said, ignoring Alaric’s crudeness as he neatly restacked the files. “That’s why they worked so hard to time it to coincide with the Feast of San Gennaro, which is one of the largest, longest-running, and most revered outdoor festivals in the United States. This opening tomorrow night at the Met is expected to be one of the premier social events in the city. Transferring Padre Cali—I mean, Father Henrique—here in time for it was a deliberate move on the part of our superiors—”

“I’m certain it was,” Alaric muttered. “The padre definitely isn’t camera shy.”

“
You
may consider him a preening prima donna,” Holtzman continued, “but I assure you, the rest of us have the utmost admiration and respect for him. And I’m going to expect you to treat him accordingly. I will no longer tolerate your complete lack of respect for proper procedure. If you have a problem with him, you’re to go through established channels. You will
not
 mock or humiliate him. And that includes pranks and physical displays of aggression. Do you understand?”

Alaric ignored him. “Why do we have so many missing-persons files? No one’s mentioned them to me.”

“Oh.” Holtzman shrugged and set the files aside. “There’s always an uptick in missing people—especially in the Manhattan area—in the fall, I’m told.”

When Alaric continued to stare at him, Holtzman elaborated. “The fall is the beginning of the new school year and often students starting college in the city drop out and don’t tell their parents because they’re embarrassed over their poor grades or experimentation with drugs or their sexuality and whatnot. So there’s nothing nefarious behind it. Our contact with the NYPD sent the files over anyway because this year there’s a larger than usual number of reports, but I couldn’t find anything unusual, so I’m sending them back—”

Alaric leaned forward to take the stack away from his boss again, then began to shuffle through them.

“I
said,
” Holtzman repeated irritably, “I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”

Alaric only grunted as he opened first one, then another file from the stack, then tossed them onto Holtzman’s desk.

“There’s nothing there, Wulf,” his supervisor said tiredly. “You know, Dr. Fiske’s quite positive about many areas of your recovery. You’re one of our finest guards—impressive number of kills, splendid record at interrogation, and all of that. But there’s one area in which the doctor says he’s yet to see any difference at all, and I must say, I’ve got to agree. Your interpersonal communication skills have always been sadly lacking.” Another file hit the top of Holtzman’s desk. “You still haven’t gotten over what happened to your partner in Berlin, even though he’s perfectly fine now—”

“Except for missing his face,” Alaric said, with a grunt. Another file hit Holtzman’s desk.

“This resentment you feel toward Father Henrique is another example,” Holtzman said. “What did the man ever do to you? Nothing. So he botched that exorcism. It was his first one. He was young. Do you know what I did at my first exorcism?”

“Ran,” Alaric said, at the same time as his boss.

“That’s exactly right,” Holtzman went on. “It’s extremely frightening to look into the face of evil for the first time.”

“Not,” Alaric said, “as frightening as looking into the face of a man who has willingly taken a vow of chastity.”

“That is a bad habit of yours,” Holtzman commented. “Expecting everyone to conform to your standards of behavior.”

Alaric stared at him. The man was clearly growing senile . . . or had he been hit over the head so many times by escaping yeti that he didn’t know what he was saying.

“I do not expect Henrique Mauricio to conform to my standards of behavior,” Alaric said. “I expect him not to do things that make me want to pound his face into a bloody pulp. Sadly, every time I meet him, he fails to live up to this expectation.”

“I understand,” Holtzman said kindly. “And given the circumstances of your upbringing, it sometimes surprises me that you don’t beat more people that you don’t like into bloody pulps. It took me quite some time to dissuade you from indulging in such behavior after I plucked you from the streets as a teenager, if you’ll recall. But there’s still a part of you that becomes quite angry when others don’t conform to your beliefs. I believe that’s why you’re so angry with Meena Harper.”

Alaric’s head came up with a snap. “I am not angry with Meena Harper.”

“That is a lie,” Holtzman said. “Why else are you so outraged about a theory she has that, for all we know, could be completely valid? Do you know what I was thinking the other day?”

“That this building still smells like vomit and school paste? Because it’s true.”

“If you like Meena so much, you should ask her out on a date.”

Alaric ducked his head back into the files. “I do not date. And besides, I did ask her over to dinner once. She said no, that it wouldn’t be pro—”

“What do you mean, you don’t date?” Holtzman looked annoyed. “All single people date. And of course she said no to dinner at your apartment.
I
wouldn’t come to dinner at your apartment if I was a woman. That’s like the spider asking the fly to step into his web. You truly are an imbe—” Another file landed on the older man’s desk. He snatched it up and said, “Would you stop? I told you, I’ve been through these. There’s nothing there. No commonality whatsoever.”

“There is,” Alaric said, laying down two more files. “All of them are from out of town.”

“What do you mean?” Holtzman looked more annoyed than ever.

“Each of the people in those files was a tourist on vacation in this city when he or she disappeared,” Alaric said. “All of those reports were filed in the missing person’s home state, though the victim actually disappeared here in Manhattan within the last few months. You said you were looking for a commonality. I found it for you.”

“I beg your pardon,” Holtzman said, his gaze dipping to all the files spread across his desk. “But are you seriously suggesting to me that there is someone out there killing
tourists
?”

“It looks like it,” Alaric said. He thumbed through one file. “Here’s an entire family. The O’Brians from Illinois, a family of five. Last seen by the concierge at their midtown hotel when they asked directions to M&M World. They never checked out. No one seems to have thought anything about it until Mr. O’Brian never showed back up at his job and the kids never returned to school. That’s when Grandma contacted the police in Illinois, and they, in turn, contacted the hotel, who assumed the family had simply flaked out—”

“Give me that.” Holtzman snatched the file away from him. “This can’t be possible. It would have been all over the local media. Someone snatching tourists from Manhattan? Just as the Feast of San Gennaro is starting up?”

“Not someone,” Alaric said. “Some
thing
.” He laid the rest of the files down with a
thump
. “Because where are all the bodies? You’d think by now they’d have started to turn a little ripe.”

Holtzman looked slightly sick to his stomach, but Alaric only looked thoughtful. Then he brightened. “I know. Let’s ask Padre Caliente tomorrow night at the Vatican treasures show. He’ll know what to do. He knows everything.”

Holtzman had already picked up the phone. He pointed at the door. “Out. Get out of my office. Now.”

Alaric was no more than a few steps out of the building and down the block before he began to reflect on the news his supervisor had imparted about Henrique Mauricio, and its implications for him personally and the unit as a whole. None of them, he concluded, was good.

His Palatine-appointed therapist, Dr. Fiske, was always encouraging Alaric to picture the worst-case scenario. It was healthy, the doctor said. Pessimists apparently lived longer than optimists.

“Because reality,” the doctor liked to say, “is never anywhere near as bad as what we
imagine
might happen.”

“I don’t know, Doc,” Alaric had said the last time they’d met. “Can you
imagine
anything worse than demons turning out to have a choice between being good and being evil?”

“Oh yes,” Dr. Fiske had replied cheerfully. “There are lots of things worse than that. After all, they could choose to be good.”

It was at this point during the session that Alaric had stood up and walked out. If he hadn’t, he imagined he probably would have stuck his fist through the doctor’s drywall. Or through the doctor’s face.

Alaric spent the evening after his meeting with Abraham Holtzman trying to imagine every worst-case scenario that Father Henrique’s being transferred to Manhattan could entail.

This was how he found himself working over the punching bag in his apartment until after midnight. Exhausted, he eventually showered and went to bed, only to be tortured by dreams in which Lucien Antonescu had chosen to be good. In one dream, he was lying in the bright sunshine in the grass in Central Park, with his head in Meena Harper’s lap . . . which was impossible, of course, because the prince of darkness would turn to ash if he stepped into sunlight.

Meena was laughing. Lucien Antonescu kept kissing her hair, which was long and dark and, for some reason, was continually falling into Lucien’s face.

It was a great relief when Alaric’s cell phone woke him early the next morning.

At least until he answered it and heard his boss’s voice saying, “Meena Harper is in some kind of trouble.”

Then something seemed to tighten in his chest. He knew it was not a pulled muscle from overworking the bag.

It was hard to think things could possibly get worse than that until he heard the words
New Jersey
and
I’ll drive
from Holtzman’s mouth.

But when he actually saw Meena Harper emerge from a taxi in front of the Freewell, New Jersey, Police Department, wearing one of those too-tight-in-the-chest dresses—this one black with little pink roses on it—she seemed to favor, the morning sun glinting on her newly auburn hair, he realized that all the worst-case scenarios he’d been imagining came nowhere close to the horror of this one:

There was a pink scarf tied around her throat.

Part Two

Saturday, September 18

Chapter Seven

M
eena woke to the shrill vibration of her cell phone and glanced at the digital clock by the side of her bed. It was only six o’clock in the morning, two hours before she usually had to wake, because she lived so close to work. No one would call this early unless something was wrong.

Something, it turned out,
was
very wrong. She knew it the minute she picked up her phone and saw the New Jersey area code.

Meena didn’t know anyone who lived in New Jersey anymore. Not since her parents had retired to Florida.

Her pulse slowed almost to a standstill.

“Who the hell is that?” her brother demanded, stumbling shirtless from his room to stand in her doorway, blinking down at her sleepily. Jack Bauer had also scrambled from his basket in the corner and was now eagerly bouncing around beside her bed, thinking it was time to get up.

“Work,” she lied. “Can you take Jack out?”

“What the hell,” Jonathan said, but without rancor. “Come on, Jack,” he said to the dog, and went to go find his shoes and the dog’s leash.

Meena answered the phone.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, familiar, but older and more quavering than Meena had been expecting. “This is Olivia Delmonico. To whom am I speaking?”

Meena had thought she might eventually hear from the woman in David’s life.

But not this one.

“Um,” she said. She wasn’t ready. She—

“Hello?” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Is anyone there?”

“Yes,” Meena said. “Yes, Mrs. Delmonico. It’s me, Meena Harper.”

“Meena Harper?”

Mrs. Delmonico formed the words with obvious distaste. David’s parents had never liked Meena. Though neither they nor David had ever come right out and said so, Meena had always gotten the feeling they hadn’t approved of their son moving in with her after college, and not just because they didn’t believe in couples living together without the benefit of marriage, but because . . .

Well, they just hadn’t liked Meena. Maybe they’d felt like an aspiring writer wasn’t good enough for their ambitious son . . .

Or maybe it had had something to do with Meena mentioning, during her first dinner out with them, a celebration of David’s graduation from dental school, that Mr. Delmonico didn’t have to order any wine on her account, especially considering his “health concerns.”

Mr. Delmonico’s ongoing struggle with alcoholism had turned out to be a secret his parents had managed to keep from David his whole life. Up until that night, that is, when she’d blown it.

Oops.

“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “This is . . . I don’t know what to say. I just found your number on a notepad by the side of David’s kitchen phone. I wasn’t aware the two of you were still . . . in touch.”

“Oh,” Meena said. She thought fast. “That. Well, you know I moved out of our old apartment recently, and I found I still had some boxes of his, so I got in touch with him about picking them up—”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Delmonico said coldly. “Of course. Well, I apologize for calling so early. But I’m actually at David and Brianna’s right now. I’m going through every number I can find, trying to see if I can track down anyone who might have heard from David. He didn’t come home last night, you see.”

“He didn’t?” Meena tried to sound genuinely surprised. “That’s strange.”

“It’s very strange,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Not like him at all.” Then, her voice dripping with ill-disguised dislike, she asked, “I don’t suppose
you
know where he is, do you, Meena?”

A picture of Mrs. Delmonico sitting in her pearls and Chanel suit in David and Brianna’s contemporary four-bedroom home—with its open kitchen and great room, three-car garage, and heated pool—flashed through Meena’s mind. Meena had never actually
been
to David’s home in Freewell, a fancy suburb about an hour’s drive from the city.

But somehow she could picture Mrs. Delmonico in it, all the same.

She could tell from the woman’s tone that she suspected that her son was right there in bed next to Meena, and that Meena was covering up for him.

Maybe in an alternate universe—one in which vampires, and therefore Lucien Antonescu, did not exist—this might have been true. Because then David would never have gotten bitten, and then Meena might actually have had the low self-esteem to have brought him home with her. Because she wouldn’t have known that something better existed out there.

But in this universe?

Never.

“No,” Meena said. “I do not know where David is.”

It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know where David was. She hoped he was in heaven, but she wasn’t going to bet on it.

“Oh. Well, then.” Mrs. Delmonico’s voice sounded suddenly defeated. “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve called every number in his address book, and no one else has heard from him either. This number . . . well, it was my last hope. His cell phone goes straight to voice mail, just like Brianna’s. David Junior was up all night crying. He’s never spent a night before without his mother
and
his father, and he’s just hysterical—”

Meena sat bolt upright in bed. Her pulse, which had been racing before, now felt as if it had stopped.

“Wait,” she said. “Are you saying that you don’t know where David’s
wife
is either?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Delmonico said. She was sobbing openly now. The picture of her sitting in her pearls and Chanel suit vanished from Meena’s head. Now she heard only the voice of a frantic grandmother. “No one’s heard from her since she went to pick up some formula. And that was at six o’clock last night. I’ve called all the hospitals, but no one fitting David or Brianna’s description was brought in—”

Meena swung her legs from her bed. This wasn’t possible. Because she’d killed David
. She’d killed him.
There was no way Brianna could be gone, too. Meena had saved Brianna. Last night,
she’d saved her
.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Delmonico was babbling, in a shaking voice. “Just now a New York City policeman called. David’s car has been found—its registration was still inside—near Little Italy. Why would David have been there? He never goes into the city. Maybe he and Brianna decided at the last minute to go to the Feast of San Gennaro? But why wouldn’t they have called?”

“Mrs. Delmonico,” Meena said, her throat very dry. “I want you to listen to me. This is very important. Are you in David’s house right now?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Someone has to stay with David Junior. My husband is here, too. He’s on the other line with the impound people, trying to figure out how we can get David’s car back—”

“Mrs. Delmonico,” Meena said. “Is there anywhere else you can take the baby? Just for a little while?”

“Well, I suppose we could take him to my daughter’s house.” Mrs. Delmonico sounded confused. “David’s sister lives a few miles away. But what does Naomi have to do with any of this? I already spoke to her and she hasn’t heard from David or Brianna—”

“I just think it would be best if you and your husband packed up some of the baby’s things and took him over to Naomi’s. Right away.”

“But when we spoke to that police officer from New York, he said the best thing to do was sit by the phone and wait for David to call. Or if we wanted to formally report that David and Brianna were missing, we could go over to the police station here in Freewell, which I thought was rude since I had him right on the phone, and you would have thought he could have taken the information. But he said we’ve got to do it in the jurisdiction in which they live.”

Meena took a deep, steadying breath. She realized now that just like Cassandra, she really was cursed.

Because Cassandra—poor, clairvoyant Cassandra, who’d denied the love of a god—had taken up with Agamemnon, only to end up murdered by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra.

“Mrs. Delmonico,” she said, her mouth gone dry as sand, “
have
you reported them missing yet?”

“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said, “no. The officer said we’d have to do it in person, and we can’t just leave the baby here by himself—”

“Exactly,” Meena said. “Drop the baby off at David’s sister’s, and then go to the Freewell Police Department
as soon as you can
. Do you hear me, Mrs. Delmonico? It’s very important that you report David and Brianna missing
right away
.”

Mrs. Delmonico sounded even more surprised. “Oh,” she said. “Well, the police officer didn’t say that. I don’t know how Naomi is going to feel about us leaving David Junior with her. She’s got the triplets now, you know. But I suppose under these circumstances, it would be all right. I just don’t know what we’re going to do about David’s car. Apparently, the impound people are being difficult. The police are searching it, or something—”

“Look,” Meena said, finally, in desperation. “Why don’t I just meet you? At the police station in Freewell. I might be able to help.”

Now Mrs. Delmonico sounded more than just surprised. She sounded stunned. “Help? How?”

“I might have some information,” Meena said. “About David. Information that the police may find useful. It’ll take me a little while to get there, because I’ll have to shower, then take the train. But I’ll be there no later than nine o’clock. You’ll meet me there, right? You and Mr. Delmonico? And you’ll leave the baby at David’s sister’s house?”

“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said, clearly flabbergasted, “I . . . yes. Thank you, Meena. That’s very . . . kind.”

Meena said it was no problem and hung up, feeling guilty.

Because she wasn’t being kind. She had no other choice. She was the last person to have seen David Delmonico alive.

She was also the person who’d tried to save his wife’s life.

And apparently, she’d failed. She couldn’t understand how . . . except for the part where she’d made out with the guy who’d provided her with the weapon with which she’d murdered Brianna’s husband.

Now she had the lives of David’s parents, and his baby, to worry about. Who knew where Brianna Delmonico was?

But Meena wasn’t taking any chances that Brianna might be looking for breakfast in her own house. She had to make sure the Delmonicos got out of there, just in case.

She could see she had a lot of work to do if she was going to rectify all the wrongs she’d committed the night before.

But when she got to the station house where she’d promised to meet Mrs. Delmonico, she could see that her karmic punishment was going to be even worse than she’d anticipated.

That’s because the last person in the world she wanted to see was waiting for her on the station-house steps:

Alaric Wulf.