The Blood Detail (Vigil) (3 page)

A Hiding Spot

I was dropped off at home at five in the morning. Sunrise was still a good hour away, and I was officially on leave.

Angie offered to come inside and assist me with whatever physical tasks I was going to need help with, but I politely declined. I‘d need to learn to function on my own. And besides, it wasn’t like I’d broken a leg or anything. I tried to ease her concerns by bragging about being ambidextrous, which was somewhat but not entirely true. Before she left, Angie made me promise I wouldn’t attempt to drive anywhere on my own. I agreed to this concession, and was then allowed to climb out of her Sentra under my own power. She waited until I had my front door all the way open before her engine revved, and she drove off.

A step inside my darkened home, and I was once again confronted by the ominous prospect of silence. To combat this now seemingly constant state of affairs, I went straight to the television set in the living room and turned it on, leaving the channel where it was, lodged on an all-news network I was watching the last time I was in the house. The health and fitness feature story they were running made me think of the murdered girl. I wondered if the case or my name was going to be mentioned on air. Then I remembered that the broadcast was national, and those East Coast bastards wouldn’t give a crap about another dead girl in LA. I considered changing the channel to a local early morning show, but found my energy level waning. I left the t.v. on, dropped my bag on the breakfast bar stool, and traipsed my way up the stairs.

My condo had one of those newfangled, three-story layouts. The bottommost level was a two-car garage which was accessed via an internal utility stairwell and an automatic door on the backside of the building. The ground level where I entered contained the living room, a kitchen, and a den. Upstairs were three bedrooms, two of which—the ones I didn’t sleep in—were totally devoid of furniture.

I had only been living in the place a little over a month. It and a small Inglewood warehouse I coveted were purchased with the inheritance money I received from my father. The final sum was quite large. His estate ended up being split into thirds with my half-brother and his mother, Deanna, and me. Even chopped up, it remained a lot of dough, too much for me alone. I stowed the bulk of it away in a few offshore accounts in case of any future needs—another neat trick I learned from Daddy.

Amusingly, at least from my perspective, it took Dad’s lawyers a heckuva long time to track me down. Changing my name turned out to be a better trick than I realized. The money itself, though—that was a double-edged sword. Yes, it was going to make my life as comfortable as the one I had growing up. But it also meant my stepmother Deanna now knew where I lived. She had been calling with visit requests constantly since I’d been found, attempting to use my kid brother as a cudgel to lure me back into the family fold. There was almost certainly a message from her waiting on the machine, there always seemed to be. My godfather Uncle Ray had been calling, too. And there was no reason I would want to talk to him. I made a mental note to change my number. That would solve both problems at once.

I entered my bedroom and hovered between the dresser and the master bath. I really wanted to take a shower, but I didn’t want to futz with my bandages so soon after they’d been redressed. I collapsed onto the bed instead. I needed to strip down and take off my shoes, but I was exhausted, on pain relievers, and haunted by the memory of having to give up my gun and badge when Angie and I had swung by the station after the hospital.

After moping about things a good long while, I fell into a half-dream state. All I could remember from la-la-land was running across a desert landscape, when all of a sudden, I plummeted over the side of a cliff, and woke up. The alarm clock on my nightstand told me I had only been out of it for six minutes—that was it. I tried to get back to sleep, but all I did was stare at the red digital numbers on the face of the clock.

At 5:22, I heard a noise downstairs—a loud clanging. It made me sit straight up. At first I thought it might have been something on the television, which I could still hear. On second thought, what I’d heard sounded more like a car colliding with my garage door. I got back onto my feet so I could go see what had happened. When I was halfway down the stairs, the telephone rang. I ignored it for the moment, barreling around the corner and speeding into the black-as-night garage.

The only vehicle down there currently was my bike, an undersized Kawasaki Ninja. Because I wasn’t able to drive it back, my GTO was still in the parking lot at the station. I was hesitant about turning on any lights, not until I knew what was going on. After a moment, I could hear hushed voices on the other side of the big door, and I decided to surprise whoever it was outside. I pressed the controller next to the light switch and the motor began to grind and the segmented door rose up. The first thing I saw were legs, about a half dozen of them. I could make out a couple of startled gasps as the door began to churn, and a one or two of the yokels actually jumped back.

“Get the fuck
out
of here,” I said, right at the same instant I realized what was going on.

What I thought were intruders were in fact LAPD tactical officers, in full helmeted gear, including some fancy night vision appliances. Once the door was all the way up, I counted three in the front, and three more racing across the isolated roadway.

“Freeze,” one of them said, and then identified themselves as officers of the law.

Since they all had M-16s pointed at me, I did as I was told, even lifting my arms above my head for good measure. “This is my home, fellas. I’m on the job.”

“We know who you are,” the man in charge said, and then gave a grimace and a hand signal to two of his people, ordering them to move around to the front of the condo.

I was curious as hell. “What was that noise? And what the hell are you doing here?”

The boss man swung under the alcove and began to examine the interior of my garage. Two of his lackeys stood guard as he did so. None of them answered my question.

“I don’t mind. Ignore me.” My arms remained raised as I stepped backward and used my right elbow to bump the switch and turn on the overhead lights. The Tac guys shouted out in four-part harmony and ripped their night vision goggles from their heads.

“What’d you
do
that for?” the boss man asked me, spitting with anger. He began to blink furiously as his eyes were forced to adjust to the light.

“You weren’t answering me,” I said. “This is my house. I belong here. You do not.”

“We were trying to protect you,” he said as he shifted away from me.

“Protect me from what?”

A van came screeching up out of nowhere and hit the brakes. The side doors slid open and two familiar faces leapt out. Detectives Mac Douglass and Sam Racine charged into my garage, like their apparent colleagues, one hundred percent uninvited. Now that I understood who was involved here, I lowered my arms.

The lead Tac officer hooked his goggles onto his belt and spoke to his immediate superiors. “She blinded us, sirs.”

“Any sign of the suspect?” Racine asked, totally ignoring my presence.

“Not a trace.”

Racine glanced up at the garage door, which had snaked up into the ceiling. He put his hand on a rather large indentation on the metal. I hadn’t noticed it had been damaged until he had reached up and touched it.

Douglass opened the closet door where my washer and dryer where kept and gazed inside. “Take the rest of your men and initiate a search,” he said in an attempt to sound authoritarian. “Cover as much ground as you can. Remain in pairs at all times.”

The armed team left. Douglass closed the door and he and Racine huddled up. I strutted toward them.

“I’m thinking he wanted to use this spot to avoid the sun,” Douglass said.

Racine nodded along. “Or he just wanted to get inside and have at her straight away. Indoors, he’d have all day to do what he wanted with her.”

“What the fuck are you two talking about?” I asked, planting my feet behind them. My sneakers squeaked against the concrete.

Both men turned to me, but it was Douglass who responded. “You had a visitor. It looks like we scared him off.”

The pennies began to drop. “It was that creep from tonight, wasn’t it?”

“Yep,” Racine said.

I had about a million questions.

“As you can see,” Douglass said, cutting me off before I’d had the chance to get the first one out. “We care very much about this suspect. We’ve been tracking him all night. He’s been on your ass since you left the murder scene.”

Lowdown

To get my answers, I was whisked away.

We traveled southbound in the back of the surveillance van. I was seated on the left side, my hands on my knees, with Douglass and Racine on the right. My only view to the outside world was through the front windshield. We whipped past the headquarters building downtown, and kept driving for another couple of miles. The building we eventually pulled into, from a ground floor parking hub with an automated security system, was a bit nondescript—boxed-shaped with a glass exterior was the most you could say about it. If I was anybody else, I might have had trouble placing it after the fact.

The driver took us over to the elevators in the underground garage, so close that when Racine opened the van door I was able to step out of the vehicle and onto the waiting compartment. I couldn’t see anything else in the building, which I guess was the plan. As the elevator headed down, I jokingly asked why they hadn’t blindfolded me, but neither of them had a response, humorous or otherwise.

Our final destination was an administrative bullpen, which appeared to take up an entire floor, with a myriad of cluttered desks at its core and enclosed offices along the outer walls. The place was hopping as we strolled down the center aisle, with Douglass and Racine flanking me on both sides. I felt like asking if they wanted to cuff me for good measure. But knowing that I’d be ignored, I kept my smart ass comment to myself.

We began to angle toward one office in particular. It had Douglass’s name and title stenciled on the glass entrance. He opened the door for me and told me I could take a seat on the couch, he and Racine would get us all some coffee. Left alone to my own devices, I ignored the couch and took a seat behind the man’s desk. There wasn’t much sitting out I could snoop through. Almost no paperwork, and the computer terminal was off. I thought about turning it on, but decided instead to kick my legs up and take a moment to regroup.

On their way back, the detectives saw me through the clear enclosure. They stopped for a second, said something vital to one another, and returned to their trek toward the office. Racine held one mug of coffee. Douglass carried two. After they’d both reentered, Pretty Boy offered me the mug with the smiling sunshine character on the side. I leaned forward to accept it, keeping my feet lodged high on the desk. I took a sip as Douglass sat in the chair in front of me and Racine took the spot I was supposed to be filling on the couch.

“Comfortable?” Douglass asked me.

“Very.”

“Do you think we may have this reversed?”

“Maybe,” I said, holding my mug out and gesturing at the room. “Man, oh, man. This place is so freaking clean. How often do you use it? I mean, it’s spotless. What kind of decent detective has a spotless office?”

Racine chimed in, all smiles. “Mac’s the fastidious type, like to an insane degree.”

“I think the word is professional,” Douglass said, correcting us both.

I looked the man over. After a long night of chasing crazy personified, his suit was still pressed like new and not a hair on his head was mussed. “I have serious questions about you,” I said, with no further explanation.

“That’s not exactly surprising. Questions seem to be your thing. You’re always asking them, even when you’re supposed to be the one answering them.”

“Isn’t that what policemen do?”

“It’s what detectives do, and you are not that. Not yet, at least.”

I shrugged. “Sorry that being attacked and pursued by a cannibalistic lunatic has made me overly curious tonight. Let’s chalk it up as one of those things.”

“About that, you are not wrong to wonder,” Douglass said. “You do deserve an explanation. How about we start off with your lunatic’s name—Danny Ray Jessup.”

“What are his priors?” I asked.

“None that we know of.”

“Then how did you identify him?”

“Through an informant. We got word of him potentially stepping out of line. But the murder call you caught was the first tangible evidence we have of his actual existence. We know he’s old, very old. Or so our informant has told us.”

“He wasn’t decrepit or anything,” I said. “I’d put him in his early forties, no older.”

“Our source is pretty knowledgeable about such things, and if he says he’s old, you can bet he’s old. And also, it was dark when you saw him.”

I took my feet off the desk, set down the mug, and straightened myself in the chair. “You are being evasive again. Just spit it out and tell me what’s really going on here.”

Racine’s voice sprang out from behind Douglass. “You’ll need to sign some non-disclosure documents first.”

“All right,” I said. “I can sign whatever. But I’m sick and tired of the runaround.”

Douglass got up and bent down next to me, unlocking the bottom drawer of his desk. Some standard issue paperwork was stacked on top of a pile of notebooks. The white A1 stock he was after was filled with paragraph after paragraph of legalese and all manner of underlined blank spaces. There was a Department of Justice seal at the top of the document. Douglass retrieved a pen from a cup container and printed my name in the first blank. He then turned to the back page and signed his name as the primary witness, and handed the pen over to me. I scanned through all three pages and then left my scribbly mark in the space next to his.

With his lips pursed, Douglass loomed above me, waiting for me to get out of his chair. I appreciated that he was being stern with me, so I went ahead and switched places with him. It wasn’t going to hurt to show him a modicum of respect.

“I’ll start off with the basics,” he said as he wiggled himself to comfort. “This detail or task force, or whatever you prefer to call it—we investigate and police a rather tiny but volatile segment of the population.” He sucked in a hesitant breath. “Okay. What I’m about to say to you next will seem ridiculous at first, but I want you to hear me out. This man Jessup you encountered was extra strong and inhumanly athletic, and he could withstand multiple gunshot wounds. He also ate a woman, gorging on her blood. And like the rest of this subsection of the city I’m talking about, he cannot survive under direct sunlight for very long. Now—what does all of this suggest to you?”

“No way,” I said, making the precise connection he had wanted me to make. “That’s bullshit. You want me to believe that this asshole is a vampire? Pull the other one. I’m no moron.”

“I never said vampire, but what we are dealing with here is certainly of that nature. People elsewhere in this building are trying to figure out what it all means. Sam and I don’t have that luxury. We just have characteristics to go on for now—the need for blood to survive, altered strength, extended life, and an absolute aversion to daylight. I did not mention crosses, telepathy, or any other supernatural trapping. I mentioned what I know as fact—what we can prove. I thought you of all people would appreciate that.”

“And I do. But I am also not going to call this guy a vampire, because that’s stupid.”

“Call him what you want. Though you need to remember, you’re the one who wanted answers. No promises were made about how you would feel about those answers.”

He had me there, the smug prick. “Go on,” I said.

Douglass rolled his shoulders, as if he were trying to recall the next line in a prepared speech. “Okay, now that you have an inkling about what we do around here, I think we need to bring in a higher authority.”

“Like an angel or a ghost?” I said, unable to resist.

Douglass shook his head. “No, our captain.” He motioned at Racine and the big detective zipped out of the room and left us alone. Through the glass wall, I watched him enter a corner office, five doors down.

“You probably should have answered your phone,” Douglass said, his voice low.

“Huh?” I swiveled back to him. I hadn’t been paying attention. My mind was mulling over what he had just told me.

“The phone at your house this morning. It was me calling to tell you to stay put. We had the suspect in our sights.”

“For a second maybe.”

“No, no. We had him. But they can hear things that we can’t. After he had trouble breaking into the garage, he got spooked for some reason and ran. I had twelve eyes on him, and no one saw which direction he took off in.”

“And there’s been no trace of him around my condo in the meantime?”

“I haven’t checked in since we left, but there wouldn’t be. Not while the sun is still up.”

I felt the urge to mock him again, but chose not to. I needed to play it cool until I’d heard their Captain out. I may not have bought into their blood-sucking supposition, but it was impossible to believe the department would go to this kind of effort unless there was
something
to it. Jessup was in no way normal when I fought him, that I did know. The truth was, my only option at the moment was to keep an open mind.

I tugged on the hem of my shirt and pulled it down over my hips. I was suddenly aware of how I looked, dressed like a civilian in jeans and a pale blue tee, and about to meet a ranking officer.

“Do you have an idea why Jessup’s so interested in me?” I asked.

“Let’s wait on that,” Douglas said. “That’s what the Captain wants to speak to you about. I think it would be best if we left that to him.”

I had no problem with that, but this Captain sure was taking his sweet-ass time. Racine had been gone five minutes, and then ten. I was getting fidgety, and Douglass was having less and less to say to me, which was pissing me off. He delayed the answer to every question I brought up. It was just like the van ride over here, dull and tedious, capped by the distinct feeling I was being lead around by nose.

A minute later, Racine and a scrawny Latino fellow with balding hair and a pencil-thin mustache emerged from the corner office and strode in our direction. Douglass stood up behind his desk, so I did the same. Racine entered the room with his boss and introduced us. “Captain Ricardo Castellano…this is Officer Grace Kimble.”

I extended my hand so it could be shook, but Castellano waved me off.

“Your wrists are hurt,” he said, stepping sideways. “There’s no need for pleasantries.” He sauntered over to the windowed wall and leaned back against it. “Please, everyone—sit.”

We all did. But he stayed standing.

“Officer Kimble,” he said. “I had you brought in here this morning to see if you were willing to work with us. This suspect we’re currently pursuing seems to have developed an interest in you, and I would like to take advantage of that. I know Mac has already gone over what it is we do in our hidden little corner of the force, but if hard work and a bit of danger doesn’t scare you off, I would like to have you deployed over here under my personal purview.”

I liked the guy at once. He was direct and to the point, unlike his two helper monkeys. Alas, a significant obstacle remained. “I’m on leave, sir. I cannot work inside the department in any fashion. I am not even sure I’m allowed to be here now, discussing an open case.”

He smiled at me. “Your suspension we can get around. But I want to make sure you understand the risks. I’m asking you to play bait for a very nasty fellow. If you say no, I will understand. But I also need to remind you that Jessup will be following you either way. If you agree to do things our way, you will be far safer than if you don’t.”

“So, you’re telling me I have no choice.”

“You always have a choice. Didn’t I say I would understand if you said no?”

I sat back and crossed my legs. It was a girlie power move, but an effective one. “Phrase it however you like,” I said. “But I don’t think I had a choice the second Douglass shared your crackpot vampire theory with me. Because I now know what’s going around here, and can use it against you, despite the boilerplate waiver I just signed. I have the sinking feeling that means I’m stuck, and I have no choice in this matter whatsoever.” I paused and took a sip of my coffee. “Sorry, sir. But that’s just the way I see things.”

“Told ya,” Racine said to Castellano. “You didn’t believe me. She’s got one hell of a mouth on her.”

The big boss shot him a look, one that told him to keep his own trap shut. He then returned his attention to me. “You are not stuck, Officer. But, I can see why you would interpret it in such a way. Is there anything I can do to reassure you—to make certain this alliance comes to fruition? I know you have aspirations. This assignment could be an excellent stepping stone for you. You succeed on a big task force, even a crackpot one, and you will make detective only that much faster.”

I became as still as I could, digging in. “Look,” I said. “I’m inclined to help out, but I’ve got no clue about what’s really going on here. I’ve heard there’s Fed involvement, and now I hear wild speculation about vampires running around the streets of LA, killing indiscriminately. Before I agree to anything, I needed to know a whole lot more.”

Castellano gnawed on his lower lip, considering what I’d said. His counteroffer came swiftly. “I’ll have a quiet space set up for you. You’ll be given full access to our two latest cases, and the background on this one. Will that amount of information work for you?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work fine.”