Blood Walk Part 13

Serruto's voice. Garreth knew he could not meet the lieutenant's eyes, so he kept his gaze riveted on the door through which Harry had disappeared.

"What happened?" The question sounded concerned, not angry.

Garreth kept his voice expressionless. "They say I froze."

"Did you?"

He could say no. He could say his gun jammed. Or he could say yes, and blame it on psychological shock, on suffering from the effects of his own recent experiences, on having come back to work too soon, after all. The first could be disproven by examining his gun and the second seemed too easy. He stared at the doorway and said, "It's my fault Harry was shot."

He heard Serruto sit down beside him . . . smelled his mixed scent of soap, aftershave, and, beneath them, blood. "I have this feeling of being ignored. I didn't know what to tell the captain. Somehow I thought these operations needed to be cleared through me first."

Why did Serruto confine himself to mild sarcasm? He ought to be yelling. Garreth and Harry knew procedure. Why had they failed to follow it? Had his, Garreth's, eagerness to collar Wink persuaded Harry in the same way the doctor and then Serruto had been persuaded to let him come back to work? Wasall of it his fault? "I got carried away and forgot to call in."

"And Harry? He's the sergeant. Why didn't he call in?"

Garreth sat angrily upright. "Harry's in there maybe dying and you're trying to blamehim ?"

Serruto sighed. "I know how you feel, but-"

Garreth stood. "How can you possibly know how I feel?" He heard the despair in his voice, a despair sharpened by the realization of how true the question was. Serruto could not know. No one normal, no one human, no one who was as he used to be could ever know exactly how he felt.

And it was looking across that now-perceived, unbridgeable gulf between himself and everyone he knew that Garreth saw Lien come running white-faced into the waiting room.

She stopped in front of him. "How bad is it?"

A constriction in Garreth's throat made speech impossible. He could only shrug.

Serruto answered her. "We don't know."

"How did it happen?"

"I'm sorry." Garreth forced the words out. "I'm sorry I didn't take better care of him. It's all my fault."

She, too, disappointed him by looking sympathetic instead of angry.

The doctor came through the doors from the trauma unit. They spun to face him. Garreth felt as though even his heart stopped, waiting for what the doctor would say.

The doctor spread his hands. "He's still alive. The bullet missed his heart. However, there's ma.s.sive trauma and hemorrhage, so although we have the bleeding stopped now and the damaged vessels repaired, we'll just have to wait to see how he snaps back."

Her face like a china mask, Lien asked, "May I see him?""I'm sorry; not yet."

Pain twisted in Garreth. If Harry lived, it would be through no credit to Garreth Doyle Mikaelian. And if Harry lived this time, what about the next? Because there would be a next time, inevitably, another dwelling, another impenetrable barrier Garreth would face and fail. He might as well accept a hard fact . . . he could not continue playing cop when his own personal set of rules differed so much from those applied to the rest of humanity.

Garreth felt in his inside pocket for his badge case. Pulling it out, he turned toward Serruto and extended it. "I shouldn't be carrying this." The words pierced like a knife in his gut.

Serruto frowned. "Mikaelian-"

The lieutenant did not reach for the badge case, but Garreth let go of it anyway, before he lost his courage to give it up. It fell to the floor, flipping open.

Lien, Serruto, and the doctor stared startled at him. The badge seemed to stare, too . . . a seven-pointed star, the remaining half of his soul, shining up from the floor.

"Mikaelian."

"Oh, Garreth."

Their voices reached out for him, like nets or webs, seeking to snare him. Garreth fled the trap. He spun and bolted from the room. He fled down the corridor with their voices chasing him. An orderly reached for him but he jerked loose in one easy pull and escaped into the twilight.

Tears blinded him. He jerked his gla.s.ses off and wiped his eyes. What did he do now? Or should he do anything? He did not really want to live. He did not enjoy it, and his life, or undeath, had endangered the existence of people who could be integral, productive members of society.

He started walking, considering how he might kill himself. It must look like an accident, to spare his family. That made it harder than ever. He cursed the changes in him that did that to him. If Lane had used her strength to simply break his neck, it would have been over, finished with.d.a.m.n you for not doing it!

He stopped short in the middle of a street. Brakes screamed and horns blared unheard around him.

Because Lane had made him what he was, Harry was dying. Indirectly, she could be held responsible, too, for that fiasco in taking Wink.

An angry voice swore at him. Garreth finally heard and moved on across the street.

She had destroyed Garreth's life, killed his partner, taken away his job, and removed him from his friends. She had destroyed more lives than his, too, when he counted the families of Adair and Mossman. He had no way of knowing how many others she had killed in her lifetime. The tally must be high. All those lives over all those years, and she still went free, to kill and destroy again, laughing at law, sidestepping justice. Growing up with a cop father, working as a cop himself, Garreth believed strongly in law and justice as the foundation of civilization. Without them, nothing remained but barbarism and chaos.

Garreth took a deep breath. He knew now what he could do . . . the same job he had been doing before. Before he ended his disliked unlife, he would hunt down the red-haired vampire.It takes one to catch one might be truer for this case than any. He would hunt her and he would bring her back to stand accountable for what she had done to Adair and Mossman and to Harry and him. If it took him to the end of the earth and time, he would find her.

1

By lamplight, the liquid in the cut-gla.s.s tumbler had the rich, dark red of Burgundy. Since giving up regular food, Garreth had taken to gulping his meals, dispensing with the unpleasant necessity as quickly as possible. Tonight, however, he turned the tumbler in his hands, wondering sardonically what Marti's Aunt Elizabeth would think if she knew the end to which her crystal wedding gift had come. He sipped the blood almost idly, playing with it as a wine taster might.This Rattus '83 is a bold vintage, speaking to the palate with lively authority, while . . .

Garreth ended the game abruptly by emptying the gla.s.s. He played not for amus.e.m.e.nt, he knew, but to delay, to avoid considering the problem he had set himself. How could he hope to hunt down Lane Barber alone when the combined facilities of the department were failing to find her? Refilling the tumbler, he wondered whether his melodramatic resignation had been premature.

No, he had no other choice, not when carrying the badge endangered fellow officers' lives. Besides, as a "free agent" he could spend his time exclusively on this one case, and since he knew what Lane was-his exclusive knowledge-he could think of leads that nonvampires would never consider. Perhaps he could learn how she thought, too.

The telephone rang, startling him. He stared across the room at it. Should he answer? He did not feel like learning that Harry had died or, if it was his parents, like admitting to his father how he had screwed up.It went on ringing. After the ninth time, Garreth dived on the phone and unclipped the cord from it, then walked back to the table in the silence and sat down with his tumbler of blood again.

First question: Where could she go?

Unfortunately, probably anywhere. In forty-odd years of singing, she must have made many connections. She could no doubt travel to any large city in the country, or perhaps even around the world, and through those connections find a new job. Most of them would not be familiar with anyone named Lane Barber, either. She could change ident.i.ty again; she must have that honed to a fine art.

Habits did not often change, though, the famousmodus operandi. She drew her food supply from customers where she worked-small, intimate clubs which offered ample opportunity for meeting customers. The Barbary Now and several other clubs the agent named where Lane had worked were all that type. How many such bars and clubs existed in the United States?

Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Garreth sighed. Finding her in North Beach had been simple compared with the task that faced him now. He had the time, of course-her bite had given himthat, at least-but in another sense, he did not. He needed to find her before his money ran out and he had to take a job somewhere. He knew something about her, but, unfortunately, not enough to narrow down her possible avenues of escape.

Perhaps the place to start learning was the one where she shed all facades . . . home.

He finished off his supper, washed the gla.s.s out, and left it draining on the sink while he grabbed his trench coat and let himself out into the evening.

One doubt troubled him on the drive to her apartment. It was her dwelling. Would he be able to enter?

He could not. Since he had no key, he tried to pa.s.s through the door as he did through the gates of the piers, but that same searing pain that had held him paralyzed outside Wink's hideout burned through him as he touched the door. Garreth backed hastily away and leaned against the porch railing while the flames cooled in him. The fact that she was a vampire and that he had been invited in before his transformation did not appear to cancel the prohibition. Now what?

He doubted he could talk Serruto into letting him in. Being officially off the case, his interest would probably be cla.s.sed as interference, if not vengeance-seeking.Isn't it? He needed to use someone else.

He found a public telephone and called Lane's landlady. "Mrs. Armour, this is Inspector Mikaelian." Resignations took time to process; officially he could still be considered a member of the department. "We met at your home last week."

"Oh, yes. You were asking about Miss Barber." She paused. "The other officers said-did she really try to kill you?"

"I'm afraid so, ma'am. I-we need to look through her apartment again. I'm sorry to bother you this evening, but could you meet me there with the key?"

"I already gave a key to a very nice-looking lieutenant," she said in a puzzled voice.

"Yes, ma'am, but the lieutenant is out of touch this evening and the key is locked in his desk. It's an imposition, I know, but this is important."

Her sigh came over the wire. "All right."

Meeting him at the curb some time later, she said, "You detectives work long hours, don't you?" She handed him the key. "Will you try to return this as soon as possible? It's the only other key I have to the apartment."

He stared at the key and bit his lip. "I'd appreciate it if you could come through with me. You've seen the apartment before and I think you can help me."

She looked simultaneously interested and reluctant. "Will it take long?"

Try not to lie all the time, man."It might"

She complained in a gentle way all the way up the steps, but she agreed to help. Unlocking the door, she moved through and began switching on lights.

Garreth waited on the porch, pain licking at him.

She looked back from the doorway of the living room. "Well, come on in; I don't have all night." The pain vanished. Garreth followed her quickly. "Look around and tell me if you think anything is missing. What she's taken might give us some idea where she's gone."

Mrs. Armour stood in the middle of the living room and turned. "She has lovely things, doesn't she? She's collected them from all over the world."

Spent good money on them, too, Garreth judged, if his term in Burglary had taught him as much as he thought about estimating the worth of objects. Though no art expert, he recognized the quality of the paintings and some small pieces of sculpture. Old toys resting on the bookshelves between sections of books drew more of his attention, however . . . several old-looking dolls, a miniature tea set, a cast-iron toy stove. Hers, from her childhood? he wondered. He studied a tray hung on the wall, its sections turned into shelves holding an a.s.sortment of small objects that reminded him of the "treasures" he had collected in an old tin tackle box when he was a boy.

She had no broken pocketknife, but there was a top-wooden, not plastic-and some marbles-more beautiful than any he had had, he noted with envy-a giant tooth, a tiny rodent skull, and various stones: colored, quartzlike, or containing sh.e.l.l and leaf fossils. He could not identify one group of objects, though. He took down the largest to study.

Held by its flat base, its large central point and two flanking smaller ones reached jaggedly upward, like the silhouette of a mountain range. Its color was dark and gla.s.sy as obsidian. Except for size, each object in the group looked identical.

"Shark teeth," Mrs. Armour said.

He blinked at her. "What?"

"Miss Barber told me once that those are shark teeth."

Black? He shrugged. Very well. His tackle box had never held anything that exotic.

Garreth put back the tooth and turned his attention to the books. Nonfiction outnumbered the fiction, but of the several hundred volumes covering a wide range of subjects, including extraterrestrial visitors and medical texts on viruses, only music, dancing, and folklore were represented by any substantial number of books.

He glanced through the folklore. All the books contained sections on vampires.

The publication dates of the library as a whole went as far back as 1919. A couple of children's books-printed with large color plates tipped in and black-and-white drawings, not the large print and easy vocabulary of the books he bought to give Brian-bore inscriptions in the front: "To Mada, Christmas 1920, Mother and Daddy," and "To Mada, Happy Birthday, 1921, Mother and Daddy." The ornate penmanship looked vaguely familiar.

He went on to check for inscriptions in the front of other books. A few had them, written in varying hands with dates from the twenties to the midseventies: "To Maida," "To Della," "To Delaine," "To Mala." Some were also signed by the person giving the book, but never with more than a first name.

Mrs. Armour, peering over his shoulder, remarked, "It's odd that the books are inscribed to so many different people, isn't it?"

"Maybe she bought them in used-book stores," Garreth said. Now, why, he wondered almost immediately, had he covered for Lane? Guilt? Let no normal human have the chance to discover what Lane is, for by giving that away, he would give away himself, too?

He searched the desk. Not that he expected Harry or the lab boys to have overlooked anything useful, but he wanted to make sure. A slim chance existed that they might not recognize something as useful that he, with his special knowledge, would. But he found nothing except blank writing paper and some felt-tip pens . . . no checkbooks, canceled checks, credit card records, or copies of tax returns.

Moving on to the kitchen, he found it as bare as Harry and Serruto had described, nor did the bedroom yield him information aside from the fact that she bought her clothes all over the world and with discrimination. He pursed his lips thinking of the price tags that accompanied labels like those.

"Can you tell me what clothes might be missing?" he asked Mrs. Armour.

She frowned. "Now, how should I-well," she amended as he raised a brow, "I guess I did peek in once. I think there used to be a blue Dior suit and some English wool skirts and slacks hanging at the end there." She described those and some other items in detail.

The dresser had been cleaned out. So had the bedside table and the bathroom medicine cabinet.

"Can you think of anything usually in the apartment that you haven't seen here today?" he asked.

From the bathroom doorway, Mrs. Armour considered the question. "I don't know. I haven't been here all that often, you know."

"Keep looking around, will you, please?"

He could understand Lane destroying papers but he had trouble believing that she would just walk away from all her personal belongings, an acc.u.mulation that she had obviously brought with her through the sequential changes of ident.i.ty. She must have a few items too loved or revealing to be left behind.

He headed back for the living room. It had more of her effects than any other room. It also had the desk. He stared at it, pulled by some magnetism he could not explain. A letter had been on that desk the first time he saw it. He wished he had seen more than the address on it before Lane turned out the light.

He tried to visualize the envelope in his mind, picturing the ornate lettering. He paused. That was where he had seen the writing that matched that on the flyleafs of the children's books.

A letter from Lane's mother! He ticked his tongue against his teeth in excitement.

"I remember something," Mrs. Armour said. "There used to be two photographs on that top shelf."

Photographs. He turned his full attention on her. "Do you remember what they were?"

"One was of her grandparents. She never said so, but I a.s.sumed it. It was very old, that brown color, you know, and the woman's hair and dress were World War I style. I have a wedding picture of my parents that looks very much like it. The other looked old, too . . . three little girls sitting on the running board of a car."

An outdoor picture? "What was the background behind the car like?"

"Background?" She blinked. "Why, just a street, I think. Maybe there was a house in it."

"What kind of house? Brick? Stone? Wood frame? Large or small?"She stared at him. "Really, Inspector, I never paid that much attention. Is it important?"