Текст книги "Hard Spell"

Автор книги: Justin Gustainis

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  Apart from some scorch marks on the wall behind the bed, the rest of the room had been untouched by the flames. The blaze had been localized and focused, no doubt because that's what a very old and deadly curse had specified.

  The curse that I had invoked.

  Sure, Prescott did the translating, but that's not what caused the curse to kick in – it's revealing to somebody what you've learned that does it.

  Which is exactly what I asked Prescott to do.

  Which is why Prescott died, in agony and horror.

  I think Karl said something to me, but I waved him off. I stood there, looking at the remains of what had been a pretty good man and wondered if he'd damned Stan Markowski in his final moments. If he did, I wouldn't blame him.

  But even he couldn't have damned Stan Markowski nearly as hard as I was right now.

After a while, I went back to acting like a cop. What else was I gonna do?

  As I turned, my foot knocked againstomething metal. A wastebasket. I looked and saw some used Kleenex, the remains of a tube of Life Savers, a bent straw, a couple of used cotton balls. And a big FedEx overnight envelope. It was addressed to Prescott, care of the hospital, with a return address at Georgetown University. Looked like his assistant back on campus had sent the stuff that Prescott wanted. Like the remaining untranslated pages of the Opus Mago.

  Then what the hell happened to them?

  I turned to one of the forensics guys, Billy Santoro. "You come across any paper around the corpse, maybe something written in a foreign language?"

  "No, no papers, Stan. Some ashes that might've been paper, but nothing that's got any hope of recovery. Fire was just too hot, you know?"

  "How about a laptop?"

  "We found something, was probably a laptop once. But now it's just a bunch of warped metal and melted plastic. You can look at it, if you want."

  "No, I guess not. Thanks."

  Well, so much for that brilliant idea. If Prescott had learned anything useful from the Opus Mago fragments, it had died with him. Even if my hunch had panned out, what would I do with a bunch of papers written in Ancient Sumerian?

  Find another translator, who can get dismembered, blinded, and burned alive for his trouble? One's not enough?

  I looked at the corpse one more time. Just punishing myself, I suppose. I didn't need to see it again – that charred mound of gunk and bone was going to have a starring role in my nightmares for a long time to come.

  As I turned away, something glittered in the corner of my vision.

  It came from the corner where Prescott's severed arms and legs were stacked. They hadn't bled much, without a heart to provide pumping action. I walked over, and tilted my head a little. There it was again.

  I squatted next to the pile of flabby, pale flesh, careful not to touch anything. I looked closer.

  A cell phone. Prescott had been holding the phone in his hand when the arm was severed. Not surprising, then, that his big paw was squeezed tight around it.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw that Billy was still taking samples of Prescott's ashes and putting them into small plastic bags.

  "You do these yet?" I asked him. "The arms and legs?"

  "Not yet," he said. "Thought we ought to concentrate on the torso first. We'll get to the rest of him pretty soon. I figure there's no hurry."

  "No. No hurry at all."

  He went back to work. Using my body to hide what I was doing, I slowly leaned forward, got two fingers around the phone, and carefully worked it loose from Prescott's grip.

  I knew I was tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation. But the cause of death wasn't exactly in dispute, even if nobody but me and Karl would ever know for sure what had happened here.

  I slipped Prescott's phone into an inside pocket of my suit coat, then stood up. Walking over near the window for better light, I casually pulled the phone out again. As far as anybody could tell, I was messing around with my own phone, just like millions of people do every day.

  I opened the phone and, with a little work, found the list of outgoing calls. The last one Prescott ever made had been to a number I knew well – it was my phone, at the squad room. Length of call: 11:46.

  Sweet Mother Mary on a motorcycle.

  "Come on," I said to Karl, who'd been staring at the body from another corner of the room.

  "Where we goin'?"

  "Back to the squad, so I can check my voicemail."

As I drove us out of the hospital parking lot, Karl said, "It's my fault."

  I turned and looked at him, and his face reminded me of a man I'd once seen at the funeral of his three children. They'd been murdered by his wife, before she killed herself.

  "What the fuck are you talking about, Karl?"

  "Prescott. What happened. It's my fault."

  "You're wrong about that, partner. You are totally fucking off base. I'm the one who roped him into all this shit."

  "Doesn't matter. You told me, Stan! You said to get additional warding for his room. I called two witches I know. One's moved out of town, I left a message with the other one's answering service. She didn't call back, and I forgot, Stan. I should have tried somebody else, even looked in the fucking Yellow Pages, if I had to."

  "Karl, listen, you didn't–"

  "But I just forgot. With people dropping dead bodies on us and Internal Affairs and the SWAT raid, and the rest of it..."

  "Listen, man, don't be–"

  "It could've made the difference, Stan! It could. If the protection was stronger, the fucking curse might not have been able to get him. Instead, he went out as hard as any motherfucker I ever saw, or even heard of. The dude was trying to help us, and for that he had his fucking eyes gouged out, and got his arms and legs chopped off, and then he was burned alive..."

  Karl buried his face in his hands and started to cry.

  If I wasn't driving, I just might have joined him.

• • • •

Back at the squad, we reported to McGuire what we'd seen, what we knew, and what we suspected.

  He sat back and ran a hand slowly over his big jaw. "All right," he said. "I'll assign a couple of other detectives to it, just so we can say we investigated and filed a report. I'll need you to brief them before they go out, so that they don't waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel."

  Fine. Now I'd have to explain to a couple of other cops just how bad I had fucked up. McGuire was right to do that – I just wasn't looking forward to it.

  "You figure this was Sligo, shutting Prescott's mouth?" McGuire asked. "He's got a copy of the Opus Mago. He'd probably know about the curse, and how to make a murder look like one."

  I thought about that, then shook my head. "No, if it was him, he'd want us to know it – he wouldn't try to hide his work by imitating the curse, the arrogant prick."

  "Besides," Karl said, "it happened in broad daylight. Sligo's a vamp, remember?"

  "Yeah, you got a point there." McGuire looked closely at me, then gave the same scrutiny to Karl. "You guys need some time off?" he asked quietly.

  Considering everything that was going on right now, he was being extremely generous. But there was no way I wanted to spend the next few days sitting around my house thinking – or worse, drinking myself stupid.

  I looked at Karl, who gave me a small headshake. His face had lost a little of the stricken look it had worn at the hospital, but only a little.

  "We'd just as soon keep busy, boss, but thanks," I said.

  McGuire took a case file from a stack sitting on his desk and put it on his blotter. Opening it, he said, "Then get back to work and catch this motherfucker, before he kills anybody else."

 e susiv>

I'd told Karl I wanted to check my voicemail, and why. He said he'd start going through the files, to see if he could find a connection between Sligo and Jamieson Longworth. Then he reminded me that sunset was about an hour away. "You've got an appointment, in the parking lot," he said.

  "Yeah," I said, "if she shows up."

  "She seemed pretty definite about it this morning. Think she'd change her mind?"

  "No, I'm just hoping that Longworth's threat turns out to be empty bullshit, that's all."

  "Yeah, I know," he said. "Don't forget, I'm going down with you when it's time. Help you wait."

  I nodded my thanks. "I wouldn't have it any other way."

"To access your voicemail messages, please press 8." The computer's recorded voice was as polite as ever. I touched 8.

  "Please enter your four-digit extension number."

  4294

  "Please enter your security code."

  3475833

  "You have eight new messages. These are your options while listening. To listen to a message, press 5. To go back to the beginning of a message, press 7. To delete a message, press 2 twice. To save a message, press 4. To advance to the next message, press 3. To end this session, press 9 twice. Ready."

  5

  "Going to the first new message."

  "Sergeant, this is Sonia, over in Human Resources. Your leave record for last month hasn't been–"

  22

  3

  "Stanley, this is Father Cebula at St Casimir's. We've got the annual Corpus Christi banquet coming up–"

  22

  3

  "Hey, Stan – Lacey. What do you get when you cross a female ogre with a werewolf? You–"

  4

  3

  "Mr Markowski, this is Rob at Nationwide Insurance. I see you've got a birthday coming up soon, and I'd like to talk–"

  22

  3

  "Sergeant, this is Ben Prescott, calling from my lovely new digs – let's see, it's room 333. The material I asked my assistant at G-town to send me arrived via FedEx early this morning, including the remaining fragments of the Opus Mago that I had yet to translate. I went right to work, and I'm pleased to say that it went faster than I'd anticipated. Maybe my brain is a little sharper from its long rest while I was comatose.

  "I should probably wait until you get over here to fill you in on what I've been able to make of this, but I'm pretty excited – and more than a little disturbed, frankly. Anyway, I thought I would get the gist of it to you now, in case that curse we talked about earlier turns out to be real, ha ha.

  "Most of what I've learned about this spell you're interested in deals with the final stage. By the way, the fifth sacrifice, the final vampire killing, is supposed to take place as part of the actual ritual. The other four are prologues, as it were.

  "All right, let's see here. The book specifies that the spell must take place near water. Still water, that is not of the sea. Meaning, not salt water. The other requirement is that the ritual be carried out on the first night of the full moon, at the 'turn of time' – which, given the context, I would say refers to midnight.

  "Um, that's followed by a long incantation the practitioner is supposed to recite, that's probably of little interest to you... Okay, here's something: I expect you'll want to know what all of this is in aid of – the purpose ofthe spell, as it were. Well, that would be, in a word: transformation. If the ritual, which is supposed to be one of extreme difficulty, by the way, is carried out in the proper manner, all the magical I's dotted and T's crossed, and so on, the vampire/wizard conducting–"

  "The disk space allotted for this message has been filled. To listen to the next message, press 3."

  Goddamn motherfucking cocksucker shit!!

  3!

  "Advancing to the next new message."

  "Prescott again, Sergeant. Sorry about that. Longwindedness is an occupational hazard of academe.

  "All right, now, where was – oh, right. Transformation. According to this, the practitioner will be transformed into... this next word is a double compound, and the grammar is confusing, but I've rendered it as 'a creature of both night and day.' The fragment says the one casting the spell will 'walk under the sun without fear.' I suppose if you were a vampire, that would be a pretty desirable thing, wouldn't it?

  "Oh, and it gets better – better, I mean from the perspective of the vampire. It says that, after the transformation, the practitioner will 'fear not holy things, nor fire, nor sharp branches.' Would that be wooden stakes, do you suppose? I guess that would make the guy some sort of 'super-vampire,' wouldn't it?

  "That goes on for a while, then four lines further down it says that this one who 'walks under, or beneath, the sun without fear,' can drink the blood of others and thereby make them 'brothers, or brethren, like himself.'

  "I'm not sure what to make of that one – you're probably a better judge than I, since you deal with this kind of thing all the time. I mean, everybody knows that vampires can reproduce by exchanging blood with one of their victims, presumably willing ones. Nothing new there. Or could it mean that once transformed, this 'super-vampire' can make others like himself, just by biting them? I suppose the blood exchange is assumed there, too.

  "Quite the spell this guy's got here. No wonder it's supposed to be so hard. He turns himself into a vampire without vulnerabilities, then can pass that on to others in the usual vampiric way? Sounds like a bad James Bond movie, if that's not redundant, but with fangs. You could create a whole army of – Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Who are you? How'd you get in here? Stay back! The... the power of Christ compels you! Get away from me, get away get awayyyyy..."

  Then there was nothing but the screaming.

  99

  "Session terminated. Goodbye."

"How'd you get in here? Stay back! The–"

  "You can stop there and log out," I said to McGuire. "The rest is… just screaming." I tried to keep what I was feeling out of my voice, and off my face. I'm a cop – we're supposed to be good at that.

  I may not have succeeded completely, because McGuire looked at me closely before he disconnected from my voicemail. I'd told him about Prescott's messages, so he'd asked me to retrieve them again but from his phone, to play over the speaker.

  I glanced over at Karl, who was in McGuire's other visitor's chair. He looked like a guy with a bad stomachache – but whether that was from Prescott's discovery or from his screams, I didn't know.

  McGuire was staring at the phone as if it were his worst enemy. He didn't look away from it as he said, "Super-vampire, huh?"

  "It sounds kind of stupid when you call it that," I said. "But, still..."

  "Yeah," McGuire said. "But, still..."

  "And first night of the full moon," Karl said.

  I hadn't had to look it up – none of us had. Everybody in the Supe Squad always knows when the full moon is due.

  "Tonight," I said.

A good piece of the squad room's west wall is taken up with a map of the city and surrounding area. McGuire, Karl, and I stood looking at it, and what we saw did not make us happy.

  All those lakes.

  "Fuck," Karl said.

  All those ponds.

  "Fuck," McGuire said.

  All those swimming pools.

  "Motherfuck," I said.

"There's no way we're going to get surveillance of all those bodies of water," McGuire said. "We couldn't do it even if we knew what to look for, which we don't – or even if we had the entire U.S. Air Force at our disposal, which we sure as shit don't."

  "So we can't find him by air," I said. "That's a fact. We'll have to approach it some other way."

  "If you've got any ideas, you'll find me an eager audience," McGuire said.

  I just shook my head, but Karl said, "There is one thing."

  McGuire and I both turned to stare at him.

  "Seems to me that Stan here has an appointment with a certain young lady, in about..." Karl looked out the window, at the setting sun. "...ten minutes or so. She said something just before dawn today, gave us the impression she might know where Sligo's daytime crib is."

  McGuire looked at me with raised eyebrows. "You've got a snitch – somebody who'll give up Sligo?"

  "Not exactly," I said. "But sort of."

  "Who do you–" McGuire started, then I saw the light dawn. "Oh. You mean..." He flipped a glance toward Karl.

  "It's all right," I said. "He's met Christine." There are some secrets you shouldn't hide from your boss, and Christine was one I hadn't kept from McGuire. I'd trusted him to keep his mouth shut about her, and he always had.

  "We were talking to Christine this morning, and it occurred to me to ask her about Sligo. It seemed like she knew something, but then she had to leave, pretty quickly." I made a head gesture toward the window, where a sliver of sun could still be seen.

  "You know," Karl said, "it occurs to me that even if she can give us Sligo's resting place, the motherfucker'll be gone by the time anybody could get there, and we can't wait until he comes back for beddy-bye at dawn. It'll all be over by then, one way or another."

  "But if we know where he's been, maybe we can figure out where he went, if we move fast," I said.

  McGuire nodded. "Then you'd better get your ass downstairs," he said. "Don't you think?"

Karl and I stood quietly near the fence in the gathering dark, listening to the crickets and trying not to think about the ugly death of Benjamin Prescott, PhD. I don't know about Karl, but my efforts weren't exactly a howling success – more like a screaming failure.

  "So," I said after a while, "how 'bout those Mets, huh?"

  Karl doesn't follow baseball, and neither do I. He likes hockey, and I've been a Knicks fan since I was a kid and got to watch the team hold their pre-season training camp at the U.

  That thing about the Mets is just something I say to fill awkward silences, and Karl knew it. He came back with his standard response: "Get a couple of good trades, and they could go all the way this year."

  We waited some more, not talking to ntil Karl said, "I'd say it's full dark, Stan."

  "Yeah."

  "Probably has been, the last ten minutes or so."

  "Yeah."

  We listened to the crickets for a while longer.

  Karl said, "Could be she's not coming, Stan."

  "Yeah."

  More crickets.

  "Maybe we oughta go back inside, tell McGuire."

  "Okay." I still didn't move.

  "Could be lotsa reasons she didn't show," Karl said. "Doesn't have to mean she's in trouble."

  I whirled to face him, and my voice was ugly when I said, "Jesus, what do you think, Karl? That maybe she found herself a nice boyfriend? That she couldn't make it because tonight's the junior fucking prom?"

  Karl didn't tell me to go fuck myself. He didn't even turn and walk away. He just stood there, looking at me. It was too dark to see his expression, but his posture didn't look like somebody who's pissed off and ready to fight.

  I stood there and listened to myself breathe for a while, a sound I used to be pretty fond of.

  "I'm sorry, man," I said quietly. "I got no right to talk to you like that. I guess I'm just …"

  "I know," Karl said. "Forget it." He gave me a few more seconds, then said, "You feel like going inside now?"

  "Yeah, might as well," I said. "She isn't coming."

  We went back to the squad and found that we had a visitor.

  It was Vollman.

I turned to Louise the Tease. My voice rising, I said, "I thought I told you–"

  Vollman held up a hand, palm toward me. "Please, Sergeant, do not chastise this beautiful young woman. I have literally arrived within the last minute."

  I looked back at Louise, who nodded quickly. "I was just looking up your cell number," she said. "Honest."

  "Okay. Sorry, Louise," I said.

  I politely asked Vollman to accompany us back to our part of the squad room. I was going to be very courteous to the old vampire/wizard – right up to the moment when I found an excuse to pound a two-foot stake deep into his aged, undead heart.

  I was in kind of a bad mood.

  As we approached our desks, McGuire came to his office door and looked our way. I shook my head, but then used it to gesture in Vollman's direction. McGuire nodded and went back to his desk. He'd understood what I meant: we'd missed one source of information, but just gained another one. Maybe.

Everybody sat down, Karl and me facing Vollman from maybe ten feet apart. He looked pretty much the same as last time, although the shirt was different – a pale green number with little roses all over it that had probably been the height of fashion just after the war. The Civil War, I mean.

  "Been a while, Mr Vollman," I said. "We were beginning to think you didn't like us anymore."

  The old face grew a tiny little smile. "Two charming young gentlemen such as yourselves? The very idea is absurd."

  Never try sarcasm on a five hundred year-old vampire.

  "We haven't got time to fuck around," I said, "so I'm going to take a risk and be totally honest with you about the situation we're facing here – as much as we know of it. I say it's a risk, because I'm pretty damn sure you haven't been honest with us, so far."

  Vollman's bushy eyebrows made a slow climb toward his hairline.

  "I'm not saying you atively lied to us, but you've withheld information, for reasons of your own. I'm pretty sure if we knew everything you could have told us a week ago, we would have closed this case already, and a pretty good man would have been spared a really ugly death."

  "Indeed?" Vollman said softly. "I am sorry to hear of that."

  "Maybe you are, maybe you're not. For all I know, you think of humans as nothing more than blood bags with legs. Some vamps do, I know."

  Vollman frowned at that, but kept quiet.

  "But it doesn't matter," I said. "Because a wizard named Sligo, who is also a vampire – you know, like you – is probably going to attempt a complex and nasty ritual at midnight, near some body of still water."

  "And if he pulls it off, the result could be very, very bad," Karl said.

  "Very bad is an understatement," I said. "The bastard will have the power to create a whole new race of vampires that'll be invulnerable to everything – sunlight, stakes, crucifixes, the whole nine yards."

  "And that will fuck up the world for everybody, Mr Vollman," Karl said. "Old-style nosferatu like you will probably become an endangered species – just like humans."

  Vollman nodded gravely. "I will give you my pledge to listen closely to all that you gentlemen have to say. Beyond that, I can make no promises."

  I sat there, and if looks could kill, the old bastard would have a long sharp piece of polished oak sticking out of his chest right that second.

  I wasn't sure what I hated more – the old vamp, or the fact that at this moment, we needed him. Needed him bad.

  Vollman let out the little smile again. "I understand, Sergeant. You despise me, and you despise having to depend on me – for anything, even information. It is a very... human reaction, and one that I am not unused to."

  I blinked a couple of times, and my voice was husky with anger when I said, "You read minds, do you? I wasn't aware that was one of the vampire talents."

  "Not minds, Sergeant – merely faces." Vollman shrugged. "I wonder if it has occurred to you that I am here this evening precisely because I am, however unfortunately, dependent on you." He leaned forward in his chair, and I swear I heard those old bones creak. "And in at least one respect we are in agreement, gentlemen: we do not have time to fuck around."

  He sat back, hands folded in his lap, waiting.

  I took one very deep breath, and tried to imagine that all the hatred and fear and frustration would leave my body with the air I was going to expel. Then I breathed out, told myself that it had worked, and got down to business with the vampire.

Karl and I took turns running it down for him, as quickly as we could without leaving out any essential facts. Once it was all out there, I said, "So we've got to find Sligo, and stop him, before midnight which is–" I checked my watch "–about four and a half hours from right now." It occurred to me that my last sentence sounded like something from a bad Fifties horror movie, accompanied by a melodramatic soundtrack riff. In my job, reality is sometimes like a bad movie – and sometimes it's worse. At least the movie usually has a happy ending.

  Vollman had been leaning forward in his chair, folded hands between his knees, looking at whichever of us was speaking. Now he sat back, intertwined fingers beneath his chin, the classic pose of Man Thinking. I wondered if he'd been on the stage at some point during his long life – no matinee performances, of course.

  Now he lowered the hands, signaling that he had reached decision. "I told you once," he said, "that I had become a vampire, unwillingly, in the year 1512. That was the truth. I neglected to mention that, at the time of my... transformation, I had a son, Richard." He pronounced it Reek-ard, the way the Germans do.

  "I had raised him myself," Vollman went on. "His mother died in childbirth, not an uncommon occurrence at that time. I was a skilled wizard, and might have saved her, but she gave birth earlier than expected, while I was away on business.

  "So, I raised the boy alone, with the assistance of a series of paid wet nurses, nannies, and tutors. When he reached his majority, he told me that he wished to learn the art of magic, under my tutelage."

  Vollman made a wry face. "What father would not be pleased to find that his son wished to emulate him by choosing the same profession? So I began his instruction – which, to do properly, takes several years. We were already well along, when I fell victim to attack by a nosferatu. And you should understand this about our kind, Sergeant, if you do not know it already: an honorable vampire, when he turns another, becomes in effect a Father in Darkness, incurs certain obligations. He must stay to teach the newborn nosferatu how to live his new, and very different, life."

  "From what I've heard," Karl said, "it doesn't always happen that way."

  "Sad, but true, Detective," Vollman said. "But, in defense of my kind, how many humans do you know who behave honorably – at all times?"

  "Well, you've got–" Karl began.

  "Guys, excuse me," I said. "Mr Vollman, this is fascinating, and I mean that. But the clock is ticking, and if you could possibly move this along...?"

  Vollman nodded. "I enjoy intelligent conversation, but you are correct, Sergeant, this is not the time." He leaned forward again.

  "Because my Father in Darkness did not mentor me in the ways of the undead, I did not learn to control my appetite for blood. Because I had not learned control, I fed indiscriminately. One of those upon whom I fed, to my everlasting shame, was my own son, Richard. And because my bloodlust was seemingly without limit at that stage, I fed on him until he was near death – at which point, overcome with remorse, I decided to make him nosferatu, like me."

  Vollman stopped speaking, and his eyes lost some of their focus, as if he was examining some bleak inner landscape. I knew that territory very well. I've lived there for years.

  "All right," I said, keeping most of what I felt out of my voice. "you made your son a vampire. What then?"

  "Unlike my own Father in Darkness, I fulfilled my responsibility to the one I had created. Although, in truth, because I was myself so inexperienced as nosferatu, there was much I did not know. But I did my best, even though my son, who was now also my Son in Darkness, hated me."

  "The two of you fought, you mean?" Karl asked him.

  "No, never," Vollman said. "He was too smart for that. But I knew my own son. In every word, every gesture, he showed how much he despised me. And I cannot in truth say that I would blame him."

  I noted his shift to present tense, but didn't say anything about it. Instead I asked, "So, you taught him how to be a vampire – and a wizard, too?"

  "I did not finish his course of instruction in magic," Vollman said, "although I had taught him a great deal by the time he attempted to kill me."

  "How'd he do that?" I asked. "Come at you with a wooden stake?"

  "No, he would not have been so foolish. I was stronger than he, you see. Stronger as a ma a vampire, and a wizard. Instead, he hired men. Thugs, really. As I determined later, he paid them well – with money stolen from me – to carry out three tasks." Vollman ticked them off on his fingers. "To transport an armoire containing his insensate form to a location far away; to seek out my resting place and drive a stake through my heart; and, finally, to burn down my home, which was also my magical laboratory."

  Vollman made a face like he wanted to spit on the floor. "The first and last of those tasks they accomplished very well. They spirited my son away, and before leaving, set fires that turned my home, and all my work, to ashes."

  "Obviously, they didn't manage to kill you," Karl said. "How come?"

  "Because I did not spend the daylight hours in the basement of that house, as I had given Richard reason to believe. I was not, even then, a complete fool."

  "I've got a feeling I know where this is going," I said, "but it would be good if we could get there soon."

  "Of course," Vollman said. "My son, I have since learned, journeyed throughout Europe, studying magic, learning the ways of the undead, and sucking the blood of innocents. In time, he found his way to Ireland, where he stayed for many years – a strange choice, in a place where the Church is so strong. And there he took for himself the name Sligo."

Neither Karl or I exactly fell out of our chairs at that point. Like an inept comic, Vollman had telegraphed his punchline from some distance away. Still, his admission raised a lot of questions. With the time factor we were facing, I tried to decide which ones I needed answered right now.

  "Why did you wait until now to share this interesting information with us?" I asked. "Didn't you care that vampires were being killed? Shit, and people accuse me of being callous."

  Vollman studied me before speaking. "I do not think either one of us is callous, Sergeant. But I was forced to make a choice. If I helped you, and you found my son, you would probably kill him. He might well leave you no choice. And even now, after everything, I would have preserved his life, if I could."

  "So you did nothing," I said.

  "On the contrary. Ever since you gave me the name Sligo, I have been searching for him, day and night. Well, night, at least. I have used my considerable influence among the local community of supernaturals. But all my efforts have turned up nothing – he has learned how to hide himself well."