Anno Dracula (55 page)

Geneviève took latex gloves out of her bag. She would have preferred a spacesuit to examine this crime scene.

It wasn’t just the filth; it was the concept. This room was a cell, not a lair. She felt the prisoner’s rage and despair...

...presumably alleviated by the rescue or escape, but lingering still.

In the unlikely event of this ever coming to trial, Emma Zoole might have to make a model of this basement, with miniature chain and toy furniture. The space shrank around her, walls closing in like Poe’s pit, ceiling lowering. She wanted out of the cell, the basement, the house, but there was more to see.

‘Here,’ said Turner, nudging a cushion aside with a boot.

A pudgy rag-doll — brown with scarlet trunks — lay face down, with a rusty nail stuck through the back of its head.

‘Remind you of anyone?’ Geneviève asked.

She didn’t get out of the row-house until afternoon.

This was a case where she was required as a vampire rather than for forensic insight. Blake and Grimes had made a start on removing the bodies. At the morgue, others could probe them for usable-in-court bullets. Geneviève had to hang around and give the cops the undead angle.

At interview, OCME had specified this would be part of her remit. She’d been too bemused by the notion of characterising herself as an expert to quibble. She’d lost count of the agencies and institutions - FBI, ATF, CTU, NSA, BPRD, Johns Hopkins, the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane — she was theoretically on call for, though only BPRD made regular use of her supposed specialist knowledge. She wondered if the Diogenes Club was still in business. They had used her in a similar fashion, not always happily. Last she’d heard, Mrs Thatcher was trying to sell off the building in Pall Mall and shift the Club’s functions to paper shufflers in Cardiff. Where once Mycroft Holmes stood in for the British government, there might soon be yuppie flats.

On the whole, vampire crime in the USA was much the same as ordinary crime - just with fangs. Bank robbery, with fangs. Car theft, with fangs. Jaywalking, with fangs. Aside from the specific felony of criminal assault with the intent to consume human blood, which was rarer than the tabloids said, American vampires were statistically less likely to commit most crimes — including murder — than the warm. Courts were handing down 500-year sentences to penalise the long lived, which threw up new problems for penitentiaries. Lethal injection of a solution of silver sulphate, a ghastly way to go, was the preferred method of vampire execution in death penalty states.

The factor which threw everything out was drac.

The drug itself was only marginally illegal - how could you legislate against a substance derived from organic matter freely flowing in the veins of law-abiding
nosferatu?
Statutes against organ snatching and private sale of body parts were extended to cover the sale of vampire blood to the warm, though they were seldom invoked if the transaction was the other way around. A tax-paying, Congress-lobbying catering industry, dependent on supplying vampires, wanted no part of this mess.

It was impossible to stay in the drac trade without breaking a dozen state and federal laws a day, but cases against drac lords were even trickier to bring than cases against regular drug cartels. There were task forces all over the place, but few big successes in the War on Drac. Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say Yuck’ campaign was the punchline of too many red-eyed dhamp stand-up routines.

Geneviève almost missed the innocent days of pale poets quaffing absinthe or hippies tripping on Bowles-Ottery ergot.

It also creeped her out — and she was well aware of the irony — that drac-heads wanted to get into her veins. This wasn’t just in the ’hoods, but everywhere. They didn’t want to turn, but they wanted to try...

She had to worry about what Emma Zoole might do if her dealer didn’t come through while Geneviève was helpless in her monthly state of lassitude. If a little cut healed by the time she woke up, would she even know?

A swelling minority argument wanted to legalise, regulate and tax drac.

She couldn’t tell the detectives much they hadn’t worked out for themselves. But she stood on the stoop, looking down at the body-tape outline that showed where Fortunato had fallen, and ran it through for them, anyway...

‘Besides whatever kick it is dhamps get out of being vampires for a few hours, the appeal of drac to your traditional drug dealer is ease of supply. It doesn’t have to be muled in from Burma or Colombia. You just need a vampire. Either a willing, paid donor or, as the shackle suggests was the case here, a patsy snatched off the street and milked. Drac production isn’t quite as simple as squeezing a vein into a baggie. The powdered form common on the street is vampire blood, usually cut with human or animal matter, exposed to sunlight until it granulates. You can leave it out all day to congeal and dry, at the risk of losing a lot of red to evaporation, or you can repurpose the grow lamps you bought when you were raising marijuana to hurry things along.’

In a room with polythene sheeting on the walls and floor, trays of drac were processed this way. Here, Barksdale red was measured into foil triangles. That location turned up more dead soldiers — two middle-aged Hispanic women and a
pre-quinceañera
girl, huddled together. For work, they were stripped to bra and panties accessorised with surgeon’s masks, shower-caps and disposable gloves. They’d been unsentimentally plugged, execution-style. More haulage for Blake and Grimes.

On the street, Barksdale drac was sold as ‘Fright Night’; the foil wraps had little bat stickers to identify the brand. Mahoney’s double-star baggies were known as ‘Near Dark’ in the projects or ‘Once Bitten’ in uptown night-spots. Other common North-Eastern drac varieties were ‘Vamp’, ‘Monster Squad’ and ‘Lifeforce’. Out of New York came ‘Innocent Blood’, ‘Habit’, ‘Addiction’ and ‘Nadja’. Along the Tex-Mex border, a strain called ‘Cronos’ was popular. An especially lethal drac known as ‘Black Lodge’ or ‘Killer Bob’ was spreading from Canada down into Washington State. California had ‘Hellmouth’, ‘Embraced’ and ‘Lost Boy’. Back in Toronto, dhamp-scene murgatroyds snorted or shot ‘Forever’, ‘Night Inside’ and ‘Amarantha’. A lot of crap was talked about bloodlines and purity of sources; it was all the same poison.

Geneviève would never know what a drac hit felt like - it didn’t work on vampires. Then again, it didn’t need to. Vampires had their own, exclusive high. Every night of the week. The thickness of skin away.

‘With demand ever on the increase, drac outfits need multiple vampires in chains or on staff. They get used up rapidly, unless handled with great care. If you want me to take a wild guess at what happened here, I’d say one drac concern had hit on a prime source of red, and another has moved swiftly to acquire the asset. This wasn’t a rescue, this was a snatch and grab. The murders were incidental. Or just to leave the trademark. This many dead drac dealers is like a double star on the bag. You know who...’

The detectives did.

‘What about the voodoo hoodoo?’ asked the black cop.

Geneviève had been thinking about the makeshift doll.

‘Chalk that up to an uncanny coincidence. You don’t really believe shoving a rusty nail through the back of the head of a doll in the likeness of Wilkie Collins could actually cause his brains to burst through a gunshot-like hole in his skull?’

‘I believe you can turn into
un chauve-souris enorme
,’ said the Jewish detective.

‘Well, more fool you because I can’t.’

She tried flapping her arms.

‘Any ideas as to the identity of our formerly cooped-up fount of all things
rouge
and rotten? Connoisseur of soul and smut?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Take a look through the missing persons files and flag the vampires. Though we’re a cagey, elusive lot. We disappear frequently and our vanishing acts can easily go unreported. It’s as if no one misses us, officers. How can that be?’

The cops shrugged, as one.

Her beeper went off.

‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘Another call on the Medical Examiner signal. So I’m into the ME-mobile and away to fight more dastardly crime. Tell me how this works out, if it works out.’

She left them and found her car. The Plymouth still had its hubcaps and was free of gang tags, scratches, bullet holes and piles of human ordure. There was a fresh blood pool in the gutter, though. She unhooked a recently severed human finger from the radiator grille and left it on the sidewalk. If reclaimed, it could probably be reattached.

Like voodoo, her car’s self-protection system was something she didn’t think about too much.

If this evening was a fair representation of what was on offer through the dating section of the Sun’s personal columns, Geneviève would look for another way of meeting eligible men who weren’t dead on a table.

Her date was a reasonable-looking, divorced guide-book writer who spoke in a monotone about his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriend and his ex-dog. He dissected his crabs the way she autopsied corpses. She started on golden and moved to pig’s blood, remembering they’d agreed to split the bill. Towards the end of the meal, he began fiddling with the button under his tie-knot. A ‘bite me bite me’ tell.

She tuned out when he left off his former dependents to deliver a lecture about ‘travel-size packets’. Normally, when her shift was over, she could forget what she saw on the job... today, she kept flashing back to the Barksdale basement. She knew her priorities were wrong — by any objective standards, the needless murder of the women in the processing room was the worst horror of the house — but that silver chain and the tiny, strip-lit space haunted her.

Her date didn’t notice she’d drifted away.

His top button was undone now. His pulses were strong, but she had a notion that his blood would be milky. The
aperitif
hits of golden had given her a warm glow, which the pig’s blood cocktail turned into a savage, needy burn of desire. Not for this man, though.

She’d rather bite his dog.

At that thought, she giggled — inappropriate to his point about favouring shaving gel over foam — and he was offended.

His Adam’s apple showed.

She looked at the neatly cracked, sliced and prised-apart crab exoskeleton on his plate.

In her reverie, she found herself in the Ten Bells in Whitechapel in 1888, at a table with Charles. They were talking about the murders.

‘It’s been nearly a month, Charles,’ she ventured, ‘since the “double event”. Perhaps it’s over?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Good things come to an end, bad things have to be stopped.’

Damn, he was right. Always.

And he was gone, not even a ghost...

The present faded back up and her date was talking at her. Like most Americans, he called her Genevieve.

Every time he used her name, which he did unnaturally often, it sounded odder to her, more grating...

At nine-thirty, Lorie - who was responsible for directing Geneviève to the
Sun’
s personals in the first place - would call her beeper. They had agreed on a cut-off point. If the evening was worth pursuing, Geneviève could tell her date it was a wrong number and carry on. If not, she could claim to be summoned to a bloodbath on the other side of town. Door number two was the current favourite.

Her big wrist watch was for work, so she wasn’t wearing it. She couldn’t see the restaurant clock from where she was sitting.

He was talking about shampoo and conditioner. Time stood still.

Prison was boring. As mind numbing as this. She’d been imprisoned in her time. In dungeons, convents, an eighteenth-century zoo. In well-appointed apartments and shacks. She had mostly shut down and tried to stay calm, secure that she could outlive confinement, waiting for the walls to fall down or her captors to age and die. She had been forgotten in
oubliettes.
Before the Dracula Declaration, that was easier than it would be now. Then, few had believed what she was.

She didn’t know what she’d do if she were captured and held nowadays.

If what went on in the Barksdale basement was now a thing, she must at least work out contingency plans. It could happen to any vampire.