Crimson Vengeance (3 page)

Then, nothing but silence filled the room.

“Damn it.” Colin quickened his step along the side of the building. Why couldn’t these buildings have more than one set of doors? He’d had no trouble scaling the security fence, but gaining entrance to the building so far proved to be more problematic. The doors were locked up nice and secure with mag-card readers that he’d learned from long experience were hard to circumvent. He kept looking. There had to be a way in.

A few minutes earlier he watched the two women roll a body into the building through the rear doors. It didn’t take a huge leap to figure out the body was the same one pulled from the chilly waters of Moses Lake, though none of it made much sense. Why bring a body some hundred-plus miles from the county of the murder? And when there were facilities for autopsy in the same county? One sure way to get the real story—only first he needed to figure out how to get in the damn place.

A muffled scream came from somewhere deep within the building. He stopped in his tracks.
Ah, shit.
All hell was about to break loose and he was the only one who could stop it. He moved even faster along the perimeter of the facility. Finally, he saw it.

Colin slammed his hand against a round red button and waited. He tapped his foot and drummed his fingers on top of the red button, ready to smack it again if need be.

It seemed to take forever before a gray-uniformed, beefy-armed rent-a-cop opened the door. He filled the doorway like a block of concrete and effectively blocked Colin’s entrance—but Colin wasn’t intimidated. This bozo was an obvious wannabe who’d never be. He just didn’t know it yet.

“The ME’s office is closed. You’ll need to come back tomorrow.” He popped his gum and rested a hand on his baton. His face was neutral though his eyes sparked. Probably practiced the look in the mirror every night.

Colin narrowed his own eyes. “Not acceptable.”

He threw a carefully placed punch to the man’s neck and the guy went down like a big bag of wet sand. Colin stepped over him before pulling him inside. A second scream, louder now that he was inside, echoed through the hallway. Leaving the unconscious man on the floor, he ran in the direction of it.

The whole time he was sprinting through the empty hallway, he kept thinking something wasn’t right. Then it hit him: after the second scream…nothing. It didn’t make sense, there should be more noise. The thing would be disoriented and hungry and looking for a way out. These things could get more than a little vocal when first rising. So where was the noise?
Please, Jesus, let
me be in time.

Colin continued to run down the hallway, pushing open doors as he went. One on his right. Two on his left. Where was he?

Goddamnit, he had to find him. Everyone here would die if he didn’t get to this creature now.

At the end of the long hallway, he smacked a wide door with his palm. It flew open, banging against a wall with a deafening crash, and he stopped, sliding on the smooth tile. The door hit his shoulder as it swung back. Bright light filled the room, spilling down like a halo around three women who stood by an occupied autopsy table.

They looked up in unison, surprise mirrored on all three faces.

“May I help you?” This came from the smallest woman.

Young and pretty, she had a voice filled with authority. Had to be a tech of some sort. He didn’t need a flunky, he needed the boss.

“I’m looking for the ME.” He peered around the room.

“That would be me. I’m Dr. Preston and you are?” Her eyes seemed to bore through him.

“In a hurry.” Colin didn’t have time for the young woman’s games. He needed the ME and he needed him now. Her dark, menacing look didn’t cut it with him. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This youngster was wasting his time.

“And I’m in the middle of an autopsy.” A single eyebrow rose though her voice did not.

He paused and studied her. “You can’t be the ME.” So maybe she wasn’t a tech. Med student, maybe?

“I can and I am. Now, sir, as I said, I’m rather busy at the moment.” Ice began to drip from her words.

His gaze went to the table and his mouth opened. Nothing came out. It couldn’t be. Less than five minutes ago, he’d heard the scream. The man, the one pulled from Moses Lake, had turned.

Colin would bet his life on it. Yet the same man was on the table and opened up like a treasure chest with a very precise Y-incision.

He was, as the old saying went, dead as a doornail, and an ME who looked to be about twelve years old glared at Colin like the intruder he was.

None of this made the least bit of sense. Not the dead man.

Not the young woman who declared she was, in fact, the ME for Spokane County. “I…I…ah…”

“Well, that certainly clears things up.”

She slowly laid an instrument on the table. It made a slight ping as metal met metal. Inside the quiet room, the sound was like a cannon shot. Her gaze came up to his face, her eyes dark and intelligent. The face might be that of an adolescent, the eyes were not. “I think,” he began to back toward the door he’d come through only minutes before. “I think, I’ve possibly made a mistake.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“My mistake.” He turned and ran.

Colin was in his car with the engine running in less than a minute. One thing this job had taught him was speed. He knew when to get out of Dodge. He didn’t look back as he sped away from the offices of the Spokane County Medical Examiner.

At the hotel, he booked a room with a balcony overlooking Riverfront Park. The downtown jewel was once the site of dirty rail yards, renovated in 1974 for the Spokane World’s Fair. Or so the helpful desk clerk informed him. It was impressive, even to his tired mind. He couldn’t envision what it might have looked like years ago riddled with train tracks, rail riders, and boxcars. These days, in addition to the lush lawns, paved walking paths, and an incredible historic carrousel, the river ran right through the middle of the park, the waters deep and clear. It was all so beautiful. If only evil didn’t lurk beneath everything majestic and beautiful.

He took off his jacket, unloaded his weapons, and dropped to the bed. God, he was tired. Eyes closed, he prayed for rest, except sleep wouldn’t come. Instead, he pondered what he’d seen and it still didn’t make sense.

Darkness had fallen well before he’d done the smack-down on the security guard. With darkness would come the man’s transformation into the preternatural realm of monsters. Short of a stake through the heart, he would have become a vampire—not a body laid out for autopsy.

Unless…

Colin jumped up off the bed and headed to the shower, peeling off clothes as he went. He was naked and alert by the time he stepped beneath the spray. The water was cool and refreshing. His mind cleared instantly. Weariness vanished as if the water washed it down the drain.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He slapped the wall, making water spray into his eyes. The sting made him blink.

He pictured the three women in the autopsy room: the tiny ME

with the intense eyes; the beautiful Hispanic coroner he’d followed from Moses Lake; and the third, a petite and attractive black woman, who stood nervously in the background with a specimen case held tight in her hands. To the casual observer, they were simply three professional women performing the business of death, just doing their jobs.

He shook his head and propped both hands against the tile.

Fresh water flowed down his back, cooling his skin and clearing his mind more fully as he whispered, “They knew.”

Riah had an uneasy feeling about their intruder. She became even more uneasy when she found Brett, the evening security guard, in a crumpled heap just inside the rear door to the facility. The good news was Brett was still alive. The bad news…

he was a big guy, and to take him down without a sound was an impressive feat. Nope, not good at all.

She couldn’t have been more than a few seconds behind the stranger and yet he’d slipped out of the building so fast, she’d lost sight of him. Riah still held an advantage. He was human and she wasn’t. No matter how fast he was, she was faster. If she had time, she could track him and find out exactly who he was.

Except she didn’t have time. Not right now anyway. She shut the door and waited to hear the click of the lock. One uninvited intruder a night was plenty. No one else was going to get through the door unless she let them in, although she wasn’t totally convinced the locked door would have stopped the last visitor even if Brett hadn’t opened it for him.

Why? Why would the man be so intent on coming into her facility he would risk not just the security guard but the cameras as well? She intended to find out. Riah checked Brett’s pulse, found it strong and steady. Before she headed back to the autopsy room, she placed a call to the Spokane police. As much as she’d like to keep this incident quiet, that wasn’t possible. The minute Brett became involved, it slipped out of her control. Because the morgue was located in the same complex as the police department, it took only a few minutes for an officer to arrive. As soon as she could make a graceful exit, she returned to Ivy.

“Who was that guy?” Ivy had her head down, her hands busy over the body on the table.

“I don’t know.”

Ivy looked up at Riah then, her dark eyes hazy behind the shield of her headgear. Dressed in green scrubs, her hair covered by a cap and her gloved hands slightly bloody, she looked a bit like she’d just stepped out of a horror movie. Though, in reality, it
was
horror.

Certainly the path she and Ivy chose was macabre to some. It was the dirty business of death most people preferred not to think about.

It was more about life than death for Riah. She’d been undead a very long time and needed to understand why. What took her youth and turned her into something she hated to think about? She knew who it was, or perhaps more accurately what it was, that took her life on a dark winter night. She’d never forget him or how he’d looked when she destroyed him. There was a lot to be said about the teachings in the Old Testament—an eye for an eye.

Now she searched for something more concrete though elusive.

She wanted to know
what
set her apart from Ivy and from Adriana. If she could discover that secret, perhaps she could find the key to her own salvation. No more blood, no more immortality, no more secrets.

Beneath the light green cap, Ivy’s brow wrinkled. “Odd,” she said as she stared down at the body.

Riah let out a breath and pulled a cap over her hair and a shield over her face. None of the blood or fluids encountered would harm her; she had just formed the habit during her many years of pretending to be human.

“What’s odd?” she asked Ivy when she once again stood at the table’s edge.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ivy muttered. “We should see some sign of a struggle, but there’s nothing.” She picked up one of his hands and showed his smooth palm to Riah. “It’s like this guy let the vamp kill him. At least the last victim tried to fight. Why wouldn’t he put up a fight?”

The unmarred skin didn’t surprise her. It was so easy to lure a willing victim, though not one of the secrets of her past she’d shared with Ivy. She wasn’t about to now either. Instead she said, “Let’s see what this guy can tell us.” She moved to the other side of the table.

“Hey.” Adriana spoke from behind Ivy. “I’m going to my lab.

I’ll call you later.” Adriana touched Riah lightly on the shoulder as she passed. Her fingers were warm even through the protective garment.

Riah nodded and forced her focus to the body. Adriana had plenty to do with her samples, and she needed to do her work here.

On the table, his chest was opened, the heart exposed. The damage that the small wooden spike had inflicted was clearly evident under the harsh fluorescent lights. “We’ll need to camou-flage that.” Riah pointed to the ragged edges of the hole caused by the stake.

“You got it,” Ivy said, and picked up a scalpel to begin the work of making this body appear to be a run-of-the-mill homicide victim.

The autopsy was completed, notes made, and the victim once more secured in the back of Ivy’s van and on his way back to Moses Lake by a little past ten. Riah shrugged out of her bloody scrubs, washed up, then slipped on a soft leather jacket. She turned out the lights in the autopsy suite and walked down the hall.

Brett was busy in the main control room making his report to the uniformed police officer, and while she’d also been questioned about the intruder, she’d successfully pled ignorance. She should have told everyone about the tall stranger who barged into the autopsy room. She could have given a very accurate description.

That she didn’t wasn’t only out of character, it was potentially dangerous. She didn’t choose to explore her reasons too deeply.

In her car, Riah reached into a cooler and pulled out a small, thick plastic bag. She sighed and accepted the inevitable. She needed the blood, and if she didn’t take it this way, her cravings would rule her. If she allowed that to happen…well, she didn’t want to think about how it would end.

She started the car and turned the heat on high. For a few minutes, she let the container rest on top of the heater vent. Taking it from a bag was bad enough. Ice-cold from the cooler was unbearable.

Even a vampire had her limits.

Once the blood was gone and she felt refreshed and sated, she turned the heat down, put the car in Drive, and pulled through the security gate onto the city street. She intended to go directly home. Instead, she found herself heading north. Ten minutes later, she pulled off Northwest Boulevard and into the driveway of a tidy one-story house along the ridge of the hill overlooking the river.

Adriana’s house. So much for good intentions.

For a long time, she sat in the car. Really, she should go home.

Adriana would let her know tomorrow what, if anything, she’d learned. Except she didn’t want to go home. Not tonight. It might have been the visit by the strange man that had her so disquieted now. Maybe. Maybe not.