Heat (80 page)

Kane dropped his juice-collector in his pack. He glared at the back of her for a while longer, and then sighed and held out one arm. “All right, come here.”

The pony came in unsteady movie-mummy jerks and practically fell into Kane’s chest. She put her arms around him, the fingers of her bloody hand awkwardly crooked out so they touched nothing. She sucked in a breath and let it out in a ragged rush. “I killed him!” she howled and burst into tears.

“You sure did.” Kane patted the shaking shoulders. His gaze went to Sue-Eye and he shrugged slightly, his mouth set in a bitterly tolerant twist. “You did just fine.”

“It was awful!”

“It’ll get easier.”

Raven drew back, her eyes frantic. “Are you going to make me do it again?”

“That depends.” Kane gave her a severe frown. “Are you going to behave yourself now?”

She nodded wildly, still searching his face.

He wasn’t going to kill her. God damn it.

“All right then. Stay close and you don’t have to help any more tonight.” Kane gave her a final consoling rub and turned to Sue-Eye. “What about you?” he asked. “Feel like killing anyone?”

Sue-Eye stared at him, almost shaking with the effort of holding so still, of not looking past him to the pony swiping at her leaky eyes and sniffling behind him. Her senses were still clogged with the smell of death and the rolling thunder of Kane’s fury, and she could
feel
how near that purple-haired bitch had come to dying. She could almost taste the blood in her own mouth it had been so close. “Oh, you bet I do,” she said.

Kane looked at her for what felt like hours as the neon lights hummed and the pissant town slept and blood soaked into the cheap linoleum inside the hotel office. At last, he reached into his pack, brought out his device, and held it out to her.

She snatched at it and gripped it, her hand aching and her breath burning.

Kane had a hand for her shoulder then, a light slap to put her feet in motion as he moved for the door. “All right then,
ichuta’a
. Let’s hunt.”

*

Little fingers on his arm brought Tagen out of a dream of stars and back into his bed. He groped behind him, his eyes still shut, to find Daria. Once that was done, he tugged her down over his hip to tumble into bed beside him. He ignored her protestations and pulled her against him, nipping at her jaw to silence her, and prepared to go back to sleep.

“Tagen, you have to get up,” she said. “At least, I think you do.”

“Mm. Unless the house is a’fire, I think not.”

“There were more murders.”

He opened his eyes. The room was dark. Daria’s face was only a pale suggestion of itself in the surrounding shadows. She was an early riser, his human host, but never this early. “What is the hour?” he asked.

“Almost four.”

He frowned, and then rolled over and switched on a light so that Daria could see his disapproval. “Why were you awake to hear of these murders?” he asked.

She went shame-faced at once. “I was…sweeping,” she confessed and immediately became defensive. “Well, the door was open all that time! All this stuff got in! Besides, I was just constructively killing a little time while I made myself a snack. It’s not like I was re-enameling the kitchen sink. I was mostly watching tee-vee.”

Tagen pushed himself into a sitting posture so that he could glare at her more effectively. “And if I were to go downstairs right now, the mopping bucket would not be wet,” he said narrowly. “I would not smell cleaners or see moisture drying on your floors.”

She was silent.

“Or your cupboards?” he pressed.

“All this stuff got in!”

He sighed and flung back the sheets, reaching for his clothing. It was not worth the argument. He would very much like to observe that no reasonable person would be sterilizing her home in the middle of the night, but she knew it already and did not need to keep hearing it from him. He stepped into his breeches and stood up to fasten them. “Tell me of these murders,” he said instead.

“The floor was filthy,” she said. Her voice was a morose shadow of itself. She would not look at him.

He sighed again and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “Yes,” he said simply. He touched a claw to the stray locks of hair that fell over her brow, tucking them back behind her ear. “But mostly you were watching tee-vee. What was it that made you think to wake me?”

“I—” Daria cast a sidelong look at the open bedroom door, and then dropped her gaze to her own knees. “There was a motel in a place called Pinesborough, near the Washington border. Someone from the graveyard shift found the No Vacancy sign on and the office closed and called the cops. The cops found practically everyone in the building dead. Do you know what a motel is, Tagen?”

“A bedding station where humans mate extramaritally,” he replied.

She looked at him, opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again and seriously said, “You watch too much cable television.”

“What then?”

“I didn’t say you were wrong.” She rubbed at her knees restlessly. “I just wanted to make sure you knew what one looked like, so when I say that practically everyone in the building was dead, you know that means someone had to go to a bunch of different rooms.”

“I do.” He regarded her closely. “When you say ‘practically’…do you mean to imply that there are survivors?”

“I’m just repeating what the news guy said. No one’s confirmed yet how many bodies there were or if there really were survivors or even how the people were killed, so…” She trailed off, looking increasingly uncomfortable, and raised a hand to rub at her scars. “So this is probably a huge waste of your time, come to think of it. Forget it. Go back to sleep.”

She stood up and Tagen moved swiftly to intercept her before she could reach the door. “Tell me,” he said intently.

“It’s probably nothing,” she insisted and tried to go around him.

He caught her arm.

She looked at his hand and when he did not release her, she sighed and said, “I was looking at the map and…and it’s not a dead match or anything, but…I think I see—”

“A pattern,” Tagen said, drawing a deep, clarifying breath. “I knew that you would. What is it?”

“Don’t get excited,” she warned him. “It’s not a real clear circle.”

Tagen blinked. He turned his head, frowning at the corner of the room as he conjured a memory of the map before him. Surely, he would have seen something as obvious as a circle.

“That’s not all. Or, actually, there’s more, but some or all of it could be crap.”

He doubted that.

“Do you want to come see?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes.” Tagen left the rest of his clothing where they lay on the floor and went half-clad out into the hall, preceding his human and moving with great purpose.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again, her head bent and cheeks pink.

“So I hear.”

“The stairs need vacuuming,” she muttered.

He turned around mid-step, one claw raised to the level of her eyes. “If you so much as touch that appliance—”

“Here, look.” Daria ducked under his arm and crossed into the sitting room, indicating the map spread out on the floor. There were more marks on it, black ones to indicate the deaths at the movie theatre and, presumably, this new killing site at the motel she spoke of. But there was also a rash of small, red circles, some of then enclosing black marks, others merely nearby.

Tagen stood beside her, looking down at the map with his hands clasped behind his back in officer’s stance. “What am I looking for?”

“It starts here, on Highway 20, when he’s on foot. These are the first murders, we agree on that, right?”

“Yes.”

“East, east, east…and then he gets his car and he goes all the way out here. Now, we can kind of consider these his feelers. He never goes out that far after this, and he’ll never kill two times in a row while traveling in the same direction again. Okay?”

Tagen shrugged and nodded, his brows still drawn together in confusion.

Daria looked up at him, bit at her lip in that endearing expression of nervousness, and then hunkered down and put her finger on the map. “He went out on I-84 and he came back the same way, I think. Then he turned up I-15, going north. Here’s the tattoo parlor, a day or two after the motel guy in Idaho. And here’s Blue Ridge, off I-5, way down by Sacramento. Now…” Daria’s teeth found her lip again. Gods, that was distracting. “The only way your guy can get from I-15 northbound to Blue Ridge, is if he stopped and took Highway 12 west back to I-84, and then to Portland first and hop on I-5. See?”

“If you say it’s so,” he said, believing himself to be a very patient man.

Daria pointed at a red circle aside of what, presumably, was Highway 12. “This is an abandoned car,” she said. “It was registered to one of these guys—” She pointed at the second of E’Var’s killings. “—and the day after it was ticketed, a missing persons report came in from the family of a young man who was supposed to be coming to Portland from Missoula, which meant he probably took Highway 12. They haven’t found him yet, but his car turned up over here—” She indicated another red circle, low on the map. “Right about the same time another family filed another missing person report. Now do you see it?”

“I…see it lies east of Blue Ridge,” Tagen said slowly. He dropped to one knee beside her and in a doubtful voice, added, “Is this the circle of which you speak?”

“Don’t look for a circle-shape,” she told him. “Look at the roads.”

She took his hand, placed his finger on the first black mark and drew it east on the thick line used to designate a roadway. East and north and west and south and east upon another road and then…

“What is this?” he asked, moving his finger from the eastward highway onto a north-running road to a red circle.

“That’s Sugarush, Nevada,” she told him. Every muscle of her was tense, betraying a great uncertainty. “Where thirteen kids got horribly killed in the woods. I didn’t think to look into that too closely when it happened because the cops have the girl who says she did it already in custody, but you get to Sugarush by going south on I-5 from Blue Ridge and east on I-80, and then take a north on Highway 95, see? And if you keep going north on 95, you’ll hit Highway 20, which will take you—”

“West,” Tagen said.

“To Hillmark,” Daria finished.

Tagen leaned back, his claws flexing on his bent knee, and stared grimly at the map. “What exactly happened in this place, Sugarush?” he asked.

“A lot of massive head trauma, I found out that much. One survivor, a girl, high as a flippin’ kite. She confessed, Tagen. At the time, she claimed she got high and imagined ‘that guy from the bible’ came and must have told her to kill everyone.”

“Bible?”

“A book most of us humans have read,” she said, shaking her head to show that wasn’t the point. “Until now, I didn’t have a reason to find out any more, but the murders she’s taking credit for fit your guy’s M.O. too damn well. I poked around a little, and I found a sound bite where she finally says just which guy from the bible she thinks she met.”

“And—?”

“And it’s a guy named Cain.” She looked up into his thunderstruck face. “Does this prisoner of yours, Kanetus E’Var, ever shorten his name?”

“He may,” Tagen said numbly. He stared down at the map. “And from Sugarush to Hillmark.”

“From Hillmark south about an hour on Highway 395 to another motel where three guys were killed the same night as the movie theater massacre. From there, south just to Route 31 eastbound, and straight out to Pinesborough. You see, it’s not a round sort of circle, but it’s always like that. He doesn’t appear to be traveling every single day, but he turns when he kills and he turns in the same exact pattern along the big roads. East, north, west, south. Which means,” she said, leaning back to look at him, “that he probably took 97 north after he was done at Pinesborough. And…and I’ll tell you something else, if you want to hear it.”

“Speak,” he said. His voice was hoarse enough that he did not recognize it for his own.

Daria glanced at the timepiece on her wrist. “The news report specified it was the graveyard shift guy who called the cops. Graveyard starts at two. Now…going back here to Hillmark and the motel he hit the same night…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he set out to kill people at that motel. I think he stopped there to sleep.”

“
Surely
not!”

“He did his thing at the theatre, and then he drove about an hour and stopped at the motel. He killed those men, and then he drove another hour and stopped again. This time, he did sleep. In a motel, and I’ll tell you why I think so.”

“He would never take such a risk!”

“Assuming E’Var’s driver isn’t speeding—which I’m guessing she isn’t, seeing as she has an alien in the car—and assuming an average speed of sixty miles per hour, plus an hour for rest stops and fill-ups, you can go from Pinesborough on Highway 97 north to where it turns into I-82 north and from there to the I-90 intersection in ten hours. At the I-82 and I-90 intersection, you will find many cheap hotels with check-out times posted at eleven or noon. Now, if E’Var is camping in the woods somewhere and not sleeping in a motel, he would already be on the road before then because he’d want to start moving while it was still cool and not sit around waiting for it to get that hot.”

“That…makes sense,” he admitted.

“The distance varies a lot,” Daria continued, “but for the most part, I can see an eight or nine hour drive between each of these murders. Hillmark is only eight hours from Sugarush, but it’s ten hours if you start counting down by the I-80 intersection instead of by the murders. It’s nine and a half hours from Sugarush to the Highway 20 intersection, where there happens to be a cute little town with a lot of summer resorts…hotels. Eight hours from that place back to Blue Ridge. Eleven hours from Blue Ridge to Portland, but seeing as that was I-5, I’m guessing that was more than one day’s drive anyway. The reason why this is important is because eight or nine hours of driving will take you quite handily from check-out time at most hotels to the time of day when it starts to cool off outside enough that you don’t go into Heat anymore, Tagen.”