InsistentHunger (18 page)

“Silver, you look like shit.”

Paige turned to find the captain watching her. “Thanks,
Captain, that’s just what every woman wants to hear.”

His eyebrow twitched. “Well, you do.” He sighed and crossed
his arms. “What are you even doing here, Silver?”

“Working.”

“Silver.” He sighed again, and she could feel the weariness
hanging on him.

She wasn’t the only one struggling with this. He had a
serial rapist loose in his town, a bunch of out-of-towners trying to show up
the department and now a missing cop who everyone thought was dead. She
wouldn’t want to be in his shoes any more than she wanted to be in her own.

“Paige, you lost a partner yesterday. No one expects you to
be here today.” His voice was soft and yet the noise level in the whole room
seemed to drop. People even typed quieter and Paige chafed under the weight of
all their sympathy.

“And yet, if I’m not here, that means I’m home staring at
the walls. Come on, at least let me go type in parking tickets. It’d be better
than sitting around doing nothing.” Paige didn’t add that it would also give
her an excuse to access the police database.

“Considering the look on your face, I’d be scared you’d
shoot the computer the first time it crashed.”

Paige stood up straighter. “Captain. I am not—”

“That was a joke, Silver, a badly timed joke. I know you
wouldn’t do that, but I also know you’re not doing well.” He looked her up and
down and Paige prayed that he wasn’t going to send her away. If she had to sit
at home and do nothing, she was going to go slowly and inevitably insane. She
had a good head start on it now.

“Please, Captain.” She didn’t often beg, but right now she
was willing to.

“You can take paid leave, Silver,” he said with sympathy
that grated against Paige’s nerves.

“If I wanted to, I would. I can’t sit home. I just can’t,
Captain.”

He rubbed his neck and looked out over the people crowding
their small station. “I still remember when that first partner of yours ate his
gun. Damn. We were all a mess over that, but now you’ve lost a second partner.
No one is supposed to come through that without being a little emotionally
battered around the edges.”

Paige nodded mutely. Everyone had been shocked that she came
out of that shooting without a scratch and when Matherton had come out of
surgery still breathing, it’d felt like victory. At least, it had until he’d
killed himself rather than learn to live with a few physical limitations.

She’d been so angry at him that she’d come close to
quitting, but this wasn’t the same. She needed to be here and she kept praying
the captain would let her stay. She planned to outwait the captain, but after
several minutes, it was pretty clear that he wanted an answer.

“I’m a lot battered around the edges. Matherton was…I know I
did what I could for him, but Brady was my trainee. He was my partner, and when
someone came looking for him, I wasn’t anywhere around. Captain, I can’t sit at
home and wonder what his last hours were like. I can’t do it.”

He looked at her with concern. “So you’re giving up on him
being alive?”

She wanted so badly to just tell him the truth, to drag
someone else into this world so she didn’t have to be alone in it. But he was a
good man with grandkids and a life that didn’t have room for vampires. She
could handle late-night visits from vampire hunters. She could worry about
whether her vampire partner was going to kill her in the middle of the night.
He didn’t need to live like that.

“You saw the blood. He didn’t survive that, Captain. If he’d
shown up in a hospital the first few hours, but now…” She let her voice trail
off without sharing Brady’s secret.

He nodded. “We’ll find who did this.”

Paige pressed her lips together as a cold fury washed
through her. “We’d better.”

The captain slapped her arm, and for a second, he left his
hand there. “I tell you what—play detective for the day. You were working the
rape case on the streets, so take a look at the paperwork and see if anything
new stands out that the rest of us are missing. I’ve looked through those damn
files so many times that I can see the women’s faces in my dreams, but we can’t
pin down the perp. Turn some of that nervous energy loose on him.”

Maybe Paige’s shock showed on her face because the captain
patted her shoulder. “Silver, you’ve got a sharp mind. You would have made
detective years ago if you’d tried for it. So your insight would be helpful.
Just don’t leave this station. If you get some lead you want to follow up, you
get one of the detectives or me. You are in no shape to follow up on anything.”

“Yes sir,” she quickly agreed.

“If you so much as go to the bathroom across the street
while hoping to run into some witness you’re interested in, I’ll pull your
badge and gun until I think you’re thinking straight again. Because right now
you don’t have the right frame of mind to be on the streets, got it?”

Paige nodded. “I got it and you’re right. There’s this part
of me that wants to crawl in a hole and let the rest of you deal with this,”
she admitted with a little more honesty than she meant to use.

“That’s called being human, Silver. You’re admitting to
being human.” The smile he gave her had too much pity for her to feel
comfortable, but after a half-second, he turned and headed for his office.

Paige swallowed her bitter emotions before she headed for
the bank of computers that had been set up for the taskforce. Most were sitting
empty because detectives were out chasing their tails after pulling together
reports from yesterday’s canvass. By this afternoon, the room would be full of
weary men and women dragging their failure behind them.

Sitting at the end farthest from the bathrooms, since that
was where people tended to gather and gossip, she logged in. When she tried to
pull up the rape case file from the common server, the computer gave an
embarrassingly loud chirp and asked for verification of a password. If the
captain hadn’t given her permission to access the file, that would have been
downright embarrassing.

“Are you looking for a file?” the profiler asked. Paige was
a little embarrassed to realize she didn’t know his name. He’d given her a ride
after Brady disappeared and he’d been working the case for a week, but she
couldn’t come up with his name to save her soul.

“The captain said to review the files. Maybe Brady and I did
see something we didn’t understand the importance of.” She expected him to
question that, but he leaned over and typed one-handed.

“Good thinking. If you get logged out, the login is your own
ID and the password is 117273. If you run into anything interesting, let me
know. Do you want the profile we have so far?”

Paige shook her head. The last thing she needed was a long
speech about the rapist’s motivations. She couldn’t care less if he was abused
as a child, and if this was a vampire, the rule book probably didn’t apply.
“I’m just looking for anything familiar, anything that I might have not
recognized the importance of when Brady and I were interviewing people.” Paige
kept her eyes focused on the computer in the hopes that the profiler would just
wander on his merry little way. Luckily he took a hint easier than Alex or
Veronica.

“If you need anything clarified, I’ll probably stay here
most of the day.” With that, he left her to wander through the files on her
own.

She started with the geographical stuff. The area was the
poorest part of town, not far from where Hunter had blown up the house. The
smell around there kept most people away, but for those without much money, it
was a way to buy or rent a fairly decent house at slum prices. And if the
suspect was a vamp, the close proximity to the swamp would make it pretty easy
to disappear.

Paige remembered how the eighties vamp had leaped into the
air with inhuman power. Yeah, it would be really easy for them to disappear on
foot and the swamp wouldn’t leave any trace.

Basic rule of profiling—people generally stayed within their
own race when looking for victims. It made sense. A white face was going to
stand out in this part of town. Historically, this was a black section, but
starting in the seventies, the blacks had moved on to better houses and illegal
immigrants started moving in.

At first clay mines and paper mills had hired them, but
these days, they seemed to run their own shadow economy of cheap labor for
construction sites, landscaping and housekeeping. So the suspect or suspects
were probably Hispanic and most likely illegal. Only an illegal immigrant would
trust the fear of the police to keep victims quiet. Unless it was a
vampire—Paige could imagine that people would keep quiet just to keep from
sounding crazy. God knows that’s what she was doing.

If the suspect was a vampire, it would also explain the
sheer terror in some of their witnesses. It wouldn’t explain why they didn’t
feel the lust Paige did when Brady got too close.

Pushing that aside, Paige focused on the case. Victims two
and five were the only ones to die. Number two, Marianna Carriño de Morales,
had a heart attack at age forty-two. The coroner found a defective heart valve
that she probably never knew about until her rapist scared her to death. Number
five, Irena Ruiz, had been an insulin-dependent diabetic and she had slipped
into a coma during the attack. She’d lasted hours before dying in the hospital.

On a hunch, Paige pulled up the files on the other four
victims. Number one was missing in action. The detectives thought she had gone
back home to Mexico. If Paige had been raped by a demon, she’d definitely want
to get out of the country, so as much as that made detectives’ work harder,
Paige couldn’t blame the woman.

Eldora Fernandez had been admitted to the hospital a week
after the attack and she was still in County General. The hospital didn’t say
why, but Jim said that people who were touched and escaped still slowly died.
Victim number four didn’t have any official entries after the rape, so
hopefully she was still alive and well. Same for victim six.

Paige sighed as she realized she had a whole lot of nothing.

However, the detectives wouldn’t have looked at dead people
as suspects. That’s where she had an advantage. Maybe the rapist was someone
who’d been turned recently. Setting up the search parameters, she searched for
any Hispanics who had died violently in the eight-county area. She wasn’t sure
what she was looking for, but hopefully something would stand out and scream
“vampire”.

“What’s that?” Paige sucked in a breath and jumped as the
profiler sat on the table next to her.

He held his hands up. “Sorry. Hey, I didn’t mean to startle
you.” Looking over her shoulder, he studied the computer screen. “Violent
deaths? Do you think our rapist has been a busy little boy somewhere else?”

Paige shrugged. “I always think of rapists as insecure
assholes who like to push other people around.”

“Good description. As a psychologist, I usually dress it up
and make the words a little prettier, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.”
He gave her a twisted smile.

“So maybe he tried pushing someone else around.”

The profiler pursed his lips, but he didn’t dismiss her out
of hand. That was good because Paige was pulling this shit out of her ass. She
was really looking for the rapist in the list of the dead.

“It’s a long shot, but at this point, long shots might be
the only new leads around. Let me know if you find anything interesting,” he
said with an encouraging smile before he headed over to the detectives’ table.

Paige blew out a breath. She was definitely off her game
today. She started searching through the computer files for her own sort of
interesting lead. Unfortunately, there weren’t any occult deaths—no strange
symbols or mutilated bodies. True, Paige had a pretty limited experience to
work from, but no one was standing out as a potential vampire.

Her phone rang and Paige reached in her pocket and pulled it
out, thumbing it on without taking her eyes off the computer. Shit. Why wasn’t
anything going her way today? These reports were all blindingly normal.

“Yeah, Silver here.”

“Silver. Oh thank God,” a familiar voice said. “If I’d known
you could run that fast, I would have set up farther from the cars. Then again,
if I’d known you were going to rabbit into the woods, I would have set up
closer to them. You worried me, girl.”

Paige could feel her entire body stiffen in anger. “Hunter,”
she said, her voice low, but Cindy from records still gave her an odd look, so
she was guessing she had her not-happy tone of voice going. Paige hit the
logout button on the computer and excused herself with a nod toward the door
when the profiler looked at her. He nodded and went right back to his
conversation.

“The one and only,” Hunter agreed. “You can handle yourself,
Silver, I have to give you credit for that. You got two kills your first time
out. I’ll even try to not hold it against you that you got one more than I did.
Of course, no one really expects the runner to take out anyone. That’s the
sniper’s job.”

By the time Paige hit the front door and pushed her way
through, she could feel herself getting physically hot despite the cool
weather. “The runner? The fucking runner?” Paige turned her back to try to
shield her conversation from a trio of men coming in. She headed down the
street in search of a quieter corner.

“Yeah, well there’s really only one way to know how someone
is going to handle terror and it’s best to know up front. Right?”

“No, not right,” Paige hissed. “Right would be giving me a
choice.” Paige was trying to whisper, but her voice kept getting louder despite
her best attempt to control herself.

“Doesn’t work that way, Silver. If hunters took on every
gun-happy idiot who caught wind of vampires we’d never get any work done. And
if the idiots weren’t convinced to keep their mouths shut, we’d have a whole
lot of panic on our hands. People are morons when they panic and vamps aren’t
any better. This way we know who’s worth training, and the rest…well, they’re
so frightened that they piss their pants any time someone mentions Dracula.
It’s just the cleanest solution.”