Laws of the Blood 2: Partners (3 page)

Haven almost said,
Lady, this isn’t a detective agency
. Then he remembered that, technically, it was. It was Baker’s office. Baker was a retired cop, now a PI. It was also Baker’s desk, which would make any missing-person problem the woman had Baker’s business. But from the way Baker was looking at him, it wasn’t.
Ah, hell
.

The first thing Haven did was put down the gun he’d picked up when the door opened unexpectedly. The woman hadn’t seen the weapon he held just below the top of the desk, which was piled with books and papers. The second thing he did was save the file the way Baker had taught him and turn off the computer.

Then he waved Baker and the woman into Baker’s office. Baker was some mixture of Native American, black, and Irish and said he got his stubbornness from all three. He was big and brown and bald and ugly but about as soft in the heart as he was hard everywhere
else. Haven had liked the man even in the days when they’d been playing hide-and-seek across the Southwest. Baker had been intent on returning Haven to prison, Haven had tried to kill Baker a few times, but they’d put their differences aside in the service of a higher purpose long ago.

It was because of the reproving look Baker gave him that Haven stood when the woman came toward the desk. Baker’d been trying to civilize him, but Haven preferred to ignore the niceties most of the time. Being polite to a distraught woman seemed like a halfway sensible idea, though if Baker hadn’t been there, Haven would have followed his first impulse and told her to get out.

Baker closed the door and leaned against it. The woman stopped in front of the desk and said, “My name is Brenda Novak, and I’m with the FBI.” By the time he had the Glock pointed openly at her, she’d sat in the chair across from the desk. She looked at him steadily—at him, not the gun. The worry hadn’t left her expression, but she wasn’t worried about him. “I know who you were,” she told him. “And I don’t give a shit. I know—something—about what you do now, and that’s why I need you to help me find my son.”

“What do you know?” Haven asked. “Who told you?” How many was he going to have to kill to keep his secrets quiet? He glared at Baker. “I doubt you told her anything,” he said to his partner.

“He didn’t,” Brenda Novak answered. “I found him.” She spared a quick glance over her shoulder at Baker. “Not an easy task.” She brought her attention back to
Haven. “Easier than finding Danny, though. Searching for Danny has led me down some strange roads—and I’m an FBI profiler; I know strange intimately.”

He’d read about profiling. It was like a kind of officially sanctioned ESP. The government had these people who looked at pictures of crime scenes and predicted what killers would do next and how to catch them. Crazy people got profiled. Haven wasn’t crazy. He kept the gun aimed steadily on the woman and said nothing.

“I realize telling you about myself is dangerous,” Novak went on. She shrugged. She had the manner of someone with nothing to lose. Jebel Haven understood the look of a spirit at the end of its resources. He knew you had to get there before you could get beyond it, into the realm where he lived. Or you got to the end of the road and you gave up and died. He didn’t have any sympathy for the ones he’d known who’d given up. He didn’t have much sympathy for those who’d died trying, either.

Baker crossed the room. He put his big, meaty hands on the back of the woman’s chair. “Put the gun away, Jebel. We’re going to listen to what the woman has to say. It’s our kind of business,” he added when Haven flicked his gaze to his partner’s for a moment.

Haven wanted to think that if this was some sort of trap, Baker would have smelled it. He trusted Baker, and he hated trusting anyone. He didn’t like it, but he sat. He put the gun down, but not away. He left it on the desktop, with his hand close to it. “What are you talking about?” he said to the woman.

“About finding my son,” she said. “That’s the only thing that interests me.”

“You’re with the FBI, and you have a missing son. Kidnapped?”

She nodded.

“The Bureau takes care of its own. Your kid’s missing, your own people are looking for him.”

She made one of those sounds that was a little like a laugh but without any amusement in it. She was a good-looking woman, fortysomething, worried, but keeping it together. “The Bureau does not really deal with “X-Files” cases, Mr. Haven. We don’t even use the term
profiler
in the department, though that is the common—well, the polite—term for what I do. I work for a conservative government bureaucracy. We do indeed take care of our own, but no one wants bad publicity. The Bureau would hang me and my son out to dry if he was caught.”

“Caught?” Haven asked. “I thought you said he was kidnapped. Feds are responsible for kidnapping cases.”

“Only if the victim’s transported across state lines,” Baker put in.

“There are federal rules and regulations about what the Bureau is allowed to investigate,” Novak said. “I think my son has been kidnapped. I also think he is involved with a cult of murderers. If it were not for the fact that my son might have to face charges on several counts of murder, I would happily turn over my suppositions—I can’t call anything I have proof—to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And some of the conclusions I’ve come to lead me to believe . . .” She sighed.
“What I suppose—suspect—I don’t even want to say out loud.” She smiled grimly. “I do not believe in supernatural evil. I already know what the human race is capable of without any help from Satan. There are nut cults out there. They brainwash vulnerable young people. There are some people who use a delusional belief in unearthly evil to do any vicious thing they want. But my son . . . I don’t want to believe that my son . . .”

“Is a serial killer?” Baker asked. He put his big hands on the woman’s shoulders.

“I suspect he is involved with a serial killer.” Her words came out in a sharp, distinct rush, but she didn’t look like she quite believed what she said. Haven noticed that she didn’t try to shake off Baker’s comforting touch.

Haven had no interest in serial killers. “What do you mean by supernatural? What does that have to do with your son?”

And how do you know about your son’s involvement, and what does that have to do with us, and how did you find out about us?
He had a lot of questions for this woman, though he didn’t want to ask them. He didn’t get involved with people; he had other things to do. Baker took on PI work sometimes. That was okay, it helped keep him in contact with other cops without anybody asking funny questions, and it helped pay the bills. Baker didn’t like it when Haven and Santini committed armed robbery in the name of the cause.

Haven already regretted showing even a slight interest in the woman’s problem by the time she answered.

“Do you believe in vampires, Mr. Haven? I think you
do,” she went on before he could issue the standard scoffing denial: No one believes in vampires. She was the one who gave the scoffing laugh. “I’m not sure if anyone ever really did, except maybe the folklorists who listened to the lies Balkan peasants told them for the price of a few beers. I don’t think you’re a gullible person, but I do know that you killed a group of teenagers who were involved with a blood-drinking cult last year. They
thought
they were vampires.”

The little shits deserved what happened to them, even if they hadn’t been the type of vampires he was used to dealing with.

“Those teenagers murdered at least two babies that I know of,” Novak went on. “I don’t mind what you did to them.”

Not to mention all the dogs the nut cult butchered to drink the animals’ blood and eat their hearts. He’d followed the trail of animal mutilations looking for his usual prey and come across the wacko kids instead. Would have been a waste of valuable time if he hadn’t taken down the little murdering bastards.

“The case was kept quiet. The local police were happy to avoid a media circus,” Novak said. “Your version of rough justice gave the appearance of being a tragic accident. Looked like those kids got drunk and their car stalled on the train tracks. The cops didn’t look any deeper than they had to, but I did.”

He supposed the woman had proof, and she was going to use that proof to blackmail him into helping her find her son. He didn’t mind that sort of coercion, it was
better than Baker looking at him sincerely and talking about helping people.

A silence stretched out for a couple of minutes, then Novak said, “Something happened to you about five years ago, Haven, that changed you from a worthless piece of repeat offender shit. Officially, you died.” She glanced up at Baker. “Something turned you from an honest cop into this scumbag’s partner. The pair of you and some of your friends have been playing vigilante against satanists and other cult crazies ever since.”

Haven and Baker exchanged a look, but neither of them tried to deny what Novak said.

“What I know about you comes from my own research,” she went on. “You were always too small-time to be a blip on the Bureau’s radar, Mr. Haven.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Baker said.

Haven didn’t like the humor he saw in his partner’s eyes, but he ignored it. “That’s me,” he told Novak. “Small-time. I hunt crazies,” he admitted. “For my own reasons. You want me to hunt your crazy kid, is that it? Bring sonny home to mama before the cops track him down and put him away. And you’re doing this for love rather than the fact you’re scared of losing your career.” Bright spots of color appeared on the woman’s cheeks as Haven went on. “Glass ceiling at the Bureau’s hard enough to break without a complication like having a serial-killing kid in your personnel file.”

“Enough, Jeb.” Baker squeezed the woman’s shoulders. “You stung him,” Baker said to Novak. “So he stung back.”

He could tell that she was more angry than offended.
Haven didn’t care, just as long as he got a reaction. He already knew she was going to make him work for her, and he would take whatever price he could get in turn.

Novak opened her purse. Jebel Haven stilled the instinct to pick up the pistol. He was not surprised at what she took out and slid across the desk to him. “There are several copies of most of the information on that,” Novak told him as he picked up the zip disk.

“Information about me.”

She nodded to his statement.

“But this is the only copy that also has everything I need to know about finding your son.”

She nodded again.

Short of killing the FBI profiler here and now and risking her information about him being passed on to unfriendly eyes, there wasn’t much Jebel Haven could do.

He rubbed his jaw. He needed a shave. He turned on the computer and popped in the zip disk. “What’s the kid’s name?”

“
H
IS NAME IS
Daniel,” Helene Bourbon told Char.

Char had gotten out the bottle of red wine she’d picked up for Thanksgiving and poured the nest leader a glass. Helene held her second glass between her hands. The first seemed to have helped her to relax a bit in an Enforcer’s presence. Char didn’t take any of the wine herself but enjoyed the dark, fruity scent the liquid gave off.

“Daniel what?” Char asked? “Who is his blood-parent?”

Helene’s shrug was slight but eloquent. “I have no idea on either count. Word has gotten out that my nest is the place for the difficult ones. He’s not the first that has been dropped off and left for me to cope with.” She sounded sad and resigned and a little resentful.

It occurred to Char that Helene Bourbon had not deliberately set up her nest on the Oregon coast as a retreat and shelter. Sometimes the role you ended up with in life just
happened
. For example, Charlotte McCairn had never intended to become a policewoman. And no one, as far as she knew, ever intended to be a
vampire. She hadn’t intended to continue being an archivist after her change to a Nighthawk; inertia and shyness kept her at that task. Since she was a Nighthawk, it was obvious that she was
meant
to be a hero, even if she didn’t feel like one.

She needed to start thinking like one. Or at least like a cop. “Who left Daniel with you? Did he know who made him? Where he came from?”

Helene rolled the wineglass between her hands, then set it down on the table. When she sat back on the couch, Char’s cat picked that moment to come in through the window Char always left open for him and to leap on the nest leader’s lap. The nervous woman jumped to her feet. The cat was flung. Fangs and claws came out on strigoi and feline alike.

“Lucien!” Char snatched up the hissing cat. “Helene!” she snapped at the woman. The command in Char’s voice surprised everyone involved. Even the cat stopped trying to claw her and looked up with something resembling respect. Char cleared her throat. She opened her mouth to apologize to her guest.

“Apologies, Hunter.” Helene Bourbon said, voice shaking. She ducked her head contritely. All evidence of change disappeared from Helene’s features, and she slowly sat back down. “I was startled.”

Char tried not to show how taken aback she was at the automatic respect her position garnered from the older vampire. Her mouth felt funny. Then she realized she was showing
that
face, the one that had scared
her
witless the one time she’d made herself look at it in the mirror. She made the hunter’s mask fade away as
quickly as possible. Once she was back to normal, Char tried to make her nod imperious, though Helene was deliberately not looking at her.