Once Bitten (4 page)

I nodded, my heart pounding in my ears. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. She pushed her middle finger between my lips and gently rubbed it along my teeth as if daring me to bite.

She raised herself up on her toes and tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips against my neck, just below my left ear where I could feel a vein pulsing in time to the rhythm of my heart.

She kissed me softly and I felt her tongue probe the skin. It rasped along my flesh as if it was the tongue of a cat and not that of a girl and then she shifted her head back as if waiting for something.

“Once bitten,” she said and I could feel her breath with each word, and then she lunged forward,

sharp teeth fixing onto my neck like a cheetah going in for the kill.

I jerked back my head involuntarily and my eyes opened and I was in my bedroom, my legs tangled up in the quilt, the pillows scattered on the floor. My skin was bathed in sweat yet my mouth was dry and swallowing was an effort. I staggered to the bathroom and filled a glass full of water. I used the first mouthful to swill around, rolling it around my tongue and spitting it out into the washbasin. I switched on the light above the bathroom mirror and looked at my reflection.

Bleary eyes stared back at me, deep set and worried, small red veins flecked through the whites, the pupils dilated as if I'd taken something. I hadn't. I opened my mouth wide and pulled back the skin on my face. It made me look younger. I relaxed and the wrinkles and the years came back. Thirtyfive going on fifty. I moved my head from side to side half expecting to see bites but the skin was unmarked. I rubbed my hand across my chin, feeling the stubble of growing hair. I could remember when all I had to do was to borrow my father's electric razor to shave the fuzz on my upper lip about once a month, then once a week, then daily. But it was only in recent years that the stubble would appear in the middle of the night. A sign of being an adult, I guess. A sign of age.

Now if I was going anywhere in the evening I looked scruffy unless I shaved again.

I took another mouthful of water and gargled with it and when I looked down to spit it out I saw that the first mouthful was red. Blood red. I turned on the taps and it swirled away down the plughole and the second time I spat it was clear, just water and phlegm. I checked out my mouth in the mirror and I couldn't see any cuts or abrasions. Just teeth, and metal fillings. Another sign of a decaying body. I filled my mouth and spat again but there was no more blood.

I took a glass of water back with me to the bedroom and lay down on my side, facing away from the window, and tried to get back to sleep. Images of the girl and the alley kept filling my mind,

her smile, her eyes, and the blood. I could hear my own heartbeat in my right ear which was pressed against the pillow. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The sound of my lifeblood coursing around the veins and arteries of my body, the tubes that were already silting up with chloresterol and fat globules and all the rest of the detritus that was floating around in my tissues. Durr-rum,

durr-rum, durr-rum. The constant reminder of my own mortality, a fist-sized hunk of tissue in the centre of my chest upon which my whole being depended. Without its seventy-odd squirts of oxygenated blood every minute there would be no more Jamie Beaverbrook. I wondered what it must be like to have a heart attack, to feel the pump splutter and jerk and stop, and to know that the end was coming, that the brain was being starved of life-giving oxygen and that it would soon all be over. The empty blackness stretching ahead for ever more. No more Jamie Beaverbrook. The chain of thought depressed me, as it always did. The morbid thoughts of my own mortality usually came at night, when I was alone in the dark. I shifted my head to try to get my ear off the pillow so that I wouldn't have to listen to the accusing heart counting off the beats that represented the time I had left. Seventy beats a minute, 4,200 every hour, one hundred thousand or so every day. What was that a year? More than thirty-five million beats. So how many did I have left if I lived for fifty more years? I did the sums in my head and it came to about 1.8 billion. Durr-rum, minus one.

Durr-rum, minus two. Durr-rum, minus three. This wasn't like counting sheep and easing myself into sleep, this was chipping away at my life bit by bit, alone in a double bed, and the thought filled me with cold dread.

I moved my head again and this time I felt my right shoulder grate as the arm moved in the socket, the sign of cartilage wearing thin from too many games of tennis and squash. It never used to make that noise, the sound of bone against bone, or maybe it was only recently that I'd noticed it.

The cartilage in my knees made cracking noises when I got up and occasionally my hips would pop if turned suddenly. Please God, I prayed, don't let me get old and don't let me die. Let me stay as I am right now. Or if you're feeling extra merciful, let me stay as I was five years ago, when I was in my prime. When I was young. I took a deep breath and I could hear the air rushing down into my lungs and when I breathed out it made a wheezing noise like the wind whistling through the branches of a dying tree. What must it be like, I thought, to stop breathing? That was the way people usually went when they died, I guess, the lungs stop functioning first, then the heart, and only then would the brain start to realise that it wasn't getting freshly-oxygenated blood like it was supposed to, like it had been for the past God-knows how many millions of heart beats. Would the body panic, or would it go quietly and surrender peacefully to the infinite oblivion?

I tossed and turned but I couldn't sleep, not because I wasn't tired but because dark, depressing thoughts kept slipping into my mind and pushing out everything else. Thoughts of sickness, of aging, of death. I switched on the television at the foot of the bed and watched a detective show where two young women private eyes in expensive convertibles cornered a drugs ring, survived two car chases and a shoot-out without smudging their make-up. It depressed me even more so I went to the kitchen and got myself a Budweiser and drank it in bed, propped up with pillows because I didn't want to lie down and listen to my heartbeat any more.

The Apartment I don't remember falling asleep but I must have done because the next thing I remembered was waking up with my neck at a painful angle on the pillow and two empty cans of Budweiser on the bedside table. The television was on and a blonde with blow-torched hair was telling me that there had been seven murders in downtown Los Angeles and the police were expecting more, what with it being a full moon and all. It was seven o'clock in the morning, an hour or so before I normally got up, but I showered, shaved and dressed and sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and a couple of apples. My briefcase was on the desktop where I'd left it the night before and I opened it and took out my laptop computer and ejected the floppy disc on which was stored the data on Terry Ferriman and Henry Kipp. I normally write up my reports in my office but I wanted to make an early start because it wasn't going to be too long before the phone rang, not if there had been seven homicides overnight. I was one of four psychologists employed by the LAPD, but one was in hospital having her breasts lifted and another had gone skiing in Aspen which meant double the workload for me and the other guy left behind, Anton Rivron.

The department insisted that all homicide suspects were examined by a psychologist as soon as possible, and had done since the early nineties. It was supposed to be in the interests of justice and all that fair play crap, but it was little more than a cost-saving exercise. There was no point in mounting a full Homicide investigation if the perp turned out to be insane. It was far easier, and cheaper, to set the shrinks on him and have him locked away in a secure mental institution and throw away the key rather than trying to pin down a motive and opportunity and all that sort of stuff they do on television. And if the perp wasn't mad then it was important to get a psychologist's report on him in the file right from the start of the investigation, so that when the Homicide detectives had finally put a case together the defence didn't simply try to con the jury into believing that the perp had been temporarily a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It used to happen a lot, the perp would sit in his cell and wait until the Homicide boys had put together a watertight case and then they'd start talking to themselves and rolling their eyes or claim to have amnesia or any one of a dozen tricks that they thought would get them out of prison and into a mental hospital where they'd stay until they could either persuade the authorities they were cured or they could manage to escape. And the waiting was a hell of lot more comfortable in a hospital than it was in a high security prison.

What the department needed was someone who could make a snap, but accurate, decision on the mental stability or otherwise of suspects which would tell the detectives the best way of proceeding with the case. They'd headhunted from England me to set up the system and recruit the three psychologists who worked with me on a consultancy basis. I'd been working at the University of London on a computer system which could assess a person's sanity and compare it with models of various mental disorders. I'd first got interested in the field after following the work of Professor David Carter at the University of Sussex who the British police called up whenever they had a serial killer or multiple rapist they couldn't catch. He'd come up with a way of drawing psychological profiles on computers based on the clues found by police. By giving the police the profile of the man they should be looking for, he made their job a hell of a lot easier. I started to get interested in what happened at the other end of the investigation, after they'd been caught. For my doctorate I developed computer models of various mental disorders and criminal tendencies based on the better part of a thousand interviews I carried out in prisons and mental hospitals in the United Kingdom and then I began working on a computer program which from simple questions and answers could be used to ascertain a person's mental state. It took many years of work, but eventually I worked it up to the point where it could be used with a considerable degree of accuracy. I produced several well-received scientific papers and went on a couple of lecture tours and then one day I got a phone call from the London office of an American headhunting firm and three months later I was in Los Angeles earning five times what I had been paid as a post-doctorate researcher.

The move to Los Angeles made a lot of sense, both from a personal point of view - I'd always been an Americophile - but also because it was the perfect place to research into sociopaths and psychopaths and a host of other mental abnormalities. Put simply, there were more lunatics per square mile in Los Angeles than anywhere else on God's green earth, and I reckoned that while drawing an obscenely high salary I'd also be able to churn out a fair number of research papers.

That's the way it worked out, too. Mind you, there was a downside. My wife left me and I lost my daughter and she set a lawyer on me who had all the sympathy of a Rotweiler with an exceptionally low IQ. And I picked up a nickname. Jamie D. Beaverbrook, the Vampire Hunter. Don't you just love America?

I did the Kipp report first and printed it out on the laser printer. I slotted the sheets into a blue cardboard folder and wrote Kipp, H, on it and then went and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. I put the cup on the desk and then I went to fetch the morning paper and I sat on the sofa and begin to read it and then I realised that my subconscious was playing for time, trying to defer the moment when I'd start to put together the report on Ferriman, T. Why was that, I wondered.

Because she was so pretty? So young? Because she looked so helpless, and yet, at the same time,

so in control of herself?

I flipped the paper closed and sat back at the desk and called up her file on the computer and went through the answers she'd given. They were the answers you'd expect from any well-balanced young woman, not too aggressive, not too self-centered. The sort of girl who'd make a good friend,

or lover. It took me twice as long to finish the report on her than I'd taken over Kipp. It wasn't that she was a more complicated case, it was more that I was finding myself trying to always portray her in a good light, then realising that it might look as if I was being biased in her favour so I'd go the other way and be too hard on her. The whole point of the Beaverbrook Program was that it was supposed to take the emotion out of the judgment, the verdict should be totally objective, and it almost always was, yet in her case I was having to constantly force myself to be neutral. And all the time the image of her in my mind was the girl in the alley in the black leather jacket, her lips against my neck. No, I didn't mention the dream in my report. Once bitten....

I was printing it out when the phone rang. It was De'Ath calling, wanting to know how I was getting on.

“Just finished,” I said, and held the receiver by the side of the laser printer so that he could hear for himself. “How's the investigation?”

“Which one?” he said, though he knew full that I wouldn't be asking about Henry Kipp, Esq.

“The girl,” I said.

“Yeah, the girl,” he said. “To be honest, Doc, it ain't going so well.”

“I thought you said it was open and shut.”

"Yeah, didn't I just? We got the report back from Forensic and it was his blood on her face and hands, no doubt about it. But there was no blood on her clothes. Yet he was covered in it. He'd been stabbed in the chest and slashed about the throat, there should have been red stuff all over her.

And there's still no sign of a murder weapon."

“What's her story?”

"Now she's saying that she found him in the alley and was trying to give him the kiss of life.

Can you believe that? Blood streaming from his throat and she's trying to give him the kiss of life!"

“Who was the guy?”

“Still waiting to hear from the bag 'em and tag 'em boys. They're gonna take his prints and run them through the computer. Look, Doc, I wanna see her report as soon as possible.”

“No sweat, but I don't think it's going to be of much help. She's not a crazy, far from it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Can you bring it round?”

“Half an hour, is that OK?”

De'Ath groaned. "Oh, man, can't you come round now? Look, I tell you what, we've just got a warrant to go round and check out her place, why don't you meet us there. Any time after ten,

OK?"

I agreed eagerly, too eagerly maybe, but I was intrigued by the girl and I thought that a visit to her home might provide some sort of insight that I wouldn't get from simply talking to her. I finished the printing, put on a tie and was outside her apartment block by ten-thirty.

It was a four-storey modern block on North Alta-Vista, close to Sunset Boulevard, and I realised, fairly close to where she'd been discovered kneeling over the body. I recognised De'Ath's car parked outside and I walked up the stairs rather than taking the lift to prove to myself that I was in good condition. I was out of breath when I reached the top floor so I stood in the hallway until I felt better and then rang the bell. De'Ath's partner, Dennis Filbin, a bulky Irishman with a drinker's nose, opened the door, grunted, and let me in.

“Don't touch anything,” he growled. He was wearing polythene gloves and so was De'Ath who came out of the bedroom with a worried look on his face.

“Don't touch anything,” said De'Ath.

“I already told him,” said Filbin.

“He already told me,” I said. “You found anything?”

“Make-up, a teddy bear, closets full of clothes. She don't appear to have no bad habits.” He sounded disappointed.

“You sound disappointed,” I said. “Mind if I look around?”

“Help yourself. Just don't touch anything.”

“Can I have a pair of gloves?” I asked him.

“If you don't touch anything, you won't need gloves,” De'Ath snarled. “Have you got the report?”

“I've got both - Kipp and her.” I handed them to him and looked around as he and Filbin read through the reports. The apartment was small: a lounge with a small kitchenette leading off it, and a bedroom with space for a double bed, a dressing table and little else. Her clothes were in closets which were built in to the wall opposite the bed and I used a pencil to push one of the doors open.

There were lots of clothes hanging up: dresses, jackets, skirts, blouses, mostly cheap and cheerful stuff, the kind you'd expect to find in any young girl's bedroom. There were three framed posters on the wall, all of them movie posters: Total Recall, Gone With The Wind, and Bambi. Eclectic taste, no doubt about it. There was a fluffy toy rabbit on the dressing table, and a black and white photograph in an antique gilt frame. I bent down to look at the picture, it was of a young man sitting in a director's chair, obviously taken on a film set because in the background were cameras and lights and a tangle of thick, black wires. The man was in his early twenties, clean shaven with his hair swept back, black and glistening as if it had been oiled. He was looking over one shoulder and smiling as if he knew the photograph would end up in a girl's bedroom. It was a movie star smile, gleaming teeth and sincere eyes. On the back of the chair was the name of the film. Lilac Time. And below those words was a name - Greig Turner. It was an old photograph, and the cameras in the background seemed to belong to the golden age of movie-making, maybe before sound, even. To the right of the picture, adjusting one of the lights on a massive tripod, was a man dressed in baggy trousers and checked shirt wearing a cap like Jimmy Cagney used to wear in his old gangster movies. I wondered if Terry was a movie buff who liked to collect momentoes of old movies, but apart from the three framed prints and the photograph there were no other collectibles around. Perhaps the man in the photograph was a relative. Father perhaps? No, that couldn't be right because her name was Ferriman. Unless she'd changed it. If the man was in his twenties and the picture had been taken, say, in the 1930s, then he'd be in his eighties now. Grandfather perhaps?

“Whatchya looking at?” asked De'Ath's voice from behind me. I straightened up. My spine clicked as I did. It had started to do that a lot recently. Arthritis setting in, I bet.

“The photograph,” I said. “A relation, maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe. We've about finished here, you'll have to make tracks.”

“OK, give me a minute or two will you?”

The bed was covered with a thick peach-coloured quilt and only one pillow had an indentation in it and for some reason I felt pleasantly pleased that Terry Ferriman appeared to sleep alone. I followed De'Ath back into the lounge. There was a small television set, a hi-fi, a three-seater black leather sofa and a matching easy chair. The carpet was short-piled, grey and featureless and the walls were white and bare. No pictures, no photographs. There were some books and CDs on black metal shelves which ran the full length of one wall and there were black blinds over the two windows. The blinds were down but open so that lines of sunlight cut through the room and drew bright oblongs on the floor. There was a black metal and smoked glass coffee table in front of the sofa and on top of it were a couple of fashion magazines. De'Ath was right, there was nothing there. No blood-stained knife, no pile of bloody clothes, no manuals on how to be a successful murderer. I could see why he was so disappointed.

The kitchenette was white and spotless and looked as if it had never been used. There was a cooker, a microwave, a small fridge-freezer and a double stainless steel sink. There was a scrubbed wood knife rack in which were slotted black-handled knifes, a toaster, and an electric kettle.

Everything was gleaming. Pristine. As if she'd never cooked there.

De'Ath saw me looking at the clean, white surfaces. “Looks like she eats out a lot,” he said.

“There's only wine and some fizzy water in the fridge.”

“Nothing unusual about that,” I said. “You'll find precious little to eat in my fridge.” Funny how I kept wanting to make excuses for her. “Nice place,” I said.

“Yeah, compact,” he said. “Bit small for me, but I guess a girl on her own would be quite happy here.”

“Samuel, you know there's a knife missing from the rack?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We noticed that.”

“No toothpicks,” said Filbin as he came out of the bathroom.

“Toothpicks?” I said.

“We found a toothpick stuck in the shoelaces of the victim,” explained Filbin. “And there weren't any in his pockets. Could be from the perp.”

They took me out into the hall and Filbin locked the door. While we waited for the elevator I asked De'Ath where he was going next.

“Office,” he said. “We're still waiting for the report on the victim. And I want another talk with the girl.”

The elevator arrived and we got in. “Can I come back with you?” I asked.

De'Ath raised his eyebrows. “You seem to be taking more interest than usual in this case, Doc,”

he said.

I shrugged. “She intrigues me.”

“Man, I am disgusted,” De'Ath guffawed. “You must be old enough to be her father.” He laughed and Filbin laughed with him.

“Come on, Samuel. She's only ten years younger than I am.”

Filbin shook his head in disbelief. “It must have been a rough ten years,” he said. Their laughing intensified and I was relieved when the doors hissed open and we went out into the sunshine.

“Anyway, God forbid I should split up this laughing policemen act, but is it OK for me to go back to the station with you?”

“Didn't you come in the Batmobile?” asked De'Ath.

I sighed. “Yes, I meant that I'll follow you back.” I pointed to my car. “I'm parked there.”

Filbin used his hand to shade his eyes from the sun. “Nice car,” he said. “English, is it?”

“Yeah. Though an American helped design it. That's why it's got fins.”

Filbin nodded appreciatively, then frowned. “What's that hanging from the aerial? It looks like a bat!”

The Autopsy There were no free parking spaces in the precinct car park so I left the Alpine on the road. Most of the cops knew who I was so I reckoned I was unlikely to get a ticket. De'Ath and Filbin were at their desks by the time I reached the Homicide office. More than thirty detectives worked out of the big open-plan office, and all the desks were grouped in twos so that partners could sit facing each and answer each other's phones and steal each other's sandwiches. They worked a three-shift system and spent most of the time out on the streets which meant that there were never more than half a dozen detectives actually in the office at any one time.

Filbin was talking into one of the phones, to Forensic by the sound of it.

De'Ath saw me listening. “Forensic said they've sent her clothes back,” he explained. “Said they're clean and there's no point in hanging on to them.”