Tempted in the Night (14 page)

Afraid Dick was settling in for another round, John abruptly stood up, grabbed his coat, and put it on. "I don't know about you, but I've had all I can take for today. I'm done." He put his hand into his one good pocket and found the folded note that Joyce had slipped him earlier.

"Wait, I've got a few more questions,"
Dresden
said as he started to walk off.

"Sorry, but I'm fresh out of answers," John shot back, stopping long enough to give the man his full attention. "As far as I'm concerned, you're as current on the cases as I am. There's nothing more I can tell you. My suggestion, at this point, is to let your brain stew on it while you do something else. When you come back to it, maybe you'll see something we both missed. Hell, maybe you'll even solve the cases."

"Do you really think so?"
Dresden
asked, sounding hopeful and appearing so much younger than John felt at that moment.

"I don't know," he said truthfully. "But rule number one, kid, is that sane, logical people don't commit murder, so don't expect their crimes to make sense. Now, go home or go meet friends or stay here if you must, but I'm leaving." With that, he turned and left, not once glancing back.

Minutes later, in his car and driving from the station, he pulled out the note with the address written on it. John had asked Joyce to let him know if she learned of anything unusual, no matter how trivial she might think it was. That morning, she'd told him about a complaint they'd received from a homeless man, who had clearly been drunk. There was too much noise coming from the abandoned building behind which he slept and he wanted a patrol unit to swing by and make the building be quiet. A patrol car had driven by, but the officers had heard and seen nothing to concern them.

John, however, wasn't as convinced that there was nothing more to the story, and he wanted to check out the place himself.

The sun was just going down by the time he reached the abandoned building and parked. Before getting out of the car, he removed the small dagger he had placed in the
glovebox
earlier and slipped it into the new sheath on his holster strap.

Grabbing a flashlight, he exited the car and walked around to the alley running behind the building, spotting one large cardboard box propped against it.

He went over to the box and glanced inside, but found it empty. Newspaper lined the bottom and several more pages were pushed off to the side. In one corner, there were a couple of empty cans of food and a candy bar wrapper; obvious signs that someone had been living there, but John got the impression that whoever it was hadn't been there in at least a day.

Taking a look around, he didn't see any more shelters. There was no one around to answer questions, so John headed for the nearest entrance into the building. With the last of the sun about to disappear beneath the horizon, it was getting too dark to see, so John flipped on his flashlight. He shone it along the back of the building, looking for a door. When he found it, he pulled his gun from its holster and, aiming the light ahead of him, went inside.

He found himself standing in a hallway that was too narrow to be comfortable, should he be attacked. He moved down it quickly and quietly, his gaze darting all around. When he reached an open door, he stopped to listen before inspecting the room with the beam of his light. Seeing nothing, he moved farther down the hallway to the next room and checked it out.
Again, nothing.
He was halfway down the hall when he caught the tinkling of a small bell coming from behind him.

Whirling around, he almost shot Harris, easing up on the trigger at the last second.
"What the—?"

"I did wear a bell this time—as requested." Harris's calm tone was irritating.

"You almost got yourself shot," John pointed out. "What are you doing here?"

"I suspect the same thing you are—looking for Brody."

"What makes you think he's here?" John asked.

The vampire looked at him as if trying to figure out how much to tell him. "All the vampires with the same
chupacabra
venom in them—whether they got it from the creature directly or indirectly through a vampire the
chupacabra
created—share a psychic link. Since I created Brody, I share a link with him. It's not a strong link, which makes it hard to follow, but I got a strong enough impression of this building that I was able to find it." He paused and then gave John a curious look. "How'd you find this place?"

John shrugged.
"Old-fashioned detective work."
At the vampire's
skeptical
look, John elaborated. "I followed up on a lead from a homeless man complaining of noise. Thought that maybe I'd find Brody."

"He's not here," the vampire said, pushing past him to continue down the hallway. "But he was."

"How do you know?" John asked, falling into step behind him.

"I don't sense that he's close by—however, there is something here." Harris stopped and looked back at John. "It might be safer if you left."

John frowned. "I'm good, thanks. Let's keep going."

Harris shrugged. "Suit yourself. I think the room he was staying in is just ahead."

"How can you tell?"

"
Odor
."

John followed the vampire down the hall until they stopped outside a room. This close, John smelled the stench of human waste mixed with rotting flesh.

The door was closed. John exchanged looks with the vampire before opening it.

At first, John saw nothing. The windows were boarded up, preventing any light from the streetlamps from filtering inside, so he played the beam of the flashlight across the room. It was dirty, filled with old newspapers, long-empty food containers that had been picked clean by rodents, rodent droppings in the corners, and a lot of dust that had been recently disturbed by human footprints, but nothing to account for the smell.

"You'd better go," Harris said again, his attention focused on the door at the back of the room.

"Why?"

"In about five seconds, this place is going to be crawling with Brody's meals, coming to life. I need to stake them, and I don't want to have to worry about you while I'm doing it."

"Don't worry about me," John said, putting up his gun and pulling out the dagger. "Just make sure you don't get staked by mistake."

Harris smiled, his fangs gleaming in the flashlight's beam.
"In that case, heads up—
four o'clock
.
I'll get the two on the right."

John whirled around just as three creatures came hurtling through the back door so fast that John barely had time to react. He raised his dagger and didn't so much stab the creature as held his dagger at exactly the right height while the creature, carried by his own momentum, impaled himself through the heart.

John wasn't sure what he'd expected to happen, but he felt a combination of surprise and shock when the vampire didn't poof into dust like in the movies. Easing the body to the ground, he turned to see how Harris was doing and discovered that the vampire had already dispatched his two and was watching him.

Harris smiled at the expression on John's face. "What? Did you expect them to explode into a cloud of dust? Sorry to disappoint you."

John fought to keep his expression straight. "How do we know they're really dead?"

Harris and John both looked at the bodies. "Trust me," Harris said, "they're dead. Come on, we'd better check out the rest of this place. I don't think there are any more waiting to attack, but I could be wrong."

They left that room and continued along the first level, checking out each room as they got to it. It was in the second to last room that John realized the search for Brody had just taken on a new level of complexity.

If there had simply been bodies, John might have coped with it better. Even the blood on the walls wasn't something new. It was seeing Jessica's name spelled out in that blood that unnerved him. And it wasn't just written once. It was splashed across every wall, several times, both large and small.

"Brody is one sick fuck," Harris commented.

"How old do you think that writing is?"

He felt Harris glance at him.
"A day, maybe two at the most.
Why?"

"That's her name."

"Whose?"

"Jessica Winslow's.
She's Admiral Winslow's cousin." He tried to put it into a context Harris would better understand.
"The woman from the park.
And she was in the car that night when I went to the funeral home; the one Brody went after."

Harris shook his head. "It has to be coincidence. When would Brody have met Winslow's cousin?"

He was right, John thought. Then he remembered. "No coincidence. She set a trap for him the next night—at a bar. He attacked her; even bit her, but I got there before he could do more than break the skin."

Harris frowned. "Still—two encounters doesn't seem like enough for Brody to have formed any kind of infatuation. Like you said, how would he even know her name?"

"Unless he's been stalking her?"

Harris shook his head. "No. I would have sensed him close to the mansion when I was there, and I didn't."

John tried to shake off his feeling of doom. "You're right." He gestured to the short hallway leading to a couple of back rooms. "Let's see if there's anything else in here."

John went into the first room while Harris continued down the hall to the second.

"Shit." Harris's voice seemed unusually loud in the surrounding quiet of the room.

"What?" John hurried to where he was and came to a sudden stop in the doorway. The walls here were also covered with "Jessica" spelled in blood, but this time, the body of a woman with long dark hair, lying facedown in the corner, caused John's heart to nearly stop beating.

"Oh, God."
John rushed to the figure and gently rolled her over, brushing long strands of hair away so he could see her face.

"Is it—?"

"No," he said. "It's not her." His relief was so great, he felt guilty. But the dead woman was beyond his help now—almost. "She has to be staked."

Stabbing a dead body shouldn't be hard, he thought, and yet… he took a deep breath, instantly regretting it as the putrid smell of death filled his lungs.