Michael was only seventeen.
They had been killing together for five years, and they kept getting better and better at it.
They were invincible.
Immortal.
Chapter 11
THAT NIGHT, the two brothers hunted in the town of Mill Valley, in Marin County. The area was beautiful, small mountains teeming with strapping, healthy evergreen and eucalyptus trees. The redwood house was maybe a hundred yards ahead, up a steep, rocky slope that they climbed with ease. A brick walkway led to an entryway with double wooden doors.
“We have to go away for a while.” William spoke to Michael without turning around. “We have a mission from the Sire. San Francisco was just the start.”
“That’s excellent,” Michael said, and he smiled. “I enjoyed what went down there very much. Who are these people, the ones in the big fancy house up there?”
William shrugged. “Just prey. They’re nobody.”
Michael pouted. “Why won’t you tell me who they are?”
“The Sire said not to talk, and not to bring the cat.”
Michael asked no further questions. His obedience to the Sire was complete.
The Sire told you how to think, feel, and act.
The Sire was accountable to no one, to no other authority.
The Sire despised the straight world, as did they.
This definitely looked like the “straight world” up ahead. The large house had all the trappings: gardens tended and watered daily, a small pond filled with koi, several layers of terraces leading up to a large house with more than a dozen rooms—for just two people. How obnoxious could anyone be?
William walked right in the front door, and Michael followed. The foyer had twenty-foot ceilings, a ridiculous crystal chandelier, a spiral staircase to heaven.
They found the couple in the kitchen, making a late meal, both of them sharing the preparations like the goody-goodies that they were.
“Yuppies at play,” William said, and smiled.
“Whoa!” the male said, and threw up both of his hands. He was close to six-four and well built. He was working like kitchen help at the vegetable sink.
“What the hell do you guys think you’re doing? Let’s take it outside.”
“You’re the troublemaking lawyer,” William said, and pointed at the female. She was early thirties, short blond hair, high cheekbones, slender, with small breasts. “We came for supper.”
“I’m a lawyer too,” the domineering male said. “I don’t think you two were invited. I’m sure of it. Get out! You hear me? Hey, you assholes, hit the road.”
“You threatened the Sire.” William continued to talk to the female. “So he sent us here.”
“Arthur, I’m going to call the police,” the woman finally said. She was upset now, the nubs of her breasts rising and falling against her shirt. She had a small cell phone in her hand, and William wondered if she had pulled it out of her ass. The thought made him smile.
He was on her in an instant, and Michael took down the husband almost as easily. The brothers were incredibly fast and strong, and they knew it.
They growled loudly, but that was only a scare tactic.
“We have money in the house. My God, don’t hurt us,” the male shrieked loudly, almost like a woman.
“We’re not after your obscene money—we have no use for it. And we’re not serial killers or anything common like that,” William told them.
He bit down into the struggling woman’s luscious pink neck—and she stopped fighting. Just like that, she was his. She gazed into his eyes and she swooned. A tear ran down her cheek.
William didn’t look up again until he had fed. “We’re vampires,” he finally whispered to the murdered couple.
Chapter 12
ON MY second day in San Francisco, I worked out of a small cubicle near Jamilla Hughes’s desk at the Hall of Justice. I attended a couple of her briefings on the Golden Gate Park murders, which were thorough and highly professional. She was impressive.
Everything about the murder case was weird and wrong-headed, though. No one had a fix on it yet; no one had a good idea, at least none that I’d heard so far. The only thing we knew for sure was that people were being murdered in particularly horrible ways. It happens more and more frequently these days.
Around noon, I got a call on my cell phone. “Just checking in,” the Mastermind said. “How is San Francisco, Alex? Lovely city. Will you leave your heart there? Do you think it’s a good place to die?
“Or how about Inspector Hughes? Do you like her? She’s very pretty, isn’t she? Just your type. Are you going to fuck Jamilla? Better hurry, then. Tempus fugit.” He hung up.
I went back to work. Lost myself for a couple of hours. Began to make some minor progress.
Around four o’clock, I was staring out at the start of rush hour, San Francisco style—pretty mild, actually—while I talked to Kyle Craig. He was still at Quantico, but he was definitely heavily involved in the case.
Kyle was in a position to choose the cases he became personally connected with, and he told me this was going to be one of them. We’d be working together again. I looked forward to it.
I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and saw Jamilla approaching my desk. She had her leather jacket half on and was struggling into the second sleeve. Going somewhere? “Hold on, Kyle,” I said into the receiver.
“We have to go,” she said, “to San Luis Obispo. They’re going to exhume a body. I think it’s related.”
I told Kyle that I had to leave right away. He wished me happy hunting. Jamilla and I took the elevator down to the parking garage beneath the Hall of Justice. The more I saw of her work, the more I was impressed, not just by her savvy but by her enthusiasm for the job. A lot of detectives lose that after a couple of years. She obviously hadn’t. Are you going to fuck Jamilla? Better hurry, then.
“Are you always this pumped up?” I asked her once we were inside her blue Saab and heading out toward 101.
“Yeah. Pretty much,” she said. “I like the work. It’s tough but interesting, honest most of the time. I could do without the violence.”
“This case in particular. The hangings give me the creeps.”
She looked over at me. “Speaking of life-threatening situations, you’d better buckle up. We’ve got a hike ahead of us, and I used to drive funny cars as a hobby. Don’t be fooled by the Saab.”
She wasn’t kidding. According to the road signs, it was about 235 miles to San Luis Obispo. Heavy rain peppered the Saab most of the way. She still got us there by eight-thirty.
“In one piece too.” She nodded and winked as we whisked off the freeway at the San Luis Obispo exit.
It looked like an idyllic spot but we were there to exhume the corpse of a young girl. She had been hung and her blood had been drained.
Chapter 13
SAN LUIS Obispo is a college town, very pretty, at least from the outside looking in. We found Higuera Street and drove down it to Osos, past small local shops, but also Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, the Firestone Grill. Jamilla told me that you could always tell the time of day in San Luis Obispo by the scents and aromas: like barbecue smoke in the afternoon on Marsh Street, or the aroma of wheat and barley at night outside the SLO Brewing Co.
We met Detective Nancy Goodes at the police station in town. She was a petite, attractive woman with a nice California tan, very much in charge of her homicide investigation. In addition to contacting us about this exhumation, she was the lead on the murders of two students from Cal Poly that didn’t seem related to our case, but who could tell for sure? Like most homicide detectives these days, she was busy.
“We’ve got the permissions we need to exhume the body,” Goodes told us on the way out to the cemetery. At least the rain had stopped for now. The air was warm, thanks to Santa Ana winds.
“What can you tell us about the murder, Nancy? You worked the case yourself, right?” Jamilla asked.
The det
ective nodded. “I did. So did just about every other detective in town. It was very sad, and an important case here. Mary Alice Richardson went to the Catholic high school in town. Her father’s a well-liked doctor. She was a nice kid, but a bit of a wild child. What can I tell you? She was a kid. Fifteen years old.”
“What do you mean she was a wild child?” I asked Detective Goodes.
She sighed and worked her jaw a little. I could tell this case had left a wound. “She missed a lot of school, two or three days a week sometimes. She was bright enough, but her grades were just terrible. She hung with other kids who liked to experiment—drugs like ecstasy, raves, black magic, heavy drinking, all-night parties. Maybe even a little freebasing. Mary Alice was only arrested once, but she was giving her parents a lot of gray hairs.”
Jamilla asked, “Were you at the crime scene, Nancy?” I noticed that she was respectful of the other detective at all times. Very nonthreatening toward her.
“Unfortunately, I was. That’s one of the reasons I worked so hard getting the permissions we needed to dig up her body. Mary Alice died a year and three months ago, but I will never, ever forget how we found her.”
Jamilla and I looked at each other. We hadn’t heard all the particulars of the murder yet. We were still playing catch-up.
Goodes continued. “It was pretty clear to me that she was meant to be found. Two kids from Cal Poly were the ones who actually discovered the body. They were parking out near the hills. It’s a popular spot for submarine races. They went for a little moonlit stroll. I’m sure they had nightmares after what they saw. Mary Alice was hanging from a tree by her bare feet. Naked. Except the killers left her earrings and a small sapphire in her belly button. This wasn’t a robbery.”
“How about her clothes?” I asked.
“We found the clothes: UFO parachute pants, Nikes, Chili Peppers T-shirt. No trophies were taken to our knowledge.”
I glanced at Jamilla. “The killer trusts his or her memory. Doesn’t need trophies for some reason. Or so it seems. None of this follows any of the usual paths for serials.”
“No, it doesn’t. I agree with that one hundred percent. Do you know what scarification is?” Detective Goodes asked.
I nodded. “I’ve come across it,” I said. “Scars, wounds. Most often on the legs and arms. Occasionally the chest or back. They avoid the face, because then people might make them stop. Usually the scars are self-inflicted.”
“Right,” said Detective Goodes. “Mary Alice had either cut herself over the past couple of months, or someone else did it for her. She had over seventy separate cuts on her body. Everywhere but the face.”
The detective’s white Suburban pulled onto a gravel road, then we passed between rusted wrought-iron gates.
“We’re here,” Nancy Goodes announced. “Let’s get this over with. Cemeteries make me twitchy. I hate what we’re going to do. This makes me so sad.”
It made me sad too.
Chapter 14
I HAVE yet to meet a relatively sane person who is anything but twitchy in a cemetery at night. I consider myself to be mildly sane; therefore, I was twitchy. Detective Goodes was right: This was a very sad affair, a tragic conclusion to a young girl’s life.
The backdrop for the cemetery was the rolling foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains. Three patrol cars from the police department in San Luis Obispo were already parked around the grave of Mary Alice Richardson. The medical examiner’s van was parked nearby. Plus two beat-up trucks without any clear identification on them.
Four cemetery workers were digging up the grave in the bright light cast by the patrol-car headlamps. The soil looked rich and loamy and was thick with worms. When the hole was of sufficient depth, a backhoe was brought in to do the bulk of the job.
The police observers, including me, had nothing to do but stand impatiently around the grave. We drank coffee, exchanged small talk, cracked a few dark jokes, but nobody really laughed.
I turned my cell phone off. I didn’t need to hear from the Mastermind, or anybody else, here in the cemetery.
Around one in the morning, the container of the casket was finally uncovered by the cemetery workers. A lump rose in my throat, but I looked on. Beside me stood Jamilla Hughes. She was shivering some but sticking it out. Nancy Goodes had retreated to her Suburban. Smart lady.
A crowbar was used to pry off the top of the liner. It made an unpleasant groaning noise, like someone in deep pain.
The hole in the ground was approximately six feet deep, eight feet long, less than four feet wide.
Neither Jamilla nor I spoke. Every detail of the exhumation held our attention now. My eyes blinked too rapidly in the eerie light. My breathing was uneven and my throat felt a little raw.
I was recalling crime-scene pictures of Mary Alice that I’d seen. Fifteen years old. Hung two feet off the ground by her ankles, left that way for several hours. Drained of nearly all her blood. Another class IV death. Viciously bitten and stabbed.
The victim in Washington hadn’t been stabbed. So what did that mean? Why the variations on the murder theme? What did they do with all the blood? I almost didn’t want to know the answers to the questions throbbing inside my head.
Tattered gray canvas straps were carefully secured around the casket, and it was finally slowly raised out of the ground.
My breathing was ragged. Suddenly I felt guilty about being here. I had the thought that we shouldn’t be disturbing this poor girl in her grave. It was an unholy thing to do. She had been violated enough.
“I know, I know. This sucks. I feel the same thing,” Jamilla said out of the side of her mouth. She lightly touched a hand to my elbow. “We have to do it. No other choice. We have to find out if it’s the same killers.”
“I know. Why doesn’t that make me feel any better about this?” I muttered. “I feel all hollowed out.”
“That poor girl. Poor Mary Alice. Forgive us,” Jamilla said.
A local funeral director who had consented to be on hand carefully opened the casket. Then he stepped back as if he had seen a ghost.
I moved forward to get my first look at the girl. I nearly gasped, and Jamilla’s hand went to her mouth. A couple of the cemetery workers crossed themselves and bowed their heads low.
Mary Alice Richardson was right there in front of us. She was wearing a flowing white dress, and her blond hair was carefully braided. The girl looked as if she had been buried alive. There had been virtually no decay of the body.
“There’s an explanation for this,” the funeral director said to us. “The Richardsons are friends of mine. They asked me if anything could be done to preserve their daughter for as long as possible. Somehow they knew their little girl would be seen again.
“The condition of the body, once interred, can be in any state of decay. It depends on the ingredients. I used an arsenic solution in the embalming process, the way we used to in the old days. You’re looking at the result.”
He paused as we continued to stare.
“This is the way Mary Alice looked the day she was buried. This is the poor girl they murdered and hung.”
Chapter 15
WE GOT back to San Francisco from San Luis Obispo at seven in the morning. I didn’t know how Jamilla could drive, but she did just fine. We forced ourselves to talk most of the way back, just to keep awake. We even had a few laughs. I was bone tired and could barely keep my eyes open. When I finally closed them inside my hotel room, I saw Mary Alice Richardson in her coffin.
Inspector Hughes was drinking coffee at her desk when I arrived at the Hall of Justice at two o’clock that afternoon. She looked fresh and alert. None the worse for wear. She seemed to work as hard as I did on a case, maybe harder. I hoped it was a good thing for her.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked, as I stopped to talk for a moment. My eyes went to the clutter in her work space.
I noticed a photograph of a smiling, very good-looking man propped on her desk. I was glad that she ha
d time for a love life at least. It made me think of Christine Johnson, who was now living out here on the West Coast. I felt a stab of rejection. The love of my life? Not anymore. Unfortunately, not anymore. Christine had left Washington and moved to Seattle. She liked it there a lot and was teaching school again.
Jamilla shrugged. “I woke up around noon, couldn’t get back to sleep. Maybe I’m too tired. The M.E. in Luis Obispo says he’ll send us a report late today. But listen to this. I just got an E-mail from Quantico. There have been eight murders in California and Nevada that bear some resemblance to the Golden Gate Park ones. Not all of the victims were hung. But they were bitten. The cases go back six years. So far. They’re looking back even further than that.”
“What cities?” I asked her.
She glanced down at her notes. “Sacramento—our esteemed capital. San Diego. Santa Cruz. Las Vegas. Lake Tahoe. San Jose. San Francisco. San Luis Obispo. This is so goddamn creepy, Alex. One murder like this would be enough to keep me sleepless for a month.”
“Plus the murder in Washington,” I said. “I’m going to ask the Bureau to look at the East Coast.”
She grinned sheepishly. “I already did. They’re on it.”
I teased, “So what do we do now?”
“What do cops always do when they wait? We eat doughnuts and drink coffee,” she said, and rolled her dark brown eyes. She had a natural, very attractive beauty, even on just a few hours’ sleep.
The two of us had a late breakfast at Roma’s around the corner. We talked about the case, then I asked her about other cases she’d solved. Jamilla had a lot of confidence, but she was also modest about her contributions. I liked that about her. She definitely wasn’t full of herself. When she had finished her omelette and toast, she sat there nervously tapping her finger against the table. She had several tics, seemed wired most of the time. I knew she was on the job again.
“What’s the matter?” I finally asked. “You’re holding something back, aren’t you?”