Garreth drove up the alley behind Sterling-Weiss and parked at the driveway entrance. Two tall traffic cones blocked the driveway itself, yellow plastic tape stretched between them declaring: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Garreth stepped around the end of the barrier. Although pointed toward the two roll-up garage doors, the van sat outside. He understood why. The glue-impregnated paper strips suspended from the van’s headliner needed a heat source to release the fumes, and what better than the August sun. He did wonder, glancing around, why it appeared to sit here guarded by nothing more than the barrier tape.
Then the rear door of the funeral home swung open and Duncan, wearing jeans and a ball cap and t-shirt emblazoned: POLICE, lounged in the opening...obviously having kept watch from the air-conditioned interior of the building. Not that Garreth blamed him. “Well, well...look who came flying home.” Duncan glanced at his watch. “And I do mean flying. I won’t even ask how many citations you badged your way out of.” He pulled a thin cigar from a box in his t-shirt pocket and lit it. “Did they tell you you’ve got me to thank for finding the suspects’ vehicle?” The sweet aroma of brandy-soaked tobacco curled around Garreth. “You’re not the only one with investigative talent in this department.”
After spending the whole day awake, focusing for so long on the road, and enduring the headache the sunlight gave him, having Duncan crow when he had merely fallen over the van set Garreth’s teeth on edge. He pleaded to an imaginary judge, as a suspect he once arrested had, It was aggravated battery, Your Honor. He aggravated me into battering him.
“I heard, yes.” He circled the van.
A film of white forming on the windows indicated progress of the fuming, but unfortunately it also prevented seeing inside and learning what prints might be developing. Or did it? Standing on the bumper and leaning across the hood to peer through the thinner film on the upper center area of the windshield, Garreth spotted a fine tracery of white lines on the rearview mirror.
He forgot his irritation, headache, exhaustion, and the press of daylight. “Hey, Duncan!”
Duncan came on the run, took a look in turn, and jumped off the bumper to high five with Garreth. “They forgot the fucking back of the mirror!” He thumbed the mike of his portable radio. “Sue Ann, tell the Chief and Toews we’re hitting pay dirt over at Sterling!” He dragged on the cigar. “So you’ve gotten a piece of the action after all, Frisco. Happy?”
Garreth thought again about aggravated battery, but left without comment.
When he let himself into the PD through the rear entrance, Sue Ann’s eyes widened. Nancy glanced around from the computer, then down at his watch.
Garreth sighed. “None, if you’re wondering about speeding citations.” He set down his laptop case, laid the bags holding the denim tote and glass shard on a desk, and pulled evidence forms and tags from the forms shelves. “Is the evidence kit back?”
“Sorry.” Sue Ann shook her head. “I expect it’s either in Nat’s truck or Sterling’s garage.”
Nancy said. “What’ve you got?”
Garreth spread the Polaroid’s on the desk. “The albino and juvies hid up in Dell Gehrt’s hay barn Monday afternoon. They left these behind. There’s a matchbook to check for prints.”
“I’ll call Nat,” Sue Ann said.
She must have notified Danzig, too, because almost before Garreth finished the evidence forms and tags both the chief and Nat blew into the office. Garreth found himself explaining once more how and where he found the items, reassuring Danzig he had permission from Dell Gehrt to search the barn.
Which Danzig still confirmed by calling Gehrt. “Not that I don’t trust you, understand; I just want to make damn sure all our ducks are in a row when we finally haul this scumbag’s ass to court. Nat, since that ET’s gone back to Bellamy, take Nancy to help you go over that barn again while we still have daylight. Serk should be able to handle the watch alone for a while. When you get back, see what you can do with the matchbook.”
Nat nodded and started for the rear entrance with Nancy. Then just short of the hallway he turned back. “Garreth, I almost forgot. We got a call from the Bismarck PD The female half of the couple who bought Thone’s house told them Thone mentioned taking a job in Canada. Now we’re waiting for Canada to track him through his passport and social security number.” The door closed behind Nancy and him.
“Give me a mini evidence kit and I can process the matchbook,” Garreth told Danzig.
Danzig shook his head. “It’ll be simpler if we have just Nat and Melanie Hayes testifying on the physical evidence. Tell me about Cheyenne.”
Garreth did, finishing with: “I’ll make copies of my report for both you and Reichert.”
He turned on the computer and started that report. As soon as Danzig left, however, he opened his laptop, and with Sue Ann eyeing him curiously, logged on to the Internet.
“What are you up to now?”
“Not waiting for the Canadian government.” Using the people finder programs, he worked at locating Thone. Most of the search engines had US listings but using tricks Irena showed him connected to Canadian listings. Toggling back and forth to his maps for province names, he started with the southern tier and worked west one province at a time. No Thone, no Thone, no Thone. But in British Columbia, Vancouver had a listing for a Travis Thone. It could be his man.
He punched the listed phone number into his cell phone. Vancouver ran two hours earlier than Baumen but with luck the man ought was home from work by this time.
On the fifth ring, a man answered.
“Mr. Travis Thone?” Garreth introduced himself. “Do you still own the ‘95 Dodge van you bought at Boggus Dodge in Bismarck?”
Total silence greeted the question.
“Mr. Thone?”
Slowly, Thone said, “No, I don’t.”
“Who did you sell it to?”
“No one.” His voice went sardonic. “You might say I lost it in the Twilight Zone.”
Garreth blinked. “Excuse me?”
“In a poker game with dead men in a hotel suite that doesn’t exist.”
Garreth scrambled to digest that. “Ah...care to tell me about it?”
“Not really. It’s too weird. But...” Thone sighed. “What the hell. Two years ago I drove down to Spokane to give a presentation. My company does CGI for commercials.”
Spokane. Garreth’s neck prickled. Two years ago in Spokane a male of the albino’s description had stolen credit cards.
Thone said, “After the presentation four of us went to the hotel bar. These girls came in and started joking around with us. Staci and Tracy, Jeri and Geri, they called themselves...something rhyming, but the way they giggled, I’m betting those weren’t their real names.” He spoke in the tone of someone who has endlessly gone over everything in his mind.
“Can you describe them?”
“Hell yes. One was a big busty redhead pushing her cleavage at everyone and the other was little and dark-haired. She looked part Hispanic or Indian or something.”
The redhead sounded like no one they heard of, but could the other one be the Billings victim?
“After a while this clown walks in and the redhead says he’s her brother Daniel Kerrigan. I can describe him, too: twenties, skinny, tall but stoop-shouldered, stringy longish reddish hair, Coke bottle glasses. Talked like an encyclopedia.”
The albino in disguise? The so-called uncle in Billings with the dead girl could have been the albino in an elaborate disguise, too.
“He bought a round of drinks and we all sat talking, then I ended up alone at the table with him while the girls dragged everyone else out to dance. Kerrigan started playing with gold coins and rambling on in this monotone about them. God knows why I didn’t just get up and leave, he was so boring. He invited me up to his room to see some coins too valuable to carry around. I don’t know why I went--too numbed to resist, I guess--but as we reached his room a guy taking ice into the suite across the hall hailed him like a long lost brother and invited us to join a poker game. I don’t know what made me accept that, either, because I was tired. I just sort of got sucked in.” He paused. “Or suckered in. I kept winning and winning and when I drew a straight flush, I threw my car keys into the pot. I didn’t count on one of the other players having a royal flush.”
“Kerrigan?”
“No,” Thone said wryly, “one of the dead men. Only I didn’t know they were dead until the next day. I went to the room in the morning to see if there was any way to get back my van, but a maid said that room was empty. When I talked her into letting me look in, it was not only empty but not the suite I remember, just a room with no sign of a poker party. I knocked on Kerrigan’s door and someone else was in it. I gave Kerrigan’s name to the desk and they said he wasn’t registered anywhere in the hotel. But there was a message for me, an envelope with picture postcards of the other players in the game.”
“Picture postcards?” Garreth’s mind scrambled. “Of the dead men.”
“Yep.” Thone paused a beat. “Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Doc Holliday, the James brothers. Jesse held the royal flush.” Thone paused again. “I know I was had, and this Kerrigan let me know it. I just don’t know how the hell he did it, or why, for just a few bucks and my van. I’ll swear those guys weren’t just made up to look like the postcards, and there’s no way that room could have been made to look like a suite.”
Except under the influence of a vampire?
“So like I said, I lost the van in the Twilight Zone. Why are you asking about it?”
Garreth kept his answer simple. “It was used to kill a police officer and we’re trying to identify the man who drove it.” Who, though not Jesse James, might indeed be a dead man.
After hanging up, Garreth wrote his report, brooding over the computer screen and his notes. What a piece of work this albino was. Whatever else came out of his trip to Cheyenne and talking to Thone, he had learned the albino liked playing games. Knowing that did not help identify him. He could equally be a human wanting to prove himself smarter than other people or a vampire toying with humans to amuse himself. But now the effort put into the Homesick Runaway scam outweighing its profit made more sense. Ditto the elaborate charade perpetrated on Thone. The take only kept score. How successfully he played the mark was that mattered.
Rather...it had been what mattered. Who knew now, with the introduction of blood games. Having killed a dog for its blood, then drunk from dying accident victims, where might he go from there?
They might learn soon enough, because the albino also clearly liked flaunting his cleverness. Why else populate his poker game with dead men and advertising the scam to Thone, or risk discovery waiting here Monday until he could leave the van in Baumen?
Garreth preferred finding the suspects before they went for anyone else’s blood. The problem was doing so when the albino used disguises so effectively. Changing female companions as he had between Spokane and Cheyenne, or shedding them altogether–like the dead girl in Billings?–would make him even harder to recognize.
He opened his phone and called Thone again. “Do you have a fax machine there at home?”
In a puzzled tone, Thone said, “Yes.”
Garreth pulled the case file out of his laptop case and extracted the fax photo from Billings. “I’m going to send you a picture. Tell me if you recognize the person.”
Five minutes later Thone said, “That’s the girl with the redhead.”
Although he expected the identification, Garreth felt a surge of anger, and apprehension. The albino gave that girl champagne, had sex with her, and slit her wrists. Had he also killed the redhead?
He had Sue Ann query the Spokane and Billings PD’s about females of the redhead’s description found dead in their jurisdictions between a year and a half and two years ago. He went back to his report while waiting for a reply, wondering if the bobbsey bitches were still alive. Killing them would not only break the trail by reducing the trio to a solo but if the albino were a vampire, it eliminated the threat of flunkeys revealing that fact.
Sue Ann said, “Garreth, phone.”
On the other end of the line, Sheriff Reichert asked, “How did Cheyenne go?”
“I’m working on the report now.” The weight on him vanished--sunset, finally! Stretching in relief, Garreth gave Reichert a synopsis that included searching Gehrt’s barn and the phone conversations with Thone. The account of the poker game he edited, as he had the written report, to reflect only that Thone lost the van to the albino in a poker game. No sense confusing the issue with dead men and phantom suites.
“You think this turkey’s killed these girls, too?”
Garreth shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope not.”
“Continue to follow up on the redhead. And add the items from the barn to the other evidence we’re sending up to the KBI lab.”
Garreth sighed. The KBI techs could find the trace evidence in the tote, match the glass to fragments taken from the van’s broken headlight, and scan any prints on the matchbook for transmission to the FBI. But everyone here might die of old age before results came back, the lab was so overworked.
“How’s the Super Glue doing, do you know?” Reichert asked.
There, at least, he had something good to report. “I think we have prints developing on the back of the rearview mirror.” Even though wanting a print warred with the fear that it would end up matching some police record a half century old and raise uncomfortable questions..
“Well, let me know when we know.”
He was printing out his report when he heard Sue Ann’s voice. “Go ahead, Four.”
Duncan’s number. Garreth spun Sue Ann’s direction.
She nodded at him. “Great! I’ll let One and Two know.” She reached for the phone. “Ed says we’ve got prints.”
Garreth headed for the rear entrance.
Behind Sterling’s he found Duncan leaning against the van’s undamaged front fender with a proprietary smirk. “I think you ought to buy me a beer for handing you Lebekov’s killer.”
“If this van gives us prints that identify the albino,” Garreth said, “I’ll buy you a case.”
Nat’s Silverado rolled up the alley to the driveway. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Duncan pointed. “Back of the mirror.”
Nat stepped up on the bumper to peer through the windshield, then jumped down and walked around the van opening all the doors. “Let’s have a look.”
Garreth stepped well back. These fumes always overwhelmed him. “Did you find anything more at the barn?”
“One more piece of headlight, plus Nancy pulled up some of the bales where you found the tote and farther on down found Maggie’s day planner.”
While they waited for the van to air out, Nat brought the evidence kit from the Silverado. Danzig arrived, parking behind Nat’s truck. They watched while Nat unpinned the strings on the glue paper from the headliner and dropped the strips in a plastic baggie. And they crowded around the van’s side door while he sidled up between the front seats and carefully grasping the rearview mirror by the side edges, pulled. It came loose from the windshield with a crunch. Once he had it free he turned the mirror over and held it up close to the dome light to study the fine white lines Garreth could see on the back, where the glue fumes had reacted with the organic compounds left behind by whatever member of the trio touched the mirror.
Nat’s sigh felt like a punch in the gut.
“What?” Danzig said.
Nat turned around grimacing. “They’re smudged.”
Duncan swore. Mocking laughter echoed in Garreth’s head.
“I’ll go ahead and lift these anyway, because even smudged you can tell one is a tented arch.”
With arches of all types making up about five per cent of prints, a right hand tented arch turning up anywhere else could help make their case.
The laughter in Garreth’s head died away.
“I need light to hunt for prints, so, buckaroos, if you’ll give me a hand, please.”
They raised the garage door and pushed the van inside. Duncan hung around a few minutes longer, but when Nat checked the dash and the front seats with no more results, he left mumbling about heading for a beer.
While Garreth and Danzig watched Nat work his way around the interior of the van with a spotlight, moving seats and checking the under sides of arm rests and storage space lids, Garreth told the chief about Thone. He frowned at the van. “The more about this albino I learn, the more I worry about locating him. Disguises... maybe killing the females...maybe changing vehicles again if he’s paranoid enough.” The pickup could be parked behind some other auto repair shop. Instead of sitting here watching Nat conduct what appeared more and more a fruitless search, he should be out hunting the albino. If only he knew what direction hunt.
An hour later Nat slid out of the van shaking his head. “It’s a bust. There are some partials scattered around, but the lanolin from the baby wipes they used for cleaning has leached into them.”
Blurring the partials to useless smudges.
Frustration snarled in Garreth while he helped Nat pack up the evidence kit and secure the garage and funeral home’s rear door. Nor did it help that back at the office no word had come from Spokane or Billings about the redheaded female. He climbed into the Porsche and gunned out of the parking lot.
Duncan was drowning disappointment with a beer. Drinking sounded like a good idea. Several pints of blood remained in the cooler. Garreth drove to the cemetery and carried one pint to the far corner where Lane’s grave lay. Sitting cross-legged beside the rose bush planted on top keep her in, just in case cremation had not totally destroyed her, he broke the seal on the pint and took a big swallow.
Blood...salty, metallic, fiery sweet, flowed cold down his throat. Beneath him, the soil drew at him, inviting him to stretch out and lose himself in it.
“Do you have any suggestions to help me find this bastard?”
But instead of imagining some mocking reply from Lane, he seemed to hear Maggie’s voice...angry, hurt. You’re out here again? I still don’t understand. She ruined your life. She tried to kill you. Yet you’re asking her advice? Why don’t you ask mine?
Guilt pricked him. Why was he talking to Lane? Habit?
No, because you’re mine, lover. He imagined arms sliding around him from behind. You always will be. Her breath tickled the back of his neck. I made you; we’re bound forever. Blood calls to blood, even from beyond the grave.
Garreth started. He stared at the bottle in his hand. Irina said that, too: blood calls to blood. She located him at the wake that way. And he had felt her in his apartment. If one or more of these suspects carried his blood now, could he feel their presence?
He closed his eyes and let his senses reach outward. Presently something tugged at him...very faint and tenuous. Garreth turned toward the sensation and...
Saw the albino with a bloody-tipped knife, and a naked man blindfolded and gagged with duct tape. Blood streamed down the victim’s arm while the albino dragged his tongue up the liquid, eyes reflecting red as the blood he drank. Grinning, he licked his lips. “Belly up to the bar, children. Drink it while it’s still warm.”
The vision vanished. Garreth found himself on his feet staring north, skin crawling. So at least one of them had drunk his blood. And they had gone somewhere that away, escalating the violence of their games...or about to. He needed to find them fast...now...before the games turned more lethal.