I ejected the tape and sat down on the couch, staring at the tape box like it was a rattlesnake. A prostitution ring was running under Tangento’s auspices, with Barry as its biggest customer. But Barry’s proclivities were so sadistic, so macabre, that only females whose lives were completely expendable could be used. I thought about Eric and Barry. They were both killers, both evil from society’s point of view, and both would be dealt with in the same way if they were caught. Yet they were so different. My parents taught me that there was no such thing as circumstantial morality, only right and wrong, but experience had now taught me that it was much more complex than that.
I opened one of the sheets of paper, and then dropped it as if it was a burning match. I ran into my room and pulled out of my purse the letter that Eric had written, telling me he was leaving town. I had known right away it was the same handwriting, but now I had proof. I carried the letter back to the living room. The sheets of paper contained a list of names, all of them Asian, written in Eric’s archaic cursive. This was evidence that Eric had given to Lucy, and Kimberley had stolen it from her.
I could see what Eric’s plan had been. If he had trusted this to the police, Barry would have found a way to weasel out of it. No bodies would ever be found, and dredging up witnesses in Asia would be impossible. Eric had provided this material to Lucy because of HFB’s access to the court of public opinion, hoping she would expose Barry and Tangento and cause a public scandal from which neither would recover. Lucy hadn’t been interested in being a vigilante, however, but even so what she knew had gotten her killed. Kimberley had tried to use it to her own advantage, to further her obsessive desire to succeed at HFB, and she too earned a spot in the morgue for her efforts.
Now it was my turn. Perhaps I’d never get to see Eric again, but at least I could finish the job that he had left undone.
I left my building with two suitcases packed with a few clothes, books, and toiletries. I’d pick up the rest of my possessions later, or maybe I wouldn’t. These trivial things didn’t seem to matter much anymore. I stood for a moment in the portico and looked outside. The day was gray and overcast, with fog thick enough that the houses and apartment buildings across the street seemed wavering and insubstantial, like images on decaying celluloid film. The lack of direct sunlight meant that I wouldn’t need sunglasses, so I simply adjusted the suitcases to make them more comfortable in my hands and walked out the door. Immediately I entered a scene straight out of an old movie: a man in a trench coat and fedora materialized out of the fog, pointing a gun at my chest. The scene was so contrived it took me a moment to get scared.
“Now what kind of a gentleman would I be if I didn’t offer to help you with those bags?” The syrupy southern accent was unmistakable. Barry Warner had not gone back to Texas, he was right here.
He gestured with his other hand toward a shiny, silver Mercedes parked in the loading zone. “Are you going to the airport? Let me give you a ride, taxis are so scarce in this town.”
“That’s okay, my car’s just down the street.”
Would Barry Warner shoot me on the street in the middle of the day? Was he that crazy?
“If you’re thinking about running away, don’t try it. I dropped two eight-point bucks last season, and I guarantee they were faster than you are.” He smiled, showing his white, elephant-sized teeth.
Okay, so he was that crazy. I’d have to come up with a better plan than wildly running down the street.
Barry opened the trunk of his car with a remote control and gestured that I should put my suitcases in it, so I obeyed.
“Now get in the back seat,” he said.
I opened the door but Barry didn’t wait for me to sit down. He shoved me roughly into the foot space below the back seat. Then he kneeled on my spine while he blindfolded me with a scarf and tied my hands behind my back with scratchy rope. I lay in a torment of pain from my wrenched arms and crushed back and listened to him climb into the driver’s seat and start the car.
“Where are we going, Barry?” I managed to grunt.
“To your friend Eric’s house, to bring him a little present.”
I didn’t think my heart could pound faster than it already was, but it surprised me by doubling its rhythm. He knew who Eric was? And more importantly, he knew where he was?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, probably not very convincingly.
“You aren’t the only one who’s been doing their homework. I’ve been following you for days. Your weirdo friend Nicolai Blaloc was particularly helpful.”
I was freezing cold, but droplets of sweat were dripping between my breasts. “Who’s Nicolai Blaloc?” I asked, deliberately mispronouncing the name.
Barry snickered like I’d told a dirty joke. “After the incident in your apartment, when you didn’t die like a good girl should, I started to get a little suspicious. With a little, um, persuasion, Nicolai explained it all to me. When I realized that I had the very knife he was talking about in my possession, well, y’all can’t imagine how happy I was!”
“How do you know where Eric lives?” I was wiggling my hands, trying to loosen the ropes.
“Same way I learned about you. Surveillance! For a vampire, he sure is oblivious. Although I guess he figures ain’t nobody gonna hurt him, right?” The more animated Barry become, the more pronounced his accent.
The car droned. I could feel the wheels turning, but of course I had no idea where we were going. The rough rope chafed mercilessly, but it loosened a little as I rotated my wrists.
Barry seemed to be in a garrulous mood. “Yep, I’ll tell you, I was more than a little surprised when I saw you again after I left you and Kimberley in your apartment. It was like seein’ a ghost.”
Hoping to capitalize on the average human’s fear of the supernatural, I said, “If you believe Eric is a real vampire, aren’t you scared to confront him?”
He chuckled. “Let me tell you a little story. When I was a boy in Mississippi my grandfather used to handle rattlesnakes in church. Every Sunday for twelve years he’d go into a trance and let those damn things crawl all over him like ants at a picnic. One day a snake bit him and he up and died. The question is, does the fact that he handled the snakes for twelve years without being bit mean that miracles exist, or does the fact that he died mean that they don’t?”
“And your point is…?” I squeezed my fingers together to make my right hand as narrow as possible and pulled hard. The rope was definitely loosening.
“My point is, I stayed well clear of those rattlers, miracle or no. You might be alive now because I nicked a rib instead of getting the knife in properly. Or this Nicolai fella might be right. Whether Eric is a vampire or just a human nutcase, he’s gonna die when I stick the fancy knife in him. So that’s what I’m gonna do.”
“Did you know about Eric when you killed Lucy? Is that why you drained her blood, to make it look like he did it?”
Barry chuckled again. “I didn’t kill Lucy, Angie! That was Kimberley. I didn’t know Lucy had a damn thing on me.”
“Kimberley?” This time my ignorance was utterly convincing.
“Kimberley is ambitious, in case you didn’t notice. She went over to Lucy’s house that Sunday, to put a little pressure on her. She had found out that Lucy was planning to fire her and she wanted to, uh, convince her otherwise. She took her to the Bennetts’ and kept her there for a few days. Kimberley was dosing Lucy with drugs and Lucy naturally developed loose lips. She told Kimberley about the vampire coven, about dating Les, and unfortunately, about me.”
I turned my head so my other cheek could be rubbed raw by the all-weather carpet. “So Kimberley had a scapegoat for murder in the vampire coven and someone else who could help her advance at HFB besides Lucy.”
There were clues galore that I hadn’t seen: Kimberley’s absence from our apartment at the same time that Lucy was missing; her attempts to steal Macabre Factor from me; the comments her parents had made about her at their party; her obvious blackmailing of Barry. Had I been too obsessed with Eric to pay attention to what was going on around me?
I smelled smoke. Barry had lit up a cigarette. “So, Kimberley kills Lucy on Tuesday night and dumps her back home, trying her best to make it look like a vampire killing. Then she comes to me and says, ‘Put me in charge of Tangento or you’re gonna find your dirty laundry spread all over Market Street.’”
“I heard that, actually, at the Bennetts’ party,” I said.
“Really, well, you do know too much, don’t you?” Barry said amiably.
“But why did you decide to kill Kimberley if you’d already given her what she wanted?” At that moment I managed to slip my right wrist out of the rope. I rubbed it quickly against my pants and then put it back inside the loops, so that it looked as if I was still bound.
Barry clicked his tongue, making a tut-tutting sound. “You’da thought she was my ex-wife, the way she expected me to keep paying out, Angie. She planned to start her own firm, and she was going to get me to persuade, shall we say, certain men at other companies who had dealings with Tangento’s more subterranean commerce to give her their advertising accounts.”
“Why me? Was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“No, Kimberley told me some snitch had been sending you envelopes, leaking little bits of information about my business to you.”
“So, two ducks with one bullet, huh, Barry?”
“Do you hunt, Angie?”
“Just for the right words,” I answered.
The car screeched to a halt. The door slammed as Barry exited the car. A new wave of fear prickled my skin and clenched my gut. Had Barry brought me to a quiet place in the woods to kill me? But when he climbed into the back seat, pulled me upright and took off my blindfold I saw that we were still in the city. I didn’t know the street specifically, but I could tell from the houses—a stately mix of Tudor and Arts and Crafts styles—that we were in Sea Cliff, an upscale neighborhood near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was quiet here, but not the woods by any stretch.
Barry had taken off his trench coat and fedora. In his starched white button-down shirt and Dockers slacks he now epitomized the banality of evil. He pointed out the window.
“That’s the Count’s castle, right there.”
Eric’s house was an anomaly in this old-fashioned neighborhood, a stunningly modern building of cement and glass. It looked like two shoeboxes, one standing on its edge and the other emerging from the side of the first, cantilevered over a hill and resting on pilings. Barry opened the door and pushed me to the sidewalk, not noticing that the rope was loose around my wrists. Now would be the moment to run away, as Barry was hefting his linebacker frame out of the back seat, but I didn’t consider it. Eric might be asleep inside the house, helpless against Nicolai’s ancient knife. I couldn’t let Barry reach him.
Instead of turning toward the house, Barry prodded me to walk up the street. He kept the gun against my ribs, hidden under the trench coat that he had placed over his arm. Under his other arm was the ornate box containing Nicolai’s knife. Barry peered in the window of each car we passed.
When we came upon a huge blue SUV Barry said, “This one will do.”
With the butt of the gun he hit the glass in the passenger window. As the alarm wailed, ear-splittingly loud, Barry rushed me back to Eric’s house. He pulled out the gun and shot the door lock, the sound drowned out by the alarm.
“People have no idea that car alarms are a criminal’s best friend.”
We walked into an expansive living room. Floor to ceiling windows framed a three-sided view of the bay. The two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge peeked out of the fog. Because of the way the house was cantilevered over the hillside I felt like we were on the deck of a ship. The room was bright with sunlight, even on this foggy day, and there were no curtains.
“Guess he doesn’t sleep in here,” Barry said, echoing my thoughts. He took hold of my arm again and led me into the hallway.
“I figure he doesn’t walk around during the day, right?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Yes, he does. And the gun won’t do anything to him, and neither will the knife. I know, I tried it already.”
Barry just laughed. “Never cheat a cheater, or lie to a liar,” he quipped. “Besides, I got a plan for all eventualities. Want to hear it?”
Of course I did, so I nodded.
“Well, Angie,” he said. “If he’s a normal human freak, I’m going to shoot him. If we find him sleeping in some coffin like a supernatural freak I’m going to stab him, and then shoot him. What do you think?”
I turned to look at his broad, handsome, cartoon-character face, and saw that he was smiling at me like I was his co-conspirator.
“Good idea,” I replied.
In front of us was a circular iron staircase spiraling both up and down from the main floor. Barry guided me down the stairs into a long hallway. Recessed lighting highlighted a collection of old photographs of different cities. I recognized Paris and Venice before Barry opened a door and pushed me into a room. The interior was dark but Barry patted the wall until he found a light switch.
It looked like the bedroom of any well-to-do San Francisco bachelor, not that I had been in many for comparison. Tasteful abstract oil paintings decorated the walls. An ancient-looking Oriental rug covered the oak floor. The bedroom set was black and modern, with a tweedy gray coverlet that matched the tweedy gray drapes. A small, oval portrait hanging near the bed caught my attention. It was framed in gilt and dark with age. Fascinated, I moved closer. It was an oil painting of an ethereally lovely woman. With her copper-colored hair and light blue eyes, it had to be Eric’s mother. The picture confirmed that it wasn’t just his vampire powers that made him attractive: it was in the genes as well. No wonder a vampire had chosen him as a permanent companion.
“This must be his bedroom, but dang, where he is he, Angie?”
“How should I know?” I shrieked. I was trying to stay calm but the tension of walking through this silent house, trying to be ready for whatever battle was around the corner, was almost unbearable. If something was going to happen I needed it to hurry up, because I couldn’t hold myself together for much longer.
Barry threw open the two closets and even banged on the walls and felt the floor. I watched him, my mouth dry with fear. I could only hope that if Eric really was asleep in the house that he had hidden himself really well. I had been using all my senses to locate him, not just looking but sniffing the air and sending out mental feelers to sense his presence around a corner or behind a wall. The bedroom held a slight vestige of Eric’s scent, enough to tell me that he had been there recently. But even as I searched for him I hoped he was nowhere nearby.
We returned to the hallway. The next room had a reinforced door with a lock on it, but the key was in the lock. Barry pocketed the key and we went inside. This room was much larger than Eric’s bedroom and looked like it was just used for storage. I say just, but it was filled with things that would have amazed me had I not been in such dire circumstances. It was like visiting the basement of the Metropolitan Museum. Standing on a stone column was a marble statue at least eight feet high, of a young naked man with chiseled abs and a tiny penis. Two holes gaped where his jeweled eyes should have been. There was a gleaming black and red vase, its circumference decorated with pictures of men in togas hunting various animals. A richly engraved warrior’s shield that looked like it was made of pure gold sat in an open wooden crate filled with Styrofoam peanuts. A stack of oil paintings leaned haphazardly against one wall. The one in front was of ballet dancers in gauzy white tutus pirouetting in a high-ceilinged studio. My sister had a very similar print in her half of our room while we were growing up. It was either a Degas or a mighty good knock-off, and why would Eric own a fake when he could have bought this painting in Paris when it first went on sale?
“Hell’s bells, Angie, look at this stash,” said Barry, running his hand over a marble bust of some long dead conqueror wearing a wreath of pressed gold leaves. He picked up the wreath and placed it on his own head. “I’m no expert, but this looks like some valuable stuff. And just think, it’ll all be mine when you’re both dead. What an unexpected bonus.”
He wandered through the room, picking things up and putting them down with no reverence whatsoever. Ancient vases and delicate statuary wobbled and teetered under his ham fists.
“Do you know what any of this stuff is?” he asked.
“No, but I know Eric’s going to kill you when he finds you here,” I replied, with more bravado than I felt.
“Not if I find him first,” Barry said.
We finished searching the first storeroom and then crossed the hallway into a second room with a reinforced door. It also had a key that Barry took with him. We moved much more swiftly through this room, as my captor had ceased to be impressed by the treasure trove around him. We were near the back of the room when Barry stopped abruptly.
“Hey, that looks promising.”
A massive stone sarcophagus with an ornately carved top and sides stood against the far wall, surrounded by packing crates, Chinese porcelain vases, and a giant wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. My heart sank.
“What do you think, Angie?”
“It’s Egyptian, or maybe Roman.”
He laughed. “No, I mean, do you think Count Chocula might be sleeping it off in there? It looks pretty sturdy.”
To my great dismay, I thought that he might be. The sweet fragrance of vampire was much stronger in this room. I wondered if Barry had noticed it.
“I told you, Barry, he doesn’t sleep during the day. That’s a myth.”
Barry made the tut-tutting sound of disapproval again. “I went to college too, missy. After five years at Ole Miss you think I don’t understand reverse psychology?” He pushed at the lid of the sarcophagus. “Jesus, that’s heavy. Could you help me?” He looked up. “No, of course you can’t, your hands are tied, aren’t they?”
He stuck the gun in the waistband of his pants and placed the knife box on a nearby table, and then he crouched so that he could apply all of his considerable strength to the task at hand. Now was my chance. Slipping my hands out of the rope, I grabbed the nearest thing, a large porcelain vase, and raised it over his head. But Barry’s football instincts were still intact. He swung around and rushed me with his shoulder, sending me flying into the statue of the Virgin. Mary and I hit the ground amid shards of the probably priceless vase. My head bounced like a tennis ball on the concrete floor. I tried desperately to stay conscious, but a galaxy of stars whirled in front of my eyes and an inky blackness crept in on both sides until it finally engulfed me.