Blood Walk Part 49

Holle's. Garreth only glanced around it before moving on down the hall. Since Holle never had the chance to come back here after Irina moved out of his house, he could not have a new address for her. At the back of the house lay a kitchen slightly remodeled into an employee lunch room/lounge. A utilitarian office with files and several desks adjoined it and connected in turn to another office next to Holle's, smaller but carpeted and furnished more stylishly. A framed photograph of a woman with two teenage children stood on the tidy desk between a vase of tulips and a Rolodex file and appointment book. Holle's secretary? He hoped so.

If Irina had told anyone where she could be reached, it would have been Holle's secretary.

Sitting down, Garreth reached for the Rolodex. This was probably a slim chance. Still . . . he might get lucky.

He spun the side k.n.o.b to bring the R's around. RE . . . RI . . . RU . . . RUDENKO. But the card was for a Natalya Rudenko at the Philos Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. Irina's "mother," no doubt. He eyed the appointment book. Perhaps a local number had been written down there.

He pulled the book over close and turned the page back to Wednesday. Was it only yesterday, well, day before yesterday now, that they had found Holle's body? It seemed an eternity ago.The page had little writing: a few appointments written in precise, square printing . . . crossed out by a shakier hand. But there was one telephone number, scribbled in the margin near the bottom of the page, with a note under it in that same unsteady hand: something heavily crossed out, followed by a legible wordRieger.

Garreth stared at it, sucking on his lower lip. Was it what he was looking for? He squinted at the crossed out word but could not decipher it through the scribble over it. He turned the page to study the back side and the preceding page. And grimaced. Only the impressions of the crossout strokes had come through, not those of the word itself.

Or two words, maybe, he decided, turning to Wednesday again and studying it more. It started with SH, but something looking vaguely like a capital P appeared halfway along the word, and a lower case L shortly after that. Garreth frowned in concentration.

Sh . . . P1 . . .

A click sounded in his head. He grinned. Sheraton-Palace?

The longer he studied the notation, the more logical that seemed. The name fit the s.p.a.ce, and the Sheraton-Palace was an old hotel that had survived the 1906 quake. If Irina had been visiting San Francisco for a very long time, it would be one place she remembered from the past. Rieger could be the name she registered under.

He glanced around the office for a phone book. One look at the cla.s.sified pages should verify if the telephone number was for the hotel.

"I believe directory is locked in lower right drawer," a female voice said behind him.

Garreth whipped around in disbelief and panic, adrenalin flus.h.i.+ng icy hot through him. How could anyone sneak up on him? He had not heard or smelled anything!

But now a scent reached him . . . sweetly spicy-musky, wafting from a slight figure standing against the still-closed door from the hall.

He stared, breath frozen in his chest. Meeting her anywhere else, he would have taken her for just another sixteen or seventeen-year-old, especially in her designer jeans, ankle-high fas.h.i.+on boots, and and oversized s.h.i.+rt. Lane had described Irina as exquisite, like a Dresden figurine, but at five-foot-nothing, flatchested, and dark hair cropped boyishly short above a face with slavic cheekbones, pixyish described her better. Except there was nothing pixyish in her faintly slanting eyes . . . nothing childlike, either. Darkness robbed them of color, but not expression; they watched him coldy, appraising, noting his every move.

Nor was there anything remotely pixyish about the Beretta she pointed at him.

"You are Garreth Mikaelian, I think?"

Garreth could not identify her accent. Eastern European originally, perhaps; now very diluted. "And you're Irina Rudenko."

"But of course. I see you're staring at my toy." She hefted the Beretta. It looked gigantic in her small hand. "Do you like it?"

"I'm wondering what you think you're going to do with it." She must know bullets could not hurt him.

"Shoot you perhaps," Irina replied. "Clip has ebony bullets."

Adenalin spurted in him again. Ebony! Little pieces of wooden stake tearing through him propelled by exploding powder!

"You'd kill one of your own kind?"

Stupid question, man,an inner voice snarled.Of course she would. She already has.

"Why not? You do."

The adrenalin turned to ice. She knew about Lane! He covertly eyed the distance between his chair and the far corner of the desk.

The gun waggled fractionally side to side, like a head gesturingno. "It would be foolish. I learned to shoot before pistols had bullets or rifling in barrel and I could knock flies from a horse even then."

The matter-of-fact statement drove the ice into his bones. Garreth fought rising panic, fought to think of a defense, or escape.

"But I prefer not to shoot. It's best this seem like an accident and not another murder." She stepped away from the door. "Shall we go?"

His mind raced. Could he jump her as he pa.s.sed her? No, she had moved well to one side. So he remained seated. "If you want me dead, you'll have to kill me here."

"As you wish," she said calmly. "It just means I must be sure your body is never found." Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Desperation acted where logic had failed. He hurled the appointment book at her, then flung himself after it, grabbing for the gun. But she ducked sideways before he was halfway there. His hands found only empty air.

Movement blurred across his peripheral vision. He had just time to identify it as the gun barrel slicing at him before pain exploded in the side of his head.

The floor smashed up into him.

From a great echoing distance Irina said mockingly, "Thank you."

Dimly, he felt her bend over him. A hand caught the back of his head, another his chin. Terror exploded in Garreth. She intended to break his neck!

He tried to roll, to catch her wrists and break her grip . . . but his body obeyed weakly, sluggishly. Her foot pinned his left wrist to the floor.

"I've always wondered about Afterlife," Irina said. Her grip tightened. "Usually I have hoped none exists. There are too many souls I would not care to meet again. But for you, I hope there is, so your victims may confront you."

One word penetrated the storm of terror and dizzying pain. Victims? Plural? Who else besides Lane? He struggled to force his tongue into cooperation before she started the fatal jerk. "What . . . victims?"

"Leonard Holle and that male prost.i.tute, of course."

Confusion thundered through the fog in his head. Relief: she had not learned about Lane after all! Bewilderment: then why had she killed those three men? But she accused him of the murders. Except she was one victim short. Because she wanted to confuse him or because . . . she knew nothing about the Count?

He wrenched at the wrist trapped under the instep of her boot. "I didn't kill either of them, or Count Dracula either!"

The grip on his head tightened still more. "Dracula! What are you talking about?"

Too late he realized how ridiculous the remark must have sounded. He said hastily . . . through his teeth because of her grip, "The hustler's roommate. We found his body later the same day Holle died. He called himself Count Dracula and acted like a movie vampire. Someone drove a stake through his heart."

Above him, her breath caught. "Holy Mother. And you claim that someone wasn't you?"

"It wasn't me."

She released his head, but only to grab him by the shoulders and slam him backward into the desk. "Then why are you here, Garreth?" she asked softly. Glowing ruby red, her eyes stared into his. "Why, if not hunting me to kill, too?"

He squeezed his eyes shut in a chilly rush of fear. He did not dare yield to her. What if she asked about Lane?

She whispered, "Garreth, look at me."

No! he thought.

"You say you didn't kill Leonard and the others, but how can I know that?" Her voice purred. "Look at me, Garreth. Is only one way to be sure. Only one way. You must know that. Look at me."

Her voice pulled at him. Lane had been able to do that, he remembered. While he lay on his driveway with her arrow through his shoulder, her voice alone had almost made him turn where she could take a second, fatal shot at him. Irina had even more of that kind of power, he sensed.

"Look at me."

The whisper slid through the pain and fog in his head.

"Look at me."

It snagged him. Slowly, inexorably, his chin lifted. His eyes opened.

Irina's filled his vision, pulling him in until nothing else existed but their glowing ruby depths. He barely heard her voice, distant and warmly approving. "That's better. Now, did you kill Leonard and the other men?"

"No."

She spun away and paced across the room, hands clasped together at her chin, as though in prayer.

Freed, Garreth slumped back dazed against the desk. "I-I thought you killed them. Only another vampire could have overpowered Maruska that way at night."

Irina looked around. "Go. Leave the city and go home to the prairie where you are safe."

He blinked at her and sat up straighter. The action set his head throbbing. He ignored it. "No way. There's a murderer loose killing people and trying to frame me. I have to find who it is."

Irina's mouth thinned. "What a foolish child you are! You have no idea what you're dealing with. Go home and leave this to those with experience to handle it."

He eyed her. "Could it have anything to do with the reason you wanted to find Lane so urgently?"

She hesitated, and before answering, came back and leaned down to catch his arm. Pulling him to his feet, she said, "Be sensible and go. You are a child of Mada's excesses. Do not become a victim of them also."

A part of him bristled at being shooed away like a bothersome child, especially by someone who looked like a child herself, but the irritation dissipated before a chilling thought. Back at Holle's house he had wondered if another vampire might be involved.

What if that were the case? An old, powerful, perhaps crazed one might explain Irina's concern. But only one vampire would explain those last two statements. Lane. He fought to breathe.

"Irina, it is possible-"

Belatedly, he realized he was talking to the air. In the few moments he was lost in thought, Irina had left, moving so silently that not even he heard.

He sat down at the desk again, shaking. Lane. Death waited for him in this city, Grandma Doyle said. Could that mean Lane, not Irina? Could she really be here after all, in spite of everything? But if that were true, if all of his precautions had still not kept Lane in her grave, what was it going totake to lay her once and for all?

1 For once it was a relief to be awake and moving around by daylight. The pounding on his door had rescued him from dreams of finding Lane's grave blown open as though by dynamite and Christopher Stroda sitting at the bottom of the gaping hole gestering for Garreth to join him. Lien'sI Ching reading for the day gave him something else to think about. Number Three, Difficulty At the Beginning.

"It leads to supreme success, which comes through perseverence," Lien said at breakfast. "But no move should be made prematurely and one should not go alone; one should appoint helpers. A change line at the beginning reinforces the need to have helpers, that change line producing hexagram Number Eight, Holding Together. For good fortune we must unite with others who complement and aid one another."

Garreth followed Harry into the Hall of Justice elevator. Helpers. Sure. He grimaced. Who? It would be difficult to team up with Fowler again, even if he wanted to, and telling Harry everything would only make the case against him worse.

Girimonte already sat at her desk when they walked into Homicide. She looked up with a grin. "Good news. We finally ID'd Count Dracula. Clarence Parmley, formerly of Columbia, Missouri. His prints came in from the FBI this morning, on file from an arrest in 1971 for civil disobedience-protesting U.S. involvement in Viet Nam." She puffed her cigar. "I gather that was in the halcyon days of youth, before he became a vampire."

Serruto appeared in the doorway of his office. "Briefing. Let's get to it, troops. Bad news, Harry. Lieutenant Fogelsong in Burglary just called me. There was a break-in at the Philos Foundation last night. A blood bank technician is in the hospital with a concussion and the file cabinets were all jimmied open. Another tech in the building who caught a glimpse of the intruder describes him as a man with light-colored hair and a stocking over his face."

Garreth's stomach dropped in dismay.

"It couldn't have been Garreth," Harry protested. "I had his door locked from the outside."

"Did you have the window barred?" Girimonte asked.

Serruto said, "We ought to know something one way or the other before too long. The tech said she'd come downtown sometime this morning to look at mug shots. You won't mind sticking around here for a lineup instead of going out with Takananda and Girimonte, will you, Mikaelian?"

Harry's mouth tightened.

But Garreth made himself shrug. "Of course not."

He slumped in a chair, closing his eyes. A break-in. It had to have happened after he left. But . . . who? Lane? She had pa.s.sed as a man before. Last night's dream came back to him. Cold ran down his spine. The hair color could be from dye, or a wig.

Had she followed him there? She must have. She must have been watching him all along. It was too much for coincidence that Maruska's killer intercepted him before Garreth arrived and that Holle's killer and the Philos burglar went to work just after Garreth left them.

After the briefing ended, Harry and Girimonte picked up their coats and headed for the door. "Oh, if you need something to do, Mikaelian, you can read the book Fowler gave me," Girimonte called back. "It's in the upper lefthand drawer of my desk."

You know what you can do with your book, honey,Garreth thought.

Fifteen minutes later he found himself reaching for the book anyway. It was the only thing to do. Everyone else remaining in the squadroom avoided him as though he had caught AIDS. Concentration proved as difficult as it had been the night before, though.

His mind kept slipping back to the break-in and Lane, a distraction not helped by a tall, charming brunette in the book who reminded Garreth of Lane. He gripped the book, white-knuckled. How could she still be alive? How?

Serruto tapped his shoulder. "Let's go. That witness from the Philos Foundation is in Burglary."

Garreth had filled in for several lineups before. Since he had not been the man the technician saw, this should be no different, he told himself. Then while shuffling into the lighted box with four other lean, blondish officers, it occurred to him that the technician might have described not someone she saw at all but someone Lane, using hypnotic powers, told her she saw. He bit his lip. This could be the evidence Lane intended to incriminate him once and for all.

"Face the front," a voice said from the speaker overhead.

Garreth put his back against the height-graduated wall.

"Number three, take off your gla.s.ses."

Slowly he complied, and stood squinting into the lights that kept him from seeing who sat on the darkened side of the gla.s.s wall facing him.

An eternity dragged by while the hair p.r.i.c.kled all over Garreth's body and cold ate into his bones. Smells of blood and aftershave and cigarette smoke pressed around him, strengthed by confinement in the lineup box.

"That's all," said the voice from the speaker.

He put his gla.s.ses back on and they all shuffled out.

To Garreth's surprise, only Serruto waited for him. Grinning, the lieutenant slapped his back. "Congratulations; you're too short."

He could not feel much relief. That might lift suspicion from him but a burglar taller than he did not rule out Lane.