Lover Arisen, page 12
“I have to go—”
As he started to move away, she jerked him back with a yank on his leather jacket. “You stole from me. From my mind. I want what’s mine back—I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t care about that. Give me my memories.”
Strong as he was, it was no problem to disengage from her and get to his feet. Staring down at her, his face was remote. “I don’t want you involved in any of this.”
“It’s too fucking late for that, isn’t it.”
“Exactly what kind of danger do you think I’m in.”
“Stop deflecting—”
“What kind of danger!” His words were harsh and loud, and they echoed around the barren, dirty room and the body that lay on the mattress beside them. “How do you know.”
Erika looked at Connie’s remains and her heart ached. There was always death in Caldwell, but tonight the Grim Reaper seemed to be everywhere. And the idea this man, with his criminalities, was in trouble was not a news flash. The problem was… the danger was not from his life on the street. It was from that shadow from her nightmare. She just knew it.
“My dream changed,” she answered roughly. “I fell asleep at my desk tonight, and I know I had it again… but something was different. Different in a bad way. If you give me back my memories, I’ll probably be able to tell you.”
She couldn’t believe what she was saying. She couldn’t believe any of this.
Because it was as if there were two parts of Caldwell, the obvious and the hidden, and these moments with him now were causing her to straddle a divide she sensed she wasn’t even supposed to know about.
“You can’t save me.” He shook his head as he spoke, his eyes seeming to drink every detail of her in. “And this whole fucking mess is a rabbit hole you shouldn’t go down.”
Erika thought back to when she’d woken up at her desk in a free fall to the floor. There had been two dreams, the recurring one at the triplex, and a new one that had scared her… where had she been in the nightmare? Where had she…
“Down my stairs,” she blurted. “I was at my house. The lights were all off. I was going down my stairs to my front door. I looked into the mirror there—a shadow. It was a shadow that came after me—and it was a shadow that came out of you.”
The rush of clarity ushered in a return of the headache, but she didn’t care. It was a relief to be able to remember something, anything—even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and a shiver went through her body. And it was weird. Getting chased in a nightmare by some kind of darkness was pretty standard spooky-subconscious crap, yet she knew down deep that whatever it had been…
Was real.
She pegged the suspect in the eye with a hard stare. “You don’t want me to save you? Fine. Just don’t leave me in a position where I can’t protect myself. That thing is in my house.”
* * *
Note to self: Shit can always get more complicated.
As Balz stood over his detective—not that she was his—he knew he shouldn’t be where he was. Vampires and humans did not mix—more to the point, they shouldn’t mix. But after he’d gotten into the brain of that asshole down by the bridge, there was no way he was going to let some poor woman bleed out if he could help it.
And the dealer had left the woman alive.
The moment Balz had come in through the front door of the apartment, he had followed the copper scent here to the bedroom—and as soon as it was obvious things were too late, he’d intended to leave immediately.
Something had made that impossible.
Guess his destiny had known his detective was going to show up.
And now here he was, in even deeper.
“Fuck.” Balz looked around the squalid room. “Mother… fucker.”
When his eyeballs provided him with absolutely no quick-fixes whatsoever—but like, what, this sad scene was a Kmart for solutions?—he refocused on Erika. She was staring at the body, the stillness in her a clear indication she was going through so many mentals. A lot of which were his fault.
“I never believed in the list,” she said absently, as if she were talking to herself. “Never did… but I think I do now.”
“What list.”
It was a long minute before she glanced back at him, and again, he had the sense she was speaking her private thoughts out loud: “Everyone who joins homicide, sooner or later, sees the list.” Her eyes traveled up and down his body, like she was recording every detail about him. Just as he’d done to her. “It’s not merely cold case files, it’s totally unexplained cold cases, and they go back a hundred years or more. Bodies with black blood in their veins that later disappear from the morgue. Autopsies that show physical anomalies that no coroner has documented before. Remote sites where ritual murder has clearly taken place, but there are no human or animal remains. Missing persons reports and homicide cases that are ‘solved,’ except no one can figure out exactly how or why.”
There was a pause. “Then there are murder victims who were skinned alive or had organs removed without any instrument markings on their bodies… victims like Herbert Cambourg, whose watches you turned in to that dead black market dealer. Cambourg’s torso had been split up the middle.” She shook her head and looked back at the dead human woman. “But something tells me you know this.”
When he didn’t respond, she smiled in a hard way. “Do you have any idea how many detectives get MRIs because they have persistent headaches and are convinced they have a brain tumor? But it’s never that. And there’s nothing wrong with my mind, is there.”
Balz took a deep breath. “No, I’m afraid there isn’t.”
“I can’t believe I’m talking like this.”
“You can trust me.”
She laughed in a harsh rush. “Spare me that line, okay? Especially when we’re both next to a woman you probably killed.”
“She was dead when I got here.” When Erika went to counter that, he cut in, “Your forensics guys will prove it wasn’t me.”
“Will they?” Her eyes returned to his, and they narrowed. “Or are you just going to make me and everyone else in the department believe that? How the hell do you manipulate people’s minds? It’s some Scooby-Doo stuff, for sure.”
“I love that cartoon,” he said remotely.
“Me, too.” She rubbed her forehead and seemed to exhale in defeat. “Except the monsters aren’t real in Cabot Cove. I’m beginning to believe they’re real in Caldwell, though.”
“Cabot Cove is Murder, She Wrote.”
“Oh, sorry,” she murmured with exhaustion. “I didn’t mean to Jessica Fletcher this situation.”
“ ’S okay. I like that show as well.”
She took a deep breath and seemed to be unaware of what she was saying, her words coming out in a jumble. “I binge-watched the first five seasons in February when I had the flu. I don’t like it from then on because of the other detectives that got brought in.”
“Agreed. Plus the computer instead of the typewriter in the opening, toward the end of the series.”
“I was downright offended.”
And people say vampires and humans had nothing in common, he thought grimly.
God, if only he could keep talking to her like this. About nothing special or stressful. He loved the sound of her voice.
But of course, that wasn’t their reality.
“I’m going to call this scene in,” she said. “And I’m not going to stop looking for you. Sooner or later, I’m going to find you and figure this whole thing out. If you have any decency at all, you’ll make that easier rather than harder on me—because, quite frankly, I’ve been way past my limit for years now. But that’s not your problem, is it.”
“I can save us both. You aren’t going to have to defend yourself.”
“You’re speaking to a woman who lives alone and puts murderers behind bars. I always have to defend myself.” She threw up her hands. “And if you’d let me know what the hell we’re talking about, that would be just great.”
In the silence that followed, he reflected how, lately, his life had been one bad decision after bad-luck-kick-in-the-nuts after another. So of course, he had to open his piehole.
“You’re right, Herbert Cambourg wasn’t killed by a human,” Balz heard himself say. “And you’re right. That shadow in your dream is very, very real.”
“So what is it?” she asked in a reedy voice.
“It’s evil. Pure evil.”
“What’s going on here in Caldwell? What’s behind the curtain? You’ve got to tell me.”
“The less you know, the better. But I am going to protect you.” He put his palm up to her again. “Yes, I know I’m a low-life criminal, a thief, a killer, all that bullshit. But when I tell you I’m not going to let anything happen to you, I mean it.”
“I’m not going to remember this, am I.” She shook her head. “I’ve tripped and fallen into another world, haven’t I. And you’re going to fix it so I stay in mine.”
She had an odd look on her face, as if she had tried to reconcile two mutual exclusives, and when that had proven impossible, had resigned herself to a dual reality that was at once against everything she believed… and the only explanation there was.
Balz had an absurd impulse to reach out and touch her in some way, give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, brush her face with his fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he kept his hands to himself.
“Please… please, don’t erase me again.” When her voice cracked, she cleared her throat—and God, those eyes of hers were cutting right into his soul. “All I have in this world is my mind and you’re ruining it.”
“Not by choice.” Shit, he couldn’t bear this. “Erika… I won’t let you get in the middle of all this.”
No, he was just going to bring Devina right to her front door, if he didn’t leave right now. Jesus, the demon had been in her dream already…
Balz took a step back. And another one. “You can’t remember me. It puts you in danger.”
“No, please—”
He hated the vacant look on her face as he went into her mind and started editing himself out of her. Again.
She was right. He was doing damage, and though he had harmed many, many things in the course of his life of fighting, hurting her was wrecking him.
But what choice did he have. She had to stay far away from him, both in her mind and physically, while he got Devina out of himself.
And then killed that fucking demon.
Funny, he had been pissed when it had just been about him. Pulling this woman into it? Devina had made a big fucking mistake.
He was incandescent with rage—and if history had proven anything, he was a very, very bad enemy to have.
“I won’t see you again, Erika,” he said softly. “And even though you won’t remember me… I will never forget you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Late the following afternoon, as the light started to fade quick thanks to some heavy cloud cover, Erika got in her unmarked and headed for the exit of the CPD headquarters parking lot. After she swiped her card at the kiosk and the gate lifted, she was careful to check both ways before pulling into traffic, and when she hit the gas, she didn’t hit that pedal very hard at all.
As she negotiated her way into the stream of traffic, she could remember reading a study that had assessed the reaction times of tired drivers. The conclusion was that those who were drowsy were just as impaired and dangerous as drunks or those under the influence. It made sense and so she was super careful, all ten-and-two’ing the wheel while she peered over the dash like a little old lady, the other vehicles around her a dodgeball game she just wanted to survive.
It had been yet another really, really long night.
God, Connie.
While Kip had processed the suicide down by the river, Erika had handled the sad scene at that walk-up on Market—
Her perennial headache, which had mercifully backgrounded itself for the afternoon, took a sharp step forward, like a security guard getting ready to deal with a trespasser. Jesus, it was like any time she thought about walking into Connie’s, the thing came back—
“Damn it.”
The pain across her frontal lobe rocketed to abscessed-tooth levels, and she had to pull out of any thoughts involving her arrival at that apartment. But it was strange. If she remembered anything after she got there, the headache went away: She could dwell all she liked on calling in the body, taking preliminary photographs with her phone, and waiting for the crime scene processing unit to get there. And then leaving the scene was okay, too: Going back down to the bridge, meeting with Kip for an update on that case, staying there until ten in the morning… none of that made her head pound.
As she came up to a red light, she threw out a hand for her bag. The Motrin bottle she had been hitting hard since around four a.m. was right in reach. Maybe she should just make things even easier and Velcro the thing to her palm.
Or her forehead.
Shaking out two more pills, she swallowed them dry—or tried to. She was gagging and coughing and thinking about brain tumors when the light turned green.
Driving on, she thought of all those other detectives who complained about migraines, aneurysms, strokes. It was almost a rite of passage in homicide for someone to insist that their doctor order an MRI—
“Ow,” she muttered as things started to pound again.
Fighting through the pain, she got stuck at the next intersection—and reminded herself things could be worse. With the way the pedestrians on the crosswalk were hunkering down against the wind, you’d have sworn it was January, not April.
Ah, spring in Caldwell. The only thing warmer was a meat locker, the only thing less gusty, a turbine.
As she watched the people trudge by, she found herself sinking into sadness, sure as if she were missing somebody. The sensation at her sternum made no sense, and yet she couldn’t shake the idea that she had left someone behind.
Ghosts following her even before the sun went down.
About ten minutes later, she pulled up in front of the Commodore. By the grace of God, she managed to find an open parking spot—and when she went to put money in the meter, there were twenty-eight minutes remaining on the thing.
“Maybe my luck is changing,” she murmured as she stared up the flank of the high-rise.
The Commodore was luxury living at its finest, at least according to its fancy new trademark. The building had previously been all condos, but a management company had bought out most of the lower floor units to take advantage of short-term stays. Functioning now as part hotel, part residence, it had gotten a major facelift.
Walking over to the entrance, she pushed her way into the marble lobby and instantly smelled a pungent fragrance, something that was a combination of astringent and rose petals.
Guess the spa they’d added was up and running.
There was a concierge at the front desk, and as she flashed her badge, he didn’t even ask who she was on-site to see. He just nodded her through like he didn’t want any more trouble in the building—and really didn’t want a detective loitering around, chatting it up.
Given that she had been here a lot lately, on account of two very messy homicides, the Commodore’s corporate overlords were no doubt getting antsy. Murder houses were great for road traffic, foot traffic, and the month of October. They were not great for the renters and owners of expensive urban real estate.
The elevator took her up to the first floor of the penthouse triplex—and as soon as she stepped out into the hall, her footfalls faltered.
Something had happened here… something involving—
Her thoughts fragmented as her headache got worse, sure as if the agony was determined to redirect her or lay her out flat on the carpet if necessary—and she was sick of it. Tomorrow morning first thing, she was calling her doctor and getting a referral to a neurologist. She couldn’t keep going like this. The headaches were constant, and though she could swear she’d found a pattern to it all, the idea that what she was thinking about was the driver was just nuts.
It was also not a medical diagnosis.
Pushing through the discomfort, she went down the hallway’s runner and stopped at an ornate door that was marked with a little brass plate that read: “Mr. and Mrs. Herbert C. Cambourg.”
Before Erika could ring the bell, the entrance to the triplex opened. The tall, thin woman on the other side had long, blond-streaked hair that was straight as a ruler, a face as smooth and lovely as a Renaissance marble bust, and a body that was right out of the Kate Moss tradition of models. As a chaser to all that, her dark blue pencil jeans and high-collared blouse were tailor-fit to her—and definitely cost more than Erika’s monthly mortgage payment.
Then again, Mr. Cambourg had had good taste in art, whether it was inanimate or the living-and-breathing variety.
On the other hand, the objects he wanted to collect was a different matter.
“I saw you on the security camera,” Keri Cambourg explained. “And as I said, you never have to apologize. Anytime you want to come here, you’re welcome.”
“I wish I had some news about your case.” Erika stepped inside the long, formal corridor. “I do want to assure you that we’re going to find the person who killed your husband.”
Keri closed them in and then leaned back against the paneled door. “I’m not sure you will, and I don’t mean any disrespect. Nothing about this has made any sense to me.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“I’m not sure I care anymore.” The widow crossed her arms around herself. Looked away. Looked back. “I guess that sounds bad.”
“People grieve in different ways. There is no right or wrong—”
“I’ve had three women come here in the last two days. Three of them. They walked past the concierge downstairs—and do you want to know why? My husband has another unit in this building, and the concierge knew them all. They’ve been rotating through, evidently.” As Erika cursed under her breath, the widow shook her head. “I knew that Herb… well, I wasn’t oblivious to what he was doing on his business trips. He never threw it in my face, however—or that’s what I thought. In reality, he was just a better liar than I could have guessed. Another apartment… downstairs, in this very building. Can you believe it? The lawyer broke the news to me today.”
