Blood Truth, page 9
“Righto. So what does that tell us?”
Boone narrowed his eyes on that wait line again, his fangs descending. “There will be others unless we stop the killer.”
“Yup. That is the one conclusion that I am allowing myself to draw at this point.”
On that note, Butch unbuttoned his fine cashmere coat. Which was protocol for when anyone interacted with humans. You know, just in case you needed to get to your weapon. As Boone did the same to his leather jacket, he felt that anger of his shift inside of his skin. He was so hoping that they found the guy who did this tonight—
Butch stopped dead in the street. “Not ‘guy.’”
Pulling up short, Boone looked around. “What?”
“You just said you hope we find the ‘guy’ who did it tonight.” Butch shook his head. “We don’t know whether the killer is a male or female. Remember, no assumptions at this point, okay? And when we’re in there, just observe. I’m going to do most of the work.”
Jesus, Boone thought. He wasn’t even aware of having spoken out loud.
“Yes, sir.”
Butch clapped Boone on the shoulder and resumed walking. “You’re going to do fine.”
As they closed in on the entrance to the old shirt factory, bypassing the line, the two bouncers at the door flexed up, but they ultimately didn’t follow through on the my-turf posturing. Instead, the two men just nodded the way in clarity, like they’d been hit in the face with a pair of VIP passes.
You had to love mind control over humans. And it was not a surprise that Butch clearly was a master at the manipulation.
“So you’ve been here before?” the Brother asked as they entered and went past a coat check.
Boone made a mental note to talk to the woman on duty, except how would that go:
Hey, have you seen any vampires go past you?
Oh, yeah, sure. About three hundred every night. Were you looking for one?
He shook himself back into focus. “Ah, I’ve only been here once, and it was a while ago. But like I said, my cousins come a couple times a year.”
“Yeah, this doesn’t seem like your scene.”
Boone checked out a half-naked human who was vomiting into a plastic bag in the dark corner. “No. It’s not.”
Inside the large open area, there was a big crowd dancing, talking, hooking up. The music was loud, so people had to get close to communicate—and the darkness reinforced the need to go clutch: With the limited faculties possessed by humans, they had to get up in each other’s spaces to hear and see properly in the dim environment. And it wasn’t all Homo sapiens LARPing it. He could sense a few vampires milling around among the men and women, but just three or four—and they stayed away. Made sense. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fraternize with these rats without tails, so no one in the species was going to hi-how’re-ya and reveal themselves in this environment unless they had to.
“Let’s go down to the lower level,” Butch said over the din. “V told me the stairwell’s entrance is somewhere back there.”
As Boone follow-the-leader’d through the gyrating bodies, he stared straight ahead and let his peripheral vision track the masks, the drapes of clothes, the heights and the weights of Pyre’s patrons. Just as he had been trained to do.
The stairwell to the subterranean level turned out to be easy enough to find, and they proceeded down a dank, cold series of steps, bottoming out in a corridor that was long as a football field and strobe-lit by a series of last-legged fluorescent ceiling mounts.
“Fourth door down on the right,” Butch said. “Storage area.”
Boone looked at the sequence of heavy doors. “Is that what’s behind all these?”
“Think so.”
The sound of something snapping brought Boone’s head around. Butch had taken a pair of bright blue nitrile gloves out of the pocket of his coat and was putting them on.
“It’s a little late for this”—the Brother held his hands up like a surgeon—“but old habits die hard and all that shit.”
“Why is it too late?”
“There is no way they got the body out without disturbing the scene. No matter how careful they were.”
From out of another pocket, Butch produced a small headlamp and put it on like a crown. Triggering the beam, he stopped in front of door number four. “You stay out here, but by all means, lean in and look around. Like I said, the scene’s basically ruined at this point, but there’s no reason for us to add to that by both tromping around inside.”
As the Brother opened the heavy panels wide, the creaking hinges were right out of a horror movie—and so was the scent that hit Boone’s nose like a slap.
Blood. Not exactly fresh, no. But there was a lot that had been spilled—
Oh, God, Boone thought.
Down on the dirty concrete floor, directly in the path of Butch’s frontal lobe beam of light, there was a congealed puddle that was shocking in size.
As Butch stepped through the jambs and looked around, the walls of the empty storage area glistened in the icy illumination of his lamp. But at least all that appeared to be groundwater seepage as opposed to plasma.
The beam rose to the ceiling and moved in a slow circle before stopping in the center of the room directly over the congealed puddle. “This was where she was hung up. On one of these.”
A series of iron eyelets, thick as a male’s thumb, were set in rows in the ceiling’s heavy beams. It was hard to imagine what they had been used for. Maybe as part of a dyeing system for fabric?
“Was it by ropes?” Boone asked. “How she was hung up, I mean.”
“A meat hook.” The Brother got down onto his haunches and looked around, his lamp illuminating the Jello-like blood too many times for Boone’s comfort. “Boy . . . if she wasn’t dead before he hung her up, she did not last long.”
“Him?” Boone tried to cough the tightness in his throat away. “I thought you said we shouldn’t draw conclusions.”
“Fair enough, you caught me. But statistically, the vast majority of serial killers are male. And the ritual nature of these killings, with the females strung up, throats slashed, all of them bleeding out here at the club, is a clear pattern. The killer finds what they’re looking for and does what they have to with the victims out of sight down here.”
Boone coughed into his fist again. “What exactly did he do to her?”
“I didn’t show you the pictures, did I?” The Brother held his phone out behind him on an arm stretch. “They’re in the camera section.”
Boone swallowed hard as he took the unit and went into photographs. When he called up the first of . . .
“Oh . . . fuck,” he breathed.
One terrible image, after another . . . after another. There seemed to be an endless number of them—and abruptly, the smell of the rotten, moldy earth, and the cold pool of blood, and the idea that someone had lost their life right down here where he was made him dizzy.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
The polite words were spoken fast, and he didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. His body moved before he was aware of his brain ordering his legs to lift his feet so he could back away. When he hit the door opposite the one that was open, he coughed a couple more times and turned the phone screen into his leg. Dropping his head, he breathed through his mouth and felt the world spin—
The smell of fresh air in the springtime, of delicate flowers, of . . . sunshine . . . had him lifting his eyes.
Down by the stairwell’s door, a figure was standing still as a statue and focused on him. And in spite of the black hooded robe that covered the head and draped down to the feet, he knew it was a female.
And that scent of hers. It went in through his nose and didn’t stop there. Somewhere along the neuropathways of his mind, or maybe it was in his very veins, what started as a thing he smelled became a fullbody sensory experience.
Like touch.
Like . . . a caress.
Straightening, he took a step forward. And another. Sure as if she were calling his name and he were powerless to resist the entreaty. But before he made it very far, she disappeared back through the stairwell’s door quick as a gasp.
Desperate not to lose her, he took off in her wake, his stride nothing short of a bolt. By the time he got to where she had been standing, the distorted steel panel was easing into its poor-fit position against its jambs, and he yanked the weight open. Following that springtime scent, he jumped up the steps three at a time and broke out into the club proper.
She must have been going at a dead run, he thought. To have gotten up those landings that fast.
Boone looked around to assess whether she’d gone all the way out of the building or was trying to get lost in the crowd. If the latter was her goal? Mission accomplished. There were too many people dressed in black with too many cloaks covering their heads—
There she was. Heading for the exit. Fast.
Shoving humans out of the way, Boone didn’t care if he created chaos—and unlike her, his big body couldn’t bob and weave through the tight squeezes between the men and women. By the time he ran through where the coat check was, she was out the door, her scent already beginning to fade.
Out in the cold, he barraged past the bouncers and looked left and right—
There, going around the far corner of the building. The tail end of her cloak billowing out behind her.
Boone closed his eyes, intending to pull his dematerialize-in-a-pinch trick—except then he realized he had a movie theater’s worth of human eyeballs focusing on him. Not exactly the kind of PR stunt the vampire race needed: Surprise! We really do exist!
Cursing a blue streak, he took off on foot and tried to follow her prints in the snow. There was no way of isolating which were hers, however, and her scent had dissipated into the night.
The female was no doubt gunning for some privacy so she could ghost out of here. And if she did that, he was never going to catch her.
Boone rounded the corner of the building and slowed his roll to a walk . . . which then petered out to a standstill. There were no security lights on the exterior flank of the old building. None on the warehouse next door. And the illumination from the distant streetlights only carved out a narrow visual slice down the space between the structures. Even with the reflective quality of the snow cover and a set of supercharged vampire retinas, there was a lot that he couldn’t see.
“Goddamn it—”
The soft click of a gun safety being taken off duty ripped his head around.
Staring into the dense shadows, his nostrils flared as he caught her scent on the cold breeze.
Yes . . . he thought. There you are.
“You can trust me,” he said into the darkness. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
* * *
I’m not going to give you a chance to hurt me, Helania thought as she kept her nine-millimeter trained on the vampire who’d tracked her outside the club.
The dark-haired male was standing in the dim glow of streetlamps that were a good block and a half away, but there was more than enough light to assess him. And damn . . . he was downright enormous, with heavy shoulders, a barrel chest, and long, powerful legs. All that socalled real estate was covered in black leather, the jacket he had on open in spite of the cold, his hands bare of gloves.
His deep-set, pale eyes were trained right where she was standing in the darkness.
You’re too good-looking to be a killer, she thought to herself.
But come on, like only hump-ugly males killed people?
Still, she was shocked at how handsome his face was: Strong, even features, as well as a pair of lips that made her think of things that should be last on her cognitive list given the circumstances of their acquaintance, as it were.
“I just want to ask you a couple of questions.” He flashed his palms at her and slowly raised them up like he was on a TV cop show. “My name’s Boone. And you can lower that gun.”
Maybe he could see her, although she doubted it. She was very far back from the glow he was standing in. How had he found her? Oh, wait—he’d probably heard her taking the safety off.
And was that an aristocratic infliction to his words?
“Can you tell me what you were doing down in that corridor just now?” he asked.
“It’s not restricted access. Anyone can go there.”
There was a pause. “It’s you. You were the one who called us.”
Helania felt her heart rate double. Which was saying something considering how fast her pulse had been to begin with. But yes, she had called the Brotherhood’s emergency number. Yes, she had reported what she had walked in on last night. And yes, she had gone down to the lower level just now to find out what he and the other male he’d come with were doing.
Two large males enter the club and ignore all the sex opportunities? While they make a beeline for the back where the stairwell was?
Who the hell else could they be?
“You’re a Brother?” she asked.
“I’m a trainee. But I came with one and I’ve been put on this case.” He lowered his hands. “I swear, I just want to ask you about what you saw last night. That’s the only reason I followed you out here. You haven’t returned our calls, and I was worried I’d lose you.”
Helania stared down the barrel of her gun at him. For a split second, an image of her sister came to mind and she teared up. Was this the mistake Isobel had made? Letting her guard down around a male she thought she was safe with . . . only to pay for that misstep with her life?
“You can trust me,” he said softly.
No, she couldn’t. But as the image of that female hanging from the ceiling came back to her, she realized she might need him. Assuming he was who he said he was.
And that was not a given.
“What do you want to ask me,” she said. “I told the operator all I know.”
“What’s your name?”
“Helania.”
“I’m Boone. And I’m sorry that we have to meet like this.”
If they were not separated by twenty feet—and a gun—she had a feeling he would have offered her his hand, and she was glad he couldn’t. She didn’t want to touch him—although not because she was repulsed by anything about him.
It was the opposite, and that was the problem.
“So what happened last night?” he prompted.
Helania cleared her throat. Like that would pull her thinking together. “I saw a male of the species go down to the lower level with a female. They didn’t come up for quite some time, and I had to check and see if she was okay.”
“Do you come to the club regularly?”
“In the last few months, yes.”
Make that the last eight months, she thought. Since Isobel had been killed.
“The female in question—you were a friend of hers, then? You knew her.”
“No, I was just worried for her safety.”
“Had you seen her at the club before?”
“That I don’t know. She was wearing a mask, and she still had it on when I . . .” Helania swallowed hard as horrible images flooded her mind’s eye. “Anyway, with all the costumes, it’s impossible to say whether she’d been there before.”
“Why were you concerned about her welfare?” Boone held up his hands like he was trying not to offend her and make her defensive. “I mean, people have sex at the club, and it happens down there, I’m sure. It’s all part of the experience, right? I’m just wondering why you felt the need to check on her.”
“Females are allowed to watch out for each other.”
“No doubt. But I’m trying to figure out how you knew she was in trouble—”
“I didn’t kill her.”
The male—
Boone—recoiled. “I didn’t think you did. Why would you call the body in if you had?”
“I have to go—”
“Was the male she was with wearing a mask? Can you tell me what he looked like?”
She shook her head. And then remembered he probably couldn’t see her. “No mask, but he had sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes. He was also wearing a black skull cap pulled low. He was big, bigger than you.” It seemed odd to use the male’s body as a comparison, as if she had crossed some line of propriety. “He carried her down there while they were kissing. That’s all I know.”
“How long was it until you went to check on them?”
Helania was unaware of deciding to lower her gun. One moment it was still pointed at his chest; the next it was settled down by her leg.
“I should have gone sooner.” She felt her shoulders slump under her cloak. “I let them go for too long.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.” She’d gotten distracted searching the crowd for other signs of unrest or danger. “I was people watching. I didn’t . . . I should have gone sooner.”
“Can you give me any idea of how long it was?”
“It might have been well over an hour, but it could have been longer. I thought I smelled the blood, you see.” In her mind, Helania replayed her descent down those stairs step by step. “I caught the scent emanating from the basement and had to follow it.”
“Were you here with anybody?”
“No, I only come on my own.”
The male—
Boone—crossed his arms over his chest, and didn’t that make him look even bigger. Especially as he frowned. “Do you have any specialized training?”
“What do you mean?”
“As in self-defense? You said in the message you left that there had been another victim. And yet you went down there, away from the crowd, to track the scent of blood. Weren’t you worried about your personal safety?”
She pictured Isobel clear as day. “Not at that time, no. I was only worried about her.”
The female was either blindly heroic . . . or utterly reckless, Boone decided as he stared into the shadows thrown by the old building. Thanks to his eyes adjusting, he could make out her form, the black of her cloak offering a subtle contrast to the density of the rest of the darkness she had hidden herself in. She had lowered her weapon down by her side, but she seemed poised to bolt, her body weight tilted back on her feet and leaning to one side. He wanted to see her face with a desperation that was unsettling, but that hood was still up—and for no good reason at all, he wondered whether she had held it in place as she’d run off.
