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The lieutenant grinned, and for a second the years dropped away.

“I’m sure you noticed,” Merrick said, “that the blood on the knife is still drying, which means this isn’t even an hour old. So why is the water cold?”

“Exactly. No one would get into a cold tub to slit their wrists. Whoever did this didn’t count on her landlady letting herself in to return a curling iron.”

Shutting his eyes, Merrick envisioned a tall figure that looked like a man slipping down the dim hallway toward this apartment. Or maybe climbing up the brick outside to a cocked window. He saw the woman sitting in her chair reading, looking up, maybe, as she felt a change in the air. But she wouldn’t see her killer because he would be reaching out mentally, finding the capillaries in her retinas and pinching off the blood flow to create a blind spot that her mind would then paper over with the familiar, safe contours of her apartment. Next he would dilate her jugulars, dumping the blood from her brain, catching her as she fell. He would barely feel her weight as he carried her to the bathroom in arms that could lift a truck, hands that could smash through a wall. She’d had no chance, none at all, because vampires weren’t real. Actually, this woman probably had seen her killer, but only in the deepest phosphors of her brain, where no expectations exist to fill in the blind spots. Novelists had dragged forth images of the blood eaters, distorted by their fevered imaginations, and Hollywood had thrown these distortions up on the screen, and ironically, being revealed in the false light of myth had only made the secret of the ages more secure. Yes, we know about vampires, and the thing we know best is that they are fiction.

Okay, no cross or wooden stake would have saved this woman, but an alarm linked to a camera might have. How long had the hemophage who’d been here tonight passed among humans, taking what it needed—two hundred years, a thousand? Had it roamed, in the dead of night, the trampled fields of Hastings and Waterloo, drinking the blood of the dying? How many bodies had it left in the woods, where the teeth of other animals would erase its own? Now you could nail a killer from a hair or a trace of his blood—provided he was human. But if it was an auto accident, a house fire, a missing person, a suicide, you didn’t even look.

“What I want to know now,” Des said, “is where’s the rest of the blood? It sure as hell isn’t on the floor. And it’s not inside her, either, she’s white as Wonder Bread. Do you think he could be back—our vampire killer?”

Our vampire killer.

“I assumed he was dead,” Des mused. “In fact, I had this theory that you killed him.”

Merrick gave him a sharp look.

He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m not accusing. But you spent night and day hunting the vicious bastard, and then you stopped and he stopped.”

Merrick saw the vault in the ground out in the Virginia woods, the rows of cots in the commons for those too weakened by lack of blood to move anymore. He saw Abezi-Thibod, Balberith, Procel, lying there in the indigo half-light, white hair fanned on the pillows. The faces of dead pharaohs, until you saw an eye glitter with hatred. Others screamed and pounded behind the iron doors around the commons, where he’d put the fresh captures, and where, at last, he had put Zane.

Nausea spiked up his throat. He should never have come here. The nightmare was over, must stay over.

“Oh, you went through the morions,” Des said, “for a few months after the last killing. But you’d never have retired if you’d thought he was still out there. Or so I hoped.”

“You think I would catch him and, instead of bringing him in, just kill him?”

“Your secret would have been safe with me.”

Merrick felt a weight in his chest. Judge, jury, executioner.

Des looked uncomfortable. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve never known anyone with more integrity. I knew all along it was probably just wishful thinking. I did keep screening VICAP for years after his killings stopped, to see if they’d start up somewhere else. They didn’t. And this