Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [60]
My condo was a wreck, which is to say, it was as pristine as my place back in Seattle except that everything was coated in dust. I’ve never trusted housekeepers enough to pay one to visit during my absence.
The bathtub had a spider in it.
But it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been hot, and it wasn’t. It was merely muggy and kind of cold, which wasn’t vastly different from Seattle, but was vastly better than the bone-gnawing freeze of Minnesota.
The city of Atlanta sprawls like hell because there are no natural boundaries to stop it, and its neighborhoods are practically their own individual nations. I don’t mean the blocks are broken down by ethnicity per se, though in some of the zip codes you could certainly make a case for it. I mean you’ve got your hipster sections, your New Money strips, your Southern Hollywood club ghettos, and the relics of the Olympic Village, plus a dozen other subdivisions of subdivided class, type, and preference.
There’s even a gayborhood—sort of. It would probably be more accurate to say that Atlanta is the gayborhood of Georgia, but there are parts of town that are more rainbow-friendly than others, and the spot I wanted was right on the edge of a gaudy strip filled with drag bars and bathhouses.
Why did I want this spot? Well, I didn’t find a Holy Grail at Holtzer Point, but in my hard-earned score I nabbed a small lead on another member of Project Bloodshot in a fat stack of material that was otherwise kind of useless to me. The rest of what I’d stolen hadn’t amounted to much, though I now was the proud owner of Ian’s paperwork without all the aggravating black bars. Unfortunately, the lack of bars didn’t tell me much. They might tell him more, I didn’t know, but I resolved to pass it along to him and Cal next time I saw them.
Mostly the net gain was a collection of serial numbers.
Much to my personal queasiness, the other three personnel dossiers (which including Ian’s, made the sum total of my loot) all appeared to detail subjects who’d died while part of the program. But although two of the deceased were listed without next of kin or any other personal contacts … subject number three actually came with a name and a hometown.
She was easily the best documented, with all her physical stats like hair and eye color, height and weight, as well as the results from some series of tests she’d taken. But I didn’t know what those tests were, or what they meant.
All the attention to detail had me thinking that she might’ve been a special case. Maybe they had bigger and better things in mind for her at Jordan Roe, or maybe she was only more cooperative than the others. I had no way of knowing.
Anyway, I had a woman’s name—Isabelle deJesus—and I had a place of birth, Atlanta, Georgia. And from what was left of her processing sheets, I was almost 100 percent certain she’d been a vampire.
She had the correct 636 serial number starter, and I noted a few other telltale marks that bolstered my suspicion. She’d been kept in an underground bunk like Ian (no windows), and the lone fragment of her chart mentioned a required dietary supplement that was provided twice a week. Gosh. I wonder what that could have been.
I ran her name through a phone book and my Internet sources, and turned up a big fat nothing … short of the fact that “deJesus” is not a hugely uncommon Spanish name and I could spend the next fifteen years interviewing every “deJesus” in Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.
Then—on a hunch—I ran the scarce facts through a missing persons list. After all, Ian hadn’t gone along willingly; maybe Isabelle hadn’t, either.
And then I understood that I’d gotten things wrong.
Isabelle hadn’t been a woman. She’d been a girl.
I found a listing for her as a teenage runaway, gone missing about ten years ago. Someone had been looking for her. Looking long and hard. The case had been pushed to the media every couple of years, and ads had run in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Someone hadn’t wanted to let her go.
That put a damper on my glee. I know it happens—hell,