Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [61]
That transition point sometime in the late teens, from homeless kid to homeless person, that’s a real bitch. That’s when they get you—or so I hear.
Ironically, ghouls tend to come from a higher social tier than young vampire soldiers. They’re people who have something professional to offer a vampire House or family. They have accounting skills or computer skills; they have law degrees or other certifications. They’re white-collar and ambitious, hoping to upgrade to a cape.
With a little digging, I turned up an address for Isabelle’s parents. It turned out to be a modest beige house with red shutters and a pair of tall, gangly roses growing up around an arch in front of the porch.
I parked my car across the street from it and stared down at a picture I’d taken from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Isabelle’s sophomore-year high-school photo. She looked thin and pretty, with hair she hadn’t yet figured out how to tame and lip gloss that was a little too bright for her coloring. But she had nice eyes and good bone structure. Her Hispanic ancestry stood out in the width of her cheeks and the set of her mouth.
I’d spent some time working out what I might say to her parents. I hadn’t been able to scare up too many details of the kid’s case, except that she’d either run off or been kidnapped sometime in the middle of summer break before her senior year and she’d never returned home, but her case had been closed with the missing persons bureau.
I suspected government intervention on that point. Of course, by then I was seeing government intervention under every rock and in every corner.
Man. I thought I’d been paranoid before I took Ian’s case; now I was downright deranged.
I wondered when she’d become a vampire and who had done it to her, but I doubted her parents would know. I didn’t even know how I’d go about asking, but I figured that pretending to be a concerned cold-case detective might work. I have a badge I bought off eBay a couple of years ago. I think the cop who originally wore it is dead. Regardless, it’s never gotten me double-checked or refused before.
Before I’d made the drive down to the quiet little inner-city suburb, I’d nabbed some new clothes at a high-end mall and I’d utterly failed to find a new car I wanted to buy on the spot. Something innocuously authoritative—like a dark blue Crown Victoria or something—would have been ideal, but I couldn’t find one for sale that suited my fancy so I’d been forced to rent one.
My rented pseudo-cop-car did a good job of completing my Professional Law-Enforcement-Type-Person package. I was wearing a gray pantsuit and black ankle boots, with a button-up long-sleeved shirt that was white and crisp. I almost felt like a gangster from the forties, but I told myself it all worked fine and I walked up to the house, pretending like I belonged there.
I knocked, and I heard a flurry of activity inside before someone came to the door. The peephole went dark for a moment, then a series of locks worthy of my abode in Seattle went clicking and retreating, until only a chain remained. The door opened as far as the chain would let it, and a man’s voice asked, “Who’s there?”
An eyeball followed the voice into the narrow crack permitted by the chain; it belonged to someone middle-aged, and suspicious.
I held up the badge for the eyeball’s perusal and said, “I’m Raylene Jones, a cold-case detective with the Atlanta Police Department. I was hoping I could talk to you about your daughter.”
The door closed, and a second voice came to confer with the man. They