Circus of the Damned - Laurell K. Hamilton [3]
I could go home, shower, and get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Glorious. My beeper went off. I jumped like I’d been stung. Nervous, me?
I hit the button, and the number that flashed made me groan. It was the police. To be exact, it was the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. The Spook Squad. They were responsible for all preternatural crime in Missouri. I was their civilian expert on monsters. Bert liked the retainer I got, but better yet, the good publicity.
The beeper went off again. Same number. “Shit.” I said it softly. “I heard you the first time, Dolph.” I thought about pretending that I’d already gone home, turned off the beeper, and was now unavailable, but I didn’t. If Detective Sergeant Rudolf Storr called me at half-past dawn, he needed my expertise. Damn.
I called the number and through a series of relays finally got Dolph’s voice. He sounded tinny and faraway. His wife had gotten him a car phone for his birthday. He must have been near the limit of its range. It still beat the heck out of talking to him on the police radio. That always sounded like an alien language.
“Hi, Dolph, what’s up?”
“Murder.”
“What sort of murder?”
“The kind that needs your expertise,” he said.
“It’s too damn early in the morning to play twenty questions. Just tell me what’s happened.”
“You got up on the wrong side of bed this morning, didn’t you?”
“I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“I sympathize, but get your butt out here. It looks like we have a vampire victim on our hands.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Shit.”
“You could say that.”
“Give me the address,” I said.
He did. It was over the river and through the woods, way to hell and gone in Arnold. My office was just off Olive Boulevard. I had a forty-five-minute drive ahead of me, one way. Yippee.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“We’ll be waiting,” Dolph said, then hung up.
I didn’t bother to say good-bye to the dial tone. A vampire victim. I’d never seen a lone kill. They were like potato chips; once the vamp tasted them, he couldn’t stop at just one. The trick was, how many people would die before we caught this one?
I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to drive to Arnold. I didn’t want to stare at dead bodies before breakfast. I wanted to go home. But somehow I didn’t think Dolph would understand. Police have very little sense of humor when they’re working on a murder case. Come to think of it, so do I.
2
THE MAN’S BODY LAY on its back, pale and naked in the weak morning sunlight. Even limp with death his body was good, a lot of weights, maybe jogging. His longish yellow hair mixed with the still-green lawn. The smooth skin of his neck was punctured twice with neat fang marks. The right arm was pierced at the bend of the elbow, where a doctor draws blood. The skin of the left wrist was shredded, like an animal had gnawed it. White bone gleamed in the fragile light.
I had measured the bite marks with my trusty tape measure. They were different sizes. At least three different vamps, but I would have bet everything I owned that it was five different vampires. A master and his pack, or flock, or whatever the hell you call a group of vampires.
The grass was wet from early morning mist. The moisture soaked through the knees of the coveralls I had put on to protect my suit. Black Nikes and surgical gloves completed my crime-scene kit. I used to wear white Nikes, but they showed blood too easily.
I said a silent apology for what I had to do, then spread the corpse’s legs apart. The legs moved easily, no rigor. I was betting that he hadn’t been dead eight hours, not enough time for rigor mortis to set in. Semen had dried on his shriveled privates. One last joy before dying. The vamps hadn’t cleaned him off. On the inside of his thigh, close to the groin, were more fang marks. They weren’t as savage as the