Nikki Heat slowly erased her whiteboard, packing away the photographs and newspaper clippings into an evidence box. The case was closed, and with their perp dead, there wouldn’t be any trial. She wasn’t happy about the way the case had been closed — whichever version of the story: the truth, or the one that had gone into the official reports. There were still too many unanswered questions. At the top of the list was “where was her head?” Rook was probably right, it was most likely in a landfill.
She came to the columns on the Tepes Club, and on Spring and Bishop. There was much more to that story than what had gone into their reports. Heat knew that the club was more than just the place where Burke had found Margaret Winston.
The FBI had finally shown up to take over the case, now that it was over. Nikki had an FBI agent looking over her shoulder right now, watching as she packed up everything. Heat put the last of the photos into the box, taped it shut, and handed it over to her.
The agent gave her a perfunctory “Thank you,” took the box, and walked away with it. Heat sat back down at her desk to think.
She’d gone back to the Internet, back to the sites she’d found about girls fighting vampires. They didn’t seem so crazy to her now. Some of them might actually be telling the truth. That was a very scary thought. The idea that there was a hidden world, lurking beneath the surface of the one she lived in. She’d thought that she knew about what might lurk in the darkness: muggers, rapists, thieves and killers; but now it seemed that there was a whole other layer beneath that, full of the monsters from humanity’s worst nightmares. She needed to learn more. She decided to make a phone call.
Nikki Heat entered the bar, and looked around. She spotted Spring and Bishop in a corner booth: one that gave them a good view of the entire place. Spring saw her, and raised her glass to her.
Jameson Rook, Raley and Ochoa followed her across the bar to Spring’s table. Spring waved for them all to sit down, and called a waitress over. “What are you having?” she asked. “It’s on me, tonight.”
Rook ordered a beer, but Heat, Raley and Ochoa stuck to soft drinks. Spring smiled at them after they had placed their orders. “You’ll probably be wanting something more, later.”
“I want to keep my head clear, Ms. Spring.”
“I told you, it’s Kim. I hear they’ve given up searching the river for the body.”
“When a body goes into the river, it’s either found right away, or no search is going to find it,” said Rales. “Someone might find it if it surfaces again, but we all know that’s not going to happen.”
“So, no one’s going to be getting a medical discharge?”
“Yes, and Rook is going to keep getting published in The New Yorker and First Press.” said Heat, “but we all want to hear your story about what really happened.”
Spring took a sip from her beer. “What do you think happened?”
Heat knew that Rook was going to be insufferable about this, but she couldn’t come up with any other theory that fit all the evidence. “Burke was a vampire.”
She looked around at the others, and saw that Roach was reluctantly agreeing with her, while Rook was looking smug.
“Welcome to the world of the blue pill,” said Spring.
“Red pill,” said Bishop. “Blue pill lets you stay in the fantasy. Red pill is the real world.”
“Whatever,” said Spring. “Vampires are real, and they’re not in the least bit sparkly. They are, with very few exceptions, vicious killers.”
The waitress returned with the drinks order. There was a pause in their conversation while she passed them around. Bishop sucked on the straw in her drink, slurping the last of it from her glass. “Can I have a refill, please?” she asked the waitress.
“Sure thing. Diet Coke?” asked the waitress. Bishop nodded, and the waitress left the table again.
“How common are they?” asked Rook. “Why don’t we see more evidence of them?”
“Not very,” said Spring. “In the US, there are maybe 3,000 vamps, tops. A hundred or so in New York. Some places have more, some less. And you don’t see more evidence for them because, for the most part, they’re careful. They know that they’re outnumbered 100,000 to one, and they take precautions. Any vamp that gets sloppy and starts leaving bodies around with bite marks on it will probably be taken out by other vamps, and then the police do what you guys just did with Burke: they find a story that people will believe, even if it isn’t the truth.”
“If they aren’t killing, how are they surviving?”
“I didn’t say they aren’t killing. I just said that most of them are careful about it. Even Burke wasn’t leaving corpses behind that were obvious vampire kills. He cut off the really incriminating evidence, and disposed of it.”
“Could he survive on just one kill every month or two?” asked Rook.
“Not really,” said Spring. “There are other victims that he did a better job of disposing of, whose bodies will probably never be found, and he picked victims who wouldn’t really be missed, for the most part.
“There are other ways a vamp can survive, too. They mostly don’t like doing it, though. A vamp can live off blood from any mammal. Lots of butcher shops sell blood from cows or pigs. Some of the blood from blood banks gets skimmed off. Some of the blood that’s rejected after testing ends up being sold to vamps, instead of being disposed of. Hepatitis, or AIDS won’t hurt a vamp, but they claim it messes up the taste. They prefer blood from healthy people, and without the preservatives that get put into medical blood. There are half a dozen bars in town that will serve you a Bloody Mary, made with real blood, if you know to ask for it.
“Then there are the places like the Tepes Club.” Spring grimaced. “Though Dwyer is trying out a new wrinkle in that particular scheme.”
“What happens at the Tepes Club?”
“There’s a segment of the population that thinks vampires are ‘cool’,” said Spring. “Helped along by some writers of popular books. It’s created a subculture of idiots who want to have a vampire suck their blood, and will actually pay for it to happen. Most won’t try it more than once, but a few people get off on the experience, and keep coming back for more. Then there are the vamps who take homeless people off the streets and use them like the Masai use cattle. Keep them well fed, and watered, even give them accommodations better than your typical prison cell: the blood from a healthy donor tastes better than blood from an unhealthy one. And once a week or so, a vamp chows down on them, just not taking enough blood to kill them…usually. Most of the victims in a scheme like that last a few months before they become so anemic that their blood stops tasting very good, so they’re disposed of.”
“What’s Dwyer’s wrinkle?”
“Instead of keeping his cows penned up, he’s recruiting hookers, and paying them to keep coming back,” said Spring. “I doubt if he’ll be able to bring in enough who’ll be willing to open a vein from time to time to really make it work.”
“And you’re the Slayer who hunts and kills them,” said Heat. “Or do you prefer ‘dusts’. Makes you sound so much less like a serial killer, yourself.”
“The government had a secret prison where they tried to keep some vamps, and other things, locked up, a few years ago,” said Spring. “It didn’t end well. Forty of the guards were killed.”
“The government knows about this?”
“Yep. It’s all Top Secret, Need to Know type stuff, but they know, and they learned their lesson. Why do you think you didn’t see any sign of the FBI until after we staked Burke?”
“Bureaucratic intertia?” asked Rook.
“More like Bureaucratic ass covering,” said Bishop.
“Yeah, vampire cases rarely have a nice neat ending that you can tell the public about, even when you get the perp,” said Spring. “Usually, they have to just let them stay officially unsolved. They’d much rather it be the New York police who get the rap for not catching the guy, even when they know the vamp’s been dusted. You guys got lucky, we dusted the vamp in a place where it was easy to say the body got lost.”
They continued talking about vampires, and other things that haunted the night. Heat switched over to drinking scotch on the rocks, while Roach joined the beer drinkers. They went through a couple of plates of nachos.
“What about that girl, Melody, that you chased out of the club?” asked Raley. “Was she a vampire? And is she dust?”
“Yes, and no,” said Spring. “Melody Kimball, Sunnydale High class of ’99. She made it through to graduation, and became a vampire that day.”
“Why’s she still alive? Did she get away from you?”
“No, we caught her. We let her keep un-living in exchange for information on the club. Sometimes you have to let the little fish go, to get a shot at catching the big ones. I’m sure you’ve cut lots of deals with crooks, in order to catch their bosses. And I’m sure that you liked doing it as much as I do, but having a reputation for keeping my word when I say I’ll let something go in exchange for information, makes it a lot easier to get that information.”
“So, Melody was really from Sunnydale. What about Burke?” asked Heat.
“Don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Spring. “It wasn’t just the human population that got out of Dodge before the end. Sunnydale used to have the world’s highest concentration of vamps, and other things.” She shrugged and ate some more nachos. “The city government was completely controlled by them. The cops there were either corrupt, or stupid. Most of their efforts went into covering up what was really going on. Made what you guys did with the Burke case look lily white.”
Roach bristled a bit at that, but Spring waved them down. “No, I mean it. According to the Sunnydale cops, there were gangs on PCP roaming the streets, stabbing people with barbecue forks. They never managed to catch anyone from any of these gangs, but that’s what was going on. And they kept that explanation going for years.”
Spring went on to give more examples of things that had happened in Sunnydale that the police completely covered up, or gave totally ludicrous explanations for. It was nearly midnight when she stood up.
“Detectives, it’s been a pleasure. I wouldn’t have caught Burke nearly so quickly without your help, but it’s time to call it a night. Alex has classes in the morning, and I believe that most of you have work. If you ever get another case that looks like it might be vampires, give me a call, but until then, I suggest you forget about everything I’ve told you tonight.”
Spring started to walk away, with Bishop following her. She stopped and looked back. “And I suggest you stay far away from the Tepes Club. Dwyer knows I’m keeping an eye on him, and that if I ever find out anyone died there, I’m shutting him down permanently, and with extreme prejudice.” And then she was gone.
Heat sat at the table with Rook and Roach, and sipping her scotch, lost in her own thoughts. Even Rook didn’t seem to have anything to say.
She wished that she could take Spring’s advice, and just forget what she now knew about vampires. She hoped that she would never have cause to talk with Kimberly Spring ever again.
She doubted if her wish, or her hope would be fulfilled.
| Chapter 5 | Contents |