Chapter Nineteen
Patrick
Pat swung by the station to check in with Dispatch. HR had left a note in his Inbox asking him to remind Detective Ellison that he was required to make up his mandatory psych meetings before he’d be allowed to return to work.
He was in a dark mood by the time he arrived at Lachlan Graham’s door where Mallory greeted him, looking entirely too awake and fresh-faced considering how long they’d stayed out the night before following dead ends. She gave him a once-over that, despite her neutral expression, he could feel judging the purple bruises under his eyes and his disheveled hair. He’d slept on the couch; firstly, because he didn’t have the energy to resist Ethan warm and so close to him even while he was as far away as he could have been, and Pat’s desire left him feeling queasy and sick with guilt that he wanted to start something even when he knew Ethan found any contact repulsive. Secondly, because he just hadn’t felt like reopening the raw wounds of their ongoing argument. He felt like half the time he didn’t even know why they were snapping at each others’ throats, but that didn’t stop them from grating their nerves raw.
“Didn’t sleep well?” his cousin asked, already at the counter pouring coffee which he doused liberally with milk and sugar before he offered it to Pat. Smart wolf.
“Where are we?” he asked instead of an answer: obviously he hadn’t slept well, they had more important things to talk about.
“We were adding the clubs from last night to our map of victim locations and Vector was going to mark the scent trails he’s followed. If we can get an overview of vampiric movements throughout the area we might be able to see a pattern,” Mallory explained. “What we learned last night—”
“Wasn’t shit.”
“I don’t know about that,” Vector piped up. Pat scowled at him.
Mallory shook her head. “He’s not wrong. We know that there are vampires who frequent every location we visited last night on at least a semi-frequent basis. The fact that management was universally missing or unable to speak to us has to mean something.”
“You think they knew we were coming?”
“Or that they’re being investigated and have chosen to make themselves scarce. That’s the next thing we need to do, dig up ownership and business records, liquor licenses, anything official that isn’t connected to the supernatural that might give us an idea of the players involved.”
Pat rubbed his eyes. “And what if they’re all humans?”
“No point in speculating until we know one way or the other.”
“I can work on that if someone’s got a laptop,” he offered, willing to concede to Mallory’s logic and leave her and Vector to their project—about ten pages of white printer paper spread out across Graham’s dining room table with a blown up section from Google Maps printed in fading green ink. Mallory sifted through a stack of crime scene photos, uncovering a slim silver Macbook, which she logged into and then passed to him.
“I asked Ms Beck in IT to pull official records for us, but maybe you can check the social media accounts from our victims and see if there’s any crossover between places they visited and the clubs from last night.”
“We should see if there’s been any news written on these places. Or maybe advertising directed at college students,” Vector added.
Pat sighed. He agreed with both of them, but social media wasn’t his area of expertise. He rolled his shoulders and started with the local paper, one ear tracking the disjointed conversation between Mallory and Vector as they worked on color coding their map.
A little while later, he sat back with a frown, drawing their attention.
“What?” Mallory asked.
“It’s strange. There’s nothing about vampires in the whole city. But there are attacks being reported, some minor assaults, all of them taking place down right in the middle of our club scene. No deaths though, so they would have been handled by another department. And nothing about anyone being arrested or charged for anything.”
“So, it’s a rougher scene? How is that strange?”
Pat read from one of the P-I’s articles dating back almost ten months ago.
“‘The victim, a local college student who declined to have herself named, reported lacerations to the neck and face as a result of an over-exuberant party-goer. Police were called to the address at—’ it’s the second place we tried last night—‘just after three in the morning on Wednesday. They spoke to witnesses, but the victim declined to press charges.’” He frowned. “Lacerations to the neck and face? Come on, what does that sound like?”
“An over eager vampire,” Vector said.
“Why wouldn’t they just say vampire though?” Mallory asked. “If someone is suppressing the information, then why were they allowed to report on the incident at all?”
“It takes a lot more work to suppress a detail than an entire story,” Vector suggested. “Could have been a compromise.”
“But that leaves this reporter, and whoever their editor is, in the know that the city wants the information suppressed.”
Pat shrugged. He didn’t have a better explanation.
“There are other reports like this one. All of them from clubs or bars within half a mile of our first victim, all of them reporting some kind of incident involving a young woman being roughed up.” He sighed and curled his hands into fists, frowning. “I hate that we can’t even say for sure this isn’t normal for these places. As far as I can tell, none of them have changed names or ownership recently so they’re not being dinged by Chambers or the police department. They’re not being shut down. Not even a bad report from the health department.”
Vector tapped their makeshift map. “I think this place, Le Sang de la Rose, is our hub. Any altercations reported there?”
Pat painstakingly typed the name into the search and sighed. “Six separate briefs printed, the same as the rest I found.” He stood up and joined them on the other side of the table to view the map. Vector wasn’t wrong, Le Sang sat smack in the middle of the neighborhood, and thanks to their work, it was easy to see how Vector’s scent trails all passed by or tracked back there.
“What does that mean?” he asked. “Something the Rose?”
“The Blood of the Rose,” Mallory replied.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he snarled.
Vector grimaced and shook his head.
“How the hell can they be that brazen?” Pat demanded.
“Maybe it’s easy to be bold when you know that no one is willing to acknowledge your existence,” Mallory replied. “Maybe they want to be noticed?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree with Pat. Being noticed seems like the last thing you’d want if you had a good thing going for you, in this case the mass denial works in their favor. They can operate in relative obscurity and without government oversight. Why would they risk that?” Vector said, clearing away their empty coffee mugs. He ran soap and water in the sink and started cleaning up while the three of them considered the information.
“They’ve gone from minor assaults that none of the victims pursued legal action, to killing three women in as many weeks. That’s a drastic escalation,” Mallory said. “I agree that making sure they fly under the public radar as much as possible makes sense, but then how do we account for these recents deaths? And the bodies were all dumped close to the clubs where previous incidents happened, which means they can be traced back.”
Pat agreed. “Even if we didn’t have a werewolf nose to track their movements, that would be easy enough to connect.”
“It’s sloppy,” Vector said.
Mallory started in her chair, blinking a couple of times as she stared down at the map, her heartbeat ticking up audibly to both wolves.
“What if it’s a copycat?” Her finger tapped the locations where they’d discovered dead victims. “Any chance these precise locations coincide with any of your toned down briefs?”
Pat compared the addresses. He found one that matched a public disturbance report from February, but then nothing for the other two.
“All right, something else then.” Mallory traced out a trail highlighted in blue from the second and third victims, back to where Vector’s nose had told them approximate place of death. “What about these addresses?”
“Yeah, okay, both of those match with reports of two separate violent arguments that broke out over spring break. But that doesn’t really connect with a copycat. I mean if they wanted to copy the incident, why would they transport our dead victims away from the club?”
Mallory frowned, her shoulders slumping a fraction. “You’re right.”
All this time, Vector had been making himself busy in the kitchen, pulling out ingredients to make a smoothie that roared to life in an expensive looking blender. Pat and Mallory fell quiet while it ran.
The noise drew Graham out of the bedroom, dressed in soft flannel pajama bottoms and a heather grey T-shirt that smelled like Vector even from the other side of the room. The human looked pale and drawn and just as thin as he had the other day as he sank into Pat’s empty chair. He angled the Macbook back around, eyes running over the dozen open tabs.
Vector poured the smoothie into a tall plastic cup and set it down next to the laptop, leaning down to run his nose over the exposed patch of skin behind Graham’s ear, which made the human shiver and shoot him a quick, almost pleased look. The casual ease between the two men made something clench tight in Pat’s own chest. Even when Graham smelled the shake and wrinkled his nose, complaining that he didn’t like banana, he kept leaning into Vector’s space without shying away as the wolf sat down next to him and threw a proprietary arm over the back of his chair.
“Potassium is good for you,” Vector argued. “Do you want me to puree kale instead?”
“Christ, no,” Graham grumbled quietly and sipped his drink.
Vector’s hand curled over his shoulder, thumb rubbing back and forth under the neck of the T-shirt.
“How far back does the P-I’s reports go?” his cousin asked, still mostly focused on watching Graham drink.
Pat shook himself. In response, Graham reached out and tapped something into the keyboard, nimble fingers navigating the track pad with an ease that made Pat envious. He and Mallory waited while Graham typed, clicked, typed some more, set his drink down despite Vector’s protests so that he could use both hands.
“Nothing before last January,” Graham said in an undertone.
Pat wondered if his throat was hurting him more today than it had the day before, or if he’d strained it. He frowned. “That’s just over a year after Adam’s death.”
“And more than two years after Lachlan’s undercover work,” Vector said.
“They’re still having issues with rowdy clubbers,” Graham said, pointing to something on the screen.
Vector read with a frown marring his face. “There was another fight two nights ago between two unnamed women and a, quote, ‘guy who didn’t know when he was getting the brush off.’”
Mallory pulled out an empty chair, mindful of their notes as she leaned her elbows on the table. She shot Pat a significant look at the chair next to her. “So, we’ve got evidence of a trafficking operation from three years ago. And you have no idea what Adam was looking into? He never said anything about—”
“No. I didn’t even realize he was doing a private inquiry until a week before his death. He was upset about something, and he mentioned vampires once. And then…”
“So, we have no idea if it was connected to the trafficking or something completely different. We might be looking at multiple groups of vampires operating in the city.”
The four of them sat in silence while they considered this new angle.
“That seems more likely,” Graham rasped. He nudged his glass of purred banana away only to have Vector push it back into his hands. The human rolled his eyes. “If my cover hadn’t been blown, I might never have encountered the vampires involved with the trafficking operation. Before they—” his hand dropped down below the table again. “—tortured me, I didn’t have any clue that there was a supernatural element involved. I wasn’t always the best at noticing that sort of thing,” a look at Vector, “but I think I’d have noticed if I was working with vampires before they tried to bleed me to death.”
Graham subsided back into the curve of Vector’s arm, sipping slowly at his smoothie in between little grimaces at the taste. “This is utterly vile,” he said under his breath, quiet enough Pat wouldn’t have heard it if he wasn’t a wolf. Vector pursed his face into a concerned expression.
“If you really hate it I can make you another.”
Graham sighed and shook his head.
Continuing from her earlier train of thought, Mallory said, “And would you say you were surprised to find out Sloan was, as you said, conducting his own inquiry into local vampires?”
Pat shrugged. “I guess? It seemed a little out of left field. He didn’t tell me what prompted it.”
“Which suggests that we’ve got two officially connected investigations, both of them uncovering or investigating vampire activity that wasn’t public knowledge.” She tapped Le Sang on the map. “It wasn’t being written about in the bloody newspaper.”
“True,” Pat said, trying to figure out where she was going with this. He found himself agreeing with Graham’s conclusion: they must be dealing with disparate elements. If that were the case, they might not be looking for an organized group of feeders but one or two loose cannons who liked clubbing and killing more than they cared about flying under the police’s radar.
Mallory checked her phone and said, “The latest incident was reported two days ago, how much do you want to bet we have another body before the end of the week?”
Pat shook his head. “There’s no correlation. It’s been almost a year since the first published incident reports. If there’s another victim that follows the escalation pattern, not the assaults reported in the P-I.”
“But then why the escalation in the first place? Why kill three women now and attack another the same night but not kill her?”
“Our killers aren’t the same vampires causing the club disturbances,” he said, feeling that tingle in the back of his brain that accompanied an epiphany, as pieces fell into place with one another. “But maybe our killer knows that other vampires were causing those issues and they’re using the area as a hunting ground to muddle their own movements. To hide them in amongst the assault reports. Maybe whoever they are they even hope or assume that the deaths will be handled with the same broad brush as these others,” Pat said and jerked his chin at the computer.
Vector sighed. “All of this is conjecture.”
“But it makes sense,” Mallory said, eyes bright.
“Except we still have victims who were moved. If whoever is killing these girls wants to pass off their kills as unwitting victims of the vampires who visit these clubs, why go to the effort of moving the bodies?”
She threw up her hands. “I don’t know. We need to run down actual vampires living in the city. Until we do that all of this is just speculation.”
Vector nodded. “And unfortunately, we’ll have to take a couples days off for the full moon before we can do that.”
Pat could have slapped himself at the reminder; how had the full moon completely slipped his mind?
“That’s only one night,” Mallory said.
“For werewolves, but the moon effects vampires too. They should all be home in their coffin dirt for the night of the full moon as well as the days just before and after,” Vector explained. “Only the oldest bloodsuckers have the energy to withstand the pull and stay awake for those nights. Actually, that might have something to do with why we’ve got bodies right now. A couple of vampires could be going a little too far to be well-fed before the moon. We should have thought of that.”
“I didn’t know the moon effected vampires,” Mallory admitted. She turned to Pat. “Did you?”
“It’s not something that comes up a lot, but yeah. Vector’s probably right about the timing. The full moon’s tomorrow night.”
“Then we’ve got three days to figure out where to look for these guys.” She huffed softly under her breath.
“It’d be a hell of a lot easier if we weren’t having to work out of Lachlan’s apartment.”
The human looked up from his smoothie with a slow smirk that made Vector curl around his shoulders, tucking his face into the curve of his pale throat. Pat watched them with that jealous ache in his own chest expanding again fast like a balloon full of helium, until he tore his eyes away and stared, unseeing, down at the annotated map under his fingers.
What good was jealousy? It didn’t change anything. Just made the thought of going home to face Ethan and his sharp tongue a little harder. A double-edged sword he both craved and cringed away from, needing it as desperately as he wished, in the quiet reserve of his thoughts, that he didn’t need it at all.