Chapter Seven
Patrick
A day later, Pat returned to work, safe in the knowledge that his father had promised to call around and see about getting someone in to access the fire damage to the townhouse. The pack’s insurance would cover the cost, and even though the water and suppressants from the firefighters looked bad, a closer examination of the living room had left him optimistic—to his untrained eye, the damage looked more cosmetic than structural. Even if they had to gut all of the furnishings, Pat hoped that they’d be able to move back in a couple of weeks. He didn’t mind using the kids’ half of the building, but it would be easier for everyone if he and Ethan could move back into his house before the start of winter quarter.
While he’d taken a day to get things in order, Mallory had been sticking her nose into their vampire case. He arrived at the South Seattle Police Precinct bearing coffee for the both of them—he figured that after his disappearing act in August, he owed Mallory coffee for at least the next year, maybe two—to find her already sitting behind her computer with a scowl and dark bruises under her eyes. Was no one getting a good nights sleep these days?
“Thank you,” she said, distracted, taking a sip from her cafe au lait without breaking eye contact with the computer monitor.
“Find anything?”
“I staked out that nightclub last night, but the management is more slippery than a mongoose.”
“Couldn’t talk to anyone?”
“No one with anything useful to say. All of the bartenders and waitresses gave the same answer: they didn’t see or hear anything. And none of them recognized the victim’s picture. Not that I’m surprised.”
He hit the power button on his tower and waited for her to elaborate.
“It’s not my scene, you understand, but that place gave me a strange vibe.”
“Like?”
“I can’t put my finger on it. The whole time I felt like I was being watched. But it was more than that. I mean, I’m sure the manager was there just making sure I didn’t get to them. They were all too twitchy for their answers to be entirely honest. And the club goers…” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You sure there are no covens here? I mean, how hard would it be, really, to hide a bunch of vampires in the middle of a major city?”
“Well, obviously there are vamps here. But they don’t have to be part of a coven.”
Mallory leaned over her desk. “You should tell me everything you know about them.”
“It’s not that much.”
Her lip curled, a there and gone again sneer quickly tucked behind her usual reserved expression. It was another little tick that she never would have expressed five months ago, but ever since his return to Seattle, Pat had noted the increasing tension in his partner, the shortened span of her patience. He didn’t want to call himself a coward, but Pat wasn’t in a hurry to find out about everything that had happened during his and Ethan’s impromptu global trek.
“You’ll have to tell me eventually if this does turn out to be more than a solitary vampire attack.”
“Has Lynch finished the exam?”
“I have to pick it up at nine.” Mallory checked the time on her phone. “She never gives up anything when I go early.”
“What about…”A quick check showed that the rest of the Major Crimes floor was quiet, one other solitary agent on the far side of the room with earbuds in and his attention fixed on something playing on his monitor. “What about Alan’s file?”
Mallory’s mouth pursed into a frustrated line and she gave a minute shake of her head.
“Locked up tight. I put in a request with the Captain for special clearance, but so far she hasn’t responded to it. You’d think they’d want us to have any information that might help cover this up.”
He tensed.
“Why would we cover it up?”
“Well, we wouldn’t, but I wonder if the department might not be trying to. I mean consider the evidence. Why else would they lock Sloane’s file and all of his reports? Especially from you? Don’t you think it sounds a little bit like a party line, saying that there are no covens in Seattle? Historically, vampires are dangerous and difficult to keep in check for civilian governments. The fact they can claim Seattle is, for all intents and purposes, a vampire free metropolis has to be a mark in their favor. For humans and supernaturals alike.”
“Doesn’t sound like you need me to tell you anything about vampires.”
“Maybe I was testing you,” Mallory said, leaning one elbow on the edge of her desk and turning to look back at her monitor.
A rush of something cold, slimy, and uncomfortable made Pat shiver.
“You’ve been doing your research.”
“What else would I be doing? It’s part of our job,” she said, her tone hard.
Before Pat could answer, his phone rang. He picked it up on the second ring, breathing a sigh of relief, and listened to the softly spoken Dispatch operator dispense an address and a case code. He hung up and met Mallory’s sharp look.
“Patrol just called in another body.”
“If we hurry, we can get Lynch’s report before she leaves.”
The two detectives moved in sync, grabbing their service pistols and badges, locked up their computers and desks, and made a quick march downstairs to the morgue. There was no sign of Lynch, but they caught her assistant, Tobias, shoving evidence bags and boxes of latex gloves into a go-bag.
“Hey, Detective Mallory,” Toby said, distracted, bending to pick up a stack of clipboards off the ground.
“Good morning. Are you guys headed over to Rainier?”
“Just got the notification. You too?”
Mallory nodded. “Before you go, do you think I could have a copy of the—”
“Of course.” The young medical assistant dropped his bag on a chair and sifted through a stack of reports cluttering up the front desk. He pulled out a slim file and handed it to Mallory. “It’s not complete. Just the preliminary. We’re still waiting to hear back from the FBI about the bite indentations. Hopefully they’ll ping someone’s file so you have a name to go with…” He gestured helplessly back towards the closed doors that led into the morgue proper.
“I appreciate this.”
“No worries. See at the scene?”
Mallory nodded, and together the two of them got back into the elevator and rode it up to the main floor.
“I’ll drive,” Pat said uselessly as Mallory had her nose buried in the report and showed no indication of coming up for air until she had finished reading it.
It felt comfortable to be back behind the wheel of his Camero. The old engine purring to life with a familiar grumble and the smell of the worn leather soft in his nose. Like slipping into a well loved coat or chair that Pat knew just how to move around inside of. They avoided the tail end of morning traffic by taking a series of back streets, and pulled into the alley behind another bar just after nine in the morning.
Mallory had been quiet the entire time, first reading and then staring fixedly out at the passing storefronts. Now she unbuckled her seat belt and said, “What are we, half a mile away from where the first body was found?”
“About.”
She slipped out of the car and Pat followed, the two of them stepping over the police line to greet the officer in charge, a man named Banks. He directed them around the corner where the back of three buildings formed a diamond shaped area cramped with parked vehicles and dumpsters. They had beaten the rest of the CSIs to the scene. The responding officers had marked off the area to prevent contamination, and Officer Banks said that his partner was inside taking statements from the shop employees. Other than that, they’d been waiting for back-up to proceed.
“The ME should be right behind us. Mallory do you want to go in and help with statements?” Pat asked.
“All right,” she replied.
Banks cleared his throat. “I don’t want to speculate, but…”
Pat gave the officer a look when he trailed off.
“What?” the wolf demanded.
“Well, you’ll see.”
He tamped down on his frustration and pulled on gloves as he approached the body. It had been poorly hidden behind one of the dumpsters, bare bent legs laying askew in full view of anyone approaching this corner. Pat grabbed his phone and snapped a couple overall shots of the scene. The smell of refuse was so strong it nearly covered up the distinct waft of blood. Decomp was indistinguishable from the rank smells from the dumpster itself, but the girl—woman—still looked…
Fresh was the wrong word for it. Pale. Waxy. And the matching holes low on the curve of her neck explained why.
Pat stretched out to get a picture of her face without disturbing the dumpster. He’d wait for Lynch to get here and the official photographer before he started moving things around.
She was young, like Linetti, with soft rounded features and dark hair lying in a messy pool under her head. Eyes closed and mouth slack. Completely bloodless as far as he could tell, even the wounds on her neck had been cleaned.
“Not a drop wasted.”
“What was that?” Doctor Alice Lynch asked. Pat jumped up and turned, surprised at how close she was standing; he backed up to give her room to work.
“Just noting that there isn’t any blood.”
Lynch cocked her head and studied the body. Behind her, Toby shot him a quick smile, the younger man’s arms overburdened with bags and instrument boxes.
“Oh,” Lynch said.
“What?”
“I see what you’re saying.” She gestured at her neck with an odd smirk flicking across her face.
Without another word, she snapped gloves onto her hands, and she and her assistant began cataloging the body. After a couple of minutes, Pat helped them shift the dumpster away from the wall to facilitate access to the victim. Lynch worked quick and methodical, making short observations at Toby who noted them in a log book. While they worked, Pat examined the rest of the ally, looking for anything that might have been left behind by the girl or her killer. But in an ally overflowing with garbage from at least two different bar/restaurants, it was hard to distinguish anything. Everything looked unintentional. If nothing else, he was able to confirm his first suspicion: they hadn’t wasted any blood, the rest of the alley was clean of that particular body fluid.
He rejoined Lynch just as Mallory and Banks’s partner exited the building behind the victim. In the time he’d been looking around, two other officers had arrived, one of them toting a camera and the other one placing numbered markers around the body.
“Zella Liu, age nineteen,” Lynch said, reading from the girl’s bright pink wallet. “I’ve got local coffee punch cards, a library book card for the Seattle Public Library, and a meal card from Seattle Pacific University. Another college girl.”
Mallory stared down at the victim with a tense look on her face, arms crossed.
“What about the bite? Is it from the same person?” she asked.
“I’ll have to examine it under microscope to say. The teeth span is the same, but that’s not saying much. Just means the two biters had similarly sized mouths.”
“Doctor, this is two bodies in less than a week with similar MOs. We’ll need a rush on the autopsy.”
Lynch looked from Mallory to him, waiting for Pat’s nod before she shrugged and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
The exchange did not go unnoticed by his partner; Mallory’s frown deepened as she shot him a dark look. Pat didn’t know what Lynch thought she was playing at trying to alienate Mallory, but she’d always been weird around him. He remembered her cool reception of Ethan too, last summer on the Mirande case, and it made him uncomfortable. He was pulled out of his thoughts when Mallory stepped up into his personal space to speak without being overheard by the rest of the officers.
“We could be dealing with a serial killer. I mean, whatever you call a vampire you starts killing his meals.”
“Same difference.”
“So you agree?”
Pat didn’t want it to be true, but the close proximity of the deaths, the bites, the age of the victims, and the fact that they were both college students…young, pretty college students. All of it tripped his suspicions. He dipped a shallow nod.
“We need to interview the victim’s friends. Find out what they were doing down here.”
“I’m done here,” he said.
Mallory nodded. “We’ll start with Liu. We need to call her parents too.”
Pat gave instructions to Banks to keep the scene secure until the CSIs were finished and forward his report to Pat’s desk ASAP. Then he and Mallory left, turning northwest away from the city center.
The two detectives did the exhausting work of contacting Zella Liu’s mother, an older divorcee living in a lower income area of Everett who gave them the address for Zella’s dorm as well as the names of her roommate and a friend. Pat sat stiffly next to Mallory on Mrs Liu’s couch while she ran through a list of basic questions. Mrs Liu answered them with trembling breath:
What had her daughter been studying? What year was she? Did she like to go out clubbing? Drinking? What kind of friends did she tend to hang out with? Had she mentioned meeting anyone recently? Boyfriends? Ex-boyfriends?
“I—I don’t know. No, no one new, but she didn’t like to talk about that sort of thing with me. She’s a very independent girl. Was. Oh, god, was,” Mrs Liu said, face crumpling as she slouched over her knees, eyes full with unshed tears. “Do you think it was—could it have been someone she knew?”
Mallory clicked her pen and closed her notebook. “We’re not sure yet. These are just standard questions while we try to get a clearer picture of your daughter’s life. The better we understand her movements in the days leading up to her…death…the better chance we have of pinpointing whether this was random violence or the result of a personal attack. If you think of anything, don’t hesitate to call me.” Mallory set a business card with her extension at the precinct on the table in front of Mrs Liu. “Is there anything you’d like to ask us before we go?”
Mrs Liu glanced up at them from behind a curtain of dark hair, chewing on her lip. Grief made the lines on her face stand out in sharp relief while she weighed her question. Eventually she shook her head and they stood.
“We’ll call as soon as we know anything for sure,” Pat murmured, and then they left the cramped house on Evergreen Way.
“If she was on a half scholarship to SPU she must have been smart,” Mallory said. “Tuition there isn’t cheap.”
Pat nodded absently. In the car, Mallory checked her phone while he drove them over to the SPU campus. It wasn’t hard to find the victim’s dormitory, and a young blonde—Amanda something according to Mrs Liu—answered the door with a confused expression, her cellphone plastered to the side of her head while she listened to someone yammer on the other end. Pat tuned into the panicked tone of the voice on the blonde’s phone and listened while another young-sounding woman repeated that she “didn’t have a fucking clue where that bitch was and she didn’t care either.”
“Hold on,” Zella’s roommate snapped, cutting off the other girl’s tirade and turning to the two detectives. “What do you want?”
They held up their badges and Pat watched her swallow, hand trembling as she muttered a stilted goodbye into her phone and hung up on the other girl.
“Fuck, she’s dead, isn’t she?”
Mallory gestured to the dorm room and said, “I’m not sure you want to have this conversation out here in the hall.”
Pat could feel curious eyes on them as the young woman let them inside. He left the door propped half-open so she wouldn’t feel trapped in the confined space and took up a position blocking out curious eyes. He could sense movement up and down the hall as whispers broke out. Mallory and Zella sat in computer chairs, the only furniture other than a lumpy bean bag chair and the two lofted beds. His partner clasped her hands together and broke the news to the girl.
“She’s really dead?” Amanda asked, twisting her phone in her hands.
Pat tipped his head and said, “You knew she was missing.”
“Yeah. I mean—I was hoping she was just out with someone. Had a really good time and didn’t feel like coming back to the dorms.”
“Did she stay out late like that frequently?” Mallory asked.
Amanda hesitated.
Pat frowned. “If you know something…”
“Yeah I get it,” she snapped, shooting him a dark look. “I’ve watched Law & Order. I met Zella last year, freshman roommates, and we decided to stick together. She was really good about studying and going to class last year. Quiet. Liked to stay in. We’d watch Netflix together on the weekend. But lately, she’s started…she had started to go out at night, staying out late, didn’t want to hang out with me. Didn’t want to talk about who she was seeing.”
“Was there a boyfriend?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. Either way we’re stuck living together for the rest of the year, and I didn’t want to cause problems so I didn’t ask. Just let her do her thing.”
“Do you have any idea what sort of places she liked to go to? Were these clubs or bars?” Mallory asked.
Amanda shrugged.
Pat crossed his arms and settled himself more firmly in front of the door. He could hear quiet footsteps walking past as gawkers tried to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside Zella and Amanda’s dorm room.
“Who was that on the phone?” he asked.
Amanda’s eyes snapped to him. “None of your business.”
He arched an eyebrow at her, meeting her stare with a bland, unforgiving look of his own.
“Do you know anyone named Jocelyn Linetti?” Mallory asked, cutting through the tension.
Amanda shook her head.
“Are you sure?” Pat asked.
“Yes.”
“Any chance Miss Liu ever mentioned her name?”
“I don’t recognize it.”
A pack of kids passed the room, their voices raised in a debate that slid through Pat’s attention without grabbing him. He jerked when someone fell against the door, knocking into him, not that a one hundred and fifty pound eighteen year old had a chance of physically shifting him, but it tore Pat’s attention away from the conversation with Amanda. He stepped out into the hall while Mallory finished asking their questions. He stared down the four teenage boys in the hall until they turned pale, the smiles slipping off their faces as their prey instincts kicked in, and they beat a hasty retreat.
Mallory shut the door behind her; she had a laptop tucked under her arm.
“Zella’s,” she said. “It was logged into her social media accounts.”
Pat grunted acknowledgment and they left.
“Amanda said she didn’t know anything about vampires and that Zella hadn’t mentioned them either.”
“I heard.”
“Right. So, what do you think?”
“The phone call when she answered the door, the person on the end sounded irritated and they were discussing a missing girl. Could be something. Could be that Amanda has more of an idea who exactly Zella Liu was hanging out with than she wanted us to believe.”
“I liked that line about Law & Order, which could just as easily mean she thinks she knows how to lie to the police.”
He huffed in agreement. “One of us needs to start contacting Linetti’s friends.”
“And by one of us you mean me,” Mallory said in a neutral tone.
“I’ll look through her Facebook.”
“Of course.”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
Mallory tapped her fingers against the her knee and stared out the Camero’s window. It had started to rain, the streets dark and overcast with heavy clouds. Pat had had to turn on the running lights and the windshield wipers to cut through the afternoon gloom.
“Do you want me to talk to her friends?” he asked when the silence stretched uncomfortably.
He knew he sounded low and gruff, and Pat hoped she wouldn’t call his bluff. He wasn’t in the right mood to deal with more teenage humans who didn’t want to cooperate with a police investigation. Mallory oozed quiet politeness, and people responded positively to her crisp, English diction, as though just by opening her mouth she had set the scene in the film and invited everyone onto set with her. People always responded well when they thought their lives were imitating art.
Pat had a face that turned heads, that made women—and sometimes men—flirt with him, but none of the instincts that would have helped him use that kind of attention for his own gain. Ethan was good at that sort of thing, flirting, leading people on until they smiled and spilled their secrets. Or he had been before.
“You know, if I hadn’t met your mother, I’d think we needed to have a conversation about this, but I’d like to think better of you, Clanahan.”
Pat sat up straight and shot her a confused look.
Mallory stared straight ahead at the road and ran her tongue once across her bottom lip; he could almost see her metering out her words.
“If you think that because I’m a woman you can get away with not having to talk to people—”
“I just think you’re better at it.”
“That’s not any better,” she said, cutting him a sharp look.
They stopped at a red light and Pat closed his eyes. She wasn’t wrong.
“I know,” he admitted. “Fuck—I’m sorry.”
“You act like such a crank since we’ve been partner, like you’ve got this huge chip on your shoulder, but…”
“What?”
“I’ve read your file,” she said with an empty smile and met his eyes. “Do you hate working with me?”
“God, no. You’re a good detective.”
“I’m not fishing for compliments.”
“I’m serious.”
“Then is it because I’m a woman?”
“It’s because you’re reliable. Because…” Pat ran a hand over his face and put his foot on the gas as the light turned green.
“At some point, you’re going to have to stop acting like a grumpy shit head.”
“I know.”
She sighed and rolled her shoulders. “I’ll talk to Linetti’s friends while you go through the computer. And while you’re at it you can see about getting into Sloan’s files too. But you should think about making a New Year’s resolution, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.”