COLD CASE - Chapter 14
I spent a restless night tossing and turning. Sometime around eight, the phone got me out of bed.
The hotel phone was hissing even more than usual. It sounded like I was holding a rattlesnake to my ear.
Mrs. Winfield was on the other end. And she was pretty upset.
"Mr. Dresden?" she shouted uncertainly. I wasn't sure if she could hear me.
"It's me!" I yelled back.
"Oh... thank God! Are you okay?"
Something cold suddenly slithered down my back. "What's wrong, Mrs. Winfield?"
"Mr. Flint is dead!"
I took a while to get what information I could from Mrs. Winfield and assure her that I would be careful. She was pretty worried. Actually, the conversation only really ended because the phone was becoming useless.
After I hung up, I brought Bob up to speed. Flint had been murdered in his office last night. Mrs. Winfield found out when the cops called her. They were checking with everyone who had recently employed Flint to see if they might know something.
"There's not exactly a shortage of suspects," Bob said once I was done.
I shook my head. "Forbes, Sergeant Sykes, and Mrs. Sykes are the obvious ones. And there's also the possibility that we have other, undiscovered Archetypes out there. Hell, it's completely possible that someone mortal has his own reasons to keep the Skorzeny case buried."
"You need more to work with," Bob suggested.
I nodded and reached for my duster and staff.
Flint's office was in a grungy, working-stiff part of Las Vegas. From the outside, his office didn't look like much - just a slot in a fifty-year-old strip mall. There was a sign next to the door that said, "Flint Investigations". It featured the classic symbol of a watchful eye. A tangle of crime-scene tape adorned the door.
I looked around. It was early-afternoon and a lot of people were in the area.
Fortunately, there was a backdoor to Flint's office in the alley behind the building. The door was pretty solid and had a lock that would have been formidable to a casual thief. I slipped it open without much difficulty and pulled loose a couple of perfunctory strips of crime-scene tape.
Flint's office was a lot like the man. Basic, blunt, and to the point. There was a desk, a couple of easy chairs, and a pair of file cabinets. The backroom had a beat-up couch, a tiny refrigerator, a small TV set, and another file cabinet.
Flint had died in the backroom. There was a taped-off outline of a body on the worn carpet.
I frowned at the outline. Edna had come through again and got a copy of the initial crime-scene report. She read me the details over the phone. According to the homicide detective who wrote the report, Flint had died from a 'massive injury to the throat'. Since additional detail was the responsibilty of the coroner, nothing else was said. However, there was no blood-stain on the carpet. Trust me on this, if you do enough damage to a man's throat that it kills him, there's blood. A lot of blood.
Okay, the implication was obvious.
I searched the office, paying particular attention to Flint's desk. I didn't find anything useful. On Flint's desk was a picture of a much younger version of him wearing a police officer's uniform. He had his arm around a woman that nobody would describe as a beauty, but whose looks were vastly improved by the happy grin on her face. Flint had a slight quirk to his lips that I think had been his equivalent of a smile.
As I left, I locked the backdoor behind me and replaced the crime-scene tape.
I waited until sundown and then went to a bar not too far from my hotel and got quietly drunk.
Well, actually, I was using a trick that Ebenezer had taught me long ago. It was a spell that broke apart alcohol molecules and left behind a harmless residue that tasted like peppermint. Since the spell called for a bit more fine control than I can normally manage, my results usually tasted more like peppermint-flavored gasoline.
Back when I was learning it, I hadn't seen the point to that particular spell. But, as usual, there was more than one thing that Ebenezer was trying to accomplish. The first was to work with improvimg my control - something poor Ebenezer spent years struggling with. The other was more subtle, but just as important. Sometimes it's handy to look like you're getting drunk when you really aren't.
Just after midnight, I got up from my seat at the bar. The bartender suggested that he could call me a cab. I gave him a wobbly smile and told him that I was staying in a hotel just down the street. He nodded his head and I stumbled out the door.
It was a ten-block walk back to my hotel. And it involved going down a lot of poorly-lit streets and past more than a few dark alleys. That wasn't a coincidence. I'd spent a few hours that afternoon scouting out the area around my hotel.
Predators often react aggressively to a prey animal that looks vulnerable. And predators love to attack from ambush. Both make for easy kills, and predators aren't in it for the sport. They kill for a living.
I was hoping to trigger the instinctive reactions of one specific predator. I wanted to make the acquaintance of Flint's murderer. It seemed likely that - now that Flint was taken care of - the killer would be interested in the other guy in town who was asking awkward questions.
As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long.
He was quiet and very fast, but I was on the lookout for a sudden rush of movement.
I twitched my wrist. I could hear my shield bracelet jingle.
The vampire slammed into my shield and bounced. You have no idea how much I enjoyed being the one who was inflicting a nasty surprise, rather than being on the receiving end. It made for a nice change in my life.
The vampire looked like a teenaged boy. Of course, there was no way to know its real age. He was wearing tattered jeans, a dirty t-shirt, and a pair of worn-out sneakers. His dark hair was wild and matted. A fanged snarl and reddish eyes dominated his face to the point that it was difficult to make out the rest of his features.
I flicked my blasting rod into my hand and held it ready as the vampire scrambled to its feet.
"We can talk or you can die," I said steadily. Which was a lie, of course. There was no way that I could let him get away. I was just hoping I could get some useful information out of him.
The vampire hissed at me. Then he began circling, waiting for me to make a panicky prey-animal mistake. He was used to that.
I merely pivoted to keep him in sight.
"You don't understand," I said with a shake of my head.
Something uncertain seemed to appear in his eyes.
"I'm the predator. You're the prey," I said quietly.
He hesitated for a long moment. Then his face hardened and he lunged for me again.
I finished the walk back to my hotel.
Behind me, the alley was in flames. Somewhere in the middle of the fire was an untidy pile of scorched bones.
I can't really use the internet - I kill computers if I get too close to them. So the next morning, I paid a librarian to print off all of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's post-1969 missing-person flyers for teenage boys. The librarian seemed duly impressed to be working for a real-life private eye.
It turns out that Las Vegas has a depressing number of lost boys.
The vampire I'd killed the night before was named Joshua Evans. He vanished in 1973. There was no way to tell for sure, but it was reasonable to assume that he was one of Kathryn Rawlin's victims.
I spent the rest of the day checking news archives and police reports, trying to learn what I could about Joshua Evans.
"Are you planning on getting any sleep?" Bob asked gruffly.
"Later," I replied shortly.
"You didn't go to bed last night," Bob said seriously. "And you're obviously running on empty right now."
I put down the vending-machine Coke I was drinking.
"I killed a kid, Bob."
"No," he corrected, "you killed a forty year old monster who happened to be in a kid's body. And if you hadn't done it, he'd still be out there - adding to his body-count. Harry, you've got to stop beating yourself up based on something as meaningless as appearance. Concentrate on the facts."
I tiredly rubbed my face. Bob was right, of course. However, that really didn't help.
"So what did you find out about Evans?" Bob asked.
I shrugged. "Nothing solid. He vanished in '73. Ever since then, there's been a scatter of killings reportedly done by a dark-haired teenager. They usually happened in the area between Reno and Las Vegas, but there was also some crossover into California and northeast Nevada. For a while, back in the mid- to late-seventies, the Nevada State Patrol had a task-force investigating the possibility that there was a young serial killer working the highways and back-roads. Evans was actually one of their suspects. However, the task-force was shut-down when the case stopped making conventional sense."
"Okay," Bob said thoughtfully. "The state patrol decided the pattern wasn't a real pattern because the killer didn't seem to be getting any older. How many victims are we talking about?"
"Fifteen obvious ones from 1973 to 1980. Most of them were in the early years of that time-range. However, once you see the pattern, there are a lot more deaths and disappearances that are probably due to Evans. He was killing transients - mostly border-crossers from Mexico. Since they officially didn't exist, and were a long way from family and friends, there was nobody to miss them."
Bob thought that over. "So he was learning his craft from 1973 on. By 1980 he got good enough that he stopped being spotted. Harry, if you extrapolate from the number of killings done by Skorzeny..."
"Then Evans' body-count in the last forty years is huge," I said grimly.