"The master vamp of this group is strong enough to hide his power from both the Church of Eternal Life and the Master of the City, nothing we killed up there had that kind of power."
"We lost three men up there, I think that's plenty powerful enough."
I shook my head. "Most of these were babies, almost brand-new. What I saw at the earlier crime scenes wasn't a feeding frenzy, it was methodical. The vampires up in that condo were still more like animals than thinking beings. They were too wild to be taken on an organized hunt."
"I don't know what you're talking about, an organized hunt. You make it sound like killing humans is like hunting deer, or rabbit."
"To some of the vampires, it is."
He shook his head, hands on hips, and started to pace in a tight circle, but the open door of the van stopped his pacing. "It's the right number of vamps. They had one dead stripper, and one that they nearly killed. That's good enough."
"They took her and left a state trooper as a witness, so we'd know. They wanted us to come here tonight. Why?"
"They ambushed us in the hallway, Blake. I think we were just better at killing them than they planned for us to be."
"Maybe, but what if it wasn't a trap to kill us? What if it was a trap to kill the vampires?"
"That's just... that makes no sense."
"You're ready to close the case. You're ready to declare them dead, defeated. We kill a few vampires, find a few dead humans in the condo, and you're ready to believe it's our serial killers."
"And who else would it be? Are you saying we've got copycats?"
"No, I'm saying that if we close this case, then they can just move on to the next town. They can start over."
"You're saying they left us some of their baby vampires so we'd kill them and think it was them? They sacrificed their own people for this?"
"Yeah, that's what I'm saying."
"You know what I think, Blake?"
"No, what?"
"I think you just can't let it go. I think you want it not to be over."
It was my turn to try to pace, but I was smaller, and standing a little farther out from the doors, so I got almost a full circle out of my pacing. It didn't help. "I want this over with, Hudson, more than you do. Because if these vampires were left up there as sacrificial lambs, then they used me to kill them. They used all of us as a sort of a weapon, their weapon."
"Go home, Blake, go home to your husband, or boyfriend, or f**king dog, but go home. Your job is done here. Do you understand that?"
I looked up at him and tried to think how to explain it. I finally tried something I didn't like admitting to the police at large. "I saw inside the memories of one of the vampires at the church earlier tonight. I saw some faces. I got some names. Those faces aren't up there. Those names aren't going to belong to any of the dead."
"This case is closed, Blake, which means your warrant has been fulfilled. You're done. Go home."
"Actually, Sergeant, I have sole discretion on whether a warrant is finished or not. Mark me on this, if we don't get these guys in St. Louis, they'll move shop. We got some of them tonight, but not all of them, and we sure as hell missed the big guy, and if you don't kill the main master, he just moves somewhere else and starts making new vampires. It's like going in for cancer surgery, if you don't get it all, then it keeps spreading."
"I thought you were dating a vampire," he said.
"I am," I said.
"For someone who's dating one of them, you have a damned dark view of them."
"Ask me how I feel about human beings sometimes. I've gotten called in on too many serial killer cases, where they want it to be a monster, because they don't want to believe that one human being could do shit like that to another human being."
"How long you been doing this, hunting vamps, doing the bad crimes?"
"Six years, why?"
"Most violent crime units rotate their people about every two to five years. Maybe you need to see something a little less bloody for awhile."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I sort of side-stepped it. "Up there, the master vampire that was hiding in the corner, none of you could see him, right?"
"Until you shot him."
"I could feel him. I knew exactly where he was. He was controlling the others in the bedroom. If he hadn't died, then the others would have kept attacking, even with the holy objects visible. We'd have lost more people."
"Maybe, but what's your point?"
"My abilities with the dead are genetic, it's like a psychic gift. No amount of training or practice will teach you how to see the invisible. There are less than twenty people in the entire country that have abilities even close to mine."
"There are a hell of a lot more than twenty people in the new federal marshal's program," he said.
I nodded. "Yeah, and some of them are good. Some of them would have sensed his power, but I don't know if any of the rest would have known exactly where to shoot."
"You're saying that you're the only one who can do your job?"
I shrugged.
"Look, Blake, take some advice from someone who's been doing this longer than you have. You're not God, you can't save everybody, and the police work in this town has been running just fine without you to baby-sit. You aren't the only cop in this city, and you aren't the only one who can do this job. You've got to let go of that idea, or you'll go crazy. You'll start blaming yourself for not being there twenty-four-seven. You'll start thinking, if only I'd been there, this bad thing, or that bad thing, wouldn't have happened. It's a lie. You're just a person, with some good abilities, and good judgment, but don't try and carry the weight of the whole f**king world. It'll crush you."
I looked up into his brown eyes, and there was something in his face that said he was giving advice that had been hard-won. If I'd been a girl-girl, I'd have said something like, you sound like you're talking from experience, but I'd hung around with the boys' club too long not to know my manners. Hudson was opening up, and he didn't have to, he was trying to help me; asking him personal shit would have made me an ungrateful wretch. "I've been the only one for so long."
"Did you go up in that condo by yourself?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"Then stop acting like you did. Do you have anyone waiting for you at home?" His voice was gentler than it had been when he'd first told me to go home to my husband or boyfriend.
"Yeah, I got someone waiting."
"Then go home. Call him from the car, let him know that the officer down calls weren't you." They never released names of the downed officers to the media until all the families had been contacted, better for the bereaved, but hell on all the other families with police officers out and about tonight. They were all waiting for the phone to ring, or worse, the doorbell. No one with a police officer in the family wanted to see another cop on their doorstep tonight.
I thought about how I'd left Micah and Nathaniel standing in the parking lot. How I'd told them to take Ronnie home. How I hadn't kissed either of them good-bye. My eyes were hot, and my throat hurt.
I nodded, maybe a little too rapidly. My voice was only a little shaky. "I'll go home. I'll call home."
"Get some sleep if you can, you'll feel better tomorrow."
I nodded, but didn't look at him. I'd taken a couple of steps when I turned back and said, "I'll bet you almost anything, Hudson, that the crime lab is going to agree with me. The DNA in the bites from the first vics aren't going to match most of the vamps upstairs."
"You just won't let this go, will you?"
I shrugged. "I don't know how to let go, Sergeant."
"Take it from someone who knows, Blake. You better start learning, or you're going to burn out."
I looked at him, and he looked back, and I wondered what he'd seen in me tonight for him to feel that I needed the "burnout" lecture. Was he right? Or were we all just tired? Him, me, all of us.
80
I drove home thinking about vampires. Not the fun ones. The ones we'd just killed. It was nearly three in the morning, mine was almost the only car when I pulled out onto the highway. Eight dead vamps, plus one human cohort. My bet was a human servant, because he was the one that had killed Officer Baldwin with a sword. That spoke of long ago skills. Not many modern humans are good enough with a blade to take out a tactical officer armed with an MP5. Eight was enough to account for all of them, but I knew we'd missed Vittorio. He just hadn't been there.