No other people were in sight. Valentine Kaiser now led the way, in the manner of a man who knew just where he was going.
Presently, around the corner of an aisle that throbbed with noise, another vampire met Joe and his escort. This one was a young-looking woman, dressed in jeans and sweater like a college student. She acknowledged Kaiser's arrival with an odd gesture, a nod that was almost a bow, followed by a curious look at Joe.
"Anything yet?" Kaiser demanded of her.
The lookout shook her head, looking disgusted. Kaiser muttered words that sounded like swearing, in a language that reminded Joe of Latin, and moved on.
Lila followed, making sure that Joe came along, as Kaiser led them around another corner. Here some panels had been removed from a bank of metal cabinets, and a figure in coveralls, this one a man and a breather, was at work, with screwdriver, pliers, and some kind of electronic meter.
Looking over the workman's shoulder into the exposed machinery, Joe decided from the number of wires visible that this might be the central tie-up for the building's phone lines.
Kaiser paused just behind the workman. "Any success?"
The man turned his face back over his shoulder, looked scared, and mumbled something.
"You might as well admit it loud and clear, I can hear you anyway. I'm beginning to suspect you're not as much an expert as you've claimed to be."
"Sorry," the workman muttered, not turning around.
"Are you? I'm not sure you know what the word means." Kaiser appeared to be considering how best to explain it.
The man raised his head for a quick look at Joe, as if wondering whether Joe was someone he had to be afraid of too. Then he quickly averted his eyes again.
Joe, leaning back against another paneled unit with his hands in his coat pockets, was observing other features of the surroundings, near and far. These included a power substation, a large part of the building's elevator machinery, and provisions for heating and air-conditioning. Also somewhere nearby, he supposed, would be water tanks and pumps, and of course the phone equipment.
Kaiser gave up staring at his trembling workman and turned to Joe: "I hope you're more useful than he is." He grinned. "You're willing to talk with me, aren't you? Tell me things? Or are you determined to keep secrets?"
"Fine, we can have a talk. Anytime. Would you like to make an appointment?"
Kaiser only grinned. "Maybe we should have our talk sooner rather than later." He ruminated. "Yes, let's do that. But I have a few things to do up here, I'll have to ask you to wait downstairs for me for a few minutes. Lila will walk you down."
Joe didn't ask downstairs where. He was sure that all was going to be made clear to him. Before he and Lila were allowed to depart, Kaiser muttered something privately to the gray-eyed woman, as if giving her special instructions of some kind.
Once she'd received her orders, the woman turned to Joe, put out a hand, and exerted effortless inhuman strength, turning Joe around with a grip on his shoulder as if he were no bigger than a small child. She smiled up at him as she turned him around. Joe knew better than to take it personally. With Lila just behind him, he was marched back to the otherwise still-deserted service stairway and down nine flights of concrete steps to eighty-nine, a residential level.
The corridor here looked just like the one on Uncle Matthew's floor. They encountered no one in the hall. Joe's escort stopped him suddenly, with an effortless tug on his arm, in front of an apartment door. Then Lila took out a key and opened the door and gestured Joe inside.
The place was laid out a little differently from the apartment of Matthew Maule, and was sparsely and plainly furnished. One other person was in the living room, a young woman wearing an army surplus field jacket, open over a dirty-looking shirt. Her jeans were worn, her bare feet grimy. She looked up sharply as Joe and his escort entered, and then relaxed. She was a breather.
"I'll be staying here for a while, dear," Lila said to her in a surprisingly sweet voice. "If you've got anything to do elsewhere, go right ahead"
The young woman seemed about to get up from her seat on the sofa, then changed her mind. "I'm waiting for Val," she said "You can go ahead whatever you want."
Lila nodded, apparently satisfied. Joe looked around. He wasn't being invited to sit down. There seemed to be no one else in the apartment, though of course he couldn't see all the rooms.
Casually he started strolling. He liked very much the idea of putting at least a little distance between himself and Lila. His guardian was just standing in the living room, in that untiring way they had. Might as well look the place over a little, if possible, and then—
His stroll had brought him partway down a hall, to a spot from which he could look in through an open bedroom door, past a bed with rumpled sheets and blankets, to an open bathroom door beyond And in the bathroom was what looked like—
Joe stopped, his mouth suddenly dry. He turned to look back at Lila. Lila, leaning against the front door in a somewhat masculine pose, arms folded, was smiling pleasantly at Joe.
Loosening his topcoat, Joe moved on into the untenanted bedroom and into the bathroom beyond.
It was the waitress, he had no doubt of that from Angie's and John's description. Red hair, shapely body, naked now. It was hard to tell, under present conditions, about her age. Her limbs were bound with twine, all tied up compactly close to her body in a kind of tumbler's knot, her body suspended head downward over the green-tiled bathtub. Plaster and tile had been knocked in patches from the walls and ceiling, to find a solid purchase for the heavy bolts that had been driven in to give solid support for the chains that held a human body's weight.
Joe was almost sure with his first good look at the discolored face, the half-open eyes, the needle bite wounds on the throat and elsewhere that she was already dead, though a very faint trail of saliva still drooled from the distended lips of her open mouth. The string of clear saliva went trailing down into an indescribable puddle in the tub, where the stopper of the drain was closed, so that the tub had caught and preserved the considerable volume of vomit, blood, and perhaps other fluids that had drained from the woman's body since she was hung up like this.
Joe put out his left hand, and had just time to feel the coldness of Elizabeth Wiswell's shoulder, before a warning voice sounded just behind him.
"Don't touch!"
He turned to see Lila, who had moved a couple of rooms closer, almost twinkling at him. Joe leaned against the doorframe, fighting down a sudden urge to vomit. Briefly he allowed himself to close his eyes.
"And don't throw up in the tub. That would ruin things. We have a kind of experiment going there," the vampire said behind him.
"Who is she?" asked Joe, though he was certain that he knew.
"Just a little thing. A thing that wouldn't do what we wanted it to do."
Joe thought he heard a tiny sound, a faint choking too inhuman to be called a moan, from the body over the tub.
Vaguely disbelieving, he turned his head in that direction. "Elizabeth?"
The tiny sound was not repeated.
"Come out of there," ordered Lila. Joe looked at her, standing five feet away in the bathroom doorway. She added: "I want to show you something, little man-thing. I may even let you have some fun."