“Anything else useful left of the postmark?”
Harry dug his notebook out of his suit coat thrown across the stool next to him…thumbed through, and handed it to Garreth. “I copied it, thinking maybe I’d look at it and have a brilliant insight, or my artist wife would.”
The drawing showed a postmark circle with the two visible numbers at the bottom. At the top of the circle, partials of three letters also remained. A dotted line indicated the edge of the fragment. Below the postmark Harry had drawn an elaborate M.
He pointed at it. “That was written, not printed, so it had to be part of the address on the envelope.”
The address on the envelope Garreth saw in Lane’s apartment started with an M…Madelaine Bieber. So Lane burned the letter before leaving…or at least the envelope. What did she consider dangerous for them to find? Too bad the return address and so much of the postmark were destroyed. Addressed to her real name, it must have come from someone who knew her well and from a long time back.
“Did you learn anything useful from her driver’s license or car registration?”
“Just that the information given for the license was false.” Harry frowned. “We ran her through NCIC, and asked for Wants on anyone fitting her description. She was in the wind so slick she’s got to have done this before. She’s wanted somewhere for something.” He sighed. “Anyway, that’s where we are now.”
Garreth wished desperately for a way to slip away, too. The simplest solution that did not involve just running, or trying to hypnotize both Harry and Lien, was wait for them to go to bed. Except that meant trying to ignore blood scents and hunger for several hours yet. Cue the distractions.
He tapped the postmark. “Maybe we can get more out of this. Let’s see if we can figure out what these letters are.”
They bent over it. That close, their scents overwhelmed him. He forced his focus to just the sketch.
Harry sighed. “Even if we decide what they are, we don’t know where in the city name they are.”
“No,” Lien said, “this first letter is the first letter of the name. As long as you copied everything exactly, there’s enough space to its left to show there’s no letter there. And the letter has to be a B or D…curved bottom line with a straight edge on the left.”
The next letter ended in two slanted feet. An A or X.
“Unless I didn’t get it exact and it’s an H,” Harry said.
“I don’t think many town names start BH or DH,” Lien said.
Garreth said, “Not BX or DX, either.”
She nodded. “So I think Harry copied correctly and it’s an A…DA or BA.”
The curve of the last letter, they decided, made it a C, O, or U.
“Or maybe a G,” Lien said, “because a little is cut off the right side. It might even be a Q, depending on the font.”
Frustrating, because any of these letters worked with the first two.
Harry closed the notebook with a sigh and shoved it back in his coat. “Well, it was worth a try, but it didn’t get us anywhere.”
Not until they knew more about Lane. In the meantime, the exercise used part of the evening and distracted Lien from the fact he had still not eaten anything. Garreth committed what they had of the ZIP and city name to memory…for when it could be useful.
The rest of the evening crawled by in an agony of gritting teeth against the hunger. Garreth drank enough tea to float a freighter. Lien started pressing him to eat something. Finally he gave in, but insisted on serving himself. Out in the kitchen he took a helping of rice and the pork and heated it in the microwave so she and Harry would smell it from the family room. The aroma also helped mask blood scents for a while.
He tried salving the hunger by imagining himself eating the rice and pork, remembering the sauce’s sweet tang, the crisp coating on the pork nuggets…even as he carefully buried everything at the bottom of the trash.
The hunger refused to be tricked.
Finally he began faking yawns. “Thirty hours sleep or not, I’m ready to hit the rack again.”
He retreated to his room, where he stood at the open window sucking in air free of any blood scent. While waiting for Harry and Lien to come up, too, he removed the bandage from his neck. Just in case of…trouble. As unobservant as witnesses tended to be, they did remember things like bandages. When he listened at their bedroom door and finally, finally, heard the even breathing of sleepers, he sneaked downstairs and out the patio door.
Vaulting the fences to the end of the block and heading for the nearest bus stop, Garreth found he could still not think about what he intended to do…or how to do it. Or where. He let his body take him, guided by its new instincts. With little surprise, though, after several transfers he found himself in North Beach amid streaming humanity.
Of course…Lane’s turf, rich with game. The rigid isolation he imposed on himself on the bus shattered, flooding him with the sounds and smells around him. Smells of perfume, aftershave, deodorant, sweat…but above all the rich, salty hot scent of blood. It ignited a renewed frenzy of hunger.
He stumbled down the street, eyeing everyone…the hunger urging him to pick someone, the rest of him heartsick, hating that urge. How could he bring himself to attack another human being as Lane did? What if he refused? Would starvation kill a vampire?
Occasionally a woman passed whose scent seemed especially strong and he turned toward her like a compass to north…only to pull back, afraid. How long had it been since he last picked up a girl? Before he met Marti. He had been turned down a fair number of times in those days, he recalled. A refusal now meant more than a blow to the ego; it meant no supper. Worse, what if she came with him? What if he killed her?
He could not do it. He just…could…not…do…it!
In panic, he turned up a side street and ran away from the crowd, away from the blood smells fanning his hunger, and did not stop until the next corner. There he leaned against the wall of a building, swearing at himself. Some vampire he made. What was he going to do?
Gradually, he became aware of voices around the corner, sharp, full of anger and fear. A man’s: “Richie says you’re holding out on him. He don’t like that.”
“I’m not,” a woman replied. “I do the best I can. I swear.”
Garreth recognized Velvet’s voice. Edging up to the corner, he peered around it. The hooker stood backed against the building by a man waving a switchblade under her nose.
“Well you better do better, baby, because Richie says you’re running in the red. You ain’t cost-effective. So unless you get your act together, you will be running red. I’ll fix your face so you can’t get a job ushering at a dogfight.”
Good old Richie, Garreth thought.
He rounded the corner. Two long strides put him on top of the muscleman, clamping a hand on the wrist of the knife hand just as the man registered Garreth’s presence and started to turn. Garreth bent the wrist back. The forearm gave with a sickening crack. He let go of the wrist and smoothly took the knife as the muscleman collapsed screaming to the sidewalk.
Garreth stepped over him and put a hand under Velvet’s elbow. “Come on; let’s get out of here.” He hurried her away.
Her eyes looked the size of dinner plates. “Why’d you do that? He wasn’t going to cut me this time. Now Richie will get mad.”
“Tell Richie the muscle was getting carried away and about to use the knife for fun when a friendly flatfoot came along. Better yet, drop a dime on him and we’ll nail him to the wall before he does have you carved up.”
She bit her lip. “Sometime, maybe. For now, thanks.” She glanced sideways at him. “Say, what’s the story on you? First I hear they found you stiff in an alley with your throat torn out, but here you are walking around breaking arms with one hand. You look younger somehow, too.”