“Open your eyes, Inspector. You can’t arrest or try me. Our kind are beyond the reach of mere human laws.”
“No.” He shook his head. No one could be beyond the law. Without law there was only chaos.
Opposing feelings warred in him…his belief in justice against the obvious impossibility of following proper procedure. He must violate the latter to accomplish the former, and that itself violated what his badge said he stood for. He would not be acting with proper authority.
His radio crackled. “Baumen Seven,” Doris said, “see Mr. John Haffener, 723 Prairie Circle, about vandalism.”
Reflex made him respond… “10-4.”…but he hesitated with his hand on the ignition key. How could he take the call and still deal with Lane?
“I believe you’re being paged,” she said. “Since I’m sure you don’t want me out of your sight, why don’t I ride along.” She buckled her seat belt.
I Ching echoed in his head. The maiden is powerful. Beware.
She obviously saw his uncertainty. Her lip curled. “How paranoid of you. Do you really think I’m stupid enough to try something in my hometown, where everyone sees everything? Where my mother would know about it? I won’t foul her nest. I don’t even hunt here.”
He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “How do you eat?”
“In Hays. Even during the holidays there are young men around the college campus eager to pick up an attractive girl and demonstrate what superstuds they are. I wear my own face there, of course.”
“Do you kill any of them?”
Her eyes went cold. “You can be so tediously one-track. No, I don’t kill them. Hays isn’t that far from home. Now, let’s talk about something more interesting…like the senses.” She leaned her head out her open window and blew. The steam of it swept away behind them. “Fairy wreaths my cousin Vicky used to call this. I think the temperature’s near freezing.”
He thought so, too, feeling the tires want to slide at a stop sign.
“I used to hate cold. Now it doesn’t bother me. I’m not crazy about heat, but can certainly bear it better than before. Don’t you find that true? And doesn’t the world have so many more odors since crossing over? Isn’t it also wonderful being able to see in the dark?”
Questions he truthfully had to answer yes, but admitting it aloud felt like a trap. He drove in silence past the stadium to Prairie Circle.
The vandalism became immediately obvious…a smashed jack-o-lantern halfway up the driveway with a dark substance spreading from it toward the street. He got out. “Are you going to wait in the car?”
Lane smiled…more a grimace with that face. “Of course. We have so much yet to talk about.”
Her amiability raised the hair on his neck. She must have something in mind for him. The maiden is powerful.
Trying to guess her plan, Garreth barely listened to the victim while they surveyed the driveway. His flashlight showed the substance as red; his nose identified it as paint. Latex, he thought, squatting down and picking at one edge. It might just peel off, especially with damp concrete under it.
Then a name Haffener said rang a bell in his brain, Marvin Jacobs. He stood. “Two weeks ago Mr. Jacobs was the victim of vandalism, too. Someone scratched ‘bastard’ on the hood of his car outside the Cowboy Palace.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” An answer that came too quickly.
Garreth caught Haffener’s gaze and violated his freedom from self-incrimination. “Why did you key Jacobs’ car?”
“There was a set of golf clubs at an estate auction I wanted to bid on. One was supposedly signed by Jackie Gleason. They were scheduled to sell about two o’clock…only Jacobs talked the auctioneer into putting them up an hour earlier, before I got there, and bought them himself. And bragged about it at the Cowboy Palace.”
It sounded like their beef went back farther than the golf clubs. Whatever the origin, it needed to stop before escalating any farther. “I’ll talk to Mr. Jacobs and see if he will admit to painting your driveway. If so, I could arrest you both for vandalism but do you really want the embarrassment of going to court? I think you should offer to pay for repairing his paint job, and I will have him come tomorrow and clean your driveway. Then I want this…feud done with. I don’t want to see either of your names on this type of complaint again, understood, or I won’t hesitate to haul you downtown…in handcuffs…in full view of your neighbors.”
Haffener winced.
So did Jacobs when Garreth obtained an admission of guilt there, too, and presented him with the same threat of public humiliation.
“I see you employ our very useful hypnotic ability,” Lane said after Garreth returned to the car and sat writing up his preliminary report…the final one to be typed at the office.
He wrote on without replying.
“How about sex?” she said. “Ah, I see you have discovered the joy of vampire sex. Isn’t it interesting we still blush. We’re honey for flies, and what sex as humans ever compared to what it’s like when we’re hungry?”
The purr in her voice rasped at him. He laid down his clipboard and slapped the car in gear, pulling away from the curb with a jerk. “Your point?”
“Isn’t that obvious? Look at all we are…our superiority, our abilities. Why would anyone want to be a mere human when they can be…us.”
“Because family and friends are worth more.” He made no attempt to hide his bitterness. “Now I’ve lost them. Every moment with them is a lie. Which isn’t a problem for you, is it, since you never cared about anyone except your mother.”
“None of them except her ever cared about me,” she said coldly.
“So you probably asked to come across.”
She snapped, “Yes!”
“How did you find a vampire?”
Lane smiled. “Irina found me…Vienna, July, 1934. It really wasn’t the place to be that month with Hitler’s putsch and Dollfuss’s killing, but Matthew said as long as the cafes and museums stayed open what were politics to us. This exquisite woman sat down sat at a table next to us that evening and started flirting with Matthew. Naturally I went over to tear her face off.”
That sounded familiar. “Like you attacked Claudia Darling?”
In his peripheral vision she blinked. “Who?”
“Your 1942 assault victim.”
Lane sniffed. “Oh, that slut. I should have killed her. You know what she did after getting me arrested?”
“Got you fired and then blackballed around North Beach. She told me.”
“You’ve seen her? Well…how is the little bitch these days?”
“Matronly and rich.”
Lane laughed. “Whereas I am anything but matronly and am very rich.”
His skepticism must have shown on his face.
Her forehead twitched. “Oh, yes, I am. You can learn a lot during pillow talk about making your money grow, especially with a little vampire encouragement. Which brings me back to Irina. Garreth, park somewhere so we can talk face to face.”
“Eye to eye?”
She sighed. “You are paranoid. We’ll sit back to back if that makes you feel — no, not here! Turn right.”
Into the cemetery, not St. Thomas More’s parking lot. So she disliked being even in the vicinity of a church?
“Let’s go to the War Memorial,” she said.
A tall granite obelisk in the middle of the cemetery with cannons on its left and right pointed at the obelisk. Erected in 1920 to commemorate the Great War, which everyone optimistically assumed would be the Last War.
He steered into the cemetery, radioing Doris his location, and parked at the Memorial’s island. Swinging out of the car, Lane strolled through the mist toward the obelisk. He climbed out, too, but remained beside the car.