As if I could fucking stop you. "What?"
"Ask whoever conducts the autopsy to look closely at the throat wound, with special attention to any trace elements that may be found there. It is very important, I think, to know exactly what was used to inflict the fatal cut."
"What was used?" Karl said. "Shit, that oughta be obvious. It was a knife, and a damn sharp one, too. Or a straight razor, maybe."
Vollman nodded. "I expect you are correct, Detective. But a crucial point is the material that the blade was made of."
"Why's that so important?" I asked him.
"The answer to that depends on what you find out," Vollman said with another one of his toothless smiles. Didn't want to display his fangs, I guess.
The smile didn't last long. "I will be, as you say, in touch."
Vollman took a couple of steps back, the fog and darkness making his form indistinct.
"I need you to do better than-" I began, then stopped. "Vollman? Vollman!"
He was gone, the stagy old bastard.
Karl summarized my feelings very well. "Fucking vamps," he said.
The autopsy report only took twenty-four hours or so, which was almost as big a miracle as the one that followed "Lazarus, come forth!" It informed us that the victim died of "exsanguination following a single deep, narrow laceration that severed carotid artery, windpipe, and jugular vein, with aspirated blood as a contributing factor."
In other words, somebody cut the guy's throat, and he bled out and died, inhaling some of his own blood in the process. Big surprise.
The tissue analysis of the wound area took another couple of days. Would've been longer, but the Homicide guys had put pressure on the lab. Good thing, too, or we might have had to wait a week or more for the results. Nobody rushes stuff for the Supe Squad.
Homicide was treating this as their case. For the time being, we were letting them think it was. But we still got copies of all the paperwork. Scanlon saw to that.
"Silver?" Lieutenant McGuire stared at the top sheet of the lab report I'd just dropped on his desk. "They're sure?"
"Sure as the lab is likely to be," I said. In the chair beside me, I heard Karl give a quiet snort of laughter. He was probably thinking about some of the notable fuckups the lab had made in the past.
"I could have a sample sent to the FBI in Washington," I said, with a straight face. "They've got better facilities, as they're always reminding us."
"Sure," McGuire said. "And the results might even come back before I collect my pension. But I doubt it."
He was right. When it comes to requests from local law enforcement, the FBI lab could make a glacier look speedy.
"You didn't get to the good part yet," I told McGuire. "Keep reading."
He gave me a look, then returned to the lab report. McGuire's a fast reader, and I wondered how long it would take him to get to the punch line.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four "A vamp? The vic's a fucking vampire?"
I was about to say something stupid like "Yeah, where do we send the medal?" when Karl piped up with, "Must be, boss. It's pretty hard to fuck that up, once you know what to look for. There's, I think, nine different tests they can do."
We both looked at him. He shrugged and said, "I read a lot, okay?"
McGuire sat back in his chair, frowning. "Why would somebody use a silver-coated knife to off a vampire? There's plenty of easier ways to do it."
"Beats the shit out of me," I said. "But Vollman thought we might find something interesting in the wound. That's why I requested the tissue analysis."
"Who's Vollman?" McGuire asked. "Oh, right – your informant, I remember now. Maybe you better ask Mr Vollman why he thought the laceration would have unusual material in it."
"I'd love to," I told him. "But I don't know how to contact the bloodsucker."
McGuire raised his eyebrows at that, then lowered them in a first-class glare that included both Karl and me.
"The old bastard wouldn't give us his contact information," Karl said. "Said he'd get in touch with us, instead."
McGuire shook his head in disgust. "Then you two clowns had damn well better hope-"
"Excuse me, Lieutenant?" Louise the Tease had appeared in McGuire's door. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a man here to see the detectives." Louise looked at me. "It's the one who was here before – Vollman."
I thought that kind of timing only happens on TV, but maybe Karl and I were having a change in our luck. And about time, too.
We excused ourselves and got out of his office before the lieutenant could finish cutting each of us a brand new asshole.
"Silver," Vollman said thoughtfully, after I'd told him about the lab report. "I thought it might be some such."
"And you thought that why, exactly?" I asked.
"Has the knife itself been found?" Vollman asked, instead of answering my question.
"Not so far," Karl told him. "Homicide had uniforms searching a five-block radius. They checked all the usual places where somebody would dump something – sewer grates, dumpsters, trash cans, like that. Nada."
"Look," I said. "We both know you don't need a silver-plated knife to kill a vampire, although it seems to do the job pretty well. So the silver must have some other purpose."
"A ritualistic purpose. Gotta be," Karl said.
"And you knew it," I said. "That's why you told us to check for foreign substances in the wound. I want to know what you know about this, Vollman."
The vampire/wizard looked at his hands for a long moment. They had long, thin fingers and the skin was free of the brown spots you associate with old folks. Guess vamps don't have liver problems. And for them, sun damage is never an issue – except when it's terminal.
"I know little," he said finally. "But I suspect much, and fear even more."
I slammed my open hand down on my desk. "Why don't you cut out the cryptic bullshit and tell us something straight out, just for a change?"
Vollman raised his head and looked at me. He didn't seem to change expression, but I was suddenly very aware that I was sitting opposite a five hundred year-old monster who's probably killed more people than I've had meals.
But I've faced down creatures as scary as Vollman before. I didn't blink or look away. I wan't afraid of him – or so I told myself.
The old man held my gaze, then nodded, as if he had just confirmed something. "Very well, Sergeant. But what I know does not, regrettably, amount to a great deal."
Vollman settled himself in his chair before going on. "The symbols you showed me were, in fact, from the language of ancient Sumeria. They do not constitute a word, but rather seem to form the first three letters of the name of an ancient god."
"What god?" Karl asked him.
Vollman looked uneasy for the first time since I had met him. "I would prefer not to say the name aloud. This is a powerful and quite malevolent deity. It probably makes no difference whether its name is spoken, but I have learned something of prudence in my long life."
I knew what he meant. There are some names it's better not to say out loud, if you don't have to. Speaking of the devil doesn't necessarily make him appear – but it might.
"All right," I said. "Would you be willing to write it down for us, instead?"
"Yes," he said. "That I am prepared to do."
I found a pad in one of my desk drawers and handed it to Vollman, along with a pen. After a moment's hesitation, he wrote something on the pad and passed it back to me.
He had written the word "Sakosh."
It meant nothing to me. I showed the pad to Karl, who glanced at the name, looked back at me, and shrugged. He'd never heard of it, either.
I tossed the pad on my desk. "So, somebody killed a vampire last night with a silver blade, then carved the name of some old Sumerian god on the guy's forehead. What's this got to do with the Opus Mago and George Kulick?"