"Here's the reason my buddy called me, and why I got in touch with you guys," Lacey said, walking over to the body. She pushed bloody blond hair away from James Dwyer's forehead, and there they were: three of the same kind of symbols that we'd been encountering on corpses lately. In fact, these looked kind of familiar.
I reached into my jacket pocket for my notebook. Even though the case files contained plenty of photos from each of the dead vamp crime scenes, I had still made cies by hand of the symbols that had been carved into each of the victims.
First vic – three symbols. Check. Second vic – three symbols, but different from the first set. Check. Third one – three symbols found on the guy in Wilkes-Barre. Check. Same weird alphabet, but different from the other two. Then James Dwyer, right in front of me. Three symbols. Check. Except…
"Lacey, lift the kid's hair again, will you? Karl, take a close look at these."
Karl stepped closed and leaned in close. Then he straightened up. "They look similar to the ones we been seeing," he said. "Not surprising."
"No," I said, "but here's something that is." I showed him my notebook. "See?" Each of the first three vics had a different set of these fucking arcane symbols carved on him. But James, here-"
"-has got the same markings as the first vic." Karl's forehead wrinkled. "So, maybe this fucking ritual, whatever it is, requires some kind of repetition, only… Fuck, I dunno."
Lacey was looking at me. "There's something else that doesn't fit," she said. "Now that you mention it. The M.O."
"All the M.O. s have been different," Karl said. "I mean, that's part of the pattern, haina?"
"I think maybe I see what she's getting at," I said to him. "It's not weird enough."
She nodded slowly. "Yeah, exactly. My guy had been done by a silver garrote, and in your two, the perp used-"
"Charcoal bullets and a silver-coated blade," I said. "Wooden stake through the heart, it's, I dunno, too conventional."
"Okay, I'm with you now," Karl said, "but it still doesn't tell us shit. We don't know why the perp would all of a sudden start using the tried-and-true method of killing a vamp, but we don't know why the fucker's doing anything he does."
"Yeah, but I wonder…" I let my voice trail off. "Look, we should get out of here so the coroner can take the body away. They're probably waiting for us."
As we shuffled back out the door, I said, "Besides, there's something I wanna look at in the car."
"What's that?" Karl asked.
"My laptop."
Karl was just slipping into the passenger side as I reached under my seat for the slim laptop computer. I heard the rear door open and close as Lacey scrambled into the back seat.
I opened up my computer, logged on, then passed it to Karl. "Here," I said. "You're better at this stuff than I am."
"What stuff?" Karl asked.
"Searching the Internet."
"Ah, hell. It's not all that hard to find porn." He glanced over his shoulder at Lacey. "Not that I would know."
"If not, you're the only guy in the world who doesn't," Lacey murmured.
"So what am I looking for, Stan?" Karl said.
"Images of the symbols that were carved into the first victim."
He looked at me. "Scranton PD never released that information. Neither did Wilkes-Barre."
"No, they didn't," I said. "But it's funny how much confidential stuff gets on the Internet without being officially released. I want to know if somebody outside law enforcement could've known what those symbols looked like."
Lacey leaned over the front seat. I could feel warm breath on the back of my neck. "You're thinking copycat?"
"Maybe," I said. "It would sure explain a few things that don't otherwise make much sense."
Despite his modesty, Karl was good at nding stuff online besides porn. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, and I could hear him swearing softly as his search efforts came up empty, one after another. Then he stopped, stared at the screen, and said, "Jesus fucking Christ on a goddamn bicycle."
"What?" I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.
"This," Karl said, and turned the screen to face me.
And there they were.
The website described the photo as showing "Actual Occult Symbols Carved into Murder Victim in Scranton PA!!!" The idiot who put it up there explained that this was somehow a sign of the oncoming Apocalypse.
Whoever he was, I hoped he was wrong.
"How the fuck did some asshole get hold of these?" Lacey said from the back seat.
"Lots of possible ways," I said. "Somebody at the coroner's office, a guy doing night shift at the morgue, the funeral home people – could've been anyone. Almost everybody's got a cell phone these days, and almost every one of those has a built-in camera."
"Yeah, be a piece of cake," Karl said. "All you'd need is some decent light and about a minute of privacy."
Lacey had her forearms crossed over the back of the front seat, her chin resting on them. "So some 'fearless vampire killer' decided to make his work look like it was done by Sligo – or whoever's been going around knocking off vamps – to throw us off the scent. That what you're saying?"
It was quiet in the car for a few seconds.
Lacey bit her lower lip for a second or two, then shook her head. "Doesn't make any sense, Stan," she said. "Mostly these Van Helsing types want publicity for their deed, if not their name. See themselves as big holy heroes. They wouldn't want a serial killer to get the credit."
"Yeah, I know," I said. "It doesn't fit the pattern. If it's a vigilante, that is."
"But what's left?" Lacey asked. "If it's not the wizard, or a fucking vampire slayer…?"
I looked over at Karl and raised my eyebrows. He saw me, and nodded slowly.
"Lacey, listen: far be it from me to tell the great Michael Twardzik, Lieutenant, Pennsylvania State Police Criminal Investigation Division, how to run one of his cases."
"Apart from the fact that he'd tell you to fuck off as soon as you opened your mouth," Karl said.
"There's that too," I said. "But he seems to like you, Lacey. Kind of."
"He's got fantasies about getting in my pants," she said, "which should be filed under G for 'Good fucking luck.'"
"Whatever the reason, he at least lets you talk to him," I said. "Which is more than Karl and I can say."
"I know about you and the academy thing," Lacey said, "but what did Karl do to piss him off?"
"Guilt by association," Karl said, with a grin.
"Anyway," I said, "the next time you have the lieutenant's ear, you might whisper in it that he should take a good hard look at the kid's parents."
Lacey just stared at me.
I said, "If it were me, I'd want to know where both parents were at the kid's time of death, whenever the coroner says that was," I said. "I might also check trash cans and storm drains in a ten-block radius, looking for some bloody clothing that somebody might have tried to get rid of. And check the sink traps in the house for blood residue – you know the routine."
"'Course I do," she said, "and I'm aware that in most murder investigations you look at family first. But why…?"
"When we were in there, I counted six nails sticking out from the walls with nothing hanging from them, and those people are too neat just to leave nails there for no reason. That's where they hung the crucifixes, the paintings of the Sacred Heart, the little frescoes of the Virgin Mary, all that. If you looked, you'd most likely find all that stuff stashed in a bureau drawer. And I'll bet that all of it will be back on the wall tomorrow, or the next day."
Lacey shook her head again, but not as if she was disagreeing with me. "I can imagine how hard it is to deal with someone in your family who's been changed," she said. "But to off your own kid in cold blood…"
"You're Catholic, aren't you, Lacey?" I asked her.