Otto called the precinct back. “Sergeant Iverson.”
“ Yes, sir?” the sergeant responded militarily.
“ Check your records for any complaints filed against a Matthew Matisak.”
“ Have earlier done so, sir, when the APB was run on him, and sorry to say, but nothing-not so much as a parking ticket.”
Otto was crossing Irving Park Road at Ashland, having come off the Kennedy, headed for Gamble's address.
Brewer's voice broke the static of the radio. “I've got your destination, Otto, and I'm behind you.”?
THIRTY
It was all taking too much time, Matisak thought, and he began to rush things. He lifted the trach tube and turned it to the off position. He placed the tourniquet about her neck, and finally, he kneeled below Jessica Coran's throat. With her eyes wide, the way he liked it at first, he pressed the sharp, beveled edge of the straw into her throat, but she suddenly flailed and writhed. He dropped the spigot as a trickle of blood ran down her soft, white throat, and the glass tubing crackled into jagged pieces.
“ You damnable bitch!” He struck her and went back to the briefcase for a second spigot. This time he held her head so that it was immovable as he quickly jammed the straw into her jugular with the practiced hands of a physician.
She couldn't see it, but she knew that the end of the tube had just filled with her blood. He tightened the tourniquet about her throat, almost choking off her air, and then he opened the spigot.
She smelled him as he moved in closely enough to lower his head below the spigot where he lapped up her blood before it could spill to the floor.
The horror of the moment transfixed her.
She was dying.
Her life was running out of her.
There was no escape.
She was dying the way that Candy Copeland and the others had died: at the hands of a bloodsucking, human lamprey, a Tort 9 monster. She was fast becoming another statistic for the FBI records.
And there were sure to be future victims of this madman, Matisak…
J.T., Boutine, Brewer, all the others, would find Gamble with his head shot off at close range, a suicide note written in blood-perhaps her blood-beside him, and Matisak would be safe from anyone's hounding him, so long as he chose to stay “on the wagon,” or to gain his blood by other means. He could never again safely use the spigot.
But he would kill again, and again, and…
“ Just like milking a cow,” he said in her ear between gurgles and slurps.
She felt the uncaring and dizziness overtaking her; wondered how long she would be conscious. She didn't want to be conscious any longer…
Or was it all a terrible dream? Had the entire long nightmare of the case she had pursued since Wekosha been just that? A long, long nightmare from which she seemed unable to climb?
Was she in fact in Virginia, in her apartment, in her bed, about to wake any moment from the horror? It was a comforting alternative to which her anguished mind resorted moments before passing out.
# # #
Matisak began to enjoy himself too much. He had stopped the flow of her blood, and she had regained a weak consciousness. This excited him.
But he fought the old urges as overwhelming as they were; he must not give in. He must carry through with his plan. There was too great a push on for his capture, and even with Lowenthal's death, too much doubt cast by this woman to let her live. The search for the vampire must end with Gamble's death.
He had planned it down to the smallest detail.
But there was much to do and each moment that Dr. Coran was here meant a moment more that someone could trace her to Gamble's place. He must hurry.
But perhaps he had time for a little indulgence, perhaps a pint.
At least a half pint.
But first he must ready everything. He lined up the jars to within reach. He positioned the briefcase and puttered about with the power tools, readying these.
It was all going so perfectly.
He could hardly believe his luck, and that she had been such a fool. In the end, he thought, they were all fools. And he did the same work as the trap-door spider, taking its prey in through surprise.
“ It was a surprise, wasn't it, Dr. Coran?” he asked, but she wasn't replying. She just hung there upside down, like a sleeping bat.
She was pretty, this one.
# # #
Jessica thought she heard her father's voice telling her how pretty she was. She was eleven years old and somewhat gangly and very awkward. She had been teased by some insensitive lout at the new school on the army base where her father had once more been relocated, and as a child going through a difficult period, relocation was the last thing she needed. She had just gotten settled in at the school in Germany when they'd had to pack everything up for Spain. Her mother's health had started falling off as well, and she would never fully regain her strength. And so her father had been spending more time looking after her.
“ You're the most beautiful girl in that school, Jessie, and when you go back, you've just got to keep telling yourself that. And then you just watch what happens…”
All of her life, her father had been a great morale booster, a great teacher and a wonderful friend. A flood of memories about him, and of her being with him, washed over her. It was her father who had convinced her that she had what it would take to be a medical doctor, and later what it would take to be an FBI woman.
She heard sounds around her that disturbed the memories of her and her father at their summer retreat home where the woods were alive with wind and sunshine and small creatures, and where they hunted deer. She had learned to disembowel and skin the deer at a young age, and her interest in forensic medicine began with her fascination in exploring the inner workings of the deer's body.
She had learned to overcome her initial fears and squeamishness to the point of placing her arm into the carcass up to her elbow in order to come away with the organs in her hand. Later, on many a hunting trip with men in Minnesota, Oregon and Canada, she was always told that she didn't have to watch as they cut open the carcass, hung it from a tree and proceeded to clean it of unwanted parts. More than one man who had become interested in her ran quickly away from her when she had shown them the quickest and most efficient method of disemboweling the creature.
Something dark like a void filled her mind and blotted out these thoughts now, and it sat on her chest like an evil urchin, grinning at her. It was mindless and shapeless and it, like the deer, was cut open, soaking her with blood as the deer did when she reached in to remove its insides. She strained to see what it was and then it coalesced into a form, the form of a woman. She feared going nearer, and yet her mind made the final step toward the form dangling from the tree. It was her.
The shock brought her around, making her moan, and the moan increased her consciousness.
She recalled where she was.
Recalled Gamble.
Recalled Matisak.
Recalled her escape attempt, and its having failed.
She felt her arms tied behind her back, the gag in her mouth. She felt the pressure of the blood in her head and the pain in her ankles from her own weight.
She felt the strange, unusual weight on her throat: the spigot.
She forced herself to remain calm, telling herself she must think… must think… must think…
Jessica knew that Matisak didn't want her to be too conscious, and that he certainly didn't want to have her eyes pinned on him as he carried out his heinous ritual on her. It was, after all, a weakness, an addiction, and even Matisak knew that his drinking blood was an addiction, and addicts only indulged their addictions in private. He didn't like to be watched at this stage of his killing act, and not wishing her eyes to be put out by his scalpel, she held them closed against the nightmare. She thought of the mistakes she had made; how her mistakes had led her into this trap; how she had broken with FBI procedure in coming here alone; how she had gotten Kaseem killed, and how she had helped that bastard, Matisak.