The two-story building Jodi led us to was large enough to support two or three businesses on the ground floor, and on the second floor, multiple apartments with a gallery, enclosed with decorative wrought iron. Holding up the gallery, matching wrought-iron poles marked the space between the sidewalk and the street, giving the lower floor protection from the sun. It was a nice-sized building, the multiple windows and doors on the first floor having jalousie windows above each, and on the second floor there were key-design windows and doors. Over it all was a fancy brickwork soldier course. I thought there might have been dormers in the roof, making a third floor a final residential area or artist’s atelier, but my visual angle wasn’t right to tell for certain. The building was stuccoed or plastered, hard to tell in the strobing lights. The windows and doors were all shut, and I could hear the hum of an air conditioner running.
The smell of death reached out and grabbed me.
CHAPTER 5
I Will Cut out His Heart . . . I Will Bring It to You
Inside the main entrance, which was located on the corner, beneath an elaborate curlicued door header, Jodi handed us each a stack of paper clothing and pointed us through a narrow space along one wall. The inside of the building was hidden from our eyes, but the smells . . . they told the tale. Alcohol of every kind, old toilets, fried food—the scents of a bar and grill. And over it all rode the stink of bowels, urine, the sweet reek of blood starting to go bad.
Eli glanced at me, his eyes hard, holding both a warning and a question in his expression. I shook my head, not having an answer to whatever he needed to know. Sitting on a long bench, we pulled on the paper booties, long white paper jackets, and white hats, which looked like poofs of dough on our heads. Lastly, we snapped on nitrile gloves, the medium blue the county preferred.
Jodi stuck her head around the corner and motioned us out. She was similarly dressed, in paper and nitrile, and when we made our way around the partition into the main room, we saw everyone dressed in the paper clothing. All the living, that is.
My eyes tried to take it in as my nose went on overload with death-death-death. The dead were wearing colorful party clothes, jeans, skirts, boots, ballerina shoes, gold chains, T-shirts, button-downs, running shoes, capri pants, sandals, peasant blouses, tank tops, wifebeaters; every manner of casual dress seen at a New Orleans bar in a summer heat wave was represented. The dead were slumped at tables, lying on the dance floor, crumpled behind the bar, two prone halfway in the men’s room door, one supine on the bar, as if she had been dancing the cancan and then lay down to sleep, her dress still thrown high, over her head. Some had bloody throats with signs of multiple puncture marks, the way victims look when several vamps have been at them but didn’t feel the need to rip and tear. Fastidious, deadly vamps. Others were slumped so that I couldn’t see their throats, and still others’ heads were turned around on their spines, facing the wrong way. When the vamps were done, they had broken the humans’ necks. It was much worse than the photos. It always is.
I ground my teeth and crossed my arms over my chest, gripping them with my hands. The pain that had hidden, subdued, in my flesh throbbed up my arm and hand like a bomb going off at the pressure of my fingers. Along with the pain, the pinpricks came back, tingling hot along my skin. I wanted to curse or scream. Punch something. I should have killed Joses Bar-Judas, taken his head where he hung on the wall. I had known in my gut that he was evil incarnate. I could see it in his eyes, even without proof of any wrongdoing. And I had done nothing. Worse, much worse, I had let him get by me. I had let him get free. To do this. This horror.
Hunched into myself, I turned around slowly, taking in the room. The band members were all lying with their instruments, two with guitars in hand, one guy with a trumpet, another with a sax. A girl on drums, looking as if she fell asleep across her base drum, curly dark hair with bright pink stripes painted in. Her dress was hiked up around her waist, as if—
I didn’t finish that thought. But my blood heated and my heart rate sped as I forced myself away from my own shock and back to the crime scene. To that moment. To that problem. To that flood in the midst of the deluge of problems.
Eli had said that draining fifty-two humans meant 286 quarts of blood. How many humans had been drained? How many vamps had been there? How many vamps were on the rampage?
“Tell me,” Jodi said, the words too calm.
I pushed all the questions away as the anger and guilt that accompanied them flamed high in the dark places of my soul. “You already know vamps did this. What do you want with me? Why am I in the middle of this?”
“I’ll file your sympathy away for later consideration,” Jodi said evenly.
I started to reply and clamped my mouth shut on the words. Closing my eyes, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about all this.” I swept my left hand out around me and regripped my injured arm. When I took a breath, it stuttered on a sob that I swallowed down.
“Okay. I wanted you to know exactly what this city is dealing with. So that you will tell me if you recognize the vampire who did this.” Her tone was mild, so placid, so carefully bland, her words so precise. “Vampire,” she enunciated, rage leaking into the two syllables, contained under pressure, as if she was close to explosion. “Singular.”
“The math doesn’t—” I stopped and looked again at the humans who showed no bloody throats and realized that the humans who appeared to have deformities had no other injuries. Their heads had been twisted around until their necks broke, but there were no fang marks, no sign of draining, and none had the pale-pale flesh of the drained. Not all fifty-two had been taken for feeding. Most of them had been killed without blood loss. Vamps didn’t do that to their cattle. They might bleed their dinners dry, but they didn’t kill them with their blood still inside.
I looked along the ceiling and found the security cameras, two of them, one pointed at the bar, the other at the dance floor and the cash register. One vamp, she had said. Joses Bar-Judas was old enough to have that kind of power. The words like the ashes of death in my mouth, I said, “Show me.”
She led the way out of the bar and back to the place where we’d dressed. She had us remove our personal protective equipment and toss the PPEs into a bag. In a crime scene, everything would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb for trace evidence that we might have picked up and carried out by accident.
Jodi led the way outside, into the muggy heat of predawn, and into a tent set up with bright lamps, a long table, and a whiteboard. There was nothing there, not yet. But soon the table and the board would be filled with evidence and notes and comments that would later be put into computerized records. Few police departments could afford the kind of fancy computer system seen on TV cop shows, and NOPD was among the poor law enforcement departments, so the whiteboard would be front and center in the ongoing investigation. In the distance, a generator roared, a huge one, to provide power for the evidence gathering.