The door buzzer went off. Costin started to get up, but she said, “No, stay. Let me. In fact, would you go into the front room so whoever it is doesn’t see you here?” She was thinking, given the news coverage, that it might be a reporter, and if so, she had no intention of letting him in or of finding out more about her or of waylaying Costin when he tried to leave.
The buzzer sounded again. She squinted through the peephole and was astonished to see the police detective from last night. As she unlatched the door, she thought Well, at least this won’t feel like déjà vu.
Opening the door, she said, “Inspector, what are you doing here?” Then before he could answer, adding, “Should I call you inspector principal or is just inspector acceptable? I don’t know the etiquette. I’m ashamed also to say I don’t remember your name. I know you said it.”
“Not surprising under the circumstances. It’s Marin Lucescu, and inspector is perfectly acceptable, Miss Vulpes.” He gestured past her. “May I come in?” Under his other arm he had a large padded brown envelope.
She stepped aside and allowed him to pass her. Instinct directed her, kept her from hesitating, from appearing guilty, even if she couldn’t explain what she might be guilty of. “To the right,” she said, ushering him into the room with Costin.
The front room served as a library for her and Decebal, although the majority of the books belonged to him. Ruksana snatched a robe from her bedroom door before going in herself.
She introduced Costin to the inspector. She explained that he had just shown up because she wasn’t answering her phone, which she’d only now discovered was not in her possession.
Lucescu chuckled and handed the thick envelope he’d been carrying to Ruksana. “We were having a similar problem, until someone noticed that this phone collected among the evidence went off every time we tried to call you.”
She opened the envelope, seeing inside her phone and the mail that she had picked up before the attack.
“All of your mail was on the floor of your car. Most of it escaped contamination.”
At the word, she twitched. “Contamination?”
“Blood spatter. That there isn’t much on the mail or the passenger seat tells us a good deal about where the more savage part of the attack took place. It is almost all his blood of course, very little belonging to you, and that’s mostly smeared on the seat and the mail, probably from when he struck your face. Again, consistent with what you remembered.”
Costin said, “But the news, they said it was a pack of dogs attacked him.”
Lucescu nodded unhappily. “We would like it to be dogs. Last night that seemed the obvious explanation.”
Ruksana swallowed. “Now it’s not?”
“Unfortunately, there’s no evidence of a dog pack. Feral dogs running through that much blood would have left prints all over the parking lot. We have his prints of course, and a few of yours, Miss Vulpes, that indicate he dragged you onto your feet, out of the car. I was wondering if by chance you remembered anything more of what happened. Often the amnesia from a trauma is temporary, and we’re looking at some confusing data.”
“I’m sorry, no. I did have a nightmare last night but it was about falling.”
“A dream of helplessness — very common post-traumatic nightmare. Next time, see if you have enough control to turn it into a dream of flying. They say that’s healthier.” A moment of uncomfortable silence followed, and then Lucescu turned to Costin. “Since you’re here, Mr. Stelea, I would like to get a statement from you, just as a matter of record, to corroborate hers.”
“Certainly.” He glanced worriedly at Ruksana. “But I want to know, if it wasn’t dogs, what was it?”
“No idea. None.” Then he half-smiled. “One of the officers even suggested it was these vampires that are in the news. That’s how in the dark we are.”
Ruksana drew in her breath. Costin and she traded worried glances. The headline on her computer, the exposure — he had reached the same conclusion as she.
Lucescu observed their demeanors and laughed. “Really, you shouldn’t concern yourselves terribly, unless these new vampires are incredibly wasteful. No blood went missing from what we can tell. Neither of you was bitten.” He sighed. “Honestly, we may never figure it out. No one cares much about a dead rapist except that he’s dead.”
She stood clutching her phone and the envelope, and willed Costin to ask no more questions. Just standing here she could be infecting Lucescu.
No one moved or spoke. Finally, she couldn’t stand it. “Well, I’m going to go charge my phone and put on some clothes. You can conduct your interview in here if you like.”
Costin replied, “Actually, I should like to get some more coffee. Could we do it at a coffee bar?”
Thank you, she broadcast silently to him.
“Certainly,” replied the inspector. “I could use a mid-morning snack myself. We’ll leave you, then, Miss Vulpes. Oh, and I expect you’ll have your car back tomorrow. As I said, we’ve completed our spatter analysis, and that’s really all there was for us there.” He turned away, then paused, his head bowed. “Actually, there is one more thing. I just want to confirm. I know I asked you last night. But — you don’t own a dog and never had a dog in your car the past few months. Is that correct?”
“That’s right.”
“No fur coat?”
“Never. I’m opposed to them. And anyway, I was doing research in Antarctica since November. The car was in storage.”
“Storage, eh? Could someone have taken it out? Your grandfather, for instance.”
“He doesn’t drive. All I can tell you is, I took it out for the first time last night, and I had no sense that anyone had touched it.”
He nodded in disappointment, and continued on into the entryway, followed by Costin, who ducked into the kitchen to grab his coat and laptop bag.
Ruksana followed Lucescu. “What’s so significant about my having a dog in the car? You said it isn’t dogs.”
He turned. “Not a pack of dogs, no. But there is fur, some white hairs both in your car under where you were lying on the driver’s seat, and on the victim, in the blood around him. Our lab is having a lot of trouble identifying it. It’s not synthetic, but we’re thinking maybe an exotic pet? There were also a couple of prints, smeared of course and so we can’t be sure what they are. They might even be your toes if he was supporting your weight, but that scenario is inconsistent with other evidence. As I said, nothing about this is clear. It’s almost as if some avatar came into being to protect you and then vanished into thin air.” He glanced at Costin behind her. “Probably what I should be asking is if you worship any ancient gods.” He gave her a resigned smile and opened the door.
Costin didn’t kiss her. He whispered, “I’ll call you,” as he passed.
That was the moment she realized that he might have wanted to get out of there not to protect her so much as out of fear of her.
She sat at her kitchen table beside her cold tea. She quit the browser page to get rid of the awful headline, and closed the laptop. It wasn’t until a sob burst from her that she realized she was crying.
— 13 —
A short time later, with the phone starting to charge, she sorted through her calls: Three from Costin followed by two texts insisting she call him; a half dozen more from a city number she didn’t know but that was probably the police trying to contact her. Sandwiched in the middle of those lay a quick text from Vincent: Kwasi contacted. Team arriving Paris ASAP incl Harry. U must come 2. Special body convening. Need your samples. Blood. Will send details. Vincent.
It had arrived last night. It didn’t surprise her that they were moving fast to contain and identify this, whatever it was. This was the side of Vincent she’d seen when they had first been thrown together: smart and efficient. Whatever bad blood lay between them, he obviously was putting it aside in this emergency. They were all going to be lab rats despite his best efforts to bury the matter. How much did anyone know? If they were convening a special inquiry, what did they know? More than she did, certainly. She texted back. I’m here. Ruksana.
She took the time now to do a search on her laptop and read as many of the articles on the new vampires as she could. Two named an individual in New York, a Michael Fayne. He seemed to be the first of them — but that had occurred in October!
She could find no relation between him and NSF nor any Antarctic team at all. Had some previous scientific expedition inadvertently carried the same contamination back with them? Or was any of this even related? She had only the flimsiest of evidence that what infected her had anything to do with these so-called vampires. That was Decebal and his folklore forging links without any evidence. They could as easily have encountered a previously unknown strain of streptococcus for all anyone was saying.
She chided herself for not sticking to facts, to scientific analysis — what she knew, not what she supposed. Periglacial rock was easily identifiable, the processes working on it observable, recordable — ice in the facies splitting immense boulders again and again to form the rubble. Conclusion based on observation, the scientific method.
But the events of last night were not a known quantity. It all might have been an anomaly. It might have been dogs, regardless of what evidence the police had found. And her position relative to it was entirely subjective. She was part of the events, not the clinical observer. What could she know for certain?
Ruksana closed her eyes and tried to see it all again — the car door flung open, the terrible pain of being struck as she turned, then flashes of light and the pain overwhelming her, followed by the coarse face of the man above her, big as the supermoon in the sky as he pulled at her clothes, trying to drag her out, and there was that claw, reaching up to slash his mouth and face — reaching up from where she lay. Her arm, her hand, however transformed. Black claws and white fur. Not a hallucination after all, not —