The old woman turned down the volume on the cassette player next to her, atonal Chinese music fading into a pleasant muted tinkle. Her fingers continued to pull feathers from the chicken as she looked up at Sue. "More have died," she said.
Sue looked at her grandmother, confused, not knowing if that was a statement or a question. "I don't know," she said, a response that applied either way.
"More will die."
Sue sat down on an overturned vegetable crate next to her grandmother.
"Why will more people die? If we are going to right the cup hugirngsi, why don't we right it now? Why are we waiting? Can't you find out where it is hiding? Can't we go there and destroy it?"
Her grandmother did not answer. "I dreamed last night of amirror man.
A giant who makes mirrors." "A real giant?" Sue asked. "Or a tall man?" "A tall man."
"Pee Wee Nelson."
"Do you know him?" Her grandmother did not sound surprised.
"I just met him today. He used to be the police chief. He is a friend of my editor and his brother, the current police chief."
The old woman nodded, as if this was what she had expected to hear. "We must talk to this tall man. We will need amirror to use against the cup hugirngsi. '"
"A mirror?"
1 "Baht gwa. The mirror with eight sides." The old fingers moved away from the chicken, traced a delicate octagon in the air. "It will reflect and frighten the cup hugirngsi. Even tse raor are afraid of their own appearance."
"But what are we going to do? Are we going to wait for the cup hugirngsi to come to us and attack?"
"No," her grandmother replied, resuming her plucking of the chicken.
"We will go to its lair and confront it there."
"Where is that?"
I do not know."
"How will we find out where it is?"
"ZJi Lo Ling Gum. '"
Sue shook her head, frustrated. "Well, when will we find out?"
"when it is time."
"What if we find out too late? What will we do then?" The old woman's voice was low and filled with an emotion Sue had never before associated with her grandmotherwfear. "I do not know," she said quietly.. "I don't know." " stared at the figure in disbelief. Fifteen thousand.
Fifteen thousand people had died of exsanguination in the United States since the FBI had begun keeping statistics. And that only included the information that had been entered into the computer. Who knew how many more cases were sitting in files that had not yet been in put? The pre-1920 backlog was not a high priority, and updating of the computer files was being done piecemeal. Fifteen thousand.
Rossiter turned down the intensity knob on the screen, the amber numbers fading into black. A pattern had emerged here, but it was not a pattern that made any sense. With few exceptions, the murders recorded had traced a recognizable path across the country that corresponded to a very definite time line. It was as if the murderer or murderers had crisscrossed the nation for the past six decades, killing as they went, draining the blood of people from the West Coast, the Midwest, the East Coast, the South, and the West.
The amazing thing was that there was nothing more to go on, no other tie-ins, not even an increase in other crimes along those routes. In a few cases, there had been arrests, but no convictions, the individual trials obviously attempts by the politically ambitious to prove to the voting public their criminal-catching credentials despite the o1> vious lack of evidence.
If these deaths really were connected, how had the killers survived in their travels? They hadn't robbed stores or houses along the way, apparently they had not even stolen from the victims. Had they taken ordinary day jobs to earn money while they went on their cross-country killing spree? Were they now working as clerks at the drugstore in Rio Verde? Attendants at the gas station? It just didn't jibe. Some of the murders were too far apart in too short a period of time. There had to be pieces of the puzzle still missing. From the facts available to him now, it could reasonably be deduced that the murderers had not had to eat, buy gas, or find places to stay, that the killings themselves had been sustenance enough--and he knew that could not be the case.
Sustenance.
It was still in the back of his mind, though he didn't want to admit it.
Vampires.
Rossiter closed his eyes, massaged his temples. He was not an overly imaginative man. Even as a child, he had never been afraid of ghosts or monsters or the dark. His fears had always been more concrete: accidents, adults, the tangible dangers of the real world.
But he had not been able to shake this vampire fixation, and when he tried to rationally analyze each new piece of information he uncovered, his mind kept drifting back to thoughts of the undead. He'd considered pulling in another agent to look at the data, maybe Buetell or Hammon, who were assigned to the case anyway, but he didn't want to give up his baby just yet. The more of a hot dog he was, the more he brought in on his own, the greater the reward would be careerwise. Before he started adding others onto the bandwagon, he had to be sure that his contribution was definitive and documented, that it would be clear to everyone that this was his idea and that the essential work had been done by him.
One interesting thing he'd discovered was that the Bureau did maintain quite a bit of information on vampires. He'd checked out several books and articles from the Bureau's library, three of which had to be sent from D.C., and he'd accessed two studies on the subject that had been conducted by operatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Of course, the existence of such information didn't mean much--the Bureau had files on anything and everything even remotely related to murder and death--but if he ever decided to pursue the vampirism angle, he at least knew he had Bureau sources he could quote for backup.
Not that he would ever consider ascribing a series of murders to vampires.
Unless... Unless he could prove the existence of multigeneradonal medical vampirism within a specific family.
A family of medical vampires that had killed fifteen thousand people?
He had to stop thinking about this. He had to put it out of his mind.
He opened his eyes, stared at his darkened computer screen. One of the reasons his brain was running along this track was the last series of faxes he'd received from that hick police chief in Rio Verde.
Apparently, a housewife claimed that her daughter had been abducted by Elvis. Ordinarily, he would have assumed that the woman was in shock because her daughter was missing or that she was already planning her insanity defense in case her daughter's body was found and she'd done a poor job of hiding her involvement. But the fact that the police had not ordered any psychological tests for the woman and were apparently treating this as an ordinary missing persons case, and the fact that this incident, bizarre as it was, fit cozily into the mainstream of current events in Rio Verde, made Rossiter take it a little more seriously himself.
Could Elvis be a vampire?
That was just too far out to even consider.
He needed to get out of Phoenix, get back over to Rio Verde, and check things out for himself. He'd made a big deal of his jurisdictional authority on his last trip there, but he hadn't been back since. He'd been so absorbed in this computer search that he'd virtually abandoned legwork the past week or so and had given the case back to Captain Hick by default.
He was turning into a petty bureaucrat.
He was turning into Engles.
Working here could do that to an agent.
Rossiter reached into his pocket, took out his key ring, and found the key to the computer. He shut off the monitor, locked the keyboard, but kept the computer on to retain the information he'd accessed. He stood, pocketed his keys, then walked over to the elevators. He was going stir-crazy in here. Outside, the day was overcast] "patch of light gray and white clouds covering the sky over Phoenix, a wall of black storm clouds massing above the desert to the north. Across the street, a small group of cowboy-hatted Indians stood blocking the doorway of a bar, talking among themselves. Next door, a team of well-dressed lawyers were posed on the courthouse steps, addressing a news crew from Channel 10. In the real world, it was business as usual.