S. Cedric - Of Fever and Blood

“What?” Vauvert asked.

She turned to him, her face loaded with worry and rising anger.

“Stop screwing with me now. Tell me what you did.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that this is no animal blood, Alex.”

Vauvert looked stunned.

“Not animal blood?”

She stared daggers at him.

“I don’t know what you’ve done, but this is serious. That’s human blood on this bullet. I can’t cover for you on something as serious as this. Who did you shoot?”

“Well, Leila, that’s precisely the problem. I have no idea.”

“Cut the crap, please. You extracted these bullets. You damn well saw the person they came from.”

He bowed his head.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

He massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Then he looked at the forensic scientist still staring at him.

“How long would it take you do to a DNA sequencing and run it against the central database?”

“With the new equipment I can do it in less than half an hour. You think that the person you shot is on file?”

“We can give it a try, right?”

Deep inside, he hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

He walked to the window in the hallway to smoke while Leila got busy isolating a DNA strand and starting the sequencer.

He had smoked six cigarettes and was lighting the seventh when she came back to see him, her face ashen, to give him the result.

Vauvert felt the weight of the world pressing very, very heavily on his shoulders.

He remained at the window for a while, watching the canal below and the heavy sky above, before he made up his mind, knowing that anything he did now would topple a series of dominoes and that everything would soon be out of his hands. He pushed open the door to the stairwell. One floor below, he emerged in Homicide headquarters.

What Leila had just told him was spinning in his head.

The DNA sequence match.

Impossible.

Inexplicable.

He would have to find a way to explain this to his bosses. Or else he would have to lie. This type of thing couldn’t be explained. That was clear. No matter what happened now, he knew that it would all blow up in his face sooner or later. Or, in other words, he was neck-deep in shit.

In the break room, he found the shift team. Sebastien, Nicolas, and Christophe: two officers and one detective. The men were in the middle of a card game and looked at him with puzzled faces.

“Listen guys,” he told them. “I won’t beat around the bush. I’m back on the Salaville case, starting at square one.”

“The Black Mountain Vampires?”

“Precisely. I know it’s a cold case, but new evidence makes me think that we missed a third man last year.”

“So what do you need?”

“I want you guys to go back to the farm right now. Take weapons with you.”

The three gave each other concerned looks.

“What’s going on exactly?”

“I went over there this morning,” Vauvert explained. “There has clearly been some activity. Maybe an accomplice, maybe not. Bring back a full status report. Someone has left new inscriptions on the walls of the barn. They’re written in blood, and they’re fresh. You gather samples of everything you find suspicious. And bring back any animal traces that you find. There’s excrement everywhere, in both the house and the barn.”

“Excrement?” Nicolas asked, wrinkling his nose. “What’s all this about? What kind of animals are you talking about?”

“Look, I’m not sure, okay? It may be canidae shit.”

“Say what?”

“Wolves,” Vauvert said. “Or something else, I don’t know. I just want to make sure. You’ll understand for yourselves as soon as you get there, believe me.”

“Right now?” Sebastien asked. “To go get some wolf shit? We’re the only ones on duty, Alex…”

“And I’m your superior officer,” Vauvert answered, clear and unequivocal.

Reluctantly, the three men got up and left to get ready.

Vauvert was alone in the break room. He stayed there for a minute, breathing slowly to settle his agitated breathing. Once he had calmed down a bit, he left the room and walked down the hallway.

He knocked on the door of the only person who would listen without judging him.

Once he had finished telling his story, Vauvert raised the can of beer to his lips and downed it in nearly a single gulp.

He was in Detective Damien Mira’s office. His colleague, an old-fashioned cop who kept a stash of beer in the bottom drawer of his desk, was sitting in front of him. His pensive expression exaggerated his heavy jowls. With each passing year, Mira’s frame grew larger. At fifty, that was a whole lot of years that had gone by.

“You don’t mean to put any of this in your report. Do you?”

Vauvert chuckled nervously.

“You kidding? Of course not. There’s no way I could put any of that in writing.”

“At least one thing’s settled,” Mira said.

He looked at the sheet of paper on his desk with the DNA test results that Leila Amari had produced. For the tenth time, at least, he read the name that was written on it. And for the tenth time, he frowned.

“Right. And there’s no way this could be a mistake?”

“No,” Vauvert answered. “The genetic comparison is a hundred percent reliable.”

“Okay, so we’re talking about the blood of one of the Salaville brothers.”

“Of Roman Salaville, yes.”

“A man who is dead,” Mira said.

“That’s what I thought,” Vauvert muttered. He opened another beer and took a long swig before going on, “God dammit, Damien, I saw the bastard split open on the autopsy table last year, and he looked deader than dead. I don’t get it.”

Mira, pensive, took off his huge tortoiseshell glasses and began to clean them with a handkerchief.

“But the thing you shot at, it didn’t look like that guy.”

“I’ve told you everything already.”

“Yes, I know. You told me it looked like a wolf.”

“Two fucking wolves. With eyes like lasers. I’ve never seen anything like it, I swear.”

“And you have no explanation for any of this?”

“What do you want me to say? There is no explanation.”

“Well, if you ask me… you’re right,” his colleague said. “It is impossible.” He put the glasses back on. “There is one thing funny about your story, though.”

Vauvert gave him a curious look.

“Go on, make me laugh.”

“Those two guys, the press called them the Black Mountain Vampires.”

“They always give them stupid nicknames. What’s so funny about that?”

“Well, that story of yours, the way you tell it anyway, it reminds me of the story of Dracula.”

“Dracula? I don’t get it.”

“You don’t watch vampire movies? The stories are always sort of the same. The vampire has these wolves guarding his castle. They’re really people, servants the vampire chooses from the lowest strata of society, messed-up folks who are easy to control. Once they’re under his will, they find victims for him to feed on. In the story of Count Dracula, the servant was named Renfield, if I remember correctly.”

Vauvert nodded.

“Okay. So you’re saying that the Salavilles were like a Renfield? Servants of a Prince of Darkness who did the dirty jobs for him so he could remain invisible?”

“That’s it,” Mira said, chuckling. “I mean, metaphorically speaking.”

Alexandre Vauvert said nothing. Metaphorically speaking or not, he did not see anything funny about this.

His men had been gone for more than an hour and a half, and he hadn’t heard from them.

He was starting to worry.

When the phone finally vibrated on the desk, he grabbed it.