Stephen Leather - Once bitten

There's no excuse for killing children. None. I went straight to my office and drew up the report and put it in a file and then dropped it into the internal mailing system because I didn't want to be around when Canonico got hold of it.

He'd never forgiven me for what happened a few years back when I was on one of my first cases. The Teen Killers, they called them, two nasty pieces of work who'd ended up in a cell together at San Quentin, both of them serving time for rape. They spent several years telling each other stories of rapes they'd committed and planning what they'd do when they got out. They came up with this great idea, that they'd buy a large van and use it to kidnap and rape girls, but to make it a bit more exciting they'd go out with the intention of getting girls of every age between thirteen and nineteen. It was a sort of game. A contest. A full set, nothing less would do. Their names were Ed Vincent and Ronnie Bryant but after the third rape the media began calling them The Teen Killers. It was Vincent's idea that the girls should be buggered as well as being raped, and it was Bryant's idea to fit up a video camera and lights in the back of the van so that they could film what they did to the girls. It was never really known which one of them decided that the girls should be strangled with their own underwear because when they eventually came to trial they both blamed each other.

Vincent was the smarter of the two, he had an IQ of 154, and in court Bryant said that he fallen under his influence and that it was all Vincent's doing. They got caught after the fifth murder. The MO had been the same in each case, the naked bodies were discovered by the side of a freeway with a number written on their back in lipstick. The number was the age of the girl. Within a year of them both being released they'd killed a thirteen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, a seventeen-yearold, an eighteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old. They'd almost got the set, Vincent told me, and he seemed more upset at missing out on his target than the fact that he was facing the death penalty.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they were picked up in a bar in Hollywood and I was called in to run them through the Beaverbrook program. You've got to remember that this was some time ago and that the program wasn't as sophisticated as it is now. Or as accurate. It wasn't a bug in the programming, it was more the fact that I didn't have enough case histories input as comparisons.

That's what I told Canonico, anyway. Not that it did me any good. I ran them both through the program and it highlighted a number of mental abnormalities which I reckoned were serious enough to justify the men being held in a secure hospital rather than a prison. Canonico protested and demanded a second opinion, I insisted that any further examinations were carried out in a hospital and they were put into separate vans and driven over to a secure institution near Santa Ana.

There was a cock-up, Vincent escaped, and was on the run for ten days. During that time he picked up a fourteen-year-old girl, manacled her in the back of his van, and filmed himself raping, buggering and finally strangling her. They caught him in a motel outside Palmdale, watching the video and playing with himself. Canonico forced me to watch the video, right the way through, slapping me around the face every time I tried to get out of the chair and away from the images of pain and terror and the little girl's unheeded tears.

He'd never forgiven me for the girl's death, and I didn't expect that he ever would. It wasn't my fault, I knew that, and when Vincent eventually went in front of a panel of psychiatrists they came to the same conclusion as I had and he ended up in a secure mental hospital. Bryant was executed a year or so ago when his appeals ran out.

Filbin was still at his desk working his way through the city's knife retailers and I asked him if De'Ath was still talking to the Ferriman girl. He shook his head and said that he'd gone to the Coroner's Office to see how the autopsy on the victim was going. I left the building quickly without bumping into Canonico, which almost made up for the fact that I had indeed been given a parking ticket. Somebody had impaled a clove of garlic on my aerial and I pulled it off and threw it into the gutter. The vampire joke had worn thin a long time ago.

When I arrived at the lab where the Coroner was working away on the victim of the previous night's murder I parked the Alpine next to De'Ath's car. Inside a receptionist told me that Black De'Ath had gone into the lab where the body was being sliced up and analysed. I said I'd wait outside because I'd seen more than my fair share of corpses being cut up and to be honest they always made me feel pretty queasy. I'd never actually thrown up, but why take the risk? After half an hour or so a grey haired man in green overalls came out carrying a tape-recorder, followed by De'Ath. De'Ath raised his eyebrows when he saw me.

"I was curious," I explained. "I just wanted to know what the autopsy showed."

"Knife through the heart," said De'Ath. "Slash to the throat came afterwards. We've got a pretty good idea of the shape of the knife that did the damage."

"So what's the plan? Get hold of a knife like the missing one and compare it with the shape suggested by the autopsy?"

"Man, you should be a detective," laughed De'Ath. "I'm not sure how much good it's going to do us. I asked her about the knife. She said that when she rented the apartment the knife was already missing, and she said she could prove it. In one of the drawers of the kitchen there should be a full itinerary of everything in the flat, dated when she took on the lease. Maybe we missed it.

I'm on my way there now." He saw the look on my face and wagged his finger before I could speak. "If you want to tag along, that's OK with me, but don't let the Captain find out about it," he said.

On the way out he waved his notebook in front of me. "There is something else you should know," he said. "Victim was drained of blood. Most of it anyway."

"What?" I was shocked, but then realised that he was probably building up to another vampire joke.

"There was hardly any blood left in his body. Now that's not all that surprising considering that he'd been stabbed in the chest, but there wasn't more than a pint or so in his clothes or on the ground where we found the body. And like I said, the girl's clothes were clean." He stopped by his car and unlocked the door.

"You're not going to tell me he was bitten by a vampire, are you, Samuel?"

He roared with laughter and slapped the roof of his car with the flat of his hand. "You've been mixing with weirdos for too long, man. You're going over the edge." He laughed again and shook his head. "What it means, Van Helsing, is that he was almost certainly killed somewhere else and then dumped in the alley." He got into his car, still laughing.

As I followed him down the road to Terry's apartment I could see him still shaking with laughter and shaking his head.

He let us into her apartment and I waited by the hi-fi while he put on another pair of polythene gloves and carefully went through the draws in the kitchenette. "Yeah, here it is," he said, fishing out a sheet of paper. "A full inventory." He looked at the knife rack and counted them off. Six knifes in the rack, six knives on the list. Dated six months ago." He folded the list up and slid it into a polythene bag and put it in his inside pocket. He pulled a plastic carrier bag out of the drawer and carefully put the knives into it. "Right, that's us," he said.

"Give me one minute," I said and headed for the bedroom.

"Don't…" he began.

"I know, don't touch anything," I yelled back at him. I was playing a hunch, don't ask me why, but I just wanted to get the name of the man in the photograph. The film star. Greig Turner it said on the back of the chair and I scribbled the name down on the back of one of my business cards.