William Bernhardt - Capitol Murder

“But my witness was a young woman of unquestioned integrity,” Padolino insisted. “His witness is-is-well, for God’s sake. She’s a vampire!”

“Not exactly,” Ben corrected.

“Okay, she just runs with the wolves, whatever. The point is, the fundamental credibility required of any witness, and especially from an eleventh-hour surprise witness, is utterly lacking.”

Herndon batted his finger against his lips. A long time passed in silence while the attorneys waited in excruciating suspense.

“You both make good points,” Herndon said, at long last. “And I suspect I could rule either way and not be wrong. The only difference is, if I say no to Mr. Kincaid, he’s going to lose, and Appeal Item Number One would be my ruling against his new witness. Why should I let that happen? That’s not good for me or the prosecutor’s office. Furthermore-” He paused, looking deeply into Ben’s eyes. “-I’ve been watching the defense work for several weeks now. And I tend to think that if Mr. Kincaid says this witness is critical to learning the truth about what really happened-then she probably is. I’m going to allow it.”

“But-”

Herndon turned his finger. “Don’t bother. The prosecution’s objection is noted. But the jury is going to hear what this woman has to say.”

Given all that she had been through, Beatrice looked better than Ben expected, but there was no denying her fragility, the brittle-glass quality of her demeanor. She had been brought to the stand in a wheelchair, and her doctors had insisted that she should testify for no longer than one hour without taking a break of equal length, and that she should be on the stand for no more than four hours a day. Her skin was pale-almost to the point of being translucent-but Ben knew she had suffered severe blood loss and probably had not seen the sun for a very long time.

“It was all fun at first,” Beatrice explained. Her voice was quiet and delicate; even with her microphone turned up to its maximum volume, the spectators in the rear of the gallery had to strain to hear what she was saying. “We were just four DC working girls out partying, trying to have a good time. Originally, we frequented the usual twentysomething haunts-the Rhino Bar and Pumphouse, that sort of place. But as we soon learned, we all had a dark side-probably what brought us together in the first place. We were all into Goth, so we started going to those clubs. We thought the whole occult thing was kind of sexy. So it was inevitable that we would end up at Stigmata. The owner’s head toady, Sid Bartmann, took a shine to us and invited us to their upstairs apartment one night-and that was when our lives began to fall apart.”

“Was that when you first began taking drugs?”

“Yes. Bartmann had a lab not far from the club where he cooked the stuff up. The drugs only increased the intensity of the fun, at first. And the sex… well, you got used to it, after a while. If you were high enough, that could be fun, too. Some of the men up there learned about our… interests, and they took us to a meeting of Circle Thirteen. That was where the Sire spotted us. His minions invited us into the Inner Circle, allowed us to take part in their secret ceremonies. All very thrilling. Exciting. Sexy. Like I said, fun, fun, fun. Until Colleen got killed.”

Beatrice described how the Sire had taken them, while they were all high, and involved them in the Inner Circle’s sacrificial rites. Colleen had been chosen to be the first because she was so immersed in the vampiric mythos. It had long been a fantasy of hers to participate in a gothic vampire sexcapade.

“Her hands were bound behind her back,” Beatrice explained, her voice halting. “She was tied to a chair. And we just stood there watching, thinking how cool this was, getting more than a little turned on. We’d been warned that the ceremony required some small bloodletting, but hey, we were vampires, right? They assured us the drugs would prevent Colleen from feeling any pain, only erotic pleasure, and the injury would be small and temporary and invisible.

“But something went wrong. That was when we realized the Sire wasn’t a wannabe. He truly believed he was a vampire. ‘Vampyr,’ he liked to say. And he craved blood. Craved it with such intensity that he lost all control. That’s what happened with Colleen. I don’t know how to explain it with any word other than-bloodlust. Once he stuck his teeth into Colleen and started drinking from her, he couldn’t stop himself. He started on her neck but eventually moved to her jugular. Blood spewed everywhere. Colleen’s eyes bulged. She screamed, but somehow that only seemed to titillate him, to urge him on.”

“Did you try to stop it?” Ben asked.

“God, yes. All three of us ran to help her, but the other members of the Inner Circle held us back. They told us not to worry-they’d seen it happen before.” She paused. “I don’t think even they realized just how out of control the Sire was. And by the time they did-it was too late.” Tears poured from her eyes. “Colleen was dead.”

Ben gave her a moment to collect herself, then forged ahead. “What happened next?”

“We didn’t know what to do. Amber wanted to go to the police, but the Sire said we were just as likely to go to jail as he was. We were accomplices; they’d get us on felony murder charges, he said. Plus-we needed that drug. If you haven’t been dependent on a drug, you can’t know what it’s like. Veronica talked about us all quitting our jobs and getting out of town-but we didn’t have the money to last a week on our own, and we knew it wouldn’t be a day before we came crawling back to Sid or the Sire to get our fix. We were hooked. We couldn’t live without it. We’d do anything for it.” Her head fell. “Even sell out our friend. Even cover up her murder.”

“So you… just went back to the party-hard swinging vampire life?”

“At first. Then Veronica came up with an idea-a way to make some serious getaway money-enough to buy a huge supply of the drug, enough to last us for years, enough to blow town and start our lives over again somewhere outside the influence of the Sire. Somewhere far away from those hypnotic eyes.”

“Do you know what her plan was?”

“More or less. She was going to film Senator Glancy having sex with her-then blackmail him for money.”

Several members of the jury stirred. For the first time, the story presented by the Glancys had received some independent verification.

“And did you think that plan was… realistic?”

“Definitely. Veronica had a way about her. It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous. She knew how to make herself irresistible, how to make men know she was interested, available, or better yet, how to make them think she wanted them. And it wasn’t all a show, either. She liked having sex and as with most things in life-practice makes perfect. She was good at it. Veronica was kind of like a drug herself. Men became addicted to her.”

“Did you follow the progress of her… plan?”

“For a while. Till the morning one of the Sire’s Inner Circle goons showed up unannounced at the apartment Amber and I shared after she left the escort service. With a gun.”

“Why was he there?”

She pressed a hand against her chest, trying to regain her strength. “The video had been released-the video Veronica made to blackmail Senator Glancy-and suddenly the eyes of the world were on her. The Sire was afraid she’d expose everything. He’d decided it would be best to ‘bring us all in.’ He’d gone to the Capitol to collect Veronica himself and sent this goon after us. Well, we knew what that meant. We’d heard about the young girls who went to the Inner Circle and disappeared. We’d seen the Sire and some of the other hard-core bloodsuckers going into that secret, always locked, back room, licking their chops. I knew if we cooperated, no one would ever hear from us again. So I made like I was coming on to him, snuggled up close, fiddled with his fly. And while I distracted him, Amber snuck up behind him and clubbed him on the side of the head with a baseball bat.”