Линкольн Чайлд - Bloodless

“I am now sending,” said Moller as he turned back.

Total silence for a moment. Then, as the photos began hitting people’s phones, a great aaahhh- ing and ooohhh- ing came up like a rising wind. Everybody, press photographers included, was staring at their phone. She could even make out a few choked-off gasps and garbled sounds of fear and horror.

What was it? Gannon was dying to see, but she couldn’t break off directing to grab her own phone. She glanced at Betts. He, too, was staring into his phone, an expression of sheer delight mingled with horror on his face. She went back to covering the moment, her camera operators getting shots of people’s reactions.

A moment later, she heard Betts speak loudly. “Hey, what are you doing?” She looked over to see him advance rapidly toward the woman, Daisy Fayette, who straightened up. She had been bending over Moller’s equipment case, and now she dropped something back into it with a guilty look.

“What is this?” Moller yelled, spinning around. “Why are you touching those things?” He rushed over. “ Alte Drache , how dare you touch my instruments?”

Daisy went bright red, and then recovered, saying frostily: “I was curious to see your equipment. After all, I’m also a supernatural researcher.”

“You can’t go rummaging around like that!” Betts said as Moller began rearranging his case, cheeks red with anger. “In fact, you weren’t even supposed to be on the set today at all. Johnny, see Mrs. Fayette out of here.”

Gannon watched as the woman was led off by one of the crew, protesting ineffectually. Good riddance , she thought. Fayette, the opposite of photogenic, was obviously just a busybody, angling for more camera time. Gannon had herself lobbied for engaging the woman — a local point of view was an important consideration — but as happened so often, the people you thought were going to be a bonus turned out to have no camera presence. The woman should have remained primarily a voice-over, as Betts had initially said.

Now Betts came over. “Have a look.” He pulled out his cell phone and swiped through.

Gannon took up the phone with great interest. The first of Moller’s photographs was of the tomb with the angel with a raised arm. A CSI worker was standing to one side, blurred from the long exposure. On the opposite side of the tomb, a cloud of mist appeared to be rising out of the grass, inside of which stood a figure. Amid the blurry swirl of mist, she could just make out a staring eye, and a bony hand reaching out in a most sinister way toward the oblivious CSI worker.

She swiped. The next photo showed another cloud of eddying mist, larger and more diffuse, in which she could just make out a giant face, four feet in diameter, indistinct and bloated, and of a tremendously evil aspect. The third photo was the best — or worst — of all, showing what appeared to be a demon climbing out of the very earth, its naked, emaciated arm emerging from the ground, along with the top of a skull covered with wispy hairs, with hollow eye sockets and grinning teeth.

“Holy shit,” she murmured, “these are amazing.” She could feel her heart beating like a tom-tom. They were extremely creepy, and what’s more, they looked real. The photos had obviously been taken just moments before. Could Moller have somehow manipulated them inside the camera before sending them out? It didn’t seem possible, but as a photographer Gannon knew all too well that there was an almost infinite range of digital manipulation tricks. Anyway, it hardly mattered: this was stupendous stuff, and how Moller got the images was his business.

She handed the phone back to Betts. “These will make fantastic stills for the documentary.”

“Absolutely. And there’ll be many more.”

“But...” she asked, half facetiously, “where’s the vampire?”

Moller, coming over, answered instead of Betts. “The vampire is not here. It may be somewhere nearby. What you are seeing are demonic presences excited by the recent passage of the vampire, like buoys bobbing in the wake of a big boat.”

“So you think you can get a picture of the vampire himself?” Betts asked.

“If you put me in the right place at the right time, yes.”

“Excellent!” Betts cried, slapping Moller on the back, much to his displeasure.

“And you can’t be any more specific than that?” Commander Delaplane asked.

The kid — Toby Manning — shook his head. He’d washed his face and hands since she’d first seen him in the cemetery, but his clothes were still a mess. His eyes were clearer, though, and he was relatively composed. Not all that surprising, she mused to herself — he’d been asked to go over the events leading up to his friend’s death probably half a dozen times in as many hours, and now it was becoming routine.

She waited a minute or two, her gaze on Manning. Then she glanced at Benny Sheldrake and past him to where the two FBI agents were seated at a small conference table. Pendergast gave a slight nod.

“Okay,” she said, snapping off her recorder. “Thanks for your help. You can go now. I’ll have a car take you home. Get some rest, all right? And stick around, because we’ll be calling on you again in the coming days.”

Manning nodded, stood up, and — with a furtive glance at Pendergast — shuffled toward the door.

Delaplane consulted a handwritten list of names, crossed off Manning’s. “That just leaves the Ingersolls. They’re waiting outside.”

“Excellent.”

Delaplane sighed inwardly. This was a necessary procedure, interviewing potential witnesses to last night’s mess. They had already spoken to a woman who lived across from the Ingersolls’ B and B, the bartender at the place where the two youths, Toby and Brock, had gotten hammered, the custodian of the cemetery, and a handful of others. The interviews had been short, and — unfortunately — they hadn’t contributed much in the way of hard evidence to what they’d already learned.

She picked up the phone, asked a watch officer to get a ride for Manning.

“And bring in the Ingersolls,” she said.

A minute later, there was a knock on the door and the two came in, escorted by an officer. Their eyes darted around the room, taking in everyone present. Then they sat down in the chairs set before Delaplane’s desk. The woman, Agnes, had an expression of stone — still in shock, no doubt, from the rush of unpleasant events — but her husband, Bertram, looked aggrieved, almost angry, like Sisyphus after being assigned a larger hill.

“Mr. Ingersoll,” she said, nodding, her voice clipped, uninflected, professional. “Mrs. Ingersoll. Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” the woman mumbled without thinking. Her husband said nothing.

“I’ll be recording this conversation,” she said, snapping the machine on again. “Do I have your permission?”

“No problem,” said Mr. Ingersoll.

After going through the preliminaries of date, time, and those present, Delaplane launched into the questioning. “I know this must be difficult, but I’d like you to please go over again with me, one more time, the events leading up to your discovery of the body. Step by step, and please take your time and mention any new details you might have remembered since making your previous statements, no matter how minor.”

The couple was silent for a moment. Finally, the woman began to speak in a low, halting voice. The story she recounted was, almost word for word, the same one Delaplane had heard already: the walk through the quiet streets; the sudden rush of sound combined with an inexplicable sense of movement; and then, her husband sprawling over a body and her frantic call to 911. The husband winced as she went over certain details but otherwise remained silent.