Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

Jack nodded. “We’ve yet to determine whether it’s Billy’s blood on the blade, or if her prints are on the haft.”

“And if they are her prints?” Naomi asked.

He waved away her concern. “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble setting her up. This has been meticulously thought out.”

“What about the bizarre nature of the murder?” McKinsey said. “The knife wounds, draining the victim of blood?”

“Red herrings,” Jack said, “designed to get us going around in circles.”

McKinsey made a noise in the back of his throat.

“What,” Jack said, “you think there’s a vampire infesting Fearington?”

“Of course not, but don’t you think it’s possible that when Alli found out about this other girl…” He snapped his fingers.

“Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi cut in helpfully.

“Right. Isn’t it possible that when Alli found out Billy was boffing Arjeta Kraja she flipped out?”

“And the sky could be falling,” Jack said acidly. “Let’s deal with reality.”

McKinsey shrugged, as if to say, I tried.

“Something stinks in this setup.” Jack peered again at the corpse. “It’s weird, gothic, over the top. We need to find out where the stink is coming from.”

“We need to talk to this Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi said. “ASAP.”

Jack nodded, only partly engaged. There was another thing he was reluctant to share with Naomi and McKinsey. He had the nagging suspicion that Alli knew more about this girl than she had let on. Why she would keep that secret was anyone’s guess, but Jack knew Alli well enough to know that she must have a damn good reason. She better have.

No one would tell him where she was taken. Jack had called Henry Carson’s townhome in Georgetown without luck.

Jack, his mind made up, turned to Fellows. “I want to interview Alli’s roommate.”

VERA BARD lay on a bed in the academy infirmary. The pinkish light of dawn streamed in through windows and a small skylight high up in the ceiling. The walls were painted a cheerful yellow, but the floor was institutional gray linoleum, a veteran from another era.

The nurse led Jack over to Vera’s bed. Alli’s roommate was a dark-haired girl with large, slightly upswept chocolate eyes, an assertive nose, and a wide, expressive mouth.

“Please, just for a few minutes,” the nurse cautioned. “She is still very weak.”

Fluids dripped into Vera’s arm and her eyes were hooded, as if she was having trouble staying awake, but this only made her seem sultry. She looked vaguely Eurasian. Her long hair had lost its sheen to sweat; it lay lankly on the pillow in thick, Medusan coils. Still and all, Jack observed, she was an exceptionally beautiful young woman.

He sat on a painted metal chair and introduced himself. “Vera, would you tell me what happened last night?”

“I … I don’t know.” Her voice was soft and husky. “I went to bed as usual, read for a bit, took my pill, as usual, and went to sleep.” She licked her dry lips. “The next thing I knew I woke up here.”

“Alli was in the room when you went to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“And while you were reading?”

“Yes.”

“Did you two talk at all?”

“Before I went to the bathroom we were talking about…” Her brow crinkled. “I can’t remember about what. Boys, maybe.”

“About Billy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“And after you came back from the bathroom?”

Vera shook her head and a lock of hair fell across her cheek.

Jack sat for a moment more. He smiled at her. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

Vera seemed not to have heard him. She licked her lips again. “I want to see Alli.”

“I’ll speak to Commander Fellows.” Jack rose. “By the way, what medication are you taking?”

“Crestor. I have high cholesterol.”

Jack nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Vera.”

ON THE way out of the infirmary, Jack encountered Naomi.

“DNA is going to take at least a week,” she said, “but the forensic team found Alli’s fingerprints on the water glass beside Vera’s bed.”

“Anyone else’s?”

“Just Alli’s.”

Jack’s cell phone buzzed, and then Dennis Paull was speaking rapidly and tensely in his ear. He strode down the hall, away from Naomi and McKinsey, who had appeared.

“A new position?” Jack said after a moment. “Is Crawford kicking you out?”

“Not exactly.” Paull further explained the changes. “You’re coming with me, Jack. I’m pulling all the details together. At midnight you and I are going to fly to Macedonia, then trek west into the mountains to a shithole called Tetovo, where we will terminate this sonuvabitch Arian Xhafa.”

Jack bit back a protest. Though Paull had made it clear that he was sympathetic to Alli’s plight, Jack suspected he’d simply argue that there were other people—Naomi Wilde chief among them—who were perfectly adequate to being Alli’s advocate. Besides, in Harrison Jenkins she had one of the most savvy criminal attorneys on the planet. Jack could hear him now: Forget it, Alli’s in good hands. The trouble was, that was only half true. No one knew Alli the way he did, and she wasn’t about to open up to anyone else, Naomi included. And keeping silent wouldn’t help her cause one iota.

Instead, he said, “Just like that? From what you’ve told me he’s exceptionally well defended and well armed. He won’t be easy to kill.”

Paull laughed. “I may have spent the last several years behind a desk, Jack, but believe me when I tell you that I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”

FIVE

ALLI, WALKING slowly around her uncle’s study, spent the slowly ticking seconds dragging her fingertips across the tops of books, the contours of artifacts and souvenirs, the outlines of framed photos of her uncle with presidents past and present. She paused at a photo of the two brothers and stared at her father. He was smiling into the camera, his hand on his older brother’s shoulder. Judging by the hazy mountains in the background, they were out west somewhere, doubtless at one of her uncle’s ranches. He clutched a ten-gallon hat in one fist.

She was certain she ought to feel something at the sight of her father’s face—a sense of remorse, of pain, of a space inside her into which he had once warmly nestled—but she felt nothing. It was as if her heart had been turned to wood, burned to ashes in a fire, and was now a heart in name only, a hollow vessel, useless as a desert in which nothing could live.

She tried to think of incidents in the past—her time with Emma, Jack’s daughter, and more recently, her adventures with Jack himself in Moscow and the Ukraine. All of it felt like a dream, or a film she was watching without becoming fully engaged. Briefly she tried to fight her way out of the disassociation, but it was too difficult for her to defeat. There was a good reason for that, too. Without being aware of it, she had developed a mechanism for keeping her distance from the week of terror when she had been imprisoned in the small, lightless room and subjected to …

She was still in a prison, one of her own making.

A barrier came up, like a wall of lead stopping Superman’s X-ray vision. Her own X-ray vision—her habit of peering backward into that one section of her past, examining that week, picking at it as if it were a scab that wouldn’t heal—had to be thwarted at all costs, even to the loss of feeling in the present.

She made a little inchoate sound in the back of her throat, as a fox will when caught in a spring-loaded trap, when it is about to gnaw off its paw to regain its freedom. The truth was she longed to talk with Annika, though this was the one thing she must always keep from Jack. It was Annika who had convinced Jack to let her go see the mistress Milla Tamirova, who had taken Alli into her BDSM dungeon and made her confront her terror at being tied into a chair. Why had Annika done this? Because she, too, had been held hostage. She knew the hell into which Alli had descended because she had inhabited that very same hell. Unlike Alli, however, she had managed to escape. If only she could meet with her again, but neither she nor Jack knew where she was.