Bentley Little - The Summoning

"Were they walking toward a car or a truck, or did you see any unfamiliar vehicles parked near the garage?"

"That's all I saw. I've been wracking my brain all morning trying to remember something else, but that's all I could come up with."

"Did you see anyone else on the street or in the general area who also might have seen something?"

"Like I said, the street was empty." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter. "That really is what the man looked like.

That's why I remember it so clearly."

"What was Mr. Torres wearing?"

""He had on jeans and a dirty T-shirt."

The chill was resurrected. That was exactly what he had been wearing when they'd found the body.

Robert glanced again at Steve, who raised his eyebrows hopefully. He wanted to follow up with more questions, to go over every point of Donna's story in detail, but he sensed from her voice that such an attempt would not be successful right now. He would cruise by later, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning, and talk to her in person. "I think we have enough for now, Donna, but I may need to ask a few additional questions later. Would it be more convenient for you if I contacted you at home or at the bank?" "Either one is fine."

"Thank you for calling, then. I'll have this transcribed into a statement. I may add whatever additional information you can give me later, and then I'll need you to come in and give us your John Hancock, okay?"

He hung up a moment later and walked across the office to his own desl

"Anything there?" asked Steve..... "Hard to tell." :

"Is she reliable?"

"Donna Sandoval doesn't have an imaginative bone in her body." He sighed. "I believe she saw someone, but I don't believe she saw who she thinks she saw." "What's that supposed to mean?" : "Do you remember Caldwell Burke?" Steve shook his head.

"Biggest crime we've had since I've been on the force. He was a child molester, and he was sent to Florence in seventy-nine for molesting Donna's daughter."

"That's who she saw with Tortes?"

"That's who she described. But Burke was cut and killed five years ago in a yard right

"So you think she saw some guy with Tortes, didn't get a look at him, and put the molester's face on him?"

Robert shrugged. "Could be. I don't know." He glanced out the window. There were a few thin white wisps of cloud near the hills on the horizon, but other than that the sky was a deep dark unbroken blue.

It was going to be a hot one. '

"So what's the plan?"

He thought for a moment. This morning he wanted to go over Troy's Garage once more, and then the length of street between the garage and the arroyo, see if he could fred anything they'd passed by on first inspection. He would send Steve, and maybe Ted, to help out the DPS with the search for Mike Vigil. This afternoon, he planned to lead a full and complete search of the arroyo, from beginning to end. They'd examined the area immediately adjoining the segment in which they'd found the body, but little else, and he had a hunch they might've missed something, "Call Jud and Ben," he said. "I need every man out here. I want a full force today."

"But it's their day off."

"They'll get comp time." He looked at Steve. "You don't think a murder and a missing person's enough of a reason to adjust the regular work schedule?"

"I didn't say that."

"I hope not. Or I was going to Suggest you give up police work and try your hand at shoe sales."

Steve grinned sheepishly. :/

"We're going to make a thorough search of the garage, the arroyo, and the area between the two. I want you and Ted to assist the state in looking for Vigil."

"What do we do? just call them up and tell them we're coming over?"

"Basically...... "I don't--" '

"I'll call Finn in Casa Grande and tell him to expect you two around noon."

"Thanks."

"Just don't let those guys push you around. Vigil's our missing person. They're working for us here." "Gotcha."

The phone rang again, and Steve answered it. Robert listened to his deputy's side of the conversation and felt the chill return. He thought of Woods's report. Exsanguination.

Steve hung up. "Man wouldn't give his name, but he says he knows who the vampire is."

"The vampire," Robert repeated.

Steve nodded slowly. "This is getting pretty weird," he said.

"Yeah." Robert put his feet up on the desk and once again looked out the window. "It is."

The temperature in the afternoon was even more unbearable than Robert had expected. He stood in the shade of the west wall of the arroyo and chugged the last half of his canned Coke. When was this damn Indian summer going to end?

He watched the two closest men walk slowly across the arroyo floor.

There was no way that the shifting, loosely packed sand could have held a footprint, but he'd hoped to find something: a thread caught on a jojoba branch, a strand of hair pulled out in a struggle, hell, even a discarded gum wrapper.

But vampires don't chew gum.

Damn it, he had to start taking this seriously

They'd found nothing new at the garage, and the detritus along the side of the road had been impossible to differentiate. He'd called off that search early in order to concentrate efforts down here. He had a gut feeling that they might find some sort of clue in the arroyo. The deliberate placement of the dead animals about Torres's head suggested to him that the mechanic had not been killed and then his body dumped, that most of the action had instead taken place down here, away from any possible witness's line of vision. "Chiefl" " He looked up to see Stu Thiebert hurrying around the curve of the arroyo, his feet pumping furiously in the shifting sand, his body moving forward at an incongruously slow pace, looking almost like a cartoon figure.

"We found something! ..... Robert stepped away from the wall, placing his Coke can on the sand where he could retrieve it on his way out, and headed toward Stu, motioning for Jud to follow. His own feet moved slowly through the sand, but he hardly seemed to notice. "What is it?" he called.

"Mice! Dead desert mice! They're about a hundred yards downt"

Robert stopped walking, frowned. "Mice?"

"They look like they've been drained! You gotta come and see it!"

Robert felt his stomach clench up. He suddenly wished he'd brought Rich along. He followed Stu around the corner, Jud hurrying close behind. Ahead, he could see the other three men in a huddle next to the arroyo's eroded east wall ...... "Here!" Robert, Stu, and Jud reached the spot almost at the same time.

"Ben found them." Stu pointed toward a crack in the arroyo wall. "In there."

Robert's gaze followed his deputy's pointing finger. On the floor of the upward sloping fissure, reaching all the way o the surface, were twenty or thirty desert mice. They had indeed been drained of blood and fluids. Their bodies looked like deflated sacs of fur, their heads like- hairy eyeless skulls, i Surrounding the top half of each mouse was a semicircle of shriveled, dried black beetles.

"Mother of shit," Jud breathed. The other men were silent. He looked at Robert. "What do you think this means?"

The knot in his stomach tightened. "I don't know," Robert said. "But go up and get the camera. And radio for Woods. I want him to see this."

He stared for a moment at the dead mice and their halos of bee des then turned away.

After shutting off the lights, closing the blinds, and locking up the office, Rich walked around to the rear of the building, sorting through his overstuffed ring for the keys to the pickup. The sun had almost set, was little more than an orange half circle on the flat border of the cloudless western horizon, and the ground, the cactus, the buildings, and the mesas behind were all bathed in a muted amber glow that lent the town a fake, cinematic quality.