Nikki Heat updated her whiteboard the next morning. She removed Chavez and Johnstone’s pictures. In the old Chavez column she put the Tepes Club and Alucard, and in the former Johnstone column she put the two girls from from the club and her crime scene. At the top of that column she put one of the pictures that were always taken of the crowd that assembled around any crime scene. In this particular photograph Rook was clearly visible behind the two girls, checking out the blonde’s butt.
Beneath it she had written “? slayer ?” and “? dusted ?” She’d looked both terms up in Urban Dictionary to see if they were some sort of slang expressions she hadn’t encountered before, but it hadn’t yielded anything that looked like it might fit. A wider Google search of the terms just turned up some nonsense about vampires, and girls who hunted them. She decided she didn’t want to add more fuel to Rook’s crazy theory. She knew that he came up with that sort of theory just to wind her up, but there was no sense stoking it any more.
The DVD that Alucard had given her contained video from half a dozen different cameras. One exterior camera covered the main entrance off the street in front of the club, and another covered emergency and service doors off the alley at the back. One of the interior cameras was focused on the bar, and the other three covered the bulk of the interior, showing the dance floor, and all the tables around it. None of the cameras showed the balcony or the stairs leading up to it, or Alucard’s table.
All the video was from standard definition cameras that had pretty good low light performance, but with one quarter the standard frame rate, allowing for a total of twelve hours of video to fit onto one DVD. She put all six videos up on her computer screen, and started them playing together — watching as they fast forwarded through the two hours, in just thirty minutes — to give herself an overview of Margaret’s last visit to the Tepes Club.
She saw the taxi drop Margaret in front of the club, just a couple of minutes after she started the videos playing. She saw her enter; go to the bar; circulate through the crowd, sometimes spending some time with one man, or another. She only paid for her first drink herself. All her other drinks were paid for by someone else. At about 12:45 she met a man: tall, well built, clean-shaven with short blond hair. He bought her a couple of drinks, and then they left the club together. Nikki checked the timestamp: 1:13 a.m. Margaret had probably been killed no more than forty-five minutes later.
Heat went back over the videos in slow motion, tracing the man’s movements back from the time he first met Margaret. He had arrived at the club shortly after her, and spent his first half hour prowling around the outside of the main club floor, watching everyone. He reminded Heat of a leopard stalking a herd of zebras: looking for the one he would would separate from the throng, and kill.
Heat went through all the video, looking for the best view of him, and then printed it out, and stuck it up on her whiteboard. She sat back and looked at it for a minute, looking back and forth between it, and the composite drawing from Scotland Yard.
The London Metropolitan Police had used a standard computer program to make their composite. NYPD had the same program. Nikki started it running on her computer, and entered the numeric code that came along with the drawing. The same composite drawing appeared on her computer screen. She eliminated the layers with the moustache, beard stubble, and hair. She flipped quickly through the other hair style selections, finding the one that most closely matched the picture from the video. What she ended up with was a pretty good match. She printed out the new composite, stuck it up beside the British one, and put her picture from the video with them. She was pretty sure that they were all pictures of the same man.
Rook still hadn’t made an appearance when Captain Montrose called Heat and Roach into his office for an update on how the case was progressing. Heat showed him the picture of Margaret Winston leaving the club with the unidentified man, and the two versions of the composite.
“Do you want to release his picture to the media?” asked Captain Montrose.
“Not yet,” said Heat. “This guy has a history of moving between jurisdictions. Telling the press we’re looking for him is most likely just going to spook him: make him change his appearance and move again. I think we should just go with a BOLO to law enforcement, train and bus stations, and the airports. Hopefully someone will spot him.”
The Captain nodded. “Do it. Anything else?”
“I talked to ‘Alucard’s’ lawyer. They’ll be here for a meeting this evening.”
“You didn’t demand to see them sooner?” asked the Captain.
“I tried, but the lawyer insisted that his client wouldn’t be available before six, as he ‘works nights.’ And the lawyer is with Marthar and Fowl.”
“Damn,” said Roach. Every cop in the city hated Marthar and Fowl: the law firm of choice for the well-heeled scum of the earth.
Captain Montrose grimaced. If you didn’t have all your ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed when dealing with a Marthar and Fowl client, you were liable to find your case evaporating, and yourself at the receiving end of a string of reprimands. “Alright, but don’t go too easy on him, just because of his lawyer.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Heat. She knew the Captain would shield her as much as he could from any fallout from Marthar and Fowl. “Any word from the Feds?” She was a little surprised that no one had appeared yet to take over the investigation.
“No,” said Montrose. “They’re being surprisingly quiet for a case involving an international serial killer. Well, let’s not look that gift horse in the mouth. Get back to work.”
“Yes, Sir.” Heat and Roach left the office.
Nikki Heat was not pleased by the sight that greeted her in the bull pen. Rook was there, and he wasn’t alone. The blonde was there too, and she was writing on Heat’s whiteboard.
Rook saw Heat striding toward them and read the expression on her face. He raised his hands. “It wasn’t me! She was here before I was!”
“Who are you? How’d you get in here? Why are you writing on my board?”
She turned to Heat, and smiled. Heat was once again struck by the strange dichotomy of her appearance. At first glance, she could be a teenager, but she gave off an aura of maturity that only came from someone with a great deal of life experience. “Kimberly Spring; through the door; and I thought you’d like to know his real name.” She pointed at what she had written on the board.
She had added “John Dwyer of Cleveland OH” to the column on the Tepes Club.
“You know him?”
“Only by reputation. He’s a blood sucking leech, but hardly the worst of his sort.”
“Why are you here, Ms. Spring?”
“Call me Kim.” She handed over a business card with her name, email address and phone number on it, from something called Guardian Security. The address was in one of Manhattan’s more expensive neighbourhoods, and that’s saying something. “And I’m here to introduce myself, so you don’t waste too much of your time investigating me, when you could be looking for that guy.” She pointed at Heat’s pictures of her prime suspect.
“You’re some sort of P.I.?”
Spring leaned back against the edge of Raley’s desk. “Not exactly. Guardian provides a lot of security related services to our clients. I’m more of a … trouble-shooter.”
Heat looked her up and down. She didn’t look like she could handle much trouble. She was dressed in an expensive business suit, and despite wearing shoes with two inch heels, the top of her head didn’t rise much higher than Heat’s chin. “What’s your interest in this case?”
“One of our clients runs an international student exchange program for especially gifted girls.” Kim pointed to one of the European newspaper stories posted on the board — the one about the French exchange student in Rome. “She was one of their students. Ever since then, we’ve had an interest in seeing to it that this guy gets caught.”
“Why haven’t you come to us before now?”
“And tell you what? Until I heard from one of our European friends that you’d asked for the INTERPOL file, we didn’t even know for sure if we were looking for the same guy, and once you got that, you got pretty much everything I know about him.”
“There’s nothing about the Tepes Club in the INTERPOL file. What’s his connection to that?”
“He likes Goth clubs. It’s where he finds most of his victims. That was my fifth of the night, when you saw me there. How’d you find it, by the way?”
“Police work,” said Heat, not wanting to give away any specifics, though the trail that had led her to the Tepes was easily discernable from the information visible on her whiteboard. She didn’t want to draw Spring’s attention to anything there that she hadn’t already noticed. “You weren’t just in the Tepes by chance. They knew you there.”
Spring glanced at what was written under her picture, and smiled. “I’m also in the pest control business, and, like I said, Dwyer is a blood sucking parasite, but he’s just a mosquito.” She nodded back at the board. “This guy’s a… You know? I can’t think of any animal that wouldn’t be insulted to be compared with him.”
“In other words, a human being,” said Rook.
“What about the girl you chased out of the club?”
“Melody? We went to high school together. She has … issues. She saw me and just assumed that I was there looking for her. I have issues with people who run from me. I just naturally want to chase them. I caught up with her a couple of blocks away, and we had a nice little chat. Caught up on some old times, reminisced about some mutual friends, and then went our separate ways.”
“Who’s your friend?” asked Rook, nodding back at the photograph from the park.
“Alex? She’s my apprentice.”
“Does this apprentice have a full name?” asked Heat.
“Alexandra Bishop. Same address as me,” she added before Heat could ask. “I think that covers everything you need to know about us.” She got up and started toward the elevators.
Heat followed behind her, with Rook tagging along behind. “Just a minute, Ms. Spring.”
Spring didn’t stop. She looked back over her shoulder. “I told you, call me ‘Kim’, and I’ve got places to be. I just dropped by to introduce myself.”
“We weren’t finished,” said Heat.
“You might not be finished, but I am.” Spring pushed the button to call the elevator, and turned back to Heat. “Oh, Detective, be careful of Dwyer. He can be dangerous.” The elevator doors opened, and she stepped inside.
“I thought you said he was just a parasite,” said Heat.
Spring pressed the button for the ground floor. “Oh, he is, but do you know what the deadliest animal on the planet is?”
The elevator doors closed on her smile before Heat could give any sort of response. She gave Rook a questioning look.
“The mosquito,” said Rook. “Kills far more people every year than anything else.”
Back in the bull pen, Heat assigned Detective Raley — their self styled ‘video czar’ — to making a more detailed examination of video from the club, to see if he could pull any clues from it.
Heat’s research on John Dwyer hadn’t turned up any history of arrests. He had run a series of clubs in the Cleveland area over a period between 1995, and 2000, and then had dropped out of sight for a few years before surfacing again as “Jean Dupuis.” Most of his clubs in Cleveland had been run by the same sort of networks of corporations as the Tepes Club, and had gone bankrupt after operating for a year or two. Heat suspected that if she put some forensic accountants onto their books, she’d find that the reason they’d gone bankrupt was that Dwyer was siphoning off money into his own pockets. She considered forwarding the information on him to bunko, for them to have a closer look, but she dismissed the idea. She doubted if his business model had anything to do with her case, and if he was using Marthar and Fowl as his lawyers, everything was probably technically legal, anyway.
He arrived at the precinct at a little after seven o’clock, accompanied by his lawyer. The lawyer was a smarmy little man who introduced himself as Lucas Munro. He reminded Heat of a Martin Short character from an old SNL skit: a lawyer who denied everything, including what he had just said ten seconds earlier.
She accompanied Dwyer and his lawyer into one of their nicer interrogation rooms: one used to interview victims, not suspects. It had comfortable chairs, and though it did have an observation window, it was semi-concealed behind some half closed venetian blinds.
She wasn’t planning on letting Dwyer know that she knew his real name at the top of the interview. “Mr. Dupuis, Mr. Munro, thank you for coming.”
“I’m always happy to assist the police, Detective Heat,” said Dwyer, still using his Dupuis accent. “And before you ask, I have some more of our surveillance video for you, covering the … altercation that you witnessed last night.” He nodded to his lawyer.
Mr. Munro opened his briefcase, and removed a DVD from it. “I would like to remind you that my client is under no obligation to supply you with this video, and it is being handed over now as an example of his willingness to cooperate with your investigation.”
“Can you tell me anything about the three women?” asked Heat. “The one who ran, or the two who chased her?”
“No, not really,” said Dwyer.
“Your bartender told me that one of them was one of your ‘special guests’.”
The lawyer leaned over and whispered something into Dwyer’s ear.
Dwyer nodded, and he whispered some more. Eventually the lawyer leaned back. “My guests value their anonymity, even from me,” said Dwyer. “The young lady is most attractive, that is her primary qualification for admittance. She uses the name ‘Rhapsody,’ but I am certain that is a pseudonym. I don’t know much of anything else about her.”
“What about the other two?” asked Heat. “You made a rather abrupt exit, just as they arrived.”
“Just a coincidence, I assure you,” said Dwyer. “I was so engaged in observing you, that I forgot about an appointment. I was nearly late for it.”
“Uh-huh,” said Heat, not believing a word of it. Instead of continuing with that line of questioning, which she didn’t expect to go anywhere, she placed a picture of their suspect that was clearly taken in his club on the table in front of Dwyer. “Do you know this man?”
Dwyer made a show of looking carefully at the picture, before he shook his head, an slid the picture back across the table to her. “No, can’t say that I do. My club has had thousands of patrons, since it opened. You can’t expect me to recognize every one of them.”
Heat placed a second picture — this time showing a profile of their suspect with Margaret Winston — on the table. “Are you sure about that? Maybe you saw him from a different angle.”
Once again, Dwyer made a show of carefully considering the picture. “Still ‘no’ Detective. Is there anything else? I would like to get back to my club, before it gets too busy.”
Heat stood up. “No, Mr. Dwyer, that will be all, for now. Thank you for coming in.”
Dwyer didn’t seem to be the least bit surprised that Heat knew his real name. “Thank you, Detective.” He had dropped the French accent for a generic north-eastern American accent. Heat wondered if this one was put on as well. “This has been one of my more enjoyable police interviews.”
Heat escorted Dwyer and his lawyer back to the elevators, and said goodbye to them there. After the doors closed, she wondered if she had time to go to the locker room, for a quick shower. Something about Dwyer and his lawyer left her feeling even more unclean than dealing with suspects and their shysters usually did.
She didn’t have time, so instead she went to give Raley the DVD of last night’s activity at the club.
Rales was sitting at his computer, with surveillance video from ATMs on his screen. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
“I noticed from the club video that our suspect had a pretty big wad of cash on him, that he used to pay for his drinks. I thought maybe he might have gotten it from an ATM close to the club before going in.”
Heat knew that that was a long shot, but it was often the long shots that closed cases. It didn’t need a detective with Raley’s talents to do the job, though. “Pass that off to someone else. I’ve got some more video from the club for you. It covers the time that Rook and I were there last night, and should include Spring and her friends. I want to see what ‘Melody’ or ‘Rhapsody’ or whatever her name is looks like. I’d also like to know how they got out of that alley so fast.”
Raley was at Heat’s desk ten minutes later. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“Believe what?”
Raley leaned over her shoulder, to reach her computer mouse. “I put a clip up on the servier.” He clicked a few times, and brought up a video clip showing the rear door and alley behind the Tepes Club. Rook shifted his chair around so he could see the screen as well.
The door opened so fast that it was closed in one frame, and a blur in the next, with the blurred image of a woman coming out of it. Over the next couple of seconds two more blurred women came running out the door, chasing after the first one. They became smears across the image as they accelerated down the alley, and around the corner at the end of it. A few seconds later Heat came out the door. She was moving fast enough that she was a little blurred too, until she stopped to look both ways, but not nearly as much as the women had been.
“Now, the lighting is pretty dim in that alley, so the camera’s using a long exposure time, but those girls had to be running insanely fast to get that much motion blur,” said Raley. “I’d need to go down there with a tape measure to be sure, but by my rough estimate, they were doing over twenty miles an hour by the time they left camera range.”
“That’s Usain Bolt kinda speed,” said Rook. “Why aren’t these girls on the Olympic track team?”
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