a single sheet of paper lying on the table.
“Lieutenant, you remember Daphne Beauchamp? She’s our head archivist now, runs the morgue. And this is George Rodriguez, our head of security.”
Taylor did remember Daphne, with her funky glasses and her quiet strength. She’d been an intern in the archives when they’d first met, peripheral to a case. Her roommate had been kidnapped and held by the Snow White Killer, had barely escaped with her life. She was also quietly dating Marcus Wade, but Taylor knew they were keeping the seriousness of their relationship under wraps from both their employers.
“Daphne, good to see you again. Have you heard from Jane Macias recently?”
“You don’t read the New York Times, do you, Lieutenant? Jane’s making a name for herself as an investigative journalist. She’s halfway to a Pulitzer by now. Detective McKenzie.” She shook his hand gravely. “I found the letter this morning when I came in. It was on the floor near the back door, the Porter Street entrance.”
Daphne had grown up a bit, the last vestiges of college coed replaced by a calm assurance. Close contact with violent crime did that to a person.
Taylor turned to the head of security, a short, stocky Hispanic man with eyes as black as jet. “Mr. Rodriguez. I’m Lieutenant Jackson. This is Detective Renn McKenzie. Perhaps you could pull the security tapes from the back lobby for us, see if we can identify who might have dropped the letter off.”
“Call me George. I’ve already got them queued, but I can’t see anything amiss. There’s the usual mishmash of people coming in and out of that back entrance. The camera faces the street, and I didn’t see anyone out of place. It’s entirely possible someone ducked under the camera and slipped it through the door.”
“Isn’t there security at that entrance?”
“There’s a security booth, yes. But it was unmanned. Cutbacks, you know.”
“We’ll look at it more closely. Thanks for getting things set for us.” Taylor pulled a set of nitrile gloves out of her jacket pocket, snapped them on. “This is the letter?”
Greenleaf nodded. “Yes. I knew you needed to see it. I trust you’ll let us print this. I have a right to tell this story.”
She ignored the last question. “Who all’s touched it?”
“Security, Daphne, my assistant, too. It was addressed to me, so Daphne dropped it after she came in. My assistant opened it, saw what it was and set it on her desk. After that, no one. We used another sheet of paper to bring it in here for you.”
“Okay. I’ve got a crime-scene tech on his way over. He’ll need to take fingerprints for exclusion. Thanks for being so cautious-that helps.” She only had one more glove in her pocket-it was time to stock up. She handed it to McKenzie, then stepped closer.
The letter was typed, on regular white paper. What she read took her breath away.
October 31, 2010
The Tennessean David Greenleaf, Editor 1100 Broadway Nashville, Tennessee 37203
Dear Mr. Greenleaf,
You can’t possibly begin to understand the impetus of this letter, so we would advise against trying. We’re sure that you will feel that our actions, while difficult, were purely motivated and absolutely justified.
We are responsible for the murders. We are not sorry, they were horrible people who needed to be cleansed from this earth. We need to tell you why we came to this decision. Why we felt compelled to end their suffering. We have found the one true path. We had to show them the way. They hurt us. Over and over and over, they hurt us, and humiliated us.
We sought only to release them from their dreary existence, to lead them unknowing out of their cave and school them in the bright, harsh light of the world’s realities, showing the underlying truth to their very existence. We are goodness and light, temperance and justice, sophists, skeptics, purveyors of platonic love. Ideal beauty and absolute goodness. We are truth. We are their deliverance. We are the sun, essential to the creation and sustaining life of their world. We guide the archangel into their corporeal bodies, fight to pilot their souls to the radiance, where together, as one, we can achieve the ultimate bliss.
But words are not enough to satisfy our meaning. The best way to explain ourselves is through the medium of film. We have included a Web site address which has a movie of yesterday’s events. We would greatly appreciate you sharing this with your staff and helping us place it in the hands of a producer who can bring it to the big screen.
The Immortals
Blood is intensity; it is all I can give you. http://www.youtube.wearetheimmortals.com
The row of symbols was smeared, the edges ragged, the ink suspiciously crackly and imperfect, ranging from dark pink to deepest burgundy.
“Son of a bitch. Is that blood?” Taylor asked.
McKenzie stooped over the letter, looking closely. “Looks like it. Tim will have to do a presumptive test.”
“What’s the black underneath?”
“There are words handwritten under the symbols.” “Can you make it out?”
“I think so.” He picked up the letter, moving it back and forth in the light. “It looks like it reads, ‘Blood is intensity, it is all I can give you.’”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He met her eyes. “I have no idea.”
She turned to Greenleaf. “We need a computer. I want to see this ‘movie’ they’re talking about. Have you watched it?”
“Just the beginning. I…I couldn’t go any further.”
Greenleaf blanched, and she felt the dread building in her stomach.
It only took Greenleaf a few minutes to get them ready-he’d been anticipating their desire to see the Web site immediately. Daphne had a laptop already tied into the high-definition screen that was used for presentations. She dimmed the lights a bit, apologizing-the screen showed up better in the dark.
Taylor shook her head. What now?
She could see that the video lasted twenty minutes, and didn’t want to imagine what might be contained in that time period.
The film began in darkness, a pinpoint of light in the center growing larger and larger until they could clearly see it was a full moon. A deep voice narrated, one that sounded familiar, but Taylor couldn’t place it. The words were a jumble, overwrought with purple prose, but their message was clear. The vampires were recreating their race from the nonbelievers. It reminded Taylor of any number of ads for horror films she’d seen over the years-films she would never, ever watch. She lived horror every day, had her own nightmares. She certainly didn’t need someone else’s twisted imagination inside her own head.
The narration ceased, silence crowding through the speakers. The distinct sounds of footsteps grew louder as the shot came into focus. She recognized the scene-it was filmed from the front lawn of the Kings’ house.
“Fast-forward,” she said.
“It will take a minute. The upload isn’t done yet.” Daphne fiddled with the controls, tried sliding the play bar forward, but it wouldn’t move. “We just have to wait for it to load all the way.”
It didn’t take long. The next scene flashed up, and Taylor leaned forward in her chair. It was a long shot of the hall leading to Jerrold King’s bedroom. Taylor sucked in her breath as a hand appeared in the frame, pushing open the boy’s bedroom door. King’s body was spread-eagled on the bed, naked. The camera never panned to his face, just showed the long shot, then his torso. He appeared dead.
The disembodied hand disappeared, then came back into the frame with a long, wicked, gleaming knife. Taylor forced herself to watch as the knife got closer to Jerrold’s body, and the tip pierced the boy’s flesh, loving, gentle, then whipped into slashes and circles, the pentacle appearing in a blur of motion. The wound oozed, but didn’t bleed freely-Jerrold was newly dead, but dead for all that.
The scene cut to an open mouth. A high-pitched laugh, disembodied and androgynous, filled the frame. The camera pulled back slightly, enough to allow a vision to appear, a specter in black, unidentifiable but with black hair. The camera zoomed onto its chin, then did a close-up on the mouth, black-stained lips drawn back in a grin, as
