Blood Hunt

It had been stripped clean! The furniture remained, but the paintings, the sculpture, the books and objects on the shelves had all gone.

Garreth ran for the bedroom and jerked open the closet. Her clothes still hung inside. In the kitchen he found the few items in the cupboards untouched, too.

Back in the living room he stared around him. When had she come back? Sometime since yesterday morning, obviously. She had come back and taken the items important to her. How did she know the apartment was not being watched?

Perhaps because she herself had been watching?

He sat down at the desk, swearing. She must never have left the city. What had she done, checked into one of the cheap residence hotels in the Tenderloin in some kind of disguise? With her height, she could even pass as a man. She had stayed, even with the whole police force looking for her, and watched, and when it was safe, coolly retrieved her belongings.

What was it her agent had said? All ice and steel inside. Yeah!

A shiver moved down his spine. The maiden is powerful. Beware of such a maiden. Made of ice and steel and with over forty years head start on him in vampirism and living experience, did he really stand a chance of finding her? What might she do if she suspected he was after her?

Then he shook his head. Personal danger should be the least of his worries. His life was already gone. All she could take away from him now was existence. On the other hand, she had the capacity to harm a great many more people if allowed to continue unchecked.

So…he must keep going.

He needed a direction, though. Any help he might have gained from her belongings had disappeared. He had to proceed on what he already knew. What did he know?

The writing paper still remained in the desk. He took out a sheet and itemized his knowledge. She came, probably, from a Germanic background. She sometimes used Germanic names. She spoke a German and Russian combination.

He made a note to find out through one of the local universities the location of German and Russian groups near each other in the United States around World War I when she was born.

Could any of her belongings regionalize her? Too bad he did not know rocks well enough to describe those in the type tray to a geologist. If all of them were childhood “treasures” as other objects in the tray seemed to suggest, and if two or more came from a single geographic area, it might have been a lead. All he remembered, though, was the black shark tooth. Was that something he could use?

The apartment had given him as much as it was ever going to. He left, checking out the window beside the door to make sure the street was clear before passing through to the porch, then drove down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

A few of the shops in the area remained open, catching late tourist trade. He wandered into one. “Do you have shark teeth?” he asked the girl behind the counter.

She took him to a section where the wall displayed small circles of jawbone lined with rows of wicked teeth.

He studied the teeth. They looked the same shape as the teeth he had seen, but were all white, not black.

“Do you have any black shark teeth?”

She blinked. “Black? I’ve never seen black ones before.”

He tried a similar shop farther down the pier with the same result. Neither the two clerks nor a customer there had never seen or heard of black shark teeth, either. The time had come, he decided, to seek expert advice. In the morning he would call one of the universities and ask them where black shark teeth came from.

Morning. He chafed at that. Why did it always have to be during the day when he could accomplish anything? He crossed Jefferson and began wandering through the arcades of the Cannery, peering into its shop windows fuming in impatience. Nothing was open when he felt most like working. Lane had taken convenience from him, too.

Then, in the window of a jewelry shop, he saw them…earrings hanging on a T-shaped plastic stand, hooped for pierced ears, with small black teeth dangling from them! The shop sign said Closed, but the lights remained on and a man moved along a counter inside. Garreth rapped on the window.

The man turned and pointed at the sign in the window stating business hours.

“I just want to ask where the shark teeth earrings come from,” Garreth called, automatically reaching into his jacket pocket before remembering he had no badge there.

The man stared tensely until Garreth’s hand came out of the pocket empty, then: I’m closed, he mouthed. Come back tomorrow.

“I just want to know where those earrings come from!”

But the man shook his head and walked into a back room. Moments later all the lights except the security lights went out.

Garreth debated what he might accomplish passing through the door and following the man, other than frightening him…and maybe tripping an alarm the man also set from the back room. Better not risk that.

He leaned his forehead against the window, straining to read the card under the earrings. Without luck. Letters upside-down and backward he could work out, but not print that size from this distance.

Standing there, he tasted life without the badge…no authority, no leverage. And realized how alone he stood against his quarry. The maiden is powerful. He shivered in a chill blowing down his unprotected back.

7

The TV morning news warned citizens to drive cautiously. Fog had rolled in overnight and blanketed the entire city so heavily that it lay in a dim, shadowless twilight. Foghorns sounded from Mile Rocks east to Fleming Point and from Point San Pablo south to Hunters Point. Garreth reveled in it. Daylight remained above it, weighting and weakening him, but not as heavily. He felt almost comfortable on the sofa, feet on the coffee table, dialing the number of the biology department at the University of San Francisco.

“My name is Garreth Mikaelian. I need to talk to someone who can tell me where certain kinds of shark teeth are found.”

He would have thought that was a simple request, but the phone went on hold for what seemed an eternity before a reedy male voice said, “This is Dr. Edmund Faith. You’re the gentleman who needs to know where to find certain breeds of sharks?”

“No, I need to know where their teeth are found. The other day I cane across a black shark tooth in a shop on Fisherman’s Wharf and I’d to find another and have a pair of earrings made for my wife’s birthday. However, the girl in the shop had no idea where the tooth came from and neither did anyone else I asked.”

“A black shark’s tooth?”

“Yes. What part of the world do they come from?”

“A black one would be a fossil. You need to talk to a paleontologist.”

Par for the course. How many investigative lines had he followed that went just like this. “Can you suggest someone, please?”

“Try Dr. Henry Ilford.” He gave Garreth a phone number.

Garreth jotted the number down, and dialed the new number.

Dr. Ilford, a secretary informed Garreth, was out. Please leave a number.

Garreth remembered from his brief college days how difficult it could be finding a particular professor when one needed him. “Might I talk to a grad student, then.”

“I’ll see if any are in their office.”

The phone went on hold again. Garreth drummed his fingers. As much as he preferred phoning to running around in daylight, perhaps he should have driven to the campus. On hold he found it too easy to imagine the