Blood Hunt

apartments. For now, he better check in with Harry before his partner put out an APB on him.

7

He missed Harry at the Westin and arrived back in Homicide to find Harry starting reports. After a rundown of Garreth’s day, he sighed. “So we both came up empty.”

“Except for identifying our bodega gunman and the odd results of the autopsy.” Garreth rolled a report form into his typewriter. “Did I miss anything interesting at the Moscone?”

“Just Susan Pegans fainting dead away when we told her about Mossman…and here I thought women swooning went out with whalebone corsets. No one I talked to, conventioneers or other exhibitors around Kitco’s booth, saw him last night or knew where he was going.”

Garreth began his report. “Find anything useful in his room?”

“Nothing telling us where he went. He had clothes, a couple of paperbacks, a return plane ticket to Denver. He left his exhibitor’s badge…and did go out light, like Verneau said. Personal keys, several other credit cards, two hundred in cash, and another two hundred in traveler’s checks were under a false bottom of his shaving kit. No billfold, so he must have had that on him when he was killed. He made two calls, one Monday and one last night, both a little after seven in the evening and both to his home phone in Denver.”

“Tomorrow why don’t I check the cab companies to see if one of them took a fare of Mossman’s description anywhere last night?”

“Do that.”

Garreth remembered then that he needed to talk to the lieutenant. He knocked on Serruto’s door. “Got a minute?”

“If it’s about the warrant on O’Hare, we have it. There’s an APB out on him, too.”

“I’d like to stake out his mother’s and girlfriend’s apartments. He’s bound to get in touch with one or the other.”

Serruto leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t we see if the APB and your street contacts locate him first? Two stakeouts use a lot of men.” He did not say it, but Garreth heard, nonetheless: We can’t spend that much manpower on one small-time crook.

Garreth nodded, sighing inwardly — all were not equal in the eyes of the law — and went back to his typewriter.

An hour later he and Harry checked out for the night.

8

Garreth always liked going home with Harry. The house had the same atmosphere Marti gave their apartment, a sense of sanctuary. The job ended at the door. Inside, he and Harry became ordinary men. Where Marti had urged him to talk, however, Lien bled away tensions with diversion and serenity. A judicious scattering of Oriental objects among the house’s contemporary furnishings reflected the culture of her Taiwanese childhood and Harry’s Japanese grandparents. The paintings on the walls, mostly Lien’s and including examples of her commercial artwork, reflected Oriental tradition and moods.

Lien stared at them in disbelief. “Home before dark? How did you do it?”

Harry lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “We went over the wall. If someone calls, you haven’t seen us.” He kissed her with a great show of passion. “What’s for supper? I’m starved.”

“Not lately.” She patted his stomach fondly. “Both of you sit down; I’ll bring tea.”

Strong and laced with rum…an example of what Garreth considered a happy blend of West and East. Between sips of tea, he pulled off his shoes and tie. One by one his nerves loosened. These days, he reflected, Harry’s house felt more like home than his own apartment did.

During dinner Lien monopolized the conversation, heading off shop talk with anecdotes from her own day. She brushed by the frustrations of finishing drawings for a fashion spread in Sunday’s Chronicle to talk about the art appreciation classes she taught at various grade schools in the afternoons. Garreth listened bemused. Her kids came from a different world than he saw everyday. Free of drugs, well fed and cared for, bright-eyed with promise. Sometimes he wondered if she deliberately told only cheerful stories. Not that he objected; he liked hearing about a pleasant world populated by happy, friendly people.

Not that he regretted becoming a cop, either. Just…sometimes he wondered what he might be doing now, what kind of world he would live in, if he had finished college…if he had been good enough to win a football scholarship like his older brother Shane, if he and Judith had not married so young, if she had not gotten pregnant his sophomore year and had to stop working, leaving them with no money to continue school.

Or would things have been any different? He always wanted to be like his father. He loved visiting the station and sometimes riding along in his father’s patrol car, learning how to handle a nightstick, going to the firing range. While Shane had been starring in backyard scrimmages and Little League football, Garreth played cops and robbers. Police work seemed a natural choice when he had to go to work.

After dinner, helping Lien with the dishes, he asked, “Do you believe people really have free choice, or are they pushed in inevitable directions by social conditioning?”

She smiled at him. “Of course they have choices. Background may limit or influence, but the choices are still there.”

He considered that. “Consulting I Ching isn’t a contradiction of that?”

“Certainly not. If anything, the Sage supports the idea that people have control over their futures. He merely advises of the possibilities.” She looked up in concern. “What’s the matter? Are the dreadful broody what-ifs chewing at you?”

He smiled at her understanding. “Sort of.”

Maybe what really chewed on him was Mossman, who had lost all choice. He worked at keeping emotional distance from murder victims without becoming indifferent to the crime. Otherwise, he knew, he could screw up his head and burn out. Mossman and his peculiar bruise, though, haunted him…maybe because of the bruise, whose twin case eluded him? It lurked in the back of his mind the rest of the evening, even through the excitement of watching the Giants win a 1–0 squeaker. He stared at the TV screen with Harry, trying to pull the case out of his memory and asking himself who would stick two needles into someone’s jugular and drain out all his blood. It sounded like something from a horror movie.

Garreth had no particular desire to go home to his empty apartment, so after leaving Harry and Lien, he drove back to the Hall of Justice. He sat in the near-empty office doodling on a blank sheet of paper and letting his mind wander. Bruise…punctures…blood loss. He recalled a photograph of a man in a bathtub, arm trailing down over the side to the floor. A voice said, “Welcome to Homicide, Mikaelian.”

He sat bolt upright. Earl Fay’s voice! It had been Faye and Centrello’s case. Faye had told Garreth — new to the detail then — all about it in elaborate, gory detail.

Garreth scrambled for the file drawers. Everything came back to him now. The date was late October two years ago, just about Halloween, one of the factors which fascinated Faye, he remembered.

“Maybe it was a cult of some kind. They needed the blood for their rituals.”

Methodically, Garreth searched. The file should still be here. The case remained open, unsolved. And there it was…in a bottom drawer.

Seated cross-legged on the floor, Garreth opened the murder book. Cleveland Morris Adair, an Atlanta businessman, had been found dead, wrists slashed, in the bathtub of his suite at the Mark Hopkins on October 29, 1981. The death seemed like suicide until the autopsy revealed two puncture wounds in the middle of a bruise on the neck, and although Adair bled to death, his wrists had been slashed postmortem by someone applying a great deal of pressure. That someone had also broken Adair’s neck. Stomach contents showed a high concentration of alcohol. The red coloring of the bathwater proved to be nothing more than grenadine from the bar in his suite.