“About that... having people delivered like pizzas. Why would you do that?”
“I realize it must seem a little foolish. Kidnapping humans is so much more complicated than killing them, as I suspect you may have figured out for yourself over the years. Unfortunately, keeping them on hand was necessary at times.”
“And you used someone like Yavorsky to get them?”
“Who else would I use? People who market in young girls aren’t driven by ethical principles. It was risky, I admit. I did my own procuring, as much as I could. That’s what I was doing in Tahoe when I ran into Mio, looking for a body to snatch.”
We both seemed to be dancing around the obvious question. “Why would you need to keep them on hand?”
“I needed their blood for something other than drinking.”
“You didn’t drink their blood?” I asked, genuinely curious where this was headed.
“Well, I drank a little, on occasion. A sip now and then. But I needed it for something else. Which brings me to the other reason for paying you a visit.” Calvin stretched his legs and settled himself more comfortably into the sofa cushions. “A while back, in the early part of the twentieth century, I started looking into the possibility of a cure for our intolerance to sunlight. Initially, my efforts were rather farcical, as you might imagine. Given the state of medical science at the time, not to mention my own complete ignorance of biochemistry, the chances of success weren’t very good. I’m sure you’d get a kick out of some of the harebrained concoctions I came up with. You’ve probably seen some of those old film clips of man’s early attempts to build flying machines—you know, men jumping off cliffs with goofy mechanical bird wings strapped to their arms, that sort of thing. My early efforts were more or less comparable. The only reason I survived my experiments was because my vampire metabolism was impregnable to my own half-baked determination to poison myself.
“I’d pretty much given up after a few decades of using myself as a lab rat. Then, in the fifties, Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA and I began to think maybe a cure wasn’t so far-fetched. I spent a few years getting myself up to speed in the related sciences. But as the decades passed, the more I learned, the more difficult it became to pursue research in the directions that seemed the most promising.”
“Facilities?”
“Among other things. There is a serious technology barrier. The tools get harder and harder to procure. The laboratories are in a constant state of technological evolution. Much of the research consists of inventing and developing the research tools, themselves. Everything tends to be shrouded behind patents. And even if you have access to the equipment, it’s so expensive, you need a mountain of venture capital to afford it.”
“I can see where being a vampire might not encourage investors,” I said.
“Indeed. But being a vampire isn’t the real problem. Seventy or eighty years ago, my research consisted mainly of concocting ingestible or injectable chemical compounds. My efforts may have been poorly understood and misguided, but they weren’t incommensurate with the scientific procedures of their day. But as biology progressed deeper and deeper into molecular-level mysteries, and as the various specialized disciplines branched and multiplied, it became more and more difficult for me to keep pace. My so-called research inevitably grew more and more fanciful. Eventually I had to accept the fact that I was a dilettante, at best, dabbling in something that was way beyond me.”
“But you’ve continued to dabble?”
“Yes, but that’s all it is. All it has been for quite a few years, now. Just a hobby.”
“So the people you were keeping at your house,” I asked, for some reason wanting to have it spelled out. “Their blood was for your hobby?”
Calvin only looked at me, as if the answer to my question was obvious enough not to require an actual response.
“And you haven’t made any progress?” I asked.
“Nothing substantial, I’m afraid. A few ideas that might be worth looking into. But I’ve gone as far as I can on my resources.”
“But you think a cure is still worth pursuing?”
“I really don’t know. I’m not convinced it isn’t.”
Calvin leaned his head back against the sofa cushion and closed his eyes. I was thinking about what he’d told me when it dawned on me why he was there. “Mio’s financial resources,” I said.
Calvin smiled and then opened his eyes. “Mio is preposterously wealthy, plus she owns a controlling interest in several companies that are already invested in biological and genetic research. She could easily incorporate my work into existing programs.”
"I don’t get it. Why not talk to Mio yourself?”
“I would have when we met at Tahoe. But she was too busy making sure I wasn’t going to bother you. So I dropped it. Then you showed up at my house in Pollock Pines and... well, put a bug in the program.”
Calvin said this as if the consequences of what had happened were of no real concern to him, but the girl’s escape had clearly been a potential problem.
“The truth is,” he continued, “I’m not worried about it. In fact, I’m half glad things turned out this way. I’ve been putting something off, something that requires my attention elsewhere. Your visit was just the little nudge I needed.” As Calvin said this, he took a CD jewel case out of his shirt pocket. “I’d like you to give this to Mio,” he said, laying it on the sofa cushion. “As I said, I’ve pretty much hit the limit of what I can accomplish on my own. The DVD is all my notes, everything that might possibly be useful, should Mio be interested in continuing my research.”
Calvin leaned back and closed his eyes again. The dissonance between the idea of Calvin that I had retained for so long, and the thoughtfully
