10

The only vista the Bay Vista Hotel enjoyed was a slantwise glimpse of the Embarcadero, a frontal view of the warehouse across the street and the elevated traffic of I-80 north beyond that. In the lobby, sagging easy chairs held down a threadbare carpet. A blowsy woman behind the desk divided her attention between a paperback romance and the hystrionics of game show contestants on a small TV at one end of the counter.

Harry flipped open his badge case. "What's Count Dracula's room number?"

"Cute," the woman said without looking up. She turned a page. "I suppose you want Frankenstein's room number, too?"

Harry frowned. "There is a man registered here who calls himself Count Dracula. Thin, pale, fake Balkan accent. Wears a black cape."

"Oh, sure."

Fowler said, "Do you have a guest named Alucard?"

Of course. You should have thought of that, Mikaelian. Especially after taping and watching every vampire movie that showed on the channels Baumen received.

The desk clerk rolled her eyes. "That wierdo. Three-oh-six, and if he complains about his room not being made up today, tell him the maid only goes through once and he opens up then or the room don't get done."

With a wink at Harry, Girimonte said in a flat, Dragnet-style voice, "Yes, ma'am; we'll tell him."

The narrow stairs creaked a every step. Ribbed rubber glued to the treads flapped loose on several, threatening to trip the unwary climber.

"Fowler," Harry asked back over his shoulder, "where did he come up with the name Alucard, and how did you know about it?"

From behind Garreth the writer said, "Elementary, my dear sergeant, at least to a fan of old horror movies. Alucard—Dracula spelled backward—is an alias used by Lon Chaney's Dracula, so I thought it likely our Count would copy him."

"As he says: elementary, old chap," Girimonte murmured.

They reached the third floor. Harry rapped on the door of 306. "Count, it's the police. Sorry to disturb you but we need to talk to you."

No one came to the door.

After a minute Harry knocked again, harder. "Count?"

No one moved in the room as far as Garreth could tell.

"Count Dracula!" Harry shouted. He pounded the door with a doubled fist. "Open this door!"

"I doubt he'll answer," Fowler said. "Vampires don't move around by daylight, after all."

Girimonte said grimly, "This one will. I'm not coming back at night just to satisfy a fag's idiosyncracies." She hammered on the door hard enough that the numbers shivered. "You! Cupcake! We don't have time to play games. Now open the fucking door!"

Still no response.

"Let me try," Garreth said. He moved up to the door. "Count, it is possible for you to move around in daylight. Dracula does sometimes in Bram Stoker's book, and Louis Jourdan did in the PBS production of Dracula. It's a beautiful day out, too . . . raining. There's no sun shining at all."

Harry and Girimonte leaned on each other, choking with laughter. The corners of Fowler's mouth twitched.

The Count, however, remained silent.

Garreth leaned his forehead against the door. "Count, will you please—"

The plea died abruptly in his throat, strangled by a terrible realization: a hotel room, though just a room, became a dwelling for the person in it, yet he felt nothing touching this door, not a flicker of barrier flames. A distinctive odor seeped through the door, too, the same one which had filled Holle's room. "Shit. Harry, get the pass key."

They gaped at him. "What?"

"The pass key! He's dead in there!"

Still they stared. "Dead? How . . ."

"I can smell him!"

Girimonte took off for the stairs like a deer.

Garreth slammed the wall with the side of his fist. Another one. He tried to tell himself that this death might have nothing to do with the others. Considering the Bay Vista's usual clientele, he could have been killed by someone ripping off the room.

When Girimonte came pounding back up the stairs with the key a few minutes later to unlock the door, all possibility of that scenario evaporated. The Count lay stretched on his back on the bed as though in state, dressed in a tuxedo, hands folded across his chest . . . but blood dried to dirty brown covered the pleated shirt and out of the middle of it protruded a shaft of wood.

"Good lord," Fowler said hoarsely.

The dead man's head twisted grotesquely to the side, but his expression of terror and pain—eyes popping, mouth stretched open in a soundless shriek, hands frozen into claws—testified that his neck had not been broken until after he had suffered the agony of the stake being pounded into his chest. Like Holle, his hair lay clumped in points on his forehead. The crossed wrists bore abraided grooves where he had fought bonds, grooves like those on Hope's wrists. More abrasions from mouth to ears indicated he had been gagged, too.

Dried blood also covered a pillow on the floor, especially around a hole in the middle of the pillow.

Fury boiled up through Garreth. The dead man's final screams had sunk unheard into his gag, but they must have echoed and reechoed endlessly in his head as the killer laid the pillow over the victim's chest to absorb any splattering blood and pounded in the stake through it. Garreth's head rang with those screams. Lane and Irina, blood mother and daughter indeed. They shared the same taste for inflicting wanton pain. This little man had harmed no one with his fantasy. He certainly did not deserve a death like this. I'm going to find her, Count, just as 1 found Lane. That I promise you.

"The stake's been made from a chair rung," Harry said.

He pointed to a wooden desk chair with a rung missing from between its front legs. Curls of wood from sharpening the rung to a point littered the desk top.

Girimonte disappeared into the bathroom. "The washbowl has the plug in and there's a little water still standing in it. Looks like he got the same treatment Holle did."

"But much earlier." Harry sniffed. "Maybe yesterday."

Girimonte eyed Garreth from the bathroom doorway. "Where were you yesterday, Mikaelian?"

Garreth's breath caught.

"You know where he was!" Harry snapped. "I found him at home in bed asleep."

"At three o'clock in the afternoon, yes. What about before then?" She raised her brows. "We have hours unaccounted for between the time you left for work and went home after Mikaelian. Maybe he didn't answer the phone not because he sleeps so soundly, but because he wasn't there."

"Van, don't start that again!"

"Harry, why don't you stop burying your head?" Girimonte ticked off points on her fingers. "He fights with a hustler he claims had information about a killer he has very personal reasons for wanting to find, and the hustler dies. Later that day the hustler's roommate is killed, too, with signs of having been tortured, possibly in an effort to gain information. That afternoon someone else connected to our lady killer has words with him and today he turns up dead. Also tortured. And this bloodbath started the day after he arrived in town."

"Oh, come now," Fowler began.

"This is ridiculous," Garreth said. He intended the statement to be calmly firm, but it emerged with the sharp edges of fear and disbelief he felt. How could anyone seriously think he— "I want to collar Lane so desperately that I commit murder myself? Three innocent civilians? Come on!"

Girimonte pulled one of her elegant cigars from her breast pocket and lit it. "You come on, Mikaelian. You're dirty. You know a lot more about this case than you're telling anyone. I can smell it."

She was the kind who, believing something, would dig until she got what she was after. He could not afford to have her digging; it would turn up more than she counted on, more than he wanted anyone to know. "Harry, you know me. Straighten her out."

Harry sighed heavily. "A year and a half ago I'd have said I knew you. Now you've changed, Mik-san. I can't guess what you're thinking or feeling anymore. And I can't help feeling that Van's right about one thing . . . killer or not, you do know more than you're telling." The almond eyes slid away from Garreth, dark with unhappiness and profound unease.