“Do we know why?”
“Not yet.”
Martyn grunted. “You’d better get back across the road. I’ll contact Stephan and see if we can dig up anything more on Kazdan’s recent movements.”
To Gabriel’s way of thinking, it was more important to find out what was so special about this woman that
a man like Kazdan, who was reportedly a general in Sethanon’s organization, was forfeited in an effort to try and recruit her. But he said nothing, merely nodded and left Martyn to the shadows.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘SUSPENDED until further notice’?” Sam stared at the captain in disbelief.
He sighed wearily and spoke more slowly, as if she were a child with minimal comprehension—which, after twenty-two hours without sleep, was a little too close to the truth.
“You shot your partner, Ryan. Blew his brains out. There has to be an investigation, and you’re suspended until it’s finished.”
“Did I mention the fact that he’d become a vampire?”
“Several times,” the captain replied heavily. “Vampires have rights, same as the next person.”
She sighed and rubbed her forehead wearily. Somewhere in the last few hours, her head had begun to ache, and that ache was getting steadily worse. But she knew better than to ask for some painkillers. There were no such things as rights or fair treatment for a cop suspected of foul deeds. She was lucky they’d fixed her ankle before they realized she was the one who’d pulled the trigger on Jack.
“Did I mention he was trying to kill me?”
“Ryan, you blew a hole in his thigh, then shot his friggin’ head off. That’s more than self-defense.”
She shuddered and tried to ignore the bloody images his words brought to mind. He really didn’t have to tell her what she’d done. It was a moment she’d relive in her dreams for years to come.
“The first shot was just a warning, Cap. And I did warn him that the next time I’d shoot to kill, but he didn’t seem to believe me.”
“Well, you and Jack were partners for five years. Maybe he thought the bond between you meant you wouldn’t shoot to kill.”
She shook her head, unable to believe what she was hearing. “So, it’s perfectly all right for him to try to kill me, but not for me to defend myself?”
“Try to face the fact that we have only your word and a corpse. And while you said you had your wristcom on record, the labs weren’t able to pull any images from the unit.”
She glanced down at the wristcom. There’d been no indication that control had downloaded the information from it, and there should have been. “It was on, Cap. And it was working.”
“You may have thought it was working, but the labs say there are neither images nor voice.”
So was the unit faulty, or just the linking capacity? “Do they want me to send them the unit? Maybe there’s a problem with the sat-link?”
He shook his head. “They tested the link. They can read everything A-OK. There’s just nothing in the memory about last night.”
She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Then just do a DNA scan on Jack’s body. It’ll back up the fact that he’s a vampire.”
He hesitated and glanced down at his hands. “We don’t have to. His corpse was touched by sunlight when the boys were bagging it. It didn’t go up.”
How could there have been no reaction to daylight? Of all the myths that abounded about vampires, that was the one that had proven true. No immunity to daylight. The minute the sun touched them, they burned. “Damn it, I saw his teeth, Cap. He was a vampire.”
“You might have seen teeth, but there was no reaction to sunlight.”
She stared at him for a moment before asking, “Have you done blood and DNA tests?”
He nodded. “Inconclusive.”
“How can a blood or DNA test be inconclusive? Either he was a vampire or he wasn’t.”
“They’re running further tests. Until they come back, you’re suspended.”