Cerulean Sins (Vampire Hunter 11)

She seemed to have trouble looking away from the picture. "Are they all like this?" she asked in a voice gone thin.

"Yes," Zerbrowski said. His voice was soft, too, as if he had made his point and wouldn't rub it in.

She looked up at me, and it looked like a physical effort to pull her gaze away from that photo. "You'll be the darling of the media again," but her voice was soft, like it didn't matter.

"Probably," I said, "but it's not because I want to be."

"You're just so damned photogenic," her voice had held a hint of her earlier scorn, then she frowned and glanced down at the photo again. She seemed to hear what she'd just said, and with that awful, hideous photo sitting in front of her, it seemed the wrong thing to say.

"I didn't mean . . ." She rallied, and put back on her angry face, but it seemed more like a mask to hide behind now.

"Don't worry, O'Brien," Zerbrowski said, and he had his teasing voice back. I knew enough to dread what would come out of his mouth next, but she didn't. "We know what you meant. Anita is just so damned cute."

She gave a weak smile. "Something like that, yes," she said. The smile vanished as if it had never existed. She was all business again. O'Brien never seemed to get very far from business. "Seeing that this doesn't happen to another woman is more important than who gets credit."

"Glad to hear we all agree," Zerbrowski said.

O'Brien stood up. She pushed the picture back towards Zerbrowski, doing her best not to look at it this time. "You can question Heinrick, and the other one, though he doesn't say much."

"Let's have a plan before we go in there," I said.

They both looked at me.

"We know that Van Anders is our guy, but we don't know for sure that he's our only guy."

"You think one of the men we have here helped Van Anders do this?" O'Brien motioned towards the picture that Zerbrowski was tucking away.

"I don't know." I glanced at Zerbrowski and wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was. The first message had read "we nailed this one, too." We.I wanted to make sure that Heinrick wasn't part of that 'we'. If he was, then he wasn't going anywhere, not if I could help it. I really didn't care who got credit for solving the case. I just wanted it solved. I just wanted to never, ever have to see anything else as bad as that bathroom, that bathtub, and its . . . contents. I use to think I helped the police out of a sense of justice, a desire to protect the innocent, maybe even a hero complex, but, lately, I'm beginning to understand that sometimes I want to solve the case for a much more selfish reason. So I don't ever have to walk through another crime scene as bad as the one I just saw.

57

Heinrick was sitting behind the small table, slumped back in the chair, which is actually harder than it looks in a straight-backed chair. His carefully cut blond hair was still neat, but he'd laid his glasses on the table, and his face looked younger without them. His file said he was closer to forty than thirty, but he didn't look it. He had an innocent face, and I knew that was a lie. Anyone who looks that innocent after thirty is either lying, or touched by the hand of God. Somehow I didn't think Leopold Heinrick was ever going to be a saint. Which left only one conclusion--he was lying. Lying about what? Now there was the question.

There was a Styrofoam cup with coffee in front of him. It had been sitting long enough that the cream had started to separate from the darker liquid, so that swirls of paleness decorated the top of the coffee.

He looked up when Zerbrowski and I entered. Something flickered through his pale eyes: interest, curiosity, worry? The look was gone before I could decipher it. He picked up his glasses, giving me a blank, innocent face. With his glasses back on, he came closer to looking his age. They broke up the line of his face, so that the frames were what you saw first.

"You want a fresh cup of coffee?" I asked him as I sat down. Zerbrowski leaned against the wall, near the door. We'd start out with me questioning Heinrick to see if I got anywhere. Zerbrowski made it clear that I was up to bat, but no one, including me, wanted me alone with Heinrick. He had been following me, and we still didn't know why. Agent Bradford had guessed that it was part of some plot to get me to raise the dead for some nefarious purpose. Bradford didn't know, not for sure. Until we knew for sure, caution was better. Hell, caution was probably always better.

"No," Heinrick said, "no more coffee."

I had a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of file folders in the other. I placed the coffee on the table and made a show of arranging the pile of folders neatly beside it. His gaze flicked to the folders, then settled serenely back on me.

"Had too much coffee?" I asked.

"No." His face was attentive, blank, with a touch of wariness. Something had him worried. Was it the files? Too large a stack. We'd intended it to be too large. There were files at the bottom that had nothing to do with Leopold Heinrick, Van Anders, or the nameless man that was sitting in another room just down the hall. It was impossible to have a military record with no name attached, but somehow the dark-haired American had managed it. His file was so full of blacked-out spaces that it was almost illegible. The fact that no one would give our John Doe a name, but they would acknowledge he was once a member of the armed forces was disturbing. It made me wonder what my government was up to.

"Would you like something else to drink?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"We may be in here a while."

"Talking is thirsty work," Zerbrowski said from the back.

Heinrick's eyes flicked to him, then back to me. "Silence is not thirsty work." His lips quirked, and it was almost a smile.

"If sometime during this interview you want to tell us exactly why you were following me, I'd love to hear it, but that's really secondary to why we're here."

He looked puzzled then. "When you first stopped us that seemed to be very important to you."

"It was, and I'd still like to know, but the priorities have changed."

He frowned at me. "You are playing games, Ms. Blake. I am tired of games."

There was no fear in him. He seemed tired, wary, and not happy, but he wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid of the police, or me, or going to jail. There was none of that anxiety that most people have in a police interrogation. It was odd. Bradley had said that our government was going to just let Heinrick go. Did he suspect that--know that? If so, how? How did he know? Why wasn't he the least bit afraid of spending time in the St. Louis jail system?

I opened the first file. It held grainy copies of old crimes. Women Van Anders had slaughtered in foreign countries, far from here.

I laid the photos out in front of him, in a neat row of black and white carnage. In some of the photos the quality was so bad that if you hadn't known you were looking at human remains, you'd have never guessed. Van Anders had reduced his victims to Rorschach tests.

Heinrick looked bored now, almost disgusted. "Your Detective O'Brien has already shown me these. Already marched out her lies."

"What lies would those be?" I asked. I sipped my coffee, and it wasn't bad. It was fresh, at least. As I sipped, I watched his face.

He folded his arms across his chest. "That there are fresh murders here in your city like these old ones."

"What makes you think she's lying?"

He started to say something, then closed his mouth tight, his lips a thin angry line. He just glared at me, pale eyes bright with anger.

I opened the second folder and began laying out colored photos just above the old black and whites. I laid them out in a line of bright death, and watched all the color drain away from Heinrick's skin. He looked almost gray by the time I sat back down. I'd had to stand to reach the ends of the table, to lay out the photos.

"This woman was killed three days ago." I got another file out of the stack. I opened it, and fanned the photos on top of it, but didn't put them with the stack. I wasn't a hundred percent sure I'd be able to match the photos back to the right crime. They were supposed to be marked on the back, but I hadn't marked them personally, so I didn't want to risk it. Once you get into court the lawyers get damned picky about evidence and stuff.

I pointed to the file pictures. "This woman was killed two days ago."

Zerbrowski stepped forward and handed me a plastic baggie with a handful of polaroids in it. I tossed the baggie across the table so that it slid by him, and he caught it automatically before it hit the floor. His eyes were very big when he saw the top print.