The Book of Death Read online

  ‘You get someone who looks like you to take your place.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got a friend that would give up their head to save me.’

  ‘Me either. But the Bourbon Kid had one. I have no idea who it was. Just another John Doe to add to the list of victims, I suppose.’

  ‘Which includes most of our colleagues,’ Clay sighed.

  ‘Not all of whom will be missed.’

  ‘That’s harsh.’

  Harker rubbed his chin. There was no easy way to make his next revelation without Clay thinking he was insane, so he decided to simply blurt it out. ‘Did you know the last Police Captain was a vampire?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said –’

  ‘I heard what you said.’ Clay frowned. ‘You just implied that Captain De La Cruz was a vampire.’

  ‘I didn’t imply it. I came right out and said it.’

  Clay looked shocked, and unsure of whether or not he was being teased. ‘You mean vampire, as in, sucks blood and turns into a bat?’

  Harker looked around the room and spotted a plastic chair nearby. He grabbed it and sat down opposite Clay. ‘I don’t imagine the bat thing is real, but he was definitely a blood sucker.’

  ‘Seriously, you think he was drinking people’s blood?’

  ‘I know he was.’

  ‘I hear the rumours of vampires in the town all the time, but I assumed it was at worst just a group of people drinking blood and pretending to be vampires or something like that.’

  ‘It’s very real.’

  Clay didn’t look convinced. ‘So I could have killed De La Cruz with a crucifix or some garlic then?’ he said with a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘He would probably have preferred that to the way he was killed last night.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. A shotgun up the asshole. Shitty way to go.’

  ‘Yeah, his lunch is all over the elevator. I’m gonna have to get some poor sucker to clean that up later.’

  ‘Don’t look at me.’

  ‘Don’t piss me off then. Anyway, I didn’t come here just to talk to you about dirty elevators and vampire’s assholes.’

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I spent half an hour on my laptop this morning going through De La Cruz’s private files. There’s one particular case he was working on that stood out. I can’t work out how it’s never been on the news. His files say he spoke with you about it on a couple of occasions. I want to know what you’ve got on it.’

  Clay leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s the child killer case isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. How d’ya guess?’

  ‘Because it’s been pissing me off how De La Cruz never did anything with it. And like you, I can’t work out how it never made it onto the news.’

  Harker liked the fact that his colleague seemed to care as much as him. ‘I’ve got a theory on that. I think De La Cruz was protecting the killer.’

  ‘I can believe that, but why?’

  ‘I suspect it was another vampire.’

  Clay screwed his forehead into a contorted frown. ‘That would actually make sense. The evidence would back it up too.’

  ‘Good. So what have you got? Any DNA or anything?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Clay turning back to his computer. He started tapping away at the keyboard as he spoke. ‘However, there’ve been seventeen murders that I know of.’

  ‘Actually it’s more like eighty six.’

  Clay raised an eyebrow. ‘Like I said, seventeen that I know of. But in terms of DNA we’ve got nothing, no saliva, blood traces or anything like that. What we do have to link all seventeen of the murders i—’

  Harker interrupted. ‘A green tongue and bite marks on the neck?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ve been going through De La Cruz’s files. The bite marks yells vampire at me, but I don’t get the green tongue part.’

  ‘It’s a kind of poison. All these kids were drugged by an unidentifiable green solution. It causes almost instant paralysis.’ He paused and peered over his glasses once more, no longer tapping on his keyboard. ‘But there’s something else. Something that De La Cruz dismissed out of hand as coincidence, but quite clearly it’s a huge clue in the case.’

  Harker perked up in his seat. ‘What?’

  ‘For twelve of the seventeen victims we found something else. Grey hairs. Usually only one, sometimes two or three, but on several occasions the victims had the grey hairs underneath their fingernails.’

  ‘Like they fought back before the paralysis set in?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well can you get a DNA match for the hair?’

  Clay grinned. ‘Good question. De La Cruz was taking away all the hairs away to analyse them himself, but he never returned any of them. Kept claiming I’d never given them to him and all kinds of other excuses. But, lucky for you, I kept the most recent one. Never told him about it. I knew he would make it vanish if he got his hands on it, so I kept it here and did some analysis.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s not human hair.’

  Harker raised his eyebrows to emphasise his surprise at the remark. ‘What?’

  ‘It ain’t human hair. It’s goat hair.’

  ‘Goat hair?’

  ‘Goat hair.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. It’s goat hair. You’re the detective, not me.’

  ‘So, it’s like a trophy or something? A calling card to identify the killer?’

  Clay shrugged. ‘Like I said, you’re the detective. Personally I would have said the green poison and the bite marks were a perfectly adequate calling card. No need to leave the goat hairs intentionally too.’

  ‘True.’ Harker scratched his chin. ‘So why goat hair? I guess I can go looking for someone who owns goats. This could be a fairly useful clue.’

  Clay smiled. ‘Yeah, all you gotta do is find a vampire who happens to be a goat herder in his spare time.’

  ‘You got any better suggestions?’

  ‘Jesus, Harker, you’re slow.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not a goat herder or a shepherd you need to be looking for.’

  Clay turned the monitor on his computer around for Harker to get a good look. He stared at the screen for a few seconds, puzzled by the picture of a person he recognised. Then the truth hit home. He shook his head. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Goat hairs. Sonofabitch.’

  Eight

  Ulrika Price had encountered numerous problems during her time as Head Librarian at the Santa Mondega Library, but right now she had possibly the most serious crisis of her career. She had lost The Book of Death. Rameses Gaius, her master, had entrusted her as the keeper of the book with two simple instructions, log names in it when instructed to and never under any circumstances lose it. The previous day she had logged three names in it at his request, but then she had carelessly left the book unattended and it had vanished.

  She had suffered a sleepless night tossing and turning as she tried to cast her mind back to the previous day’s events. She had wracked her brain trying to work out what could have happened to it. Eventually in the early hours she had come to the conclusion that her teenage assistant, Josh, a dimwit of the highest order, must have stuck it on one of the shelves somewhere by mistake.

  Fortunately the following morning the library was quiet, which afforded her the time to hunt for the book. For two hours she had searched in vain. It was nowhere to be found. After one last look around her desk area she gave up and decided to phone Josh to see if she could get any sense out of him. These were desperate times indeed. She was relying on Josh, a total idiot, to remember something from the day before. Normally he couldn’t remember anything from five minutes before.

  She sat at her desk and dialled his home number on the office phone, tapping impatiently on the desk with one of her long bony fingers. Eventually after about eight rings, Josh’s mother answered the phone.

&n
bsp; ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘It’s Ulrika Price at the library.’

  ‘Fucking hell. Hang on a minute. I’ll go get him.’

  Josh’s mother knew better than to waste time making idle small talk with Ulrika. The two of them had exchanged harsh words in the past after Ulrika had once described Josh as a mindless baboon in one of her written appraisals of his performance at the library. Through the phone’s earpiece Ulrika heard some shouting and cussing and the sound of someone dropping the phone.

  Eventually Josh’s irritating voice came through loud and clear. ‘Hello, Miss Price.’

  ‘Hello Josh, you moron. I need to know what you did with The Book of Death yesterday.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘There was a book on my desk yesterday, it’s called The Book of Death, and it’s gone missing. You must have put it somewhere, or given it out to a customer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He sounded as gormless as ever, much to Ulrika’s annoyance. ‘Well,’ she snapped. ‘What have you done with it?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Try to remember, please.’

  A brief silence followed before Josh replied. ‘Was that the Sesame Street annual?’

  ‘No. Why would a Sesame Street annual be called The Book of Death?’

  ‘That’s what I was wondering when I put it back on the shelf.’

  Ulrika perked up. ‘So you have seen it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘It was a big black book, just said The Book of Death on the cover. You’re the one who said it was a Sesame Street annual.’

  ‘Why would I say that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you told me to put it back on the shelves before I went home last night. I remember because it’s the last thing I did.’

  Ulrika breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Okay, so you thought it was a Sesame Street annual. Therefore is it safe to assume you stuck it on a shelf in the children’s section?’

  ‘No. I think I stuck it in Reference.’

  ‘Why would you stick it there?’

  ‘Because I stick all the books in the Reference section.’

  ‘Prick.’

  ‘I did put it under A though, for Anonymous.’

  Ulrika rolled her eyes. Talking to Josh was exasperating. ‘Well that’s something. Thank you. By the way, don’t bother ever coming back to work here, Josh, you’re not welcome.’

  ‘Fine by me. Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, goodbye and thanks for your incompetence.’

  ‘Oh, Miss Price, before you go, there’s one last thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You smell.’

  Josh hung up. Ulrika slammed the receiver down in frustration. However, in spite of Josh’s rudeness and general ineptitude, at least she now knew where to find the missing book. She hurried over to the Reference books and began scouring the section marked A for Anonymous.

  There were some pretty decent books written by anonymous authors, but the only one Ulrika was interested in was The Book of Death. Unfortunately after scouring the shelves for ten minutes, she came up empty handed. Either Josh had given her incorrect information or someone had borrowed the book from the library after he’d stuck it on the shelf.

  The only person who had come into the library after Josh had left the previous night was Sanchez Garcia, the bartender from the Tapioca. Ulrika thought back to his appearance. She had caught him loitering suspiciously in the Reference section, then he had borrowed a book called The Gay Man’s Guide to Anal Sex, an odd choice of book for him, she thought. Although Sanchez struck her as being completely inept with women, he didn’t strike her as a homosexual either. On the contrary, she’d caught him staring at her cleavage on several occasions, and his dress sense was shit.

  She rushed back to her desk to check the computer logs to see if anyone else had been in around the time Josh left. If no one had, then Sanchez might just be the prime suspect in the disappearance of the important book.

  As she sat down at her desk the telephone rang. She answered it with an impressive level of politeness considering how irritated she was.

  ‘Hello, City Library.’

  ‘Ulrika?’

  She recognised the voice. It was Rameses Gaius. A shiver ran down her spine.

  ‘Hello Rameses,’ she said, her voice betraying her anxiety.

  ‘Did you write those names in The Book of Death yesterday as I asked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Read them back to me please. I need to clarify what names you wrote.’

  ‘Um, oh,’ Ulrika tried to cast her mind back to the names she had written in the book the previous day.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Gaius snapped. ‘Have you not seen the news? They’re saying the Bourbon Kid is still alive. This is important. What names did you write down?’

  Ulrika cringed. She couldn’t remember the names, certainly not under this kind of pressure. ‘One of them was John Doe,’ she said.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘I can’t remember the other two,’ she said.

  ‘Well look them up in the book for goodness sake!’

  Ulrika swallowed hard. ‘I can’t find it at the moment,’ she said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it’s been borrowed by someone.’

  ‘Borrowed by someone? Since when the fuck did you start allowing people to borrow The Book of Death?’

  ‘I don’t. My assistant messed up. But I think I know who has it. I’m just going to track him down. I’ll have it back within the hour.’

  She could tell by the sound of his breathing that Rameses Gaius was furious. ‘If you don’t get that book back by lunchtime, I’ll send my daughter Jessica to come help you look for it. And I gotta tell you, Jessica really doesn’t like you.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Gaius hung up the phone. Ulrika sat still for a few moments, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. The book was missing and she had less than two hours to find it.

  ‘Morning Ulrika,’ said a man’s voice. She looked up and saw Rick from the Ole Au Lait walk past her desk on his way out. She hadn’t even seen him come in because she had been so engrossed in her conversation with Rameses Gaius. She didn’t like Rick any more than she liked anyone else in town, so she ignored him until he was halfway down the stairs and heading out of the library before she responded with a veiled “Fuck off” under her breath.

  Her top priority was to get The Book of Death back urgently. And her prime suspect was Sanchez Garcia.

  Nine

  Beth had received an early phone call from the museum’s new manager, Elijah Simmonds. Although he was only in temporary charge, he now had the authority to fire her. He had insisted she drop by the museum even though she had been given the day off by Bertram Cromwell. Chances were high he was calling her in to relieve her of her position as a cleaner.

  She and JD arrived at the museum to find a medical crew outside lifting a stretcher up onto the back of an ambulance. The face of the person on the stretcher was concealed beneath a green blanket. Beth could tell it was Bertram Cromwell. She didn’t need to see the gory details. The sight of the blanket pulled over the face of the body was enough to set her mind racing with all kinds of unpleasant images.

  JD put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her in tight as they walked up the steps to the front entrance of the museum. In doing so he shielded her from the sight of the body. Having his arm around her shoulder made her feel safe, and warm too. She had a blue cardigan on over her white T-shirt but with the sudden arrival of snow in Santa Mondega the cardigan wasn’t offering as much warmth as usual. She could feel the cold around her legs too because her black jeans had a few tears in them and not for fashion reasons either. They were just bloody old and knackered and she couldn’t afford a new pair. With her hair down and the wind blowing it all over the place she actually had a rather cool grungy look going on. She was quite ple
ased about that because it seemed to be a look that JD liked. He was still wearing his clothes from the night before, blue jeans, black T-shirt and black leather jacket. Beth was hopeful that they looked like a well-matched couple. And secretly she was keen for some of her colleagues to see the two of them together.

  Just inside the museum reception area, one of the security guards rushed over. Beth knew him only as James. He was a broad muscular fellow and like every other security guard that had ever worked there his grey uniform looked a size too small. Maybe in his case it was by choice because it looked like he wanted to show off his large pectorals. He was a big guy in his early twenties with a blond wavy haircut and stupidly large shoulders. A nightstick hung from a belt at his side, but in truth he didn’t look like the kind who would need it. His fists were big enough to deal with most things.

  ‘Beth, have you heard the news?’ he asked with a look of genuine concern on his face.

  ‘About Cromwell? Yes. Terrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Shocked the hell out of me.’ James seemed to suddenly notice that she wasn’t on her own. He stared at JD for a second, then looked back at her, his face showing signs of confusion. ‘What you doing in today anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be off?’

  ‘Simmonds called me and asked me to come and see him about something.’

  James grimaced. ‘Oh. He’s in his office. You can go straight in. He’s on his own.’

  ‘Where’s his office?’ Beth asked. She couldn’t recall Simmonds ever having an office.

  ‘Cromwell’s old office. Down there.’ James pointed down a corridor that Beth knew well. Her thoughts turned back to Cromwell, one of the nicest men she’d ever met, in a city full of horrible people. He had been the only person to make her feel welcome at the museum. The thought of him being brutally slain by a psycho with a machete was almost too much to bear. It made her more grateful than ever to have rediscovered JD.

  ‘Poor Bertram,’ she sniffed, feeling an outbreak of tears coming on. ‘He was such a nice man.’

  ‘Yeah. Simmonds will be a good replacement though. He’s already got big plans for this place. He’s gonna have a real shake up.’

  Beth’s heart sank. Her time at the museum was surely at an end. Simmonds, the high-flying, pony tailed, scrotum scratching slimebag, didn’t like her. Cromwell had been her only ally at the museum.