Oh yes. That"s the part where you could make a case for "lucky."

Buried at the bottom of some files that had otherwise been coded and cla.s.sified into near uselessness, I found a lead on one of the experimental subjects. I"d have been happier with details on my burgling compet.i.tion, but it"d have to suffice-and hey, it was one more lead than I"d had earlier that evening.

So I ran with it. And less than twenty-four hours later, I was on a plane to Atlanta.

6.

I"ve never cared much for Atlanta.

It"s crowded and hot, and even in the dead of winter it doesn"t get dark as fast as it does up in the northern hinterlands where I usually hang out. This means I have less people-interaction business time, and less running-around time in general. Yes, I keep a safe house there, and yes, I was happy to find myself back in a cushy spot instead of a hotel room, but I wasn"t so charmed to be back in the Southeast.

My condo was a wreck, which is to say, it was as pristine as my place back in Seattle except that everything was coated in dust. I"ve never trusted housekeepers enough to pay one to visit during my absence.

The bathtub had a spider in it.

But it could"ve been worse. It could"ve been hot, and it wasn"t. It was merely muggy and kind of cold, which wasn"t vastly different from Seattle, but was vastly better than the bone-gnawing freeze of Minnesota.

The city of Atlanta sprawls like h.e.l.l because there are no natural boundaries to stop it, and its neighborhoods are practically their own individual nations. I don"t mean the blocks are broken down by ethnicity per se, though in some of the zip codes you could certainly make a case for it. I mean you"ve got your hipster sections, your New Money strips, your Southern Hollywood club ghettos, and the relics of the Olympic Village, plus a dozen other subdivisions of subdivided cla.s.s, type, and preference.

There"s even a gayborhood-sort of. It would probably be more accurate to say that Atlanta is the gayborhood of Georgia, but there are parts of town that are more rainbow-friendly than others, and the spot I wanted was right on the edge of a gaudy strip filled with drag bars and bathhouses.

Why did I want this spot? Well, I didn"t find a Holy Grail at Holtzer Point, but in my hard-earned score I nabbed a small lead on another member of Project Bloodshot in a fat stack of material that was otherwise kind of useless to me. The rest of what I"d stolen hadn"t amounted to much, though I now was the proud owner of Ian"s paperwork without all the aggravating black bars. Unfortunately, the lack of bars didn"t tell me much. They might tell him more, I didn"t know, but I resolved to pa.s.s it along to him and Cal next time I saw them.

Mostly the net gain was a collection of serial numbers.

Much to my personal queasiness, the other three personnel dossiers (which including Ian"s, made the sum total of my loot) all appeared to detail subjects who"d died while part of the program. But although two of the deceased were listed without next of kin or any other personal contacts...subject number three actually came with a name and a hometown.

She was easily the best doc.u.mented, with all her physical stats like hair and eye color, height and weight, as well as the results from some series of tests she"d taken. But I didn"t know what those tests were, or what they meant.

All the attention to detail had me thinking that she might"ve been a special case. Maybe they had bigger and better things in mind for her at Jordan Roe, or maybe she was only more cooperative than the others. I had no way of knowing.

Anyway, I had a woman"s name-Isabelle deJesus-and I had a place of birth, Atlanta, Georgia. And from what was left of her processing sheets, I was almost 100 percent certain she"d been a vampire.

She had the correct 636 serial number starter, and I noted a few other telltale marks that bolstered my suspicion. She"d been kept in an underground bunk like Ian (no windows), and the lone fragment of her chart mentioned a required dietary supplement that was provided twice a week. Gosh. I wonder what that that could have been. could have been.

I ran her name through a phone book and my Internet sources, and turned up a big fat nothing...short of the fact that "deJesus" is not a hugely uncommon Spanish name and I could spend the next fifteen years interviewing every "deJesus" in Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.

Then-on a hunch-I ran the scarce facts through a missing persons list. After all, Ian hadn"t gone along willingly; maybe Isabelle hadn"t, either.

And then I understood that I"d gotten things wrong.

Isabelle hadn"t been a woman. She"d been a girl.

I found a listing for her as a teenage runaway, gone missing about ten years ago. Someone had been looking for her. Looking long and hard. The case had been pushed to the media every couple of years, and ads had run in The Atlanta Journal-Const.i.tution The Atlanta Journal-Const.i.tution. Someone hadn"t wanted to let her go.

That put a damper on my glee. I know it happens-h.e.l.l, everybody knows it happens-that teenagers sometimes fall into bad times and bad habits, and I even had insider knowledge that some of the s.k.a.n.kier vampire families will go out of their way to recruit kids like Isabelle when they want disposable foot soldiers. If you forced me to speculate about their rationale, I"d have to say that it probably has something to do with strays. If you take care of strays, the strays will take care of you, later on. And besides, if you get them young enough, they"re easy to control.

That transition point sometime in the late teens, from homeless kid to homeless person, that"s a real b.i.t.c.h. That"s when they get you-or so I hear.

Ironically, ghouls tend to come from a higher social tier than young vampire soldiers. They"re people who have something professional to offer a vampire House or family. They have accounting skills or computer skills; they have law degrees or other certifications. They"re white-collar and ambitious, hoping to upgrade to a cape.

With a little digging, I turned up an address for Isabelle"s parents. It turned out to be a modest beige house with red shutters and a pair of tall, gangly roses growing up around an arch in front of the porch.

I parked my car across the street from it and stared down at a picture I"d taken from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Isabelle"s soph.o.m.ore-year high-school photo. She looked thin and pretty, with hair she hadn"t yet figured out how to tame and lip gloss that was a little too bright for her coloring. But she had nice eyes and good bone structure. Her Hispanic ancestry stood out in the width of her cheeks and the set of her mouth.

I"d spent some time working out what I might say to her parents. I hadn"t been able to scare up too many details of the kid"s case, except that she"d either run off or been kidnapped sometime in the middle of summer break before her senior year and she"d never returned home, but her case had been closed with the missing persons bureau.

I suspected government intervention on that point. Of course, by then I was seeing government intervention under every rock and in every corner.

Man. I thought I"d been paranoid before I took Ian"s case; now I was downright deranged deranged.

I wondered when she"d become a vampire and who had done it to her, but I doubted her parents would know. I didn"t even know how I"d go about asking, but I figured that pretending to be a concerned cold-case detective might work. I have a badge I bought off eBay a couple of years ago. I think the cop who originally wore it is dead. Regardless, it"s never gotten me double-checked or refused before.

Before I"d made the drive down to the quiet little inner-city suburb, I"d nabbed some new clothes at a high-end mall and I"d utterly failed to find a new car I wanted to buy on the spot. Something innocuously authoritative-like a dark blue Crown Victoria or something-would have been ideal, but I couldn"t find one for sale that suited my fancy so I"d been forced to rent one.

My rented pseudo-cop-car did a good job of completing my Professional Law-Enforcement-Type-Person package. I was wearing a gray pantsuit and black ankle boots, with a b.u.t.ton-up long-sleeved shirt that was white and crisp. I almost felt like a gangster from the forties, but I told myself it all worked fine and I walked up to the house, pretending like I belonged there.

I knocked, and I heard a flurry of activity inside before someone came to the door. The peephole went dark for a moment, then a series of locks worthy of my abode in Seattle went clicking and retreating, until only a chain remained. The door opened as far as the chain would let it, and a man"s voice asked, "Who"s there?"

An eyeball followed the voice into the narrow crack permitted by the chain; it belonged to someone middle-aged, and suspicious.

I held up the badge for the eyeball"s perusal and said, "I"m Raylene Jones, a cold-case detective with the Atlanta Police Department. I was hoping I could talk to you about your daughter."

The door closed, and a second voice came to confer with the man. They spoke in rapid Spanish that was too m.u.f.fled for me to follow. I understand it a little but not much, and not very fast. But through the solid old door I couldn"t pick up anything but a spare syllable or two.

After almost a full minute, the chain slid back on the other side and dropped swinging against the door with a clatter. The k.n.o.b turned and the door opened, revealing a matched set of fifty-something Latinos who"d begun to look alike, as long-married couples sometimes do.

"Mr. and Mrs. deJesus?" I guessed.

They nodded. The mister was half a head taller than the missus, with a balding pate and a badly matched shirt and pants off the JCPenney specials rack orbiting his waistline. The missus was wearing a plain blue dress and flat shoes. The missus said, "Please come inside. You can sit down."

"Thank you," I said, and followed her. The mister stayed behind me and rebolted the locks. I liked him already, even if I wasn"t wholly keen on the idea of being secured within the smallish home with the Catholic-ish decor and worn green s.h.a.g carpeting.

I followed them to a terrifying gold-and-cream couch and sat down on the end, on the edge. They sat across from me, interrogation-style, like they"d be the ones asking the questions.

"Our daughter has been missing for years," the missus said flatly. "Why you here, now?"

I dug deep and called up every episode of relevant television I could recall and said, "I"m from a cold-case unit. It"s my job to take a second look at cases that were closed, or went...erm...cold. And I understand that your daughter"s case-"

"Our daughter"s case was closed." The missus cut me off. There was no eagerness in her face, not like her husband"s. He wanted to talk, he wanted to ask questions. I could see it in the perk of his eyebrows. But she wasn"t going to let him. She"d run out of hope, and she refused to borrow any of his.

I told her, "I realize this. We think it might have been a clerical error. And I"d like to ask you about Isabelle. According to our records, police believed she ran away. They didn"t believe she"d been abducted. Do you think she left on her own?"

The mister shrugged quickly and said, "She left. We don"t know why."

"But were you surprised?" I pressed.

Even the mister, the almost-optimist of the pair, was forced to admit, "No. She was unhappy. Her brother-"

At this, the missus seized hold of his arm and mumbled something accusatory in Spanish and, when the mister dug in his heels for a moment of back talk, they excused themselves to the kitchen, where they argued some more in that speedy clip of chatter.

Their behavior told me plenty, of course. The missus didn"t want to admit domestic disharmony, and since she didn"t believe Isabelle was coming home anyway, she didn"t see the point in being helpful. And the mister was daring to hope that maybe the APD was back and something new might come of his daughter"s case. It made me feel a little like a heel, that I was taking advantage of these people"s confidence. But the truth was, I did did intend to do their daughter a favor if I could-and if I couldn"t, I"d use her experience to help other people. intend to do their daughter a favor if I could-and if I couldn"t, I"d use her experience to help other people.

Or other vampires. Whatever.

While the couple argued quietly in the other room, I scanned the living area and saw no pictures of Isabelle or her all-too-briefly mentioned brother. If I didn"t know better, I would"ve sworn that these two somber, matching older folks had never procreated. There were no awards, no family photos, no trophies or tokens of anybody"s childhood. Not even the ghosts of little pitter-pattering feet that once made the parents proud.

Somewhere off in the kitchen, the mister put his foot down long enough to come back into the living room and ask me, "Do you really mean to help? Are you really with the police?"

"Yes," I said, my eyes as innocent and sincere as I could force them to look. "Absolutely. Look, sir, I can"t make you any promises, except that I promise to try. I know that the situation wasn"t handled very well the first time around; I know there were screwups and gaffes." It was an easy guess. He didn"t contradict me. "But my job is to help find your daughter."

He swallowed, and cleared his throat. "And if she isn"t alive anymore?"

"If she isn"t, then maybe I can give you closure. Even if I can"t give her back." I knew I couldn"t give her back. Not even if I found her, and she"d escaped, and all was well and she was happily sipping a too-true-to-description b.l.o.o.d.y Mary in a nightclub, and sleeping with the drummer of the skeezy house band. But I I needed to know, and I swore to myself, if not out loud to the trembling mister, that if I learned anything benignly useful or helpful, I"d hold up my end of the charade and pa.s.s the information along. needed to know, and I swore to myself, if not out loud to the trembling mister, that if I learned anything benignly useful or helpful, I"d hold up my end of the charade and pa.s.s the information along.

Since he seemed disinclined to keep talking, I tried nudging him again. "Please, if there"s anything at all you can tell me about what happened to her, or-"

"Her brother," he whispered.

"I beg your pardon?"

He glanced over into the kitchen, where the missus was loudly banging gla.s.ses and pans around, pretending to do something. Maybe she was angrily making coffee. I don"t know. But he said again in that lowered, soft-shoe voice, "Her brother. Adrian. He went looking for her."

The brother again. I seized on it, and asked, "Did he have any luck?"

The mister stiffened. He said, "I could not say. I do not know. But I think he might have."

"What does that mean?" I asked too fast, almost dropping my Cool-Professional-Cop-Voice. "Your son went looking for your daughter and you what...you just didn"t ask about it?"

"He is no longer part of this family!" he said almost loud enough to halt the banging in the kitchen, but not quite.

"How does that work?"

"He isn"t...He"s not like us not like us. He never has been like us," the mister said, leaning on his words for some emphasis that I was just too thick to pa.r.s.e. Did he sprout antlers? Take up cannibalism?

"Not like you...how?"

The mister was getting frustrated with me, but that only made the feeling mutual. He grabbed for a phone stand and seized a piece of paper from it, then scrabbled around until he"d found a pen. "You don"t understand," he mumbled, writing quickly.

The noise in the kitchen stopped and he froze, as if he"d been caught doing something naughty. Then he wrote faster, wrapped up his brief message, and shoved it into my hand.

The missus emerged from the kitchen with a Crock-Pot inexplicably in hand. She grumbled in top volume and rapid-fire Spanish and the mister whined back, denying something. I squeezed my fist around the sc.r.a.p of paper and could guess exactly what she suspected.

They argued for another few seconds, and I rose from my seat, stuffing the note into my pocket and announcing that I was going to leave before the missus had a chance to throw me out. I barely made it; she was ushering me to the door before I could even reach the hall to make my big exit.

I felt bad for the mister, standing behind her as she herded me out. His head was bowed and he was still holding the pen he"d used to tell me something-something important, but unspeakable. He didn"t look up as I left; he turned his back and stood in his living room, or that was the last I saw of him as the missus shut the door with a slap, a click, and then the subsequent sound of locks being reset.

I wanted to yank the paper out of my pocket, uncrumple it, and read it on the spot, but I waited until I got back to my car. I wanted to be out of that woman"s reach. She scared me. Sort of. Her type type scared me, anyway. I half expected her to reach out through the living room window and s.n.a.t.c.h it out of my hands. scared me, anyway. I half expected her to reach out through the living room window and s.n.a.t.c.h it out of my hands.

I locked my car doors because, well, I lock everything. And I was sitting in the dark, parked on a street in a Not-the-Best-But-Not-the-Worst part of town. I wasn"t really worried about being mugged, but I didn"t want to be interrupted. Maybe if I"d been hungrier I might"ve welcomed a bit of thuggish attention, but I wasn"t hungry and I didn"t want it.

I stuck my feet down past my car"s gas and brake pedals and straightened my body enough to reach into my pocket for the paper. The car"s overhead lamp was yellow and feeble, but with eyes like mine it was enough to read by. The note said "2512 W. Peachtree Circuit. Sister Rose."

Or at least that"s what I thought it said. The mister"s handwriting was bad, and rushed. I scanned it again, concluded that I"d been right the first time, and wondered exactly which "Peachtree" street "Peachtree Circuit" might be. If you"ve never been to Atlanta, then let me save you a bit of grief. If someone tells you something"s on "Peachtree," you must demand that they get more specific. There are probably a dozen incarnations of Peachtree, going in at least that many directions through every part of town.

In short, even though I"m fairly familiar with the city, I"d need to find a phone book or an Internet connection before I could draw any conclusions about where this place was located.

All the way back to my condo I wondered what the address was, and what it signified. Sister Rose. I could"ve gathered by the deJesus home decor that they were Catholic, but were we talking a convent? Did they even have convents in downtown Atlanta? Upon reflection, I was forced to admit that I didn"t see why not, but that didn"t make it feel any less weird to me.

And if Sister Rose was a contact for Adrian deJesus, I"d have to do my best to look her up. Thank G.o.d (or whoever) that lore about the crucifixes isn"t true.

I made a mental note that I shouldn"t a.s.sume Adrian shared his family"s last name. For whatever reason, he obviously wasn"t considered part of the family anymore, so he might"ve renamed himself.

Back at the homestead, I ran a search through Google Maps and was a bit surprised (and aggravated) to learn that the address was less than five miles from the deJesus home. In fact, the longer I stared back and forth between the helpful little map and the squished piece of paper, the more I suspected that I"d drawn some incorrect conclusions about Sister Rose and the nature of the location. Another quick Internet search confirmed my new suspicions.

This was the address of a drag bar called "the Poppyc.o.c.k Review."

Sister Rose indeed. No wonder the mister didn"t want to talk about what junior was up to in his spare time. Or, erm, her (?) spare time. I"ve never been very clear about how the p.r.o.nouns were supposed to work in such circ.u.mstances as these. I decided to err on the side of caution and a.s.sume that, just in case...Sister Rose might be a woman who knew Adrian deJesus. And I"d sort out the particulars later.

I would"ve gone out that same night, except that I didn"t want to drive all the way back out to the heart of the gayborhood when I"d practically been right there not an hour before. Atlanta traffic is not the sort of stuff that inspires a body to commute, even in the evenings.

Especially in the evenings, in that part of the city. It"s a popular destination. in the evenings, in that part of the city. It"s a popular destination.

Instead, I settled in with a long hot bath and the television remote, or that was the plan until I figured out I hadn"t paid my cable bill in a couple of years. Therefore, confronted with the wasteland of network television-until I realized that my TV wasn"t even compatible with the "digital revolution"-I closed up all my windows, locked everything lockable, and called it a day.

When the sun set and I woke up the next evening, it was far too early to approach any self-respecting drag bar. Instead, I made a point to pick up a new stash of disposable cell phones-buying one each from three different drugstores. I memorized the numbers and stuck the phones in a drawer, just like I kept them in Seattle. And after I"d done a ritual Checking of the Living s.p.a.ce, I concluded that no one was listening and no one was watching, because if I didn"t, I couldn"t make the necessary phone calls with any peace of mind.

I didn"t call the Bad Hatter. I didn"t have anything new or important things to say to him, and it would only p.i.s.s him off if he thought I was wasting his time just to tell him I was alive. I couldn"t call the stray kids because-if they"d followed directions-they didn"t have a phone anymore. So I sealed one of the new phones into a padded envelope and express-mailed it to a post office box a few blocks away from my old warehouse. Pepper had a key to it. She knew to check it. She"d probably already done so.

No, my first call was to Pacific Northwest Information, and then to a handful of other out-of-the-way reference-type inst.i.tutions, none of which were very well known and two of which were not strictly legal. Then I spent another few minutes on the Internet, and before long, I had the Minion Cal"s real name and a potential phone number.

It was risky, yes. But I needed to talk to Ian.

The digits I dialed didn"t look familiar, and I didn"t recognize the area code. I could feel myself flushing as the line rang, rang, and wasn"t answered. I was nervous-intensely nervous-about trying to contact Ian. There was always the hypothetical possibility that I was putting him in danger, and I didn"t like the thought of that even slightly.

But I needed to ask him about Isabelle deJesus. And by G.o.d, I was gonna gonna.

Voice mail picked up, without a personalized message-only the electronic robot-woman informing me that customer number 8862 was not available right now, and I was welcome to leave a message.

I did. I said, "Cal, I"m looking for my client. Have him call me at this number." And then I hung up. I knew I was leaving my callback digits in the other phone"s memory, so now it was only a matter of time and luck.

Then, on a different phone-just in case the message to Cal didn"t work out and I had to junk it-I called Horace.