After a time, when Kira’s tears had eased, I took the girls upstairs and filled the tub with lavender salts. Both sisters climbed in. When Mitch wanted to join them, I left Kira to deal with him. Fighting him would take her mind off her own fears.
From the shrieks and splashes I heard while I tidied the bedroom, it sounded as though Mitch had brought a sense of normality back to the girls. I fixed lunch on a tray so they could sit in bed like princesses, watching TV and eating peanut-butter sandwiches. Mitch, his black fur drenched, but smelling sweetly of lavender, bounded into bed with them.
As I mopped the bathroom floor and strained black hairs from the tub, I mulled over the skimpy information Kira had given me. No wonder the man in the black rain slicker looked like a vampire or death itself: he’d just murdered a man. It must have sent a shock through him to have that group of girls show up singing and dancing seconds after he’d stabbed Wuchnik.
Or had it? I went back to the question I’d been asking all along: had he chosen the cemetery, along with a vampire-style killing, because he knew the Carmilla girls would be there already?
But then, how had he known? Wuchnik was the blackmailer, the eavesdropper. I was assuming he was the person the Ashfords had sent out to Ruhetal to put a stop to Leydon’s work on behalf of her mentally incompetent client, but what was the connection between the Ashford family and the Carmilla club in the cemetery?
I called Petra over at the Malina Foundation: it was just possible that Trina Ashford—Leydon’s niece—belonged to one of the Malina book groups. Petra clicked through computer screens while I waited but came up empty.
“I don’t want to cause any more panic than the parents in your program already feel, but they need to know there’s a possibility the vampire killer may attack other kids in the group. He may worry that they have his face on their phone screens.”
The doorbell rang as she was hesitating—she was afraid calls like that would further jeopardize her job.
I assumed it would be Gabe Eycks at the door with a bodyguard for the girls, but it turned out to be Terry Finchley from Area Six. I buzzed him in and told my cousin that I would bring the matter up with the police.
While Finchley climbed the stairs, I dashed to the bedroom to tell Kira and Lucy they needed to stay there until I came for them. However far beyond corruption the Finch was, if he knew one of the girls he was trying to trace was with me, he’d jump on her—and me—with both feet.
Peppy remained in bed with the girls, soulfully looking at their crusts of bread. Mitch felt that a knock on my apartment door was his call to action, but I forced him to stay in the bedroom—I didn’t think he’d add anything to a conversation with the police.
“Detective!” I opened my front door with a flourish.
Elizabeth Milkova followed Finchley into my living room, her white shirt limp with sweat under her bulletproof vest. Finchley, as always, looked freshly cleaned and pressed, but his mouth was set in a hard line.
“Victoria Iphigenia—did your mother name you that so the rest of us would always know how ignorant we are around you?”
My smile turned brittle: jokes that mention my mother rattle me. I needed to be careful not to let Finchley’s angry ribbing cloud my judgment. “What is making you feel especially ignorant today, Lieutenant?”
“Bodies in my jurisdiction that no one tells me about.” He sat on the arm of my couch, right leg dangling. Milkova stood next to him with parade-ground stiffness, hands clasped behind her back.
I gestured toward a chair, but she shook her head. I looked at Finchley. “Unless it’s a job requirement that your underlings stand in your presence, please command your officer to sit. She’s making me so uncomfortable that I doubt I can focus on your questions.”
The frown lines in Finchley’s face deepened, but he said, “Take a pew, Liz. And you, V.I., tell me about Xavier Jurgens.”
“The techs were saying that all the evidence pointed to Jurgens having committed suicide. You don’t agree?”
“That was before we looked at the vodka bottle: it had been wiped clean of prints. That made us ask Vishnikov to do a complete autopsy: Jurgens’s hands had been bound before he passed out. It’s looking like someone force-fed him a bottle of pill-laden booze, then untied him. So talk to me about Salanter’s granddaughter and the hospital orderly.”
“What—the FBI isn’t sharing?”
“Oh, the feds, they never share with us CPD lowlifes. But if you’d called me yesterday to report Jurgens’s death, I might have had a crack at questioning Jana Shatka.”
“What happened to her?” My mouth was unpleasantly dry: I’d been assuming Shatka had run away, but maybe the death-dealing vampire had reached her first.
“She was on the five-twenty-five to Warsaw last night. She landed in Kiev at six-thirty this morning, Chicago time. Who knows what time it is there.”