Vendetta (21 page)

He walked behind the Dumpster to washes of blood swirling in the rain. Cat squatted down, observing but not touching anything. When she straightened she shuffled her boots to destroy any footprints of theirs.

Vincent stopped and inhaled a new layer of odors, scents that had seeped into the walls of the building. “Cigarettes. Cooking oil and food. Sweat. A man who was in the diner… could’ve been a lookout.” Wood. Splinters. The memory-echo of scraping metal and antiseptic floor cleaner. “At one point he moved a stepladder that was possibly kept in a commercial kitchen.” He kept focusing. “The ladder was in the alley, but I’m not sure when.”

“The diner kitchen?” Catherine asked. “I think I saw that guy. I went out back and there was a young man sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette.” She frowned. “I wonder if he made us as cops. He had a strange reaction to me. When we were in the diner, we talked to the FBI agents on the phone but we kept it off speaker. But if someone had a parabolic listening device, they could have heard the whole thing.”

Vincent grunted. “McEvers told you to meet her here, right? To tell you something, or to lure you into a trap? I wonder if the person who killed her prevented her from telling you something or saved you?”

“There was a girl texting the whole time we were there. She wasn’t a very good waitress. I wonder if she was texting McEvers or Lizzani. Or even Robertson and Gonzales and telling them we’d arrived. Or someone else altogether. The killer.”

“Maybe if we went back into the diner, I could get more information,” he said, but Catherine shook her head.

“I probably shouldn’t go back in.”

“I’ll go alone,” Vincent said.

He turned and Catherine grabbed his arm. He scented her worry. Her body was practically singing with fear. For him.

“What if this is some kind of ruse to call
you
out?” she whispered fiercely. “People know we were together. And you’re being hunted everywhere.” Her shoulders were hunched; she was shrinking down, the very opposite of his brave Catherine. She was more like him than she realized: when she was unable to fight beside him or protect him, she felt lost. That was when she dropped her focus, her “tiger-cop” ferocity. Until he had been able to control his beast side as well as he could now, that would be the most likely scenario for him to begin to lose it. His powerlessness would enrage him most of all. He never felt more threatened than when Catherine was in danger.

“Catherine, we have to find this boy. His death is going to be unspeakable. Agonizing. I was a doctor. I know every single thing that’s going to happen to his body if he doesn’t get some insulin.” “They have to know that. They won’t kill him until they get their money,” Catherine insisted. “They haven’t even set a time for the money to be paid.”

“That you know of. You said yourself you’re not sure that all the messages from the kidnappers are coming through.”

“Then we need to hurry.” She tilted her head back to lock gazes with him. “Ever since you had to go back on the run…” She cleared her throat. “If it feels wrong, promise you’ll pull back.”

“I will.”

They walked together back through the alley. Catherine couldn’t know that his predator senses were replaying Claudia McEvers’ last moments as if he were physically present. Ghostly white images projected how hard she had fought for her life. Martial arts moves, kicks, all to no avail. She had been very surprised. The pain and terror as the gun butt came down again and again.

And then, as he was about to step out of the alley onto the sidewalk, he smelled the weirdest scent. It took him a couple of seconds to figure out what it was, but even then he didn’t know what it was called.

“Those bright red cherries that they put in drinks,” he said. “What do you call them?”

“Maraschino cherries?”

“I can smell them. And… coconut. Popcorn. It’s a mixture. Do they have something like that on the menu in the diner? A dessert?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t look at desserts.” She sniffed. “I can’t smell it.”

“You’re lucky. It’s so sweet my eyes are practically watering.” He began to walk out of the alley, and then he stopped. “It’s strongest here. Right here. Whoever smelled like that waited here.” He cocked his head. “The man who beat McEvers came up beside popcorn guy. A car pulled up and they both got into it.”

“What about stepladder guy?” she asked him.

“I don’t scent him down here. He must have gone the other way, around the Dumpster and back into the diner through the door you described.”

“So he wasn’t afraid to be seen. Making it more likely that he wasn’t a stranger around here. So he might be in the diner right now, working. Or maybe he’s lit out by now.”

“One way to know.”

Her lips parted in protest, and then she ducked her head in assent. He was going to do what he was going to do, and she knew there was no talking him out of it. It was game on, and Vincent was at bat.

B
all cap low, Vincent strolled down the street with his hands in his pockets. There was a menu in the window of Mars, and he ran his gaze down the offerings until he got to desserts. Nothing with maraschino cherries, popcorn, and coconut.

He went in. He saw at once the texting waitress, who barely looked at him. But her heartbeat picked up and she took a step away as he approached.

Does she know who I am? Is she telling someone to call the police, that she’s spotted the murderer, Vincent Keller?

She didn’t seem agitated enough. She was on guard but she wasn’t overly stressed. She was acting
guilty
, he realized. It wasn’t that she recognized him.
She
was afraid of being recognized.

He sat at the counter. There were a few other people in a scattering of booths. Based on Catherine’s description of the diner, it had gotten busier.

“Coffee, please,” he said in a voice even lower and gruffer than his normal tone.

While she turned to a coffee warmer to pour him a cup, he slid off the bar stool and headed toward the back. It was convenient that the bathroom was located past the open kitchen. Vincent paused on the threshold of the steamy cooking area, pretending to search for the bathroom door, peered into the kitchen, and focused.

The man who had brought a ladder into the alley was in there. He was standing over a deep fryer. He had red hair, he was a little taller than average, and he wore a soul patch. The tattoo on his bare forearm read
Hendrix.

Vincent looked around for a ladder and saw one in the corner of the kitchen, folded up rather incongruously beside a large stack of oversized cans of tomatoes. Vincent honed in on the ladder and went just a little beast, eyes averted. There was no blood on the ladder, as he might have expected. In fact, he didn’t scent Claudia McEvers or her killer on it. No popcorn or maraschino cherries, either. But he did smell the other odors of the alley, the smells that had been there before Claudia McEvers’ murder. That would place the man in the alley before she’d been killed. Maybe he was innocent of all of this.

Sometimes a ladder was just a ladder, and a cook was just a cook.

He must have felt Vincent’s gaze on him. His heartbeat accelerated into overdrive and fear-sweat clogged Vincent’s nostrils. The man was terrified. Feigning nonchalance, he walked over to a deep fryer and lifted up the basket, checking the fries dripping with hot oil. He was trembling.

Vincent continued his journey to the bathroom, opened the door so that it appeared that he had gone inside, and texted Catherine:

Yes. He’s here. Wait. Conceal.

He waited for the guy to leave the kitchen.

Bingo.

Now in a black jacket, the cook furtively darted into the hall and hurried into the dining room. Vincent heard the front door open and close. He moved back into the dining area himself, dropped some bills beside his cup, and left.

Then Vincent made as if to wait at the curb for a break in the traffic to cross the street. In actuality, he was searching with his beast senses for the cook. Catherine was a few feet away on his right, waiting out of sight as he had requested. He scented her and heard her steady heartbeat. She was on the job, intent but not nervous.

There.

The guy was hurrying down the street to Vincent’s left. Vincent began to follow him, maintaining a good distance with his ball cap down and the snow landing on his pea coat. He didn’t turn to look back at Catherine, wasn’t sure if she would stand still in the snowfall, which was getting worse, or re-enter the diner to examine the empty kitchen. Maybe she would start following him and his mark.

The cook looked over his shoulder, realized that Vincent was behind him, and his heartbeat picked up. He quickened his pace. A tiny flicker flared to life inside Vincent. Where it resided, Vincent wasn’t sure—his brain? His body? It was the first flash of the interest of a predator in potential prey. But he was allowed to feel that, wasn’t he? It was the same kind of charge a cop got when they tailed a suspect.

Wasn’t it?

He didn’t have to feel
less
than another human being so that he could actually claim that he
was
a human being.

So, okay, he permitted himself to enjoy the hunt.

The cook was getting increasingly scared. As he walked past a large window he glanced into it, searching for Vincent’s reflection. Vincent slowed to make that impossible, and the flicker inside him grew.

Beasthood was ingrained in him, inside his very DNA. He had to work to control that side, and he couldn’t relax his vigil, ever. He throttled himself back down and worked to see what the cook had done in the alley with the ladder, now that he had more sights and sounds to work with.

In beast-flashes, he saw the cook carrying the ladder into the alley. It had not yet begun to rain. The young man set the ladder down about five feet from the Dumpster. The body was already in the Dumpster by then, but it didn’t appear that they guy was aware of it. Despite that, the man was afraid.

He climbed the ladder, looking constantly up and down the alley. Dripping with apprehension. Then he climbed to the top of the ladder, balancing precariously on the top, and extracted something from his jeans pocket, beneath his white work apron. Cotton fibers and tiny fragments of tobacco had cascaded out of his pocket onto the ground.

There was something in the man’s hand, but Vincent couldn’t see what it was. The roof of the diner was shingled, and there was a gap where part of a shingle had broken off. He slipped whatever was in his hand into the gap. Vincent concentrated harder. It was something metal…or
in
metal.

We have to go back and get that
, Vincent thought. He thought about texting Catherine to check it out but he was too intently focused on his quarry to do it.

He let the vision-memory fade. The cook was coming up to a cluster of men and women in jeans, work boots, and jackets that read dickinson construction, who were hurrying beneath the eaves of the buildings toward Vincent, possibly returning from lunch.

The young man broke into a run. He waved his hands and shouted, “Help! That man is after me! Help!”

The construction workers looked from him to Vincent. Their faces became ugly. Then one of them narrowed his eyes in suspicion and said, “Hey, man, what’s up?” His eyes widened. “Hey, wait a minute!”

Recognized.
Or nearly. He considered blurring past them but knew he couldn’t. Even considered knocking them all out. But of course he couldn’t do that either. He could only look on helplessly as the group spread themselves across the sidewalk, effectively barring his path.

He was afraid to even speak to them, for fear of being recognized, and hung a right toward the curb. He watched the cars as they trundled past and he darted into an opening. Once across the street, he disappeared into an alley.

Then, safe from scrutiny, he turned left and
blurred
, hoping to catch up with the cook. His mind was so fixed on triangulating his location that he missed the gaping hole in the ground before him—part of another construction site—and tumbled down hard onto his back. A crusty layer cracked beneath him and he fell into ice water. He lay stunned, the wind knocked out of him, and cursed Reynolds for taking away his ability to heal himself. Of course Reynolds had done it so that when it came time to kill Vincent, it would be easier.

His phone was still in his pocket. He rolled over onto his knees to protect it from the ice water. Finally able to take a breath, he crawled to the nearest side of the pit and searched for handholds—plant roots, rebar, anything. There was nothing but damp, packed earth; he pushed his fingers into the mud and made grabbing attempts with his hands. He pulled himself up, then extracted one hand, raised his arm, and drilled his fingers into a section of mud closer to the top. His ribs hurt and his head was pounding.

Still he forced his fingers in, and then in again, until finally he lifted himself out of the hole and lay on the ground for a moment, catching his breath. He held his hands straight out to let the rain wash them, then found the paper towel he had used to open the Dumpster and dried them. He wanted to tell Cat to search the diner’s roof for something metal.

He texted her and hit send.

Message undelivered
, his phone read. He saw that that he had only one bar, and cursed under his breath.

He finally stood and then he
blurred
, seeing the cook’s path down the block and attempting to follow it. But then he detected a car and put on the brakes. He ground his teeth in frustration as he watched a cab driving away. He knew the young man was in it, and soon it wove into the complex pattern of traffic. As he tried to decide if he should attempt to overtake it, he caught an elderly man beneath an umbrella staring at him.

Best not to chance it
, he thought.

Daubed with mud and soaked to the skin, he trudged back to where he had left Catherine. She was standing beneath an eave, as wet as he was, colder, no doubt, and she heaved a sigh of relief when she saw him. He gestured for her to stay where she was—he would come to her—but as soon as he was within striking distance, she threw her arms around him as if she couldn’t help herself.