you hope we find the ‘guy’ who did it tonight.” Butch shook his head. “We don’t know whether the killer is a male or female. Remember, no assumptions at this point, okay? And when we’re in there, just observe. I’m going to do most of the work.”
Jesus, Boone thought. He wasn’t even aware of having spoken out loud.
“Yes, sir.”
Butch clapped Boone on the shoulder and resumed walking. “You’re going to do fine.”
As they closed in on the entrance to the old shirt factory, bypassing the line, the two bouncers at the door flexed up, but they ultimately didn’t follow through on the my-turf posturing. Instead, the two men just nodded the way in clarity, like they’d been hit in the face with a pair of VIP passes.
You had to love mind control over humans. And it was not a surprise that Butch clearly was a master at the manipulation.
“So you’ve been here before?” the Brother asked as they entered and went past a coat check.
Boone made a mental note to talk to the woman on duty, except how would that go:
Hey, have you seen any vampires go past you?
Oh, yeah, sure. About three hundred every night. Were you looking for one?
He shook himself back into focus. “Ah, I’ve only been here once, and it was a while ago. But like I said, my cousins come a couple times a year.”
“Yeah, this doesn’t seem like your scene.”
Boone checked out a half-naked human who was vomiting into a plastic bag in the dark corner. “No. It’s not.”
Inside the large open area, there was a big crowd dancing, talking, hooking up. The music was loud, so people had to get close to communicate—and the darkness reinforced the need to go clutch: With the limited faculties possessed by humans, they had to get up in each other’s spaces to hear and see properly in the dim environment. And it wasn’t all Homo sapiens LARPing it. He could sense a few vampires milling around among the men and women, but just three or four—and they stayed away. Made sense. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fraternize with these rats without tails, so no one in the species was going to hi-how’re-ya and reveal themselves in this environment unless they had to.
“Let’s go down to the lower level,” Butch said over the din. “V told me the stairwell’s entrance is somewhere back there.”
As Boone follow-the-leader’d through the gyrating bodies, he stared straight ahead and let his peripheral vision track the masks, the drapes of clothes, the heights and the weights of Pyre’s patrons. Just as he had been trained to do.
The stairwell to the subterranean level turned out to be easy enough to find, and they proceeded down a dank, cold series of steps, bottoming out in a corridor that was long as a football field and strobe-lit by a series of last-legged fluorescent ceiling mounts.
“Fourth door down on the right,” Butch said. “Storage area.”
Boone looked at the sequence of heavy doors. “Is that what’s behind all these?”
“Think so.”
The sound of something snapping brought Boone’s head around. Butch had taken a pair of bright blue nitrile gloves out of the pocket of his coat and was putting them on.
“It’s a little late for this”—the Brother held his hands up like a surgeon—“but old habits die hard and all that shit.”
“Why is it too late?”
“There is no way they got the body out without disturbing the scene. No matter how careful they were.”
From out of another pocket, Butch produced a small headlamp and put it on like a crown. Triggering the beam, he stopped in front of door number four. “You stay out here, but by all means, lean in and look around. Like I said, the scene’s basically ruined at this point, but there’s no reason for us to add to that by both tromping around inside.”
As the Brother opened the heavy panels wide, the creaking hinges were right out of a horror movie—and so was the scent that hit Boone’s nose like a slap.
Blood. Not exactly fresh, no. But there was a lot that had been spilled—
Oh, God, Boone thought.
Down on the dirty concrete floor, directly in the path of Butch’s frontal lobe beam of light, there was a congealed puddle that was shocking in size.
As Butch stepped through the jambs and looked around, the walls of the empty storage area glistened in the icy illumination of his lamp. But at least all that appeared to be groundwater seepage as opposed to plasma.