Blood Secrets - By Jeannie Holmes Page 0,92

wanted to reclaim them both and knew, as he sat in the mobile forensics lab, that it was possible with the help of the two analysts before him, if he could muster the energy to focus on their words.

Reyes Cott stood in front of him, gesturing to a porcelain doll encased in a large clear plastic evidence cylinder. “It’s supercreepy,” he said. His overly large eyes protruded farther than normal. “I’ve seen some weird shit but this doll beats it all.”

“Spare me the melodrama, Reyes,” Varik snapped. “Just tell me what you found.”

“Human blood.”

“On the doll?”

“In the doll.” Reyes picked up the cylinder. “As you know, the body is made from human skin that’s been turned into a type of leather, which is itself very high on the creep-o-meter, but the real show is in the porcelain head. At one time it was filled with human blood. A crack along the neck caused the blood to seep out.”

“Why fill a doll’s head with blood?”

“Good question. Why make the body out of human skin?” Reyes set the cylinder aside. “I think I have an answer to both.” He jiggled the mouse connected to his laptop computer and the monitor flickered from a screen saver to a website. “I found this site—it’s sort of like Wikipedia for occult practices—and there’s a bunch of stuff on here about poppet magic, or using dolls as a stand-in for a real person.”

“Voodoo dolls,” Varik said, pushing to his feet to view the site over Reyes’s shoulder.

“Not exactly. Voodoo’s a religion, whereas a lot of what’s detailed on this site is just straight-up magic. Really freaky magic.” Reyes clicked on a series of links and an article featuring a lifelike doll with glowing red eyes appeared.

Varik leaned forward. “Soul transference?”

“According to the author of this article, a portion of the soul can be trapped in a vessel, in this case a doll, and used to boost the creator’s prana, or psychic energy.”

“Which is what vampires feed on when we consume human blood.”

“Precisely.” Reyes tapped the screen. “Now, going back to what we discussed yesterday, I’m thinking if this is possible, and you could perfect the storage devices and get enough of them, the need to consume blood would practically flatline, once you overcame the cravings for the taste.”

“Alex said she heard hundreds of screams in the Dollmaker’s house.”

“If he does have hundreds of these and if he has any form of psychic ability, which you say he does, each one of these would act as a battery. The guy would be turbocharged.”

Varik straightened up and sighed. “That would explain why the bond has been cold. He’s blocking it somehow.”

“But that has to be taxing, regardless of the number of spare batteries.”

“Is there anything this doll can tell us about who he is?”

Reyes smiled, showing a crooked left fang. “I saved the best part for last. Because I’m such a thorough guy, I checked out this doll from stem to stern, so to speak. I found a partial print embedded in the porcelain underneath the doll’s wig. I used a high-tech modeling compound to get a workable negative—”

“He stuck Silly Putty to the doll’s head and then froze it,” Freddy Haver chimed in from his station across the lab.

“Hey, it worked. You said it wouldn’t, and you still owe me twenty bucks.”

Varik seized the back of Reyes’s neck and squeezed, earning a pained squeak from the analyst. “You could use your mother’s face to get the print. I don’t care how you got it. I want to know whom it belongs to. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you get a hit from IAFIS or VIPER?”

“Freddy has it.”

Varik released him and moved to Freddy’s station. It was standard procedure to submit all prints to IAFIS—the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the human-run FBI—as well as its twin, the Vampire Identification Patterns and Enforcement Resource, or VIPER. The systems were maintained separately since vampire fingerprints weren’t as pronounced as humans’ and were often overlooked by them as smudges.

Freddy handed him two sheets of paper. “VIPER lists the print as belonging to Peter Strahan. I knew you wanted it so I put a rush on the request for a current address for Strahan—5726 Caspian Drive. It’s in the southeastern part of Nassau County. The second page is a map showing—”

Varik didn’t wait to hear more. He took the pages and in two paces had reached the lab’s entrance. “Radio Damian and tell him where to meet me!”

Forgoing the steps, he jumped