accent. I could hear music playing and people talking behind him. A party? A door clicked shut and he said, without any accent, “Hey, Harry.”
“I’m standing outside your apartment in the freaking snow with your birthday present.”
“That won’t do you much good,” he said. “I’m not there.”
“Being a professional detective, I had deduced that much,” I said.
“A birthday present, huh?” he said.
“I get much colder and I’m going to burn it for warmth.”
He laughed. “I’m at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.”
I glanced at my watch. “This late?”
“Uh-huh. I’m doing a favor for one of my employees. I’ll be here until midnight or so. Look, just come back tomorrow evening.”
“No,” I said stubbornly. “Your birthday is today. I’ll drive there.”
“Uh,” Thomas said. “Yeah. I guess, uh. Okay.”
I frowned. “What are you doing out there?”
“Gotta go.” He hung up on me.
I traded a look with Molly. “Huh.”
She tilted her head. “What’s going on?”
I turned and headed back for the car. “Let’s find out.”
WOODFIELD MALL IS the largest such establishment in the state, but its parking lots were all but entirely empty. The mall had been closed for more than an hour.
“How are we supposed to find him?” Molly asked.
I drove my car, the beat-up old Volkswagen Bug I had dubbed the Blue Beetle, around for a few minutes. “There,” I said, nodding at a white sedan parked among a dozen other vehicles, the largest concentration of such transport left at the mall. “That’s his car.” I started to say something else but stopped myself before I wasted an opportunity to Yoda the trainee. “Molly, tell me what you see.”
She scrunched up her nose, frowning, as I drove through the lot to park next to Thomas’s car. The tires crunched over the thin dusting of snow that had frosted itself over scraped asphalt, streaks of salt and ice melt, and stubborn patches of ice. I killed the engine. It ticked for a few seconds, and then the car filled with the kind of soft, heavy silence you get only on a winter night with snow on the ground.
“The mall is closed,” Molly said. “But there are cars at this entrance. There is a single section of lights on inside when the rest of them are out. I think one of the shops is lit inside. There’s no curtain down over it, even though the rest of the shops have them.”
“So what should we be asking?” I prompted.
“What is Thomas doing, in a group, in a closed mall, on Valentine’s Day night?” Her tone rose at the end, questioning.
“Good; the date might have some significance,” I said. “But the real question is this: Is it a coincidence that the exterior security camera facing that door is broken?”
Molly blinked at me, then frowned, looking around.
I pointed a finger up. “Remember to look in all three dimensions. Human instincts don’t tend toward checking above us or directly at our feet, in general. You have to make yourself pick up the habit.”
Molly frowned and then leaned over, peering up through the Beetle’s window to the tall streetlamp pole above us.
Maybe ten feet up, there was the square, black metal housing of a security camera. Several bare wires dangled beneath it, their ends connected to nothing. I’d seen it as I pulled the car in.
My apprentice drew in a nervous breath. “You think something is happening?”
“I think we don’t have enough information to make any assumptions,” I said. “It’s probably nothing. But let’s keep our eyes open.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than two figures stepped out of the night, walking briskly down the sidewalk outside the mall toward the lighted entrance.
They both wore long black capes with hoods.
Not your standard wear for Chicago shoppers.
Molly opened her mouth to stammer something.
“Quiet,” I hissed. “Do not move.”
The two figures went by only thirty or forty feet away. I caught a glimpse of a very, very pale face within one of the figure’s hoods, eyes sunken into the skull-like pits. They both turned to the door without so much as glancing at us, opened it as though they expected it to be unlocked, and proceeded inside.
“All right,” I said quietly. “It might be something.”
“Um,” Molly said. “W-were those v-vampires?”
“Deep breaths, kid,” I told her. “Fear isn’t stupid, but don’t let it control you. I have no idea what they were.” I made sure my old fleece-lined heavy denim coat was buttoned up, and I got out of the car.