Nick listened to the squad room clock measuring off endless minutes on the wall behind him. Computer keys clicked. A solitary phone warbled. And from the coffee niche wafted a miasma of stale donuts and burnt caffeine.

Desk duty was boring enough when there were phone calls to make and case reports to write up. When 'business' was so slow that you had to pretend to look busy, it could be downright stultifying.

Across their conjoined desks, Don Schanke fixed him with the calculating gaze of a veteran poker player and queried hopefully, "Do you give up?"

Nick scowled. "Not just yet. Let's see..." He counted clues off on his fingers. "Surname starts with K. Fictional character; male; on a television show; not American, Canadian or European; not on the air in the 90s, the 80s or the 70s. So, next question. Are you the author of The Penal Colony?"

Schanke rolled his eyes. "No, I am not Kafka. And be grateful we're not narrowing categories here, partner, or that would definitely be an illegal question."

"Illegal." Both detectives started at the intrusion of Captain Stonetree's gruff voice. "Like in homicide, maybe?" A case folder landed with a smack on the desk in front of Nick. "Looks like your slow night just got busy," Stonetree grumped. "Guy out in the 'burbs says he just found a body in his basement. ME's already on it. And now, so are both of you."

"Uh, right Cap'n." A sheepish Schanke got up to shrug on his rumpled suit coat. "We're on it."

Stonetree harrumphed, and without further words, turned and stalked back to his glass-walled office. Nick, already absorbed in the preliminary case report, scarcely noticed. "Caller discovered upright oil drum behind locked door during home renovation," he read aloud. "Body was sealed inside."

"Oh, swell. A packing job. I can't wait." Schanke started walking, only to turn back when Nick remained seated, still perusing the report. "Hellooooo, Knight! You coming?"

That provoked snickers from several of the other night shifters. Ignoring them, Nick hastily committed the caller's name and address to memory, snagged his own coat from its wall hook, and went after Schanke.

"So, who was it?" He didn't ask the question until they were in the Caddy and half way to their destination.

"Huh?" Uncharacteristically quiet, Schanke had been staring out the window at Toronto's night lights.

"Your K," Nick prodded. "The Botticelli game?"

"Oh, yeah, that." Schanke cocked a suddenly suspicious eyebrow. "You mean you're giving up already? Mr. Never-Forgets-Anything is giving up on my K?"

"Let's just say I've never had a lot of time to watch television. So, who was it?"

"Only one of the coolest characters on the absolutely greatest TV spy show ever. Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin."

Nick braked for a red light and looked at his partner with a completely blank expression. "Who?"

"Oh, come on, Nick. Don't tell me you never saw The Man From U.N.C.L.E.! Napoleon Solo? Mr. Waverly? Thrush?"

"Uh..."

Schanke pouted. "Well, it was only the hottest show on the tube in 64 and 65, that's all."

"Schank, in 1965, I was..." Nick hesitated, calculating fictitious years. "...seven."

"And I was fifteen. What of it? Y'know, we have really got to work on your cultural education, Nicky Boy, we really do."

He was still prattling on about spies, 60s TV shows, and Nick's lack of knowledge about same when they pulled up behind the coroner's van in front of the caller's residence. Natalie's sedan and two squad cars with their light bars flashing were all parked beyond the van, and despite the Spring chill and late hour, a growing crowd of curious neighbors was gathering in front of the two-story house. Nick and Schanke had to wade through a barrage of anxious questions on their way to the door.

The homeowner was a single, 26-year-old computer engineer named Harold Mendelin. He'd never seen a dead body before, and was so rattled he could barely spell his own name. Nick and Schanke left him in the capable hands of a department psych counselor and made their way to the cellar.

It was one large concrete room. Nick rapidly noted four open ground level windows near the ceiling, a hatch-like metal door with a broken padlock dangling from its bent hasp, and the permeating, unmistakable odor of death. There were drag marks scoring the floor for a short distance from the metal door, leading to a bright blue, upright oil drum now sitting center floor. Beside that stood Natalie Lambert, clipboard in hand, a paper filter mask covering her nose and mouth. She pulled two more of the masks from her white coat pocket as they approached.

"You'll be needing these," she said.

When they'd both donned the filters (though Nick found the thing of no help whatsoever), she pulled away the loosened top of the barrel.

"Ohhhhhh, man. That's..." Donald Schanke -- he of the cast iron stomach -- looked about to lose his souvlaki-and-marinated-pineapple lunch. The stench of decay and something puissantly chemical assailed them the moment the lid came away. And the thing in the oil drum barely resembled anything human. Nick could see a small hand curled over what looked like a bundle of gray leather matted with dark hair.

Natalie waited until they'd both peered inside, then slid the heavy cover back into place.

"I take it," Nick said, his voice muffled by the useless filter mask, "that we're not exactly dealing with a recent crime here."

"Not by a long shot," Nat confirmed, and handed Nick an evidence bag with a small, dark rectangle sealed inside. "We fished a woman's purse out of there. Pretty badly saturated with body fluids and whatever chemical was originally in the drum. There was an address book -- too wet to examine yet -- and this. It's an appointment card."

"For an M.D. on Bay Street." Nick had to tilt the badly stained card to read the handwriting on the printed line. There was no patient name, just the words, "Next appt." and a date. With a glance up at Nat, Nick read it aloud. "Two p.m., 10-23-63."

"Get outa here!" Schanke took the bag and held it up to the fluorescent ceiling lights, squinting at it until he was convinced Nick had read the date correctly. "You telling me a corpse stashed under a house for thirty years could still be this ripe? Is that possible?"

Natalie nodded. "Decay and desiccation rates can be greatly prolonged in a sealed environment. So yes, it's possible. I'll know more when I can x-ray and autopsy her. Assuming it is a her, and the purse was hers."

"We'll check out the M.D. and pull records on who owned the house in 1963," Nick said. "Missing persons records may not be much help, at least not until we have a little more description."

"I'll do my best." Nat motioned to two of the coroner's assistants. "Take her out, guys. And keep it upright, okay?"

Nick was grateful to get rid of the mask and go topside, back out into the cooler, fresher night air. When the coroner's van had pulled away, Nat intercepted him on the sidewalk just out of earshot from the Cadillac, where Schanke already waited in the passenger's seat. "How was the latest protein shake?" she wanted to know.

Nick hadn't been prepared for that question. "Great," he said, too quickly. "Just fine. Never tasted better."

She scowled at him. "Y'know, in eight hundred years, I'd think you'd have learned to lie a little better. You did drink it, right?"

"Yeah." Her scowl deepened, ripe with suspicion, and Nick gazed longingly at the waiting Caddy. "Most of it. All right, all right, some of it. And it tasted like dishwater, but hey, don't stop trying, okay?"

The scowl became a faint but discernible smile. "Okay," she said.

They walked in silence to the parked Cadillac. Nick opened the door, but turned back before getting in. "Oh, and Nat? You ever hear of something called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?"

"The what?"

"Yeah. Me neither. G'nite, Nat."

"Oh, man!" Schanke's familiar refrain floated from inside the Caddy. "I can't believe you guys never even heard of it! That was a great show!"

The next two weeks put a definite end to the slow period. Four homicides crowded their case load, and Stonetree had just delivered the file on a fifth when he asked what was happening with the "Jane Doe in the Oil Drum" case.

Schanke gave him the bad news before Nick could answer. "So far, nothing but dead ends, you should pardon the expression. Whereabouts unknown on one Martin Lavine, who owned the house in 63. The guy just drops off the records that same year. And the oil drum's a wash, too. No marks, no labels, no serial numbers."

"The M.D. on the appointment card," Nick said, "died in 1975. His daughter took over the practice, but she doesn't have any records that old."

Stonetree thrust out his lower lip, something he often did when mulling something over. "And still no ID on the victim?"

"Not unless Natalie's come up with something." Nick checked his watch. "She had a back up in cases, had to delay the preliminary autopsy until today."

Schanke brightened at that. "Does this mean we're about to pay a visit to our friendly neighborhood morgue?"

With a sigh, Nick surveyed the pile of unsolved case folders on his desk. "Well," he said, "we don't seem to be doing much good here."

"Right." Schanke held out five fingers as he got up. "But gimme five seconds first, okay? Brookman just brought in two dozen fresh chocolate eclairs."

He was still licking chocolate goo off his fingers -- and Nick's stomach was still churning -- when they walked into Natalie's lab.

"I was about to call you." She'd just finished washing up and was drying her hands when they came in. On the metal exam table, Jane Doe lay curled on her side, frozen in the same fetal position she'd held inside the drum for so many years. The strong odor evident in the cellar was greatly diminished. And now, Nick could see that she had indeed been human once. Despite her mummified state, he saw a face that was young, rather pretty, and somehow not at all at peace. She reminded him of...

He interrupted his own thought by asking Nat if she'd found anything.

"I can't give her a name yet. No wallet or ID in the purse, the body's too far gone for fingerprints, and the address book is going to take a while to dry out enough to separate the pages. Nothing on the chemical in the drum yet, either. However..." She flicked on the wall-mounted light panel, illuminating the x-ray of a human skull. "I can tell you that Jane was approximately eighteen years of age. And the probable C.O.D.," she pointed to a spot high on the film, "was blunt force trauma to the occipital lobe, right here."

"What's all that?" Schanke pointed to one of several bright areas on the x-rayed teeth.

"Gold bridge work. And it wasn't done here or in the States. I checked. Even in the 60s, this kind of dental prosthetic was only common in Mexico and Latin America. But hold on..." She pulled the film loose and clipped another in its place. This time, Nick recognized the side view of a spinal cord and pelvic bones. There was also an indistinct roundish shape floating just above the pelvis.

"Hellloooooo," Schanke said softly. "Is that...?"

"Uh-huh." Natalie glanced toward the autopsy table. "Jane Doe, whoever she was, was four-to-five months pregnant when she died."

"Sounds like a motive to me," Schanke said. "Maybe a little 'inconvenience' someone needed to get rid of in a hurry, before the wife found out?"

"Inconvenience..." Nick paced back to the small figure on the table and looked again into Jane Doe's painfully young face. "To Mr. Lavine, perhaps?"

"Wherever he may be," Schanke said. "And that could be the graveyard by now, y'know."

"Maybe. But I think we should try a little harder to find out."

Nat switched off the light panel. "I'll let you know what turns up with the address book and the chemical analysis. I don't think a full autopsy would tell us any more than the x-ray has, so I'm going to keep her in the cold unit as is, for now." She paused, watching Nick's pensive study of the body. "You think there's a chance you can find this guy, three whole decades later?"

"Who knows?" Schanke said. "Maybe if we work up a facial reconstruction, release it to the press and make a plea on the air, we'll get lucky and he'll give himself up. Hey, thirty years is a hell of a long time to live with that kind of guilt, y'know?"

Nick met Nat's gaze for a prolonged moment, not breaking it until Schanke noticed and said, "What? Did I say something?"

When Nick headed out the door without replying, Schanke followed, muttering complaints all the while. "Geez, Louise, what is it with you two?"

Back in the Caddy, Nick endured his partner's inane chit-chat for several blocks before abruptly pulling over to the curb and killing the engine. Schanke peered through the windshield at the less-than-upscale neighborhood they'd stopped in, then looked at Nick with trepidation. "Now what?"

When Nick opened the car door, trepidation turned to near-panic. "Oh no, not again. Now where the hell are you going?"

"For a walk."

Schanke eyed the dark street, its doorways full of the bedrolls, blankets and cardboard boxes of the city's homeless, and said incredulously, "Here???"

"Yeah, here." Nick stared at the sidewalk and its population of disenfranchised mortals. "Why do we do this?" He'd narrowly avoided saying 'you.' "Why do we tolerate a society that deems all of these people inconsequential?" That had been LaCroix's word for them. The inconsequential. An entire class of humanity that no one ever noticed; people no one would ever even bother to report missing. Inconvenient in human terms, perhaps. Quite convenient indeed for vampires -- and murderers. "Take the Caddy back to the station?" He tossed the keys across the front seat and got out of the car.

An agitated Schanke fumbled with the jangling keys. "Knight! Stonetree is gonna have your badge if you don't stop disappearing like this!"

"Tell him I'm running down a lead."

"Yeah, right. What lead?"

Without answering, Nick walked away from the Caddy and its sputtering occupant, pausing just long enough to wince at the sound of slamming doors, an over-revved engine and squealing tires. His beloved car peeled away from the curb and tore off down the street, leaving a foul odor of burned rubber behind.

A bored clerk at the open-all-night Burger Barn hardly blinked at Nick's request for thirty sandwiches in separate paper bags, and took his credit card without comment. And though a few of the sidewalk sleepers refused his offering, swore at him or demanded money instead, most accepted the meal with muttered thanks. It took less than twenty minutes to exhaust his supply.

The last of his small burdens gone, Nick moved into an alley between the featureless brick buildings. It was even darker here, and reeking with the mingled odors of garbage, vomit, feces and urine. There were also more homeless camped out here, more cardboard shelters from which a dozen mortal heartbeats thrummed. Despite the more powerful stench of trash and human waste, the smell of blood coursing through veins so close by began overwhelming his senses, and Nick felt his eyes burn gold. He quickly sought out the alley's darkest unoccupied corner, tilted his head back to look skyward, and rapidly took flight.

City lights blurred beneath him, coming back into focus only when he slowed and landed on a roof to peer down on yet another street, this one in Toronto's bustling nightclub district. Richmond ran east to west three blocks from here. He could see the Raven's distinctive black-tarred roof over there, but tonight it was not his destination. He looked instead to the street below him, where several dozen club patrons milled, laughing, talking, smoking. They had company. On nearly every corner waited practitioners, both male and female, of the world's oldest profession. Nick watched them propositioning the passersby and leaning into the car windows of those who pulled over to negotiate a price. One young woman in particular drew his attention. Under the skimpy clothes, heavy make-up and bleached-blonde hair, he saw the frail body of a girl who was surely no more than fifteen. If that. He wondered if, thirty years ago, Jane Doe might have plied the same trade on a similar corner. Like the homeless, prostitutes were easy prey to those who fed upon 'disposable' humanity.

It had been just the same in 1228.

"They are prey, Nicholas, nothing more. You must feed. And then, you must forget."

LaCroix had stood over him and whispered that admonition eight centuries ago, while a newly turned Nicholas de Brabant had cradled the limp, bloodless form of his first lone kill.

He'd never even known her name.

Paris in 1228 had been a perfect hunting ground, its alleys and river wharfs teeming with the nameless, homeless poor. Even a fledgling vampire could easily lure an innocent from their midst. And if those so lost were mourned at all, who was to know?

His first conquest had come with him willingly, almost eagerly. Young and thin to near emaciation, she had meekly asked for nothing more than a crust of bread in return for her favors. And when, moments later, she lay frail and lifeless in his arms, a crushing weight of guilt had descended on him, bringing blood tears to his eyes and invoking LaCroix's sardonic warning that he must learn to forget.

"I can't." Nicholas had nearly choked on the words. "I can't do this."

"Oh, but you can. And you will." LaCroix had crouched beside him, and with the back of one pale hand had begun to caress his face. When Nicholas cringed away, the same hand roughly grasped his chin and forced his head up. "You will learn not to concern yourself with the inconsequential." LaCroix's grip had tightened painfully until at last, the hand withdrew with a disgusted flourish. "Come," his master had commanded then. "The Seine has many places where the inconvenient remains of one's repast may be disposed of. I will show you how it is done."

From his rooftop aerie, Nick watched a red pickup stop at the teenage prostitute's corner. After a very brief conversation through the open passenger window, the girl opened the truck's door and climbed in. Nick kept the pickup's tail lights in view until they merged into a main traffic artery and disappeared uptown. If its young female occupant were to disappear as well, he wondered if there would be anyone to notice, any more than there had been in Paris eight hundred years ago.

"Somebody somewhere must have cared about her," he told Schanke across their paper strewn desks. Another two weeks had gone by, and they still had no viable leads.

"Yeah, maybe." Schanke sighed. "Somebody somewhere in South America, probably, which last time I checked, was still a hell of a big place. We may just be looking at an unsolvable here."

Nick glowered at the case file in front of him. "She had to be someone's friend, daughter, lover. Maybe even wife. How does she just vanish like that without anybody noticing?"

"Happens every day." Schanke stopped shuffling case files long enough to meet his partner's grim expression eye to eye. "Look, Nick, it's a thirty year old cold case, for God's sake. You can't solve 'em all."

"Maybe not," Natalie's voice intervened. "But we can try." Nick stood to take the folder she proffered. "We finally got the chem report on the stuff in the oil drum. It's a green polymer based dye used to color plastics. And that..." Nick had pulled out an eight-by-ten photo of a stained address book page. "...is our fifth legible address and phone number."

"The first four didn't get us far," Schanke complained. "They were all either deceased or untraceable."

"This one isn't." Nat tapped the thick city directory beside Schanke's desk phone. "Isabella Ramos is still in the book at the same address and phone number."

"All right." Schanke was on his feet now, too. "Finally. Someone to go talk to."

But Nick hadn't moved yet. He'd found something else in Nat's folder: a computer generated recreation of Jane Doe's face as it had probably looked in life. He stared into a delicate, too-thin face with full lips and deep, dark eyes -- and saw a girl who had once walked the Paris wharfs in hope of a scrap of bread.

"According to my forensics team," Nat said while Schanke came to peer over Nick's shoulder at the picture, "that should be close enough for anyone who knew her to recognize."

"Okay, we're outa here. Oh, wait..." Schanke did an about face and made tracks for the coffee niche. "I'm gonna need java and a couple of glazed donuts for the road."

Natalie quirked a smile at his departing back, then noticed Nick's continuing pensive study of the virtual Jane Doe. "What is it, Nick? Something about this one getting to you?"

Nick's reply was addressed to the young face gazing up at him from the folder. "I don't believe in disposable people," he said.

Janette had been his only comfort in the beginning. For a time, in her arms, he could almost forget what he'd become.

Almost.

Yet even she had insisted upon echoing LaCroix's demands. "You will shed your mortal guilt in time, Nicolas. That we must kill to live is part of what we are. What you are."

Three nights after his turning, they'd stood together on a balcony of LaCroix's chateau overlooking Paris. Just inside the open doors, a tangle of disarrayed linen attested to their daylight activities in Janette's bed chamber. Below, under a half moon, the Seine flowed silently past myriad firelit windows.

"Why?" he'd asked suddenly, and when her eyes widened in query, "Why did you choose me?"

The night wind teased at her unbound hair as she came closer, molding herself against him. "I wanted you," she said simply, and her next words were murmured into his ear. "I still do."

When her tongue had followed her words into his ear, then trailed rapidly down to his throat, Nicholas had promptly forgotten his woes, and embraced instead his only pleasure.

Isabella Ramos took one look at Jane Doe's recreated face and immediately broke into tears.

"No! Oh, no!" She'd taken the picture and cradled it, sobbing, in her arms.

Awkwardly, Nick and Schanke sat down flanking her on the well-worn sofa. "We're really sorry, Mrs. Ramos." Schanke put a comforting hand on the distraught woman's shoulder, and Nick found himself marveling at how tender his normally wisecracking partner could be at times like this. "I know this comes as a shock, even after so many years. You must have been very close."

She nodded, wiping away tears with her free hand. "She lived with us for a year in 1962, when she first came here from Guatemala. I thought she'd gone back! When she disappeared, I thought..."

Schanke kept his hand on her arm as the tears threatened to return. "It's okay," he soothed. "Tell us about her. What was her name?"

As much to feel useful as anything else, Nick slipped the notebook and pen from his pocket and began jotting down her answers.

"Alma," she said, stroking the face in the recreation. "Alma Linda Salgado. I helped her to get hired in my work unit at the factory."

Nick scribbled 'illegal imm?' next to his note about that, but didn't pose the question. "What factory was that, Mrs. Ramos?" he asked instead.

"Ibsen's. It used to make artificial flowers from plastic. They were plastic back then."

That explained the green polymer dye in the barrel. Nick made a note. Schanke, meanwhile, went straight to the point. "And did Alma have a boyfriend?"

Isabella's eyes teared, but she looked angry now. "Wait," she said, and got up suddenly. "I'll show you."

She disappeared briefly into another room, returning with a large, glass-framed photo. She handed it to Nick without sitting down again, and Schanke moved over to look at it. The black and white image showed at least thirty people grouped in three rows beneath an outdoor sign. "Ibsen's," Nick read aloud. "This was your work unit?"

"Si. There is Alma." But even before she pointed, Nick had already spotted the slender young woman whose face so closely resembled the computer graphic. The real Alma, though, had been even prettier than her recreation. She stood next to a young version of Isabella, both of them smiling. "And this..." Isabella's finger strayed to a figure standing apart from the rest. "...was Alma's lover. Our shift supervisor, Senor Lavine."

"Bingo," Schanke breathed, and when Isabella looked confused, he said, "Martin Lavine, in 1963, owned the house Alma's body was hidden under."

Isabella whispered a hasty "Dios mio," and crossed herself. Nick looked quickly away, studying the forty-something man in the photo with renewed interest. He'd seen that face somewhere before.

"You wouldn't happen to know where we could find Mr. Lavine nowadays, would you?" Schanke asked.

"I wish I did. The factory closed more than twenty years ago. We never kept in touch."

Nick mentally added thinned hair, thirty years and an equal number of pounds to Martin Lavine's picture. Where had he seen that face recently?

"Alma was so happy," Isabella was saying. "When she told him about the baby, he promised to divorce his wife and marry her."

"Yeah." Schanke stood, absent-mindedly brushing down the lapels of his wrinkled suit. "That's what they all say."

Canadian Pharmaceutical. Nick flashed on the cover of a magazine he'd seen in Natalie's break room not long ago. 'Ci-clon CEO resigns over labor scandal,' the blurb had said. And just above it had been the thirty years older face of the man in Isabella's photograph. He'd glanced at the story while he waited for Nat to finish a report. Ci-clon's CEO was under indictment by Crown prosecutors for alien smuggling, inducing forced labor without pay, and for multiple other unspecified abuses.

"Knight?" Schanke's tone implied he'd asked the question at least once before. "You coming?"

"Yeah." Nick got up, still intent on the framed photo. "Thanks for your time, Mrs. Ramos. Do you mind if we hang onto this for awhile?"

She hadn't minded, but Schanke was about to burst before they'd even reached the Caddy. "All right, give. What is it with you and that picture?"

"In a minute." Nick opened the driver's side door, but instead of getting in, turned on the short wave unit and pulled out the mike. "Dispatch, this is 81 Kilo. I need an address on one Marcus Banning, former CEO of Ci-Clon Pharmaceuticals."

"Who?" Schanke demanded from across the Caddy's white vinyl roof. "Is this guy supposed to know where Martin Lavine went or something?"

"Stand by, 81 Kilo," the dispatcher said.

"He didn't go anywhere, Schank." Nick reached over the car to hand him Isabella's framed photo. "He just changed his name. Then he paid off enough people in the right places to cover his tracks." Not a very difficult task. Nick himself had done it dozens of times.

"81 Kilo," the radio squawked. "Dispatch responding, do you copy?"

"Copy, dispatch. Go ahead."

"Subject Marcus Banning resides at 82353 Dante Road, Park View."

"Copy that," Nick said. "Thanks, dispatch. 81 Kilo out."

Schanke had whistled at the reported address. "Tony neighborhood," he remarked. "Done well for himself, has he?"

"We're going to need a warrant. There's a copy of Canadian Pharmaceutical in Nat's break room that'll prove Lavine and Banning are the same person. Run it past Stonetree, will you?"

Schanke jumped when the Caddy's keys came sailing toward him, though he caught them this time without fumbling. "Oh, now wait a minute. You are not gonna take off like that on me again. You do know what the word partner means, right? Together? Support? Cops watching each others' backs?"

Schanke didn't run out of harangues for several more sentences -- but long before that, he was already talking to himself.

Even from the air, Marcus Banning's residence was impressive. Twelve acres of gated, forrested parkland with a central mansion big enough to rival even some of LaCroix's estates.

Nick drifted to a soundless landing on the gabled roof. With one hand lightly resting on the lip of a white brick chimney, he summoned gold flame into his eyes, and with the vampire's preternatural senses, stood perfectly still and listened.

Several human heartbeats drummed steadily beneath him. All but one came from the lower floors. The one set apart was beating close by, just below and to the left. Nick stepped effortlessly off the roof's edge to hover at the nearest tall window. There was no balcony, but he had no difficulty balancing on the narrow ledge while easing open the unlocked glass panel.

He entered a large, dimly-lit room lined with bookshelves and leather chairs. From behind a polished mahogany desk, the man whose face had adorned Nat's magazine stood up in alarm. "Who are you?" he demanded. "And how the hell did you get in here?"

"I flew," Nick answered honestly, and couldn't help delighting in the look of consternation that unvarnished truth invariably evoked. "And you don't really want to press that signal button -- Mr. Lavine."

"What...?" Stunned surprise now, and a hand jerked hastily away from under the desk's edge. "What did you call me?"

Nick moved closer, deliberately permitting the vampire's air of menace to exert itself. "Martin Lavine," he said. "At least, that was your name thirty years ago, when you murdered Alma Salgado and left her body in a chemical drum under your house."

The hand moved again, this time to snatch a pistol from one of the desk drawers. With practiced ease, Nick captured the mortal's gaze as he pointed the weapon. "That won't help you either," the vampire's deep voice growled. At once, the gun tumbled from suddenly nerveless fingers and fell with a thunk to the desktop. Lavine's heartbeat, racing just minutes ago, slowed to a steady pace at the imposition of a will far stronger than his own.

"How many others?" Nick probed deeply and without qualm, unfazed by Lavine's pained expression. "Alma Salgado was only the first, isn't that true? After that, it only got easier. New name, new job, and enough money to buy all the cover-ups you needed. So you learned to use and dispose of them as easily as you throw away the garbage. Because that's all they ever were to you."

Lavine muttered something, but to Nick, his words were unimportant. Even without taking blood, the vampire could pry into the blackest depths of a mortal's being, and the dark things lurking deep in Lavine's soul told Nick that everything he'd surmised about this man was cruelly, horribly true. He saw faces -- dozens of faces, many far younger than Alma had been. He saw them screaming and cowering away from Lavine's blows. He saw them lying cold and pale on black plastic trash bags, bundled and taped like so much refuse, and finally buried in remote, anonymous graves.

And all of it was only too painfully familiar, as though he'd just gazed into a mirror at the centuries-old depths of his own unpunished depravities. One murderer exposing the sins of another...

Nick withdrew the mental probe, though he did not release Lavine altogether. "How do you live with that kind of guilt?" he pressed. "How do you enslave and murder, prey on the innocent time and again, and then just go on as though you'd done nothing at all? How?!"

Lavine's lips moved -- but it was unmistakably LaCroix's voice that replied. "Do you ask because you truly loathe this ability? Or, perhaps, because you envy it?" The blue-white specter of LaCroix's face imposed itself over Lavine's. "If this pathetic mortal can excise his noisome conscience, then tell me, Nicholas. Why is it that you could never master so simple a task?"

Nick found himself on the other side of the desk in a faster-than-humanly-possible flash, but by the time he closed both hands around Martin Lavine's sweating neck, LaCroix's shade had evaporated, leaving only the mortal's pasty, expressionless face behind. Nick fought the overwhelming urge to go on choking the life from him, and only just barely succeeding, released him with a disgusted shove. "You won't remember this," he commanded. "I came in through the front door. I showed you and your staff my badge, and I told you I was here about Alma Salgado." He withdrew the vampire's mental influence with an abruptness that left Lavine shaking his aching head.

"I don't..." the man started to say, then sat heavily down in the chair, staring curiously at the pistol he couldn't remember dropping on the desk. Nick did not enlighten him. "I don't know anyone by that name," he finished, though his voice broke mid-sentence.

"That's odd," Nick said with sarcasm. "Because thirty years ago, she worked for you, had an affair with you, got pregnant and just disappeared -- until last month, when her body turned up in a barrel under the house you owned in 1963. Still sure you didn't know her? Or was she just one of so many others that you really can't remember?" How often he'd yearned for a mortal's ability to 'conveniently' forget such things. Instead, the vampire's flawless memory kept every last victim a part of an indelible tableau that had haunted him for eight long centuries. How could LaCroix have expected him to forget? It simply wasn't possible.

"She was nobody," Lavine said angrily, glaring up at him. "They were all nobodies. All of them."

"Disposable people?" Nick glared back at him. "How many, Lavine? How many of them have you killed when they became just too inconvenient?"

Lavine's eyes hardened. "I don't have to answer that," he said. "You have no warrant, no proof."

"I'll have both soon enough. I'm betting the DNA of Alma's unborn child is going to match yours. And I can guarantee you, we'll find the others. If the Crown had a solid case against you before, they'll have an ironclad one now. So do us a favor..." Nick placed one hand on the desk to lean forward over Lavine, a deliberately intimidating stance. "Don't leave Toronto. Try, and I promise you, there's nowhere on this Earth you can hide that I can't find you." He was gratified to see fear replacing rage in the mortal's eyes. "That's the problem with being a murderer, with preying on the helpless. Sooner or later, we all have to pay."

Lavine looked puzzled now. "We...?" he echoed.

Nick was spared having to explain that slip by a sudden commotion somewhere outside the door. Leaving Lavine in his chair, Nick hurried out into the corridor, where several strides down the hall, at the top of an ornate staircase, he found Donald Schanke and a black-suited security guard in the midst of a heated argument.

"All right, that's far enough." The bodyguard had moved to block Schanke's path. "For the last time, no appointment..."

"This is my appointment, you gunsel!" Schanke shook his badge in the man's face.

"...no warrant..."

"I'm workin' on it!"

"...no meeting! I'm telling you, Mr. Banning is..."

"Mr. Banning is under arrest," Nick interrupted, and flashed his own badge when the startled guard turned around.

"Who...? How the hell did you get in here? No one is supposed to be..."

The explosion of a gunshot obliterated the rest of his sentence.

Nick made it back to the study well ahead of the two mortals, but he was all the same too late to do anything for Banning-Lavine. His body was slumped forward in the chair, with the pistol from the desktop clutched in a death grip in his right hand. Where the fatal round had exited, most of the left side of his head was missing, and the blood scent in the room was so strong that Nick could barely repress the vampire's clamoring, ravenous desire to surface.

The security guard came less than three steps into the study, turned instantly bilious and wheeled back to the door, colliding with Schanke as he fled the room with one hand covering his mouth.

"Oh, geez..." Nick's partner took in the gruesome scene with a jaundiced expression. "He couldn't have at least waited for the warrant to come through?"

Nick hardly heard him. This was not the outcome he'd expected, though it had perhaps been foreseeable. Why hadn't he confiscated the damned gun when Lavine had first dropped it on the desk?

"Knight?" Schanke's hand was suddenly grasping his arm. "Oh now listen, don't start that guilt trip thing on me again, okay? This was not your fault!"

"No..." Nick thought of Martin Lavine's mesmerized gaze and the dozens of victims he'd seen lingering there. "No, it was his. And now he's paid for it." Schanke gave him an 'are you okay?' look, but Nick obviously wasn't. "Sooner or later," he said, and started abruptly for the door, "we all have to pay."

Nat brought him a new shake that night after shift. He downed it without complaint, standing at the window as the darkness over Toronto neared its inevitable surrender to another sunrise. The faint light of pre-dawn had already begun stinging him like angry wasps when Nat pulled the empty glass from his hand and replaced it with the remote control. Squinting in the growing light, he waited another full minute before pressing the button that lowered the steel shutters over all of the loft's windows.

When they had rumbled to a final halt, sealing out the day, Nat still stood there with the glass in her hand. "I don't suppose you want to talk about it?" she said.

"Lavine," he answered at length. "He murdered dozens of women, virtually enslaved hundreds more. But as hideous as his crimes may have been, they pale to nothing compared to mine. So what's the difference, Nat? What right does one killer have to judge another?"

"As much right as any of us." She carried the glass to the sink, rinsed it and placed it on the counter. "And the difference..." She turned back to face him. "...is that you care. So do I, Nick. I can only tell you what you told me -- don't stop trying. Don't ever stop trying."

Long after she'd gone, Nick had remained standing, brooding, in front of the carved fireplace. When his senses warned of another presence, he registered no surprise at the spectral appearance of LaCroix on the loft's second floor landing. He was not prepared, however, for the unmoving female figure that materialized draped over the ghost's outstretched arms. Nick remembered that face, that lithe, too-thin frame...

"Your first conquest sends her regards," the apparition taunted, and it began moving with slow, deliberate steps down the stairs, carrying its limp burden. "Her name was Cerise, if you still care to know. And she wishes to thank you. You did, after all, vastly improve her situation."

"Stop this, LaCroix. Please..."

"Come now, Nicholas." The specter reached the bottom of the stairs and halted there. "Does your victim's forgiveness not assuage your misplaced guilt? She forgives you. They all forgive you."

It was a lie, of course. Even if it had been true, it would make no difference. He would never be able to forgive himself.

"Release them, Nicholas. Release your guilt."

"Never." Infuriated, Nick charged at the glowing apparitions, only to find both dissipated by the time he reached the staircase.

"You will come around," LaCroix's disembodied voice whispered in his ear. "Sooner or later, you'll have no other choice."

It faded then, leaving Nick longing to escape the loft, to fly away, to be anywhere else but here. Trapped by daylight, however, he threw himself onto the leather couch instead, and eventually fell into an uneasy sleep. His nightmares were haunted by a ghost named Cerise.

The persistent nagging of an intercom buzzer woke him several hours later.

"Knight? Helllooooooo! Wakey, wakey!" Buzzzzzzzzz. "Are you gonna sleep through your entire night off?" Buzzzzzzzzz. "Come on, pardner, up 'n' at 'em. You've got company here!" Buzzzzzzzz-Buzzzzzzzzzz.

A groggy Nick stumbled to the intercom and blinked at the monitor screen, where Schanke's round face filled the fish-eye camera lens like a fun house fright mirror. Someone else was standing behind him. Nat, Nick realized when Schanke's face retreated far enough for him to make out the other figure. Nick buzzed them in, and had just enough time, while the freight elevator lumbered downstairs to collect his guests, to indulge in a cold bovine breakfast from one of the wine bottles in his fridge.

 "Yo, Nicky boy!" Schanke erupted from the lift with a stack of video tapes in hand and Natalie three steps behind him. "You are gonna absolutely love this, man." He bustled over to the VCR with his treasures while Nat handed Nick a box of microwave popcorn.

"What is it I'm going to love, exactly?" he asked her softly. Schanke was already preoccupied with turning on the home theater system and loading the first tape.

"The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," she said. "And somebody 'really cool' named Illya Kuryakin."

"Oh. Yeah." Nick had long since forgotten the Botticelli game and Schanke's mysterious K.

"Feeling better?" A concerned Nat followed him into the kitchen, where one of the bags of popcorn was shortly sent spinning on the microwave's turntable.

Nick extracted a large plastic bowl from the overhead cabinet and gave it to her with a small smile. "I'll live," he said, and knew by her amused look that she'd recognized the inherent joke in those words.

"All right!" Schanke's excited voice said from the couch. "We are cued and ready. Bring on the popcorn and get ready to groove, 'cause man-oh-man, it is gonna be 1964 all over again."

"I'm afraid," Nat confided over the mini-explosions of popping corn, "I really don't remember a thing about 1964."

"Well, let's see," Nick mused. "There was Vietnam, the cold war, the space race, Jack Ruby convicted for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald... Oh, and some British singing group or other named after a misspelled insect."

Nat rolled her eyes and opened the beeping microwave.

"Grooo-vy!" Schanke enthused when they delivered the steaming bowl of popcorn. "Okay, boys and girls. It is showtime!"

And while a lively jazz theme accompanied the video's opening cast credits, Natalie Lambert was heard to murmur, "Y'know... that Illya Kuryakin guy's not half bad..."
 

**End**
 
 

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