2

CRIME SCENES WERE OFTEN MASS CHAOS, THIS ONE exceptionally so.

Nick had to park his green Cadillac two blocks from the church and wend his way through a noisy crowd of onlookers. (Had all these people been inside the church? Surely that was unlikely, on a Wednesday evening.) His badge got him past two police barricades and the omnipresent yellow tape, finally bringing him to the sidewalk in front of the building. There he found Natalie in a white coroner’s smock, taking notes over what he assumed was the deceased.

The body had already been bagged (though they hadn’t closed it up yet) and lay on a gurney. Nat reached periodically into the bag to inspect something, then made another notation on her clipboard.

“What’ve we got?” Nick came closer and glimpsed the face of a thin, blond boy inside the body bag. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

Nat correctly read his expression and sympathized. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. I had the same reaction; always do when they’re this young.” She scribbled something else on the clipboard. “His name was Conrad Seldon Lewis and he would have been eighteen in September. He collapsed in the middle of a service here an hour ago. Everyone thought he’d just ‘succumbed to the spirit,’ or something like that – it’s that kind of service – only he didn't get up again.”

Nick peered down at the pale, too-young face and shook his head. “Doesn’t sound much like a probable homicide to me.”

“No, but then kids his age don’t die of natural causes very often, either. There’s no visible trauma, not a mark on him that I can see, at least so far. I’ll have to let you know what I find later on tonight.”

Nodding, Nick cast a wary glance at the open doorway of the church. It was a large, round, modern structure that looked nothing at all like the stone-and-gargoyle cathedrals of his day. But the unadorned five-foot-high crosses molded into each of the wooden entry doors made him glad, just the same, that the victim had already been brought outside.

At Nat’s signal, two white-coated assistants zipped the body bag and wheeled Conrad Lewis off to the waiting coroner’s wagon. She remained behind for a moment, watching Nick, the flashing red and blue emergency lights reflecting in her eyes and hair. “It won’t kill you, you know,” she whispered with a nod toward the building. “As I recall, not long ago, you even managed to spend the entire day inside a church, and somehow you lived to tell the tale.”

The cold terror of that memory brought a grim smile to his lips. “Yeah,” he said noncommitally, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather coat so Nat wouldn’t see that they were shaking. “I guess so.”

“Schanke’s inside,” she told him, “questioning the witnesses.”

It was another of her unsubtle cues; one he ignored for the moment. “Check with you later?” he asked.

“I’ll call you when I have something. If I have something.” She held his gaze for a few moments longer, as though she might want to say something more, but then she tucked the clipboard under her arm and turned to leave, heading for her car. The marked white van carrying the body was already pulling away.

Nick stood where he was, feeling conspicuously useless amidst the clamor of voices, flashing strobe lights and squawking police radios. When there was nothing else for it but to force himself to go inside, he shrugged the coat higher onto his shoulders and, with a sigh, started for the door.

He’d no sooner steeled himself to cross the threshold than reprieve barreled out the door in the person of Donald G. Schanke. Nick’s exuberant partner nearly bowled him over, then settled for clapping him hardily on the back instead. “There you are! Listen, pard...” The back-patting gesture became an impelling grip that wheeled Nick away from the church door – a coercion he allowed without the slightest objection. “We have got nada on this thing to indicate a homicide.” His balding partner with the Elvis Presley sideburns kept hold of his arm, guiding him back to the sidewalk. They fell into step together then, though Nick didn’t have the faintest idea where they were going. “Nobody in there saw zip, ’cept that the kid just keeled over.”

“Nat said she’d have a prelim in a few hours.” Nick looked over his shoulder at the floodlit building. “Aren’t church services usually on Sunday?”

“Huh?” Schanke paused, following his gaze, then resumed walking. “Oh, yeah, well, this is some sort of revival meeting or something. Holy roller stuff, y’know? Seems they did the singing and praying and communion thing as usual, and then everybody filed down front for more prayers and for the healing bit. That’s where it gets a little weird.”

“Weird?” Nick echoed. “Weird how?”

“Well, they do this... this thing.” Schanke waved his hands in the air. “It’s mostly a lot of swaying and moaning and what they call ‘speaking in tongues.’ I’ve seen it on cable TV a few times, and lemme tell ya, it’s... well... strange. The weirdest part of all is when the guy in charge comes around, touches ’em on the head and bam!” He slapped a fist into his palm. “They go down like a bulldozer hit ’em, one after the other.”

Nick, who had studied virtually every religious ritual on the planet over the centuries, had never heard of this one. But then, he hadn't exactly been in close touch with Christian church practices of late.

“Is that what happened to Conrad Lewis?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. They call it getting ‘slain in the spirit,’ only it’s not supposed to be slain slain, if you get my drift. Not as in dead, you know? This kid went down and stayed that way.”

“Well,” Nick said, “there's got to be a reason.”

Schanke snorted. “Yeah. Ten-to-one he shot up, sniffed or downed something before he went in there to get religion. Should be interesting to see what Natalie turns up.”

“Yeah.” Nick stopped walking. “Schank?”

“What?”

“Are we going anywhere in particular?”

“Just to my car.” His portly partner, having arrived at the vehicle in question, opened the door and extracted a grease-stained pasteboard box from the front seat. “I didn't get to finish breakfast and I’m starving. Hey, you want a jelly donut? I got extras.”

Nick’s nose wrinkled at the sickly sweet odor emanating from the box. “Thanks. I’ll pass.”

“Okay, but you dunno what you’re missing.” Schanke pulled a sugar-coated glob from the carton and devoured it in three bites, licking pink goo off his fingers in the afterglow. “A cop who doesn’t like donuts,” he marveled. “Nicky-boy, you are very bad for our reputation.”

“I try.” Nick urgently needed to get out of there before his stomach churned up what he’d had for breakfast. Somehow, watching Schanke eat was even worse than choking down Nat’s protein shakes. “I’ll see you at the station,” he muttered, and escaped before Schanke could tuck into another donut.

He kept the Caddy’s top down on the drive to the station, reveling in the cool breeze and in the myriad scents permeating the night air. Sounds assailed his heightened senses from a thousand windows, a mad jangle of electronic chatter from televisions, stereos, telephones, computers – the mortal world of the twentieth century. He eavesdropped for a fleeting moment on a dinner conversation here, a domestic argument there, a dog’s bark, a child’s cry, and in still another place, the breathy, panting sounds of a couple making love.

With the car idling at a red light, he closed his eyes and tried to remember what it had once been like to partake of that sweet human intimacy, designed to affirm and create life rather than destroy it. But his memories found only death, hunger, and the blood that his Beast craved above all else. Mortal pleasures he had once squandered – food, sunlight, love – had dimmed over the years until they were now little more than vague shadows, wisps that teased at him with dreams of what he’d once been and longed to be again.

The impatient blaring of a horn behind him startled Nick into accelerating the Cadillac through the now-green light. He tried to tune out the cacophony of sounds around him, to concentrate on his immediate world and nothing else. It worked – for a few blocks, anyway.

“What do you know about ‘love?’” LaCroix’s voice jeered at him from the car radio. “What did you ever know?”

Nick reached to twist the knob, but the radio was already off.

“Love is like that soul you so desperately seek,” the silken voice persisted. “A thing gone from us – and good riddance to it.”

The Caddy rolled to a lurching stop in front of a deserted office complex. Nick glanced guiltily around him, expecting to find the master vampire’s specter lounging in the back seat. It wasn’t, but the phantom radio signal persevered in familiar, avuncular tones.

“No. We have no need of ‘love.’ That particular mortal folly is beneath our kind.   As are the creatures who conceived it. Why do you waste your time with them, deluding yourself that you can emulate their frailty? You will never be human, Nicholas. In the end, one way or another, you will always come back to us, to what you are. You always have.”

They were the same taunts LaCroix had hurled at him five centuries before, from Constantinople’s thousand-year-old ramparts...

*  * *

Below them, the battle had raged on, well into the second month of Mehmet’s siege.

“Why are you here, LaCroix?” The booming reports of both cannon and culverin fire had nearly drowned out his words. The smell of gunpowder and mortal death, inseparably mingled, hung in the cool May air, and an unseasonable fog – an ill omen – shrouded the city. “You said you cared nothing for our cause.”

“Their cause. And I don't.” LaCroix had studied his fingernails, exuding practiced indifference to the carnage going on behind him. “But I do so enjoy being in on the end of a battle. The rewards are so plentiful. From what I hear, the slaughter has been magnificent. A hundred Christian captives impaled on spikes within sight of these walls. And your emperor’s exquisite revenge, I understand, was to drag nearly three hundred Turkish prisoners to the parapet and behead them in full view of the sultan’s camp. Oh, I am truly sorry to have missed that!  It must have been glorious!”

“No.”  Sickened, Nicholas had turned to watch a Bashi-bazouk assault force raise its ladders against the Gate of Charisins to the north.   When crossbows and muskets answered from the walls, the climbers fell, screaming, into the trenches below. A mangonel sang, hurling stones into the breach, sending up a dozen more death cries. The Turkish cannon responded with another barrage against the battered wall. Stone shot burst into rubble when it struck, encroaching further still into the ancient, crumbling mortar.

“The prophecy says, does it not, that this city shall fall in the fog, beneath a waning moon?” The former Roman general peered up at the moon, just past full and barely visible between the clouds, and smiled. “As to your question,” he said, his tone resolutely bored, “a far better one would be, ‘Why are you here?’ Your home, your ‘family’ and your beautiful Janette all await you in Venice, and yet you linger in this tiresome city that some upstart Turkish potentate has decided to claim for his own. Really, Nicholas. Why do you bother?”
 
“I wanted to help.”

“Ah.” LaCroix breathed the single syllable as though it answered all his questions. “So the good physician tends to the sick and wounded with his poultices and physics and, no doubt, his bleeding devices. How touching. And yet it appears he is also still the noble chevalier, intent on vanquishing the same religious foe that he himself fought two hundred years past.”

The ancient vampire’s glacial stare turned at last to survey the mass of tents and torches dominating the landscape to the northwest. “Take the advice of a general who knows too well the ways of generals. This pathetic attempt to forestall the inevitable will be no more successful here and now than your ill-planned crusades were then.”

Nicholas glared at him. “You’re wrong.”

“The proof lies before you.” LaCroix swept an arm toward the panorama of Mehmet’s encampments. “Scarcely one-and-twenty mortal years of age he may be, but this sultan is no fool. Little by little, his army has advanced, filling every foss along the way with stone, with soil, with the dead, until now he is camped on your very doorstep. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this Mehmet had been a Roman in some former life.”

“He won’t break through,” Nicholas insisted. “He can’t. Our fortifications will hold.”

“Will they?” LaCroix drew the question out into a goading purr. “And if not? Two days hence, my callow young friend, Byzantium will be no more. Your beloved Constantine, if he survives this routing, will find the heart sliced from the last of his empire, the ‘heathen’ once more in possession of his holy city. And what will it have proven?” Cannon fire punctuated his scathing commentary. “What will either side have gained? Absolution? Salvation? These are mortal notions of immortality, Nicholas, and they are a myth. You have no business here.”

“I believe in their cause. And in their ‘notion’ of immortality as well.”

“You do amuse me,” the older vampire scoffed. “A creature of darkness striving to save men’s souls! At such foolishness the gods themselves must laugh.”

“Your gods, perhaps.”

“Then look around you.” LaCroix sneered the words at him. “These Greeks and these Turks both believe, do they not, that they fight and die for the greater glory of their One True God?  They cannot both be right. They cannot both win the victory.”

“Get out of here, LaCroix. Leave us to our own devices.”

“Oh, I think not.” Ice blue eyes glittered at him in the moonlight. “This might prove to be... diverting. And I do expect the cuisine will be exemplary.”

He’d taken to the air then in a rush of wind and laughter, and left Nicholas alone on the parapet. In the same moment, a cry had gone up along the battlements. The Turkish forces were retreating, but something else had drawn the attention of the watch. Men gasped and pointed eastward. Nicholas saw many of them cross themselves and fall to their knees.

He followed their gaze east across the city – to the roof of St. Sophia’s church – and saw the glow of an unearthly light suspended in the haze above the dome’s great cross. It hovered there for several terrible moments, bathing the Church of the Holy Wisdom in a hellish yellow glare. The Turks, judging by their shouts of surprise, had seen it as well, and fled back to their encampments in horror.

What evil omen was this?

Before Nicholas could begin to contemplate an answer, the strange light dimmed and dissipated, vanishing into the fog.

*    *    *

Toronto’s Twenty-seventh Precinct house was almost as chaotic as the crime scene had been. If crime scene it was, Nick thought as he slid into his chair and stared glumly at the pile of unfinished paperwork on his blotter.

Facing an equally imposing mountain of the same, Schanke quirked a smile at him from the opposing desk. “Welcome to the paper mill,” he grumbled, rolling a report form into his typewriter. “You know, one of these days the janitorial crew is gonna find my corpse buried under a ton of this stuff, and everyone’ll say, ‘Oh, so that’s where that Schanke guy disappeared to!’”

Nick sighed in agreement and flipped open the top folder to get down to business. His partner’s inane chatter went on, becoming background accompaniment to the drudge work they were both slogging through. Schanke never seemed to notice that his complaining conversation was entirely one-sided, or if he did, the fact mattered to him not at all. Maybe they both just needed the distraction.

Somewhere halfway through the pile of reports a shadow fell across Nick’s desk, and he looked up into Natalie’s earnest eyes. She carried another stack of manila folders identical to the ones he’d been sifting through, and she handed most of them down to him. “Giles, Bellus, Turner and Focault,” she recited. “All natural causes, no probables.” Nick accepted the reports and set them aside as she held up the last folder. “However...”

Captain Stonetree materialized at her elbow as she opened the report, nodding a mute greeting.

“Conrad Lewis?” Nick guessed. It had been the only name missing from the possibles list.

“Yeah.”

Stonetree peered over her shoulder. “That the kid who died at the church service earlier this evening?”

“That’s him. I did a prelim on his stomach contents, and I’ve got a full autopsy scheduled for later tonight. This is the preliminary blood panel.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Schanke chimed in. “He OD’d, right? Or he drank himself to death?”

“Nope.” Nat tapped the paper with one fingernail. “There was a trace of alcohol in his system, but not enough to cause even mild intoxication.”

“Maybe the wine,” Nick ventured, and looked at Schanke. “Didn’t you say they'd served communion?”

“Uh, no,” Natalie said before Schanke could answer. “Not unless they’re using beer as a sacrament these days. And anyway, it’s a Protestant service, right?” At their blank looks, she added, “They don't tend to use real alcohol in their ceremonies.”

“Right,” Schanke said. “I knew that.” Which meant that he hadn’t.

“And what’s this other thing?” Stonetree asked, pointing to another notation in the folder.

“That’s the reason I'm listing him as a possible homicide,” Nat replied. “There’s also a trace of an up-and-coming designer drug in his blood stream. Rohypnol.”

Schanke squinted at her. “Ro-what-nol? I don’t think I’ve heard of that one yet.”

“Well, it’s not exactly something you'd take for a high. Down in the States, it’s known as the ‘date rape drug.’ Renders the victim virtually senseless and ultimately unconscious. Trouble is, there wasn’t enough of it in Conrad's blood to qualify as an overdose, let alone enough to kill him – even combined with the alcohol. It’s likely someone slipped it to him unawares, though. No one for any reason I can think of would take this stuff voluntarily.”
 
Stonetree sighed. “Okay, so it’s a possible. Anybody know if the kid had family?”

“Uh-uh,” Schanke said, sitting up in his chair. “Lost both his parents in a car accident last year. No siblings. According to the church people, he was working his way through university on a scholarship and a part-time pizza job. And he’d been a regular at services every night since the revival started a week ago. Even helped the guest evangelist set up for the show.”

Stonetree’s eyebrows met each other over his nose “Guest evangelist?”

“Yeah.” Schanke fished a yellow spiral notepad out of his coat pocket and thumbed through the pages. “Some guy name of Henri LeFebre. Hails from Montreal via Belgium, at least according to the bio in the church bulletin I checked out. I didn't talk to his nibs in person.”

“M-hm.” The captain eyed the litter of folders covering both their desks. “Well, you two don’t appear to have anything terribly pressing on your dockets at the moment. Schanke, check out the university. Find out who his friends were and what he was up to right before this revival meeting thing. Knight, you go talk to the preacher. Just don’t play your hand until we know if it’s a genuine homicide.”

“Uh, Cap’n...” Nick purposely avoided Natalie’s eyes. “Maybe Schank should be the one to talk to LeFebre. I mean, he’s already done the initial interviews, and besides...” He tried to make it sound like a sincere compliment. “...he's a whole lot more familiar with churches than I am.”

“M-hm,” Stonetree said again over Schanke’s puzzled expression. “He’s also a whole lot more familiar with kids, seein’ he's got one and all. You have some kind of problem with churches, detective?”

“Uh, no,” Nick said a little too quickly. He looked helplessly from Stonetree to Schanke and finally to Nat, who was unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile. “No problem.”

“Good.” Obviously considering the issue closed, Stonetree walked away and maneuvered his bulky frame through the melee of ringing phones, report-piled desks and precinct witness interviews to eventually disappear behind the glass partition of his office.

“Yes!” Schanke dry-scrubbed his hands and bounced to his feet, snagging an overcoat from the back of the chair behind him. “Thank you, Natalie, for the temporary reprieve. I am outta here. Boy-oh-boy, fresh air here I come.”

“You’re welcome,” Nat called to his retreating back. Then she took in the pained expression Nick still wore, and swung the folder in her hand at him in a mock attack. “Hey. Will you stop looking as though you’ve just been sent to the gallows? It’s only a church, for pete’s sake, not a medieval torture chamber!”

Nick grimaced. “Easy for you to say.”

Sobering abruptly, Nat lay the file folder down on his desk and spread her hands on top of it. “We all have to face our fears eventually, Nick. And I’ve already seen you conquer this one once before.”

He rose, retrieving his own coat, and leaned forward to answer her in a near-whisper. “Actually, it was a little more like ‘collided with’ than conquered.”

“You can do it,” she whispered back, still altogether serious. “I have faith in you.”

“Thanks,” he said, and meant it. Glancing shyly around the squad room, he planted a swift, friendly kiss on her forehead. Then, with her startled gaze following, he fled before that all-too-human gesture could awaken the Beast and its insatiable desire for something more.