The God Hunter Read online

  We got coffee, took a little booth. There were film posters all around. “See that?” he said. “Signed.” We both peered at the signature of this famous actor, marveling; Fantino seemed more than a little proud, as if he’d personally acquired the thing. Then he opened play. He leaned back, easy and alert, the light catching a gold ring on his finger.

  “First off, I am here as a personal favor. This is for Anna, OK?” He said this to me, not her. “It’s an Immigration issue. Immigration, Fraud. Whatever. I work Homicide. Let’s get that clear. And till he acts to make it otherwise, he’s not my jurisdiction. Are we clear?”

  I said, “He’ll kill again.”

  Lieutenant Fantino looked at me over his coffee cup. His eyes were very dark, long-­lashed, and strangely soft, near feminine, set in a face as male as it could be. He put the cup down, dabbed a napkin to his lips.

  “You sound sure of that one, friend.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Is pattern,” Anna said. “Faster all the time. If he is here—­we have three, four days, maybe. Then, a death. Death will be—­horrible. Like nothing you have ever seen.”

  “Doubt that.”

  “No. Truly.”

  Fantino looked at Anna, then at me.

  “He drains ­people,” I said.

  “He drains them.”

  “Like vampire,” she said.

  “He drains their energy. You walk into a murder site, you feel it. You feel the absence.”

  Fantino shrugged. He sipped his drink, wiped a hand across his mouth. “So he’s a vampire. OK.”

  “Something like.”

  “Won’t be my first.”

  “Serious?”

  “Hey.” He raised a forefinger, pointed it at me. “New York. You name it, we’ve got it.” He leaned back, laid his arm across the seat-­back next to him. “Guy I’m thinking of . . . Arne Peeters. This is, oh, ten years back? Big goth scene going here. Still is, I guess. Lot of kids, they like the vampire thing. They think it’s cool. They like the look. They wear the shades and leather coats, the older ones, they have their own clubs, all that . . . Plus, this is my theory, these kids get a chance to play at sex, and if you’re young, say, thirteen, fourteen, maybe not too sure about yourself, wondering which way you lean, whatever . . . So. Kids an’ vampires. Well, some of ’em, the older ones, they want to go a little further, make it just a bit more real, see? And what’s a vampire without fangs?

  “I don’t mean joke store fangs. I mean custom-­made, authentic fangs, which fit to a plate and slip over your teeth. Now, that costs money, like any kinda dentistry, and for some of these kids, money’s no object. I mean, Christ, when I was their age, allowance was a coupla bucks for movies on the weekend. These kids . . . well. It’s an act, just harmless fun for most of ’em, you know? But it costs. It really costs.

  “Now Peeters, he had money. Also a record, mostly misdemeanors, juvie stuff, but nothing much. Burglarized a family friend once, told us he was looking for drugs. Charges dropped. That’s all we had on him. Not that records tell you much. There’s the official side, and there’s . . . you know. The other side.”

  “OK . . .”

  “Here’s the thing. Peeters got his fake fangs. Slipped ’em on his real teeth, just like all the others. ’Cept his were different. I only saw ’em when we brought him in. He had these, like, inch-­long canines, and in each of ’em, in back, there was a little groove that ran from the top to the bottom. Understand? He asked for that specifically. Know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “See, that groove, that’s a channel. Sink your teeth in someone’s neck, and what happens? Sure, you make a hole. But you also block it up. You won’t get any blood flowing till you pull out. Unless you’ve got a little groove runs down each tooth. And then the blood shoots straight up. Especially,” he said, “if you hit an artery.”

  “Nasty.”

  “Yes in-­fucking-­deed. When we went into his background . . . Now there’s the real history. The stuff that’s not on paper. As a kid, he liked to set traps for the neighbors’ cats. They’d disappear. A few days later, there’d be a little pile of fur and bones seen in the trash. Everyone knew, nobody said. An old lady caught him one time trying to make off with her Persian cat. He said he wanted to take it for a walk. Parents smoothed things over. You know? He got a talking to. Meantime he was drinking blood. Being goth wasn’t a game, or a fashion style. The fashion was the cover. Got that?

  “He took jobs—­clerking, computers, signed up for a journalism course—­but nothing lasted. Always some kind of fight, he got caught stealing, something like that. He started on marijuana, graduated to crack so fast it was like there was nothing in between. Soon he’s doing the whole cocktail. Then the assaults started up.

  “It was geared around club hours. Lower East Side, mostly. ­Couple in Williamsburg. All after hours. All tied with the scene. So we interviewed the kids. Some thought it was a joke. But some of ’em were scared, real scared. We heard his name. His street name, and his real name. The boy who played it rough, you know?

  “It wasn’t a tough case. We brought him in, he denied it all. But then he wanted to talk about himself. He was trying to explain, see? ‘I have an iron deficiency,’ he told me. Went into lots of detail about red blood cells and hemoglobin and how it was supposed to work and how it didn’t work for him, and if he didn’t get the iron that he needed, he might die. Science 101. ‘Try iron pills?’ I said. He told me that he couldn’t digest ’em, got to get it pre-­digested, like a blood transfusion, or by drinking blood . . . ‘So you admit the whole thing?’ ‘No!’ he jumped up in his seat. He shook his head. ‘I need blood. I have a medical condition. But I wouldn’t—­’ blah blah blah. ‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘You got a medical condition, and I’ll diagnose it. You’re a fruitloop. OK?’

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true, authentic story of the New York Vampire. I kid you not.”

  We smiled. I felt I should applaud.

  “So,” said Fantino, “that’s what your guy’s like?”

  “Did anybody die?”

  “No. No, they didn’t. Assault, yes. No fatalities.”

  “Then it’s not like our guy, no.”

  Anna said, “I’ve seen when our man kills. You will know it. Please, you will call? Get me into it?”

  “You’re sure he’s here?”

  She nodded.

  “Not moved on yet? Big country here. If I was him—­wanted fugitive—­I’d be in Nebraska now. Just sayin’.”

  “I think he’s here,” I said, realizing I probably knew why, as well. “He’ll want to recharge after the flight. It’s getting less and less time between killings. I’d guess his energy’s draining away. He,” I corrected myself, “thinks his energy’s draining away. He’ll want somewhere busy. Lots of ambient emotion. I bet he loves New York.”

  “ ‘Ambient emotion’?”

  “Uh-­huh.”

  Fantino drained his coffee. “Well, I’ll let you know.” He made to stand, then stopped himself. “I have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Guy steals your passport. OK, it’s an Immigration question, but, well, what the hell, here goes. He steals your passport.”

  “Right.”

  “How’d he get into the country? He steal your fingerprints, too?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” I said.

  Anna said, “Fake.”

  “What?”

  She held her hand up, fingers spread.

  “He has Chris’s fingerprints. From a glass, a plate, something in his room. From records, maybe. He makes fake prints. See?” She rubbed her fingertips together. “Made with—­with latex, I think. This I have seen before.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Oh yes. He is genius—­mad, evil genius. Is growing problem, a
ll across Europe.”

  Fantino said, “Well, I’ve seen mad. And I’ve seen evil, too, I reckon. Maybe both together. But genius as well? Nope. Not this boy.” Then he smiled. “Anna—­look after yourself, huh?”

  He left his coffee, half-­finished, and raised a hand to us.

  Anna’s eyes were on him till he left the bar.

  CHAPTER 27

  PREDATORS

  “This is stupidness. We are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “Stupidity,” I said.

  “Yes. Stupid city. And we are waiting for—­who? Him, or him, or her to die?” She jabbed her cigarette at passersby, as if she’d been at bayonet practice in some weird virtual academy. “Is that it? We let someone die, then what? Call NYPD? We find the killer? He is caught in action?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do we look for him? What place has ‘ambient emotion’? We do stakeout? Where?”

  “Anywhere.” I watched the crowds, knowing she was right. “Everywhere . . .”

  “You should tell me. You should tell Lieutenant Fantino. Already he is thinking you are crazy. And I am crazy, to be with you! Ah—­” She pushed her lower jaw out, shook her head. “You tell me this is not a man. You tell me this and, yes, I believe. I have seen his work; yes, I must believe. But you do not tell Fantino that this murderer looks like you. A thought who walks and talks and looks like you. But to Fantino, you say nothing. You are afraid that he will lock you up? Or he will not believe? I do not know, I do not care. But you hide information, and I, I hide it with you. I go along with this, because you ask. Now though, I am not so sure. Because we are too quiet, someone might die.”

  Someone would die, I thought. In fact I’d very little doubt. Whether we talked or not. And as she’d said, once you were thinking of it, it became impossible not to imagine everyone you saw as a potential victim: the bagel seller with his cart, the lady with the dog, the vagrants with their cardboard sign: JUST GIVE US $$$!!! I couldn’t save them. I told myself that. No matter what I said or did, I couldn’t save them. So I’d kept quiet. I just wasn’t sure how good my reasons were for doing so. I wasn’t sure if they were good at all.

  “The Registry,” I said, and trailed off.

  “Yes?” She lit another cigarette, her lighter flaring angrily.

  “OK,” I said. “This is a bad one, and probably you’re right. Perhaps we ought to tell. I just don’t think that it would make much difference, not at this point. But, well, my boss was here last night. Told me he’d flown in from Boston, but I don’t think so. I think he came here specially. To give me—­well. A warning.

  “The Registry are distancing themselves. From this, from anything to do with it. If things go wrong—­if things get out—­they can hold their hands up and go, ‘It’s not us,’ and the person nearest to it goes home carrying the can. He made that pretty clear to me.”

  “ ‘Carry the can.’ That is like ‘holding the baby,’ yes?”

  “Most definitely yes.”

  “Then we are sailing in the same boat, worse luck. I tell you at home: this is a case that kills careers.” Ganz blew out, vanishing a moment under clouds of soft, gray smoke.

  “We’re shafted,” I said.

  “Yes! And now we have decided that we must go on and do our job. Where do we search? Do we wander without maps? Or show your picture, ask, ‘Have you seen this man?’ ”

  “Well . . .” The smoke stung my nose. It made me want to sneeze. “We could try the zoo.”

  “Why that?”

  “Because . . . because it worked before. That’s all.”

  “All right. It worked before. And to be hoped, it works again.”

  I watched the polar bear. There’s a thing about polar bears; in the wild, their territory is so vast that captive bears often go crazy with restrictions. It’s very hard to keep them sane here. Yet increasingly, wild bears have been known to forsake the wilderness and hang around the edge of towns, looking for easy pickings in the garbage bins and Dumpsters, which they visit in the night. Adaptable, like all of us. I thought of this, then thought about our quarry, settled in the same place for who knows how many thousand years, then all at once, upping sticks and heading for the New World. Adaptable, perhaps. But why?

  The bear reached up, stretching his long neck, his nose twitching for city smells, hints of a world beyond the park, beyond New York. He had an oddly doglike quality when he did that, and you could almost forget he weighed about a thousand pounds and could kill you with a single swipe of those big, black, sabre claws.

  I stretched, too, and sniffed the air. Just like my double had, mimicking the animals, mimicking the predators.

  “The killer,” I said. “He’s learning from them.”

  “What?”

  “I have a theory. It kind of links with something I’ve been thinking for a while. Best I’ve got so far, at least.”

  The bear sank to his haunches. He was in there, we were out here; only a big pit in between, nothing but air keeping us separate.

  I had told her, finally, the full and exact story of what happened all those years ago, with Shailer, and the thing that stepped out of the mirror; told her, in fact, everything that Seddon would deny if it should ever become public knowledge.

  Anna only grunted her acknowledgement, said nothing.

  “I shocked it,” I said. “The full force of the mains, right through it. And it vanished. Gone. These things—­sometimes they dissipate, just disappear. In this case . . . evidently not.”

  “Evident. Yes.”

  “So, here’s my point. It’s not the full thing, right? It’s not the full god, or entity, or energy, whatever you want to call it. Most of it, we bottled. We got it. So what’s left . . . it’s weak. Before that, it was strong, and powerful. But now it’s not. It needs more power, that’s why it kills. It’s trying to grow, get back its strength. Or maybe just maintain itself.”

  “The bear,” she said. “The bear is mad.”

  “They don’t like captivity.”

  He was standing there, throwing his head from side to side like someone hefting a bowling ball.

  “I sympathize,” I said. “Place is much too small for it.”

  She ignored this. “And the killer. You say he is at the zoo, too, with you. The leopard. Why?”

  “To learn,” I said. “To learn to be a predator. He was—­like this.”

  I tried to snarl, to show my teeth, the way my counterpart had done.

  “He’s an apprentice. Every time he kills, he’s stronger. But he’s still not used to it. That isn’t how he feeds, or how he used to. So he needs to learn. Every kill, he’s stronger, smarter. Longer it goes on, worse it’s going to get.”

  “A question then, Chris Copeland. How much of him is you?”

  “He looks like me. It’s mimicry, I think. He—­it—­it’s some kind of energy; I think it rode the light in my reflection. Piggybacked on it, somehow. It’s not unknown, though it’s unusual, I’ll grant you that.”

  “So. Looks like you. And talks like you.”

  “Yeah. He’d got my voice, he said my name, he—­”

  He said my name. I stopped myself.

  “Your name,” she said. “And talked to you. Not in Hungarian. In English. How does he learn this? You can explain that?”

  “No.”

  “No.” She hooked her arm in mine. “He looks like you. Perhaps he thinks like you. Perhaps he has your interests, your tastes. Perhaps through this we track him down.”

  “You’re not still thinking that he is me, then?”

  “I think nothing, know nothing.” But she looked at me and smiled. “Now I am teasing. No, he is not you. But he is like you. In some way. Yes.”

  “You were pretty good yourself, you know, keeping the truth from Fantino. Second thoughts since, though, eh?�
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  “Perhaps.”

  “The fingerprint thing. Snappy answer. Very smart. Do ­people really do that? Latex fingertips?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “You’ve heard about it, though?”

  “Oh, I have seen it. Oh yes. Truly.” She took her cigarettes out of her purse and, slowly and deliberately, lit up. “I have seen it in a James Bond movie. Very clever plan, I think. Would really do the trick.”

  CHAPTER 28

  CAFÉ TALK

  We found a café on the west side of the park, over towards Broadway. I ordered a bagel, lox, and cream cheese—­going native—­while Anna had a burger. We drank good, black coffee. And we sat right at the back, away from all the other patrons, speaking like spies, our voices low, heads down, eyes watchful all the time.

  “They’re a rarity, incarnates. Rare, but not unknown. The Registry admits the possibility, it just doesn’t like to talk about them. It’s, oh, well, yes, in theory. But in practice . . . never heard of ’em. Sorry, don’t know what you mean. Never happens. . .

  “On the other hand, they’ll give you lots of chat about the pre-­incarnates. There’s a prodromal phase that sensitives and schizophrenics are alert to. They get the first taste of what we might call paranormal activity. Well, the pre-­incarnate phase quadruples that. It’s got a real nuisance value: poltergeist phenomena, voices, visions, sometimes a wind or sudden shift in air pressure—­you tend to notice if it’s in a building. Some places, they think it’s all part of the usual religious stuff, you know? Depending on the country and the culture. Tricky, that one. Very touchy. I mean, there are shrines we’re dying to wire up. If we could get permission—­or find some way that we didn’t need it. What’s at Lourdes, for instance? If we could just soak up the power in that. There’ve been pilgrims going there for centuries, full of expectation, full of hope, all kinds of energy. Or Mecca. No chance, obviously. But think of it. Those places are charged. They’re hot.”

  “But not incarnate.”

  “Oh no. No way. Dormant, I’d say. But not always. Places tend to get a rep because at some stage, something’s happened there. There’s been some kind of manifest. That’s what we try to tap and siphon off. That’s our job.”