The Blood Detail (Vigil) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the couch.
    “Comfortable?” Douglass asked me.
    “Very.”
    “Do you think we may have this reversed?”
    “Maybe,” I said, holding my mug out and gesturing at the room. “Man, oh, man. This place is so freaking clean. How often do you use it? I mean, it’s spotless. What kind of decent detective has a spotless office?”
    Racine chimed in, all smiles. “Mac’s the fastidious type, like to an insane degree.”
    “I think the word is professional,” Douglass said, correcting us both.
    I looked the man over. After a long night of chasing crazy personified, his suit was still pressed like new and not a hair on his head was mussed. “I have serious questions about you,” I said, with no further explanation.
    “That’s not exactly surprising. Questions seem to be your thing. You’re always asking them, even when you’re supposed to be the one answering them.”
    “Isn’t that what policemen do?”
    “It’s what detectives do, and you are not that. Not yet, at least.”
    I shrugged. “Sorry that being attacked and pursued by a cannibalistic lunatic has made me overly curious tonight. Let’s chalk it up as one of those things.”
    “About that, you are not wrong to wonder,” Douglass said. “You do deserve an explanation. How about we start off with your lunatic’s name—Danny Ray Jessup.”
    “What are his priors?” I asked.
    “None that we know of.”
    “Then how did you identify him?”
    “Through an informant. We got word of him potentially stepping out of line. But the murder call you caught was the first tangible evidence we have of his actual existence. We know he’s old, very old. Or so our informant has told us.”
    “He wasn’t decrepit or anything,” I said. “I’d put him in his early forties, no older.”
    “Our source is pretty knowledgeable about such things, and if he says he’s old, you can bet he’s old. And also, it was dark when you saw him.”
    I took my feet off the desk, set down the mug, and straightened myself in the chair. “You are being evasive again. Just spit it out and tell me what’s really going on here.”
    Racine’s voice sprang out from behind Douglass. “You’ll need to sign some non-disclosure documents first.”
    “All right,” I said. “I can sign whatever. But I’m sick and tired of the runaround.”
    Douglass got up and bent down next to me, unlocking the bottom drawer of his desk. Some standard issue paperwork was stacked on top of a pile of notebooks. The white A1 stock he was after was filled with paragraph after paragraph of legalese and all manner of underlined blank spaces. There was a Department of Justice seal at the top of the document. Douglass retrieved a pen from a cup container and printed my name in the first blank. He then turned to the back page and signed his name as the primary witness, and handed the pen over to me. I scanned through all three pages and then left my scribbly mark in the space next to his.
    With his lips pursed, Douglass loomed above me, waiting for me to get out of his chair. I appreciated that he was being stern with me, so I went ahead and switched places with him. It wasn’t going to hurt to show him a modicum of respect.
    “I’ll start off with the basics,” he said as he wiggled himself to comfort. “This detail or task force, or whatever you prefer to call it—we investigate and police a rather tiny but volatile segment of the population.” He sucked in a hesitant breath. “Okay. What I’m about to say to you next will seem ridiculous at first, but I want you to hear me out. This man Jessup you encountered was extra strong and inhumanly athletic, and he could withstand multiple gunshot wounds. He also ate a woman, gorging on her blood. And like the rest of this subsection of the city I’m talking about, he cannot survive under direct sunlight for very long. Now—what does all of this suggest to you?”
    “No way,” I said, making the precise connection he had wanted me to make.