Cold Case -- by Jean Graham --(Usual disclaimers, permission to archive,
etc.)

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 65, 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!"

*                         *                         *

Cold Case -- by Jean Graham -- Part 2 of 6

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.

*                                   *                                     *

Cold Case -- by Jean Graham -- Part 3 of 6

"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 shoulders, 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 fact 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 phoeo. "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.

*                           *                             *

Cold Case -- by Jean Graham -- Part 4 of 6

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."

*                            *                             *

Cold Case -- by Jean Graham -- Part 5 of 6

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.

*                            *                             *

Cold Case -- by Jean Graham -- Part 6 of 6

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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http://members.aol.com/JeanB7