Free Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life by Whitley Strieber

like “Drnk asshl” meant.
    He stuffed the fax in his pocket. Maybe the trip had been a bust. And yet, the man that Leo had murdered last night had been real. He had been alive, and now he wasn’t. Unless…could she have been meeting another creature like herself? God forbid. His firm belief was that she was the only one. He and his team and the others around the world were good. They were damn good. She was the only one.
    So this Mr. Whoever had not been missed—at least, not yet. Maybe somebody would report him in a few days, but Paul did not have a few days. If there was any evidence of this man’s death left in Leo Patterson’s house, it would soon be gone.
    “I think I’m running out my time,” Paul said.
    Something approaching a smile of relief flickered in Binion’s face. Paul decided that he probably couldn’t even imagine how much this man wanted him out of his office.
    He took off, thinking that he would have to proceed with his investigation on the ground, in the time-honored way of the policeman. There was a reason they used to be called flatfoots.
    Paul thought he might approach the house. As soon as she’d started getting rich, Leo had bought it from the trust that Miri had set up to hold her property. Miri had needed to be able to disappear for a century or so, and return to find that her taxes had continued to be paid. She had created a trust in Liechtenstein that did all the bookkeeping and made sure everything was running properly.
    Leo had known about the trust, and had somehow gotten it to sell her the property. How had she ever convinced them that they had the right to do this? No matter, it was now owned by Leo Patterson, big as life, the deed properly filed downtown.
    Paul had not entered the house since the debacle he had experienced there, those dizzying, maddening days of love, after Miri had seduced him. She’d known the secret of his blood before he knew she was a vampire. Realizing that her fellow Keepers, as they called themselves, were being decimated, she’d used him to make her pregnant. He had just enough vampire blood to do it, something he’d found out too late.
    In the end, after she was sure she was pregnant, she’d turned on him. He’d been completely blindsided. They’d had him trussed up in the damn basement, with the furnace door open, for God’s sake. Whereupon Becky had dropped down through a skylight, an angel from on high. Good woman power had saved him from bad woman power, the angel with the gun besting the angel with the hungry, sucking jaws.
    Even though it was forested with alarms and various electronic tripwires, there was a way into that house. He had known about it for years, but never used it before. No, he’d stayed away, far away. Only a fool would expose himself to a place that had been owned by a creature as hard to kill, and as intelligent, as a vampire.
    Paul wanted to believe that they were all gone. Wanted to. But if he really did believe that, then why hadn’t he taken the early retirement CIA had offered him six years ago?
    Because he believed nothing.
    He left One Police Plaza and got in his car. The morning sun shafted down through cathedrals of golden cloud; Manhattan sparked and roared. He negotiated Park Row to the Bowery, using his quick little Saab to outmaneuver trucks and cabs, whose drivers raged at him as he cut them off.
    Passing University Hospital, he thought of Dr. Sarah Roberts, that lost soul, and her twenty-year struggle to make sense of Miriam Blaylock’s blood. She’d been seduced, in the end, blooded before Leo was blooded. She lay now in some coffin somewhere, trapped in the strange, half-conscious nightmare of a creature that cannot die. He couldn’t despise her, she had been an excellent scientist. Really, she had discovered Blaylock. In a sense, she had discovered vampires. Too bad Miriam had found the soft, lonely place in her soul, and gone there, and exploited her weakness to make her a slave.
    By the time he