“Reno, Tahoe, Atlantic City, the Caribbean, Macao, France, England,
Monte Carlo-anywhere there’s big-time gambling.” This talk of easy
access to unlimited amounts of cash excited Bobby, though he was not
sure why. After all, it was Frank who could teleport, not him, and he
was ninety-five-percent sure they were never going to see Frank again.
Spreading a sheaf of printouts across the desktop, Lee Chen said,
“The money’s the least interesting thing. You remember you wanted me to
find out if the cops are on to Mr. Blue
“Candy,” Bobby said.
“We have a name for him now.” Lee scowled.
“I liked Mr. Blue better. It had more style.”
Entering the room, Hal Yamataka said, “I don’t think you can trust the
style judgment of a guy who wears red sneakers and yellow socks.”
Lee shook his head. “We Chinese spend thousands of years working up an
intimidating image for all Asians, so we can keep these hapless
Westerners off balance, and you people in Japan blow it all by making
those Godzilla movies. You can’t be inscrutable and make Godzilla
movies.”
“Yeah? You show me anybody who understands a Godzilla movie after the
first one.”
They made an interesting pair, these two: one slender, modish, with
delicate features, an enthusiastic child of the silicon age; the other
squat, broad, with a face as blunt as a hammer, a guy who was about as
high-tech as a rock.
But to Bobby the most interesting thing was that, until this moment, he
had never thought about the fact that a disproportionately large
percentage of Dakota & Dakota’s small staff was Asian-American. There
were two more-Nguyen Tuan Phu and Jamie Quang, both Vietnamese. Four
out of eleven people. Though he and Hal once in a while made East-West
jokes, Bobby never thought of Lee and Hal and Nguyen and Jamie as
composing any subset of employees; they were just themselves, as
different from one another as apples are different from pears and
oranges and peaches. But Bobby realized that this predilection for
Asian-American co-workers revealed something about himself, something
more than just an obvious and admirable racial blindness, but he could
not figure out what it was.
Hal said,
“And nothing gets more inscrutable than the whole concept of Mother. By
the way, Bobby, Clint’s gone home to comfort Felina. We should all be
so lucky.”
“Lee was telling us about Mr. Blue,” Julie said.
“Candy,”
Bobby said.
Indicating the data he had extracted from various police records
nationwide, Lee said,
“Most police agencies began to be computerized and interlinked only
about nine years ago-in any sophisticated way, that is. So that’s all
the further back a lot of electronically accessible files go. But
during that time, there have been seventy-eight brutal murders, in nine
states, that have enough similarities to raise the possibility of a
single perp- Just the possibility, mind you. But FBI got interested
enough last year to put a three-man team on it, one in the office and
two in the field, to coordinate local and stat& investigations.”
“Three men?” Hal said.
“Doesn’t sound like high priority.”
“The Bureau’s always been overextended,” Julie said.
“And over the last thirty years, since it’s been unfashionable for
judges to hand out long criminal sentences, the bad guys outnumber them
worse than ever. Three men, full time-that’s a serious commitment at
this stage.” Extracting a printout from the pile on the desk, Lee
summarized the essential data on it.
“All of the killings have the points in common. First-the victims were
all bitten, most the throat, but virtually no part of the body is sacred
to the guy. Second-many of them were beaten, suffered head injuries.
But loss of blood, from the bites-usually the jugular vein and carotid
artery in the throat-was a substantial contributing factor to the death
in virtually every instance, regardless of other injuries.”
“On top of everything else, the guy’s a vampire?” Hal asked Taking the
question seriously-as, indeed, they had to consider every possibility in
this bizarre case, regardless of how outlandish it seemed-Julie ‘said,
“Not a vampire in the supernatural sense. From what we’ve learned, the
Pollard family for some reason generously gifted. You know that