Page 22 of Whispers at Dusk
“We are so very sorry,” Della told him. “If you need time—”
“No. I don’t need time. I need to work. We have been given the ground floor space of a building on the block with the police, and they have kindly set us up with desks and screens and all else we might need. For Lillehammer... Well, it is known as a beautiful and peaceful place where people love all that surrounds them. We must solve this and soon.”
“Agreed by all,” Mason said. Della thought he’d had a good conversation with their French and English counterparts, and they would work together well as a team.
She fell back with Mason, letting the others lead the way. She didn’t want to rudely whisper, but she needed to let him know about Orm and the man at the bar who had been drinking Bloody Marys. She did so, indicating the woods as if she were discussing something everyone already knew.
“He said something about a dig?” Mason asked her.
“An archaeological dig,” she said.
“We need to ask Angela to get information on all the archaeologists and workers who are involved with the dig,” he said.
“And maybe have a Bloody Mary,” she said.
He winced. “Maybe a beer.”
She grinned. “I have a sketch of a man we should be looking for. He apparently talked wildly. But how do I explain we have a possible lead?”
“Someone you met briefly on the street?” he suggested.
“They’ll want to know—”
“We’ll deal somehow. Now, let’s get to our headquarters. Get the lay of the land. Oh, find out where we’re sleeping...and reach home. Then we’ll get on to the nightlife. Also, these fellows have some interesting information to give us.”
“Oh?” she asked.
He looked at her. “English techs managed to get a hit on the DNA found in the bite marks of one woman.”
“Oh?”
“I guess that someone is really trying to perpetuate the vampire myth,” Mason told her. “The DNA matched a murder suspect—”
“Well, that’s something! Who? We have a name?”
“Oh, we have a name,” Mason told her.
“And?”
“The DNA belonged to a man named Judson Burns.”
“Any clues on where to find him?”
“Oh, yeah. The man was a suspect in another murder in the States. He can be found six feet under, buried at potter’s field on Hart Island in New York. He was murdered two months ago.”
“So...”
“I believe we’ll discover the DNA at other sites where thefangswere used at the throat will turn out to belong to dead men as well. How else do you perpetuate the image of a vampire—the dead who are the undead?”
The headquarters that had been set up for them was just about as perfect as it could be in a place where crime was rare and seldom violent, and investigators from different countries had determined to stop a heinous killer who might appear anywhere around the globe.
What had probably been executive office spaces at one time had been turned into interrogation rooms with doors that could be securely locked. There was individual space with desks and laptops for the agents and the detectives. A large computer offered standing space for their group with a massive screen. Every conceivable research program was available through the computer. And while Mason had found that facial recognition programs were certainly better than nothing, not even the best program could recognize the back of a person’s head or the details of a face beneath a mask or disguise.
That was all right. Mason had been assured a call back to Angela Hawkins Crow could provide them with just about anything. She was so good that seeking information from her was almost as fast as a speeding bullet.
His concern was growing rapidly. Because he feared this killer was going to move quickly. It was wonderful to have this setup in Lillehammer, but the killer had already struck in London and Paris. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t move on.
If it was ahe, of course. Or ashe. It might be athey.
