Bloodstorm Part 1

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"It can't be our guy, Mike, could it?"

"Nope, don't think so. He said the body was down by the Little Calumet River. There are other things that don't quite fit our perp's profile."

"Then I guess it ain't him. In a way, I'm a little disappointed. If that nut started deteriorating, he just might slip up, give us more to go on. Oh, well, let's blow this joint. A little fresh air might do me good."

The ride out on the Calumet Expressway reminded John of why he had become a cop. You could see every type riding along with you, from limousines to old heaps on their last legs. You could also drive through some of the worst neighborhoods of this city and not really worry about the crime. It was this diversity and the universal need of those people for protection, that had attracted John to police work and Chicago specifically.

John had grown up in the suburbs, in a little town called Dolton. In fact, where they were headed was one exit north of the Dolton Avenue exit, though John always thought of it as 142nd Street. He had moved into the city for college and a career; he had rarely returned, only on those occasions when he visited his brother. He felt a pang of guilt when he realized it had been over a year since he had spoken with either him or his mother. It had been even longer since he had seen his sister. Nobody in the family even knew where she was living or what she was doing with her life. His family had just grown apart. Their differing personalities, different interests, seemed to have a greater pull than their blood relationship.

He remembered his father, vaguely. The man had left when John was five years old, the oldest of the children. His mother had been left on her own, with three very young children and the rent due. The two clear memories that John had of his father were decidedly mixed. One was dealing with a walk they had taken through Dolton Park. John remembered the leaves on the trees were changing colors and falling. According to his mother, he had said something cute about the leaves falling and breaking their necks.

His other memory was a little darker. He remembered an argument between his parents that had escalated. He could see it in his mind's eye still; his father grabbing his mother and slamming her into a wall so hard that a light switch had broken from the wall by the back of her head.

It had only been after John had grown up that he had both come to terms with these conflicting memories and understood why his father might have left. His mother was difficult to love and almost impossible to like. John had a suspicion that she suffered from schizophrenia, but she never sought help for the madness that every one around her saw. She had also lost her father at an early age, through death rather than abandonment. John's father always suffered by the comparisons that his mother made between the two men. John always resented the implication that his mother would rather have married her father, rather than the man who had been his dad.

John was awakened from his reverie by the car slowing to exit the expressway. He was not surprised to see the exit blocked by police cars. The number of officers and equipment that were already on the scene did surprise him.

"This doesn't look good, Mike. It looks more like a circus than a crime scene. Hell, the news media even beat us here." John said as he noticed two television vans parked on the side of the exit, just before the barricade.

"Yeah, the chief was saying that they had already blown that."

"Who blew it?"

"Believe it or not, the Corps." The Army Corps of Engineers maintained the Ship and Sanitary Canal. This began not far from their location.

"Well, I'm glad it was those guys and not any one from the department. What are we looking at anyway?"

"Female student from Saint Francis High School. She didn't come home last night after she was at the library. Parents called in the missing report about half an hour ago, after the Corps guys called us about the body."

"Where the hell did you get all this information. Fuck, Mike, I was in the squad room and didn't hear about it." John said as Mike stopped the car and they got out and looked around. There was a forest preserve nearby and this road they were on was rarely used by any traffic, other than trucks heading to the landfill.

"The Chief thought he'd let you stew for awhile. You know, try to get that whole mess about the case out of your system."

"Okay, I can see that I might be a little focused on this guy. I'm still a cop though; I can do the job he asks me to." He said as they approached the riverbank. The concentration of police manpower was thickest here.

A sudden clatter of noise accompanied a uniform officer up the embankment. John was about to ask what was wrong with the man, when the clown vomited on John's shoes.

III

Greyhound Bus Terminal, Chicago, Illinois, August 4, 2002, 1:15 P.M.

The vampire hunter deserted the calm, quiet environment of the bus for the noisy bustle of the terminal. All of his earthly belongings were slung over his shoulder in the form of an old army rucksack. Authorities frowned on his professional equipment being on any form of any transportation. They might not have objected to the crucifix, or even the holy water. Sharpened stakes, however, were questionable, even if they were just Louisville Sluggers in a former life.

He looked around for the nearest bank of public phones and headed over there to do some quick research. He had to find out where the offices were for the Archdiocese of Chicago. This was his first trip to the city in a thirty-year career and a fifty-year life.

He was almost certain the Cardinal would help him out. Kevin had heard that the leader of the largest group of Catholics in the country was a firm supporter of the Pope, almost a blind follower. This suited his purposes nicely; the fewer questions the better. This type of devotion was rare in this day and anything else was dangerous to his mission.

It was almost impossible being a vampire slayer in the 21st Century. It hadn't been much better in the eighties or nineties when he had been in his prime. He blamed mass media and a general decline in morals for the difficulty. He had to put the blame somewhere and it didn't lie with him.

The media was to blame because they had made vampires non-threatening. Hell, he thought, they even made them appear sexy. He had to admit that there was something attractive about them. You held the same deadly fascination for a poisonous snake; that didn't mean you wanted to be one.

From the time of Mr. Stoker's work to the present explosion in interest, people had always considered them fictional, even mythological. Mankind needed myths from his earliest days. He used them to explain situations that he could not readily explain by other means. Vampires were a way to explain away sudden deaths; to consider them real, for most people, was ludicrous. Kevin knew better.

His other problem stemmed from a decline in religious interest. Polls showed that people did consider themselves good members of their various faiths. The definition of what 'good' meant had changed over the years.

The most evident change in attitude was within the Catholic Church. Its parishioners were once well known for their belief in papal infallibility. Now, however, there was a great deal of disagreement on many fronts. They even disagreed what it meant to be Catholic. From the use of birth control to a woman's ability to serve the church, it seemed that everyone had a different opinion on each of these issues and they weren't afraid of voicing those opinions any more.

Excommunication was just not the threat that it once had been and it was still the only weapon in the Vatican's arsenal. Kevin knew that this pope had to bend to more pressure for change than his predecessor had faced; he also knew how it distressed the man who was heir to the Keys of Peter. He was faced with the Herculean task of keeping the interest of his flock and keeping the traditions of his Church intact. Kevin usually ignored such trivial matters, except when they impacted directly on his calling.

One of the ways that it did impact him was in the form of clerical disbelief. Although he was armed with an open papal communication that called for any clergy to help him, sometimes that was just not enough. They wouldn't outright refuse to assist him; they would just mumble excuses about how difficult it would be to render such aid, if their 'people' found out what he was doing. The sad part for Kevin was that he understood such reluctance; he even sympathized with it. He wished he had the luxury of denial.

Kevin had been born June 6th, 1952 in Oxnard, California. His father had been a pilot in the Navy; his mother taught elementary school. The only thing that had saved him from being a Navy brat had been his father's death shortly after he was born. He had grown up in Oxnard and had come of age during that strange time that was lumped under the word 'Sixties'.

He did a lot of things in high school that his classmates did. He protested the war in Vietnam and burned his draft card as soon as he received it. His mother told him that his father would be spinning in his grave over that one; Kevin didn't care. He had been looking for that reaction.

He let his hair grow long and he tried drugs. He was somewhat surprised to find that he didn't enjoy them. The loss of control scared him a lot. This was the same reason he didn't want to go to Vietnam, so it seemed foolish to look for it at home.

He was lucky to get an athletic scholarship to UCLA for his freshman year in 1969-70, for baseball. He was hoping to enter their prestigious student film program. The tragedy at Kent State that spring affected him deeply and when he returned home for the summer break both his mother and girlfriend mentioned the change that had come over him.

He had dated Mary for almost three years and it was a foregone conclusion that they would get married. He tried hard not to take her for granted and it had been very difficult being faithful to her over the demands of the baseball groupies when he had been at college. They were both devout Catholics, however, and he considered his fidelity as much an accomplishment as any he had made on the diamond.

It was also their faith that accounted for their chastity, at least so far. The furthest it had gone had been a little petting under their clothes but with them still in place. Her reasoning seemed to be that it wasn't sex if they still had their clothes on.

His life changed forever that summer. One evening he was headed home, after seeing Mary, enjoying serenity that seemed to envelop him. He opened the door of the two-story home that he and his mother shared. It may have been a premonition that caused him to turn to the basement door instead of heading straight upstairs, he was never sure why he had done that. He remembered the way the door creaked when he opened it.

Kevin shook himself away from his memories and he once more became aware of his surroundings. He noticed a cop looking at him suspiciously; he still wore his hair shoulder length, despite the baldness that was beginning to show on top of his head. He tore the page with the cathedral's address on it out of the phone book and headed out the door to try to find shelter for the night.


Chapter Five: Bitter Harvests

"And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land;"
- Genesis 41:30

I

South Shore Apartments, Chicago, Illinois, August 6, 2002, 4 A.M.

He came in from the hunt confused and weary. This whole vampire thing was not going as he had thought it would. His second victim had behaved a little better than the first, but she had still not gone as quietly as he had hoped. The frenzy that had descended on him, both times, embarrassed him slightly.

He had expected to have more control, now. He had always thought of vampires, when he did think of them, as cold, aloof, detached from human emotions. It had always been his emotions that got him in the worst kind of trouble. He didn't have any idea what type of trouble he could find in his current form, but he felt he was sure to find it.

The Sean Cunningham that the world knew had been born March 2, 1965. His parents were abusive, both mentally and physically and he had grown up in an atmosphere of fear and guilt. Fear that something he did would bring punishment down on his head. Guilt that something that he had done deserved that punishment. Sean felt there had been no one to turn to for protection, except his older sister.

Brianna was seven years older than Sean and had taken most of the burden of his daily needs from the time Sean was an infant; She diapered him, bathed him, fed him, and so on. He didn't know that your sister wasn't supposed to bathe you when you were eight years old, he thought that was perfectly normal. He also thought it was normal that she started fondling him to try to get a reaction from him at around that same age. She would have been fifteen when she started this.

The relationship grew even more intense the very day that he had his first orgasm under her bathing touch one morning when he was nine. Sean guessed this was the sign his older sister had waited for. Although, he wasn't sure why she had waited so long.

They both went to parochial schools; Sean attended St. Mary's Elementary and Brianna went to St. Francis High School. The entire day, Sean thought about what had happened that morning, going over in his mind exactly how he had felt. He felt slightly concerned about the fluid that had leaked from the tip of his penis or what his sister called 'his special thing'. He knew that he couldn't ask any of the nuns about this, or his parents.

His sister answered some of his questions that afternoon when they had returned home from school, but more with her actions than her words. She brought him into her bedroom, a room that he was strictly forbidden by his parents from entering. When Brianna started undressing him, he began to protest that he had already had had his bath for the day, a typical nine year old, in that respect. He remembered the conversation as if it had happened yesterday.

"Don't worry, there something else I want to show you." She said, as she pulled his underwear down over his hips and off his legs. She began stroking him. When he was standing up, she did something she had never done before; she put her mouth over it and began sucking.

The feeling that shot through him was intense. The adult Sean could now identify it as pleasure, but the younger Sean was shocked by the very intensity of it. He watched her, curious once the fear subsided. He could see her bra straps through her white blouse, then he noticed that the top buttons of the blouse were unbuttoned and he could see down her blouse. He was fascinated by the sight of her cleavage, bound by the material of her bra.

He could also see the way her plaid skirt had come up her legs. He looked at her legs, the barest glimpse of white visible. He was somewhat surprised that, when her hands were not on him, she would stroke the inside of her thighs. She even seemed to be sticking her fingers somewhere just out of view now.

The noises that Brianna was making were slightly confusing. They sounded like a mix between pain and frustration. He asked her if anything was wrong. She shook her head, but must have taken this as a sign as well, because she stood up and started undressing herself.

Until that time, Sean had never seen his sister naked, or any female for that matter. The additional flesh on her chest did not surprise him; he was surprised by the lack of it between her thighs and the sparse hair growing there. She lay on her bed and spread her legs, then spread open what lay between them. She gave him a quick anatomical tour; she explained what was expected from him and asked him to lie on top of her. Her hand guided him into her and he was again surprised at the heat and dampness he felt enclosing him. She told him what to do then and it was not long before he felt his second orgasm of the day and his life.

She told him afterwards that this must be kept a secret and, as long as it did, they could continue doing this, every afternoon if he wanted. That was how it happened and it continued that way, every afternoon, for over a year. Then, he could remember a huge argument that his parents had gotten into with her and the next morning she was gone. The only answer that his parents gave him at the time was that she had gone to visit relatives.

It wasn't until he had turned twenty that he found out the truth and it cast a new light on her and the feelings that he was beginning to worry about. She had become pregnant and had been sent to a special boarding school. Sean did not know if the child was his because Brianna had committed suicide before she delivered the baby.

The feelings that were beginning to worry him at this time, however, were his continuing attraction to young, Catholic schoolgirls. It had felt normal when he was growing up, but he had never shifted to older girls. He seemed to be stuck on girls that reminded him of his sister, physically and emotionally on that borderline of adulthood.

When he was twenty-five, he got into his first trouble because of this attraction, or obsession, and he pled guilty to statutory rape. He spent three years in prison and he was now a registered sex offender. His obsession continued after prison but self-preservation had kept him from fulfilling his increasingly darker fantasies.

These fantasies were what he had been trying to drown out at the bar. It was why he was surprised by his encounter with the woman. It was also why he was so pleased with his new status. Now, he thought, he had the power and permission to live out those fantasies.

II

Chicago Homicide Unit, August 6, 2002, 10 A.M.

John Parker threw his ashtray across the room. Thankfully, it was empty when the fit struck him. Unfortunately, in John's mind, it was made of metal instead of glass. It would have been so much nicer to hear a satisfying smash instead of the dull thump that it made when it struck the wall.

What caused his anger was the news that he had received when he had arrived that morning. Another body had been found; another Catholic girl and people were upset now, for various reasons. This guy was on a fast turn-around time, and it was being made top priority. A task force was going to be assembled and it was only complicated that the second victim, the second one they knew about at least, was the youngest daughter of a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. That would bring the Feds in. John knew they wouldn't wait around for a local police request for their "assistance".

All of this pissed John off for various reasons. The biggest one was that he wouldn't be one of the lead detectives on this case. That would go to some political flunky, better at kissing ass than getting to the bottom of things. It also meant that his case would be ignored until they caught the killer of these young girls.

Perversely, John was glad that the Feds would get involved quickly on this case. It meant that the usual jurisdictional uproar would be kept to a minimum. It also might keep them out of his hair and he might even be able to sneak a VICAP profile on the other killer. Two big mights, John thought, but as long as I'm wishing, I've got to wish big.

John went and picked the ashtray up from the floor and lit a cigarette. Mike came in as John was sitting down at his desk.

"I guess you heard, huh?" He asked

"Yeah, I heard. You hear anything about what our role is going to be on the task force?"