Known Devil by Matthew Hughes

wheel. She never took her eyes off the road. “A new drug on the streets, addicted supes going crazy, and a gang war, to boot. God, I love this job!”
    We arrived at Moosic Street a couple of minutes later. The end of the block containing Ricardo’s Ristorante had a couple of black-and-white units straddling the street with their lights flashing, to keep out civilian traffic. That was as close to the action as the uniformed officers were likely to get. Department policy said that when vampire perps were suspected, regular patrol units were supposed to secure the area, keep their distance, and wait for the specialists from Occult Crimes to arrive.
    Two more cars from the squad, headlights still on, had got there ahead of us. They were parked more or less in front of Ricardo’s Ristorante, diagonally from the sidewalk. Cops at crime scenes don’t have to park at crazy angles that nobody else would imitate – we do it because we can .
    I was noticing trivial stuff like that because there was nothing else to look at. No suspects in custody, no bodies, no wounded vamps – nothing . That street was cleaner than a nun’s asshole.
    The restaurant itself was shut tight, with no lights showing anywhere. I thought that was unusual – places like Ricardo’s usually stay open until dawn, at least. But maybe Calabrese didn’t want the restaurant to be known as a supe hangout – or maybe they’d just closed early tonight.
    The only things moving in that block of Moosic Street were seven detectives, who were milling around and looking at each other with “What the fuck” expressions on our faces.
    I glanced around at the others. I was the only sergeant in the bunch, and that meant I was Ranking Officer on Scene – at least until some Lieutenant or higher came along and relieved me. I hoped it wouldn’t take long for that to happen. In the meantime, I figured I’d better act like I knew what I was doing.
    “Alright, everybody!” I said. “Looks like I’m ROS for the time being, so we might as well get to work.” The other detectives all looked at me, but nobody gave me an argument.
    “Aquilina, Sefchik, see if you can get somebody to answer the door at Ricardo’s, and don’t forget to check around back. The rest of you start the canvass. A lot of the neighbors aren’t gonna want to come to the door at this hour, but keep your thumb on the buzzer until they do. You all know what kind of questions to ask, so let’s get started.”
     
    Nobody ever answered the door at Ricardo’s that morning, and our canvass of the neighborhood turned up exactly zip. None of those living in the apartments overlooking the street saw anything, knew anything, or thought anything – or so they said. Even the two people who’d called 911 about shots being fired told us that they’d heard the gunfire, yes, but hadn’t looked out to see where it was coming from. They had said so very earnestly, and the detectives interviewing them had just nodded, as if they believed every word.
    It’s a pain in the ass when witnesses won’t talk, but I couldn’t really blame the civilians for clamming up. Who wants to get on the wrong side of a bunch of criminals – hard guys with guns who aren’t afraid to use them?
    So we had no witnesses, and no forensic evidence, either. Whoever had cleaned up the scene had been fast but thorough – they hadn’t left so much as a shell casing behind. There were bullet holes in some of the buildings, but the bullets would be so badly fragmented that ballistics tests would be impossible. Several fresh-looking stains in the street were probably blood, but that stuff was useless without somebody’s DNA to compare it with. And I had a feeling that the guys whose blood had seeped into that asphalt were never going to be seen again.
    It took about two and a half hours to reach the conclusion that this so-called crime scene was going to be about as fruitful as a dead apple tree. Lieutenant Russo from Homicide had