The Origin of Dracula by Irving Belateche Page A

I’ll snoop around and see what’s up,” Lee said.
    That’s exactly what I wanted, but I got out of the car, ready to face my fear. I had to—if I didn’t, it meant I was already conceding the game, and Nate’s life. I should’ve come here months ago. I should’ve weathered the storm of emotions the visit would have unleashed. I should’ve cleaned out Lucy’s office. I should’ve been a better father to Nate. Instead I had sought shelter from the storm. A shelter I never found.
    We stepped up to the glass doors at the back of the building. They didn’t slide open. “It’s locked for the night,” I said. Through the doors, I saw the dark hallway that ran to the lighted lobby out front. “Let’s see if the security guard is still on duty.”
    I headed to the path that ran along the south side of the building.
    But Lee glanced to the back of the parking lot like he’d spotted something, so I took a look, too. Two parallel rows of privacy hedges separated the lot from the back yards of the houses on the other side. A bulky man wearing a grimy knit cap was pushing his way through a gap in the row that bordered the lot. When he stepped onto the blacktop, I saw that he was bearded—a scraggly nest of steel wool—wild-eyed, wobbly, and covered in layers of ragged and dirty clothes.
    Lee and I continued around the southern corner of the building without commenting on him. Over the last two decades, the homeless had become as big a part of the Northern Virginia landscape as the relentless sprawl of homes, shopping malls, and business parks. Nate was terribly frightened of the homeless. When we’d pass a homeless man or woman on the sidewalk, he’d avert his eyes and circle as far around them as the width of the sidewalk would allow. And if he was holding my hand, he’d squeeze it more tightly.
    Lucy had patiently explained to him who the homeless were, hoping to ease his terror. I remembered her compassionate descriptions. They were pour souls down on their luck, or they suffered from mental illness, which she explained to him as the inability to distinguish between make-believe and reality, or they were addicts, which she said was another illness, one where a person couldn’t stop doing things that made them sick.
    But I never said a word about the homeless to Nate. Because, in a way, I felt the same way he did. Not that I was afraid of the homeless—but I was afraid of what they represented: the reality that life could easily descend into despair, as mine had.
    We rounded the front of the building and headed to the lobby. Through the large glass doors, I spotted a heavyset security guard, late thirties, with thinning, sandy hair, sitting behind a marble counter. He must’ve been engrossed in something because he didn’t look up until Lee and I had been standing there for a few seconds.
    When he finally noticed us, he shook his head, donned an annoyed expression, and mouthed, “We’re closed.”
    I waved him over, but he shook his head again and reiterated his mantra: “We’re closed.”
    “It’s important,” I said, loudly, so it’d carry through the glass.
    He frowned and stood up slowly, as if it took an impossible effort, then made his way around the counter. He took his damn sweet time walking over to the glass doors. So much time that I thought he must have been trained by Andy Callen, the security guard on duty the night of Lucy’s murder. The police report had stated that good ol’ Andy, ensconced behind the marble counter in his own world that night, hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
    I leaned close to the doors and didn’t raise my voice this time. “I work at Brown & Butler, but I forgot my pass card,” I said.
    “Name?” the guard said, and he moved close enough to the door for me to read his nametag.
    Andy Callen .
    I was face to face with the man who could have saved Lucy. The man I’d purposely not confronted. What good would it have done? Detective Wyler had hammered that into