“He refused to speak, or couldn’t, but we arrested him and put him in a holding room for questioning. For five hours straight he just sat there and didn’t make a sound, then all of a sudden he starts . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . babbling.”

“Speaking in tongues maybe.”

“Maybe.” Brueger looked at me with an expression somewhere between lost and pissed off. I could see this guy had her good and freaked.

I asked her if they’d tested the blood and they had. The tests came back as strange and inexplicable as the bloody man. It wasn’t his blood. It was many peoples’ blood, all mixed together. She said the lab told her it would be impossible to separate the samples, but there could be as many as seventy-five to one hundred different possible blood types in the mix.

“And he hasn’t done anything but this babbling?” I asked.

“Pretty much, and it’s constant, hour after hour.”

I scratched my head. “You wouldn’t happen to have a drink, would you?”

She glared at me.

“I didn’t think so,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Well, he did speak a couple words we could understand.”

All I had to do was keep my mouth shut to avoid stepping in a big pile of shit, but it’s amazing, sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to avoid.

“Yeah, what’d he say?” I said, walking right into it.

Brueger nodded. “He said your name.”

Fuck.

I followed Brueger and a cop downstairs. I couldn’t tell if the cop was a ghoul or not, but he sure as shit looked like one. But then again, most cops do. We took a back elevator from the bottom floor and went down one more. It looked like some kind of dungeon.

“What’s with this place?”

The cop turned to me. He had huge wide-set eyes and a nose like a boxer. “They used to bring perps down here in the old days, if you know what I mean.”

I did. This was where they used to bring people to beat confessions out of them, and by the blood smudges on the walls and floor, the old days weren’t so long ago.

Brueger tried to sanitize. “The new cells and interrogation rooms are in the next building. They’re much nicer and more modern.”

The boxer-faced cop gave me a wink. I just looked back at him with a dull stare as we rounded a corner and came up on two cops standing outside one of the many doors lining the dingy hallway. One of the cops was Norris. He nodded when he saw me.