The bathroom light went dark, the door opened, and Belinda came out. She knotted the belt of a terry-cloth robe that couldn’t hide the voluptuousness of her full breasts and wide hips.

I smiled and fluffed her pillow. I was ready for more fun. The sex had been uncomplicated and easy. No interruption on my part to hypnotize her and erase the memory of my vampire nature. I didn’t even have to remove my contacts. Having a natural “human” tan was liberating.

Belinda ignored the invitation and sat her rump on the edge of the mattress. She poured the melted ice and what was left of the margaritas from the pitcher into one of the glasses. She opened the top drawer of the nightstand and took out a bottle of pills. Aspirin? After popping a couple of pills, she chased them with a drink from the margarita glass.

If she had a headache, I could recommend a better cure.

Belinda turned and looked at me like she didn’t recognize who I was. Had I given her too much of the amnesia-causing enzymes? Better ease up on the vampire mojo this second time around.

“What was your name?” She took another swallow.

I couldn’t believe I’d been so careless with my fanging that she’d forgotten my name.

Belinda didn’t wait for me to answer. “You better go. I have to get my sleep. It’ll be easier for me in the morning if you’re gone.”

She was kicking me out? Just like that? My emotional compass spun in circles. What had I done wrong?

“No hard feelings,” she added. “I had a good time.”

A good time? She’d had enough, and out the door for me? She didn’t even remember my name. “What am I? An anonymous piece of ass?”

Belinda put the glass back on the nightstand. “What are you complaining about? You had fun.”

“Yeah but…” My brain went numb with confusion. This had nothing to do with my fanging her. I wanted Belinda to treat me as she would any other man, and she did. Take a number, wait your turn, now get the hell out.

No hard feelings? I was a vampire, the supreme sexual predator, and I felt…used, as disposable as last night’s condom.

I stewed in humiliation. Now what to do? The spider-bite treatment hid my vampire persona, which it did too well. Show her my fangs and talons? Belinda, you had sex with a vampire.

Big deal, apparently, because that didn’t change the fact that she was giving me the boot. This wasn’t about my being a vampire, it was about my pride. A very human pride that I thought I no longer felt.

If I showed her my true self, the bloodsucking monster of the night, what then? I couldn’t let her live with that knowledge, so I would have to either erase her memory-and we’re back to her judging me as worthy of only one bout on the mattress-or I’d have to kill her-which I wouldn’t do.

Naked and embarrassed, I slipped from under the covers and gathered my clothes. Belinda sat cross-legged on the bed, watched me get dressed, and yawned.

I saw why her fiancé was ambivalent about tying the knot with this fickle bitch. Getting out now was a good idea. I checked my pockets to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

“The front door will lock behind you,” Belinda said in a tone that meant “scram.”

I drove off, reliving the evening, thinking how my clever macho talk, my smooth moves in the sack were all a setup for her punch line: Beat it.

My vampire savoir faire had little to do with getting laid. Hell, if Belinda had been horny enough, I could’ve been a buck-toothed hick driving a Yugo and she would’ve jumped my bones.

I couldn’t stop the chatter in my head, the constant search for a stinging comeback I should’ve made to placate my ego. But I had to get on with my investigation. I stopped in a convenience store, bought a tall cup of coffee, and added a good amount of blood from a plastic bottle that I had brought in checked baggage. Fortunately, the blood was A-negative, which tended to have a soothing effect on me, like valerian root.

My mood tempered, I drove through the darkness and returned to the crash site. The cluster of vehicles had thinned to four state police cars.

As soon as I parked, a trooper came out from the shadows and asked if he could help; in other words, what was I doing here?

When he got close, I zapped him. I fanged the trooper only enough to keep him under-barely tasting his blood-and locked him in the backseat of his cruiser.

I scanned the area and saw the red auras of woodland critters but no humans.

Two trailer-mounted generators hummed alongside the road. I followed a line of cables from the generators toward a glow in the woods beyond. Rows of plastic bins held jagged pieces of metal, most the size of my arm or smaller. I peered into the woods with my night vision and didn’t see anything of concern to me.

A circle of construction lights on towers illuminated an oblong black area gouged into the ground. The area was a couple of hundred feet long and about a hundred feet wide. Scorched brush surrounded the perimeter. Small flags dotted the site. Wreckage, either a tail fin or a wingtip, flattened a shrub to my right.

I stood in a patch of burned weeds and studied the impact hole. There was no crater; rather it was a jagged trough scooped into the earth.

I walked around the perimeter. The plane must have hit the ground at a steep angle, ricocheted, and exploded. Good luck trying to collect the remains of these dead.

So where were the remains? And that wreckage in the bins, where was that going?

What did this have in common with the Cessna Caravan the Araneum had mentioned? Other than both planes had smacked the earth, killing all souls on board, I didn’t see a connection.

I returned to the road and found another trooper patrolling the area. I zapped her and asked where the remains were stored.

She said they were in a hangar at a small private airport nearby. I made her give me directions. Then I shoved her in the backseat of the cruiser with the other trooper I’d fanged. I unbuttoned their shirts and loosened her bra. Would they admit to finding themselves in a situation that risked the wrath of human resources? I took the male trooper’s ID badge.

The airport was seven miles away. I got there at a quarter after four in the morning and parked in a deserted lot. I clipped the trooper’s badge to my shirt and got out of my car.

The early morning hour-oh-dark-thirty, we used to call it in the army-plus the smell of prairie grass and aviation fuel reminded me of assembling for helicopter assaults in the infantry.

A corporate jet climbed noisily from the main runway. Strobe lights flashed on its belly and tail. The jet looked too fancy for a pop-stand airfield like this. Was Goodman on the jet and had I just missed him?

The operations building was locked. This was a rinky-dink enterprise: a few prefab hangars, a concrete runway, and a dozen small private airplanes and ag sprayers tethered to the parking apron.

I walked around the south side of the operations building. Construction lights illuminated an area in front of the largest hangar at the far end. I approached down the taxiway and circled around a fueling point.

A couple of big RVs, several black SUVs, and three panel trucks sat in a row beside the hangar. Traffic cones and police tape marked a perimeter around the area. Two red auras identified a couple of men, both bored, standing guard next to an unmarked Crown Victoria at the entrance into the perimeter.

I could break into the hangar from the back or the roof. But getting past these two guards shouldn’t be much trouble, so why bother?

The men gossiped and sipped coffee from paper cups.

I scoped the area. Nothing but the lights, the vehicles, and the two wide doors of the hangar shut together. Light from inside leaked through the edges of the doors. Nothing waited in the darkness beyond.