“Good point,” I said. “It’s probably as little account to them as sparrows’ tears.”

I figured Karl would recognize that I was quoting the last line from You Only Live Twice, and the grin he gave me showed I was right.

“Hey, not bad, Stan,” he said. “Your taste in reading is improving.”

“Even I get tired of Reader’s Digest sometimes.”

I went to the front of the squad room and poured a cup of coffee that I didn’t really want, just to give myself a chance to stretch a little and think. By the time I got back to my desk, I figured I might have an answer to the problem Karl had raised.

“So, alright,” I said to Karl. “Let’s say Slattery’s people give us that ‘You come to us’ bullshit. So we tell them, ‘Sure – we’ll be happy to come over there to talk to Mister Slattery. We’ll have to work it into our busy schedules, though. And we can’t guarantee that we won’t show up in the middle of the candidate’s next press conference. Wonder what all those reporters would make of a couple of detectives showing up to talk to the Big Man himself?’”

Karl thought about that for a bit. “That might just do the trick. Slattery’s got a big lead in the polls, but I don’t guess he’s willing to chance any bad publicity this close to election day.” He gave me an approving nod. “Pretty good, Stan – you’re developing a devious mind. I like that in a partner, even if he is warm.”

I was about to thank him for the compliment when McGuire stuck his head out of his office door and yelled our names.

When we were standing in front of his desk, McGuire said, “We’ve got a report of another explosion.”

“Aw, fuck,” I said. “How bad is this one?”

“Not like the car bomb at Ricardo’s, I’m glad to say. In fact, Scanlon says it might not be the same kind of bomb at all.”

“Scanlon’s there already?” Karl asked.

“Yeah, and he says there’s a couple of dead vampires at the scene – so you two better get over there.”

The address he gave us turned out to be in the 1800 block of Spruce Street. Using the flashing lights and siren, we were there within ten minutes. This time out, the siren didn’t bother me at all, thanks to Rachel. I’d been remembering the sweet taste of her lips when Karl brought the car to a halt, and my thoughts came back to the present.

The yellow crime scene tape marked off an area in front of Cassidy’s Bar and Grille – a place that I knew drew a mixed clientele of humans and supes. Despite what McGuire had told us, I was expecting something along the lines of the devastation we’d seen outside of Ricardo’s, or at least the kind of damage that that had accompanied Victor Castle’s murder. But all the klieg lights showed us was a lot of broken glass from Cassidy’s front windows and numerous small holes in the masonry – along with two dead bodies sprawled in the middle of the street.

There was also a hell of a lot of gore – splashes of blood, hair, and tissue spread out from the bodies at a wide angle and for maybe fifty feet behind them. It was as if somebody had been using a machine gun and hadn’t been worried about conserving ammunition.

Scanlon was about twenty feet from the corpses, staring as if he expected them to get up and tell him what the hell had happened.

“When we got word there was another explosion, I was expecting something a lot worse than this,” I said by way of greeting. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I had the same kind of reaction myself when the call came in,” he said. “But this was no car bomb – we can be thankful for that.”

“What’s Dennehy think?” I asked him.

“Bomb squad’s not here yet,” he said. “But I got a couple ideas of my own. Come on.”

He led us away from the bodies and toward the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street from Cassidy’s. Although the area was still within the area cordoned off by crime scene tape, it wasn’t nearly as well lit as the area around the corpses.

Before I could ask him, he said, “The crime scene people are short of lights tonight. There was a bad car crash on the South Side, and they had to take some of the kliegs over there. But check this sucker out.”

From his coat pocket, Scanlon produced what I assumed was a flashlight, thick around the middle but less than a foot long. Then he clicked it on, and I found myself squinting against a sudden glare that was far brighter than I would ever have expected from something so small. Karl can see in the dark, but even he seemed impressed as he said, “What the fuck, Lieutenant?”

“Nice, isn’t it? One of those new quartz tactical flashlights. Puts out 860 lumens, whatever that means.”

“I think that’s tech-speak for pretty fuckin’ bright,” I said. “How come Homicide gets those and we don’t?”

“Homicide doesn’t,’ he said. “I bought it myself from a catalog. Set me back eighty bucks. Now, take a look over here.”

We’d reached the curb, and Scanlon’s super-flashlight gave a clear view of what there was to see: a lot of scorched asphalt, a chunk of what looked like melted green plastic, and a small piece of shiny metal in a V shape.

“This was the bomb?” Karl asked, disbelief clear in his voice. I didn’t blame him.

“I don’t think it was a bomb at all,” Scanlon said, “in the accepted usage of the term. I’m pretty sure that this here is what’s left of a Claymore mine, after it’s been detonated.”

“That’s military ordnance, isn’t it?” I said.

“It sure is,” Scanlon said. I figured he’d know. Scanlon was in the Army when he was younger, and I knew he’d served in the Transylvanian war, although he never talked much about it. He probably used Claymores himself or saw them used.

“I thought a mine was a round thing that you hide just below the surface of the ground,” Karl said. “Somebody who doesn’t see the detonator steps on it, or drives over it, and boom.”

“They still use those,” Scanlon said. “But this is a different kind of weapon.” Scanlon brought out his smartphone. “I looked it up on the Internet for you,” he said, and handed the phone to Karl. “Here.”

I looked over Karl’s shoulder, even though I’d seen pictures of a Claymore before.

The photo on Scanlon’s screen showed a curved rectangle of green plastic, on its side, with “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” stamped on it in big letters. It had a small metal attachment on top that looked like a rifle sight, and from the underside protruded two pairs of scissor legs that would stand the thing upright. The shiny piece of metal that lay on the road in front of us looked an awful lot like one of those legs.

Karl scrolled down to see the details. “Seven hundred steel balls embedded in plastic explosive,” he read aloud. “Kill zone is fifty meters wide, extending back more than a hundred meters.”

He handed the phone back to Scanlon. “Pretty impressive. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

I said to Scanlon, “McGuire said that the vics were vampires – that’s why we were sent over here.”

“They are,” Scanlon said. “I checked for fangs, and they’ve both got ’em.”

“Then this impressive weapon here” – I nodded toward the asphalt in front of us – “should have been worth shit, since we all know that explosive devices don’t kill vampires.”

“You’re right – they don’t,” Scanlon said. “Unless they’ve been specially modified.” He took something small and round from his coat pocket and tossed it to me underhand. “With these.”

As I tried to get a close look in the uncertain light at what I was holding, Scanlon said to Karl, “I could have given that to you, but it would have been kind of like pulling a nasty practical joke – and I have no use for people who do shit like that.”

I was holding a metal sphere about the size of a pea, and when I heard what Scanlon said to Karl, I was pretty sure I knew what it was. “Silver?”

“Seems to be,” Scanlon said. “Technically, that little item should be in an evidence bag. But there’s so many of them back there – embedded in the building, the road, the vics, and God knows where-all – that I figured it wouldn’t hurt to hang on to one.”