Trail of Dead

by Olson, Melissa F.

  “Like, some opera singers probably wouldn’t be able to rap,” I contributed, and Jesse flashed me a grin that made my heart ache. Goddammit. Had I really expected him to just wait around for me to be ready to date him? What an idiot, Scarlett.

  “Exactly,” Kirsten said, but she kept her eyes on me. “Both Erin and Denise were like…girls who go to karaoke bars but only perform country music.”

  “Limited,” he said, trying to catch Kirsten’s eye.

  I was beginning to feel like the go-between in a middle school fight. Scarlett, tell Jesse I’m not speaking to him. It wasn’t like Kirsten to be this openly hostile, but at least she was talking to one of us. “But…I don’t mean to be insensitive, Kirsten, but wouldn’t they, you know—”

  “See their own deaths?” Kirsten supplied. She gave me a wan smile. “Even if they looked at their own futures—and every witch I’ve ever known avoids it—future magic is almost impossible to plan or control, and mostly it works on smaller things that can still be changed. Death is…not small.”

  “Okay, so they didn’t need Olivia for cleanups,” Jesse concluded. “But isn’t there another way they could have met?”

  I thought it over. “The Vampire Trials?” I suggested. Every three years—three being a powerful number for the supernatural—Dashiell holds sort of an open court for the supernatural. Any vampire, witch, or werewolf in the city with a serious gripe can bring it to Dashiell for a ruling. A null—first Olivia, now me—sits with the “defendant” to make sure they can’t harm anyone during the proceedings. It’s almost exclusively vampire business, though: if a witch or a wolf brings a matter before the court, it’s because their leader is too conflicted or too involved to solve the matter in-house. Will and Kirsten deal with almost all of the disputes for their people. Either way, Kirsten would know.

  Kirsten was glaring at me, and I realized I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the trials in front of Jesse. He was making a point of ignoring the question, but his eyes were jumping around with repressed curiosity. “No,” Kirsten said firmly. She broke the glare to look at both of us. “These were not powerful witches. They didn’t have enemies, and they didn’t know Olivia.”

  “Okay, so what does that mean?” Jesse asked.

  Kirsten and I shared a look, but I answered him. “I’m guessing it means that Olivia’s partner was the one who knew both of the witches. She’s helping Olivia kill them, or maybe Olivia is helping her.”

  “Why ‘her’?” he asked.

  I hesitated, but Kirsten cut in. “You can say it. If a vampire or a werewolf—or even a human—were going to kill Denise and Erin, they would have done it differently. Olivia is working with a witch. And most witches are female.”

  “Are we sure that a witch didn’t just help Olivia against her will?” Jesse asked diplomatically. He looked at Kirsten. “Do you know if any other witches have died or disappeared in the last two days?”

  She shook her head at him, caught up in the conversation despite herself. “That’s what I’ve been doing since three this morning. I called in sick and tried to contact every witch in Los Angeles. If I couldn’t reach someone, I used a tracking spell. Everyone is accounted for.”

  Jesse looked at me with sudden fear. “Wait, that thing you told me about, the mind-control thing, can vampires do that to witches?”

  Kirsten answered for me. “Not really. One of the weird things about magic is that it cancels itself out among species. So you can’t turn a werewolf into a vampire, you can’t change a witch into a werewolf, and you can’t really press the mind of a witch. A vampire might be able to press a really weak witch just a little bit, but that would be, like, getting her to lend you a dollar.”

  “They’re like magnets,” I supplied, mouth half-full of onion ring. I swallowed and added, “Different…charges. Or whatever.”

  “All right, well, forget the accomplice for a second,” Jesse said. “What do you think Olivia’s endgame might be? What does she want?”

  “When we speak to Dashiell tonight he may have other insights, but my suspicion is that she wants Scarlett.” When Kirsten looked at me, it was chilling. “I’ve known that woman for more than a decade, and I’ve never seen anyone as obsessed with anything the way she was with you. But I don’t know if Olivia wants to kill you, or maybe toy with you first, or something.”

  I looked sadly at my empty baskets of onion rings. “Three would probably be too many, right?”

  “Scarlett.” Jesse’s voice was quiet. “This isn’t a joke. This is your life.”

  “And maybe I should just give it to her.” When I said it, I was thinking aloud more than anything else, but I turned the thought around for another moment, realizing I was right. They were both staring at me. “Come on, you guys. How many more people have to die—”

  “Shut up,” Jesse said fiercely. I stopped short. “I never want to hear that crap from you again. If you so much as think about giving yourself up to her, I will know, and I will throw you in jail. I’m still a cop, and I can make it happen.”

  My mouth dropped open a little. Kirsten was looking at Jesse with a small, amused smile. It was the first look I’d seen her give him that wasn’t cold and untrusting.

  Reindeer Headband bopped up to our table. “More onion rings?”

  Chapter 8

  After the meeting with Kirsten, Jesse dropped Scarlett off at home so she could catch up on a few weeks’ worth of laundry and run some errands. Jesse was planning to spend the afternoon reading the files for the two witches’ deaths and making calls from his apartment: nothing Scarlett could really help with, anyway. Or that was what he’d told Scarlett. Privately, Jesse figured they were both a little raw from the morning’s conversations and could use some time apart.

  On the way home, he called Glory and asked her to e-mail him the case file for Denise’s “suicide,” and she promised to do it during her 1:00 p.m. lunch break. He almost asked her to make an excuse for him to his supervisor, Miranda, but remembered that he wasn’t actually on duty. Jesse was used to switching shifts around, but it still felt weird, being off from work in the middle of a weekday. Especially since he was technically working.

  When he had first realized that Erin’s murder was likely tied to the Old World, Jesse had been…well, more than a little excited. The thing was, during the La Brea Park investigation, he’d felt so integral. It had started with him just trying to cover his ass, but then he’d gotten invested, and then suddenly he was playing an important role in finding Jared Hess. And he’d even gotten the credit back in the real world. Jesse had thought his resulting promotion to detective would give him a better shot of keeping that sense of relevancy—he had thought he’d be doing more or less the same thing he’d done with the La Brea Park case, but with human perpetrators and human crimes. Jesse had been disappointed to discover that D1s did nearly as much scut work as the uniformed officers. During all the witness interviews and phone calls and paperwork of the last two months, he’d begun to long for that feeling of knowing you were actually contributing to something.

  Now he should be thrilled: he was less than twenty-four hours into a new Old World investigation, and Dashiell had flat-out handed him that same importance. As far as Jesse knew, he was the only cop who had the slightest idea what Erin’s death might really be about. And besides, he’d worried about Olivia since she’d first turned up as a vampire; it’d be good to finally be hunting her down. So why did he feel this dread hanging over him, fogging up his thinking? Maybe he was just spending too much time with Scarlett, worrying about her safety and remembering why he’d had such a crush on her. She was beautiful, of course—those bright-green eyes just got to him—but he loved her spirit, her attitude. And her attempts to use that attitude to hide how much she was hurting.

  He needed to talk to Runa, Jesse decided, and switched lanes to get off the freeway. The files could wait a little longer. He was craving even just a few minutes of the tentative new normalcy they’d been building
together. Besides, he needed to talk to her anyway, to make sure she hadn’t told anyone about the hand marks on the Jeep. He just had to figure out a way to do that without making her suspicious or giving away anything about the Old World. How do you ask someone to keep something quiet without revealing its importance?

  It took him forty minutes to get from Scarlett’s home in West Hollywood down to Runa’s third-floor efficiency in Venice Beach, which she shared with a one-eyed white cat she’d named Odin and a mountainous pile of photography equipment. Jesse had called ahead, so when he pushed the button for her apartment Runa buzzed him straight in. She was standing in the doorway when he came out of the elevator, leaning against the frame in a purple tank top and a flowing skirt that Jesse knew was just one piece of fabric draped around her waist and tied in a knot. Her white-blonde hair was parted and pinned back into two little buns, one behind each ear. “Hey, friend,” she said merrily, turning her face up for a kiss.

  “Hey yourself.” Jesse put his hands on Runa’s waist, taut from yoga, and backed her into the apartment, craning his neck to plant kisses along her throat.

  She giggled. “Oh, boy. Cover your eye, Odin.” They both looked at the white cat, who just bared his teeth in response. Cats tended to dislike Jesse, a dog person, and Odin was no exception.

  Runa pulled away and took a step backward so she could see him better, her face growing serious. “Listen, Jess, I’m really sorry about your grandmother.”

  “My—oh. Right. Thank you.” There was a reason why he had never worked undercover, Jesse thought wryly. “Thank you, but she was in a lot of pain and it was almost a relief.”

  Runa nodded, hugging him around the middle again and leaning her upper body back to meet his eyes. “You going to the funeral?”

  “No, it’s too far. I’m just…well, doing a little work on a couple of my cases, actually.”

  “That sounds like you,” she replied, eyes sparkling.

  “What are you up to today?” he asked.

  “Oh, today is big. First, I did laundry. Later, I’m getting groceries. And in between…are you ready for this? Get psyched. Are you psyched?” He nodded, grinning. Her cheerfulness was infectious. “Okay. Today is…backup day!”

  “Backup day? What, you and Odin drive around town in a convertible, exchanging quips and knocking down doors with your blazer sleeves pushed up?”

  “Not that kind of backup, silly. Come see.” She led him past her rumpled bed—like Jesse, Runa was not a big bed maker—and to her workstation, which was usually covered in a layer or two of tripods and detachable flashes. Today she’d cleared all that off to make room for two very serious-looking external hard drives. “This,” she explained, “is where I back up all my photos. The good ones, anyway. I used to keep all of them, but with digital photography it’s just too easy to fill up even the biggest hard drives with data.”

  The calm that had started to seep into Jesse’s chest disappeared again. “This is for your artistic stuff?” Runa was a civilian employee, meaning she only worked part-time for the department. She also taught yoga classes and worked on her own personal photography to sell at shows.

  She tapped the two different drives, and Jesse saw that they were faintly labeled, one with an R and one with the letters LAPD. “Both, the cops and the artistic stuff.”

  “They let you do that?” Jesse said incredulously.

  “Well, I’m not allowed to duplicate, print, or share any of my crime-scene stuff. Not that I’d want to. But you know how the evidence room is, and the department computers. I got paranoid that some of my photos would be lost before a case goes to trial, and the department would blame me for not producing the evidence.” She shrugged. “So I back it all up, and delete it after the trial.”

  “What about the stuff from last night?”

  “Yeah, that’s here too. Why?”

  “No reason.” Jesse pulled her back into a hug, kissing the part of her hair. “Listen, is there any way a guy could get a home-cooked lunch around here? I’ve been dreaming about those vegan teriyaki burgers…”

  “Liar!” she teased, swatting him on the shoulder. “You hate my food.”

  “No, really. I think I might be coming around.”

  Her face lit up. “Okay, I’ll make some lunch today, and you can buy me dinner tomorrow night. Deal?”

  Jesse wondered how long it would take to catch Olivia. “The night after okay?”

  “Sure.” She kissed his cheek. “Make yourself at home, I’ll be back in a few.” She gave him a strange look as she left the room, sort of speculative and curious, but Jesse was too distracted to worry about it just then. The moment she was gone, Jesse turned back to the computer, unable to believe what he was about to do.

  Chapter 9

  By 3:00 p.m. I had already done two loads of laundry and been to the dry cleaner’s and the drugstore. Jesse and I weren’t supposed to be at Dashiell’s until 6:00—the sun went down at 4:48 that day—so I should have tried to nap, but I was keyed up, worrying about Olivia and the witch situation. A distraction sounded pretty good right about then. Eli and Caroline were both working at Hair of the Dog, and I wasn’t in the mood for Molly, so I called Jesse. My list of friends is not long.

  “Cruz. “Just checking in. Anything new on your end of things?”

  Jesse sighed into the phone. “Nothing we didn’t already know. Santa Monica PD believed the suicide story on Denise. Every single detail fits, except for what Kirsten said about the hydrophobia. I can’t even really blame them for dismissing her.”

  “Yeah…” I didn’t know what else to say. What did I even want out of this phone call?

  But Jesse read my mind. “You’re totally antsy, aren’t you?”

  “Who, me?” I protested halfheartedly. “No way. Cucumbers wish they were this cool.”

  “Lies,” he said solemnly. “Shameless lies. You are antsy in your pantsies.”

  I couldn’t help it: I snorted into the phone. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Come to think of it, neither can I,” he said thoughtfully. “But I’m restless too, and I have an idea. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Wear…oh, just wear what you usually wear.”

  “What does that—” I began, but he had hung up.

  An hour later, I was at an honest-to-God shooting range.

  Jesse had explained that I needed to know how to defend myself against a human threat, and I didn’t necessarily disagree. Besides, I figured learning to shoot was going to be more fun than sitting at home chewing my nails during reruns of crime shows on cable. And I was right—except for the terrible elbow pain.

  “Holy crap, this thing kicks,” I complained, putting the pistol down carefully so I could shake out my arms.

  Jesse’s voice was calm and instructive. “That’s because you’re jerking it.”

  “You’re jerking it,” I retorted. Because I’m mature.

  We were in one of the seedier-looking parts of North Hollywood, in a brick building that had once been a shoe factory. The current owner, whom Jesse had introduced simply as Clinton-never-Clint, had converted it to a small shooting range, with ten long aisles and those targets that zoom back and forth. Clinton had also made the excellent decision to offer the city’s police a 15 percent discount, which made it a popular place for off-duty cops, especially right after shift changes. It was just before four o’clock, though, and Jesse and I were the only ones in there, aside from Clinton, a clean-shaven guy in his late sixties with one of those man-bellies that would look like pregnancy on a woman. He had greeted Jesse by name and then retreated to a big metal desk near the entrance without another word.

  Jesse gave me the kind of long-suffering sigh that my mother had perfected before I turned nine. “Here.” He stepped behind me, actually doing that macho thing guys do in movies where they’re all Ooh, let me show you how to do something while simultaneously turning you on with my muscles, ooh.

  I tried to hold that thought up against the m
ore animal part of my brain as Jesse’s arms went around mine, and his breath lifted hair off my neck. He wasn’t that tall, maybe five ten or five eleven, but he had long, thickly muscled arms that fit all the way around me. He smelled wonderfully of his usual Armani cologne-and-oranges scent, and something else—gun oil? Gun powder? Something mechanical-y.

  “You’re holding your breath,” he reminded me, his voice next to my ear.

  “Right.” I exhaled and turned my head to face forward. Eli, I told myself. You’re…something with Eli. Involved. Yes, there’s a good word. Involved. “This is all so Beverly Hills Cop,” I said nervously.

  “Look, this is what you’re doing,” he said. With my index finger still safely on the outside of the trigger guard, he wrapped his own finger around mine and gave the whole gun a quick tug backward toward my chest. “Jerking. Instead, focus straight ahead, keep your elbows loose but firm, and squeeze, like this.” Demonstrating, he squeezed his whole right hand around my whole right hand. “Got it?”

  Work, brain, work. “Uh, what about the kick?”

  “I’ll brace you.”

  His arms around me loosened a little, giving me more room without moving away. He seemed so solid behind me, I felt like I could take a head-on collision and not so much as rock backward. “Remember,” he said, “Breathe in, and squeeze on the exhale.”

  I managed to wound the diabolical paper target with five of the next six shots. “Good, good!” Jesse said happily. I set the gun down gently on the table and turned my face to his, accidentally grazing his mouth with my cheek. We both froze. I didn’t meet his eyes, but a long moment of silence lingered as we both considered the possibility that lay between us. Well, considered it again.

  We had gone on one official date, just one. It was right before I left for New York, and the idea was to do something normal. Human. He picked me up and took me to the ArcLight in Hollywood for a movie and a nearby sushi restaurant for dinner. We talked about the movie and our favorite actors, and he told me stories about his parents’ mischievous pit bull. For once, there was no talk of vampires or werewolves or witchcraft or anything else Old World. And it was amazing. I felt guilty about Eli, but he and I had had nothing but awkward work conversations for months, and Jesse…he looked at me sometimes like I was just another person, which no one else had done in the last five years. I couldn’t resist it.