Trail of Dead

by Olson, Melissa F.

  “Hello?” I said cautiously.

  “Oh, thank God. I’ve been calling and calling. Is this Scarlett Bernard?”

  I glanced back at the hospital building. I’d forgotten that I couldn’t get reception inside.

  “Yes, this is Scarlett.”

  “I have a—a problem? Is that the right word?”

  I frowned. Most of my cleanup calls happened at night, but a daytime crime scene wasn’t unheard-of. “You’re calling about my cleaning services?”

  “Yes, I’m Esther, there’s this vampire and…” She took a sobbing breath. “I think he might be dead.”

  I opened my mouth to say that she should call Eli and give him the job, but then I remembered he was dealing with a big cleanup at Hair of the Dog. I shrugged to myself. There wasn’t anywhere I needed to be just then, and it was still my job. “Give me the address. I’ll be right there.”

  As soon as I had entered the address in my GPS and was on my way, I started to call Jesse to tell him where I was going. I had his number highlighted on my phone’s screen and everything, but then I abruptly pushed END and tossed the phone into my work duffel on the passenger seat. Vampire or not, this was a dead body. Jesse would feel obligated to call the police and turn it into an actual investigation; he was dense like that. I couldn’t involve him.

  Then again, I wasn’t an idiot, either, and I knew this might also be a trap designed by Olivia. I doubted it, as the sun was still up. Whenever she unleashed her evil plan, she would do it at night, so she could see its horrors reflected on my face. But still…if I got killed because I didn’t tell Jesse where I was, I was going to feel really stupid.

  I thought about it a moment, then pulled over and sent him a text that I would be delayed for a work errand. Then I called Molly’s cell phone and left her a voice mail: “Hey, babe. If there isn’t an ‘all clear’ voice mail on here when you get up, something bad has probably happened to me. Call Jesse and tell him I went to two five four Spring Boulevard in Silver Lake. Oh, this is Scarlett.”

  Problem solved. I pulled back onto the road.

  The address that Esther had given me was for a small, weathered-looking cottage on the outskirts of Silver Lake, currently one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. Wait, no, maybe that was last year. I can’t keep track. At any rate, Silver Lake had once been one of LA’s most dangerous areas, then had gone through urban renewal or whatever, so now it was a mix of excessively developed residential areas and neighborhoods that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about cleaning up their act. Spring Boulevard was somewhere in the middle: two blocks from a Coffee Bean but shabby enough to have bars on every window of every building, even the upper floors.

  I don’t know what I was expecting Esther to look like—maybe a teenage runaway from a Lifetime movie, with big eyes and an artfully dirty face—but she wasn’t it. When the cottage door opened, the woman inside was plain, skinny as a rail, and bald as Daddy Warbucks. A dark-pink cotton scarf was wrapped around her head, and she didn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows. She looked like she was pushing fifty. Oh. I suddenly understood the situation.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said, a little cough clutching at her words.

  “Of course. Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. She shook it with a frail grip. Esther was one of the human servants who had hooked up with vampires in hopes that they would turn her. She was dying. Which also explained why she looked so miserable—if her vampire had died, she was out of luck. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “I’m a—well, I don’t know what you call it, but I sort of help out a, a vampire?”

  A human servant. With the habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. This was just what my day had been missing. “What can I do for you, Esther?”

  Her voice broke. “Well, he’s—he’s dead? I mean, he’s really dead. I just came over and he was here and I didn’t know that they even left bodies; I thought they went to dust or something—”

  She kept rambling, so I broke in, trying to sound soothing. “It depends on the vampire, Esther. When they’re killed the magic leaves them, the years catch up with them, and their bodies revert to where they should be. So very old vampires do turn into dust, just like in the movies. But new vampires may just look like a slightly rotted dead body, and so on.”

  When she answered her voice was very small. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Can you take me to the body?” I said gently.

  “Oh. Right. This way.” I followed her into the cottage, which was barely furnished at all: a couple of folding chairs and a cheap TV in the living room, a card table in the kitchen. There was no refrigerator, no signs of food. “I don’t eat much,” she said, catching my look. “He’s—the body is down here.”

  She opened a door in the kitchen, revealing a set of wooden stairs. A basement. Great. Vampires have a talent for finding the few houses in LA that actually have basements. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is a trap, I told myself. I certainly didn’t feel anything Old World in my radius. But I motioned for Esther to go first.

  The downstairs was the opposite of the first floor: wall-to-wall carpeting, gorgeously framed art prints on the walls, a flat-screen TV, couches. Everything was well kept but comfortable looking: someone spent time here. Esther continued toward the back wall, where another door led to a tiny bedroom. I could see the dead body lying in the doorway. “That’s him,” she said unnecessarily.

  The body had a sort of mummified look: most of the flesh had wasted away, but a few tendrils of hair and skin still clung to the skeleton—male, judging by the clothes. He was wearing a simple button-down men’s shirt and dark slacks that weren’t new but still contrasted heavily with the decrepit skeleton. He’d also been wearing black loafers, but they’d fallen off when his body shriveled up and were lying on the floor near his feet. In the middle of his chest, a gaping hole had ruined the nice line of the shirt. I looked closely and saw the little wood splinters. He’d been staked. Vampires die when their heads are detached from their bodies, or when their hearts are destroyed, or by fire. You don’t technically need a wooden stake to destroy a heart; that’s just something that worked well in the Middle Ages. We have better weapons now, but the stake is a classic, and a lot of people believe that its long history makes it more powerful.

  I looked around, but didn’t see anything stake shaped. I didn’t really smell him, just the faintest whiff of old decay. The vampire had been a vampire for a couple of years, at least. I was pretty confident now that this wasn’t a trap, but I was still glad when Esther hovered near the stairs, staying in my line of vision. I dropped my oversize duffel bag of supplies and crouched down, balancing on my heels as I pulled out a thick, disposable plastic body bag and my surgical gloves. “You found him like this?” I asked. “You didn’t pull the stake out?” Vampires don’t die very often in LA, and when they do, Dashiell has to know about it. If it had been after sunset I would have called him immediately after my first conversation with Esther, but since he’d be unavailable for a few more hours I’d have to remember all the details myself and fill him in later that night.

  “No, I think she took it with her.”

  “She?” I said. “Do you know who did this?” Excellent. I could simply tell Dashiell and be done with the matter.

  Esther nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think it was his…friend. She’s a vampire too, but she gives me the creeps.” She shuddered and wrapped her stick arms around herself.

  “Know anything else about her?” I asked, mostly focused on spreading the body bag out next to the corpse.

  “Just her name. He introduced her as Olivia.”

  Chapter 20

  Olivia’s name hit me like a slap, and I lost my balance, toppling over onto the carpet. Fully seated on the floor, I stared at Esther, and then back at the desiccated corpse. The shape was right, but just in case, I asked her for the vampire’s name.

  “Albert,” she whispered. “His name w
as Albert.”

  So Olivia had killed her accomplice. One of her accomplices. I had no idea what to say next, and I suddenly couldn’t stand being in the same room as the corpse. “Can we go up to the kitchen and talk for a second?”

  Shrugging and biting at a fingernail, she led me back up the stairs. I sat down at the card table and nodded toward the other chair. Esther sat.

  “How did you find me?” I began. “How did you know where I’d be?”

  “I didn’t. But Albert gave me your phone number in case of emergencies. He said if something happened to him, I should call you.”

  That seemed odd. Jesse had said that Albert was off the grid, on the run from Dashiell. Why would Albert direct Esther to call me, one of Dashiell’s employees? Unless…“Did Albert suspect something might happen?”

  Esther hesitated, thinking it over. “I think…I think he loved Olivia? For whatever reason. But he didn’t really trust her.”

  “Okay. Who owns this house?”

  “Albert did. It wasn’t in his name, though. He said it used to be one of his former human servants?”

  “And why do you think Olivia was the one who killed him?”

  Her shoulders hunched. “It just seems like something she would do.”

  Couldn’t argue with that. “Did they both live here? Albert and Olivia.”

  “Sort of. Albert lived here all the time, in that room where his”—she winced—“his body is. Olivia has a room here, but she used to come and go when she wanted. When she was here, I tried to be somewhere else.”

  “How come?”

  “Like I said, she gave me the creeps. Albert and I, we weren’t, like, romantic, you know?” She seemed to be waiting for a response on that, so I nodded. “It was more of a business thing. But one time he let her feed off me, and she was…not gentle. And now Albert’s gone, and he promised to turn me before…” She swallowed hard, seeming to struggle with it. I could see her eyes filling. “Before I die.” Esther was crying openly now. “What am I gonna do?”

  Awkward. I felt sorry for these people, the vampire hangers-on who just wanted to be able to live, on whatever terms necessary. Who knows, maybe I’d have more sympathy if I were the one dying. But you shouldn’t become a vampire out of fear of death. If anyone should become a vampire at all, it should be because that’s what you want to be. I felt like I should tell her I was sorry or ask how much time she had left or something, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. Besides, I had bigger fish at the moment. “Can you show me her room?”

  “It’s in the basement too,” she sniffled. “But it’s locked.”

  “Is she in there now?” This stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me. What if I was in the same house as Olivia? A flood of emotions ran through me: fear that she would get me, relief that she might have been found, and, of course, the urge to run away very quickly.

  But Esther shook her head. “The lock is one of those heavy detachable ones, and it’s on the outside. She can’t be in there.”

  I looked out the window, reassuring myself that the sun was very much out. Then I told Esther she could stay where she was and descended back into the basement. In the main living room, I turned in a circle until I spotted the skinny door against the back wall. The door and the handle had both been painted the same white as the sheetrock around it, which would have been pretty good camouflage if it weren’t for the heavy silver padlock dangling from the doorframe. I approached it cautiously, paying close attention to the edges of my radius, just in case. If Olivia was in there, she was currently dead, but proximity to me would bring her to life, and she was still plenty dangerous as a human. By the time I got to the door, though, I was satisfied that unless the room turned into a huge tunnel, there was nothing Old World inside.

  Behind me, I heard Esther climbing partway down the stairs, where she sat down to watch. I ignored her and looked at the padlock. It was shaped like the kind you see at the gym, but three times the size, and I didn’t think even my heavy-duty bolt cutters could gnaw through it. I went back to my bag of tools and pulled out a simple flat-head screwdriver. There was no way I was getting that padlock off without a blowtorch, but the two metal loops that it locked together were another story: they were just screwed into the door and the doorframe with ordinary screws. Rookie mistake. I could have taken the time to take out all the screws, but instead I poked the screwdriver into the U of the bolt and levered it back. I put my weight into it, and was finally rewarded with a splintering snap as the whole setup came fumbling into my stomach. “Hey,” Esther protested, but her voice was even weaker than it had been. I dropped the padlock onto the floor and pulled the door open.

  Dark. Lots of dark. I felt around both sides of the wall but couldn’t find a switch. Trying not to think about what else I might find, I flailed my hand into the air a few steps into the room. Esther probably thought this looked hilarious. Finally, my fingers closed around a thin piece of string. I tugged.

  There are some who might say that I screamed, but I maintain that it was more of a womanly bellow. Esther shrieked behind me. I jumped back a few feet, and when I finally got my breath, I stepped back in, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light and to the shock.

  Every inch of every wall in the low-ceilinged room was covered in photos of me.

  There were a few older shots—me in my high school graduation robe, a couple of shots of me running on a track. I’d only been on the cross-country team my junior year of high school, which was probably about when Olivia had found me. But most of the pictures were from the time of Olivia’s death onward. Me at the grocery store, me at a bookstore, me lying on the beach with a hat over my eyes. There was even a whole series taken through the windows of Molly’s house: me watching TV, making supper, napping on the couch with a spilled water glass on the floor next to me. I winced. No moment of my life was too mundane or too private for her to capture.

  “They’re all of you.”

  The voice was only a few inches behind me, and I jumped, half expecting to hit my head on the ceiling like a Looney Tunes character. “Jesus, Esther, don’t do that.” I turned around, and that’s when I saw the back wall of the room. This one wasn’t covered in pictures. There were just four big eight by tens, hung neatly, two on each side of the door. Each shot was of the person walking on the street, completely oblivious. Molly was captured at night, talking on her cell phone and throwing her head back to laugh. My brother Jack was walking with a slice of pizza in his hands. He was wearing his scrubs and an anxious look on his face, like he had to get back to work. Jesse was leaning against an unmarked car, reading from a file and chewing on his lip. Eli was wheeling a dolly stacked with boxes into Hair of the Dog.

  You will not cry, I told myself. You will not run screaming. You will not stop breathing. I had gotten used to the idea of Olivia being obsessed with me, and while all those shots of me were creepy, they almost had an inevitability to them. But the pictures by the door were different. She had pinpointed the four people I cared about most. Had she left those out so I would know she was coming for them? I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and stared at it stupidly, as if I didn’t know what it was.

  “I think I’m gonna go,” Esther said behind me. “Um, good luck with everything.” There were footsteps, and then a heavy silence behind me. Smart girl, that Esther.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at my phone, watching it tremble in my shaking hands. Eventually, I was able to dial.

  Eli got there first, as planned. I had closed the door to the Scarlett room and was sitting outside on the front steps. Hugging my knees again. He got out of the truck in a hurry, then slowed down when he saw me. I didn’t say anything as he crouched into my eyeline. He was wearing jeans and a dark-red T-shirt with Hair of the Dog embroidered on the left breast.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you leave work,” I said woodenly.

  “It’s fine. Will’s there today. There was a fight last night, but I finished cleaning u
p half an hour ago.” Eli had that barely contained look he gets when he wants to touch me. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk. I had forgotten all about the other crime scene.

  “The stairs are in the kitchen. The body’s at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. You need to get it out of there as fast as you can, because Jesse is on his way. He can’t see it.” My voice sounded dead even to me.

  “Okay…” he said cautiously. “Are we switching vehicles? I can pick up the truck later.” He held out his keys expectantly.

  “No. You’ll have to put the body in your truck. It should be light. Squish it down in front of the passenger seat. Whatever. I don’t care.”

  He stood there for a moment, hesitating. I didn’t bother explaining that I didn’t have the White Whale with me. “Just do it, Eli,” I snapped. I didn’t look up again.

  He disappeared from my vision, and I heard him step into the house. I didn’t move. After a while he came out carrying a surprisingly small plastic garbage bag, which presumably held the disposable body bag I’d left down there earlier. He loaded it in his truck without a word, but then came back to squat in front of me again. “It’s done,” he said quietly. “Scarlett, what is it?”

  “You should go,” I said. “Jesse will be here.”

  I thought he flinched when I mentioned Jesse, which gave me an idea. “We’re going to handle the case together,” I said. “I don’t need you.” He stood up, staring down at me, looking confused. “Jesse and I will be together,” I repeated. “Just stay away.” I flicked my eyes down so I didn’t have so see his reaction.

  Eli disappeared from my line of sight, and a moment later I heard his truck start up. I didn’t move.

  It took Jesse another fifteen minutes to get there. He had probably had to drop Kirsten off at his parents’ house. He pulled up in his personal car, a navy Corolla, and came straight up to the steps, standing in front of me. “I checked the records,” he said. “The place is owned by a woman named LuEllen Schaub. She was found dead in a hotel room last year. No heirs, and the courts haven’t gotten around to figuring out what to do with this place.”