“You made a weapon that contributed to killing a man; I’d call that something.”
“A weapon?” he replied, feigning confusion. “How could silver necklaces be a weapon? Heck, how do you know the dead guy didn’t bring them with him? Maybe they were a present for his girl or something.” He sat back in his seat, still smiling. “See, Officer, I don’t much like werewolves. I’ve got no problem with them getting killed off; that’s why I make the damn stuff in the first place. Oh, and it’s very lucrative.” He glanced over at me. “At any rate, you’ve got absolutely nothing you can take to a judge or a superior officer, at least not without using the word werewolf, which I’m guessing you’re not gonna do. And so I think I’d like you to leave my store now. The right to refuse service, and all of that.”
My mouth dropped open a little, but I didn’t say anything. Jesse’s furious look pretty much said it all. There was a long moment while he and Sanderson stared at each other, and then Jesse stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Sanderson. I’ll be keeping a real careful eye on your business in the future.”
“You do that.” Sanderson didn’t sound scared one bit, and I followed Jesse as he marched out of the building.
The moment we got outside, Jesse’s temper exploded. “I hate this!” He stalked over to his car and kicked at the tires, spitting out a long, angry stream of Spanish. I caught only a couple of words, one of which referred to...uh...lovemaking. I’d never yet seen him lose his cool, so the burst of anger was kind of...fascinating. When he was done, he braced his arms against the car and stared at the ground, defeated.
I leaned against my van. The sun was now taking a breather behind the clouds, and there was a cool breeze riding the September air. “So what’s up?” I said lamely.
“What’s up? Were you in the same interview I was? That guy knows something, but he’s not saying anything because he doesn’t have to. I can’t get a warrant, I can’t even write up a report, I’m risking my career and both of our lives, and we’ve got nothing.” He turned around and leaned back against his car, sliding down to the ground and putting his head in his hands.
My detachment faded. He was right. We were screwed.
“What about Thomas Freedner?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Same thing. Contacting his known associates got me nowhere, and I can’t get a warrant to run his credit cards or search his place. Unless he suddenly just shows up, it’s a dead end.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment, and then Jesse lifted his head and looked at me. “Scarlett, we might die in the morning. How are you so calm?”
His face was so lost, so defeated, that something stubborn and tight in me just...didn’t seem important anymore. I stepped over and sat down next to him, folding my legs and leaning my back on the passenger door with a sigh. “You asked what happened to me.”
“Yeah.” Jesse raised his eyebrows but let the silence sit there.
“You have to understand, I never had any idea what I was. Once in a while, when I was out in public, I would have these weird sensations, but I just thought everyone had them, the way everyone has headaches or heartburn. I might never have known, even. But when I was eighteen, my mom and dad were killed in a car crash,” I said matter-of-factly. “The police said it was an accident, even though no one was drinking and my mom’s Jeep had just been inspected. The brake pads were worn down to nothing; the brakes failed, and the car pitched off the freeway during a rainstorm.”
“Why were the brake pads worn, if the car had just been inspected?” he said sensibly.
I shrugged. “The police said the mechanic must have missed it, the mechanic said no way, everyone figured the other party was lying. Even me. Because why would anyone want to kill my parents? My mom worked at an animal shelter; my dad taught eighth grade history.
“In any case, right after they died, I met my mentor, Olivia. And Olivia...She stepped into my life and gave me a job, fed me, even let me live with her. I was grateful for it.”
Really grateful. My mom and dad had left Jack and me a little money, but so much went into the funerals, and then to the mortgage. Jack, whose grief was so great he could hardly look at me, ended up staying at the house, which was probably a lot easier for him to face than a hysterical teenage girl. None of our distant relatives were interested in housing an eighteen-year-old who should be taking care of herself anyway.
Olivia had taken me in, made me a little family. Gotten me to love her. And if it was a shadow of my old life, well, it was more than nothing. And there was a new world to learn about, and a business, and for a long time, that was all enough to get by.
“Anyway, so a couple years later, Olivia was in the hospital, dying of cancer, and she asked me to go to her house and get a few things. Water the plants and stuff. I knocked over a potted plant in the house, and I felt terrible. I didn’t want the plant to die, too, you know?”
He nodded.
“So I went to find some potting soil in this crappy old gardening shed that Olivia had behind her house. I’d never been in there; I hate gardening. But when I went in and poked around, I found something tossed behind a bag of potting soil. It was one of those instruction manuals that comes with your car.”
Comprehension spread across his face. “But this one was for your parents’ Jeep.”
I nodded. “And the thing was, Olivia drove a Saturn. Before that, she’d had a Toyota sedan; she’d told me stories about it. Even so, I probably shouldn’t have put anything together, but there was just this...feeling. So I went through her house, found some pictures of me, one in a frame. It was taken at my high school graduation.”
Jesse winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, ouch. There were a couple of other things, and I finally put it together. She’d found me, somehow, months before my parents died. Olivia couldn’t have kids, see; for some reason, it’s usually hard for nulls. And here I was, this young, impressionable null, perfect for her to take in. She wanted to sort of adopt me, I guess, except I already had parents. So she switched out the brake pads and...herded me toward her. Wormed her way into my life and became like a second mother to me.” Much, much later, the thought had struck me that I was lucky she hadn’t killed Jack, too. I never told him about Olivia, which is just one more reason why we avoid each other.
I pulled my knees up to my chin, hugging my legs to my chest. “She told me once that she’d grown up around cars, but I had no idea...” I trailed off. “Anyway, Will liked me, and he was irate when he found out about Olivia. Dashiell...Well, he’d known about Olivia and my parents, but he didn’t care. It made no difference to him that Olivia was the mayor of Crazytown; he was just happy she had found a null apprentice.” That still stung. Even then, I hadn’t been so naive as to think Dashiell and I were friends, but that level of coldness was still a shock.
“Did you...What did you do?” Jesse asked quietly.
“Nothing. I did nothing. I went to a ratty hotel, and I locked the door and went to bed for ten days. She called my cell, and I didn’t answer. Then on the tenth day, it was the hospital calling, and she was dead.”
“You didn’t confront her?” His voice was shocked.
“No,” I said flatly.
That wasn’t the whole truth. Two days after I figured it out, I had crept into the hospital late at night, way after visiting hours. The nurses all knew me by then, though, and one of them, a stout older woman with a hundred extra pounds, gave me a little smile and nod to let me know it was all right. “Visiting hours” doesn’t always apply on the cancer ward.
Olivia was barely alive by then, almost swallowed up by the machines and tubes keeping her alive. She looked pathetic, her long chestnut hair missing in great patches, her skin yellowed and cracking. Only a few days before, I had been gently rubbing lotion onto her arms, crying over her condition. Now I watched my hand reach toward her, saw it rising up to her mouth. It would be so easy to just plug her nose, cover her mouth. I wouldn’t even have to press down hard. T
here wouldn’t be an autopsy.
A strand of long, near-black hair fell in my face, and I froze with my hand in midair. It was my mother’s hair. I stepped across the room to the mirror. In the half light, with my hair clouded around my face, I looked just like her. Stricken with shame, I left the room without another glance back at Olivia. It took seven more days for her to stop breathing, but at least it wasn’t my hand that did it.
“Anyway,” I said, trying to push the memory away, “I did...um...”
“What?”
I winced. “I did sort of burn down her gardening shed.” I’d made no effort to conceal my guilt. It had cost Dashiell a lot of money to pull the right strings so I wouldn’t go to jail. Mostly, I figure he did it to make sure I’d keep working for him, but he’d never taken any bribe money out of my pay. Sometimes I think it was his apology for not telling me about Olivia.
Jesse gave me a bemused half smile, part reprimand and part approval. He thought for a few moments and finally said, “What was going to be your major?”
Not the question I was expecting. “Um, veterinary science.”
He gave me a baffled look.
“What? I like science, and I love animals.”
“You do?” He seemed genuinely surprised.
“Yes. The only reason I don’t have a bunch is that they’re...well, sort of allergic to Molly. Animals can’t handle vampires. Their little hearts just can’t take the stress of that kind of predator.” I rested my head on the car behind me. I missed animals. But even if I survived the week, who knew where I’d be living in a year, two years.
“I didn’t know that,” he said quietly.
It occurred to me for the first time that Jesse could have known a lot about me. “You know, most of this is public record—my parents’ crash, the fire, Olivia’s death. You could have looked all this up.”
He gave me a heartbreaking grin. “That would be cheating.” Jesse reached over and pulled a little piece of feather out of my long hair, a tagalong from the bait shop. It was a pretty suave move, and I could feel the warmth coming off his body. His fingers lingered in my hair, moving toward my cheek, and for the length of a heartbeat, I saw his goodness and I wanted in. In that moment, I wanted, more than anything, to crawl into his arms and make myself a home there. A place to rest, and to let go. All I’d really have to do was be still and let him kiss me.
That’s the thing about homes, though; they can just kind of fall out from under you. And I wouldn’t be falling again.
“Anyway,” I said carefully, turning away so my hair slipped from his hand. “You asked me how I deal with all of this. As bad as it is right now, as bad as it would be even if I were killed, nothing will ever be worse than that for me.” I didn’t tell him what I really believed—that I was already half-dead anyway. Better to die the rest of the way than let anyone else get hurt because of me. I was just sorry that Jesse’s fate was tied to mine.
I was too much of a coward to look at his face, and he finally just said, “So, what do we do now?”
I checked my watch. It was almost 2:00 p.m., which meant I now had about sixteen hours to find the killer and clear my name before Dashiell would come for me. I sighed, letting my head thunk back against the car. “I have no idea.”
He looked at me again, but this time it was just thoughtful. “Come on,” he said finally. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Chapter 24
Twenty minutes later, Jesse led Scarlett up the walkway to his parents’ front door. “Now, you’re going to want to stand back,” he whispered, with exaggerated seriousness. “Be ready for anything. Remember, it can smell fear.”
She’d been game up to a point, but now Scarlett was beginning to look nervous. She touched her hair and tugged her T-shirt down over her jeans. “Jesse, come on, what are we doing?”
“My folks work weird hours, so if I’m in the area, I stop to let him out during the day,” he said. She was still processing that when he turned the key in the door. There was a second of frantic scrabbling, and then Jesse pushed the door inward and eighty pounds of taut, hyperactive muscle flew out of the house. With a cursory glance at Jesse, Max beelined for Scarlett, knocking her down onto her ass and licking her face with frantic abandon. Jesse winced—that was a little much, even for Max—but Scarlett was laughing. She’d dropped the guarded look on her face so quickly that he hadn’t even seen it happen.
“Scarlett, Max. Max, Scarlett,” he called over the sound of Max’s excitement and her giggling. “Sorry, my parents are terrible disciplinarians.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Stop, you crazy thing,” she was saying, but her fingers were digging into his pelt, scratching enthusiastically. Max took that as confirmation of her love and wagged his tail hard enough to wiggle the whole back half of his body back and forth. Scarlett managed to roll over onto all fours and drop her shoulders into a fake pounce. Max immediately mirrored her, and she attacked, rubbing at his head as he danced around her. Sunlight filtered through the oak tree on his folks’ front lawn, and Jesse held his breath as he watched them. For the first time since he’d met her, Scarlett looked happy and unguarded. And young. He felt as if he were in sort of a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life, looking at what Scarlett Bernard would have been like if one thing in her life had gone differently. Her long hair was slipping out of her ponytail, and her cheeks were flushed. In her ratty T-shirt and old jeans, she was beautiful.
Finally, Max wandered off to pee, and Scarlett returned to Jesse. “Thank you,” she said, eyes bright. “He’s wonderful.”
Jesse was smart enough to be casual about it. “No problem,” he said. “Listen, I really do need to get back to the precinct. I’m supposed to be digging through all this paperwork on the history of the park. I know it’s a long shot that I’ll find anything at this point, but I don’t know what else to do.”
He winced as Scarlett’s face shut back down, and she reached back to redo her ponytail. “That might not be a bad idea,” she said finally. Her voice was back to flat professionalism. “Whoever is doing this is obviously trying to say something, with the teeth and the blood and the silver. It could be that the location is important, too.”
They made plans to meet up again in a few hours.
Before he went back to work, Jesse decided to take a shot at Thomas Freedner again. He took surface streets the short distance to Janine Malaka’s West Hollywood apartment building, a six-floor, pueblo-style walkup that had that LA look of long-expired glory. The halls were a little dingy and the lobby plants were plastic, but many of the residents had made an effort to put out a welcome mat or wreath of dried flowers to spruce up their doors.
Janine Malaka was a Hawaiian woman in her mid-forties, pretty and chunky, wearing a long bright-blue-and-yellow muumuu. She greeted Jesse with the wary respect that is often borne of a long history with the police department. When he explained that he was asking about Freedner, she shrugged and took the chain off the door, ushering him inside.
“I haven’t seen Tom in years,” she said, leading him to a worn fabric sofa that had been carefully patched and restuffed. “We was working together at the Stop and Go over on Franklin Street, you know? Just before he got caught dealing that last time? We was just friendly. Used to buy a little pot from him, now and again. What’d he do now?”
“Nothing at all, as far as we know,” Jesse assured her. “We just want to ask him some questions about a case. Have you heard from Tom since he was released from prison?”
“Naw. Him and me was never friendly after he went in.” She shrugged. “Was more of a work friendship, you know? Never slept with him or nothin’. He was into guys. But I happened to be hangin’ with him when the cops came for him the last time, so they took down my name.”
“Do you know about his...other activities?”
“You mean the vampire stuff?” She laughed again. “Yeah, he told me once. We was high as kites and I didn’t believe him, but then he showed me the scars.
I figured him and his friends like to run around and play vampire.” She shrugged. “Never bothered me none. All kinds in this town.”
Jesse was getting frustrated. He checked his watch—only a few minutes until he had to go meet Scarlett. “Do you have any ideas about where Tom might go if he was in trouble?”
She made a show of thinking it over. “You try his friend who plays the vampire? Abe something?”
“Yes, ma’am” Jesse lied. “He wasn’t helpful.”
Malaka shrugged again. “The thing you need to know about Tom,” she said with a new fierceness, as though she’d only just realized she was in the conversation, “is that the vampire stuff was what he lived for. It’s all he talked about, like he was in love with vampires the way that some are in love with people.”
Jesse frowned. “What do you think would happen if it were taken away? If he couldn’t...play vampires anymore?”
Her face lost its dopey relaxation, and the look she gave Jesse was serious and a little scared. “Then I think that boy would flat-out lose his mind.”
Chapter 25
Despite my deadline, I was really, really looking forward to getting a few hours of sleep back at Molly’s. After forty minutes of traffic, I finally hung my bag and my canvas jacket on the hook that Molly had put up inside the door for me and headed for the kitchen, planning to grab some crackers and a shower and go to bed. Before I’d taken a full step into the room, though, I stumbled and almost went down, grabbing the doorframe for support. There was a bouquet in a vase on Molly’s kitchen table: two dozen purple mums. A little white card was folded open on the table, leaning against the vase. Hugging the wall, I moved close enough to see the generic cursive writing: Just Because.
Florists don’t open until daylight, and Molly hadn’t been “awake” all morning.
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