“Melanie, what are you doing?” The voice was behind us. Oliver stood in the hallway just short of the brighter light of the living room. His voice was the sound of rocks falling, trees breaking. A storm that was just words but seemed to cut and slash.
The thing on the floor cringed from the voice. Her lower body was becoming serpentine. A snake of some kind. Jesus.
“She’s a lamia,” I said softly. I backed away, putting the outside door to my back, hand on the door knob. “I thought they were extinct.”
“She is the last one,” Oliver said. “I keep her with me because I fear what she would do left to her own desires.”
“Your creature that you can call, what is it?” I asked.
He sighed, and I felt the years of sadness in that one sound. A regret too deep for words. “Snakes, I can call snakes.”
I nodded my head. “Sure.” I opened the door and backed out onto the sunny porch. No one tried to stop me.
The door shut behind me and after a few minutes Inger came out. He was stiff with anger. “We most humbly apologize for her. She is an animal.”
“Oliver needs to keep her on a tighter leash.”
“He tries.”
I nodded. I knew about trying. Doing your best, but anything that could control a lamia could play mind games with me all day, and I might never know it. How much of my trust and good wishes was real and how much of it was manufactured by Oliver?
“I’ll drive you back.”
“Please.”
And away we went. I’d met my first lamia and perhaps the oldest living creature in the world. A red-fucking-letter day.
Chapter 31
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the apartment door. I shoved the door open with my shoulder and ran for the phone. I got it on the fifth ring and nearly yelled, “Hello.”
“Anita?” Ronnie made it a question.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“You sound out of breath.”
“I had to run for the phone. What’s up?”
“I remembered where I knew Cal Rupert from.”
It took me a minute to remember who she was talking about. The first vampire victim. I’d forgotten, just for a moment, that there was a murder investigation going on. I was a little ashamed of that. “Talk to me, Ronnie.”
“I was doing some work for a local law firm last year. One of the lawyers specialized in drawing up dying wills.”
“I know that Rupert had a dying will. That’s how I could stake him without waiting for an order of execution.”
“But did you also know that Reba Baker had a dying will with the same lawyer?”
“Who’s Reba Baker?”
“It may be the female victim.”
My stomach tightened. A clue, a real live clue. “What makes you think so?”
“Reba Baker was young, blond, and missed an appointment. She doesn’t answer her phone. They called her at work, and she hasn’t been in for two days.”
“The length of time she’d have been dead,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Call Sergeant Rudolf Storr. Tell him what you just told me. Use my name to get to him.”
“You don’t want to check it out ourselves?”
“Not on your life. This is police business. They’re good at it. Let ‘em earn their paychecks.”
“Shucks, you’re no fun.”
“Ronnie, call Dolph. Give it to the police. I’ve met the vampires that are killing these people. We don’t want to make ourselves targets.”
“You what!”
I sighed. I’d forgotten that Ronnie didn’t know. I told her the shortest version that would make any sense. “I’ll fill you in on everything Saturday morning when we work out.”
“You going to be all right?”
“So far, so good.”
“Watch your back, okay?”
“Always; you too.”
“I never seem to have as many people after my back as you do.”
“Be thankful,” I said.
“I am.” She hung up.
We had a clue. Maybe a pattern, except for the attack on me. I didn’t fit any pattern. They’d come after me to get Jean-Claude. Everybody wanted Jean-Claude’s job. The trouble was, you couldn’t abdicate; you could only die. I liked what Oliver had had to say. I agreed with him, but could I sacrifice Jean-Claude on the altar of good sense? Dammit.
I just didn’t know.
Chapter 32
Bert’s office was small and painted pale blue. He thought it was soothing to the clients. I thought it was cold, but that fit Bert, too. He was six feet tall with the broad shoulders and build of an ex-college football player. His stomach was moving a little south with too much food and not enough exercise, but he carried it well in his seven-hundred-dollar suits. For that kind of money, the suits should have carried the Taj Mahal.
He was tanned, grey-eyed, with a buzz haircut that was nearly white. Not age, his natural hair color.
I was sitting across from his desk in work clothes. A red skirt, matching jacket, and a blouse that was so close to scarlet I’d had to put on a little makeup so that my face didn’t seem ghostly. The jacket was tailored so that my shoulder holster didn’t show.
Larry sat in the chair beside me in a blue suit, white shirt, and blue-on-blue tie. The skin around his stitches had blossomed into a multicolored bruise across his forehead. His short red hair couldn’t hide it. It looked like someone had hit him in the head with a baseball bat.
“You could have gotten him killed, Bert,” I said.
“He wasn’t in any danger until you showed up. The vampires wanted you, not him.”
He was right, and I didn’t like it. “He tried to raise a third zombie.”
Bert’s cold little eyes lit up. “You can do three in a night?”
Larry had the grace to look embarrassed. “Almost.”
Bert frowned. “What’s ‘almost’ mean?”
“It means he raised it, but lost control of it. If I hadn’t been there to fix things, we’d have had a rampaging zombie on our hands.”
He leaned forward, hands folded on his desk, small eyes very serious. “Is this true, Larry?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Vaughn.”
“That could have been very serious, Larry. You understand that?”
“Serious?” I said. “It would have been a bloody disaster. The zombie could have eaten one of our clients!”
“Now, Anita, no reason to frighten the boy.”
I stood up. “Yes, there is.”
Bert frowned at me. “If you hadn’t been late, he wouldn’t have tried to raise the last zombie.”
“No, Bert. You are not making this all my fault. You sent him out on his first night alone. Alone, Bert.”
“And he handled himself well,” Bert said.
I fought the urge to scream, because it wouldn’t help. “Bert, he’s a twenty-year-old college student. This is a freaking seminar for him. If you get him killed, it’s gonna look sorta bad.”
“May I say something?” Larry asked.
I said, “No.”
Bert said, “Certainly.”
“I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”
I wanted to argue that, but looking into his true-blue eyes I couldn’t say it. He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I’d known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
“How old were you when you started working for me?” Bert said.
“What?”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-one; I’d just graduated college.”
“When will you turn twenty-one, Larry?” Bert asked.
“March.”
“See, Anita, he’s just a few months younger. He’s the same age you were.”
“That was different.”
“Why?” Bert said.
I couldn’t put it into words. Larry still had all his grandpar
ents. He’d never seen death and violence up close and personal. I had. He was an innocent, and I hadn’t been innocent for years. But how to explain that to Bert without hurting Larry’s feelings? No twenty-year-old man likes to hear that a woman knows more about the world than he does. Some cultural fables die hard.
“You sent me out with Manny, not alone.”
“He was supposed to go out with you, but you had police business to handle.”
“That’s not fair, Bert, and you know it.”
He shrugged. “If you’d been doing your job, he wouldn’t have been alone.”
“There’ve been two murders. What am I supposed to do? Say sorry, folks, I’ve got to babysit a new animator. Sorry about the murders.”
“Nobody has to babysit me,” Larry said.
We both ignored him.
“You have a full time job here with Animators, Inc.”
“We’ve had this argument before, Bert.”
“Too many times,” he said.
“You’re my boss, Bert. Do what you think best.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Hey, guys,” Larry said, “I’m getting the feeling that you’re using me for an excuse to fight. Don’t get carried away, okay?”
We both glared at him. He didn’t back down, just stared at us. Point for him.
“If you don’t like the way I do my job, Bert, fire me, but stop yanking my chain.”
Bert stood up, slowly, like a leviathan rising from the waves. “Anita…”
The phone rang. We all stared at it for a minute. Bert finally picked it up and growled, “Yeah, what is it?”
He listened for a minute, then glared at me. “It’s for you.” His voice was incredibly mild as he said it. “Detective Sergeant Storr, police business.”
Bert’s face was smiling, butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.
I held out my hand for the phone without another word. He handed me the receiver. He was still smiling, his tiny grey eyes warm and sparkling. It was a bad sign.
“Hi, Dolph, what’s up?”
“We’re at the lawyer’s office that your friend Veronica Sims gave us. Nice that she called you first and not us.”
“She called you second, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“What have you found out?” I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. If you’re careful, one side of a conversation isn’t very enlightening.
“Reba Baker is the dead woman. They identified her from morgue photos.”
“Pleasant way to end the work week,” I said.
Dolph ignored that. “Both victims were clients with dying wills. If they died by vampire bite, they wanted to be staked, then cremated.”
“Sounds like a pattern to me,” I said.
“But how did the vampires find out that they had dying wills?”
“Is this a trick question, Dolph? Someone told them.”
“I know that,” he said. He sounded disgusted.
I was missing something. “What do you want from me, Dolph?”
“I’ve questioned everyone, and I’d swear they were all telling the truth. Could someone have been giving the information and not remember?”
“You mean could the vampire have played mind games, so that the traitor wouldn’t know afterwards?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Could you tell which one the vampire got to if you were here?”
I glanced at my boss’s face. If I missed another night during our busiest season, he might fire me. There were days when I didn’t think I’d care. This wasn’t one of them. “Look for memory losses; hours, or even entire nights.”
“Anything else?”
“If someone has been feeding info to the vampires, they may not remember it, but a good hypnotist will be able to raise the memory.”
“The lawyer is screaming about rights and warrants. We’ve only got a warrant for the files, not for their minds.”
“Ask him if he wants to be responsible for tonight’s murder victim, one of his own clients?”
“She; the lawyer’s a woman,” he said.
How embarrassing and how sexist of me. “Ask her if she’s willing to explain to her client’s family why she obstructed your investigation.”
“The clients won’t know unless we let it out,” he said.
“That’s true,” I said.
“Why, that would be blackmail, Ms. Blake.”
“Isn’t it, though?” I said.
“You had to be a cop in a past life,” he said. “You’re too devious not to be.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“Any hypnotists you’d recommend?”
“Alvin Thormund. Wait a sec and I’ll get his number for you.” I got out my thin business card holder. I tried to only keep cards I wanted to refer to from time to time. We’d used Alvin for several cases of vampire victims with amnesia. I gave Dolph the number.
“Thanks, Anita.”
“Let me know what you find out. I might be able to identify the vampire involved.”
“You want to be there when we put them under?”
I glanced at Bert. His face was still relaxed, pleasant. Bert at his most dangerous.
“I don’t think so. Just make a recording of the session. If I need to, I’ll listen to it later.”
“Later may mean another body,” he said. “Your boss giving you trouble again?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You want me to talk to him?” Dolph asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“He being a real bastard about it?”
“The usual.”
“Okay, I’ll call this Thormund and record the sessions. I’ll let you know if we find out anything.”
“Beep me.”
“You got it.” He hung up. I didn’t bother to say good-bye. Dolph never did.
I handed the phone back to Bert. He hung it up still staring at me with his pleasant, threatening eyes. “You have to go out for the police tonight?”
“No.”
“How did we merit this honor?”
“Cut the sarcasm, Bert.” I turned to Larry. “You ready to go, kid?”
“How old are you?” he asked.
Bert grinned.
“What difference does it make?” I asked.
“Just answer the question, okay?”
I shrugged. “Twenty-four.”
“You’re only four years older than me. Don’t call me kid.”
I had to smile. “Deal, but we better be going. We have dead to raise, money to make.” I glanced at Bert.
He was leaning back in his chair, blunt-fingered hands clasped over his belly. He was grinning.
I wanted to wipe the grin off his face with a fist. I resisted the urge. Who says I have no self-control?
Chapter 33
It was an hour before dawn. When all the Whos down in Whoville were asnooze in their beds without care. Sorry, wrong book. If I get to stay awake until dawn, I get just a tad slaphappy. I’d been up all night teaching Larry how to be a good, law-abiding animator. I wasn’t sure Bert would appreciate the last, but I knew I would.
The cemetery was small. A family plot with pretensions. A narrow two-lane road rounded a hill, and suddenly there it was, a swathe of gravel beside the road. You had seconds to decide to turn in, that this was it. Tombstones climbed up the hill. The angle was so steep, it looked like the coffins should have slid downhill.
We stood in the dark with a canopy of trees whispering overhead. The woods were thick on either side of the road. The little plot was just a narrow space beside the road, but it was well cared for. There were still-living family members to see to the upkeep. I didn’t even want to imagine how they mowed the hillside. Maybe a rope-and-pulley system to make sure the mower didn’t roll over and add another corpse.
Our last clients of the night had just driven away back to civilization. I’d raised five zombies. Larry had raised one. Yeah, he
could have raised two, but we just ran out of darkness. It doesn’t take that long to raise a zombie, at least for me, but there’s travel time included. In four years I’d only had two zombies in the same cemetery on the same night. Most of the time you were driving like a maniac to make all the appointments.
My poor car had been towed to a service station, but the insurance people hadn’t seen it yet. It would take days or weeks for them to tell me it was totaled. There hadn’t been time to rent a car for the night, so Larry was driving. He’d have been with me even if I’d had the car. I was the one bitching about not having enough help, so I got to train him. It was only fair, I guessed.
The wind rushed through the trees. Dry leaves scurried across the road. The night was full of small, hurried noises. Rushing, rushing, towards… what? All Hallows Eve. You could feel Halloween on the air.
“I love nights like this,” Larry said.
I glanced over at him. We were both standing with our hands in our pockets staring out into the darkness. Enjoying the evening. We were also both covered in dried chicken blood. Just a nice, normal night.
My beeper went off. The high-pitched beep sounded very wrong in the quiet, windswept night. I hit the button. Mercifully, the noise stopped. The little light flashed a phone number at me. I didn’t recognize the number. I hoped it wasn’t Dolph, because an unfamiliar number this late at night, or early in the morning, meant another murder. Another body.
“Come on, we gotta get to a phone.”
“Who is it?”
“I’m not sure.” I started down the hill.
He followed me and asked, “Who do you think it is?”
“Maybe the police.”
“The murders you’re working on?”
I glanced back at him and rammed my knee into a tombstone. I stood there for a few seconds, holding my breath while the pain ran through me. “Shiiit!” I said softly and with feeling.
“Are you all right?” Larry touched my arm.
I drew away from his hand, and he let his hand drop. I wasn’t much into casual touching. “I’m fine.” Truth was, it still hurt, but what the hell? I needed to get to a phone, and the pain would get better the more I walked on it. Honest.
I stared carefully ahead to avoid other hard objects. “What do you know about the murders?”
Circus of the Damned abvh-3 Page 21
