I was far enough back in the living room that I couldn’t see who was behind the door when Molly opened it, but then she yelled over her shoulder, much louder than necessary, “Scarlett! It’s the fuzz!”
“Oh, man!” I complained loudly. “She said she was eighteen!”
“You guys are hilarious,” Jesse said drily, following Molly into the house and toward the kitchen. He was carrying a small paper gift bag and a to-go cup of coffee. I stumped back to my stool and picked up my mug again, raising my bad leg to rest on the only empty stool. Jesse could stand, as far as I was concerned.
Molly sat back down too and looked at me, silently asking if we needed to be alone. I shrugged noncommittally. If he wanted Molly to leave, he could ask her himself.
But Jesse ignored Molly entirely, coming right over to stand at my elbow. He was wearing jeans that somehow looked both comfortable and very expensive, a simple blue button-down, and a dark-brown leather jacket that made his eyes pop, dammit. “Sorry I was a dick last night,” Jesse said contritely. He gave me a look that was so sincere and apologetic that I started to blush. Damn his hotness powers.
“But I got you something,” he continued. He put the gift bag on the table in front of me. There was red glitter on the paper bag and matching red tissue paper sticking out of it. “Late Christmas present.”
“You . . . shouldn’t have?” I said uncertainly.
He nudged the bag toward me. “Open it.”
I picked up the gift bag, which was a lot heavier than its size suggested, and pulled away the tissue paper. Inside was a long piece of black leather the size of my hand. It had sort of a loop on one end, right next to a handle. “Jesse . . . ,” I said uncertainly, and pulled on the handle. A long stainless-steel blade slid silently out of the holster. “It’s a knife,” I said blankly. “You got me a knife.” Jesse knew I disliked violence—when we were hunting Olivia, I had refused to carry a gun even after we learned that, unlike most Old World creatures, she was willing to use to them. I’d taken a pretty firm line on not trying to kill people, and Jesse was now trying to work around it.
“It’s a boot knife,” Jesse replied. No one should ever be that cheerful before 10:00 a.m. “To go in your leather boots. I already sharpened it. If you won’t carry a gun, at least you’ll have something to protect yourself with if the werewolves come after you again . . . what?”
Happily, I had a great excuse for rejecting his newest attempt at arming me. “It’s a really nice knife, Jesse,” I said, putting it back in the holster. “But my boots were destroyed the night of the solstice.” It’s pretty hard to shred leather boots, which is why I wear them whenever the weather’s cool enough. But I’d had to crawl around in a great big mess of broken glass and blood when Eli had lost control of his wolf, and even if the boots had survived the glass, there was way too much DNA embedded in them. They’d gone into Artie’s furnace.
“Oh.” Jesse’s face fell.
But just then, Molly jumped up and grabbed my hand. “Come to the bottom of the stairs a sec?” she coaxed, tugging.
“Uh, okay.” I grabbed my cane and hobbled to the bottom of the staircase. Molly zipped up to her bedroom and back down, just barely managing to stay in my radius the whole time. When she trotted down the stairs, she was carrying a huge cardboard box with FRYE printed on the side.
“Back to the kitchen,” Molly sang. I let her lead me back to my chair at the counter. She placed the box in front of me ceremoniously. “I was saving this for your birthday,” she explained happily, “but I think you should open it now.”
I lifted the lid obediently. “Oh,” I breathed. Inside the box lay a pair of black calf-high boots, with a sturdy two-inch rubber heel and small silver buckles at the ankle and calf. They smelled of leather and polish, and were simultaneously simple, functional, and gorgeous. And my size. “They’re beautiful, Molly,” I whispered.
“Nice,” Jesse said smugly. “Those are totally you.”
Damn if he wasn’t right. I had figured that if I gave Molly money and asked her to buy new boots for me, she would come back with the kind of boots she’d wear—something thigh-high and bad-girl sexy with a five-inch heel. But she’d surprised me. These were exactly the boots I’d choose for myself . . . if I had four or five hundred dollars to spare.
“They’re too much, though,” I said sadly. “Way too much.” Molly and I do exchange gifts on special occasions, but I think the Sandra Bullock Blu-ray I’d gotten her for Christmas cost, like, twenty bucks. I pushed the big cardboard box toward her. “I can’t accept them.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Her smile was predatory. “I got quite the sale price.”
Jesse shot her his Suspicious Cop eyes. “You didn’t steal them, did you?”
Molly regarded him disdainfully. “Please,” she sniffed. “I pressed a personal shopper at Nordstrom years ago. She gave me her discount. And a sale price.” She pursed her lips in thought, then added, “And a coupon.”
“Oh. Uh . . . good,” Jesse said uncertainly. He turned back to me. “Anyway, now you can carry the knife.”
“I still don’t think it’s necessary,” I protested, but more feebly. “I have a Taser, Jesse.” A really, really good one that I thought was still illegal for civilians, but I wasn’t going to mention that part. “It has all the stopping power I need.”
He reached over and pulled out the left boot, picking up the knife holster and hooking it on the leather so the handle would be just visible on the inside of my leg. “It’s not about stopping power,” he said patiently. “If you tase one of the werewolves and run, he’ll heal as soon as you’re a few feet away and come after you again. And again. Which gives him time to get more werewolves together.” I bit my lip. He was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.
Jesse reached across the counter to touch my hand. “I know you’re not comfortable, Scarlett, but you need to be able to kill one of them if you absolutely have to. I’m not saying don’t use the Taser; I just think you should have a backup plan. Just in case.”
He looked at me, waiting for a response, and after a moment I nodded reluctantly. I didn’t have to use it, right?
He circled the counter to stand over the stool that I was still using as a footrest and held out the boot. I slid my left foot into it. Perfect fit. “I put it inside left so you can draw the knife with either hand. Do you know anything about knives?”
“No,” I said absently. I was drunk on the scent of boot leather and barely listening. I carefully pulled the right boot on too. It came to just below the swollen area of my knee, so the calf was a bit tight, but wearable. With both my legs propped on the extra stool, I pointed my toes slightly to admire the boots. So pretty. I felt like the underworld Cinderella.
“I’ll show you a couple of things when your knee gets better,” Jesse was saying. “For now, though, you just need to know how to angle for the heart. Be careful—I sharpened it.” He drew the knife easily and put it in my hands, holding it there with both of his.
I finally tore my eyes away from the boots so I could study the wickedly sharp blade that I was now holding. “Jesse . . .”
“It’s okay,” he reassured me, gently guiding the blade toward himself. “The heart is here, as you probably know,” he said, tapping the blade very lightly against his chest, just right of his breastbone as I was facing him. “But to stab someone in the heart, it’s best to go between the ribs, from here, at an angle.” He took my right hand off the knife and pressed it to his chest under the knife, guiding my fingers down to touch his rib cage. I smelled coffee on his breath. “You feel that?” he asked, his eyes searching mine.
“Honey, I feel that,” Molly murmured, and I shot her a glare.
“Don’t look at her, look at me,” Jesse said calmly. I met his eyes again. “This is important. Do you feel the space between the ribs?” I nodded. He moved my left hand down and tilted it so the knife blade would travel up through his ribs if I added any pressure. “Like that. Okay?”
His hands were warm, and I could feel his chest rising and falling under my hand. He trusted me with a knife to his heart. “Okay,” I said finally.
“Good.” Jesse dropped his hands and backed up a few steps.
“Thank you for the knife,” I said to him. “And for the boots,” I added to Molly. “I will wear them with pride and lethality.”
Molly put one hand over her heart and pretended to wipe tears from her eyes with the other. “That’s all I ever wanted,” she said dramatically.
“You’re welcome,” Jesse added, his voice turning sober. “Molly, could you excuse us for a bit?”
I got Molly back to her room, where she would “sleep” for the day. To anyone but me, she would actually appear to be dead—minus the decay—but we liked to pretend she was simply nocturnal. It was just easier to deal with, emotionally. I got dressed while I was upstairs too, and by the time I made it back down, Jesse had taken Molly’s seat and refilled his coffee.
When I was settled back on my stool, he passed me a small stack of index cards. “The bottom card has the name and address for Leah’s roommate, and Kathryn’s boyfriend and her parents. The other cards are questions you should definitely ask,” he explained.
Right. I had forgotten for a moment that I was supposed to go play detective today. “Don’t take the cards with you when you go in, though,” Jesse added. “It doesn’t look natural.”
I glanced through the cards. “Who do I say I am?”
He reached into a jacket pocket and dug out a laminated card on one of those little claw clips. “This is totally unofficial, so if someone pushes you, get out of there. I made it on my mother’s laminator.” I took the ID card, which had my driver’s license picture, the LAPD shield, and a title: Civilian Consultant. “Laverne Halliday?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. “Do I look like a Laverne to you?”
“There really is a Laverne Halliday, and she really does consult for the department,” he countered. “That way if someone calls to just verify that you exist, it’ll pass through.”
“Oh.” I looked down at my outfit. I had changed into a pair of wide-legged, dressy khakis over the new boots, a lightweight cowl-neck sweater that matched my green eyes, and a black blazer that belonged to Molly and probably cost almost as much as the boots. After a moment of consideration, I clipped the badge onto the hem of my sweater, so it wouldn’t leave any marks on Molly’s expensive blazer.
Jesse eyed me up and down, but in a professionally appreciative manner, if that’s a thing. “You look perfect,” he concluded.
“But what am I supposed to be consulting on?” I asked dubiously. My areas of expertise, after all, were stain removal, body part disposal, and the primetime television schedules of the greater LA area.
“You’re part of a new missing persons support program,” Jesse said promptly. “Checking to see if they need anything, finding out more about the victim—the missing person, I mean. That way you don’t have to try to sound like a cop; you can just talk to them. The most important thing is to look for connections between Leah and Kathryn. I looked around this morning, but I couldn’t find anything on the Internet.”
It was weird to me, how he kept referring to the victims by name. I hadn’t dealt with many dead bodies, but when I had to, I always thought of them as “the body” or “the victim.” I wondered if Jesse was trying to humanize them on purpose, to remind me. Or maybe that was just really how he thought of them.
Either way, I couldn’t really blame him.
“You seem nervous,” Jesse observed. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be great.”
I blew out a breath. “I just wish you were going with me.”
“I wish I was too, but we don’t have that much time before this guy can change again. Splitting up makes the most sense.”
He was right, I knew. “Okay,” I said finally. “I’m ready.”
More or less.
Chapter 17
Leah Rhodes and her roommate had shared a two-bedroom apartment in a big concrete box of a building just off the 405 freeway, near the border of West LA and Culver City. I had the van’s window down as I parked, and the sound of traffic from both the 405 and Sepulveda was loud enough that conversation would have been difficult. It was a still, cool January day, with no breeze to speak of, and when I stepped out of the White Whale at Leah Rhodes’s apartment, a thick haze hung over the city like a canopy of poison. The chemical scent of car exhaust stung my nose. The building’s architect hadn’t bothered adding balconies to the apartments, and I understood his reasoning.
Cane in hand, I limped up to the apartment directory and was extremely grateful to see that the Rhodes and Lewis apartment was on the first floor. I pressed the button, expecting to have to go into a long detailed explanation, but to my surprise Leah’s roommate bought the consultant story with absolutely no fuss and buzzed me in.
Inside the building, I made my way down the hall and found Amanda Lewis waiting for me in her apartment’s doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed over her chest. She was a short, plump Caucasian woman in her late twenties with strategic clothing that probably made her look slimmer than she really was. She had long, white-blonde hair tied in a careful, high ponytail, almost at the very top of her head, and bubblegum-pink lip gloss that practically showed my reflection in its shine. “You’re Laverne?” she asked, a little doubtfully. “You don’t look like a Laverne.”
“That’s just what I keep saying,” I said lightly as I approached.
Amanda Lewis led me into a small, cluttered living room. All of the furnishings, down to the threadbare rug, had obviously outlived their expiration date from IKEA. She pointed me to a lumpy sofa, and lowered herself into an adjoining armchair that had been dressed up with a pale-blue cover. I sat down in one of the two obvious ass-dents and pulled a little reporter’s notebook and pen out of the blazer pocket. Jesse had instructed me to download an app that would let me record the conversation on my phone, and had been comically dumbfounded when I informed him I didn’t have a smartphone.
“I’m not sure what I can tell you,” Amanda began, a little frown creasing her features. She wasn’t really pretty but had access to high-quality makeup that enhanced her pleasant-enough features until she was almost there. “I mean, Leah and I have been roommates for . . . oh, five or six years. But we aren’t exactly close.”
“You’ve been roommates for that long, and you’re not close?” This felt so weird, learning about someone after I’d already covered up her murder. I had to work not to use the past tense as we talked.
She bobbed her head. “We roomed together at UC Riverside; randomly assigned, you know, by the school. We got along okay, stayed out of each other’s way real well, but we didn’t, like, socialize. When we both got jobs in West LA—she’s an industrial designer at this place on Overland; I manage a restaurant at the Bev Center—it just made sense to get an apartment up here together.” Amanda gave me a tiny smile. “Leah always says that there’s friend chemistry and romantic chemistry and roommate chemistry, and we have the last one like nobody’s business.” For the first time, a look of genuine emotion came over her face. “I hope she’s okay,” Amanda added softly.
I clenched my jaw so I wouldn’t wince. Sorry, Amanda. I threw her into a furnace twelve hours ago; she’s probably not okay. “Is there someone she may have decided to go visit? A friend or boyfriend?”
“The cops at the station asked me that too,” Amanda sniffed. “I don’t know of anywhere she’d go and not be back by now. She has a boyfriend, but it’s pretty casual, I think, and he’s out of town a lot for his work.”
“Does she have family nearby?” I asked.
“Her family is all in San Diego; they haven’t heard from her, either,” Amanda replied. “Diane—that’s her mom—she’s planning to come up late tonight to file another report or whatever. She’s really freaking out.”
I wrote Diane Rhodes in my notebook. “Do you know her boyfriend’s
name?” I asked.
Amanda shrugged again. “She just introduced him as Henry. I don’t think I ever heard his last name. He was older, maybe in his forties.”
I wrote Henry—40s. Amanda was looking at me, a little impatient. “You said you guys weren’t—aren’t,” I corrected hastily, “really friendly, but you must know how she spends her time. She’s here, she’s at work. What else does she do?”
Amanda leaned back in the armchair, her eyes going distant as she considered the question. “Well, she likes to knit. She has a knitting group at the library on Thursday nights. She goes to San Diego once a month or so to visit her family—her sister just had a baby.” Her hands unconsciously clasped and unclasped in her lap. “She volunteers at the Humane Society, walking dogs, and she was active in a couple of animal rights groups, although I’m not sure she’s still doing that.”
Walking shelter dogs to werewolves was kind of a big stretch, but my ears perked up anyway. “Which groups?”
“Uh, let’s see. It’s P-A-W . . .” Amanda stared at the ceiling, squinting to remember. Then she met my eyes in sudden triumph. “Protect America’s Wolves, that was it.”
This time I did wince. Leah Rhodes had been mauled to death by a werewolf. Irony-wise, that was pretty brutal. But it couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? I wrote down the name.
I talked to Amanda for a bit longer, but all I really learned was that Leah had liked The Bachelor and had recently developed a case of baby fever, after the birth of her new nephew. “She’s been talking about kids lately,” Amanda added, shaking her head in amazement, like having kids was some weird thing they only did in Japan. “I mean, Henry just doesn’t seem like the dad type to me”—she wrinkled her nose a little—“and I can’t picture Leah as the ‘hear me roar’ do-it-yourself type.”
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