“Maybe,” she echoed, and looked around, her forehead creased thoughtfully. “Or one did the murder, and the other learned about it after the fact. Or just one did it, and is keeping it secret from the other.” Having worked through that big list of possibilities, Suze looked over at me and raised her eyebrows. “Sounds like something a nice joint interrogation would clear up.”
I considered, then shook my head. “I’m not sure. Right now this is just circumstantial. They could go back to the old Ad-hene theory—say that an elf planted the knife where it could do the most damage.” I paused, remembering Suze’s earlier comment about the other Ad-hene, and my brain suddenly started running through that possibility. “Maybe that happened.”
“I don’t think so, Fort. Seems a little roundabout for the elves or the Neighbors, and I’m not sure what causing a ruckus with the metsän kunigas actually buys them, especially since the bears were quick to finger them. I think it’s Occam’s razor on this one. The knife is here because the killer lives in the house and decided to stash it rather than dump it.”
There was definitely some reasonableness there, and I conceded with a nod. “Okay.” A sudden thought occurred to me. “Suze, your nose is sharper than a bear’s, right?”
“Absa-fucking-lutely.” Suze was no fan of false, or even real, modesty.
“Would you be able to know that we were here?”
She shook her head immediately, setting the bobble on her hat jiggling. “I can’t even tell that Dahlia and the kids were here other than their direct clothing, and they probably go through this room every day. Between the diapers, the dirty clothes, and the puddles of dripped Tide, plus it smells like she uses that utility sink for some regular bleaching, there’s just too much going on.”
I nodded. “Okay. So we take the knife with us. When the killer comes back for it, they won’t know who has it, and who knows their secret. That’ll put them on edge. We start by sitting tight and seeing if someone breaks—if we get a call that Dahlia has suddenly made a run out of the territory, we know she’s the killer. Person identified, no need to kill a scapegoat, and we can send Prudence after her.” I had to admit, that plan was particularly appealing to me because no one innocent got killed, and the killing of the guilty party would be handled by my sister rather than me.
“And if the killer sits tight?”
“The funeral is in two days—whoever stashed the knife will definitely come to check on it or move it before then. If she doesn’t panic or identify herself, then you and I go to the funeral and see if either Dahlia or Ilona is looking suspicious and twitchy.”
“Okay. But Dahlia’s one cool customer, and her mom might be as well. What if they aren’t doing us a favor and guilt-sweating?”
I shrugged. “Well, then we haul both of them into a room, put the knife down, and see if we can question it out of them.” After all, according to television, that worked all the time with real crimes. And I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone lawyering up either.
Suze considered, then grinned. “All right, I can get with that plan.” She eyed the knife that I was still holding in the washcloth. “Let’s get a plastic bag or something to carry that with.”
We went back into the kitchen, both of us gratefully breathing in the scent of air that was free from the reek of baby diapers. Suze checked in a few of the cabinets and located a gallon-size Ziploc bag. She held it open for me so that I could dump the knife and its washcloth wrapping into it.
“Suze, not that I wasn’t impressed by you sniffing clothing, but we could’ve just checked their mail.” I pointed to the pile on the counter that I’d just noticed.
I received a very irritated look. “Well, now I’ve got their scents,” she said with a confident and thoroughly superior air.
“Oh, of course.” I paused, then indicated the pile. “So, should I . . . ?”
Suze glared. “Fine, check the damn mail.” I shuffled through it—it was the usual mix of bills, junk circulars, catalogues, and offers from credit card companies, but it was enough to verify that there was mail addressed to both Dahlia and Ilona at this house.
“So Dahlia’s mom lives here,” I confirmed.
We did one quick check around the house. There were three bedrooms—one with purple walls, a child’s bed, and a crib, which the girls apparently shared. Framed prints of Winnie the Pooh, Corduroy the bear, and Paddington Bear decorated the walls, prompting more irritated comments from Suze.
“Oh, just let it go,” I told her. “It’s kind of cute. I bet you wouldn’t be complaining if there were fox pictures hanging.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. Foxes are fantastic. Roald Dahl based a whole book on that fact.”
“And the problem with bears being . . . ?”
“They’re stupid.”
I sighed heavily. “Let’s set the species-centrism aside and get on with this. Also, don’t turn around—I just spotted a picture of Baloo the bear.”
Suze was able to sniff and identify the next bedroom as Ilona’s—it was another small room, with just enough space for an adult-size twin bed, a bureau, and a nightstand. The bureau was covered with framed photos. Most were of a Nordic-looking woman (clearly Ilona) posed with Dahlia and Gil at various ages. Another picture was more recent, judging by the heavy streaks of gray in her formerly blond hair and the iPhone sitting on a table, posed with two little girls who had inherited Dahlia’s dark hair and skin. One large photo that was framed and hung on the wall looked like a wedding photo—I recognized Ilona, Matias, Dahlia, Carmen (looking about thirteen, and definitely in the awkward stage of puberty), plus a guy I didn’t recognize with pale skin and light-brown hair—all lined up and flanking Gil, who was standing beside the mystery guy. He and Gil were in matching tuxes, with shiny new wedding rings glinting from their left hands. There were also several photos of Ilona and Matias at various ages, sporting some pretty impressive early 1970s hairstyles and generally looking like a tourism ad for Switzerland. I frowned at the pictures.
“Do you think you’d have so many pictures of a guy you were planning on killing?” I asked Suze, who was following behind me with a bottle of Glade air freshener that she’d found under the kitchen sink. She gave a few squirts into the air in general to cover up our presence.
“Sure, if I wanted to avoid looking like a suspect,” she said. “These people are Finns. They can probably hold these kinds of grudges for years without letting on.”
“I am not even remotely familiar with that cultural stereotype, Suze, and I think you just made it up.”
The last bedroom was Dahlia’s. It was a fairly standard master bedroom, though she hadn’t bothered to make her queen-size bed this morning, and there were some clothes piled up on a chair in the corner. There was only one picture, this one of Dahlia and her daughters at the beach, framed and set next to the computer on her desk.
“Hey, who’s the father of Dahlia’s kids?” I asked.
“Beats me. I don’t follow bear gossip. She probably just did what the reasonable kitsune do and shacked up.” Suze sounded approving of that plan. Apparently the conversation with Keiko last night was still rankling.
“There was a wedding photo of Gil, though,” I noted. “So the metsän kunigas do get married.”
“Who knows, Fort. Maybe she and the dad broke up.” Suze gave another squirt of the Glade, this one aimed just close enough to my face to give me the hint that Suze apparently thought that we’d gotten about all the information available, and it was time to make an exit. I conceded the point.
We let ourselves out the back slider, with Suze fiddling with her picks to pop the lock back into place. Then it was over the fence again, to the car, and then cruising out of Lincoln and back toward home.
“Okay, well that was a pretty productive morning.” I looked at the Ziploc bag now riding in the foot of the passenger side next to the still-spinning blood compass. “Hey, now that we’re away from the diapers, can you sniff anything off that?”
&nb
sp; Suze leaned down and opened the bag, being careful to only touch the knife with the washcloth as she pulled it out. She stayed leaning down, keeping the knife well below the line of the windows. Apparently giant knives covered in blood were something to be cautious about flashing when surrounded by cars on Route 146. She gave it a careful sniff, then shook her head. “Blood on the blade, but I’m not smelling anything from the handle.”
“Is that normal?”
“On a murder weapon? Well, usually there’s at least a little sweating when you knife someone seventeen times, so maybe the killer wore gloves.” After that disturbing little insight into her own familiarity with murder weapons, she gave a shrug. “Know anyone who can check it for prints?”
“I was kind of hoping that you could.”
She laughed. “Fort, I might be awesome, but even I have limits. And none of the kitsune decided to go into forensics, so you’re shit out of luck on that. But I’ll let my cousin Rina know that she totally let you down by going to cosmetology school instead.”
“Okay, back in the bag,” I said, disappointed. I had a strong moment of missing Matt McMahon, and wishing that there was some way that I could show up on his doorstep with a bloody knife and get him to figure out whether there were fingerprints on it, and if there were, what on earth to do with those prints. Of course, the odds of that situation were right up there with me buying the Star Wars prequels. I forced myself to stop thinking about Matt and focus on the problem at hand. “Maybe my family has some kind of person on payroll who does that. I can ask Loren Noka.” It wouldn’t surprise me if Loren Noka answered my query by revealing that fingerprint analysis was her personal hobby. She had that kind of air about her. I considered the idea, reminding myself that this time I was doing a sanctioned investigation, and that I supposedly had resources available to me. “Actually, I should probably talk to my brother about this one. Chivalry knows both Ilona and Dahlia—maybe he’ll know which of them is a more likely murderer.” I looked over at Suze, who was fiddling with the Fiesta’s radio. “Ready for lunch?” My stomach had been letting me know for a while that it was very ready for lunch.
“It’s eleven oh five in the morning,” Suzume said flatly. “Start eating meat.”
“My nutrition is fine!” I snapped defensively. I paused and forced myself to take a calming breath. Suze was a fox—a natural carnivore. She’d given me a weird look when I’d bought a side order of salad and another of asparagus for last night’s doomed dinner party. She couldn’t help her cultural predispositions. I changed the subject. “Do you want to swing down to Newport with me?”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun. Just drop me off at my car, and you can call me later and fill me in if you learn anything helpful.”
I couldn’t quite blame her for skipping a visit to my mother’s mansion, since it was almost an hour’s drive each way and would probably eat up most of the day in between, though I couldn’t help but feel a bit annoyed, given that I’d been forced to sit through her family’s dysfunction just last night. It seemed like a bit of a double-standard for her to immediately pass on a helping of my familial crap.
I drove back to my apartment, dropped Suze off at her car, and then immediately hit the road for Newport. I stopped just outside of Providence to fill the Fiesta with gas, discovering as I did that at some recent point Suze had glued a pair of googly eyes to the inside of my gas tank flap. I shook my head, then went inside. This was my preferred gas stop on the way to Newport—not only because gas was usually at least a nickel cheaper than in the borders of Providence, but they also had a cooler filled with prepared lunches from a local deli, along with a lineup of meals that managed to have a vegetarian option that was a bit better than the usual gas station go-to of a bag of pretzels. I snagged a macaroni salad, a container of yogurt, and on my way to the register succumbed to temptation and tossed on a Little Debbie apple pie.
Since the inside of the Fiesta would not be markedly improved if a spill happened, I inhaled the macaroni salad and the yogurt while parked, tossing the containers in the outdoor trash and gnawing contentedly on the apple pie as I got back on the road and aimed myself toward Newport. I hit a little bit of congestion as all the drivers on their lunch break filled the road, but my time down remained fairly good. It was as I was crossing the Pell Bridge, my window cracked just enough for me to enjoy the smell of salt air and the sounds of shrieking seagulls without freezing, that I realized that I was hungry again. Not just hungry, but ravenous, as if the food at the gas station had been from last night rather than less than an hour ago.
I cursed as I felt my stomach actually rumble, and wondered whether I could’ve somehow contracted extra hunger cravings from being next to Keiko last night. I didn’t usually come in contact with pregnant women, after all, and my resistance to whatever weird pheromones they emitted might be low. I snickered a little, wondering how quickly she would throat-punch me if I ever mentioned that theory to her, and reluctantly considered whether Suze was actually partially correct on her nutrition theory. I’d become a vegetarian two years ago, when I’d first started dating my now ex-girlfriend Beth and she informed me about her policy of not kissing any mouth that consumed meat (which I still couldn’t entirely hold against her—after all, I had no plans to ever date a smoker), and I’d never actually sat down with a vitamin and nutrition chart to check my diet. Firstly, I was a vampire, and I had a strong feeling that feeding on my mother’s blood was helping with my iron and protein intake. Secondly, I’d survived several years of college where my primary food groups had consisted of pizza and ramen noodles, and I had managed to avoid developing scurvy. But I’d turned twenty-seven in June, and for the first time I’d had a friend complain to me about acid reflux, so maybe this was some weird by-product of getting older.
Or maybe another weird quirk of my transition into becoming a full vampire meant that my stomach was returning to how it had functioned when I was a teenager—a bottomless pit that required at least five solid feeds a day. I definitely hoped it wasn’t that—I had little desire to fund a return to my teenage eating requirements.
But regardless of why I was hungry, the result was impossible to ignore, and I pulled into the Bellevue Gardens Shopping Center and headed straight into my favorite greasy-spoon diner, the Newport Creamery. As another sign that the tourist season was well and truly behind us, I got a cheery wave and a “Be right with you, honey” when I stepped up to the take-out counter, rather than a snapped “All ice cream orders have to go to the outdoor window!” I snagged a menu and flipped to the sandwiches, wondering what exactly I needed to finally appease my belly.
I ate at the Newport Creamery often enough that I could’ve listed their vegetarian options from memory, but today I found myself fixated by the picture of the turkey sandwich. Vegetarianism had never been a particularly easy lifestyle for me—from an environmental standpoint, I certainly agreed that it made sense for people to reduce their meat consumption, and I was a supporter of people trying to at least have a meat-free day in their weekly menu, but I didn’t object on a fundamental level to the consumption of meat itself. I’d gone meat free for Beth, but I had stayed meat free because it had helped me suppress my vampire instincts—at least, until my transition had begun at the beginning of the summer. I still ate eggs and dairy, so while I’d missed a few dishes (namely bacon), I hadn’t felt terribly deprived before. There had been a few real moments of temptation, and I was certainly no stranger to the occasional backslide, but I’d never felt quite so fixated as I did at this moment, staring at the picture of the turkey sandwich, feeling my mouth fill with saliva, and picturing just how good that turkey would taste.
“Sir?” The waitress, a woman in her fifties with chemically assisted blond hair, was giving me a look that suggested that she was seriously considering calling over her manager. I blinked, and suddenly realized that my eyes felt weirdly itchy, and my vision was sharper than it should’ve been. My upper jaw was aching just a little, and there w
as a bubble of something cold and dark rising up in my chest. A shudder went down my spine as I realized that some instincts had been easing their way to my forefront while I’d been staring at the sandwich.
“Sorry, sorry. I missed breakfast this morning,” I lied, forcing as much contrition into my voice as I could, and snapped the menu closed. That explanation seemed to relax the server, who gave me a commiserating smile, and we slipped into a comfortable server-patron patter about the harsh penalties of skipping breakfast.
While they were processing my order, I hurried into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. My pupils were huge, not quite enough to completely obscure the brown of my irises, but enough to make me look seriously drugged-up and creepy. My hands were shaking as I splashed water on my face, running my tongue anxiously over my upper teeth as I checked my canines for any changes. I rubbed my face hard with a handful of paper towels, then checked the mirror again. My pupils weren’t normal yet, but they looked better than a minute ago. I panted with relief, balled up the paper towels, and threw them into the trash with a lot more force than necessary.
I definitely needed to talk with my brother. Since transition had begun, my vampire instincts had edged out during a few times of high stress, but unless getting a turkey craving was somehow my new stress threshold, this was neither normal nor okay.
I went back to the take-out counter and picked up my order, tipping the waitress as generously as my wallet would allow to try to make amends for inadvertently being That Creepy Dude. I didn’t even wait until I was back in the Fiesta before I fished my veggie quesadilla out of the take-out bag and started to gobble it down. I ate it as fast as I could—not out of any desire to relieve my hunger or even any interest in the quesadilla itself, but just out of desperate hope that it would take the edge off whatever was bringing out my instincts.
My stomach felt uncomfortably tight when I swallowed the last of it, and gurgled slightly in protest at the speed of my consumption. I sat anxiously behind the wheel for a second, then tugged the rearview mirror down to check my eyes. Relief shuddered through me when all I could see was a completely normal-looking guy with melted cheese on his chin and shirt.
Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel Page 19
