Dead Spots (3 page)

Molly doesn’t hate what she is, exactly. Unlike some vampires who deliberately try to spend time with me, she doesn’t really want to be human—ugh, humans, am I right? She just doesn’t want to look like a teenager anymore, which is understandable. Seventeen was pretty much an adult in her own time, but in the twenty-first
century, she couldn’t even buy a lottery ticket. So a few years ago, she offered me a deal, through Dashiell: in exchange for spending as much time around her as possible, I could have the spare bedroom in her house practically for free. Since my weird little ability doesn’t cost me anything, or even tire me out, I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal. Molly and I have sort of become friends, too, though sometimes I can’t believe she’s older than me, let alone older than, say, automobiles or World War I.

As she stepped into my radius, she did the little halting gasp that vampires always take when they’re around me—it’s the feeling of going from immortal back to mortal, and a vampire once told me it’s like waking up from a coma, only to find you have been beaten nearly to death. Molly’s skin lost its luminous glow, and she jerked as her heart restarted. She wiggled her jaw absentmindedly, poking her tongue at her teeth. Vampires don’t actually have
fang
fangs, but their canine teeth have evolved to be much sharper than a regular human’s. It has to feel weird to have your teeth get more and less pointy when I’m around. Then Molly went back to smiling beatifically at me, wringing her hands from a few feet away. Molly is a hugger—I know, who’s ever heard of a hugging vampire?—and though I have finally trained her not to touch me, she does tend to hover two feet away.

“
While You Were Sleeping
is on, and Peter Gallagher just fell on the tracks. Want to watch with me?”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”
Again
, I thought. Molly’s favorite technological advancement is movies, and she’s been there for every step: from their birth through the spread of theaters, home video, then DVD, and now Blu-ray and 3-D. When they bring back Smell-o-Vision, she’ll be the first in line at Best Buy. She adores film, which is probably why she bought the West Hollywood house to begin with—supposedly, Marilyn Monroe once threw up in the downstairs bathroom during a party. I would have a lot more respect for this passion if her absolute favorite genre wasn’t romantic comedy.

“I’m just going to go up to my room, I think. Maybe read a little and go to bed. Are you working tonight?” I asked.

“Nah, I’m good,” she said happily. Molly doesn’t really have to work—I’ve learned that vampires always seem to have a mysterious source of income, the result of being alive long enough to acquire, say, gold doubloons or fist-sized jewels—but she has a low-key part-time job transcribing interviews and meeting notes online. At home, she can type at lightning speed, having no trouble finishing in moments what would take me an hour. But she likes to go to coffee shops and work in the middle of people.

I’m guessing this is also where she gets her victims, but she and I don’t really talk about that. Vampires need to feed anywhere from every night to every four or five days, depending on how active they are and how much they take. Older vampires, like Molly, have the practice and control to feed a little bit from a victim, then take their memory of the event away completely, which is called “pressing their minds.” Most of the time, the victims are left feeling a tad weak and fluttery, as if they’ve just made out with a stranger. No harm, no foul, right? The messing-with-memory thing gives me the creeps, and I am very grateful that Molly is old enough to control herself—and also that she could never feed from me personally.

“Okay!” Molly crossed the living room and pulled the blackout drapes, then settled herself in the easy chair on the back wall by the window. It’s the farthest seat from the TV, but after some experimentation, we had discovered that it was directly under my bedroom. Molly never misses a chance to age, especially this close to dawn. Vampires die when the sun comes up, but in my radius, Molly can stay up and finish her movie. Of course, that meant she’d die when I left the radius again to come downstairs, but we’re both used to lots of transitioning back and forth. It happens. I sometimes wonder what Molly’s ideal age is—twenty-two? twenty-eight? thirty-five?—but I haven’t got the guts to ask. Whenever she gets there, I’ll have nowhere to live.

I stripped off my work clothes, pulled on the ancient XL Chicago Bears jersey I inherited from my father, and crawled into bed. But the adrenaline hadn’t yet faded enough for me to sleep. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about my all-time worst crime scenes. Once, a witch had burned to death—I know, the irony—when a spell had gone wrong. There had been a dead child once, too; that had given me months of nightmares. But both times had been accidents, witch magic or vampire feeding gone too far. This was deliberate. It had looked like the battlefield in one of those medieval war movies. Barbaric. I pulled the blankets tighter. At this point, it takes quite a bit to rattle me, but that scene had done it. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come.

It took a long, long time.

As he knelt in the clearing, Officer Jesse Cruz really wished he could just go back to a couple of weeks ago.

It had only been nine days since his promotion, to plainclothes office third grade, and there were times when he imagined he could still feel the starchy itch of his uniform collar, the poky little Officer Friendly pin he used to wear to all the schools. His first week at the new precinct had featured a lot of cracks about his looks and his Officer Friendly gig, and Jesse had been shy enough as a kid that he had never really learned how to make friends by teasing back. But his mother was an old-school Mexicana, convinced that the greatest troubles of the world could be fixed with food bribes, and apparently Jesse had inherited this viewpoint. At 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he had been standing in a twenty-four-hour bakery picking out donuts for the rest of the night shift. He had felt awkward in his sport jacket, unable to shake the feeling that everyone in the bakery knew he was a cop. And being a cop buying donuts...Well, it’s embarrassing.

Not that trying to buy friends with baked goods isn’t kind of embarrassing in itself
, he had thought as he walked back out to the unmarked car. Jesse was buckling his seat belt—Officer Friendly always does—when he had heard the call come over the radio, the code for a multiple homicide. Jesse listened as the dispatcher described a clearing in La Brea Park, and he felt a thrill in his
stomach when he realized just how close he was already. He started up the car, sticking the little domed flasher on the roof with one hand, and felt a shiver of excitement as he sped out of the parking lot. Maybe he’d even be the first one there.

The second that he would replay, over and over, was the moment when he’d actually dropped his gun. The girl with the bright-green eyes had startled him, and obviously the body...parts...in the clearing were beyond gruesome, but he was doing okay at that point, he’d thought. Then Jesse caught movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced over in time to see the giant dog bound toward them. He’d felt a pang of regret as he clicked off the safety—Jesse loved dogs—but before his finger could even tighten on the trigger everything had changed.

Not a dog. A naked man.

Working on autopilot, he had swooped down and picked up the service weapon, aiming for the guy’s chest, but the guy had remained motionless, curled up on the ground.
Let’s try this again
, Jesse had thought, loopy with shock, as he rose and began to circle around the blood again, toward the naked man. “Police! Don’t move!” he’d shouted, keeping a few feet away as he got far enough around to see the guy’s face. It was a normal human face, sort of wispy and pinched-looking, and if the guy hadn’t been stark naked, Jesse almost might have convinced himself that he hadn’t just seen a giant husky change into a person. No way had he seen a giant husky change into a person, right?

The guy—who was actually kind of little and scrawny when you saw him up close—finally opened his eyes and started to pull himself to a sitting position. “Stop!” Jesse had ordered, and the smaller man sort of shook himself and met Jesse’s eyes. Then his gaze darted around the clearing, and when he looked back to Jesse, there was an almost mischievous grin spreading across his face. Before Jesse could open his mouth to speak again, the guy pulled himself into a ball and rolled forward, a look of intense
concentration on his face. Jesse stared, completely speechless, as limbs started to move under the man’s skin, as if they were stretching in two directions. His skin started to sprout tiny hairs, but before Jesse’s eyes could even adjust to this development, the dog—
not a dog
, Jesse thought numbly,
a wolf
—was back. It had taken maybe twenty seconds.

The animal shook its fur, panting a little, and without a glance back at Jesse, it turned and raced off into the darkness. Jesse had fallen back to his knees, and for the first time, he really looked at the carnage in front of him.
What the hell?

That was how the next cops on the scene found him—Officer Friendly on his knees in the bloody mud, looking stunned. And for the first time, he wanted nothing more than to go back in time and undo his promotion. Officer Friendly never had to deal with wolves that were sometimes naked guys.

When the first-response team joined Jesse at the scene, they attributed his stunned, wide-eyed look to shock and the gruesome arrangement of the bodies. If they could even be called “bodies” at this point. It was a perfectly reasonable response, and nobody even hassled him much over it, to his surprise. Jesse figured that even the most hardened veterans hadn’t seen anything like this before; everyone looked subdued and shocky. A couple of the rookies had run into the woods to vomit, though Jesse had managed to keep his coffee down. He was glad he hadn’t gotten the chance to eat any donuts.

When asked to describe his arrival at the scene, Jesse heard his own voice telling the story without any mention of the girl with the green eyes or the naked...man. Lying about witnesses and withholding information were pretty much fireable offenses for a cop, but it was over and done with before he’d stopped to really weigh the consequences. He couldn’t describe the woman without describing the man—Jesse still wasn’t using the word
werewolf
, even in his own head—and he couldn’t describe the man without
explaining how everyone had gotten away from him. So Jesse kept his mouth shut, stuck to the sidelines, and watched the bustle and activity all around him.

He didn’t realize he was waiting for his moment until it came: a few seconds when the photographer was setting out equipment and the medical examiner arrived, when everyone else was occupied with paperwork and conversations and tasks. Jesse saw his chance and swooped down to pick up the black plastic garbage bag, tucking it smoothly into his jacket pocket. He immediately felt awful. He’d already lied to his fellow officers and concealed two possible witnesses, and now he was hiding evidence. This was not what he would call being a real cop. For a moment, Jesse considered walking over to the detective in charge and confessing everything. But he didn’t want to get locked away with an army of shrinks.

Besides, Jesse knew that the girl he’d seen wasn’t the actual killer—the forensics people on-site had already speculated that it must have been a really big, seriously muscled guy, and she was maybe five foot seven on a good day, not much over a hundred pounds. And whoever had killed those people would have been
drenched
in blood. Still, she had to be important to the case somehow, and if he couldn’t make her part of the official investigation, he decided that it was his responsibility to follow up with her on his own.

When the detective in charge finally dismissed him, Jesse headed back to the precinct, and straight to the lab.

Jesse had first met Gloria “Glory” Sherman, the lead forensic pathology technician, at an event for the public high schools in the county. Glory had given a speech on career opportunities in forensic science, and Jesse was there as Officer Friendly. They’d struck up a friendship, and once, he’d even brought Glory and her two kids to see the film set where his mother, a makeup artist, was working. Jesse liked Glory’s no-nonsense kindness, so he made a
point to say hello and deliver the occasional Starbucks. There are some people you just want on your side.

“Hey, Glory, you here?” he called, scanning the cluttered tables and shelves. Suddenly, she popped up into view, stretching to her full five feet one inch. Her face looked stressed and thin, and she’d jammed her glasses on top of her head so she could rub her eyes. “Were you, like, taking a nap on the floor?”

“Funny. Just cleaning up a spilled beaker.”

“Blood?”

She smiled. “Apple juice. What’s up?”

Jesse entered the lab and pulled the garbage bag out of his jacket pocket, handing it over. “How long would it take you to lift a print off this?”

She pulled on new surgical gloves and took the bag over to the three hundred–watt bulb on her desk lamp, sliding the glasses back down onto her nose. “Well, they’re latent, obviously, but pretty strong. Even with your elimination prints, it shouldn’t take long. But I’m backed up with this park thing.” She raked her fingers through silvery-blonde hair, looking tired.

“Has that evidence come in already?”

“No, it’s still being processed—”

“Then could you maybe just do this quick first? Please?” He gave her his best pleading look, and she sighed.

“What is it, exactly?”

“It’s a...personal project.”

She looked skeptical. “What, like your neighbor is a litterbug, something like that?”

“Something like that, but, Glory, I swear I wouldn’t bring this to you if it wasn’t important. Really.”

Glory checked her watch, and Jesse could see her relenting. “I’ll give you an hour, while they finish compiling all the evidence from the park. If I haven’t gotten a match by then, you’re going to have to wait.”