Dead Spots (9 page)

Jesse ignored this. “Thank you for breakfast,
Mamá
,” he said, wiping his mouth and rising to hug her. “I gotta get to the station and catch some bad guys.”

“
Sí
, but take care,
mijo
, okay? Be careful with my little boy.”

Jesse rolled his eyes good-naturedly and left his parents’ house feeling like he’d just gotten eight hours of sleep.

An hour later, however, he was back at the precinct and fading quickly. Despite the coffee he’d had earlier, Jesse was chugging Coke like there was no tomorrow, the acidy taste churning in his empty stomach. He tried to remember the last time he’d pulled an all-nighter, but it had been years ago. Ages.

Jesse spent the morning making phone calls, trying to identify the three victims. Now that the bodies had been reassembled, it was easier to identify them as a female in her late twenties, a Caucasian male in his early thirties, and an African American male in his midforties. Their clothing, when it was pieced together, had been unremarkable: T-shirts and jeans from the mall, a blazer from Brooks Brothers, a pair of Nikes. The Caucasian male had painted his fingernails black and ripped his designer jeans, but that wasn’t a particularly helpful identifier in Los Angeles. To Jesse’s surprise, none of them had been carrying any kind of ID, not to mention a purse or briefcase. The victims’ fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere, and no one had reported them missing.

The coroner’s report had been released, but it left more questions than answers. All three victims had been shot first, one by one, in both legs. The shots themselves weren’t fatal, but the injuries would have incapacitated the victims so that the killer could take his time with them. Cause of death was technically blood loss: the two main arteries—femoral and jugular—had been severed on all three bodies, and the victims had bled out. The blood work analyst theorized that each of them had belly-crawled away from one side of the clearing, as if to escape their attacker. Postmortem, the bodies had been dismembered and eviscerated, the blood shaken out of the limbs and the intestines spread around the clearing. It
was grisly and horrifying, and Jesse was grateful that at least that part had been done postmortem.

The details were important but didn’t really help to point in any particular direction. As it stood, the investigators were spinning their wheels. Who were the victims? Why were all three missing their identification? Did they go to the park willingly, or were they forced there from somewhere else? And how had they gotten to the park in the first place? LA was a driving city; everyone used a car to go anywhere. But no abandoned cars were found in the vicinity of the park, so Jesse had called cab companies and bus depots, trying to find anyone who remembered driving the three victims. No one had seen three people like that together, but there were plenty of young women and middle-aged men in cabs that night. One of the uniforms would be going around later with retouched photos of the victims’ faces.

At noon, Jesse went to see his supervisor, Captain Miranda Williams. A thick-waisted woman in her early fifties with a large hooked nose, Williams was the opposite of every police captain in the movies his family made. She was maternal, concerned, determined, and loyal. Jesse liked her a lot and was happy that he’d been assigned to her division—even if she didn’t seem that happy about it herself. Williams, like the other detectives in the unit, still seemed skeptical that Jesse had anything going on between the ears. Yesterday that had weighed on his mind, but a lot had changed since then. He had other concerns.

Williams was putting the phone down as Jesse knocked on the doorframe and entered. She gestured for him to take a seat. Jesse thought she looked as tired as he felt.

“Please tell me you have new information, Cruz. The press is starting a frenzy over this case. They’re calling it the new Black Dahlia, and you know how well that turned out for the department.”

“Yes, ma’am. And unfortunately, I don’t have any news. But I did have an idea.”

“Go ahead.”

“La Brea Park isn’t all that far from the airport. If the three of them were taken from LAX, it might explain why three such different people were all killed together. Like a random thing.”

“Uh-huh.” She seemed unconvinced.

“I thought I could take the pictures of the deceased over to LAX, show them to some baggage people, the guys who run the security cameras. If they were coming from somewhere, we could get ID that way.”

Williams thought it over and finally shrugged. “I think it’s a pretty big stretch, but at this point, we’re willing to consider anything. Go ahead. Just call me if you find anything, and get a report back to me before the end of the day, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jesse said.

He knew he’d actually have to do the wild-goose chase at the airport—these things had a way of coming back to haunt you if you didn’t follow through—but he could squeeze in a couple hours of his own investigation in the meantime. He drove to Scarlett’s, feeling a little nervous. At least it was broad daylight.

Tuesday night was another rough one. When I finally made it into bed, I found myself trapped in a mental loop, thinking about the murder and Eli and my job. The freelance gigs I get are good—I occasionally attend important pack meetings where there might be extra tension, or chaperone vampires in the business world when they can’t avoid a daytime meeting, stuff like that. But I need the steady income of my crime scene job. If not for that, I had absolutely no idea how I’d make a living. I didn’t make it through a single semester of college, and I had no skills or non-supernatural job experience. I didn’t think McDonald’s would care if, one time, I hid three severed limbs, a pool of blood, and a dead hundred-year-old desert tortoise in twenty-five minutes. No, I needed to keep my job, whatever it took, if I wanted to keep eating.

When the alarm went off at eleven thirty, I woke up stiff and cranky, still wearing my clothes from the night before. I dragged myself out for a run, showered, and pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a dark-brown T-shirt. No need to dress up for the geeks. I impatiently tugged a brush through my long hair and pulled it up in a clip while it was still damp. I checked the mirror. Good enough.

Molly was still in the armchair in the living room when I came downstairs. She’d probably fallen asleep as a human and died when I’d gone for my run. When I got close enough, she yawned
and stretched, then looked around in confusion. When she saw me, she smiled.

“You want coffee?” I asked. Molly likes to be awake during the day, if I can manage it. Going out in the sun completely delights her. Those kinds of perks are the reason why Dashiell has ordered his vampire minions to stay away from me. His protection is part of our deal, which is yet another reason why I don’t want to lose my job.

“Yep.” Molly swung her legs off the arm of the chair and followed me into the kitchen, careful to keep close to me. She sat down at the little breakfast counter, watching as I brewed the coffee. “So...I heard you’re in kind of a mess.”

“How did you hear about that?” I asked, though I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Molly just shrugged. “You know, the vampire rumor mill.” She hesitated for a second. “Do you want to talk about it?”

That surprised me, too. Most of the time, Molly prefers to act as if she and I are best gal pals in one of her romantic comedies. She’s always all perky and sort of surface. I wasn’t expecting a
Do you want to talk about it?
conversation.

In fact, maybe it wasn’t an idle question.

I pulled two mugs from the shelf above the sink and poured a dark stream of coffee into each one, stalling for time. Had Dashiell ordered her to ask me questions? I wasn’t stupid; I knew Molly reported to Dashiell about me. I just figured there wasn’t usually much to report, as long as I kept anything too personal from Molly. She had no idea that I had a brother, for example. If the impossible happened and I got a real boyfriend, someone I really loved, I’d keep that from her, too.

“Not really,” I said carefully. “I think it’s going to be okay.”

“Do you know—” she began, but then we both jumped as someone knocked hard on the door. “Whoa, jeez. I can’t get used to how humans sneak up on each other.”

That’s not really what knocking on a door means, but I didn’t bother saying so. “That must be Cruz,” I said, trying not to sound too relieved. “Where do you want me to drop you off?”

“Uh, my room is good.” I walked her up there and then skidded down the stairs, suddenly very excited to get out of the house.

Cruz and I were both quiet on the drive to Pico. He looked tired and worn-out, and I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten in the past couple of nights. I felt a sudden, very unwelcome pang of guilt. Because of my screwup with the park murders, I had almost set this guy up to be killed. Did that make him my responsibility? Should I be checking in on his emotional welfare? I considered how my mother would have answered that question, and then Olivia. Then I decided I didn’t care. Cruz had dug his own grave on this one. No pun intended.

The comic book shop, which was adorably called Nerdvana, was on a block with two dry cleaners and a day care center. Drop off your kids, read some comics! We couldn’t find a meter within a block or two, and Cruz shot down my suggestion that he use his special cop powers to secure illegal parking, so we ended up having to park a few long blocks away and walk back to the store. As we came in, I noticed a little sign above the door that said,
No Cylons, replicants, or shoplifters allowed
.

It was going to be that kind of day.

I stepped inside, Cruz at my heels. The store was one big rectangle, with bookshelves of comics lining the walls and four scarred and faded tables arranged in the open floor space. A glass counter with a cash register took up the back wall. It was 1:40 on a weekday, but each table held seven or eight guys and a huge stack of cards, with more cards spread around the tabletops in careful patterns. I could see a few cards with pictures of little weapons and elves and stuff. When I walked in the room, every single guy froze, staring at me with a combination of shame and resentment,
as though I’d just walked into the men’s locker room and found them all jerking each other off. Great. I tried to look nonthreatening, and after a long moment, they all returned to playing, but the mood was subdued. Scarlett Bernard, professional buzzkill.

I took a few steps over to the wall, examining the comic titles, and then felt the brush against my radius that meant werewolf. I glanced up and locked gazes with Ronnie Pocoa, now fully clothed and bringing a few fresh decks of cards out from the back area behind the counter. Under the store’s bright lights, I realized he was a towhead, with ruddy cheeks and pockmarks dotting his face. Ronnie had to be in his early thirties, but had that baby-faced look of the perpetually timid. Or the perpetually victimized. You see that a lot with the wolves. Cruz stepped up beside me, and Ronnie looked from his face to mine, turning white. Then, to my surprise, he dropped the cards, turned around, and bolted from the room.

Cruz and I exchanged one of those quick
What the...?
looks, and without any advance coordination, he turned and ran out the front door, while I followed Ronnie through the back, trying to keep him within my radius. I was fairly fast, but if he got his werewolf strength and speed back, I’d never see him again. He knocked down piles of boxes and games behind him, trying to trip me up, but I stumbled my way around them. Ronnie raced through a door and into a narrow storeroom where a desk and file cabinet had been haphazardly assembled. I caught him just before he got to an emergency exit door on the far side of the room, grabbing the back of his T-shirt and rearing us both backward. We collapsed in a pile on the floor, and I scooted far enough to kick the exit door open, letting Cruz inside. All three of us were panting. Cruz leaned down to rest his hands on his knees. “What the hell...was that?” I gasped.

“Don’t kill me!” Ronnie screeched. “I won’t tell nobody!”

Cruz and I exchanged another look. I climbed to my feet, reaching a hand down to Ronnie. He stared at me, terrified, and I made an impatient
come on
motion. “Ronnie, I don’t know what
you’ve heard, but I’m not going to kill you. This guy”—I nodded at Cruz—“is a cop. It would be seriously stupid for me to kill you in front of a cop. Do you think I’m that stupid, Ronnie?”

“No.”

“Awesome. Can we sit somewhere and talk?”

“Uh...I guess.”

Ronnie led us back into the main storeroom, pushing some of the overturned boxes around to create makeshift chairs. He seated himself closest to the door, which I ignored. Let him feel like he had an edge. I glanced at Cruz, indicating that he should take over. Interrogations aren’t really my thing.

“Ronnie, I’m Officer Cruz, with the LAPD. I’m not going to arrest you—yet. I just want to know what you saw the other night. Or...um...smelled.”

Ronnie’s eyes darted nervously back and forth between us. “So...he knows? About us?”

“Yes,” I assured him. “It’s okay.” His eyes didn’t leave my face, so I added, “Will knows all about it.”

He nodded then, turning back to Cruz. “Um...Well, I was running in the park,” he said uncertainly. “We do that sometimes, to stretch out. We go when the park’s closed, and we don’t hurt nobody.”

Cruz glanced at me with a question on his face.

“Their bodies have to change at the full moon,” I explained. “But most of them are strong enough to change a few other times during the month if they want to. It calms them.”

“Yeah. It helps.” Ronnie straightened up in his seat, a little more confident. “Anyway, I smelled blood, and it was
strong
. I had to go see what it was. And then I got close, and I felt something go by me, not too far.” He nodded at me. “It was you.”

“Right, after you came into the clearing,” I said.

“No, no.” He was shaking his head. “Before I got to the clearing. I was on my way, and I felt you go by, and I smelled the nothingness.”

“I smell?” I said, confused.