Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (239 page)

“And what form would that assistance take?” Sophie-Anne inquired.

After much palaver, it turned out that Mr. Flowery was willing to bring a gazillion board feet of lumber to New Orleans if Sophie-Anne would give him 2 percent of her next five years’ revenue. His accountant was with him. I looked into his eyes with great curiosity. I stepped back, and Andre slithered to my side. I turned so that no one could read my lips.

“Quality of the lumber,” I said as quietly as a hummingbird’s wings.

That took forever to hammer out, and it was boring, boring, boring. Some of the wannabe providers didn’t have humans with them, and I was no help with those; but most of them did. Sometimes the human had paid the vampire a substantial sum to “sponsor” him, so he could just be in the hall and pitch his woo in a one-on-one setting. By the time vendor number eight simpered to a stop in front of the queen, I was unable to suppress my yawns. I’d noticed Bill was doing a landmark business selling copies of his vampire database. For a reserved kind of guy, he did a good job of explaining and promoting his product, considering some of the vampires were very mistrustful of computers. If I heard about the “Yearly Update Package” one more time, I was gonna puke. There were lots of humans clustering around Bill, because they were more computer savvy than the vamps as a whole. While they were absorbed, I tried to get a scan in here and there, but they were just thinking megahertz and RAM and hard drives—stuff like that.

I didn’t see Quinn. Since he was a wereanimal, I figured he’d be completely over his wound of the night before. I could only take his absence as a signal. I was heart-heavy and weary.

The queen invited Dahlia, the little, pretty vampire who’d been so direct in her judgment, up to her suite for a drink. Dahlia accepted regally, and our whole party moved up to the suite. Christian Baruch tagged along; he’d been hovering around Sophie-Anne all evening.

His courtship of Sophie-Anne was heavy-handed, to say the least. I thought again of the boy toy I’d watched the previous evening, tickling the back of his ladylove in imitation of a spider, because he knew she was frightened of them, and how he’d gotten her to snuggle closer to him. I felt a lightbulb come on over my head and wondered if it was visible to anyone else.

My opinion of the hotelier plummeted. If he thought such a strategy would work on Sophie-Anne, he had a lot of thinking to do.

I didn’t see Jake Purifoy anywhere around, and I wondered what Andre had him doing. Something innocuous probably, like checking to make sure all the cars were gassed up. He wasn’t really trusted to handle anything more taxing, at least not yet. Jake’s youth and his Were heritage counted against him, and he’d have to bust his tail to earn points. But Jake didn’t have that fire in him. He was looking to the past, to his life as a Were. He had a backlog of bitterness.

Sophie’s suite had been cleaned; all the vampire suites had to be cleaned at night, of course, while the vamps were out of them. Christian Baruch started telling us about the extra help he’d had to take on to cope with the summit crowd and how nervous some of them were about cleaning rooms occupied by vampires. I could tell Sophie-Anne was not impressed by Baruch’s assumption of superiority. He was so much younger than her, he must seem like a swaggering teenager to the centuries-old queen.

Jake came in just then, and after paying his respects to the queen and meeting Dahlia, he came to sit by me. I was slumping in an uncomfortable straight chair, and he pulled a matching one over.

“What’s up, Jake?”

“Not much. I’ve been getting the queen and Andre tickets to a show for tomorrow night. It’s an all-vampire production of
Hello, Dolly!
”

I tried to imagine that, found I couldn’t. “What are you going to be doing? It’s marked as free time on the schedule.”

“I don’t know,” he said, a curiously remote tone in his voice. “My life has changed so much I just can’t predict what will happen. Are you going out tomorrow in the day, Sookie? Shopping, maybe? There are some wonderful stores on Widewater Drive. That’s down by the lake.”

Even I had heard of Widewater Drive, and I said, “I guess it’s possible. I’m not much of a shopper.”

“You really should go. There’re some great shoe stores, and a big Macy’s—you’d love Macy’s. Make a day of it. Get away from this place while you can.”

“I’ll sure think about it,” I said, a little puzzled. “Um, have you seen Quinn today?”

“Glimpsed him. And I talked to Frannie for a minute. They’ve been busy getting props ready for the closing ceremonies.”

“Oh,” I said. Right. Sure. That took loads of time.

“Call him, ask him to take you out tomorrow,” Jake said.

I tried to picture me asking Quinn to take me shopping. Well, it wasn’t totally out of the question, but it wasn’t likely, either. I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get out some.”

He looked pleased.

“Sookie, you can go,” Andre said. I was so tired I hadn’t even noticed him glide up.

“Okay. Good night, you two,” I said, and stood to stretch. I noticed the blue suitcase was still where I’d dropped it two nights ago. “Oh, Jake, you need to take that suitcase back down to the basement. They called me and told me to bring it up here, but no one’s claimed it.”

“I’ll ask around,” he said vaguely, and took off for his own room. Andre’s attention had already returned to the queen, who was laughing at the description of some wedding Dahlia had attended.

“Andre,” I said in a very low voice, “I gotta tell you, I think Mr. Baruch had something to do with that bomb outside the queen’s door.”

Andre looked as if someone had stuck a nail up his fundament. “What?”

“I’m thinking that he wanted Sophie-Anne scared,” I said. “I’m thinking that he thought she’d be vulnerable and need a strong male protector if she felt threatened.”

Andre was not Mr. Expressive, but I saw incredulity, disgust, and belief cross his face in quick order.

“And I’m also thinking maybe he told Henrik Feith that Sophie-Anne was going to kill him. Because he’s the hotel owner, right? And he’d have a key to get into the queen’s room, where we thought Henrik was safe, right? So Henrik would continue the queen’s trial, because he’d been persuaded she would do him in. Again, Christian Baruch would be there, to be her big savior. Maybe he had Henrik killed, after he’d set him up, so he could do a tah-
dah
reveal and dazzle Sophie-Anne with his wonderful care of her.”

Andre had the strangest expression on his face, as if he was having trouble following me. “Is there proof?” he asked.

“Not a smidge. But when I talked to Mr. Donati in the lobby this morning, he hinted that there was a security tape I might want to watch.”

“Go see,” Andre said.

“If I go ask for it, he’ll get fired. You need to get the queen to ask Mr. Baruch point-blank if she can see the security tape for the lobby outside during the time the bomb was planted. Gum on the camera or not, that tape will show something.”

“Leave first, so he won’t connect you to this.” In fact, the hotelier had been absorbed in the queen and her conversation, or his vampire hearing would have tipped him off that we were talking about him.

Though I was exhausted, I had the gratifying feeling that I was earning the money they were paying me for this trip. And it was a load off my mind to feel that the Dr Pepper thing was solved. Christian Baruch would not be doing any more bomb planting now that the queen was on to him. The threat the splinter group of the Fellowship posed . . . well, I’d only heard of that from hearsay, and I didn’t have any evidence of what form it would take. Despite the death of the woman at the archery place, I felt more relaxed than I had since I’d walked into the Pyramid of Gizeh, because I was inclined to attribute the killer archer to Baruch, too. Maybe when he saw that Henrik would actually take Arkansas from the queen, he’d gotten greedy and had the assassin take out Henrik, so the queen would get everything. There was something confusing and wrong about that scenario, but I was too tired to think it through, and I was content to let the whole tangled web lie until I was rested.

I crossed the little lobby to the elevator and pressed the button. When the doors dinged open, Bill stepped out, his hands full of order forms.

“You did well this evening,” I said, too tired to hate him. I nodded at the forms.

“Yes, we’ll all make a lot of money from this,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly excited.

I waited for him to step out of my way, but he didn’t do that, either.

“I would give it all away if I could erase what happened between us,” he said. “Not the times we spent loving each other, but . . .”

“The times you spent lying to me? The times you pretended you could hardly wait to date me when it turns out you were under order to? Those times?”

“Yes,” he said, and his deep brown eyes didn’t waver. “Those times.”

“You hurt me too much. That’s not ever gonna happen.”

“Do you love any man? Quinn? Eric? That moron JB?”

“You don’t have the right to ask me that,” I said. “You don’t have any rights at all where I’m concerned.”

JB? Where’d that come from? I’d always been fond of the guy, and he was lovely, but his conversation was about as stimulating as a stump’s. I was shaking my head as I rode down in the elevator to the human floor.

Carla was out, as usual, and since it was five in the morning the chances seemed good that she’d stay out. I put on my pink pajamas and put my slippers beside the bed so I wouldn’t have to grope around for them in the darkened room in case Carla came in before I awoke.

M
Y EYES SNAPPED OPEN LIKE SHADES THAT WERE wound too tight.

I’m coming.
I pulled on last night’s outfit, but without the heels. Instead, I slid my feet into my rubber-soled slippers. I grabbed the slim wallet that held my room key, driver’s license, and credit card, and stuffed it in one pocket, jammed my cell phone into the other, and hurried out of the room. The door slammed behind me with an ominous thud. The hotel felt empty and silent, but my clock had read 9:50.

I had to run down a long corridor and turn right to get to the elevators. I didn’t meet a soul. A moment’s thought told me that was not so strange. Most humans on the floor would still be asleep, because they kept vampire hours. But there weren’t even any hotel employees cleaning the halls.

All the little tracks of disquiet that had crawled through my brain, like slug tracks on your back doorstep, had coalesced into a huge throbbing mass of uneasiness.

I felt like I was on the
Titanic,
and I’d just heard the hull scrape against the iceberg.

I finally spotted someone, lying on the floor. I’d been woken so suddenly and sharply that everything I did had a dreamlike quality to it, so finding a body in the hall was not such a jolt.

I let out a cry, and Barry came bounding around the corner. He crouched down with me. I rolled over the body. It was Jake Purifoy, and he couldn’t be roused.

Why isn’t he in his room? What was he doing out so late?
Even Barry’s mental voice sounded panicked.

What could have been so important that Jake wasn’t prepared for his day’s sleep? I stood up, thinking furiously. I’d never, ever heard of a vampire who didn’t know instinctively that the dawn was coming. I thought of the conversations I’d had with Jake, and the two men I’d seen leaving his room.

“You
bastard
,” I hissed through my teeth, and I kicked him as hard as I could.

“Jesus, Sookie!” Barry grabbed my arm, horrified. But then he got the picture from my brain.

“We need to find Mr. Cataliades and Diantha,” I said. “They can get up; they’re not vamps.”

“I’ll get Cecile. She’s human, my roommate,” Barry said, and we both went off in different directions, leaving Jake to lie where he was. It was all we could do.

We were back together in five minutes. It had been surprisingly easy to raise Mr. Cataliades, and Diantha had been sharing his room. Cecile proved to be a young woman with a no-nonsense haircut and a competent way about her, and I wasn’t surprised when Barry introduced her as the king’s new executive assistant.

I’d been a fool to discount, even for a minute, the warning that Clovache had passed along. I was so angry at myself I could hardly stand to be inside my own skin. But I had to shove that aside and we had to act now.

“Listen to what I think,” I said. I’d been putting things together in my head. “Some of the waiters have been avoiding Barry and me over the past couple of days, as soon as they found out what we were.”

Barry nodded. He’d noticed, too. He looked oddly guilty, but that had to wait.

“They know what we are. They didn’t want us to know what they’re about to do, I’m assuming. So I’m also assuming it must be something really, really bad. And Jake Purifoy was in on it.”

Mr. Cataliades had been looking faintly bored, but now he began to look seriously alarmed. Diantha’s big eyes went from face to face.

“What shall we do?” Cecile asked, which earned her high marks in my book.

“It’s the extra coffins,” I said. “And the blue suitcase in the queen’s suite. Barry, you were asked to bring up a suitcase, too, right? And it didn’t belong to anyone?”

Barry said, “Right. It’s still sitting in the foyer of the king’s suite, since everyone passes through there. We thought someone would claim it. I was going to take it back to the luggage department today.”

I said, “The one I went down for is sitting in the living room of the queen’s suite. I think the guy who was in on it was Joe, the manager down in the luggage and delivery area. He’s the one who called me down to get the suitcase. No one else seemed to know anything about it.”