Trail of Dead (22 page)

“Just her name. He introduced her as Olivia.”

Olivia’s name hit me like a slap, and I lost my balance, toppling over onto the carpet. Fully seated on the floor, I stared at Esther, and then back at the desiccated corpse. The shape was right, but just in case, I asked her for the vampire’s name.

“Albert,” she whispered. “His name was Albert.”

So Olivia had killed her accomplice. One of her accomplices. I had no idea what to say next, and I suddenly couldn’t stand being in the same room as the corpse. “Can we go up to the kitchen and talk for a second?”

Shrugging and biting at a fingernail, she led me back up the stairs. I sat down at the card table and nodded toward the other chair. Esther sat.

“How did you find me?” I began. “How did you know where I’d be?”

“I didn’t. But Albert gave me your phone number in case of emergencies. He said if something happened to him, I should call you.”

That seemed odd. Jesse had said that Albert was off the grid, on the run from Dashiell. Why would Albert direct Esther to call me, one of Dashiell’s employees? Unless…“Did Albert suspect something might happen?”

Esther hesitated, thinking it over. “I think…I think he loved Olivia? For whatever reason. But he didn’t really trust her.”

“Okay. Who owns this house?”

“Albert did. It wasn’t in his name, though. He said it used to be one of his former human servants?”

“And why do you think Olivia was the one who killed him?”

Her shoulders hunched. “It just seems like something she would do.”

Couldn’t argue with that. “Did they both live here? Albert and Olivia.”

“Sort of. Albert lived here all the time, in that room where his”—she winced—“his body is. Olivia has a room here, but she used to come and go when she wanted. When she was here, I tried to be somewhere else.”

“How come?”

“Like I said, she gave me the creeps. Albert and I, we weren’t, like, romantic, you know?” She seemed to be waiting for a response on that, so I nodded. “It was more of a business thing. But one time he let her feed off me, and she was…not gentle. And now Albert’s gone, and he promised to turn me before…” She swallowed hard, seeming to struggle with it. I could see her eyes filling. “Before I die.” Esther was crying openly now. “What am I gonna do?”

Awkward. I felt sorry for these people, the vampire hangers-on who just wanted to be able to live, on whatever terms necessary. Who knows, maybe I’d have more sympathy if I were the one dying. But you shouldn’t become a vampire out of fear of death. If anyone should become a vampire at all, it should be because that’s what you want to be. I felt like I should tell her I was sorry or ask how much time she had left or something, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. Besides, I had bigger fish at the moment. “Can you show me her room?”

“It’s in the basement too,” she sniffled. “But it’s locked.”

“Is she
in there
now?” This stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me. What if I was in the same house as Olivia? A flood of emotions
ran through me: fear that she would get me, relief that she might have been found, and, of course, the urge to run away very quickly.

But Esther shook her head. “The lock is one of those heavy detachable ones, and it’s on the outside. She can’t be in there.”

I looked out the window, reassuring myself that the sun was very much out. Then I told Esther she could stay where she was and descended back into the basement. In the main living room, I turned in a circle until I spotted the skinny door against the back wall. The door and the handle had both been painted the same white as the sheetrock around it, which would have been pretty good camouflage if it weren’t for the heavy silver padlock dangling from the doorframe. I approached it cautiously, paying close attention to the edges of my radius, just in case. If Olivia was in there, she was currently dead, but proximity to me would bring her to life, and she was still plenty dangerous as a human. By the time I got to the door, though, I was satisfied that unless the room turned into a huge tunnel, there was nothing Old World inside.

Behind me, I heard Esther climbing partway down the stairs, where she sat down to watch. I ignored her and looked at the padlock. It was shaped like the kind you see at the gym, but three times the size, and I didn’t think even my heavy-duty bolt cutters could gnaw through it. I went back to my bag of tools and pulled out a simple flat-head screwdriver. There was no way I was getting that padlock off without a blowtorch, but the two metal loops that it locked together were another story: they were just screwed into the door and the doorframe with ordinary screws. Rookie mistake. I could have taken the time to take out all the screws, but instead I poked the screwdriver into the U of the bolt and levered it back. I put my weight into it, and was finally rewarded with a splintering snap as the whole setup came fumbling into my stomach. “Hey,” Esther protested, but her voice was even weaker than it had been. I dropped the padlock onto the floor and pulled the door open.

Dark. Lots of dark. I felt around both sides of the wall but couldn’t find a switch. Trying not to think about what else I might find, I flailed my hand into the air a few steps into the room. Esther probably thought this looked hilarious. Finally, my fingers closed around a thin piece of string. I tugged.

There are some who might say that I screamed, but I maintain that it was more of a womanly bellow. Esther shrieked behind me. I jumped back a few feet, and when I finally got my breath, I stepped back in, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light and to the shock.

Every inch of every wall in the low-ceilinged room was covered in photos of me.

There were a few older shots—me in my high school graduation robe, a couple of shots of me running on a track. I’d only been on the cross-country team my junior year of high school, which was probably about when Olivia had found me. But most of the pictures were from the time of Olivia’s death onward. Me at the grocery store, me at a bookstore, me lying on the beach with a hat over my eyes. There was even a whole series taken through the windows of Molly’s house: me watching TV, making supper, napping on the couch with a spilled water glass on the floor next to me. I winced. No moment of my life was too mundane or too private for her to capture.

“They’re all of you.”

The voice was only a few inches behind me, and I jumped, half expecting to hit my head on the ceiling like a Looney Tunes character. “Jesus, Esther, don’t do that.” I turned around, and that’s when I saw the back wall of the room. This one wasn’t covered in pictures. There were just four big eight by tens, hung neatly, two on each side of the door. Each shot was of the person walking on the street, completely oblivious. Molly was captured at night, talking on her cell phone and throwing her head back to laugh. My brother Jack was walking with a slice of pizza in his hands. He was wearing his scrubs and an anxious look on his face, like he had to get back
to work. Jesse was leaning against an unmarked car, reading from a file and chewing on his lip. Eli was wheeling a dolly stacked with boxes into Hair of the Dog.

You will not cry
, I told myself.
You will not run screaming. You will not stop breathing.
I had gotten used to the idea of Olivia being obsessed with me, and while all those shots of me were creepy, they almost had an inevitability to them. But the pictures by the door were different. She had pinpointed the four people I cared about most. Had she left those out so I would know she was coming for them? I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and stared at it stupidly, as if I didn’t know what it was.

“I think I’m gonna go,” Esther said behind me. “Um, good luck with everything.” There were footsteps, and then a heavy silence behind me. Smart girl, that Esther.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at my phone, watching it tremble in my shaking hands. Eventually, I was able to dial.

Eli got there first, as planned. I had closed the door to the Scarlett room and was sitting outside on the front steps. Hugging my knees again. He got out of the truck in a hurry, then slowed down when he saw me. I didn’t say anything as he crouched into my eyeline. He was wearing jeans and a dark-red T-shirt with Hair of the Dog embroidered on the left breast.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you leave work,” I said woodenly.

“It’s fine. Will’s there today. There was a fight last night, but I finished cleaning up half an hour ago.” Eli had that barely contained look he gets when he wants to touch me. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk. I had forgotten all about the other crime scene.

“The stairs are in the kitchen. The body’s at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. You need to get it out of there as fast as you can, because Jesse is on his way. He can’t see it.” My voice sounded dead even to me.

“Okay…” he said cautiously. “Are we switching vehicles? I can pick up the truck later.” He held out his keys expectantly.

“No. You’ll have to put the body in your truck. It should be light. Squish it down in front of the passenger seat. Whatever. I don’t care.”

He stood there for a moment, hesitating. I didn’t bother explaining that I didn’t have the White Whale with me. “Just
do it
, Eli,” I snapped. I didn’t look up again.

He disappeared from my vision, and I heard him step into the house. I didn’t move. After a while he came out carrying a surprisingly small plastic garbage bag, which presumably held the disposable body bag I’d left down there earlier. He loaded it in his truck without a word, but then came back to squat in front of me again. “It’s done,” he said quietly. “Scarlett, what is it?”

“You should go,” I said. “Jesse will be here.”

I thought he flinched when I mentioned Jesse, which gave me an idea. “We’re going to handle the case together,” I said. “I don’t need you.” He stood up, staring down at me, looking confused. “Jesse and I will be together,” I repeated. “Just stay away.” I flicked my eyes down so I didn’t have so see his reaction.

Eli disappeared from my line of sight, and a moment later I heard his truck start up. I didn’t move.

It took Jesse another fifteen minutes to get there. He had probably had to drop Kirsten off at his parents’ house. He pulled up in his personal car, a navy Corolla, and came straight up to the steps, standing in front of me. “I checked the records,” he said. “The place is owned by a woman named LuEllen Schaub. She was found dead in a hotel room last year. No heirs, and the courts haven’t gotten around to figuring out what to do with this place.”

“The stairs are in the kitchen,” I repeated. I felt like the animatronic guardian of a theme park ride. “Take a hard left at the bottom of the stairs. Skinny door painted to match the wall around it.”

Jesse paused, confused, but just shrugged and went into the house. He was in there for a long time. When he came back, he sat down on the stairs next to me, looking out at the neighborhood. It was midafternoon, and we watched a school bus deposit a dozen kids at a corner across the street. Their parents divided up the herd and split off in different directions. Jesse started to speak, but then he shook his head and remained silent. Finally, he said, “I think we should just stick together from here on out. This learning things separately business is obnoxious.”

I didn’t smile. After a few seconds, I felt Jesse staring at me, and finally looked over.

“What?”

“Olivia is not your fault, you know,” he said.

“I know.”

“No, you really don’t seem to.”

“Thanks, Robin Williams. I appreciate the after-school-special moment, but we both know that if I wasn’t around Olivia wouldn’t be on the rampage. Maybe it’s not my
fault
, exactly, but I’m still the cause.”

“We don’t know for sure what her agenda is,” he argued.

“You saw the pictures by the door?” I asked. He nodded. “She knows about you. She’s gonna come after all of you. It’s the same thing she did before; the exact same thing. Take away the people close to me. Take me.”

“You really think that’s her plan?” he asked, turning his body to study my face.

I nodded. “It makes sense. She’s not just an asshole; she’s completely boring. She’s the Elmer Fudd of trying to kill me.” I fought to keep my head from sinking onto my chest. I was so tired. In every possible way.

His voice was so dangerously soft that I barely heard it. “You’re not still thinking it’d be best to give yourself up?”

I managed to raise my head and look over at him. Jesse was watching me with his guarded cop face, but there was tension in
his jaw and shoulders. “Um, I was threatened very specifically to think no such thing.”

“Just spit it out, Scarlett.”

“Fine.” I made a point to focus on the road in front of us. The kids had cleared away now, and it seemed surprisingly deserted. “I’m not a nutcase; I do have a reasonable line of thinking. She hasn’t taken a run at me yet, right?”

“Right.”

“And I haven’t exactly been hiding. I think she’s saving me for last, which means she’s going to do something else before she gets to me. Based on that room down there, I’d put good money on her trying to kill someone I love. If I surrender, I could cut out the middle part, the part where people I love die. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same thing, Detective.”

“That’s different. I took an oath to protect and serve, and if I could exchange my life for a citizen’s, I would. But I can’t just walk up to a gang leader and say, here, kill me so you can stop killing all these other people.”

“Why not?”

He made a frustrated sound. “Because who’s to guarantee that they really will stop? Not me, because I’d be dead. And because…you don’t just let the bad guy win.”

“You’re being theoretical. I’m being realistic. Olivia isn’t a gang leader, she’s a crazy evil vampire with a metaphorical hard-on for me. Besides, who’s to say I’m not one of the bad guys too?”

“I do.”

I snorted. “No, you just don’t want me to be. It’s not the same thing.”

“Just stop it,” he snapped. “Stop talking about killing yourself—no, letting yourself die, which is even worse because it requires nothing of you—in this reasonable tone, like it’s no big deal. It’s a big fucking deal, Scarlett. And this everyone would be better off without me bullshit is tired.”