Dead Spots (26 page)

Huh. Kind of anticlimactic.

I took a deep breath and climbed the stairs, knocking on the designated door. Just before it opened, I felt an old familiar tug, the water-bending-through-glass feeling of another null in my radius.

Corrine—Corry—must have felt it, too, because her brown eyes were wide when she opened the door. “You feel different,” she said breathlessly. “Like them.” She was a couple of inches shorter than my five foot seven, with a sweet face, a neat blonde bob, and modest teenager clothes—jeans and a simple long-sleeved purple top. She was pretty in an all-American general way, but her eyes were different. There was something tired and broken about
them, as though she had resigned herself to just going through the motions, probably forever.

I swear, it didn’t remind me of anyone.

“Uh...Hi, I’m Scarlett. You must be Corrine. Can I come in?”

“Oh, sorry, yeah.” She stepped aside, letting me into the bedroom. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—maybe posters of boy bands and stuffed animals—but the room’s personality seemed to be in transit. There were dark spots on the violet wallpaper where posters had recently been removed, and in the middle of the room, there was a plain cardboard box nearly filled with the kind of junk kids acquire—trophies and battered paperbacks and photo albums. “Everybody calls me Corry.”

“Cool...Are you guys moving?”

“What? Oh, no. I’m just putting some stuff in the basement, for storage. Here, you can sit down at my desk.” She cleared a stack of binders off the desk chair and perched at the foot of her bed. When we were both seated, there was a long awkward moment while I worked up what to say.

Finally, I said, “Corry...Maybe this would be easiest if you told me how much you know. About what you are and what you can do.”

She nodded eagerly, her fingers twisting together in her lap. This girl was just bursting to talk to someone. “Okay, yeah. Um, all I really know is what Jay—that’s the guy—told me.” She took a deep breath. “He said there are evil things in the world, and I can, like, turn off their evil. Sort of save them. He would kill them when they were like that so they could go to heaven...And he said if I helped him, he’d keep Mr. Herberts from ever hurting me again.” Her voice was shaking by the time she finished, and she’d hugged her arms around herself.

I ached for her. “Is there something else?” I asked softly.

“I thought Jay would just, you know, go beat him up, threaten him or something,” she blurted. “I didn’t know...”

“What happened?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“Jay killed him,” the girl said quietly. “He made it look like an accident in the woodshop classroom, but he died just like all the others.” She paused, and I could see her thinking about the people she’d helped Jay kill. “Were they...Were they really evil?” she asked me, with something like hope in her voice.

Corry was trembling now, and I felt completely incompetent. She needed me to tell her that she’d done the right thing, that she’d helped slay the monsters, but it just wasn’t that simple. And now I was going to make her a murderer. “Oh, honey...What Jay said isn’t exactly right. There are creatures in the world that you maybe didn’t know about, but they’re not all evil or all good, just like regular people.” I was about to say that the vampires were mostly evil, but I thought of Beatrice and held my tongue.

I froze as Corry hugged her knees to her chest and began to cry. My fingers twisted helplessly in my lap. I wanted to touch her but didn’t know how she’d take it.

“Jay said we were doing good,” she sobbed, “and in the park, I just shut my eyes and stayed still, and he did these things and...” Her voice broke off. “It was so horrible. But the guy in the parking lot, he was even worse. He was crying and...and begging. And I knew something wasn’t right, so I ran away.” She rolled across the bed, pulling a tissue off her nightstand and blowing her nose. She took a moment to collect herself and then held up a red cell phone with a beat-up Hello Kitty sticker on it. For some reason, the sticker broke my heart. “And like I told Mr. Carling, Jay sent me this text today, and he wants to do it again. When I said no, he...He tried to blackmail me. That’s why I called Mr. Carling.”

“How did you find him?” I asked, trying to follow the story.

She blushed under her tears. “My parents block a lot of websites, but I can still read the
LA Times
online. I saw the article on the parking lot guy, Ronnie? And it said he had a mother, and I looked her up. I called her and said I worked with Ronnie and I
wanted to set up a memorial. She read me the contacts on his cell phone.”

“That was very smart,” I said. “Back up a second—you said Jay tried to blackmail you. Blackmail you with what?”

“He has a recording that Mr. Herberts made,” she said simply. “A DVD.”

Aside from Hugo the vampire, I’d never really hurt anyone in my life. But if that teacher weren’t already dead, I would have seen to it myself.

When I was sure I was calm, I said, “Look, I need to stop this Jay, and for reasons that are long and complicated, I don’t have much time. In fact, I have almost no time. You know how you felt when I came into the room?”

She nodded.

“Well, I’m something different, too—the same thing you are. We’re called nulls. And we need to have a very long talk, soon, about what it all means. But right now, I need to find Jay. Can you help me?”

She looked uncertain, and I tried to imagine what she’d been through recently. First the pedophile teacher, and then a man who swooped in and promised to fix everything only to turn out to be just as depraved. No wonder the girl wasn’t buzzing with eagerness. I looked around the half-packed room. This was a girl who had lost her inner compass. I took a deep breath. “Corry, what happened to you was wrong. Twice. People have been through a lot less than that and barely survived, so the fact that you’re even walking and talking is amazing. And I swear to you that I will help you in every way I can. Do you think you can believe me?”

She hesitated, then nodded, and I prayed that I would have the strength to be everything this girl needed. “Good. Now tell me, what has Jay got planned for tonight?”

She told me about the meeting time and the bus stop while I scribbled down directions on a Hello Kitty pad of paper, which
had probably come with the sticker set. When I was sure I knew where I was going, I shoved the Hello Kitty page in my pocket and stood up.

“Okay, Corry, this is really important. I need you to get your family out of here tonight. All night. Right now. Tell them anything you need to—you’re in trouble, you saw a ghost, there’s asbestos, anything. It doesn’t matter. Just get them out of here, and go somewhere safe. Don’t tell
anyone
where you’re going.” She opened her mouth, but I shook my head. “No, not even me, just in case. I just want you to promise me you’ll go. Promise?”

She nodded, eyes big and scared.

“Okay.” I scribbled on the pad again. “This is my number. You call me if anything goes wrong, okay? And in a couple of days, when my current crisis is over, you and I can have that talk.”

Ten minutes later, I was driving toward the Coffee Bean closest to Jesse’s precinct. He was sitting in the very back of the shop, blushing furiously while a blonde barista with comically large breasts stood by the table, flirting.

“Sweetheart!” he cried, as I walked up. He stood and kissed my cheek, giving me a begging look that clearly said,
Please, please, please, play along
.

I tried not to roll my eyes. The guy was just too handsome for his own good. “Hi, babe. Sorry I’m late. Oh, hey!” I said to the waitress. “I didn’t know they had table service here. I’d like a chai tea latte, please. Skim.” I shrugged out of my hoodie and sat down like I owned the place.

The blonde’s mouth snapped shut long enough for her to glare at me. She turned and stomped back behind the counter, large breasts wobbling with indignation.

“I’ll give her this,” I said thoughtfully. “How impressive is it that she can balance upright?”

“Thank you,” Jesse muttered under his breath.

“You owe me. There’s going to be spit in my tea.” He smiled, and I went on. “Listen, I found something.”

“Me, too. But you go first.”

Without further preamble I said, “I found the second null.”

“Really? Excellent!” He said excitedly. “Let’s go arrest him—or her.”

My jaw dropped. “Wait, for what?”

“Accessory to murder, of course.” He sounded pleased. “Finally, the real world can be useful here. The lab picked up tons of fingerprints and DNA at the park scene. A lot of it is probably because it’s a public space, but hopefully some of it is the null’s. We can use the evidence as leverage to get us to the actual killer.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “I know that was the plan, but...then what?” I asked. “What happens to the null in all of this?”

Jesse stared at me, but I didn’t back down. “You’re serious? The null...He has to go to jail. He helped kill somebody, remember?”

“It’s not that simple, Cruz. The null, well, had good reasons.”

“Good reasons for killing four people?” he said, outraged.

I bit my lip. How much could I tell him about Corry? Could I trust him not to arrest her when he got the full story? “Jesse, look, I need you to do something for me. For
me
, you understand? You can’t arrest her. The second null.”

“Why the hell not?” he demanded.

“She...Please, Jesse. I’m asking you for your trust, just for a little while. I’ll explain it all if we get through the next day.” When I had Corry’s permission to do so.

He looked at me for a long moment. I kept my face even. I’d known Corry Tanger for all of forty minutes, but I’d go to hell and back to get her out of this.

“And if I don’t?” he said quietly.

“Then I won’t tell you who she is. And since we’ve already established that, legally, you have nothing on me, the case will stop where it is, and the deadline will pass, and we’ll both die.”

Jesse went very still. “I can’t believe you,” he said, studying me. “You’re really gonna draw a line in the sand, after everything we’ve been through?”

“Not if you don’t make me,” I said, my voice cracking a little. “Jesse, she’s...She’s like me.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, thoughts flickering across his face, and then he nodded grudgingly. “Well...okay. I don’t need to know right now. But she can’t just get away with murder. This conversation will be back for part two.”

I nodded, and the moment passed.

Jesse stared at me as if looking for some kind of reassurance that I could be trusted. Then he lowered his voice. “Listen, I found something, too—maybe. My supervisor’s had me going through the reports of all the police incidents that have ever taken place at the park. I thought it was just busywork, but I actually found this one case that I think is...significant.” He pulled a folded sheath of paper from his back pocket and slid it over to me.

The top page was a Xeroxed school photo of a young girl. The second page was an adolescent boy, maybe sixteen or so. Their names were handwritten under the photos.

“Jared and Emily Hess,” Jesse continued. “Ten years ago, twelve-year-old Emily disappeared from the park. The kids were climbing trees after the park had closed for the night, and Jared fell asleep on a high branch. When he woke up, he claimed that strangers had bitten his sister to death and that a third party had taken the body away. The police came with dogs, forensics, the whole nine yards. They found a little bit of Emily’s blood, but no other trace of the girl. Eventually, the cops started looking at Jared.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah. His story was crazy, and there were a few other things—kid got into fights at school, a couple pets in the neighborhood had disappeared, that kind of stuff. Nothing solid, but the officers on the case thought Jared was the best suspect. They really gave him
the runaround—interrogation, juvie, where the other kids beat the shit out of him, by the way, psychiatric care, anything our guys could think of to try to get him to change his story. Kid never did, though, and eventually, the father sued the department for pushing too hard. They settled out of court.”

“Huh.” I looked at the photo of Jared. Where Emily’s school pose was sweet and simple, this shot had been taken at the police station, and it was obvious that Jared had been badly beaten just before the photo. His face was swollen and unrecognizable, a trickle of blood at his mouth. He must not have been the toughest kid at juvenile detention. There was something familiar about his defiant expression, but I couldn’t place it.

“Where is Jared now?”

“That’s the thing—nobody knows. All his financial and tax records go up until five years ago, and then they just stop. It’s like the guy vanished into thin air. And, Scarlett, that really doesn’t happen anymore.” He tapped the date at the top of the photocopied police report. “The thing is, there are dozens of reports like this in the La Brea Park file. Other incidents, even a couple of murders. But this one...This was ten years ago
today
.”

The blonde marched up and plopped my mug of chai tea in front of me on the table, letting it slosh a little. Okay, now she was starting to piss me off. I dug a five out of my pocket and handed it over. “Thanks so much,” I said sweetly. “You can keep the change for your tip.” Which amounted to about fifteen cents. I hoped she would put it toward a back brace.

Ignoring her reaction, I reached over to take Jesse’s hand. “Baby, what were you saying?”

The blonde huffed away again. The corner of his mouth twitched, but he squeezed my hand gently, giving me an open look that made me wish I hadn’t restarted this charade.

“Anyway,” he said, a little awkward, “I guess it’s possible that Jared Hess really did kill his sister. But the anniversary thing...This
has gotta be it, right? It was really vampires who killed Emily Hess?”

Jared. Jay
. “Yes.” My voice was firm, and Jesse’s face changed with my response.

He carefully removed his hand from mine. “Scarlett...your mentor, the other null...”

Oh crap
. I suddenly remembered who I was talking to, and realized what was coming. “Yeah?”