Trail of Dead (17 page)

I looked down at the map I’d just found. Salt Lake City was a long way from any port cities. “Salt Lake City isn’t a vampire town,” I guessed.

He pointed at me. “No. Actually, it’s one of the few biggish cities in the US that’s more or less Old World–free. I’m guessing that’s why Dashiell was so willing to hire Olivia—he knew she couldn’t possibly have any loyalties within the Old World already. To him it was like…” He paused, looking for words. “It was like a carpenter coming out of his house one morning to find a brand-new power drill sitting on his front step, with nobody claiming it.”

“Go on.”

He nodded. “Olivia was dirt-poor, but smart—smart enough to leave home at fifteen and put herself through college, grad school, and a PhD program.”

I felt my heart sink, but I asked anyway. “What field?”

“Psychology,” Will said softly. He dropped the folder on the coffee table, opened it, and fanned the materials out so he could see them better. I was itching to comb through every page of the damned thing, but I held back—he’d tell me what was most important. Also, he was still my boss, and the idea of snatching up all the papers and locking myself in the bathroom to read them seemed slightly unprofessional.

Finally, Will pulled out a Xeroxed packet that had
DO NOT COPY
stamped all over it. He scanned the sheet. “She was asked to leave the program before she completed her doctorate—I guess there was an incident with some other students and a thesis experiment. It didn’t matter to Olivia, though, because by then she’d found what she was looking for.”

“New victims?”

He smiled sadly. “One new victim. A husband.” He turned the packet around, handing it to me. “According to the psych evaluation, which she took as part of her program, Olivia’s big dream was to have a family. A rich family, to be specific.”

I looked down the sheet, where the evaluator’s handwritten notes read
subject feels an unnaturally strong drive to reproduce, possibly due to death of younger sister
.

“She lost a sister?” I asked, temporarily distracted by pity. I don’t care who you are; nobody deserves that.

“When she was fifteen. The little girl was two, and Olivia’s mother was driving her to day care. It was eight in the morning, but she was stone drunk.” Will looked away miserably. “There’s a report in there somewhere, but that’s basically the important part. That was why Olivia initially left home, went to school.”

I put the psych report down gently, as if that might somehow make the little girl’s death less tragic. “And she eventually found a husband,” I prompted.

“Right. Or in this case, more of a sperm donor.” Now Will pulled a grainy photograph out of the materials. It was a head shot of a smiling man in his early forties. He had an expensive haircut and perfectly white teeth, with a weak chin and watery brown eyes. “Scott Powell. He was a video game programmer who also came from money. Olivia probably figured he’d be a good father, and she went after him hard. They got married when she was thirty-one, and that was right around when she left her doctorate program. She was going to start her family, do the whole fifties housewife thing.”

“But nulls can’t have kids,” I said. Nobody really understood why. Being a null isn’t a hereditary trait, like the witches, it’s just sort of a random-selection anomaly that crops up here and there in the human species. And for some reason, as long as nulls have been known to exist, they’ve never been able to conceive or carry a child. Although I still have to deal with periods like every other woman, which strikes me as unfair.

“No. I couldn’t get her actual medical files, but I know Olivia underwent all kinds of fertility testing. She wanted a family
bad
, Scarlett. When she found out she couldn’t have one…it destroyed her. She was already unbalanced, and this just broke what was left of her mind.”

Sudden insight. “How did her husband die?”

I was picturing Olivia pushing him off a cliff or poisoning his cereal or something, but Will said, “That’s the thing, Scarlett. He didn’t. At least, not then.”

My jaw dropped. “
What?
”

Will pulled out a photocopy of some handwritten notes. “My guy found him hiding out in a little town in the Inland Empire, about ninety miles away. Esperanza. Powell
begged
the investigator not to tell Olivia where he was. He was terrified of her…Scarlett? Are you okay?”

My brain had stopped. Everything had stopped, actually, except my mouth. “What did she do to him?”

“He wouldn’t say, just that he threw money at her, got a divorce, and moved to Esperanza without telling her.

“She found him, didn’t she?”

Will’s eyebrows raised, but he just handed me a newspaper clipping with a familiar-looking masthead. “I found this a couple of months ago, after you spotted Olivia at the hospital.” It was an obituary from the Esperanza Herald, the twice-weekly paper my little hometown published. Scott Powell had died of an apparent suicide eight months earlier. I counted back on my fingers. Right after Olivia had “died” and been turned into a vampire. Will added, “I don’t know how or when she found him—”

“Years ago,” I broke in. I hardly recognized my voice. “Probably seven or eight. But she didn’t bother killing him then, because she’d found something else to interest her.”

I could feel Will studying my face. “What are you saying?”

I stabbed the clipping with an index finger. “This is my hometown, Will. She came for Scott, and somehow bumped into me.”

I didn’t actually remember bumping into Olivia or anything. Before I’d come to LA and had it all explained to me, I’d just assumed the weird feelings I got every now and then—my null thing—happened to everyone, the way everyone gets dizzy when they stand up too fast or gets a charley horse when their legs are cramped up. But I could still guess at when she had found me: after all, Olivia hadn’t taken me as a child, when I would theoretically have been more docile. She’d waited until I’d turned eighteen and come to LA to take out my parents. I was guessing that meant she hadn’t actually found me until late high school or so, and she’d decided to bide her time.

Although seriously, what the fuck did I know?

“Scarlett? Scarlett!” Will shook my arm, and I focused on the room again. When he saw I was all right, he released me right away.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

He blinked in confusion. “Huh?”

I waved my hand over the papers that were scattered across the coffee table. “With all this. You had the fancy background check; you knew she was broken in the head, so what did you do?”

“I—I didn’t do anything,” he admitted, hanging his head. “The background check set off plenty of alarm bells, from a psychology point of view, but nothing that would convince Dashiell that Olivia was wrong for the job.” He scratched the back of his neck absently. “If I had showed him all of this back then, his takeaway would have been ‘oh, her mom’s a maid, she probably already knows a lot about cleaning.’ That’s how his mind works.” Will looked up to meet my eyes, and probably saw my jaw hanging open. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he said very gently, the way you’d talk to a child. “Are you all right?”

I might have been, if he hadn’t called me honey. Insistent tears prickled at my eyes, but I blinked them away. “No, Will. I am
not
all
right. I am not. And you…you’re worse than Dashiell!” His eyes went wide, shocked. “You knew what she was, you knew she was out of her mind, and you had the humanity to care. You had to figure she was a loaded gun of crazy, but you just let her go about her nutjob business. You’re right, you could have stopped all of this. My
parents
—”

He held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, whoa! She was crazy, but she hadn’t
done anything
yet, then! And I had no idea she was going to kill your parents—”

“Really?” I snapped. “It didn’t seem awfully convenient that this woman who always wanted a family suddenly had a cute little null orphan following her around? That didn’t raise any goddamned flags?”

I was shouting now, and Hayne came striding into the room. “Miss Bernard, you need to calm down.”

“The hell I do,” I said, trembling.

Hayne’s face stilled, so that only his mouth moved when he spoke. “If you can’t calm down, you’re going to wake Dashiell, and that would be very bad for everyone,” he said, unfazed. “One of the upstairs vampires has already awoken, and she is very confused.”

My radius was expanding. Gee whiz, I must be upset or something.

I was breathing heavily, looking from Hayne, with his unflappable expression, to Will, who wasn’t meeting my eyes. “I need some air,” I whispered. Before either of them could respond, I scooped up the file, jamming it into more of a pile than anything else. I hugged it to my chest and marched down the long hallway. By the time I hit the front door I was running.

“Scarlett,” Will called after me. “Wait!” I felt him leave my radius, then enter it again as he caught up with me on Dashiell’s porch. Damned werewolf speed. “Goddammit, Scarlett,
slow down
!”

I whirled on him. “You know what this is? This is like those domestic abuse cases where the cops and the friends and the family
and the shrink all know he’s about to kill her and she can’t save herself, but everybody just figures someone else will do something before that happens. Then they’re all surprised when she’s dead.”

That stopped him short. “What can I do?” he pleaded. “How can I make it up to you?”

Without a second of hesitation, I held out my hand. “Give me your keys.”

He blanched. “What?”

“Forget Dashiell, forget Olivia, and for two minutes pretend I’m an adult who can make sensible decisions and take care of herself.”

He stared at me, both of us breathing hard, and I saw him understand that I knew exactly what I was asking from him. Dashiell had given explicit orders to keep me guarded every minute until Olivia was caught. Will wouldn’t go against Dashiell’s orders once, when he might have stopped a train wreck, and I was daring him to do it for me now.

He dug in his pocket and dropped the keys in my hand. “Where will you go?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Where she won’t think to look for me.”

Will drove one of those massive four-door pickup trucks that looks like it could be dropped off a cliff with no damage. In fact, I may have seen that in one of their commercials. It was dark red and well-worn, with nicks and scratches all over the outside and suspicious tears in the inside upholstery. There was one of those big toolboxes welded into the truck’s bed, and it was covered in dents too.

Ah, werewolves. Hell on wheels.

The minute I pulled away from Dashiell’s, I felt better. It felt good just to be by myself again, for one thing, and to be doing something, even if I had no idea what I was actually going to do. My first impulse was to head to the beach, where I do my best
thinking, but I decided that might be too predictable of me. If Olivia’s partner really was gunning for me in the daytime, there was no sense making it easy for her. Besides, I’d promised Will I was going to take care of myself, so I would damned well make the effort and stay away from my regular haunts. Which ruled out Hair of the Dog and Molly’s house too.

I pulled over a few blocks before the freeway exit to figure out where the hell I was going. What I really wanted, I decided, was to
do something
. Make something happen. I was tired of being the bait. But what could I do that wasn’t already being done? Jesse and Kirsten were following up on the witchcraft stuff. I had learned a lot about Olivia’s background, but was there anything that would actually help us find her? I looked at Olivia’s file, which I’d unceremoniously dumped on the passenger seat. Well, at least that was a place to start. I headed for the nearest coffee shop.

Jesse had been picturing a storage center like all the ones in LA—a grouping of warehouse-sized buildings that had been divided into large spaces with sliding metal garage doors. But he’d never seen anything like the monstrosity Kirsten directed him toward. Instead of warehouses, it was a single building the size of an enormous parking garage, surrounded by a small, nearly empty blacktop that reminded Jesse more of a moat than a parking lot. There were six double-sized sliding garage doors lined up along each side of the building’s exterior, but no indication of where the internal dividers might be, so the building might have been divided into twenty-four identical cubes or any lesser number of units with more than one entrance. The building was also three stories tall, which made Jesse wonder if there were additional storage units on the second and third floors, or if each unit actually needed to be three stories tall. Surely the witches wouldn’t need to store anything
that
huge, right?

Right?

“That one, the third door from the left,” Kirsten said, pointing, but Jesse could see the crime-scene tape still squared off around a large patch of blacktop. There were three uniformed police officers loitering around, and he recognized the behavior: they were waiting for the all clear to head back to the station.

“Is the lot always this empty?” he asked, feeling conspicuous.

“Every time I’ve been here. People don’t come here to stay very long.”

He parked his car a good fifteen spots away from the tape, unbuckled his seat belt, and looked at Kirsten. “How do you want to handle this?”

She bit her lip for a moment, thinking. “Why don’t I wait here and contact Alice, and maybe you could speak to the officers about what happened. Then you can ask Alice any other questions you may have.”

“I need to see the storage room too,” he said firmly.

Kirsten started to shake her head. “I can’t allow—”

“Bullshit,” Jesse interrupted. “You asked me here. You want my help. I need to see the room that he died for.”

Kirsten stared at him for a long moment, but Jesse met her eyes without flinching. Finally she nodded. “I’ll go talk to the cops,” he said.

Jesse had opened his car door and gotten one leg out when Kirsten grabbed his arm.

“Wait,” she said urgently, “you can’t tell them that Samuel had a storage unit here.”