Trail of Dead (20 page)

No, it took Olivia to really make me wonder if there was a God.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the pressure-controlled door opening and closing. Sadie settled into the pew beside me, reaching over to pat my hand.

“Thanks for talking to me, Sadie.”

She patted again. “Don’t worry about it, Scarlett. You’re not the first relative to come back after it’s all over, wanting answers to more questions. Our perspective of death, of our family member’s death, it changes with time.”

You got that right, Sadie.

“Did you ever see a guy with Olivia, at the end?” I asked. “Average height, sort of weaselly looking?”

Sadie blinked at me, and there was suddenly a glint in her eye. “You found out about Al, did you?” she said coyly. “I figured you might. They tried so hard to keep it secret.” She shook her head. “I always figured they were just getting a kick out of that, sneaking around. Wasn’t like you’d mind, that your mom had a beau in her last few months.”

I had been right—Albert had been visiting Olivia at the hospital. I had about a thousand questions, but no idea where to start. “Was she…did she say how they met?”

Sadie frowned. “I never got a full story on that, but I assumed it was through the radiology specialist, Dr. Barton. Did you meet him?”

“There were so many specialists…”

“He stood out, though—had a scar going down his lip, right here”—she touched her lower lip like she was making a vertical mark on it. “Fell off a motorcycle, he told me once. He’s a very big deal in experimental oncology, though he’s based in New York, usually.”

A vague image of a sandy-haired guy with squinty little glasses came to mind. “I think I met him once or twice. Albert…Al…he knew Barton?”

“Worked for him, I think.” She shrugged. “At any rate, every time I saw Dr. Barton, Al was with him. Stayed real close, like he needed to hear every word Barton said.”

Or like Barton needed to hear every word Albert said. Albert had found a specialist for Olivia and pressed his mind to get her the treatment. “What did Barton do for…my mom?”

Sadie shook her head sadly. “He gave her some new experimental drug…Domincydactl, I believe it was called. It was a Hail Mary pass, sugar, and it didn’t work. They’ve discontinued the drug since then. Didn’t work for anyone, I guess.”

“Why didn’t I know about this?”

“Your mom asked us to keep it private. She said she didn’t want you getting your hopes up about a one-in-a-million chance.”

Or she didn’t want me to know what she was planning. Had she suspected that I was on to her? Or was she just hedging her bets in case it really didn’t work? Whatever this drug was, it had either turned her or made it possible for Albert to turn her. It had honestly never occurred to me that nullness could be tempered chemically; I had assumed Olivia’s transformation had had something to do with magic. We all had.

“You okay, Scarlett?”

My attention had wandered. I worked to focus back on Sadie. “I think so.” I groped for something to say. “I’m…glad she found someone to be with, at the end.”

“So am I, sugar.” She patted my hand one more time and stood up. “Just remember, Miss Scarlett, your momma loved you. She was just devoted to you. I’m sure wherever she is now, she’s at peace.”

Not fucking likely.

When Scarlett hung up, Jesse had looked at the phone in confusion for a moment, until Kirsten said, “Well, that was abrupt.”

They had hit a patch of traffic on the way back to LA, and he didn’t feel comfortable using the siren this time, since they were sort of at a loss for their next step. “Yes. I hope she’s not in trouble.”

“Hayne will look after her,” Kirsten said, with perfect confidence. Jesse decided not to mention that Scarlett had escaped from Dashiell’s mansion. “Do you think Scarlett was right,” Kirsten asked, “about Olivia trying to distract us from something?”

“Probably,” Jesse said grimly. He was lost in thought, half hypnotized by the brake-gas-brake-gas repetition of the traffic. “I do think we’re missing something big. We’ve been running around trying so hard to catch up to Olivia, we haven’t stopped to think. Scarlett suggested as much last night, but I thought she was just being paranoid.”

“Well, let’s go over it all again,” Kirsten suggested.

They started with Denise’s death, what little they knew about it. “I read the police file,” Jesse said. “Witnesses saw her packing up her things on the Promenade just before one in the morning. We—the police, that is—didn’t find any of it on the Promenade or the pier, so she must have loaded it in her car.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Kirsten nodding. “She had a special permit to park at the mall off the Promenade, I think.”

“Right. Olivia—I’m assuming it was Olivia, because she would’ve had the strength—must have taken her at the car.”

“Wait,” Kirsten objected. “That doesn’t make sense. Olivia is a vampire; she wouldn’t have wasted good blood, not when she could make it look accidental.”

“Maybe she needed it to look like a suicide. She didn’t want to attract any attention yet.”

Kirsten was shaking her head emphatically. “No, there’s a method for that, which vampires just love. They put the victim in their bathtub, drink most of the blood, and let a little bit run into the water to turn it red. Hardly anyone who commits suicide that way is actually a suicide.”

Jesse was temporarily distracted. He glanced over at Kirsten. “Really? Wouldn’t the medical examiner realize a lot of blood was missing?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never heard of anyone catching it. They do this fairly often.” She wrinkled her nose. “Think about it. If you were going to commit suicide, wouldn’t you rather just shoot yourself, or take pills?

Jesse started to answer that, but remembered the actual point of the discussion. “Anyway,” he said, gesturing for them to get back on track.

“Right. You read the police report. Did Denise have any major cuts? Specifically at the arteries?”

Jesse thought back. Denise’s body had been nearly pristine, he remembered, except for some minor bites from fish. No major arteries. “No.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t Olivia,” Kirsten said. “Maybe it was the witch.”

“Denise weighed a hundred and fifty pounds,” Jesse said skeptically. He didn’t mention that that was her weight
after
the fish had nibbled on her—Kirsten didn’t need to know about that. “And she would have been fighting like crazy, and maybe screaming
for help, and terrified of the pier. If we’re talking about one witch, a woman…I just can’t see her being able to get Denise that far. Could someone have…hypnotized her?”

“A reasonably powerful witch could,” she said thoughtfully. “But although we can technically perform spells on each other, we’re naturally a bit resistant to other witches’ magic. And Denise’s mind would have dug in its heels, metaphorically speaking, about going out over the water. Hypnosis is like that; it’s hard to make the subject do something that goes against her deepest feelings.”

“Are there any other spells, though? For, I don’t know, mind control?”

She shook her head. “Neuromancy, witchcraft that deals with the mind, is an extremely specialized and difficult area to work in. I know a few witches who could put her in a trance, or maybe take a few seconds of memory, but to get her to the pier and then over the side…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

They were both quiet for a long moment, thinking that over. Jesse could understand why the Santa Monica PD had ruled Denise’s death a suicide. It was just too neatly done. “Okay, let’s put a pin in that for the moment,” he said at last. The car had finally made it to the source of the traffic—a multicar fender bender that had forced the police to close off two lanes of the freeway. Jesse nodded to the highway patrolman directing traffic around the cones, and was momentarily grateful that he’d never signed on for highway patrol. “What happened next?”

“I knew about Denise’s death, and I was suspicious right away,” Kirsten said. “But there wasn’t anything I could do, really. I just thought…I don’t know what I thought.” She slumped back in her seat, biting on a cuticle. It was obvious that Kirsten was blaming herself for not acting after Denise’s death, but Jesse didn’t bother pointing out that it wasn’t her fault. She
knew
that; she just
didn’t feel it, and Jesse understood. He’d felt the same when Jared Hess had taken Scarlett.

“Then Erin died,” he prompted gently. “What do you know about that?”

Kirsten told him about being unable to reach Erin, about using a locator spell and sending the substitute cleaner to her apartment. Jesse was still itching to know who had helped Scarlett get rid of the body, but Kirsten didn’t use the cleaner’s name, and by her sidelong glance Jesse could tell she knew not to tell him.
Dammit, Scarlett
, he thought. She must have warned Kirsten.

Jesse was still a little pissed about the cleaner taking Erin’s body, but he did realize that Kirsten wasn’t the person to take it out on, so he pushed ahead. “Was there anything else that the cleaner mentioned?” he asked. “Anything else he noticed while he was there?”

Kirsten held up a hand. “Let me think.” She sat silently for a few minutes, and Jesse figured she was trying to figure out what he should and shouldn’t know. That pissed him off again, and he was about to say so, when Kirsten said, “Two things. First, he said it looked like the body had been crushed, evenly. Not like it had been beaten and bones were crushed, but the whole thing at once.”

That matched what the crime scene techs had said about the bloodstain. “And the second thing?”

She shrugged. “It’s probably nothing, but he said there was a bit of an earthly smell. Like dirt, but sort of…processed.”

That rang an alarm bell in Jesse’s brain. He had forgotten about the dirt being at both Erin’s apartment and the Reeds’ crime scene. “Wait. I gotta stop for a minute,” Jesse said. He took the next exit off the freeway and pulled into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. Kirsten began to ask him a question, but he shook his head. “Hang on a second,” he told Kirsten, and pulled out his cell phone. He turned off the Bluetooth and dialed Glory at the lab.

The phone was answered by one of her underlings, a bright Asian twentysomething with a Mohawk whom Jesse had met a few times. He informed Jesse that Glory was working nights this week, and Jesse immediately felt stupid. Of course she was; that was why she’d been at the Jeep crime scene to begin with. He hung up and dialed Glory’s cell, glancing over at Kirsten. The witch was calmly playing Angry Birds on her own phone.

“Jesse?” Glory’s voice was sleepy and irritated. “This better be really good. The kids are in school and I was finally sleeping.”

“Listen,” Jesse began, “did you test that weird dirt you found in the Reed Jeep?”

Glory sighed into the phone. “Of course I did.” Jesse grinned to himself. “It was something called…wait, let me remember this right…industrial plasticine. It’s mostly used to make full-size models of cars before they go into production, to see how they’ll look when completed. I just figured maybe Mr. Reed did something like that for work.” She yawned into the phone. “I was gonna call you about it when I woke up.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Basically? It’s man-made clay.”

“Thanks, Glory,” he said. “That was a big help. Go back to sleep.”

He hung up the phone and relayed the information to Kirsten. “I don’t know if that helps us any, but it’s something,” he finished, but Kirsten had frozen in her seat, eyes big and round. Her phone slipped from her hand onto the car floor. “What? What is it?”

“It can’t be,” she whispered. She was shaking her head. “Jewish magics…Jewish artifacts…God, I’m such an idiot.”

“
Kirsten
,” Jesse said impatiently, and the witch’s gaze snapped over to him.

“It was the witch, the one who’s working with Olivia,” Kirsten said. “She’s made a golem.”

Jesse was a child of the movies before anything else. “Like…in
Lord of the Rings
?”

“No, no. A golem is a creature, made from clay and shaped like a man. The witch uses magic to animate the clay, sort of like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.” She rubbed her face with her hands like she was scrubbing something away. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“Is it…alive?”

“I’ve never seen one—as far as I know, no witch has created a golem since the sixteenth century. But think of it more like a windup toy. The witch builds a humanoid statue out of clay and funnels magic into it. That’s the windup. She then gives it a task, usually something simple, like ‘take this heavy box and carry it until I tell you to put it down.’”

“Just to play devil’s advocate here, how do you know that’s what this is? Aside from the bits of clay we found at the scenes?”

She shrugged. “It just fits. Clay is very heavy, and I understand the weight of the spell makes a golem heavier yet. It could easily have crushed Erin to death.” She straightened up in the seat, as if she’d just thought of something. “And in dim lighting, with a long coat and hat, it could pass for human for a few minutes. If the witch and the golem surprised Denise at her car, the golem could easily have carried her to the end of the pier and thrown her over. They’re incredibly strong.”

Jesse tried to picture it. A shadowy figure in a long coat and fedora, marching straight down the pier with a struggling woman…it didn’t fit. “The Santa Monica Pier is crawling with homeless people,” he objected. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed?”

“I told you, there are spells for taking away a few seconds of memory. Or for creating a small distraction, or helping people to sleep…”

Jesse held up a hand, a little frustrated. “Okay, okay, I believe you.” He was beginning to understand why witches made Scarlett a little uneasy. At least with the other Old World creatures, you
knew what they wanted and what they could do. He wished Kirsten could just hand over trading cards with all the witches’ stats. “We operate under the conclusion that it’s a golem. But what exactly could you do if you had a golem, the Book of Mirrors, and Lilith’s amulet, all at once?”