Vampire for Hire (21 page)

 
      
 
Sometimes I don’t play by the rules. Sometimes I make up the rules. Someone was going to talk, whether they wanted to or not.

 
      
 
A few of these men let be known that they didn’t appreciate me walking around and asking a lot of questions. One of these men might have threatened me. One of these men might have soon thereafter suffered a broken finger.

 
      
 
Might have.

 
      
 
I handed out all the fliers I had, each one with my cell phone number on the bottom and a promise that the call would remain confidential. And at the end of the night, with no one talking and the neighborhood shutting down, the four of us reconvened at the McDonald’s. We discussed our options. We all felt we had hit the area pretty hard. Most of us felt someone knew something but wasn’t talking. We all agreed that unless someone started talking soon, we would have to take drastic measures. None of us talked about what those drastic measures were. I suspected each of us had our own definitions.

 
      
 
Knighthorse
and Spinoza would both be back tomorrow morning. I would be back in the evening. Aaron King had a lead or two he wanted to follow up tonight. He insisted on following up alone, stating he would use his old Southern charm to get the information he needed. He even winked. Hell, I was charmed ten times over.

 
      
 
As I stepped into my minivan,
Knighthorse
pulled up behind me in his classic Mustang. He cranked down his window and said he’d heard from someone on the street that a mean, dark-haired lady had broken some gangbanger’s finger. His eyes narrowed. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?” he asked.

 
      
 
“Everything but the mean part. It’s not nice to threaten a lady.”

 
      
 
He threw back his head and laughed. “I knew you were a badass.”

 
      
 
“
Badder
than most.”

 
      
 
“Hey, that’s my line,” he said, winking. He rolled up his window and pealed out of the parking lot.

 
      
 
Spinoza followed behind in his nondescript Toyota Camry, a car much better suited for investigations than
Knighthorse’s
eye-catching classic Mustang. He nodded at me and told me we would find her. I thanked the deeply troubled man for his help, and secretly hoped he would find himself.

 
      
 
As I started up my minivan—a vehicle even better suited for long surveillances—Aaron King sidled up to the window. His eyes twinkled. As if he was in on a private joke. Or if he knew a secret. I rolled down my window.

 
      
 
“We’ll find that girl,” he said. “I have a daughter. I can’t stand the thought of a little girl alone and scared and possibly abused.”

 
      
 
“I have a daughter, too,” I said. “And a son.”

 
      
 
But that was all I could get out. My voice caught in my throat.

 
      
 
Aaron King angled his beautiful face down into my window. “Is there something wrong,
lil
’ darling?” he asked.

 
      
 
“No, I—” But my voice did it again. Or, rather, my throat did. It shut tight, and all I could do was shake my head.

 
      
 
But there was something so tender, so serene, so warm about Aaron King. I felt myself opening up to him, responding to him. Connecting with him.

 
      
 
I tried again. “My son...” But, dammit, that was all I could say. Even those words came out in a strangled choke.

 
      
 
Aaron reached through the driver’s side window and gently touched my chin. “Hey, even highly trained federal agents cry,” he said.

 
      
 
And I did. Hard. Much harder than I thought I would around a stranger. Aaron King let me cry. The hand he used to touch my cheek now reached around and patted my head and shoulders gently. He was a loving grandfather. A man with a big, beautiful heart.

 
      
 
And when I was all cried out, he rested his forehead against the upper window frame. “I’m sorry you’re sad,
lil
’ lady. But everything’s going to be alright.”

 
      
 
Some of the McDonald’s yellowish parking lot light caught his eyes, and when he smiled again—a smile that was so bright that it lifted my spirits immediately—I got the mother of all psychic hits. So powerful...and so mind blowing. So much so that I was certain I had made it up.

 
      
 
No way,
I thought.

 
      
 
But the hit persisted. His name wasn’t Aaron King. At least, not the name the world knew him by.

 
      
 
Unbelievable.

 
      
 
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Samantha Moon. And you can tell me about your son then.”

 
      
 
I nodded, too dumbfounded to speak.

 
      
 
He winked at me. “Go take care of your son.” And then he reached through the window and gave my chin a small boxing jab, smiled at me again, and walked back to his own car.

 
      
 
A Cadillac.

 
      
 
Might as well have been a
pink
Cadillac.

 
      
 
Chapter Thirty-two

 
      
 
Still reeling from my encounter with Aaron King, whose real name, of course,
wasn’t
Aaron King, I found myself at the Wharton Museum.

 
      
 
Danny had promised to call me immediately if anything came up, and since I hadn’t received a call, I might as well keep working, right? And with Aaron still working the case in Buena Park, I thought it was best to tackle some of my paying work.

 
      
 
I might be undead. I might drink blood. And I might be one hell of a freaky chick, but I still needed to feed my kids and pay my bills.

 
      
 
Still in my van, I removed my secret stash of foundation make-up, which I often applied heavily to my face and the back of my hands. I may not show up in mirrors or on surveillance video—weird as hell, I know—but the make-up still did. And after a long night of pounding doors and breaking fingers, well, I wasn’t sure how much of my make-up was still in place.

 
      
 
I had already been introduced to the head night security guard, whose name was Eddie. Eddie was a heavy-set Hispanic guy who seemed as cool as cool gets, and oozed a smooth confidence. The way he carried himself, you would have thought he looked a little more like George Clooney and a lot less like Chris Farley.

 
      
 
Then again, I always did think Chris Farley was a cutie.

 
      
 
We were in Eddie’s office, which was just inside the main doors of the museum. His office looked a little like Mission Control, minus all the nerds in white short-sleeved, button-down dress shirts. There were ten monitors placed in and around his desk, all providing live feeds from within the museum. While we sat, he cycled through some exterior cameras and some back-room cameras. All in all, there were over twenty cameras situated throughout the small museum.

 
      
 
Eddie leaned back in his swivel chair, a chair that looked abused and ready to give out. I was sitting in a metal foldout chair he had grabbed from a storage closet behind him. The cold metal was almost as cold as my own flesh.

 
      
 
Eddie, to his credit, rarely took his eyes off the monitors. There was a Starbucks coffee sitting next to a keyboard. The keyboard had old coffee stains on it. I wondered how many keyboards Eddie had fried spilling his coffees.

 
      
 
“Would you mind telling me about the night the crystal sculpture was stolen?” I asked.

 
      
 
He shrugged defensively. “Like any other night.”

 
      
 
I waited. Eddie stared at the monitors. Apparently that’s all I was getting.

 
      
 
I said, “So nothing out of the ordinary?”

 
      
 
“Nothing other than our back-room cameras suddenly stopped working.”

 
      
 
“Did the theft take place in the back room?”

 
      
 
“Wow, you’re good,” he said, still not looking at me. “It’s no wonder they hired you.”

 
      
 
I ignored the remark. “How long were the cameras not working?”

 
      
 
“Twenty-one minutes.”

 
      
 
“Did you catch this immediately?”

 
      
 
He shook his head. “Both pictures were frozen in place. How they did it, we have no clue. But the image looked fine, until I noticed the timer had stopped.”

 
      
 
“And how long until you noticed that?”

 
      
 
“Thirty, forty minutes.”

 
      
 
“Long enough for the egg to be stolen.”

 
      
 
“Yes.”

 
      
 
“Could have happened to anyone,” I said.

 
      
 
He squinted at me, trying to decide if I was being as big of an asshole as he was, and finally decided that I wasn’t. He relaxed a little. “I guess so, yes.”