Finally, Max wandered off to pee, and Scarlett returned to Jesse. “Thank you,” she said, eyes bright. “He’s wonderful.”
Jesse was smart enough to be casual about it. “No problem,” he said. “Listen, I really do need to get back to the precinct. I’m supposed to be digging through all this paperwork on the history of the park. I know it’s a long shot that I’ll find anything at this point, but I don’t know what else to do.”
He winced as Scarlett’s face shut back down, and she reached back to redo her ponytail. “That might not be a bad idea,” she said finally. Her voice was back to flat professionalism. “Whoever is doing this is obviously trying to say something, with the teeth and the blood and the silver. It could be that the location is important, too.”
They made plans to meet up again in a few hours.
Before he went back to work, Jesse decided to take a shot at Thomas Freedner again. He took surface streets the short distance to Janine Malaka’s West Hollywood apartment building, a six-floor, pueblo-style walkup that had that LA look of long-expired glory. The halls were a little dingy and the lobby plants were plastic, but many of the residents had made an effort to put out a welcome mat or wreath of dried flowers to spruce up their doors.
Janine Malaka was a Hawaiian woman in her mid-forties, pretty and chunky, wearing a long bright-blue-and-yellow muumuu. She greeted Jesse with the wary respect that is often borne of a long history with the police department. When he explained that he was asking about Freedner, she shrugged and took the chain off the door, ushering him inside.
“I haven’t seen Tom in years,” she said, leading him to a worn fabric sofa that had been carefully patched and restuffed. “We was working together at the Stop and Go over on Franklin Street, you know? Just before he got caught dealing that last time? We was just friendly. Used to buy a little pot from him, now and again. What’d he do now?”
“Nothing at all, as far as we know,” Jesse assured her. “We just want to ask him some questions about a case. Have you heard from Tom since he was released from prison?”
“Naw. Him and me was never friendly after he went in.” She shrugged. “Was more of a work friendship, you know? Never slept with him or nothin’. He was into guys. But I happened to be hangin’ with him when the cops came for him the last time, so they took down my name.”
“Do you know about his...other activities?”
“You mean the vampire stuff?” She laughed again. “Yeah, he told me once. We was high as kites and I didn’t believe him, but then he showed me the scars. I figured him and his friends like to run around and play vampire.” She shrugged. “Never bothered me none. All kinds in this town.”
Jesse was getting frustrated. He checked his watch—only a few minutes until he had to go meet Scarlett. “Do you have any ideas about where Tom might go if he was in trouble?”
She made a show of thinking it over. “You try his friend who plays the vampire? Abe something?”
“Yes, ma’am” Jesse lied. “He wasn’t helpful.”
Malaka shrugged again. “The thing you need to know about Tom,” she said with a new fierceness, as though she’d only just realized she was in the conversation, “is that the vampire stuff was what he lived for. It’s all he talked about, like he was in love with vampires the way that some are in love with people.”
Jesse frowned. “What do you think would happen if it were taken away? If he couldn’t...play vampires anymore?”
Her face lost its dopey relaxation, and the look she gave Jesse was serious and a little scared. “Then I think that boy would flat-out lose his mind.”
Despite my deadline, I was really, really looking forward to getting a few hours of sleep back at Molly’s. After forty minutes of traffic, I finally hung my bag and my canvas jacket on the hook that Molly had put up inside the door for me and headed for the kitchen, planning to grab some crackers and a shower and go to bed. Before I’d taken a full step into the room, though, I stumbled and almost went down, grabbing the doorframe for support. There was a bouquet in a vase on Molly’s kitchen table: two dozen purple mums. A little white card was folded open on the table, leaning against the vase. Hugging the wall, I moved close enough to see the generic cursive writing:
Just Because
.
Florists don’t open until daylight, and Molly hadn’t been “awake” all morning.
Someone had been in the house.
I edged around the table as if it might be booby-trapped and picked up a butcher knife from the block next to the fridge. We don’t use the knife set much—Molly rarely cooks, for obvious reasons, and I do more assembling than actual cooking—so it was plenty sharp. Keeping my back to a wall, I edged through the house to the staircase, ran up the stairs two at a time, and burst into Molly’s room, feeling a vampire presence enter my radius and praying that it was Molly. She had boarded over the windows in her room years ago, so I flipped the light on, holding my breath, and
saw her lying on the bed, looking peaceful. I closed and locked the door behind me and went over to shake her shoulder. “Molls? Molly? Are you okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered, and I sighed with relief. She took one look at my face. “Yeah. What’s with the knife?” Her voice was perfectly calm. When you’re two hundred–odd years old, you’ve probably been through an emergency or two.
“Someone’s been in the house.”
We searched the house room by room, me with the butcher knife and Molly wearing her Sailor Moon nightie, and found nothing besides the flowers and a busted knob on the back door. When we were positive that nobody else was there, Molly put on her bathrobe—I waited at the bottom of the stairs to stay in range—and then I returned the knife to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker. There was no way I’d be going to sleep anytime soon.
Molly perched on one of the stools, looking livid, while I filled her in on my suspicion that the La Brea Park murders were somehow connected to me.
“I cannot believe,” she spat out when I had finished, “that some asshole was in my house while I was...sleeping.” I realized that the Welsh accent had crept back into her voice. Jesus. I’d never seen her this upset. She was still human, of course, but I could see the predator beneath the cheerful exterior. “When I find that fucker, I will rip his goddamned heart out, and I mean that literally.”
I said nothing, just huddled around my coffee, waiting for her to wind down. After a few minutes, she looked over at me. “What? What are you thinking?”
“I’m really sorry.”
She sputtered a little mid-sip, then put her cup down. “What for?”
“This is my fault. If you hadn’t let me move in here, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Molly looked at me like I’d lost it. “Well...duh.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“Of course this never would have happened if you weren’t living here. But, Scarlett, I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. When Dashiell arranged for you to live here, I knew someday something might come looking for you. I just thought it’d be another vampire, because they wanted, you know, your help.”
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t put you at risk.”
She thought that over for a few minutes, then shook her head. “Scarlett...He’s given you an ultimatum, hasn’t he? A deadline?”
I hadn’t told her about that. It wasn’t paranoia; Molly really had been talking to Dashiell about me. I was hardly in a position to throw stones, though, since I’d just put her at risk. “Yes.”
“When is your time up?”
“At dawn.”
She winced, nodding. “Okay. There’s a Radisson downtown that has two basement floors. Drop me off there; walk me down into the basement. I’ll be safe there until all this is over. If you solve it before dawn, you can call me, and I’ll come home.” She hesitated. “I’m so sorry I can’t help you, Scarlett, but...”
“It’s okay,” I said miserably. “I understand.”
And I did.
It took almost an hour for us to get to the hotel, but I finally got her settled in a basement room. Molly paid for two nights in advance, telling the concierge she didn’t want to be disturbed, and I helped her duct-tape the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door, just in case. When I finally got her down to her room, Molly hugged me so tightly that, for a second, I thought she still had vampire strength. “I really, really hope I see you tomorrow. I know you can figure this out.”
This one time, I let her hug me as long as she wanted.
As I pulled away from the hotel parking lot, the cell phone in my pocket began the opening chords of “Werewolves of London.” I fished the phone out of my pocket. “Hi, Will.”
“Scarlett.” His voice was grave. “I have this address. You need to get over there right now. It’s not a job, but—”
“Will...I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” He sounded surprised. “I’ve never heard you say that.”
What did I have to lose? “Dashiell gave me until dawn to solve the La Brea Park thing, or he would assume I was involved. I’m sorry; I have to work on this right now.”
There was silence on the line, and I knew Will was thinking about the ultimatum. He could theoretically challenge Dashiell on my behalf, but as much as Will seemed to like me, he knew full well what a war with the vampires would do to this town. If he went to bat for me, there’d be casualties, and plenty of them. Not to mention the fact that the Old World’s LA experiment—allowing all three factions control in the same city—would be a resounding and bloody failure. On the other hand, if Dashiell killed me...Well, it’d be sad, but it was just one death, and I wasn’t even a werewolf.
I wasn’t even mad about it.
Finally, he spoke. “Scarlett, I didn’t know. But I think I might have someone who can help you. You need to get to this address as fast as you can.”
I rubbed my eyes. I knew Will probably wasn’t being deliberately cryptic, but I was all out of patience. “Please, Will, could you just tell me what’s going on?”
“I found the second null. Or actually, she found me.”
When I really stopped and thought about it, I realized that, all along, I had assumed that the other null was evil.
Obviously, he or she was a bad guy, a murderer, and when we found him/her, I would call Jesse and he would do some really inspired cop-threatening, and then we’d know everything we needed in order to go to Dashiell.
I certainly hadn’t expected her to be a fifteen-year-old rape victim.
Will had sketched in the details for me: Until a few months ago, Corrine Tanger was a cheerful, well-adjusted teenager from an ultra-religious family—her father was a Pentecostal minister, and her mother was the church secretary. Two months earlier, however, Corrine had been attacked by her slimy biology teacher. She hadn’t gone into too much detail with Will—understandably—but the impression he’d gotten was that Corrine had been raped. The girl was too ashamed to tell her parents, and then the teacher started hinting about another “get-together” after school. Desperate and haunted, Corrine thought she’d found a way out when a stranger had approached her and offered a deal—if she accompanied him to kill the vampires in the park, he would make the teacher stop. The girl had seen it as the only way out of her own nightmare. She was not exactly the mustache-twirling villain I had been picturing since the case began.
As I drove to Corrine’s house in Glendale, I was so nervous that I had to clutch the steering wheel hard to keep my hands from shaking. What had happened to her was twisted and tragic and just so
wrong
, and I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. It wasn’t as if I would be showing off a model new life for her to step into. In fact, I realized, there was very little I could even tell her about what we are. My knowledge about nulls as a group is limited to pretty much what I’d told Cruz that night on the way to Dashiell’s.
Not for the first time, I deeply wished I had asked Olivia more questions. What would I do when Corrine had questions I couldn’t answer? And I’d never really known anyone who had been assaulted like that—should I mention how sorry I was? Avoid the topic all together? I felt a sudden flood of grief. I missed my mom. She always knew the right thing to say in any situation. I never do.
Get out of your head, Scarlett
, I told myself sternly.
It’s not about you right now
. One thing I knew, beyond hesitation or doubt, was that I had to help this girl. The way Olivia
should
have helped me.
The Tanger family lived in one of those Wisteria Lane–type suburbs, where the houses are all tidy and large and nearly identical. These lots were small, but every single house on her street looked well cared for, like the people who lived there took pride in their homes. It was a lot like Kirsten’s neighborhood, actually, but with less money thrown around. I took two wrong turns trying to distinguish the different streets, and finally pulled into the Tangers’ driveway a little after seven. When the van was off, I took a deep breath, flexing and unflexing my aching fingers. Will had helped Corrine work up a cover story: I was a math tutor for one of her friends. The friend was sick, so I was picking up her homework and hearing about the day’s lesson. Will said the father is pretty overprotective, but I am young, white, and female. Hopefully it would be enough to get a few minutes alone with Corrine. And hopefully no one would ask me anything about math.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The woman who answered the door was about fifty and had dark hair shot through with silver and the kind of crinkles around her eyes that meant she smiled all the time. She introduced herself as Mrs. Tanger and invited me into the foyer.
“It’s so nice of you to stop by,” she said kindly. “I’m sure Amanda will appreciate getting a head start on the work she’s missed.”
“Um, yeah,” I mumbled.
Mrs. Tanger wore a pale-pink J.Crew sweater set and an actual pearl necklace on top of dark tailored pants. I tugged self-consciously at my dark-green hoodie. There were bleach stains on my jeans. I’d been going for “college student,” but now I just felt like a homeless person.
“My husband is on an overnight retreat to Palmdale, but Corry’s upstairs in her room,” she told me. “It’s straight up the stairs, second door on the left. I’ll be in the kitchen if you girls need anything.” She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Corry’s little brother Jonah needs two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale tomorrow, and of course he just told me now.” She gave me a hurried wave and headed deeper into the house.