Dead Spots (2 page)

“Scarlett,” Dashiell began, drawing out the
a
as usual. “There is a situation in La Brea Park. I will meet you at the entrance in fifteen minutes.”

“Uh, okay. I’m in Calabasas now, on a Kirsten case, but I’ll be there as fast—” I realized that I was talking to myself and shut the phone, glancing at the clock.
Shit
. Even with no traffic on the freeway, there was no way I could get to the entrance of La Brea
Park in fifteen minutes; it was impossible. And Dashiell was coming himself, in person? He might be the most powerful creature in Los Angeles, but like most vampires, Dashiell stays the hell away from me if at all possible, not wanting to age even a few minutes.

It had to be really bad.

I briefly considered speeding, but only in that way you think about something you know you’ll never do. That’s one of the rules: don’t get pulled over. My van is checked weekly to make sure all the lights are working and the gas and oil tanks are filled, and it undergoes a full inspection and detailing twice a year. If the cops pulled me over right now, all they would find was a dead dove, but even that would be bad. I had no idea whether they’d be able to figure out that I’d broken its neck backward, but even something small like that could get the rumor snowball rolling, or at best, tarnish my reputation with the supernatural community. In my business, there’s no such thing as an overreaction.

I drove south on the 405 highway as fast as I dared, three miles over the speed limit, but I was still another fifteen minutes late to meet Dashiell. La Brea Park closes at sunset, so the actual entrance driving to get into the park was chained and locked. As I pulled up to the gate, he materialized out of the shadows, a fortyish-looking vampire in impeccable black pants and a deep-green cashmere T-shirt. His dark-brown hair was a little mussed, and his blandly handsome face looked dangerously angry. I was definitely in trouble.

I parked the van at the curb and rolled my window down, turning the engine off. Dash took a few steps toward me, but stayed well out of my ten-foot radius.

“You are late,” he stage-whispered. “Our situation has grown more complicated.”

No point in groveling. “I’m sorry. Tell me what’s happening.”

“I got a text message from a private number and came to see for myself,” he said shortly. “There are three bodies ahead; they
have been torn apart. There is blood, so I do not think it was the vampires. Perhaps one of Will’s people.” Vampires, as a rule, don’t waste blood. Will is the head of the local werewolf pack. The werewolves in Los Angeles occasionally run around in the parks that close at sunset. LA is one of the rare cities where the Old World creatures share territory more or less in peace, though when push comes to shove, Dashiell is in charge. Witches and werewolves aren’t immortal, after all. It’s an uneasy peace, darkened by preceding centuries of tension, and it works best when everyone sticks to their own kind. Usually the vampires take care of vampire business, and the wolves take care of wolf business, but there is some overlap, especially when the perpetrator is unknown.

“What’s the complication?”

“A jogger ran through here two minutes ago, and she saw the bodies. You have only a few minutes before the police arrive.” He pointed toward a nearby clump of trees. “Go.” And just like that, he vanished.

I grabbed my duffel and sprinted toward the trees, fumbling to pull out a flashlight as I went. In cases where there’s a time crunch, you have to prioritize, and priority one would be the bodies. There would still be evidence without bodies, but the police couldn’t do much with a few bloodstains outdoors in a public park. I raced through the trees, trying to avoid roots and rocks, and stopped dead a quarter mile in, where I found a small clearing that had been painted red.

I stared. I’ve seen dead bodies before, of course, and plenty of blood, but this was...very different. At first it just looked like meat, like one of those movies where the monster is blown to bits and the pink pieces fall down everywhere. Except, this time, the monster was actually people. I counted heads and came up with three. Their bodies had been carved open at the stomach, and the insides were pulled outside. All four limbs had also been separated from each body, though there was way too much blood for me to determine which had come first, the evisceration or the dismemberment. The limbs sat in a pile in the center of the clearing, with the body cavities and body insides stretched around them like petals on a flower. It was almost a
pattern
, and I suddenly thought of the squares on a patchwork quilt. The smell of blood—and other things—was overpowering, even to my human nose, and I realized that the blood was
everywhere
. Splattered on the scrubby little plants, the tree trunks. I saw enough spilled blood to wonder if the killer had deliberately hit every artery. Maybe he had. Fear suddenly wobbled in my stomach. I tried taking a woozy step forward, but the shock made it feel as if I were slogging through gelatin.

That was my first big mistake: I hesitated. My kind of crime scene cleanup is all about moving quickly—not only are you generally in a hurry, but you never want to take too much time to think about what you’re looking at. This, however, was the worst scene
I’d ever been to, and I probably stared for a full minute, though I wasn’t exactly aware of the time passing. Finally, without taking my eyes off the carnage, I slid a hand into my duffel’s outside pocket and pulled out a heavy garbage bag, the thickest Hefty has ever made.

I had just pulled apart the bag’s folds, ready to snap it open, when a cop ran into the clearing from the opposite side. Suddenly, my head cleared and time sped back up.

“Police!” he hollered, gun pointed at my chest. “Show me your hands!” I let the garbage bag flutter to the ground and obediently raised my hands to shoulder height. He was young, around thirty, and Latino—and very handsome, even for LA. Under his leather jacket, I saw that his badge swung on a chain at his neck, just like the cops in movies. His gun barrel never strayed from me as he glanced about the scene and then swore in Spanish, his face paling to a sickly gray.

“Did you do this?” he demanded bluntly, and I just shook my head.

“Are you the only one?” I said stupidly, my tongue still thick.

“The rest are coming. Don’t you move.” He began to circle around the gore, stepping carefully on the scrubby grass. “Easy, now.”

He reached slowly for the handcuffs on his belt, and I realized for the first time the kind of trouble I was in. Even if I could convince the police that I wasn’t the murderer, I would be on their radar forever. My reputation for discretion would be ruined, if it wasn’t already, and I would probably lose my job. I took an automatic step backward, and then three things happened at once: I heard the first sirens, the cop opened his mouth to scream at me, and the werewolf burst into the clearing between us.

It was a male gray wolf, thin but still unmistakably, unnaturally huge, and it ran at an angle pointing straight toward the bodies, probably smelling the meat. The cop swung his gun toward
the new threat, looking frightened, and the wolf saw this and tried to reverse directions. But it was too late: with its last few steps, it skidded just a little too close to me. I felt it cross the edge of my whatever, my blankness, and then the change happened in midair. A wolf had taken the leap, and a man crashed to the ground, naked and tumbling. He fell facing slightly away from me, and I saw the cop actually drop his gun with the shock of it.

This time I didn’t hesitate. I turned on my heel and raced back to the van. I threw open the driver’s side door and tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, trying to think over the sound of the police sirens. I started the van and threw it into drive, but instead of turning back toward home, I took the first left, across from the park entrance, and found myself in a small middle-class subdivision. Gotta love LA, where you can cross any street and be in a whole different town. The houses had bars on the first-story windows but not the second, which meant it was a decent, if not completely secure, neighborhood. I took two more quick turns and parked the van on the street near a house that still had its lights on. I turned off the motor and squashed myself down onto the floor in front of my seat. It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t think I’d be able to get all the way to the highway before the cops came flying by. I tucked my hair under a dark baseball cap, opened the door, and darted around the van to slap on the big logo magnet I have that says
Hunt Bros. Cleaning Service
. Fake, but since my tax returns say that I am a professional housecleaner, I figured I could always piece together a story if needed. Any eagle-eyed insomniac neighbors wouldn’t have much to go on, just a cleaning service van parked outside a house where people were still awake. I just hoped that the cop at the crime scene hadn’t seen what kind of car I drove. I sent Dash a text message, shielding the phone’s glow with one cupped hand, and crammed myself down between the two front bucket seats to wait it out.

My mind was churning, questions ping-ponging around the inside of my head. What on earth would have done what I’d seen in
the clearing? In five years doing crime scenes, I’d never encountered that kind of brutality. With modern technology and modern cautiousness, it’s rare that I even get a complete dead human body anymore. That’s the thing about LA: it might be the second-biggest city in the country, but in the Old World, it has about the prominence of Tucson. This town is a pretty undesirable place for the supernatural to live: there’s not enough space for the wolves, who can’t afford to be stuck in traffic on full moon nights, and the city is too young and too spacey for the vampires. There are probably more witches than anything else, but so many of them are a joke, and most of the rest don’t play with the really dangerous magics. Sometimes one of the werewolves will lose a limb in a fight, or the witches will hex something wrong like that poor dove, but neither faction has many actual casualties anymore. Even the vampires, who regularly feed on humans, have had centuries to learn how to feed without crossing that line to where the victim will die. I’m occasionally called in when the new vamps accidentally kill, but even then, it’s all very obvious. Hungry vampire equals dead human.

But what the hell would have done what I’d just seen? Thinking about the scene in the clearing, I realized that I’d never really had a chance: even if the cops had taken a little longer to get there, there was no way in hell I would have been able to clean up that...mess. It would have taken one person hours just to collect all the body parts. What could I have done?

When thirty minutes had passed, I scooted up into my seat and stepped out to get my logo magnet. Then I tossed my baseball cap on the passenger seat and carefully steered the van farther into the subdivision. It took me a while to find my way back to a major street, but I finally pulled onto Pico and followed it west. When I was sure I knew my way home, I took a deep breath and called Dashiell.

“What happened?” he demanded, before I’d said hello.

“It was too late. There was a cop on scene before I could do much. He saw one of the wolves, Dashiell.”

“He
what
?” I explained about the werewolf in the clearing. “Who is this cop?” he barked angrily, as though I had personally invited the guy along as my date.

“Uh...I didn’t get a name.”

As a rule, vampires do not sigh in seething annoyance, but Dashiell made a special exception for me. “This would not have happened if you had simply arrived on time, Scarlett.”

“I know it’s bad. I just couldn’t make it there.” I bit down on any further excuses, not bothering to point out that I wouldn’t have had the time to clean up that mess anyway. I’d known Dashiell long enough to know that he was not a big fan of apologies. Apologizing is weak, and weakness tends to make vampires think of prey.

“Scarlett, now is not a good time,” he said. I automatically glanced at the clock on the dashboard. I keep track of the dawn, for obvious reasons, and it was only twenty minutes away. That was going to hurt us: if I can’t get to a crime scene for some reason, Dashiell has to throw his weight and money around to get things buried, and now he wouldn’t be able to do so until after sunset. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? “You will come to the estate tonight at eleven thirty to discuss this further.”

I chewed on my lip, deciding what to say. Screw it. “Dashiell, could you please just tell me if you’re gonna try to kill me?”

He actually laughed, but it was a dry, grave chuckle that made me shiver. “Scarlett, I am very displeased. But if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t invite you politely. And there would be no
trying
.” The line went dead.

I tossed the phone into the baseball cap on the seat next to me. This was very bad. I’d skated by for eight months with only a handful of incidents each week. Of course it figured that the one time I got two scenes in one night, it would be the most gruesome murder I’d ever seen. That kind of killing was going to get a lot
of attention—enough that I suspected even Dashiell wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on it. He would be furious with me, and that was not good for either my professional reputation or my personal safety. He might not be able to bite me, but despite our ability to extinguish magic, nulls like me aren’t invulnerable. We’re just as fragile as any other human being, and all Dashiell really had to do was buy a gun or have one of his personal goons beat me to death. I heard myself chortle, an edge of hysteria escaping my throat.
Who would they get
, I thought,
to clean up my body?

It was ten minutes to dawn when I dragged myself through the back door of the compact West Hollywood house that I share with my housemate and landlady, Molly. Who, I should mention, is also a vampire.

“You’re home!” she squealed, rushing toward me at much-faster-than-human speed. She had on designer sweatpants and a Paul Frank T-shirt with a picture of an angry-looking kitten biting a dog. Molly looks about twenty, with shoulder-length hair (currently red) and the body of a high school tennis star, but she’s really a hundred and twenty-something years old, born in Wales the same summer that Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the East End of London. She was turned into a vampire at the age of seventeen. I’ve never heard the full story on how it happened, but I get the impression that it wasn’t accidental—that was right around the time when skirmishes between the vampires and the witches led to the vampires becoming much more thoughtful about who they let into their undead club. They went after a lot of poor, pretty girls, like Molly had been.