How to Party with a Killer Vampire (29 page)

I thanked him again. He hung up.

I sat in the car a few more minutes, trying to figure out where Jonas might have gone and to guess which ordinary citizen nearby was actually an undercover cop. I wondered if Angelica knew where Jonas might be and thought about running back up to her place. But Roman had sent her back to bed. She didn’t seem in any shape to answer questions. And currently she was without a cell phone.

Dead end.

Dead ends. The thought reverberated in my head. I called Brad—the nurse said he was sleeping—so I decided to drive to the cemetery and see if I could find out how the pond dredgers were doing. I figured I’d be safe enough with them around, especially if Detective Melvin had an officer there to keep an eye on Otto.

On the ride over, I thought about which of my suspects had police watching them: Lucas, Angelica, Jonas, and Otto. Did that mean he didn’t suspect them? Of course, it also meant he could keep an eye on them in case they did something suspicious. I guessed Melvin wasn’t quite as nonchalant about this investigation as I’d originally thought, especially now that his friend Brad had been assaulted.

I drove through the quiet cemetery and spotted three men hooking up what looked like a minihouseboat to a long trailer flatbed attached to a large truck. The letters on the truck read “San Francisco Bay Area Dredging.” Apparently they had finished and were about to leave. I parked, jumped out of the car, and walked over to the one wearing a pair of rubber overalls, covered in filth and mud. His red, weatherbeaten face no doubt had stories to tell.

“Hi, I’m Presley Parker,” I said, keeping my hands in my pockets. There was no telling where his hands had been. “I’m the one who asked the police to check the pond. Did you find anything?”

He gestured to a pile of sludge-covered garbage at the edge of the pond. “A bunch of plastic flowers, old teddy bears, some broken headstones, and a chair . . .”

A chair?

“And . . .” He pulled two small plastic bags from one of his deep pockets. Inside each was a muddy cell phone.

“Great!” I said. One of them had to be Spidey’s. But whom did the other one belong to?

“I hope it was worth the cost,” he said. “It ain’t cheap.”

I figured Detective Melvin would probably bill me.

“And it ain’t pleasant,” he added.

Yuck. Another dirty job, like crime scene cleaning, but someone had to do it. Luckily, not me.

“Are you taking the phones to the police right now?”

“As soon as we get back.”

“I could do that for you,” I offered.

He smiled, and the whiskers on his face stood up. “Sorry. Against policy.”

I shrugged. I’d tried. “When will they be there?”

“Should be within the hour if we’re lucky.”

I watched as the truck and trailer backed up, then headed down the lane, pulling the dredger behind them. How long would it be before Melvin found out what, if anything, was on those cell phones?

With all my running around, the day had passed quickly. The fog had rolled in, and once again the cemetery was in the shadows of twilight. I hadn’t eaten lunch and was starving. I figured I could grab a bite at the hospital cafeteria and eat while visiting Brad.

Just then I heard a noise coming from up the hill. I looked up and saw a light on in Otto’s trailer. I decided to take a quick detour and hike up the brush-covered grade to see if he’d spotted any shady characters around the cemetery lately.

As I reached the top of the incline, I noticed the toolshed was unlocked and the door was standing open. Hadn’t Otto said he’d planned to be more careful about locking that shed after his shovel was used to kill those two men?

Maybe he needed a reminder.

I walked to the trailer and knocked on the door.

No answer.

No doubt he was doing his cemetery rounds, acting like the crazy person I’d once thought he was, making sure the dead were left in peace and the living didn’t bother them.

“Otto?” I called out.

I heard a noise inside.

“Otto?” He had to be there. I knocked again.

My phone trilled. It was a text message from Detective Melvin.
Where are you???

I started to answer, when the door to the trailer opened.

An officer stood in the narrow doorway, his hand on the gun that was tucked into his gun belt. Unusually tan for the season, he was sporting a thick brown mustache and cop-style sunglasses, his brown hair visible under his police cap.

Sunglasses inside? At dusk?

I took a step back. “Hi, I’m Presley Parker. I came to see Otto.”

“Sorry,” the officer said, his voice low. “He’s under police protection.”

The door closed in my face.

I blinked. That was weird. I guess these guys were told to trust no one, not even a party planner like me. I got down from the bottom step, wondering what to do with myself now, when I remembered Melvin’s text message. He wanted to know where I was—probably because I wasn’t on Treasure Island under his officer’s watchful eye.

I checked my watch. I needed to go to the hospital and see Brad before returning home and catching up on work. With the holiday season approaching, I was going to be flooded with requests for parties—hopefully none with another cemetery venue.

And there would be a cop at the hospital, just like there was here, so I’d be perfectly safe.

I started to return to my car when I saw the toolshed door open and remembered I’d meant to alert Otto. I could at least tell the police officer who was guarding him—or close it myself.

I peered inside. The tools were all lined up in their designated spots, except for the shovel that had been confiscated by the police. Still, there were plenty of other tools that could be used as murder weapons. I started to close the door, when I heard another noise—a crash—coming from inside Otto’s trailer.

The hairs standing at attention on my arms told me something was wrong.

I thought about the officer. Why was he inside the trailer instead of outside?

And what was up with the Hollywood sunglasses?

I felt a cold chill in my bones.

I grabbed the first tool I could reach—the clawed hand fork—and dashed back to the trailer door. I hoped I wasn’t too late.

I pulled out my cell and dialed 911 as I pounded on the door.

“Otto!” I yelled. “Are you all right?”

A muffled voice.

A thud.

Silence.

“Otto!” I pounded again.

The operator came on. An electronic voice said, “City and state . . .”

No! I had dialed 411, not 911!

The door flew open. The police officer, no longer wearing his aviator sunglasses, glared down at me.

Before I could react, he grabbed my arm and yanked me up and into the trailer.

I hit my head on something on the door frame of the small entry and fell to the floor, momentarily stunned. I closed my eyes to keep the room from spinning. When I opened them, I found myself lying half under Otto’s kitchen table, next to a pair of muddy boots.

The boots were attached to a pair of legs bound together with duct tape.

Otto.

I rolled over on my back and blinked, trying to clear my blurred vision and see Otto’s face.

Another face leaned down close and grinned. The police cap was gone, along with the brown hair; it had been replaced by short black hair.

The thick mustache dangled from one side of the man’s upper lip.

I knew I was looking into the eyes of the killer—the killer who was now pointing a gun at me.

The killer was Jonas Jones.

“Jonas!” I cried, peering at him from under the table.

That I was stunned to see the young actor posing as a police officer was an understatement, to say nothing of his holding a gun. Was it a prop, like Raj’s?

“What are you doing?”

Jonas bent over and reached for my foot to drag me out from under the table. I kicked him off and scooted back, tucking myself into a far corner among the cobwebs and tracked-in dirt, along with an old sock.

“Come out of there or I’ll shoot Otto!” Jonas yelled at me. He might have been acting, but the threat sounded real. And Otto was in no position to defend himself. Just before I’d hit the floor, I’d caught a glimpse of him lying on the tabletop, not moving.

“They’ll hear the gunshot,” I said. Bent up under the table, I pulled my legs to my chest, trying to keep as far away from Jonas as possible. This was not easy under the small table, and I knew he’d come up with a way to get me out, sooner or later.

Jonas laughed. “Seriously? Who’s going to hear it? There’s no one around, remember?”

“The cops. Detective Melvin sent an officer over. He should be here any minute.”

“Where do you think I got the uniform, Presley?”

Oh God. Had he killed the officer? He must have—he was wearing the cop’s uniform.

And waving around the cop’s gun.

How had he managed it? I wondered, then realized this was a cold-blooded killer who had no regard for human life. My heart raced; I broke out in a sweat.

“What do you want, Jonas? You can’t just keep killing people.”

“I’ve done pretty well so far,” he said smugly. “Now come on out or you’ll be the cause of this old man’s death. You don’t want that, do you?” Taking a knee, he waved the gun at me.

Although my body was racing with fear-induced adrenaline, my head was clearing. I remembered I’d had something in my hand when I knocked on the trailer door.

The clawed garden fork.

I felt around beside me and found it behind Otto’s feet. Jonas shouldn’t have seen me grasp the tool, obscured by Otto’s boots and the dark corner. I slid it behind my back and gripped it tightly.

“What happens if I come out? Won’t you just kill both of us?”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing. “But it’ll make things easier. For all of us.”

“Really? How so?” I asked, stalling for time.

“I have to set the scene,” he said calmly. “Like all good films, an actor needs a scene to make his role seem real. I’m going to make it look like crazy old Otto shot you, and then knowing he was finally going to get caught for the other murders, killed himself, after setting fire to the trailer. At least, that’s what the cops will think after they investigate.”

He gestured with his hand for me to come out.

I pulled back and tightened my grasp on the garden tool.

“Your plan won’t work,” I said. “Otto doesn’t have a gun. Only a rifle.”

“I know. That’s why I’d prefer you come out so I can shoot you with the rifle. But if I have to, I’ll use the gun. The police will just figure Otto wrestled it from the cop they sent to watch him. I don’t mind ad-libbing, but I’d rather stick to the script. I am, after all, a director’s dream of an actor.”

Sweat was trailing down my back. My forehead was throbbing from the bump I’d taken, my hands felt slimy around the hand fork, and my breathing had accelerated to the point where I thought I might hyperventilate.

I had to distract Jonas if I wanted stay alive, even for a few more minutes.

“Why, Jonas? Why did you murder Spidey and that paparazzo? You’re a talented actor, on the brink of stardom, I’m sure. Why ruin your career and your life?”

“None of that matters now. What matters is Angelica. We’re destined to be together, and as soon as she divorces her husband, we will be. I couldn’t let anyone like Spidey or Bodie get in the way of that.” Jonas waved the gun as he spoke as if it were a theatrical prop. But I knew better.

“How was Spidey a threat? He was harmless!”

“Not really. See, he overheard Angelica and me talking that night about her leaving her husband and us running away together. He had a crush on her too—who didn’t? But he came up to me later and threatened to tell the paparazzi about our plans. If word got out that she was actually married and fooling around with me on the side, I was afraid it would jeopardize my career, which, as you know, is just about to take off with this latest film. Call me old-school, but I didn’t want to take the risk. He thought if he threatened me, I’d break up with Angelica and he’d have a shot at her.”

Apparently he still didn’t know that Angelica’s so-called secret marriage was just a cover-up for her illness. And what he called “love” had actually become obsession.

“So you stopped him.”

“I had to. I sent him a text from Angelica’s phone, asking him to meet me—her—in the cemetery after the party setup. When he was alone, waiting for her, I sneaked up behind him and bashed him over the head with the crazy old man’s shovel.” He laughed. “It sounded like a pumpkin getting smashed.”