He sighed impatiently, as if that were a foolish question. “Of course, it would have been simpler to just destroy Joanna, but she happened to have powerful friends, Ariadne among them. We don’t kill our own lightly, Scarlett. To have her destroyed for harming a few human children would have created certain...tensions.”
Created tensions. I clenched my hands together, my fingernails whitening, so I wouldn’t punch him. He could easily decide to just shoot me right there and be done with it.
“With respect, Dashiell, I think that might have been a mistake,” I said very carefully. “Because Jared Hess is still out there, and I don’t think he’s done mourning his sister. He killed Joanna and Abraham, he killed the only witness, and since he couldn’t kill Olivia, he tried to set up her protégée.” I explained the weird timing of the last two murders, how by all odds I should have arrived on scene just in time to get caught. “He’s going after everyone involved, Dashiell, and you made the call to Olivia. He’s gotten information from somewhere; he’s going to know that you ordered the setup. If he’s cleaning up loose ends...You’ve gotta be on his list.”
There was a long pause while Dashiell stared at the photos. I gazed at him, wondering if his deal was still on the table. Wasn’t this enough? Did I still have to find the actual killer? Didn’t Dashiell have plenty of thugs to handle that kind of thing? I could just send one of them to Corry’s rendezvous, no null included, and—
“I appreciate your efforts, Scarlett, but I’m afraid this changes nothing,” he said at last, interrupting my thoughts. “I am tempted to not even let you leave. It would solve so many problems if I made it known that you’d confessed, and I had simply killed you.”
My eyes went straight to his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap, altogether too close to his gun. “But Jared Hess—”
He held up a hand, glaring at me, and my mouth snapped shut by itself. “You still do not understand, do you, Scarlett? I don’t care a thing for Jared Hess. If I simply kill you, I will remove the only power he has over me, will I not? After all, you still haven’t found this so-called second null, have you?”
I swallowed again. Corry couldn’t be part of this. She still had a chance. “No.”
“So you are still the best suspect, at least from my point of view. I kill you, and even if Hess comes for me, he will not make it so far as the front door before we kill him. And my reputation, as it were, will be restored.”
As he spoke, he looked more and more thoughtful, and my legs started to go all rubbery with fear. I let the silence linger for a moment, then blurted, “But you’re not going to do that, right?”
His attention returned to me, and he tapped his fingers along the antique blotter on his desk. “Not yet. You may thank Beatrice for that; she seems unusually fond of you. I have promised her that I would let you be until our deadline. In, what? Ten hours.”
As I left Dashiell’s and hurried for my van, I worked to push aside my panic and concentrate. What had I learned? Jesse’s theory was probably correct—Jared Hess had to be the killer. But so what? How did that help me? I glanced at my watch: 10:00. I still had an hour and a half to go before the meeting with Jay at Corry’s place. I tried Jesse’s phone again, but this time it didn’t even ring, which probably meant that the phone was off. So now what was I supposed to do?
I needed Jesse, I decided. If he wouldn’t answer his phone, then I would just have to go get him. I would go to the precinct. Just as I started the van, though, my cell phone began to howl “Black Magic Woman.” Kirsten. I answered, because even in the middle of the most frightening crisis of my life, Olivia’s training still stuck, damn her.
“Hey, Kirsten—”
“Is this Scarlett Bernard?”
I blinked in surprise. The voice was panicked, frightened—and unquestionably male.
“Uh, yeah. I’m sorry, who is this?”
“My name is Paul Dickerson. Kirsten is my wife.”
My heart sank through the floor of the van and into the freeway. “Tell me what’s happening, Mr. Dickerson.”
His voice raised an octave, hysterical. “He took her. He had a thing, a...a stun gun, and he took her. I found your number in her phone. It said, Emergencies. This is a fucking emergency. Can you come?”
I suddenly understood. Jared Hess didn’t just hate Joanna or the vampires, he hated the Old World. That was why he’d killed Ronnie, who really hadn’t seen anything in the clearing. The vampires, the werewolf...And now he had Kirsten. God.
But then I remembered how Hess had used Ronnie’s cell phone to text Will, and I hesitated. “Mr. Dickerson, what does Kirsten keep on her kitchen counter? The big granite counter by the sink?”
“What?”
“Please, just answer.”
“It’s a...What do you call it? A pestle and mortar. She has two.”
“I’m on my way.”
For the first time since I’d started my new life in the Old World, I was shattering my speeding rule.
As I raced toward Kirsten’s, I tried calling Corry’s cell, but the recorded operator’s voice informed me that the voice mailbox was unavailable. I tried Eli, who was working and must not have heard his cell, and Jesse, who still didn’t answer. He couldn’t be that mad at me, could he? With our lives on the line? I pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Where the hell was my backup, dammit! I was not a detective! I did not carry a gun! This was bullshit!