That line of thinking got Jesse exactly nowhere, so he went back to trying to figure out how the two victims might be connected. He spent the next hour on his laptop, trying to match both Kate and Leah to the same school, gym, church, anything. It was endlessly frustrating. There was plenty of information on the Internet, but there were also plenty of potential connections that he couldn’t look into. They might have just used the same dry cleaner as the nova werewolf or something.
Jesse paged through Scarlett’s notes again. Both women had been involved in an animal rights groups: Leah had been in PAW, which—judging by the amateur website—was a fairly small, local thing. The PAW members had a web page and a Facebook group, and they got together in person once a quarter to discuss the wolf situation in America. Jesse got the sense from their site that it was mostly about getting together to drink coffee and bitch about legislature.
Kate, on the other hand, had been part of Humans for the Protection of Animals, which was enormous. Jesse spent some time investigating whether the two groups had worked together on anything—a fund-raiser, volunteer opportunity, charity work. There was nothing online to suggest the two groups had so much as encountered each other.
He sent both PAW and HPA a message identifying himself and requesting that a senior member of the group contact him immediately. Then, bleary-eyed and still sore, he pushed the laptop away and finally fell into bed around four thirty.
Just two hours later, however, his phone began to vibrate insistently on the nightstand. Jesse was only dimly aware of its buzzing, and he felt a sleepy surge of gratitude when it finally danced its way off the table and fell to the cheap carpet with a dull thump. But seconds later it began to buzz from the floor, and with a groan Jesse reached down and fished around for it. He cracked his eyelids open and squinted at the screen, seeing a small picture of Glory. That was unusual enough to get his eyelids all the way up. Gloria “Glory” Sherman was the lead forensic pathology technician at Jesse’s LAPD station. She was also the only other human Jesse knew of who was aware of the Old World.
He answered the phone with more of a grunt than an actual greeting.
“Jesse,” Glory said in a low voice. “I’ve got one that you need to see.”
“One what?” he mumbled.
“One murder?” Glory answered, her voice slightly annoyed. “It’s weird. And our mutual acquaintance told me that I was to report anything really weird to you.”
“He did?” Jesse said, digging the heel of his hand into his eye socket, trying to wake up. It was a stupid question. Of course Dashiell was using Glory as a scout for Old World trouble. Most of the time, Jesse had been told, humans who learned about the Old World had their minds pressed to forget, and then went about their lives. If time or trauma didn’t allow for that, though, they were given a choice: join the Old World or be killed by it. Since the odds of successfully turning into a vampire or werewolf had gotten so low, this was often a death sentence, regardless of what they chose. Dashiell was willing to allow Glory to remain alive and human, however, in exchange for the occasional forensic favor. But he also kept leverage—he’d made it clear to Glory that he knew everything about her two children, including where to find them. If Dashiell had told Glory to keep Jesse informed of weird homicides, that’s exactly what she would do.
“Yeah. After that car accident case last month, remember?”
Sitting up now, Jesse gritted his teeth. The car accident in question had been part of the Olivia Powell investigation, nearly two weeks earlier, but he’d agreed to help Scarlett destroy crime scenes only a few days ago. The cardinal vampire was playing the long game. Typical. “How could I forget,” Jesse said wryly. “But I can’t come in right now, Glory. I’m on leave.”
“Just trust me, okay?”
A thought pinged in his tired brain. “Was it a woman? Mauled, or scratched, or something like that?”
“No,” her voice had lowered, and he could just picture her cupping one hand around the receiver. “Not a woman.”
Probably not the nova, then. “Glory . . . ,” he complained. “I’ve had about two hours of sleep, and I’m on leave anyway—”
“Hang on,” she interrupted, a new tone in her voice. “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”
There was a muffling on the phone, and then another familiar voice said, “Hey, Jess.”
All trace of sleepiness vanished when Jesse heard his ex-girlfriend on the phone. “Runa?” he said stupidly, like they were playing This is Your Life.
“Yeah. Listen, you gotta get down here.”
“I’m supposed to be off,” he said, hesitation in his voice now. Runa Vore was a witch who had taken a job as a crime scene photographer, partly in order to get closer to Jesse. Things had been deeply awkward between the two of them since he’d learned who she really was and broken up with her, so if she was willing to talk to him now . . . Jesse kicked off the covers and started for his dresser.
“Who’s in charge of the scene?” he asked, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could dig for clothes.
“D1s McHugh and Bine,” she replied, and Jesse almost whistled. He’d heard of McHugh, a veteran Homicide Special detective who was a couple of pay grades above Jesse. Bine must be his partner. Homicide Special usually took the really weird cases, so it was possible that their presence was just a coincidence. It was also possible, though, that Dashiell had gotten Homicide Special assigned to the case to prove to Jesse that he could. “Bine’s a friend; I’ll get you in,” she went on, urgency in her voice. “I’m texting the location. Hurry up.”
She hung up the phone, and Jesse went to get his gun.
Chapter 24