The body had a sort of mummified look: most of the flesh had wasted away, but a few tendrils of hair and skin still clung to the skeleton—male, judging by the clothes. He was wearing a simple button-down men’s shirt and dark slacks that weren’t new but still contrasted heavily with the decrepit skeleton. He’d also been wearing black loafers, but they’d fallen off when his body shriveled up and were lying on the floor near his feet. In the middle of his chest, a gaping hole had ruined the nice line of the shirt. I looked closely and saw the little wood splinters. He’d been staked. Vampires die when their heads are detached from their bodies, or when their hearts are destroyed, or by fire. You don’t technically need a wooden stake to destroy a heart; that’s just something that worked well in the Middle Ages. We have better weapons now, but the stake is a classic, and a lot of people believe that its long history makes it more powerful.
I looked around, but didn’t see anything stake shaped. I didn’t really smell him, just the faintest whiff of old decay. The vampire had been a vampire for a couple of years, at least. I was pretty confident now that this wasn’t a trap, but I was still glad when Esther hovered near the stairs, staying in my line of vision. I dropped my oversize duffel bag of supplies and crouched down, balancing on my heels as I pulled out a thick, disposable plastic body bag and my surgical gloves. “You found him like this?” I asked. “You didn’t pull the stake out?” Vampires don’t die very often in LA, and when they do, Dashiell has to know about it. If it had been after sunset I would have called him immediately after my first conversation with Esther, but since he’d be unavailable for a few more hours I’d have to remember all the details myself and fill him in later that night.
“No, I think she took it with her.”
“She?” I said. “Do you know who did this?” Excellent. I could simply tell Dashiell and be done with the matter.
Esther nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think it was his…friend. She’s a vampire too, but she gives me the creeps.” She shuddered and wrapped her stick arms around herself.
“Know anything else about her?” I asked, mostly focused on spreading the body bag out next to the corpse.
“Just her name. He introduced her as Olivia.”
Chapter 20
Olivia’s name hit me like a slap, and I lost my balance, toppling over onto the carpet. Fully seated on the floor, I stared at Esther, and then back at the desiccated corpse. The shape was right, but just in case, I asked her for the vampire’s name.
“Albert,” she whispered. “His name was Albert.”
So Olivia had killed her accomplice. One of her accomplices. I had no idea what to say next, and I suddenly couldn’t stand being in the same room as the corpse. “Can we go up to the kitchen and talk for a second?”
Shrugging and biting at a fingernail, she led me back up the stairs. I sat down at the card table and nodded toward the other chair. Esther sat.
“How did you find me?” I began. “How did you know where I’d be?”
“I didn’t. But Albert gave me your phone number in case of emergencies. He said if something happened to him, I should call you.”
That seemed odd. Jesse had said that Albert was off the grid, on the run from Dashiell. Why would Albert direct Esther to call me, one of Dashiell’s employees? Unless…“Did Albert suspect something might happen?”
Esther hesitated, thinking it over. “I think…I think he loved Olivia? For whatever reason. But he didn’t really trust her.”
“Okay. Who owns this house?”
“Albert did. It wasn’t in his name, though. He said it used to be one of his former human servants?”
“And why do you think Olivia was the one who killed him?”
Her shoulders hunched. “It just seems like something she would do.”
Couldn’t argue with that. “Did they both live here? Albert and Olivia.”
“Sort of. Albert lived here all the time, in that room where his”—she winced—“his body is. Olivia has a room here, but she used to come and go when she wanted. When she was here, I tried to be somewhere else.”
“How come?”
“Like I said, she gave me the creeps. Albert and I, we weren’t, like, romantic, you know?” She seemed to be waiting for a response on that, so I nodded. “It was more of a business thing. But one time he let her feed off me, and she was…not gentle. And now Albert’s gone, and he promised to turn me before…” She swallowed hard, seeming to struggle with it. I could see her eyes filling. “Before I die.” Esther was crying openly now. “What am I gonna do?”
Awkward. I felt sorry for these people, the vampire hangers-on who just wanted to be able to live, on whatever terms necessary. Who knows, maybe I’d have more sympathy if I were the one dying. But you shouldn’t become a vampire out of fear of death. If anyone should become a vampire at all, it should be because that’s what you want to be. I felt like I should tell her I was sorry or ask how much time she had left or something, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. Besides, I had bigger fish at the moment. “Can you show me her room?”
“It’s in the basement too,” she sniffled. “But it’s locked.”
“Is she in there now?” This stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me. What if I was in the same house as Olivia? A flood of emotions ran through me: fear that she would get me, relief that she might have been found, and, of course, the urge to run away very quickly.
But Esther shook her head. “The lock is one of those heavy detachable ones, and it’s on the outside. She can’t be in there.”