Dead Spots

Dashiell glanced at his watch. “Five minutes.”

Beatrice squeezed my hand and turned away, walking back toward the front of the house. I was on my own.

I straightened my spine and followed Dash into his colossal office, which didn’t match the rest of the house at all. The mansion reflected Beatrice’s tastes, which ran toward her native Spain and the Mediterranean. This office, however, was all medieval library—huge ornately carved oak desk, antique everything, oil lamps instead of electric. There was even a pair of white gloves lying out, presumably for the reading of extremely old books. For a moment, I wondered if Dash had seen the Renaissance. He couldn’t be that old, right? I felt very small, and wished that Jesse were there with me. Or even Eli, as complicated as that was.

Focus, Scarlett.

Dashiell pointed me to the chair opposite his desk, and we both sat down.

It was my turn to open a file of photos in front of him. I took a deep breath and passed over the two shots of the Hess children. “Emily and Jared Hess,” I told him, tapping their faces, just as he’d tapped the photos of the dead vampires. “Ten years ago tonight, Emily disappeared from La Brea Park, where she’d been playing with her brother after dark. Jared told the police he saw monsters drinking her blood, but they ignored him—or were paid to ignore him.”

Dashiell picked up the photo of Jared and studied it with renewed interest.

“Jared was very angry.”

“Go on.”

“All this time, we’ve been focusing on Abraham, figuring that he was the main victim and the other two a distraction. But Gregory told me that Joanna liked to feed from children.” I looked up, meeting his eyes. “Someone had to have called Olivia to clean up this scene at the park. Am I getting warm?”

Dashiell leaned back in his chair, looking thoughtful rather than simply angry. I hoped that was a good thing. “I remember this now. You are correct, Scarlett. Joanna went too far, and I sent Olivia in for the cleanup. We didn’t know that there was another child on the scene that night. When it made the newspapers, it seemed so perfect—crazy teenage boy kills little sister, hides the body. Joanna was punished—by Abraham, who took care of those things for me.” He stared at the ceiling, as if reading text from the tiles. “I believe he had her starved.”

I shuddered. Olivia had told me once that Dashiell’s punishment for the vampires was to lock them in a basement cell with no access to blood. They would never die, but they could sometimes go insane. Or in Joanna’s case, probably more insane. “And you’re just telling me this now?” I tried to keep my voice level.

“Scarlett, Joanna has had a handful of these incidents in her centuries of life. She was starved for five years then released, and she hadn’t made any trouble since. I had forgotten all about it.”

Steady, Scarlett, steady. “You forgot about your crazy pet child killer?”

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?”