Trail of Dead (29 page)

Caroline. Caroline was gone.

I pulled back the chair, which seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. I was so tired. Before I could even sit down, though, my phone buzzed in my hand, making me jump. I looked at the screen cautiously. Unlisted number. I answered it. “Bernard.”

“Scarlett, darling,” Olivia’s voice cooed. “Did you get the cookies I sent?”

Now I did sit, my body dropping into the office chair without me really noticing. “Where are you?”

“Oh, come on, baby, where are your manners? Didn’t I teach you anything?”

I felt a familiar little sting for the briefest moment—
I had disappointed her! I hadn’t followed directions!
As soon as I registered that thought, however, it made me even angrier. I was not a little
girl. I was not her Barbie doll. And I didn’t have to play her games. “Where are you?” I repeated, through gritted teeth. Then I remembered the psych report and the background we’d collected: Olivia wanted a family. She wanted me with her. “I—I really want to see you,” I added, letting my voice break with emotion. “I don’t know what else to do.” Well, that was honest.

There was a pause. “I’m afraid tonight’s not a good night, darling. Plans, you know. But we’ll get together soon,” she said coyly. “You can count on it.”

I moved the receiver away from my mouth so she wouldn’t hear me taking a deep breath. That was bullshit. She’d called me, she
wanted
me to see her fingerprints all over the wolfberry. She wanted me to know she was still in control, still the puppet master—and she wanted me to see her finest hour. Whatever she was planning with Mallory, she wanted to show it off, or she wouldn’t have called tonight.

She wanted me to beg for her. Fine. I could beg. “Please, Livvie?” I pleaded. In a very small voice, I said, “I don’t know where else to go anymore.”
Thanks to you, you deranged harpy.

Another long pause. I was still calming down from my earlier crying jag, and I made no attempt to hide my jagged breathing.

“Well…maybe it’s a good night after all,” Olivia said, her voice a little smug. She had won, and she knew it. “Things are going to change now, Scarlett. The way this whole city works is going to change. Would you like to see it happen?”

I waited a beat, and simply said, “Yes.”

“Everything’s going to be better now, Scarlett,” she said soothingly. “We’ll be together again. I have so many new things to teach you.” She rattled off an address. “But you must come alone,” she added.

“I will.”

Olivia hung up without another word. I set the phone down on Will’s desk. She didn’t actually care if I brought backup or not—in
her mind, there was nothing that could stop her and Mallory now. Kirsten would have been the biggest problem, and Kirsten had been shot. But it didn’t matter—I wasn’t going to bring anyone with me. Olivia was not going to hurt anyone else.

I was going to stop her first. Or die trying.

I looked around the office, and spotted Eli’s jacket hanging on the back of Caroline’s chair. I dug in his pockets until I found his keys. He wasn’t going to need his pickup anytime soon, and I was guessing that Jesse’s car had the GPS-LoJack thingy. And apparently it was my day for cruising around in half-borrowed, half-stolen vehicles. After a long moment of indecision, I picked up the handset of Will’s office phone and dialed Jesse’s cell phone number. He didn’t pick up, which was a relief, really. I waited for the voice mail tone.

“Hey, it’s Scarlett,” I began. “Listen, I know where she is, and I’m going after her. By myself. Nobody else is going to die because Olivia wants me, and I’m not going to spend one more day as a bargaining chip, or a toy, or bait.” I paused. “I know you think I’m just going to surrender and let her kill me, Jesse, but I promise, I’ll fight. You…you make me want to fight. So thank you for that, I guess. I…I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us.” I rubbed my eyes, thinking about the broken werewolf in the other room. “I’m sorry about a lot of things. But not about this. Good-bye, Jesse.”

I picked up Eli’s keys and my wallet, started for the office door, and stopped again. I turned in a circle. The safe was in the janitorial room with Ana and her girlfriend, but Will had only been in and out for a second, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be puttering with the safe while he was trying to give the women privacy. I went back to his desk and started opening drawers. I found the big revolver in the right middle drawer, next to a bottle of very expensive whiskey. Will must have been planning to put the gun away later. I picked up the gun and clumsily popped out the thingy that stored the bullets. I hadn’t handled a gun like this before, but I’d
seen plenty of Westerns with my grandfather when I was little. I counted two bright silver shells and snapped the thing shut again. I checked all the drawers one more time, but the extra bullets, if there were any, must have been locked in the safe. It was better than nothing.

My only real play here was to go the simplest route: get the bad guys in my radius and kill them. Mallory, whoever she was, couldn’t use any kind of spell on me, including her big clay toy, so the greatest danger was that one of them would be carrying a gun. I didn’t have my vest anymore, but I was guessing—well, betting my life, actually—that nobody was going to shoot me on sight. Olivia would try to convert me first, to get me on Team Evil. I just had to play along long enough to get close to both of them, shoot them, and be done. I took a deep breath. Piece of cake.

I looked down at myself, in the boots, T-shirt, and boxers. Where the hell was I going to put it? The boxers were too loose to hold the massive gun up, and my boots were too tight for it to fit inside. I sighed, wishing I’d kept the holster Jesse had given me. Out of ideas, I finally got a roll of duct tape from the desk and taped the gun to my lower back with a big X of tape. It hurt to bend my arms that way, and pulling the gun and tape off of my back would require an even more awkward position, but you couldn’t see the gun while I was moving around in the T-shirt.

And besides, it had worked for Bruce Willis in a movie once.

I left my cell phone on the desk and stepped toward the hallway, pausing in the doorway to listen. I could hear the low voices of Matthias and Will still talking in the other room. Just across the hall, Anastasia was crying softly next to her unconscious girlfriend. I turned the other way, walking straight out the back exit and into the night.

“What do you mean, she never got here?” Jesse Cruz asked the intake nurse, seething with frustration.

The nurse flicked a few keys on her keyboard with long, scary-looking red nails. “I have no record of anyone with that name coming in this evening,” she reported. She gave him a professionally helpless look. “I’m sorry, Detective. There’s nothing else I can tell you.

Jesse fidgeted, unwilling to move away from the counter despite the three people in line behind him. He had hitched a ride with a squad car to get to the hospital, irritated but unsurprised that Scarlett had decided to drive herself to get checked out. When he’d finally arrived at the hospital, he’d been so
angry
, his thoughts focused on Runa and her betrayal, replaying all the conversations they’d had to see what he might have given away. After he’d learned that Scarlett never arrived at the hospital, though, the rage had suddenly drained away, replaced by worry.

Just then the doors to the emergency room exam area began to open on their hydraulic controls, and Runa herself walked through them, her left forearm wrapped in a bandage. Her eyes were unfocused, distracted, and she nearly ran straight into Jesse.

“Oh. Hey.” Her voice was uncertain and almost afraid.

Jesse looked her over. Even now, she was beautiful, with corn-silk hair falling out of her braids and sadness in her blue eyes. Jesse felt a sudden rush of grief for the person he had thought she
was. He had been so wrong. “You got a second?” he asked. “I think you owe me a conversation.”

She nodded, and they trudged over to the ER waiting room. Runa sat down first, looking exhausted, and Jesse took the seat opposite her, half-afraid that if he sat too close she’d somehow…what? Lure him back?

Once they were seated, though, he didn’t know where to begin. “It’s been over an hour,” he said finally. “It took this long just for stitches?”

“I wouldn’t let them stitch me until I knew what was happening with Kirsten,” Runa explained. “She’s my cousin.”

“Oh.” Jesse leaned back, digesting this. “Is she gonna be okay?” he asked.

Runa nodded cautiously. “They think so. The bullet didn’t hit anything major, kidneys or lungs or whatever, but she’ll probably lose her spleen. Which I guess you can live without. She’s in surgery.”

She added, “I called her husband. He was at a Christmas party in the Valley. He’s probably with her by now.”

“Good.” Jesse felt his left knee jiggling up and down and made an effort to stop it. “So it’s true? She sent you to spy on me?”

Runa looked around with concern, but the only other people in the waiting room were two young men discussing something feverishly in the opposite corner. They wouldn’t be listening in. Runa relaxed an inch and met Jesse’s eyes, her voice even. “Yes. At first.”

“Did she tell you to sleep with me?”

Runa looked away, her strength already crumpled.
Different from Scarlett
, he thought.

“I deserve that,” she said. “But no. I was just supposed to get a job as a police photographer and keep an eye on you. Be your friend.”

“Explain to me, then, how you ended up being my girlfriend.”
How you made me fall for you
was what he wanted to say, but he had a little bit of dignity left.

Runa smiled ruefully at Jesse, wrinkling her nose in that way that he loved. Had loved. “Kirsten actually thought you were too in love with Scarlett to make a pass at me. We were both surprised when you first asked me out.” She began to lift her hands to gesture, but winced and settled her injured arm back onto her lap. “I wasn’t, like, this evil Bond girl out to seduce away your soul and betray you, or anything like that. I was just supposed to keep an eye on who you talked to, whether you seemed to be investigating the Old World on your own, if you were keeping lists of us, stuff like that. It was clear to me a while ago that you weren’t interested in exposing or arresting us, and I sort of…relaxed into our relationship.”

Jesse thought that over for a moment. “Then why didn’t Kirsten come to me right away when the witches began dying?”

She shook her head. “
I
trusted you, but Kirsten didn’t. She could tell that I was…that I was falling for you.” Runa took another deep breath. “We argued about it. Scarlett said something that helped convince her, and then she and I set up a little test for you, at the Jeep crime scene.”

“Wait,” Jesse said, confused. “What happened at the crime scene?”

She waved her good hand in front of her face, as if shooing a fly. “Not at the crime scene itself, but the next day. I had all those incriminating pictures of vampire activity, just right there for the taking. Kirsten thought you’d steal those shots, keep them as some kind of leverage against Dashiell.” She beamed at him. “But you erased them. You helped cover up an Old World secret. I knew I could trust you.”

“You could trust me,” Jesse said flatly, “but I couldn’t trust you, could I?”

She frowned, uncomfortable. “You have to understand what was at stake,” she began, “what the witches have worried about for centuries…”

Jesse held up his hand. “Runa, I just spent the last hour helping a vampire control the minds of my brother officers. It’s killing me, but I also know it was the right thing to do. I think I’m capable of some big-picture perspective.”

She was silent for a moment, and then she said very quietly, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Jesse was at a loss. He had loved this girl. And he was supposed to be a detective. How had he been so oblivious? How was it possible to love someone when you didn’t really know them at all? He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “But you understand why I can’t see you anymore, right?”

Tears filled her eyes. She would be one of those women who cried beautifully, he saw. When she nodded, they leaked down onto her cheeks. She lifted her good arm to wipe them off with the back of her hand. “Yes.”

He stood up. “I should get going. I think Scarlett is missing, and we haven’t caught Olivia or Mallory yet.”

Runa frowned. “Scarlett is missing?” she asked.

“I’m not positive that it’s anything big. But she’s not answering her phone, and this isn’t really the night for her to do that.” He studied her face. “You don’t know where she is, do you?”

“No…wait. What is she driving?”

Jesse smiled ruefully. “She took my car. I suppose I could always report it as stolen, but—” He slapped his head, feeling impossibly stupid.

“What?”

“I’m such an idiot. I have LoJack.”

He made the calls, pacing a few feet away toward the waiting-room windows so he could get better reception. Runa looked up when he returned. She showed no signs of getting up from her waiting room chair, and he figured she must be sticking around for Kirsten.

“The car is at Hair of the Dog,” he said.

“That’s good, right?” Runa asked. “She probably had a cleanup job there or something. And Will will keep her safe.”

“Yeah, I guess.” But something felt wrong, he decided. He scrolled through his phone and found the right number. “I’m gonna call the bar.” He went back over to the seats by the windows.

It rang forever. When someone finally picked up, the line was shockingly quiet. Every other time he’d called there, he’d had to shout over loud music to be heard. “This is Will,” said a tired voice. Jesse identified himself and asked for Scarlett.

“Yeah,” Will said heavily. “She’s here. We had a…well, she can fill you in, I guess. I don’t have it in me to talk about it. Hang on, I’ll go have her pick up the line in the office.”

There was a long pause, and Jesse found himself listening to a horrible Muzak cover of “Tainted Love.” Then “I Want to Run to You.” Just before the final chorus, Will finally picked back up. “Detective?”