When a cop car motored toward us, Eli’s entire gait changed into badass street thug, and he took my hand. I cozied up to his shoulder and giggled like some mindless girl in love. Beneath his jean jacket I felt a blade sheathed to his arm and muscles hard enough to crack a coconut. The cop glanced at us but didn’t react otherwise.
When I figured he was gone, I glanced back and let go of Eli. “Not bad,” he said.
“Not bad, yourself. Where did you pick up that swagger?”
He didn’t reply and I didn’t really expect him to. We were at the fence a block behind Bryson Ryder’s office. We split up, and Eli took the direct route along the fence. I strolled down three more buildings and walked along a narrow path between two that had been visible on Google. What had I ever done without satellite mapping systems?
I turned at the corner and walked by the front entrance again, seeing no one nearby, and I texted to Eli quickly, Go. I heard a muted thump and a moment later I walked up the steps to the small house-turned-storefront, and Eli let me in. I was hit with the smell of mold, dust, and human. Fainter was the smell of vamp, mixed varieties, like the way an herb store might smell if all the canisters were emptied onto the floor and allowed to dry rot. A little chamomile, some red pepper, rose hips, lilies, and dandelion, and a hint of vanilla, but all old. Nothing fresh.
Eli was wearing black nitrile gloves and tossed a pair to me. I caught them out of the air, two-handed. Black gloves were way cooler than blue or green. I had even seen where they made purple, fuchsia, and neon yellow, but I was partial to the black.
“No active security,” Eli said to me. “Looks like it was turned off and never turned back on. Backup battery is dead.” Talking on a headset to his brother, he said, “Booting up.” He started up the computer, murmuring quietly as the Kid walked him through the dull intricacies of breaking into an old PC. The Kid had wanted to come along, claiming it would make our job ten times faster. Eli had vetoed that. The little felon was in Mississippi by the good graces of a lenient judge, and no way was Eli going to let anything criminal come within ten feet of him. No. That was for us. Lucky me.
Gloved, I looked the place over. There was dust everywhere, even on the PC keyboard and the phone. There were spiderwebs in two ceiling corners. A roach motel behind the desk was full. That was one thing about the Gulf states: roaches were everywhere. They were the size of a wrestler’s thumb, crunched like bubble wrap and squirted green goo when you stomped on them, and sometimes even busted up and leaking they’d still crawl away. I’d learned to hate roaches. They were fearless. Not that long ago I found one crawling under my toilet seat. I managed not to scream and inform the boys that I was truly a girl, but it was a near thing. And it wasn’t the first time my privacy had been so rudely interrupted.
The answering machine—an old digital model—had a blinking light. I pulled a tiny recorder the Kid had given me and hit RECORD on the mini recorder, then PLAY, on the machine, half listening as it played. Bryson hadn’t answered his messages in weeks. Maybe months. One of the last ones was Misha’s voice, still listed under “new messages,” as if it hadn’t been played. Which was odd. The calendar on the wall was still on October of last year. There was a dead plant in the corner. Whoever Misha had talked to, it was beginning to look like it wasn’t Bryson Ryder, unless he had gone into hiding for some reason that let him abandon his business and yet talk to a reporter. Which was not impossible, but was highly unlikely.
On one side of the back door that Eli had kicked in there was a miniature kitchen with a small steel sink, a cheap microwave, and a tiny brown fridge, like one a college student would have kept in his dorm. The fridge stank of rotten broccoli and mystery meat, but at least Bryson’s body hadn’t been carved up and forced inside. A bathroom was on the other side of the door, and the water in the toilet suggested that it hadn’t been flushed in ages, an iron-brown ring showing where water had evaporated.
I pulled open a file cabinet. It wasn’t locked. The files inside were hard copies of his customers’ yearly taxes, three five-foot-long drawers’ worth. Nothing personal had been kept in the drawers that I could see. But in the bottom one I noticed a name on a file: CONSTANCE PERRAULT. Next to it was COLEMAN PÉRODEAU. Both were vamps. According to Reach’s preliminary research, both were lower-level scions of Hieronymus. I did a quick look for the clan Misha mentioned—Clan Petitpas. Just as I’d thought, there was no such listing.
One knee on the floor, I flipped through the files and recognized more vamp names, blood-servants, and commercial businesses owned by the same. “Eli. Got something.” He looked up from the PC. “Misha was right about one thing. Bryson Ryder is the tax consultant to the fanged and their dinners.” I pulled out a file from the H’s. “Including Hieronymus.”
“I have something too. There’s nothing new on his computer for the last six weeks. But before that, it looks like Bryson somehow got on Hieronymus’ bad side. There is a file of e-mails for each of his vampire clients, and under Hieronymus’ name is a series of thinly veiled threats written by the MOC’s lawyer. Legal threats,” Eli clarified. “Bryson was being threatened with a lawsuit.”
I tucked the mini recorder into a pocket and made sure everything appeared undisturbed while Eli went for the SUV. Just a little B and E and electronics theft before my afternoon snack.
• • •
Bryson’s home was a comfortable brick place, added on to since the Google street photos had been taken, with a big live oak shading the front yard and a mailbox full of mail at the curb, envelopes and flyers sticking out. “Not good,” I said.
Eli said nothing as he parked behind a new-model car in the drive, but he checked his weapon and chambered a round as he got out, taking point as we moved to the front door. He carried the gun one-handed, pointed down beside his leg, where it couldn’t be seen from the street. It seemed like a bit of overkill, but I unbuttoned my jacket so I could get at both of my weapons and walked facing the road, keeping an eye on the yard, street, and the neighbors’ houses at our rear.
It was typical suburbia for this time of day: quiet, no traffic, no activity. Ryder’s car had a lot of cat tracks up and down the hood and the front window. A children’s tricycle was by the front tire, on its side, and a doll lay on the walkway to the door, looking as if it had been outside for a while. The smell hit me about ten feet from the door. Something was very wrong at the Ryder home. I stopped and put all sensory clues together. “Eli. We got bodies inside.”
He stopped too, not asking how I knew, but his bearing went from vigilant to hyperalert. He held his gun now in a two-hand grip pointed at the ground in front of him. “Details.”
“Old blood. A lot of it. Sickly sweet. It’s been there a while.”
“Let’s go.” He moved back to the SUV and got inside.
I followed, buckling myself in as he drove away. All I could see was the doll and the tricycle. “A family is dead for weeks and somehow no one’s noticed yet?”
“You smelled the time frame?” he asked as he pulled back onto 84, heading for the river.
“Part of it. Another part was cat tracks on a new car, the mail in the box, and toys left out in the weather.” As we were crossing the river, I thought about calling Misha and telling her that her contact was dead, but I just burgled his office, so the less I told the press, the better, old friend or not.