"--and you'll try to recall exactly what the assailant looked like. If you settle your nerves, if you give yourself half a chance, I'm sure you'll be surprised by what you'll remember. When you're calm, collected, more rational about this, you'll realize that he wasn't Bruno Frye."
"He was."
"He might have resembled Frye, but--"
"You're acting just like Frank Howard did the other night," she said angrily.
Tony was patient. "The other night, at least, you were accusing a man who was alive."
"You're just like everyone else I've ever trusted," she said, her voice cracking.
"I want to help you."
"Bullshit."
"Hilary, don't turn away from me."
"You're the one who turned away first."
"I care about you."
"Then show it!"
"I'm here, aren't I? What more proof do you need?"
"Believe me," she said. "That's the best proof."
He saw that she was profoundly insecure, and he supposed she was that way because she had had very bad experiences with people she had loved and trusted. Indeed, she must have been brutally betrayed and hurt, for no ordinary disappointment would have made her as sensitive as she was now. Still suffering from those old emotional wounds, she now demanded fanatical trust and loyalty. The moment he showed doubts about her story, she began to withdraw from him, even though he wasn't impugning her veracity. But, dammit, he knew it wasn't healthy to play along with her delusion; the best thing he could do for her was gently coax her back to reality.
"Frye was here tonight," she insisted. "Frye and nobody else. But I won't tell the police that."
"Good," he said, relieved.
"Because I'm not going to call the police."
"What?"
Without explaining, she turned away from him and walked out of the kitchen.
As he followed her through the wrecked dining room, Tony said, "You have to report this."
"I don't have to do anything."
"Your insurance company won't pay if you haven't filed a police report."
"I'll worry about that later," she said, leaving the dining room, entering the living room.
He trailed her as she weaved through the debris in the front room, heading toward the stairs. "You're forgetting something," he said.
"What's that?"
"I'm a detective."
"So?"
"So now that I'm aware of this situation, it's my duty to report it."
"So report it."
"Part of the report will be a statement from you."
"You can't force me to cooperate. I won't."
As they reached the foot of the stairs, he grabbed her by the arm. "Wait a minute. Please wait."
She turned and faced him. Her fear had been driven out by anger. "Let go of me."
"Where are you going?"
"Upstairs."
"What are you going to do?"
"Pack a suitcase and go to a hotel."
"You can stay at my place," he said.
"You don't want a crazy woman like me staying overnight," she said sarcastically.
"Hilary, don't be this way."
"I might go berserk and kill you in your sleep."
"I don't think you're crazy."
"Oh, that's right. You think I'm just confused. Maybe a little dotty. But not dangerous."
"I'm only trying to help you."
"You've got a funny way of doing it."
"You can't live in a hotel forever."
"I'll come home once he's been caught."
"But if you don't make a formal complaint, no one's even going to be looking for him."
"I'll be looking for him."
"You?"
"Me."
Now Tony was angry. "What game are you going to play--Hilary Thomas, Girl Detective?"
"I might hire private investigators."
"Oh, really?" he asked scornfully, aware that he might alienate her further with this approach, but too frustrated to be patient any longer.
"Really," she said. "Private investigators."
"Who? Philip Marlowe? Jim Rockford? Sam Spade?"
"You can be a sarcastic son of a bitch."
"You're forcing me to be. Maybe sarcasm will snap you out of this."
"My agent happens to know a first-rate firm of private detectives."
"I tell you, this isn't their kind of work."
"They'll do anything they're paid to do."
"Not anything."
"They'll do this."
"It's a job for the LAPD."
"The police will only waste their time looking for known burglars, known rapists, known--"
"That's a very good, standard, effective investigative technique," Tony said.
"But it won't work this time."
"Why? Because the assailant was an ambulatory dead man?"
"That's right."
"So you think maybe the police should spend their time looking for known dead rapists and burglars?"
The look she gave him was a withering mixture of anger and disgust.
"The way to break this case," she said, "is to find out how Bruno Frye could have been stone-cold dead last week--and alive tonight."
"Will you listen to yourself, for God's sake?"
He was concerned for her. This stubborn irrationality frightened him.
"I know what I said," she told him. "And I also know what I saw. And it wasn't just that I saw Bruno Frye in this house a little while ago. I heard him, too. He had that distinct, unmistakable, guttural voice. It was him. No one else. I saw him, and I heard him threatening to cut off my head and stuff my mouth full of garlic, as if he thought I was some sort of vampire or something."
Vampire.
That word jolted Tony because it made such a startling and incredible connection with several things that had been found last Thursday in Bruno Frye's gray Dodge van, strange items about which Hilary couldn't possibly know anything, items that Tony had forgotten until this morning. A chill swept through him.
"Garlic?" he asked. "Vampires? Hilary, what are you talking about?"
She pulled out of his grasp and hurried up the stairs.
He ran after her. "What's this about vampires?"
Climbing the steps, refusing to look at Tony or answer his questions, Hilary said, "Isn't this some swell story I've got to tell? I was assaulted by a walking dead man who thought I was a vampire. Oh, wow! Now you're absolutely positive that I've lost my mind. Call the little white chuckle wagon! Get this poor lady into a straitjacket before she hurts herself! Put her in a nice padded room real quick! Lock the door and throw away the key!"
In the second-floor hallway, a few feet from the top of the stairs, as Hilary was heading toward a bedroom door, Tony caught up with her. He grabbed her arm again.
"Let go, dammit!"
"Tell me what he said."
"I'm going to a hotel, and then I'm going to work this thing out on my own."
"I want to know every word he said."
"There's nothing you can do to stop me," she told him. "Now let me go."
He shouted in order to get through to her. "I have to know what he said about vampires, dammit!"
Her eyes met his. Apparently she recognized the fear and confusion in him, for she stopped trying to pull away. "What's so damned important?"
"The vampire thing."
"Why?"
"Frye apparently was obsessed with the occult."
"How do you know that?"
"We found some things in that van of his."
"What things?"
"I don't remember all of it. A deck of tarot cards, a Ouija board, more than a dozen crucifixes--"
"I didn't see anything about that in the newspapers."
"We didn't make a formal press release out of it," Tony said. "Besides, by the time we searched the van and inventoried its contents and were prepared to consider a release, all of the papers had published their first-day stories, and the reporters had filed their follow-ups. The case just didn't have enough juice to warrant squeezing third-day coverage out of it. But let me tell you what else was in that van. Little linen bags of garlic taped above all the doors. Two wooden stakes with very sharp points. Half a dozen books about vampires and zombies and other varieties of the so-called 'living dead.'"
Hilary shuddered. "He told me he was going to cut out my heart and pound a stake through it."
"Jesus."