Not fucking likely.

Chapter 18

When Scarlett hung up, Jesse had looked at the phone in confusion for a moment, until Kirsten said, “Well, that was abrupt.”

They had hit a patch of traffic on the way back to LA, and he didn’t feel comfortable using the siren this time, since they were sort of at a loss for their next step. “Yes. I hope she’s not in trouble.”

“Hayne will look after her,” Kirsten said, with perfect confidence. Jesse decided not to mention that Scarlett had escaped from Dashiell’s mansion. “Do you think Scarlett was right,” Kirsten asked, “about Olivia trying to distract us from something?”

“Probably,” Jesse said grimly. He was lost in thought, half hypnotized by the brake-gas-brake-gas repetition of the traffic. “I do think we’re missing something big. We’ve been running around trying so hard to catch up to Olivia, we haven’t stopped to think. Scarlett suggested as much last night, but I thought she was just being paranoid.”

“Well, let’s go over it all again,” Kirsten suggested.

They started with Denise’s death, what little they knew about it. “I read the police file,” Jesse said. “Witnesses saw her packing up her things on the Promenade just before one in the morning. We—the police, that is—didn’t find any of it on the Promenade or the pier, so she must have loaded it in her car.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Kirsten nodding. “She had a special permit to park at the mall off the Promenade, I think.”

“Right. Olivia—I’m assuming it was Olivia, because she would’ve had the strength—must have taken her at the car.”

“Wait,” Kirsten objected. “That doesn’t make sense. Olivia is a vampire; she wouldn’t have wasted good blood, not when she could make it look accidental.”

“Maybe she needed it to look like a suicide. She didn’t want to attract any attention yet.”

Kirsten was shaking her head emphatically. “No, there’s a method for that, which vampires just love. They put the victim in their bathtub, drink most of the blood, and let a little bit run into the water to turn it red. Hardly anyone who commits suicide that way is actually a suicide.”

Jesse was temporarily distracted. He glanced over at Kirsten. “Really? Wouldn’t the medical examiner realize a lot of blood was missing?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never heard of anyone catching it. They do this fairly often.” She wrinkled her nose. “Think about it. If you were going to commit suicide, wouldn’t you rather just shoot yourself, or take pills?

Jesse started to answer that, but remembered the actual point of the discussion. “Anyway,” he said, gesturing for them to get back on track.

“Right. You read the police report. Did Denise have any major cuts? Specifically at the arteries?”

Jesse thought back. Denise’s body had been nearly pristine, he remembered, except for some minor bites from fish. No major arteries. “No.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t Olivia,” Kirsten said. “Maybe it was the witch.”

“Denise weighed a hundred and fifty pounds,” Jesse said skeptically. He didn’t mention that that was her weight after the fish had nibbled on her—Kirsten didn’t need to know about that. “And she would have been fighting like crazy, and maybe screaming for help, and terrified of the pier. If we’re talking about one witch, a woman…I just can’t see her being able to get Denise that far. Could someone have…hypnotized her?”

“A reasonably powerful witch could,” she said thoughtfully. “But although we can technically perform spells on each other, we’re naturally a bit resistant to other witches’ magic. And Denise’s mind would have dug in its heels, metaphorically speaking, about going out over the water. Hypnosis is like that; it’s hard to make the subject do something that goes against her deepest feelings.”

“Are there any other spells, though? For, I don’t know, mind control?”

She shook her head. “Neuromancy, witchcraft that deals with the mind, is an extremely specialized and difficult area to work in. I know a few witches who could put her in a trance, or maybe take a few seconds of memory, but to get her to the pier and then over the side…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

They were both quiet for a long moment, thinking that over. Jesse could understand why the Santa Monica PD had ruled Denise’s death a suicide. It was just too neatly done. “Okay, let’s put a pin in that for the moment,” he said at last. The car had finally made it to the source of the traffic—a multicar fender bender that had forced the police to close off two lanes of the freeway. Jesse nodded to the highway patrolman directing traffic around the cones, and was momentarily grateful that he’d never signed on for highway patrol. “What happened next?”

“I knew about Denise’s death, and I was suspicious right away,” Kirsten said. “But there wasn’t anything I could do, really. I just thought…I don’t know what I thought.” She slumped back in her seat, biting on a cuticle. It was obvious that Kirsten was blaming herself for not acting after Denise’s death, but Jesse didn’t bother pointing out that it wasn’t her fault. She knew that; she just didn’t feel it, and Jesse understood. He’d felt the same when Jared Hess had taken Scarlett.