Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective Read online

  “Isn’t Dan married?” I reminded Jeremy, trying to keep him talking.

  His smile didn’t change. “Not really. His wife is pretty much a beard. But Steve’s husband, now that’s serious…”

  I stopped listening to him, taking a minute to process it.

  “Are you okay? You look a little out of sorts?” Hollywood superstar and keen observer of emotion, that was our Jeremy.

  “Yeah, just a little mixed up about all of the casual affairs.” I gave him my most honest smile. It wasn’t his fault my client insisted Dan’s affair was with another woman and I’d been stupid enough to believe her.

  “Marriages are different out here,” he said sadly, but then his tone changed completely. “Hey, do you want to get some lunch?”

  Lunch was a milkshake and fries at the studio cafeteria. There might have been a burger but the shake and fries were the part worth mentioning. When we were done, I let Jeremy show me around the back lot. I wasn’t into movie studios but it seemed like knowing my way around might come in handy. Besides, Jeremy really wanted to take me on the tour. For all his movie posters and superstar status, he seemed lonely.

  We walked by a hoard of girls with visitor badges and he practically ran away from them. I guess having to sign autographs and smile for the cameras isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Magic gave me a read on him when he brushed up against me – he genuinely liked my sister. We chatted about small-town life and Gina, what she was like growing up. He seemed eager to hear about anything that wasn’t the movies and I found myself saying more than usual. For a guy who looked like a muscle-bound idiot, he was surprisingly easy to talk to.

  We parted when he went back to work for the afternoon. The experience had been a nice break but spending time with him made it hard to keep my guard up. Jeremy hadn’t mentioned my disability or dug into my past, a rare thing that endeared him to me. It wasn’t easy to stay protective of Gina when he acted like a decent guy. Still, his comment about Hollywood marriages bothered me.

  Back at the car, I flipped through my camera’s memory card. I’d shot over two hundred and ninety photos of my subject, but in all of them I’d been looking for women. If I looked for men, it was obvious. Dan with a guy having coffee, with another guy at lunch, men in all of the shots—he surrounded himself with men. I sat back in my car and rubbed my eyes. Jo and I had noticed it in the club, but I’d stuck by my clients inexperienced narrow-minded assumption until Jeremy pointed it out to me. Shame knotted my stomach, and genuine fear that I’d let my client’s judgement cloud my own even though I pegged her as naive.

  What else had I missed? I needed to recheck my assumptions, at least where it mattered. The new information about Dan justified a break while I decided how to tell his wife. I could use the time to turn back to Ted’s problem. The best way to be sure I hadn’t missed anything on Sunday morning was to retrace all my steps. This time, I’d go completely alone and not let anyone else influence my conclusions.

  8

  Casa Verde grew out of the desert landscape like a strange metal and concrete fungus. On my first visit darkness reduced the earth around the building to a moonscape of grays. Now the ground bled red with clay. A few spindly plants poked up, dusty green, making the grass landscaping into a bright green scar, out of place and wrong. I shook my head. The drive had taken hours, even starting from LA, and I was letting what I knew about this place color how I looked at it. My thoughts went back to Ted, the way he looked asleep, peaceful, content and how different that was from how he looked here. Driving up to the building I imagined how it must feel to know you could someday check in and never check out. Even though it was just imagination, I shivered.

  The guard at the gate waved me through, but no helpful nurse waited for me inside. I wandered around a bit, trying not to look lost when I finally found a security guard. He directed me to the guards’ break room. From there, I found the main security office on my own. I’d expected someplace cramped and dark, tucked away where patients wouldn’t see it. I’d expected right.

  “Private Investigator, huh?” The head rent-a-cop lazily flipped my card out of his fingers and on to the desk. “Got your work cut out for you on this one.”

  “Thanks.” I stood awkwardly, trying to think of how to play things. I couldn’t let on that I’d seen the body. “The family didn’t really tell me much.”

  He snorted. “Oh, I’m not surprised about that. Have a seat. This one is a freak show.”

  He gestured to the metal chair in front of his desk and I took it. The security office was small, maybe a broom closet once, with a fan doing unenthusiastic circles above our heads. His clean desk looked out of place next to the shelves of boxes stuffed with papers. From the date labels, I saw that they filled a document box a month, three boxes around the holidays.

  “What are those?” I asked, trying to look like I was delaying asking about the body.

  “Incident reports.”

  “Guess the holidays are rough on you.”

  “The worst.” He shook his head. “There’s this tension. Everyone wants to be doing what they always did, not stuck in here. Shit, I shouldn’t say the worst. The worst is your case.”

  “Right, yeah. The family said there were uh, parts they never found.”

  “They’re wrong. Call came in this morning. Found it all wrapped up in a shower curtain out by the way back entrance.”

  A shower curtain. So nothing supernatural, nothing special. Just a person with the foresight to bring plastic sheeting to cover the room. I relaxed, knowing that’s all I was dealing with.

  “So they uh, found, everything?”

  “Ayup.”

  My mind flashed back to the way her body looked so empty in front of me.

  “You look a little pale,” he noticed.

  “I usually handle cheating wives, not bodies,” I lied. I was actually better at this than with cheating wives.

  “You picked a hell of a pickle to start out with. She was fine at the nine o’clock rounds, fine at the eleven, and then at the three she was tied up.”

  “Nine, eleven, and three? Shouldn’t there be a one in there?”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. I needed to play stupid a little bit better. “There should’ve but the night nurse missed her.”

  I made a wordless grunt that could have been a question.

  “Yeah, shit happens someplace else on the floor and the nurse figures no big deal but really that girl was getting hacked up. Scares the crap out of you. If someone can get to you in a locked room in the middle of a locked floor, well hell, how safe are you anywhere?”

  I felt safer in my car than I did in his office, which made my goodbyes go pretty quick. I credited the feeling to the gun in my glove box, but, as I pointed the car toward the back entrance, I needed more. I decided to play fast and loose with the law and slapped the gun in my shoulder holster. The familiar weight reassured me, when really nothing had changed.

  The hospital exit stretched in front of me, asphalt bleached to an unhealthy gray by the desert sun. A set of unnaturally bright blue dumpsters sat to my left, and puffs of steam from some system I couldn’t name billowed out over them. The service road snaked and curved, following a path that didn’t make much sense. It ended at a square of dirt, about five by five. There was a drainage pipe, stained appropriately red, and a lot of bright yellow tape, but no one worked on the scene. No forensics crew with a million swabs and wipes, no gadgets to catch the killer. It was hot. Flies droned, swooping in to check out the dry stains and then moving on. I was ready to park my car and take a look but the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do it.

  I could guess from when William had gotten back to us and when we’d gotten there to see the body that the death had happened between eleven and one. Without talking to William, I couldn’t be positive but I was fairly sure that he’d caused the distraction that had redirected the nurse. How long did it take to hurt a person that way? I could ask Ted—err, Edward. He’d
know for sure, but I guessed it could be done in an hour. Had the killer kept her quiet or had she screamed? Could a person in a facility, a hospital like this, scream for an hour like they were being killed and never get checked on? I didn’t want to think about it, but something told me they could.

  The sun had started to set while I was inside. I’d been lucky the security guy had even been willing to talk to me after five. I stood by the side of the road, looking at that area under a burning orange street light, not sure what to make of it all. I squatted down, my hand on the mix of weeds and rocky earth. A light breeze blew and suddenly images filled my mind. Pain and agony, the burning ropes and the sharp clarity of cutting, my head swam with it all. Flashes came to me. Emotions ripped into my consciousness.

  My eyes watered and my heart pounded. I did my best to push through the pain and get some air into my lungs somehow. I looked down with blurry eyes, trying to dodge a fist that wasn’t even there and saw something white touching my right hand. I grabbed for it, a mistake. The fake muscles of my left arm locked and I couldn’t let go of the cloth. Worse, it transmitted the images to me even harder, faster. This was the gag. This piece of cloth had held Jen’s mouth shut as she was tortured. So much pain imprinted on a scrap of cotton.

  The fake muscles in my arm seized even harder, adding real pain to the pain I felt as a spirit witch. I struggled to move through it, to get my right hand to my left arm, trying to remember everything Ted had taught me about massage. My hand moved a bit, not much, as a flash of her fear came to me. Something had made this piece of cotton a conduit for all her emotions. I had to let it go.

  Concentrating on my breath for a while, I got my left arm to work, massaging slowly so the muscles relaxed and the cotton slipped from my fingers. I spent a while on the ground, resting my head on the hard desert sand, focusing on a blade of grass about an inch away. The images were fading a little, not much. I’d never gotten such a strong read off a common object. Sometimes a really old beloved object would show me the person who owned it. I’d held an antique doll once and had seen the little girl who had clutched it while she played and slept. This was nothing like that—no easy transmission of knowledge. This was raw.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes, then my temples. I had a throbbing headache coming on but, in a way, I welcomed it. It was my pain, not borrowed from some murder scene. I was tired, alone, and scared—a long way from home. Stumbling back to the car, I left the narrow piece of cotton secured under a rock. Inside the car, I luxuriated in the soft seat for a long while before starting the engine. I headed down the rural highway, exhausted, head pounding, but eager to be elsewhere.

  Two miles down the road, I knew I was being stupid. Channeling what was left on that gag had drained my body of everything I had. Turning into the first truck stop I saw, and ignoring the fact that it offered showers, topless dancing, and steak dinners, wanting only a safe place to park, I struggled through the headache, trying to think of how I could get help. Anyone I asked to come out here would take hours to reach me. I’d be better off sleeping in the car for a while, then heading home. I struggled to remember how long the trip back would take. It was long. Definitely long, except for someone had bragged about the opposite. I worked with the memory.

  William. Hell, that wasn’t the name I wanted.

  But then again, if William could fly out here maybe someone else could. Someone I liked. I grabbed my cell phone.

  “Can you fly here?”

  “What?” Jo asked, apparently totally confused.

  “I’m in…” I looked around at the diner, the highway in front of me. “Shit, I don’t know where I am. I’ve got at least five hours of driving to do and I’m half-dead. So I’m thinking if you could fly out here and keep me company on the drive…”

  “I can’t.”

  I let out a slow breath, trying not to let her hear it. It was a big favor to ask, a long trip and all but I’d hoped—

  “I can’t fly, Hicks. I’m not that hot in the vampire department, remember? But Jean-Laurent can. Are you someplace that can be seen from the air?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks, Jo. I like LaRue and all but he’s not road trip companion material, ya know?” Actually, this was more about trust. I didn’t need him in the car being his usual self right now.

  “Wow, you are beat. I meant he could fly me out there, turn into mist, and head home. Then I could drive with you. Does this have anything to do with the spell work stuff for last night?”

  “Too much. Way too much to do with that.” I was out of my league. Professional torturers, the people who made them, someone hunting them down, they weren’t the kind of people I wanted to hang out with. Well, except for the one that was my boyfriend. Shit, when had all this gotten so complicated?

  “Elisabeth, you still there, girl? Don’t pass out in the car before you tell me where you are, now,” she sang the words into my ear. “Is there anything big around? Anything you can see from the sky?”

  I looked up at the blinking truck stop sign with its seven colors and a half-naked girl. “Oh yeah.”

  I was tired, bone tired. Jo drove while I barely kept my head up in the passenger seat. We talked a little about the dead body and the circumstances. I dozed, or at least if I didn’t, the conversation had some weird gaps in it. She didn’t call me on it. She was a good friend that way. I couldn’t sleep for long though, too many dark images in my head. I kept waking up with a start, a little freaked out. The last time I jumped, Jo was parking.

  Smiling at the sight of my place, I struggled with the car door, trying to get it open when it clearly weighed a thousand pounds. Finally, there was a pop and I got to my feet, shaky, ready to get into bed and not get out for several hours. I rubbed my eyes, seeing something that didn’t make sense.

  “Elisabeth!” Jo shouted my name and time stood still as I turned toward her. She was by the car, but then she wasn’t and something hit me. I took the impact in my shoulder, flying to the front of the car, coming to rest next to the wheel.

  Metal screamed and twisted, blurring into a mass of destruction while Jo crouched in front of me. My mouth hung open. A car had been about to hit me—a white car, late model. I looked at the side of my own car, strangely detached. The spot where I had been standing was crumpled in on itself, the whole passenger side destroyed. My friend and savior stood from the wreckage. The second car, the one that would have creamed me, wrapped around her in a U shape, as if she was an immovable object.

  I opened my mouth to ask if she was all right but she had already moved, leaping over the car with a grace that was almost flying. The impact had locked the two vehicles together but she pulled them apart, yanking the metal so it let off an angry grunt. She shoved and the car moved backward two feet away. Far enough for her to yank the door open and extract the man inside.

  She held him at the end of her arm, his feet dangling off the pavement, her voice rising as she demanded to know what he was thinking and what the hell was going on.

  Too late, I saw she was smacking him, not bothering to check her strength. The same power that ripped the door off the car was battering his skin, pushing his head at an unnatural angle. I got up, bracing myself against the hood of her car, trying to force the exhaustion and fear out of my mind.

  “Jo.” She didn’t turn. “Jo!” Not a move. How do you stop a crazed vampire? “Damn it, Jo!” I screamed so hard I tumbled down to the sidewalk. Maybe it was my voice but it seemed more about my fall. She was on me in a second, wanting to know if I was all right.

  “You’re bleeding. Where? What’s wrong? Where does it hurt?”

  I waved her off, still amazed at how fast she could move. Five feet away from us, the bad driver was a mess of blood. On her, I could see a few cuts, little ones now, almost healed.

  “I skidded on the sidewalk, no big deal.” As I said it my body protested. She’d thrown me to safety with a bit more force than she’d needed. My shirt was shredded and under it, my skin looked worse. Still, road-ra
sh wasn’t life-threatening and I suspected the driver’s injuries were.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say anything.” She answered the wrong question helping me up. The world wobbled a little, too much pain and still the tiredness. Wasn’t adrenaline supposed to wake you up? Mine was doing a piss poor job of it. I half-slumped against her and half-stumbled up the walk.

  “I meant is he alive?”

  “Oh.” She paused for a second, surprised I would ask. “No.”

  “Great.” A dead end. No way to get information, no help to figure this out.

  “I think you should stay with us tonight.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not safe here alone. You need someone to protect you, Jean-Laurent can—”

  “To hell with Jean-Laurent. I’ve got you.”

  “It was just a car, Elisabeth. Just one guy in a car. If there had been two or three cars or another vampire, you’d be dead. I’m useless, but Jean-Laurent or Maman—”

  “No. You’re not useless. For Christ’s sake, Jo you just saved my life and kicked someone’s ass. Maybe you’re not hot shit in the vampire world but in the real world, where people die in car accidents all the time, you’re a rock star. So stop, okay? Stop believing the bullshit they’ve fed you for decades. You’re amazing. You can toss cars around like feathers. You’re only weak because you act like it.” I pounded on the hood of the car as I shouted, my arm protesting the movement and my skin spraying tiny bits of blood.

  “Goddamn it, tell me you get it!” I insisted, pulling away to stand on my own. Mistake. My body wasn’t ready for me to yell at her to get her head on straight. I took two steps back, a deep breath to say something more, and promptly passed out.

  My brain scrambled toward consciousness as emotions washed over me: anger that Jo had been kept from realizing her own power for so long, sadness at the way she doubted herself, deep love, and gratitude for all she’d done for me. The weight holding my eyes closed finally lifted. It was dark, pitch black, as if there wasn’t any sun in the sky. The clock glowed up at me, telling me it was eleven in the morning. Burning pain radiated from my left shoulder and back but I risked a few exploratory movements.