Dead on Delivery (17 page)

“Alex.” She ground his name out between gritted teeth.

I poured myself a glass of milk. “What has Alex been doing that he’s supposed to cut out?”

She gestured with her head toward her room and then walked to the door. I followed. She pointed, her finger shaking a tiny bit at the vase on her dresser.

I counted five long-stemmed red roses in the vase. “He sent you flowers.”

“It would almost be okay if he was sending them. Almost, but not quite. He’s leaving them. On my pillow.”

I felt like cold icy fingers were creeping around my heart. This was definitely bad news. “When?”

“You’ve got me. Sometime during the night. They’re not there when I go to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning, they’re there. It’s creeping me out. You know what it means, don’t you? It means he’s been in my bedroom while I’m sleeping. He’s watching me and I don’t even know it.” She sounded pissed. That was good. It was better than sounding terrified and helpless. I could work with pissed.

I swallowed hard. Most vampires don’t just watch beautiful young women sleep. “Norah, have you, uh, checked yourself?”

“Checked myself? What do you mean?” She looked confused.

“You know, for, uh, puncture wounds?” It was hard to say it out loud. It was going to be even harder to check her over.

“E w w w w w!” She started ripping her clothes off as fast as she could. “Do it. Check me. Do it now.”

I did. In a scene probably worthy of a soft-core porn women’s prison movie, I went over just about every inch of Norah, with special attention to highly vascular areas.

“Well?” she demanded, pulling her yoga pants back on as angrily as a person can yank on yoga pants.

“Nothing.” I sat down on the bed. Relieved that I’d found nothing but confused by it all the same. What the hell was he up to?

“So he is just watching me and leaving flowers.” She sat down next to me. “That’s weird. Creepy and weird. Make him stop.”

I nodded. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“You do that.” She put her head in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I know.” I sighed and patted her back, worried at how prominent her shoulder blades felt under my hand.

“I’m so confused.” She kept her head down, not looking at me.

“About what, in particular?” I spent much of my life in a state of at least a little befuddlement. I’d gotten good at it.

“He scares me.”

“He should. He’s dangerous.” And based on what I’d seen that night at the top of the parking garage, getting more so by the minute.

“And he fascinates me, too.” She looked up now, her distress clear on her face. “Is it something that he’s doing to me? Is he making me feel this way about him? I want him gone, but at the same time, the thought of him really being gone makes me . . . way more than sad. I don’t even know how to describe the feeling. It’s a little like how I felt about Pablo. Remember him?”

How could I have forgotten Pablo? He’d been a Spanish yoga instructor and Norah had gone head over heels for him the summer after we’d graduated from high school. When he’d left to go back to Spain, she’d cried for three solid weeks. “I remember.”

“Maybe if he just leaves me alone, it’ll be like it was with Pablo, too. It’ll just take a little time and this feeling will go away. Can you get him to leave me alone?”

“Is that what you want?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. I’m so confused. I need to think.” She shooed me out of the room and practically slammed the door behind me.

I considered giving it a kick but decided to try and be mature. It wasn’t my fault, though, damn it. I was not the one who’d invited him in. She was, and now she was suffering the consequences.

This was the problem with people who dabbled in the occult. Norah had thought she could dabble. She had thought she could sit on a couch and drink red wine with a vampire. She thought she could flirt with a vampire and tease and remain in control of the situation, and it would all be fun and games.

Guess what? It wasn’t. Vampires are predators and as decent as Alexander Bledsoe was, he was still a vampire somewhere deep down in his core.

What was worse was that he now seemed to be a depressed and erratic vampire. I thought about the bloodred roses on Norah’s pillow and Paul’s comment about hungry vampires and our encounter on the parking garage roof. My head started to throb.

I did the only thing that made sense to me at the moment. I went to bed and pulled the covers over my head.

 

 

I MANAGED TO SLEEP UNTIL ABOUT NOON. A GENTLE KNOCK AT the door immediately followed by the sound of a key turning in a lock woke me up. The scent of vanilla had me scurrying to brush my teeth and hair.

“I brought lunch,” Ted called from the kitchen. He did love me. He really did.

“I got the information you wanted on Kurt Rawley.” Ted was sitting on one of the bar stools at the kitchen counter already eating his panini. I sniffed. It smelled like the roasted chicken one from the co-op.

I grabbed the unwrapped package sitting on the counter and got on the bar stool next to his. “Okay. How did he die?”

“They think he doused himself with kerosene and then lit himself on fire.” Ted kept munching, but I could see from the set of his shoulder that it bothered him.

“Why would someone do something like that?” I shook my head. I unwrapped my sandwich. Turkey with Monterey Jack unless I missed my guess and I rarely did when it came to sandwiches.

He sighed. “Apparently someone who thought there were bugs crawling on him all the time would do something like that.” He popped open a bag of chips.

“How do we know that?” I grabbed one chip from the bag. One bad thing I was noticing about having a boyfriend was that it was really messing with my diet. I have a good metabolism but not quite good enough. My jeans were starting to feel a little bit snug. I could have one potato chip, though, couldn’t I?

“His mother told the cops. He’d been complaining about it for days. He felt like there was something crawling on him all the time. He tried creams and ointments. He’d been to the doctor twice. They’d started him on something called Risperidone, but it hadn’t really had time to work. Apparently it’s a syndrome. It’s called delusory parasitosis.”

It’s always nice when things have a name. Too bad this one was probably more of a symptom than a cause. I didn’t think antipsychotics would help in this particular case. Not with the nasty little doll under his bed. That was a gift that was going to keep giving and giving and giving.

Ted took a chip and shoved the bag back toward me. “Here’s something else you might find interesting. Rawley had just been released from the California Youth Authority.”

So that’s where he’d come back from. No wonder no one was bringing up the particulars. I shoved the bag back without taking a chip. “How about Bossard? Same thing?”

Ted nodded. “Yep. Both of them were released on their twenty-first birthdays.”

“What were they in for?” Now we were getting somewhere. I was convinced that if we could find the link between them, we would understand why both these boys had died.

“Murder.” He said it the way he might have said
grape
if I asked him what kind of Popsicle he wanted.

I sat up straight. “Whose murder? When?”

Ted shook his head. “There’s a limit to what I have access to. They were tried as juveniles. I can give you dates, but not too many other details. I’m guessing you can dig around in the newspaper archives and figure it out. Rawley’s and Bossard’s names won’t be in the accounts because of their juvenile status, but how many murders can happen in Elmville at a specific time that involve two juvenile suspects?”

He was right. He’d probably found out as much as he could from official channels. I’d need to do some digging on my own now. At least I knew what I’d be doing this afternoon. “It would help if I knew who was making those voodoo dolls.”

“I can’t help you with that.” He rolled up his empty sandwich wrapper and stood up.

“There is something else that you might be able to help me with.” I twirled on the bar stool so I was facing him. “There’s something wrong with Alex.”

Ted’s eyebrows went up. “What kind of thing?”

“I’m not sure. He’s gone all moody and brooding.”
And might be stalking my roommate
, I added silently.

“Isn’t that kind of par for the course with a vampire? They’re sort of known for moody broodiness, aren’t they? It would be kind of his thang, wouldn’t it?” Ted smiled.

“No.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

Ted just looked at me.

“Fine. Yes. It’s a vampire thing, but this feels different.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” He gathered up our garbage and took it into the kitchen.

“I’m not sure. You have him on speed dial. You guys are special buds now. Has he said anything?” Like when they were doing each other’s nails and having pillow fights? What was I even asking?

“About what?” Ted finished throwing out the remnants of our lunch and came back with a sponge to wipe down the kitchen counter.

“I don’t know. Feeling blue? Being obsessed with someone?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

Ted stopped wiping the counter and looked over at me. “Obsessed with whom?”

I dropped the nonchalant. “Norah, maybe?”

“That could be a problem.” He sat back down. “How bad is it?”

“He’s leaving roses on her pillow. Paul mentioned him not hanging out at McClannigan’s to pick up take-out food, if you get my drift, and he’s acting weird at work. Can you talk to him?”

“Isn’t there some kind of vampire therapist he can go to? Vampire antidepressants? Bloodzac? Zoglobin?” Ted smirked.

I punched his arm. “This isn’t funny.”

“I didn’t say it was. I just have no frame of reference here.” He rubbed his shoulder and shook his head at me.

“I don’t know that I do either. I am pretty sure I don’t want one, though.”

 

 

TED HAD BEEN RIGHT. NOW THAT I KNEW WHAT DATES TO LOOK for, it didn’t take much to figure out who Rawley and Bossard had murdered. As ugly as their suicides were, what I found was even uglier.

Jorge Aguilar, a Mexican immigrant, was beaten to death on the streets of Elmville by white teenagers about six years ago. The reason they attacked him was a little murky. After reading several newspaper accounts, it seemed like it could have been that he was walking with a white girl, that he’d yelled insults at the boys or that he had simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time. I suspected it was a lethal combination of all three. Well, lethal for Aguilar at least.

The rest of it wasn’t so murky. Aguilar had been knocked to the ground, pummeled with fists and finally kicked so hard in the head that he lost consciousness. He never regained it. Four days after the beating, he’d been taken off life support and allowed to die.

The boys, honor students and athletes, had been tried as juveniles, sparking protests that received national media coverage. I jotted down the name of the man who had seemingly led most of the protests. Luis Pelayo’s name came up over and over in interviews, listed as “a leader of the local Latino community.”

It was an ugly story. I vaguely remembered the controversy when it happened. So many of the remarks that I’d heard at the memorial service began to make sense. The talk of Bossard not being able to come back from making one mistake. Rawley’s mother’s comments about her son having paid for what he’d done started to make a certain kind of sense, too, although how you pay for taking another person’s life so cavalierly was difficult for me to calculate. There wasn’t a credit limit in the universe high enough as far as I was concerned.

The part that didn’t make immediate sense and that worried me the most, though?

The news reports all stated that there were three boys involved in the attacks. Two of Jorge Aguilar’s murderers were dead by their own hand. One was still out there.

There was one more thing that I remembered about Neil Bossard’s memorial. The kid who got thrown out of the house right before I did, the one who kept screaming about being cursed. I tried to remember his name and came up with a blank. I wondered if Ted would remember.

While I was still mulling over what to do about the third man, Sophie whirled into the apartment, her hair scented with leaves and rain. Ben trailed after her. “I did it!”

“Did what?” Sophie was nothing if not industrious. The answer could have been almost anything. She could have mastered the spinning back kick, with which I’d been helping her, or she could have passed her Algebra II/Trig exam, with which I’d been no help at all, or she could have managed to deliver the damn axe the Basajaun had given us for Ginnar the Dwarf.

“I found Ginnar!” She spun over to me and gave me a hug.

I did my best not to tense up. I have one of those touchy-feely families that is forever hugging. They all want to be in constant physical contact with each other. Except me. It’s not that I don’t like being touched. I’m just wary of it. It doesn’t always feel good. “That’s great. Was he happy to get the axe?” Not everyone was always happy to see us. We didn’t always deliver good news or tokens of esteem and love. We were not always greeted with open arms and open hearts. In this particular instance, I’d been relatively sure that Sophie would get a positive greeting.

She made a funny face.

“She didn’t exactly give him the axe,” Ben explained for her from the kitchen, where his head was in my refrigerator.

I was confused. “Did you forget to take it with you?” Actually taking the item on the delivery run was one of the first rules of Messengering. I’d been relatively sure I’d hammered that point home. Sometimes people needed more than one refresher, though. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget little details, like the object that was actually supposed to go someplace.