Love Bites (20 page)

“We found a body on the beach last night. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but we think it’s Cyril Sinclair.”

Her eyes widened for a split second, but then she smiled. “Oh, that’s not possible, Detective. I would know if something had happened to Smooch. We’re very simpatico. You must have the wrong information.”

I’ve never had to do a next-of-kin notification—I work in Beverly Hills, after all, not East L.A. Our murder rate is 0.00 times the national average. And Madelaine Sauvage, pronounced Savage, wasn’t Cyril Sinclair’s next of kin. But even so, her reaction was totally wacky. I’d just told her her boyfriend was dead and she’d blithely denied the possibility. Of course, she also talked to full-size Barbies. I didn’t know if she was truly nuts or if she knew something I didn’t.

It took me a moment to come up with an answer.

“I hope that’s true, Ms. Sauvage. Anything’s possible. We were just working off a Polaroid. I’ll tell you what, would you mind coming down to the Coroner’s office to see if you recognize the person we found?”

“Now?”

I nodded.

“All right. Just give me a minute to change.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

I couldn’t stay in the car any longer. As soon as the woman had opened her door, I smelled the same scent I’d smelled in my backyard when the werecreature attacked me. Pungent and feral. Either he was close by or I’d been wrong when I said that stench couldn’t be female. Either way, Peter was in more danger than he knew. That werewolf on my property hadn’t been a boxenwolf. There’d be no collar lying around to warn him.

Peter had left the gate ajar. I stepped inside and stood hidden in the darkness against the oleander. The front door was open. I could see Peter standing inside the entrance. The rest of the living room was visible through the windows that ran the length of the house. It was dark inside. Not a problem for my kind.

The woman had company. A living room full of women.

I let my senses sharpen and concentrated on listening to them. Smooch’s girlfriend said, “They’re all dead,” and immediately I was by the front door, my fangs dropped, my claws in place. She closed it, but not before I got a much stronger whiff of that shitty odor. She had to be a were, there was no doubt in my mind. Maybe the other women, too; the only human I smelled in that room was Peter. I moved next to the window so I could watch them all. If she started to shift, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

She seemed to be making a pass at him. She motioned for him to sit beside her, and when he didn’t, she began fondling the other women in the room. They weren’t responding, either. I looked more closely at them. No wonder they didn’t smell human—they weren’t real. She was using dummies as decorations. Like the life-size fashion dolls we’d used in France in the 1700s. Only these were dressed like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Ms. savage Sauvage wanted a minute to change. I walked over to the window and tried to see Ovsanna in the car, through the bushes. No luck. The street was completely screened from the house. The gate was opened wider than I’d left it, though. Ovsanna must be eavesdropping close by. She just didn’t trust me to take care of myself, did she?

The stench in the room grew stronger, making my eyes water. I turned around to search for the source, and there was Sauvage. She was changing, all right. Right in front of me. And fast. The buttons on her tuxedo shirt popped off. Her nipples retracted and her bra hooks pulled open as her breasts flattened into a massive lupine chest. Her boots were already on the floor—trust a woman to take care of her shoes—and she was ripping out of her jeans. But instead of a bikini wax, I was staring at the hairy haunches of another werewolf. A big mother of a werewolf—not one of those boxenwolves we’d seen on the beach; this thing was huge—misshapen and grotesque, like the werebeasts I’d seen fighting Ovsanna and her vampyres in Palm Springs. Madelaine Sauvage’s aging cheerleader face morphed into the nastiest snout I’d ever seen on an animal, with pitted yellow canines dripping green slime. She had bulbous, twisted, hairy nostrils. I didn’t know whether to shoot or puke.

She didn’t give me a choice. She was on me before I could get to my gun. Her teeth tore through my leather shoulder harness, and my backup piece, the .32 S&W, went flying across the room, shattering the front window. Huge shards of glass blew back at us, but Madelaine—or whoever she was—took most of it on her right side, the side crushing me to the ground. I kept my eyes open long enough to see Ovsanna push through the dangling fragments of glass, and then I squeezed them shut, wrenched my head to the left, and came back with all the power I had to head-butt the damn werewolf woman on the side of its skull.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I was through the window and into the room before the glass stopped falling. Peter was partially pinned under the werebeast, his leather jacket spiked with glass slivers and his gun gone. He was smashing into her with his head and bleeding from cuts on his face and neck.

Peter’s head butt sent the beast scrabbling away from both of us, but it left Peter dazed on the floor. He rolled on his stomach and used the coffee table to support himself as he tried to stand. I launched myself over him as the creature charged at me, raking my claws across her belly in midair. The coffee table flipped when she landed. Lit candles went rolling across the floor. One of them landed at the feet of a mannequin, and her crinoline caught fire.

I’d torn open the beast’s stomach when I sliced her. I’d also gotten an image from the contact. I saw Lilith on her back, her legs spread, birthing this thing. I didn’t have time to think about it. She came at me again, gnashing and growling, and when she lunged, Peter kicked her in midair from the side. I grabbed the coffee table by its leg and swung it at her as she charged him, smashing her canines back into her throat. She staggered. I leapt on her back, my fangs tearing at her neck until I found her jugular and felt her boiling blood streaming down my throat. She continued to struggle, but I could feel the life pumping out of her. God, she tasted good. I’d just fed on Maral two nights before, but Maral’s blood always had a faint aftertaste of cannabis; this were was sweeter, more familiar. I held on, sucking and swallowing, until she was dead.

Lying atop her, I was flooded with images. Split-second images that jumped like a movie preview. She was the paparazzo’s lover, all right. I saw him shift to a boxenwolf, the collar around his neck. Madelaine Sauvage was still in human form, standing half bent over, and he was mounting her from behind, his swollen wolf cock disappearing between her legs. Then I saw my battle with Lilith in Palm Springs, me in my dragon form and Lilith morphed into a serpent.

Then Lilith was a woman again: Baby Jane giving birth to another were. He was huge. He was the werebeast who’d attacked me in my yard. Lilith forced him down on his back, climbed on top of him like he was a man, and rode herself on him. She came, and then the were shifted into a human form and mounted Madelaine Sauvage.

I recognized him.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

“Ovsanna, get off her! She’s on fire!” Flames had moved up one of the mannequin’s clothes, melting its torso and flaring when they reached the acrylic wig. The form toppled over onto the hind legs of the dead werewolf, and its fur caught fire. Ovsanna had her teeth buried in its neck. She seemed to be in a daze, not aware of the heat or flames. I forced open her jaw, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her off. She had blood running down her chin, her mouth was covered with it. She bared her fangs, snarling at me. Her eyes had turned; they were glowing red. There was no recognition in them, just rage. And something else—a primal urge to attack. I yelled her name again and they flickered, and I saw her humanity come back into them. If that’s what you call it. I saw understanding return, a realization of who I was and who she was—all in a split second.

“Peter—,” she said, wiping the blood off her lips.

The flames had spread to a second dummy. The clothes were burning, but whatever the mannequin was made of, it was melting instead. I grabbed an iron poker from the fireplace set and rolled the charring mess into the hearth. “Cover that one with that rug,” I yelled, and Ovsanna did, stomping on the embers that escaped from under the purple flokati.

That just left the werewolf. It was blazing in the middle of the room, but the floor beneath it was concrete slab, so nothing else was on fire.

“I can do this!” Ovsanna said, and she took two more tools from the set and began to push the burning body toward the hearth. I grabbed a spaghetti pot off the kitchen counter, filled it with water, and doused everything that was still burning. It took a couple of trips, but by the time Ovsanna had the carcass all the way in the fireplace, the danger was over. Except for the smoke and the smell. Like driving past the dairy farms on the way to Pacheco Pass.

Talk about a mess. I’m a cop, goddamn it, and there I was helping to kill my second—what, victim? perp? beast?—in two days. Less than two days, if you want to be exact. Cyril Sinclair had been alive on the beach, attacking Ovsanna, just the night before. Now he and his girlfriend were both dead. At least we didn’t have another body to explain. Nothing was left of Madelaine Sauvage but a pile of sodden ash in the fireplace.

We opened the remaining windows to let out some of the stench. Aside from the charring on the concrete and the burned rug, the fire hadn’t done any noticeable damage. The mannequin population had diminished, but unless the cops got a good friend of Madelaine’s to examine the room, they wouldn’t know that.

I went outside and hunted around in the bushes until I found my gun. Made sure I had all the pieces of the shoulder harness. Ovsanna filled a garbage bag with most of the ash, and we burned another small log to mix with what remained. She said there wouldn’t be any human DNA in the pile, but I didn’t want any signs that a body had been burned at all, regardless of the species.

We were both bloody, although most of the blood on Ovsanna was from the werewolf and not her. What had dripped on the floor had landed on the rug, and the rug had burned with the dummy, so there was no blood to clean.

That left a little charred concrete and the broken window. With a dishcloth, I picked up Emilie’s martini shaker—Jesus, I was calling the mannequins by name now—and threw it through the window. It landed in the ice plant outside. Let the investigators think Madelaine had gotten drunk and let it fly. Hell, let them think whatever they wanted; there was no body, no sign of a break-in, nothing but a fire in a fireplace that may have gotten out of hand and a window broken out from the inside. Maybe she threw herself a raucous going-away party and then left town.

The neighborhood was empty. No one seemed to have noticed the commotion. I slipped quietly out to my car and grabbed gloves from the evidence kit I keep in the trunk. Even though I could explain I’d had to interview Sauvage because of her relationship to Cyril Sinclair, there was no sense leaving our prints anywhere. Ovsanna mopped the concrete while I wiped down the window latches, the coffee table, and the fireplace tools, feeling more and more like a perp myself. Then we started a search of the rest of the house. I was looking for anything that would explain Madelaine Sauvage’s link to Cyril Sinclair or to the paparazzi-cum-boxenwolves or why Ovsanna had been attacked.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, a bathroom, and a small office. And more dummies. One sat on a high stool at the end of the hall, in a tight black sheath with her legs crossed at the ankles, her knees swaying to the left and her toes pointed to the right in one of those fifties coquette poses. Her face was covered with a black veil attached to a wide-brimmed black hat. Another shy one, it looked like. I wondered what her name was—Gigi, maybe? Or Sabrina?

Two more mannequins stood on either side of the master bedroom closet, with their arms motioning to the door the way Betty Furness used to in those refrigerator commercials. They were nude except for aprons around their waists. Creepy. I imagined some guy in the middle of screwing Madelaine looking up to see those two figures pointing like that. He’d probably jump out the window.

There was a cell phone on the desk in the office. I made a note of the number to compare it with Smooch’s incoming calls. His name was number two on the speed dial. The only other name I recognized was the guy Sauvage said she had worked for, the head of WorldWide Talent, Mick Erzatz. He was number one on the speed dial.

There were pictures of him and Madelaine in an album she had on a shelf in the closet. Pictures of Smooch and Madelaine, too. And Madelaine and several other guys, dating back fifteen years or so from the looks of the clothes and haircuts. She looked lovey-dovey with all of them. So maybe Mick Erzatz had been more than her boss. I wondered if he preceded Smooch or if she was screwing them simultaneously. From all the stories I’d heard about Erzatz, I was guessing she didn’t have much choice. He got off on having power. Rumor was if you wanted to work for him, you had to audition on tape. He had videos of every woman he’d hired giving him head. A lot of the actresses he represented, too.

Ovsanna found one wolf-pelt collar. It was in a drawer with Madelaine’s lingerie, under her bras and panties. There was definitely a connection between her and the boxenwolves.

We took the collar with us and put the garbage bag with the ashes in my trunk and tossed it in a Dumpster on Herkimer Street, where Ovsanna had parked her car. Then she followed me back to my house. She wanted to clean up before she went home to Maral.