Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (30 page)

“Wait a second,” I said, holding up a hand. “Am I correct in saying that I’ve gotten somewhat of a reputation as being a less murder-happy vampire?”

“Do the
metsän kunigas
shit in the woods?” Suze
asked rhetorically. I wondered how long exactly the kitsune had been sitting on that particular gem. Dahlia’s expression suggested that had the situation been any less fraught, those would’ve been fighting words.

I pushed forward. “Okay, we can use that. We pretend that we believe that Dahlia is guilty, and we put her under house arrest.”

“That might be tricky, Fort,” Suze said cautiously. “We’re not using my house. Dan would definitely not go for this, and Dahlia’s house is kind of baby central.”

“No, no my house is empty today,” Dahlia said. “Gil and I were so sure that it had to be the Ad-hene. . . . We talked at dinner last night, and I agreed to send the girls somewhere safer until the situation was cleared up. Mom and I packed everything they needed, and she hit the road. They arrived in Greenville, Maine, at five thirty this morning.”

“That makes things easier.” I actually felt a deep sense of relief. Not only was this going to clear up logistics, but I was glad that her daughters were well out of the line of fire. “Is there anyone out there in the reception area who you can say for sure, based only on logical proof,
couldn’t
have been involved in either of the murders? We need someone who we can say is your prison guard, so it would help if this was a bear.”

Dahlia thought it through, then nodded. Clearly, trusting people was something she was a lot better at than coming up with possible suspects. “Alison could do it. She’s been backpacking in Australia for an entire month. Someone texted her, and she caught a plane home. She didn’t get in until the morning of the funeral.”

“Then she’s your guard while you’re under house arrest.” I looked over at Suze. “Peter wasn’t killed until after I hit him with the car and he ran off, so the killer might’ve just acted quickly to cover some tracks. We’ll search Peter’s place, just in case he was helpful enough to leave
karhu
-murdering plans in writing. Then we’ll
swing back to your house, and we’ll all sit tight and see what happens.”

There was general agreement. Dahlia whipped out her iPhone and looked up Peter’s home information for me, while Suze went out and then returned a minute or two later with our recruited prison guard/bodyguard. From the expression on her face, Suze had probably had some fun with that “random” selection criteria. Fortunately Alison didn’t look like a strange pick for that job—she was tough, and solidly built, the kind of person who definitely looked like she could backpack solo around the Australian outback for kicks. She also looked like the kind of woman who I would call for help if I needed to move a fridge.

While we filled her in on what her job was going to be, I removed a plastic bag full of industrial wire ties from my laptop case. Our original plan had been to use these as part of subduing Gil, but they now served as a way to help with our ploy. Suze fashioned a set of cuffs. “Too tight?” she asked solicitously.

“Actually, yeah,” Dahlia replied.

“Good.” I stared at Suze, and she gave a small shrug, explaining, “It’ll look more authentic. Oh, and we should punch her in the face to make it look like we roughed her up during questioning.”

“I think the cuffs are enough,” I said. “Now, is the crowd gathered?”

“Everyone’s in the cubicle room right now,” Alison said.

“Good. On our marks . . . aaaaand, everyone acting!”

*   *   *

“Ladies, gentlemen, and bears—I am pleased to say that we have apprehended the murderer of Matias Kivela and Peter Utrio.” A huge gasp went through the room, and everyone looked stunned and horrified at the sight of Dahlia at my side, her hands bound with wire ties and a blank expression on her face. I continued, pressing my
advantage. “Dahlia Kivela will be under house arrest while I discuss her punishment with my mother, but let me assure you, it will be severe.” People were already leaning over to talk with their neighbors, and many were pulling out cell phones to call or text the news to everyone else. I noticed how many people were shaking their heads, still looking amazed, while others wore smug I-knew-it-all-along expressions. Even when they could turn into bears, people were still people.

Alison strong-armed Dahlia through the crowd, presumably out to her waiting car, followed by Suze, who, I noticed, snagged her cousin Takara’s sleeve and had a whispered conference. I would’ve been following closely, but halfway to the door, Gil finally shoved his way through the crowd and wrapped one huge hand around my arm, stopping me in my tracks.

“What is
wrong
with you?” he bellowed in my face, attracting the fascinated attention of the entire crowd. “This is outrageous—my sister would never do that! What the hell did you do to her to make her say that she did that? Who did you threaten?” His other hand locked on my free arm, and I had a feeling that I would have a matching set of bruises in the shape of his fingers. I stepped back and broke his grip before he could deliver the teeth-snapping shaking that he clearly wanted to inflict, then grabbed him by the collar and towed him into the reception room and away from the crowd. I was not forgetting for a moment that, for all Dahlia’s protests, Gil remained my prime suspect.

In the reception room, with no audience of his hopeful future subjects to play to, I got up in his face. “I didn’t need a confession,” I said loudly. “The evidence spoke for itself. The murder weapon was in her house, and there was a piece of your sister’s clothing on Peter’s body today.”

Gil shook his head wildly. “That’s circumstantial evidence! Anyone could’ve put that knife in Dahlia’s house,
and who the hell knows how Peter got a piece of her clothing? How are you even so sure it’s Dahlia’s clothing? None of this would be enough for a human court!”

I was impressed—Gil was doing a great impression of a frantic and loyal brother, but I shook my head coldly and said, “It’s a good thing that the vampires don’t need courts, then,” and turned away. Suze had just come back into the building, and through the glass doors, I could see Alison loading Dahlia into her car.

“Where are you going?” Gil demanded, grabbing a handful of my jacket.

I looked over my shoulder. “To finish my investigation.”

“You’re going nowhere without me,” he snapped. “I’m not going to let you railroad my sister on shoddy evidence.”

I shook him off me again and glanced over at Suze. She gave a small, curious look, then held open the door and gestured for Gil to precede us. He did, shooting us both extremely foul glares. I followed, pausing next to Suze to whisper in her ear. “Exactly what is this plan of yours now?”

She leaned in close. “Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. Let him come along. We’ll see what he does, and if he makes one wrong move, I’ll slice him before he can shift to bear.”

I glanced down to where I knew Suze’s knife was strapped to her leg, even though her fox magic forced my eyes away from it. “Agreed,” I said.

We loaded into Suze’s Audi. I was driving, with Gil uncomfortably close in the passenger seat. Suze had clambered into the backseat (another reason to loathe two-door cars—even she was unable to make her entrance into the back look graceful), and was now sitting directly behind Gil. While he continued a loud soliloquy on the subject of his sister’s innocence, I glanced behind me and noticed the gleam of one of Suze’s smaller
knives, held carefully in her hand. Apparently she was not taking any chances, because she looked ready to slit the bear’s throat at a moment’s notice. It seemed like a solid precaution to me, and I started the Audi up.

Peter’s apartment turned out to be in the student area near Roger Williams University, in one of those tired but massive apartment buildings that are such a staple of off-campus housing that the owners have realized that they never have to do maintenance ever again, because naïve young students will continue forking over their parents’ money regardless of the size of the rat infestation. I remembered such living well—in my first off-campus apartment at Brown, the cockroaches had been so giant and aggressive that I had given up even trying to keep food in my cabinets, and had kept everything in my fridge.

Normally Suze would’ve picked the lock on Peter’s door, but as we stood in the hallway of the building’s ninth floor, with the light above us flickering ominously and what looked like fossilized vomit on the carpet, it was clear that her services were unnecessary—the lock was already broken. I pushed the door open and walked in, followed by Gil (who had finally stopped talking after Suze had openly threatened him while we walked up the stairs—naturally, the elevator was broken), then Suze, who was shadowing the bear’s every movement.

It was a typical efficiency apartment—bed, bureau, and desk in the main room, doors leading into the tiny kitchen and the tinier bathroom. The single window had a bath towel tacked to it to make up for the lack of curtains. It also looked like a bomb had exploded—every drawer had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped onto the floor, and papers were thrown everywhere. The computer keyboard, mouse, and monitor were resting neatly on his desk, but the plugs had been yanked out and the hard drive removed. There was the usual assortment of college-guy posters on the walls, but there were
several noticeable blank spots where something had been removed. On a few spots that remover had been in such a hurry that the corners of the picture still remained, with the rest torn away.

“Someone was already here,” I noted, a second later kicking myself for becoming Captain Obvious. There was a weirdly strong smell hanging in the air, and not the usual one I would’ve expected for a college guy’s apartment. “And that someone brought bleach.” I looked over at Suze. “Is there any way you can still—”

Never taking her eyes off Gil, who was staring around the room and looking distinctly taken aback, or was just admiring his own handiwork, she shook her head. “I can’t get a scent, Fort. Not once bleach gets thrown around.”

“Shit.” I looked around and nudged a pile of paper. “Whoever did this must’ve grabbed anything incriminating.”

“You don’t know that,” Gil said sharply, giving me that very familiar glare. He knelt down and started sorting through a pile of papers. “The killer was probably in a hurry, and they could’ve missed something that will prove to you that my sister is innocent.”

As he turned his attention to the papers, I exchanged a glance with Suze. She gave a little shrug and said, “Well, we did drive all the way over here.”

“All right.” I turned and looked at the demolished room. “Now, if I were a nineteen-year-old guy, and I had something incriminating to hide, where would I put it?”

Of course, I
had
once been a nineteen-year-old guy in crappy student apartments (my current apartment, while still moderately crappy, was still a cut above the cesspools that students lived in), so all I had to do was remember where I had stashed my treasures. I went straight for the closet, and started shaking out all of the shoes, then dug my hands into the pockets of all of his jackets. I found a very nice watch, probably a graduation gift from his parents, but nothing incriminating. I looked
around the room again and saw the pile of books against the side of his desk. Gil was still picking away at the papers, with Suze focusing on emulating upper management and not doing anything but watching. I grabbed the top book on the stack and flipped through it. Nothing. Next one, again nothing. I was halfway through the stack when I hit pay dirt in his copy of
An Introduction to Literary Criticism
. It was a photo, and I stared at it for a long second.

“Guys,” I said, with enough intensity that Gil and Suze both turned around. I handed the picture silently to Suze. Her eyebrows lifted slowly, and she gave a low whistle as she looked at what I’d seen—there was poor, awkward, acne-ridden Peter lying on his bed. And snuggled up next to him was the beautiful blond Carmen, with a very sly smile on her face.

Gil looked over Suze’s shoulder and gaped. “Carmen and Peter weren’t dating,” he said, staring at the photo as if he couldn’t quite process the information it was conveying because it just didn’t add up—like two and two suddenly equaling twelve. “She’s always chasing some of the older boys—
metsän kunigas
in their twenties. She told me once that Peter had a puppy crush on her.”

While Gil was trying to wrap his head around things, I pulled the next book off the stack—
Ivanhoe
. Apparently Peter had been a literature student, because I found another picture. This was quite a bit more explicit—it was just Carmen on the bed, and she was completely naked. “Looks like someone found that crush useful,” I said, and passed the photo over. I stared at Gil, realizing that the whole time he’d been defending his sister, he’d been absolutely sincere. Meanwhile, there had been Carmen, just hanging around the edges, so willing to tell me all about how Matias had killed Dahlia’s husband, or,
Jesus
, even making me promise to bring Prudence into the investigation if things stalled out.

Suze was clearly thinking the same thing. “Carmen
was working on this from the beginning, and she figured out how to get Peter to help her out. She tried to pin it all on Dahlia, and she waited until she thought that she’d be dealing with Prudence rather than Chivalry.”

“She got Peter to attack us, maybe to kill us, or maybe just kill you and maim the hell out of me and plant the evidence, who knows, but that definitely would’ve brought Prudence up here in a killing mood.” I looked at Gil. “But she was just focusing on Dahlia—why is that, Gil? Why didn’t she try to frame you for anything?”

Gil was still staring at the photos of his cousin, shaking his head. When I said his name, he jerked a little, and finally looked up at me, horrified. “Uncle Matias tapped Dahlia as his successor at the end of last month. I knew that he didn’t agree with my opinions, and that Chivalry Scott just saw me as another version of my mother, so I knew that I wasn’t going to be named the heir. But my mom asked why he wasn’t considering Carmen at all—she’s young, but she’s twenty-one now. But Matias said he didn’t want to go into it, but that she didn’t have the temperament.”