10. Digging Deeper
Chapter 10
Digging Deeper
Sierra Escondida Police Department—Moments later
T ig jotted some additional follow-up notes, then straightened in her chair. “Who was present the night Petar practiced?”
“How should I know? We don’t keep a list.” Brucie wadded his used tissue into his fist. “No one would want to gamble at an illegal casino that made them sign in.”
“Okay.” Tig ran a hand across her jaw. “But you have security cameras, right?”
Brucie’s gaze slewed toward Janey, and he shifted his legs nervously, knocking his knees into the table. “We, uh, we recycle the drives every forty-eight hours. If there’s a problem, we save the video. Otherwise, we record over the older videos. The hard drives only hold so many hours…and if we’re raided during the day, the cops won’t get much, ya know?”
Yeah, she understood the strategy. At night, they could mesmerize the mortal police to forget, but when the sun was out, they were helpless. “Can you access the video remotely?”
“Petar might have been able to, but none of us can.” Brucie glanced at his watch, and his lips moved like he was counting something. “It doesn’t matter now. We’re too far past the time when Petar did his practice for the crowd. The video’s gone.”
Tig curled her fingers in frustration. “So, just to get this straight: Janey was at the hotel when Petar was murdered, in a separate room. When he didn’t wake, she called you. How’d you get to Mordida?”
“We drove nonstop from Eastvale. Took us four and a half hours.” Brucie averted his gaze. Was he hiding something? “Got the front desk to give me his key, looked in the room, found his corpse, and got the hell out.”
“Was anything missing from the room? Any bags? His phone? Laptop?”
Janey side-eyed Brucie and gave a quirk of her head in his direction. “He has Petar’s phone.”
Brucie nodded. “Petar always hid it in the same spot when traveling. Taped to the back of the room’s chest of drawers. There’s usually an electric socket behind the cabinet, ’cause the TV’s on top, so he could hide the phone and still charge it, and if someone broke in during the day, they couldn’t steal it.”
“And did you find his phone there?” Tig asked. “Or was it on the bedstand?” Knowing where Brucie found the phone might help her pin down the time of death.
“It was taped to the back of the cabinet.”
So Petar had prepared for his day’s sleep, which meant the murder may have taken place after the sun rose rather than the hours before dawn. A mortal could be the killer. And with the vampire hunter note, it made sense. “Why’d you search for it?”
“His entire book of business is on that phone. Some people use our online app, but a lot of old-fashioned gamblers phone in their bets. Not all older vamps trust the internet.”
“What about his laptop?”
“None. He didn’t believe in portable computers, except for his phone, I guess.” Brucie gave Janey a look. “He kept notes on paper.”
Janey exhaled an angry breath. “Did you have to tell her that? It wasn’t in his room. It was with me.”
Tig held out her palm and curled her fingers repeatedly, the universal gesture for hand it over . “What are we talking about?”
Janey slapped a small notebook on the table.
Tig stared at the item. She hadn’t seen one in ages. A flip pad like detectives carried back in the day when everything was on paper.
“Like, I want this back.” Janey covered the notebook with her arms. “Or we won’t be able to collect on the bets they made.”
“Once we solve the case, we return personal property to the heirs.”
Brucie tapped Janey’s shoulder. “Let Tig have it.”
Janey narrowed her eyes at him, but released the notebook. “She better give it back.”
Tig pulled a pair of purple nitrile gloves from her back pocket. After donning them, she lifted the pad by the edges, then flipped through the pages. Each row had a dollar amount, an initialism she recognized for sports bets, like ATS for against the spread , the date and title of a sports game or horse race, and a name she didn’t recognize. “What’s the last column for? Schnauzer, Whino, Loser—”
Janey scowled. “The person who made the bet. They’re nicknames. You need the phone to decipher each one.”
Tig turned on the phone and swiped to the password entry. “Do you have the PIN?”
“No, it’s face recognition only.”
Tig sighed. With Petar dead, biometric software wouldn’t work on a mummified body. So why were they so keen on taking the phone if they didn’t have access? Janey must be lying—unless it was only the vampires who knew how to get past the lock screen. Was that why Brucie and Janey kept exchanging glances? “It would really help us track down Petar’s killer if we could open his phone. You sure you don’t have a way to unlock it?”
The group shrug annoyed her. She’d get them alone later and question them individually if Plan B didn’t work. Retrieving Petar’s body before mortals found it was now her top priority.
Jayden handed her a few plastic evidence bags.
She dropped the phone into one, put the notebook in a second bag, and the killer’s note in a third. “Captain”—she offered the evidence to Jayden—“please take these and examine for fingerprints while I assemble a team to retrieve the body and search the hotel room.”
“Will do, chief.” Jayden scooted back his chair and headed to the door with the bagged items and his stun gun.
“On second thought, hold up a minute.” Jayden paused at the door, and Tig twisted in her seat to face the one-way glass. “Liza, call Gaea. Ask if she has room at her house for the night.”
Janey clicked her tongue. “Tell her I smoke.”
Tig turned to her. “What do you smoke, exactly?”
“Like I’d tell you.”
Brucie clasped Janey’s shoulder. “She smokes crystal meth. You don’t enforce drug laws here, do you?”
“No, we don’t bother. She wants to poison herself, go ahead. But if she hurts anyone while on the stuff, the penalties here are stiff. Very stiff. So make sure she doesn’t.”
“I ain’t never hurt no one,” Janey insisted.
“And she can’t stay with Gaea,” Tig said. “Seaton, her current border is still adjusting to being vampire, and I don’t want him trying her drugs. So we’ll have to find someone who doesn’t mind.”
Jayden shrugged. “We could ask Anna. The house she’s in has three bedrooms.”
The council had granted Anna Balmer witness protection after she helped put together enough evidence for the search warrant Tig needed to bust the vampire dominance movement. The VDM tried to take over the Hill, and with their members either dead or in prison, the informant was still in hiding from her maker, Callistus Tedder, who hadn’t gotten the memo this century that abuse of one’s child was unlawful among the treaty communities. Anyway, Anna had room, but Tig didn’t know her well enough and wanted Janey and her troop with someone she trusted.
Shayna came to mind. Yacov’s widow was the only mortal on the Hill who lived alone. The town council had given her permission to remain beyond her year of mourning. But Shayna was very religious, and probably wouldn’t want a drug-smoking mortal sharing space with her any more than Gaea would, but for different reasons.
A click sounded over the intercom. “Chief,” Liza said from behind the one-way glass. “I could take them in. I have room, and she can smoke on the veranda.”
Tig silenced the groan she felt. Nothing like being put on the spot. She’d have preferred to discuss it in private first. “Are you sure? We could ask Father Matt—”
“Mikhail is still bunking at his house. I doubt there’d be room for five more.”
Yeah, Father Matt had a rather modest home. And Tig trusted the vice mayor, who also served as a reserve officer on the Hill’s small police force. Tig eyed the four vampires on the other side of the table. “Which one of you is Janey sleeping with?”
Brucie smiled. “She was Petar’s mate. Though she’s a free agent now that he’s dead.”
Janey crossed her arms. “And I plan on staying that way.”
Tig shook her head. “Yeah, but someone has to take over the loyalty bite. When Janey chooses who it is, are you boys good about respecting her choice? Especially if she picks somebody who’s not part of your group? Liza is single.” Tig looked at the other three vamps. She thought of them as the three stooges, for lack of a better name. When none of them answered, she added, “Work it out with Janey and Liza. I don’t want any problems, understand? Mortals on the Hill have free choice, and you need consent for anything you do with Janey, including feeding, but someone has to renew the loyalty bite regularly, now that Petar’s dead.”
“We get along fine,” Brucie said. “Those two have mates, but we couldn’t risk stopping for them. They’ll come by bus tomorrow.”
Tig groaned. That wasn’t great news. Two more guests to watch and house. She turned toward the one-way mirror even though she couldn’t see Liza.
The intercom clicked on again. “Yeah, I can accommodate them. We can get some air mattresses, and the mortals can double up. The vampires will sleep in my basement.”
Tig motioned for Jayden to leave. “Go ahead. Get started on dusting the evidence for fingerprints.” Then she looked back at Brucie. “You’re responsible for Petar’s cauldron. We have a few simple rules here: no poaching, no dueling, no abuse of mortals, and no live feeding on strangers within a hundred miles of the Hill—that includes no hunting. Got it?”
“Fuckin’-A, I didn’t know we were going to prison.” That was the one she’d tagged as Curly Joe, because of his bushy hair.
“You want asylum from us, you play by our rules. The vice mayor can get extra banked blood for the four of you.”
Brucie didn’t react, but the other three made sour faces that reminded her of their comedic counterparts. She reached behind her, opened a file cabinet, and pulled out four forms. She needed to get their real names if she was going to confirm their identities.
“Fill these out,” she said, handing them to the vampires. “We need the date you were turned, maker, prior identities—be particularly honest about those.” She reached back for a fifth form. “This one’s for you, Janey.”
Janey looked at the form. “Larry’s right—this is a fucking prison.”
She’d used the wrong Stooge name for that one, but if the other two were named Moe and Curly, she’d resign from police work and take up mind reading. “I think you’ll find living on the Hill far better than being in a prison. But one more thing—you’ll have to turn over any weapons you have. I’ll lock them in our gun safe, and you get them back when you leave.”
Brucie glanced at the other stooges. After they all nodded, he said, “Uh, sure.”
Tig turned to Janey. “Even if Petar left everything to you, until I clear you, you can’t touch his assets.”
Janey scrunched her eyebrows together. “Yeah, I guess we have enough cash to get by for a short time. The trust and will are back at the casino. I need them to access Petar’s bank accounts.”
“We’ll make arrangements to retrieve the documents later.” Tig pulled a business card from her wallet. She’d seen this situation before—most people who inherited sizable sums ran through it quickly unless they got guidance. “We have a fee-only financial adviser on the Hill—Liza can introduce you to Carolyn. She’s on the town council and can teach you how to manage your windfall. Here’s her card.”
“Like, fuck that,” Janey snapped. “We don’t, like, need no help with our money. Petar did it right. We all get a fixed income for, like, twenty years, and then we split the rest of it ’tween us. If I die first, it goes to my family. So these four’ll make sure nothin’ happens to me.”
Brucie shrugged. “What’s twenty years when at the end of it we’ll be billionaires?”
Billionaires. Fuck. Talk about motive. Whether Brucie realized it, he and the others just became Tig’s number one suspects.