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her at work, and she hasn't been in for two days."
"The length of time she'd have been dead," I said.
"Exactly."
"Call Sergeant Rudolf Storr. Tell him what you just told me. Use my name to get to him."
"You don't want to check it out ourselves?"
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"Not on your life. This is police business. They're good at it. Let 'em earn their paychecks."
"Shucks, you're no fun."
"Ronnie, call Dolph. Give it to the police. I've met the vampires that are killing these people. We don't
want to make ourselves targets."
"You what!"
I sighed. I'd forgotten that Ronnie didn't know. I told her the shortest version that would make any
sense. "I'll fill you in on everything Saturday morning when we work out."
"You going to be all right?"
"So far, so good."
"Watch your back, okay?"
"Always; you too."
"I never seem to have as many people after my back as you do."
"Be thankful," I said.
"I am." She hung up.
We had a clue. Maybe a pattern, except for the attack on me. I didn't fit any pattern. They'd come after
me to get Jean-Claude. Everybody wanted Jean-Claude's job. The trouble was, you couldn't abdicate;
you could only die. I liked what Oliver had had to say. I agreed with him, but could I sacrifice
Jean-Claude on the altar of good sense? Dammit.
I just didn't know.
32
Bert's office was small and painted pale blue. He thought it was soothing to the clients. I thought it was
cold, but that fit Bert, too. He was six feet tall with the broad shoulders and build of an ex-college
football player. His stomach was moving a little south with too much food and not enough exercise, but
he carried it well in his seven-hundred-dollar suits. For that kind of money, the suits should have carried
the Taj Mahal.
He was tanned, grey-eyed, with a buzz haircut that was nearly white. Not age, his natural hair color.
I was sitting across from his desk in work clothes. A red skirt, matching jacket, and a blouse that was so
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close to scarlet I'd had to put on a little makeup so that my face didn't seem ghostly. The jacket was
tailored so that my shoulder holster didn't show.
Larry sat in the chair beside me in a blue suit, white shirt, and blue-on-blue tie. The skin around his
stitches had blossomed into a multicolored bruise across his forehead. His short red hair couldn't hide it.
It looked like someone had hit him in the head with a baseball bat.
"You could have gotten him killed, Bert," I said.
"He wasn't in any danger until you showed up. The vampires wanted you, not him."
He was right, and I didn't like it. "He tried to raise a third zombie."
Bert's cold little eyes lit up. "You can do three in a night?"
Larry had the grace to look embarrassed. "Almost."
Bert frowned. "What's 'almost' mean?"
"It means he raised it, but lost control of it. If I hadn't been there to fix things, we'd have had a rampaging
zombie on our hands."
He leaned forward, hands folded on his desk, small eyes very serious. "Is this true, Larry?"
"I'm afraid so, Mr. Vaughn."
"That could have been very serious, Larry. You understand that?"
"Serious?" I said. "It would have been a bloody disaster. The zombie could have eaten one of our
clients!"
"Now, Anita, no reason to frighten the boy."
I stood up. "Yes, there is."
Bert frowned at me. "If you hadn't been late, he wouldn't have tried to raise the last zombie."
"No, Bert. You are not making this all my fault. You sent him out on his first night alone. Alone, Bert."
"And he handled himself well," Bert said.
I fought the urge to scream, because it wouldn't help. "Bert, he's a twenty-year-old college student. This
is a freaking seminar for him. If you get him killed, it's gonna look sorta bad."
"May I say something?" Larry asked.
I said, "No."
Bert said, "Certainly."
"I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself."
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I wanted to argue that, but looking into his true-blue eyes I couldn't say it. He was twenty. I
remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I
was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.
"How old were you when you started working for me?" Bert said.
"What?"
"How old were you?"
"Twenty-one; I'd just graduated college."
"When will you turn twenty-one, Larry?" Bert asked.
"March."
"See, Anita, he's just a few months younger. He's the same age you were."
"That was different."
"Why?" Bert said.
I couldn't put it into words. Larry still had all his grandparents. He'd never seen death and violence up
close and personal. I had. He was an innocent, and I hadn't been innocent for years. But how to explain
that to Bert without hurting Larry's feelings? No twenty-year-old man likes to hear that a woman knows
more about the world than he does. Some cultural fables die hard.
"You sent me out with Manny, not alone."
"He was supposed to go out with you, but you had police business to handle."
"That's not fair, Bert, and you know it."
He shrugged. "If you'd been doing your job, he wouldn't have been alone."
"There've been two murders. What am I supposed to do? Say sorry, folks, I've got to babysit a new
animator. Sorry about the murders."
"Nobody has to babysit me," Larry said.
We both ignored him.
"You have a full time job here with Animators, Inc."
"We've had this argument before, Bert."
"Too many times," he said.
"You're my boss, Bert. Do what you think best."
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"Don't tempt me."
"Hey, guys," Larry said, "I'm getting the feeling that you're using me for an excuse to fight. Don't get
carried away, okay?"
We both glared at him. He didn't back down, just stared at us. Point for him.
"If you don't like the way I do my job, Bert, fire me, but stop yanking my chain."
Bert stood up, slowly, like a leviathan rising from the waves. "Anita . . ."
The phone rang. We all stared at it for a minute. Bert finally picked it up and growled, "Yeah, what is it?"
He listened for a minute, then glared at me. "It's for you." His voice was incredibly mild as he said it.
"Detective Sergeant Storr, police business."
Bert's face was smiling, butter wouldn't have melted in his mouth.
I held out my hand for the phone without another word. He handed me the receiver. He was still smiling,
his tiny grey eyes warm and sparkling. It was a bad sign.
"Hi, Dolph, what's up?"
"We're at the lawyer's office that your friend Veronica Sims gave us. Nice that she called you first and
not us."
"She called you second, didn't she?"
"Yeah."
"What have you found out?" I didn't bother to keep my voice down. If you're careful, one side of a
conversation isn't very enlightening.
"Reba Baker is the dead woman. They identified her from morgue photos."
"Pleasant way to end the work week," I said.
Dolph ignored that. "Both victims were clients with dying wills. If they died by vampire bite, they wanted
to be staked, then cremated."
"Sounds like a pattern to me," I said.
"But how did the vampires find out that they had dying wills?"
"Is this a trick question, Dolph? Someone told them."
"I know that," he said. He sounded disgusted.
I was missing something. "What do you want from me, Dolph?"
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