Chapter 8

SABRINA STOOD beside her car when we pulled up. “That took long enough,” she said. The look on her face told me she wasn’t kidding. “I’ve had to tap dance around Detective Do-Right for the last half hour.”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my voice so the uniforms walking to and fro wouldn’t hear. “Had to wash the sewer funk off and change clothes. I don’t think you wanted us to show up fresh from Morlocktown.”

“Or less-than-fresh, as the case may be,” Greg said.

Sabrina sighed, then nodded. “Yeah, good point. I’m glad you drove, too. I don’t need to explain to Fitzpatrick how you guys just happened to be walking by and saw the lights.”

“Especially since nobody is just walking by this time of night,” Greg said, waving a hand at the deserted South Boulevard. We stood in the parking lot of a converted mill building just outside of downtown Charlotte. In the daylight, or even early evening hours, this part of town was packed with shoppers at the antique stores and the kitschy decorating shops that filled the parking lot, interspersed with folks jamming the English-style pub or the upscale Mexican restaurant on the corner. But at four in the morning, the place was deserted.

“Wow, even the strip club is dark,” I remarked. “Any security cameras?”

“Sean’s looking around. That’s how I got him to get out of my hair for a little while.”

“He’s a pain in the ass, huh? Want me to get him reassigned? I have a little pull with your boss.” I grinned at Sabrina.

She didn’t grin back. “Stay out of it, Jimmy. I actively try to forget your ‘other activities.’ I don’t need you sticking your nose in with McDaniel and using some kind of Master of the City leverage on him.”

I held up both hands in surrender. “No problem. Just wanted to help.”

She sighed again. “Sorry. It’s just a pain in the ass, you know? Trying to be a cop, dealing with your secrets, now I’ve got a partner for the first time in years, and I have to juggle all that stuff.”

“All what stuff?” Fitzpatrick’s voice came from behind me, and it was all I could do not to turn around and rip his heart out through his ribcage. I cursed myself silently for letting a human get the drop on me. I could have all the power in the world, but if I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings, I was gonna end up with a stake through my heart sooner rather than later. I cut myself a little slack by thinking that Greg would have taken out anyone or anything that really meant me harm, but still made myself a mental promise to do better.

“Hey guys, what are you doing here?” Sean’s voice was cheerful, but for the first time since I’d met the chipper detective, there was a hint of steel under it. He didn’t like us being there, poking around his crime scene. That made two of us.

“Detective Law called us in,” Greg said. He stepped forward and pulled out his phone. A few taps and swipes on the screen, and he handed it over to Fitzpatrick. “Is that the girl you found?”

Fitzpatrick looked down and pursed his lips. He looked up at Greg, then me. “Yeah, that’s her. What does that have to do with you two?” Now he really didn’t like us being at his crime scene. He had no idea how much he needed us here, depending on how long Julia had been dead.

“Her name is Julia O’Connell,” I said as Greg pocketed his phone. “Her brother hired us to look for her. Seems she went missing Monday night after her shift at Landmark. Her mother didn’t get any help from CMPD when she reported the girl missing.”

“Monday night?” Sabrina said. “That’s two days. Why haven’t we heard about this, Fitz? A missing kid should have been part of the morning brief. At least a memo from the lieutenant . . .”

“She’s eighteen,” Greg said, his voice dark.

“Crap,” Fitzpatrick said. “So she’s an adult.”

“Which means that she only became a real missing person about . . .” I looked at my nonexistent wristwatch for emphasis. “Four hours ago.” I didn’t bother to hide my disgust. The whole thing stunk to high heaven.

“Shit,” Sabrina said. “She looks so young.”

“Can I see her?” I asked. Fitzpatrick’s head snapped up. “To confirm ID,” I said quickly. “I don’t want you knocking on her mother’s door if this is just someone who looks like Julia.” I also wanted to see if I could get a sense as to how drained she was, and if she really was going to come back. Because if she was going be reborn as a vampire, it would be about eight hours after she died, and she would come back hungry.

Sabrina turned and walked toward an ambulance, motioning for us to follow. I ducked under the yellow crime scene tape strung up between a bush and a light pole and walked over to a gurney with a black body bag on it. I unzipped the bag, and Julia O’Connell stared up at me. She was dead, all right, and I could smell the stink of a vampire on her. I didn’t see any puncture wounds on her neck, but that didn’t mean anything. Vampire bites heal quickly thanks to the magical nature of the wound, but the absence of a cause of death told me as much as a bullet wound.

She looked so damned young.

I zipped the bag and nodded to Sabrina. “That’s Julia.”

“I’m sorry, Jimmy.” She reached out and put a hand on my arm.

I jerked my arm back, pissed. “Why? I did my job, right? I found her. Now we can go to her mother, wake her up, if the woman has even managed to sleep for worrying about her oldest child, and tell her that we found her daughter, she can be collected at the county morgue, and by the way, here’s the bill.” I gave a sharp laugh and turned away.

Sabrina grabbed my shoulder, and I turned back to her, still angry. “No, Detective, I did my job. I found her. You guys are the ones that failed Julia. Your department and your stupid forty-eight hour rule. Does that look like an adult to you?” I pointed at the bag, my voice rising. “What was the giveaway that she was fully grown? Her flowered bookbag? The Wonder Woman T-shirt? The high school ID? Yeah, she was real grown up. But our local police didn’t care about any of that, did you? Nope. She was eighteen, so you couldn’t do anything until she was already dead. Good job, CMPD. Cleared that missing persons case in just hours. Well done.”

Fitzpatrick rammed me like a muscular bowling ball, shoving me back with a forearm to the chest and slamming me up against the ambulance. I looked down at his snarling face and was honestly surprised. I didn’t know he even knew how to scowl, but he was doing a pretty good imitation of it right now.

“You shut the hell up, Black,” he growled at me. His voice was thick, and his eyes teary. “You think this doesn’t tear us up? You think we aren’t just as pissed off as you are? Well, kiss my ass, you little prick. I’ve got a nineteen-year-old daughter, you son of a bitch!” Sean was yelling now, pulling me down by the collar until he was right in my face. “This sucks. I know it, Law knows it, McDaniel knows it. But we don’t make the rules. We just have to play by them. So we can’t go looking for every college kid who doesn’t call home for a day or so, or every husband who gets pissed off and turns his trip to the store for smokes into a night at a hotel to take a break from his crying kid. And we have to put a number on it. And that number is eighteen. Would it matter if the number was twenty-one? To this girl, yeah. But most of the time not at all.”

He shoved me once more into the ambulance and took a step back. He didn’t take his eyes off me, like he expected me to throw a punch. I was tempted, but he was right. I was being a dick, and deserved to get thrown around a little bit. I was probably even asking for it. I just didn’t expect him to be the one to sack up and do it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

His head snapped up and he stared at me, like he was looking for the punchline. “What?”

“I said I’m sorry. You’re right. I was just pissed.”

“Yeah, well . . . I’m pissed, too,” he grumbled, but most of his fire was gone.

“Good. I wouldn’t want you partnered with my girlfriend if you weren’t.”

“If you two are done hugging it out, can I take her to the morgue?” Bobby stepped around the side of the ambulance with a clipboard. “Who wants to sign her over?”

Sabrina took the paperwork and started flipping through, scribbling on the bottom of several pages. Fitzpatrick looked up at me. “I don’t see what she likes about you, Black.”

“That’s okay, Sean. I think you’re a dork,” I said, completely sincere.

“We’ll find who did this. I’m not going to let this slide. I wasn’t kidding. My daughter is barely older than her. This one hits home.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” Greg said, trying to defuse the dick-measuring contest.

“I don’t get to see her much. She’s in college at Penn State, and her mom and I split up a long time ago. But she’s why I’m here.”

“I don’t follow,” Greg said. “We aren’t anywhere close to Penn State.”

“A lot closer than Denver. This was the biggest city on the East Coast with an opening for a homicide detective when she was starting school. I didn’t want to be too close, you know? Didn’t want to seem smothering. But I wanted to be closer. In the same time zone, at least.” He smiled a little, but this wasn’t the normal, peppy, dumb puppy smile I was used to seeing out of Fitzpatrick. It was a fleeting thing, a tenuous smile that told me he was crazy about his kid, but he didn’t see her often at all.

“Makes sense, Detective,” I said. I stuck out my hand. “We cool?”

“I still don’t like PIs,” he said. Then he took my hand and we shook. “But we’re as cool as we can be.”

“Dude, my girlfriend doesn’t like PIs. I’ve never met a cop that does. Now, I’m going to ride to the morgue with the body, and Greg is going to go with you two to notify the mother. That way there will be someone she knows with her the whole time.” I pushed my words on Fitzpatrick, and he nodded like he just randomly let civilians ride around with murder victims all the time. “You won’t remember that I rode with the body, but you won’t think it’s strange when you see me again at the hospital.”

Bobby and Sabrina finished the paperwork, and he tossed the clipboard on top of the stretcher. I picked it up. “She’s not furniture, Bobby.”

He looked up at me, his brown eyes wide. I could almost see the protest start to form in his face, but he nodded and took the paperwork from me. He walked around to the front seat of the ambulance, and Sabrina and I loaded Julia’s body into the back. I climbed in beside her, and Bobby closed me in. A few seconds later, I heard the driver’s door close, and he looked back between the seats at me.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “She’s going to turn, Bobby. And that won’t be pretty.”

“I know. I was around when Abby woke up, remember?” I did remember, even though that seemed like a lifetime ago. Abby was killed and drained by the same vampire that turned me, making us siblings in some weird vampire logic. My sister killed our dam a few days later, which started us down the road that led to her killing Gordon Tiram then abdicating the title of Master of the City to me. I really hoped this kid wasn’t going to be anywhere near that much trouble.

I should have known better.