It took me another ten minutes to find Salt's number, and as the phone rang, I wished with all my might that she would let it go to voicemail. Naturally, she picked up. I explained what had happened, and she listened in icy silence. Around the second time I paused to check if the call had dropped, I realized I probably should have called her earlier, instead of chatting with Amanda about the best bike routes around the city.
Finally, Salt cut me off. "Get outside, close the door, and wait for the CSI team to arrive."
She hung up before I could respond. After a short internal argument, I went back inside and grabbed the mahogany containment box with its properly filled out evidence sleeve. This thing was dangerous enough to kill people and I couldn't trust that the crime scene technicians wouldn't open the box to look inside. There were vampires among the CSI techs. I wasn't going through that again, no matter how angry Salt was. Then I went back outside, shoved it into my duffel bag, and closed the door.
I was a professional. Waiting near two bodies wasn't hard. Adults did things like this all the time. There was probably a bunch of forms I was supposed to be filling out, but I didn't know what they were, so I was just going to stand there and wait until I stopped twitching. I could use some alone time to process the events of the day anyhow.
Closing the door helped with the smell, though not completely. After a few minutes of wondering if one of the Silver Edge employees had opened the window, I realized the odor was coming from my clothes. I sat down with my back against the door, closed my eyes, and wondered how much mail carriers got paid.
A voice from my left startled me. "It's about time someone showed up to deal with that crazy vampire!"
I opened my eyes and looked to the side to see a middle-aged white woman in a purple caftan emblazoned with the message Love is All. She carried a huge macrame bag over one arm, and her hair was pulled back into a sloppy bun with silver hair sticks holding it in place. To my eye, she looked like the sort of person who made life decisions based on having her palm read. Then again, my path through life hadn't exactly been giving me stellar results lately. And she probably had less debt than I did. "Excuse me?"
"You're FBME, right? I called the cops this morning to say that vampire in three was going to hurt someone. They said they'd call you guys, though if I'd known it was going to be so long before someone took me seriously, I'd have gone to stay with friends. That FBME vampire that came by earlier spent less than two minutes inside. Then she came back out and said everything was fine and I should mind my own business. All those vampires are a menace."
Clearly, Love is All had a few gaps. "Why did you think your neighbor was going to hurt someone?"
"Because he started screaming and banging on the walls. Made me glad I paid for an anti-vampire ward the minute he moved in. That sort of thing should be a tax write-off." She eyed me suspiciously. "They won't let him come back, will they?"
I blinked, picturing the death mask of the vampire inside the apartment. That vampire wasn't going anywhere other than the morgue.
She must have seen my confusion, because she added, "Sure, he looked quiet when they walked him out of here. But take my word for it — you can't ever trust them."
It took me longer than it should have to realize she'd seen Bowers leave and confused him for her dead vampire neighbor. In my defense, it had been a long freaking day. "The vampire in apartment three won't be back," I said with complete sincerity.
She harrumphed and headed down the stairs. "You'd better be right. It would be safer to just kill them all." And having blithely advocated for a war crime, she left.
Stuck in front of the apartment for at least the next hour, I tried distracting myself with games on my phone, but I gave up after a few minutes. My thoughts were a tangled mess of the personal, professional, and a mixture of the two.
Holy shit, my father had a whole other family that I knew nothing about, and I had a sister. If Bowers hadn't been impacted by the bracelet until he was right next to it, why had the vampire on the other side of a wall been so severely affected? And how had the FBME agent — if it really was an FBME agent, who stopped by earlier — not noticed a person-sized hole in the wall and two corpses in the apartment next door?
Assuming the neighbor wasn't lying or confused, a vampire from the agency had entered apartment three this morning and left everything as it was, including a bracelet that had come very close to sending Bowers on a killing spree.
Getting attacked twice in two days… Every data set had the occasional outlier. Twice felt like the start of a pattern. But if the attacks had been intentional, Bowers was the likely target. I was just a cog in the basement machine, easily replaced by someone like Hamilton. Bowers was a real agent, and he didn't strike me as someone who would give up on things easily. The pterodactyl spell had been triggered by a timer — Bowers would have been inside the apartment with me if I hadn't gotten distracted by the furniture and taken so long to find the anti-vampire ward. He was stronger and better at fighting than I was, but the bracers had been the thing that saved me, and he couldn't have worn those. Up to now, nobody had survived a pterodactyl attack. If Bowers had been inside, his death would have been written off as an unfortunate accident.
And today, if Bowers had lost control, he very likely would have killed me and possibly others. Completely draining the energy from Joshua hadn't been enough to save the vampire next door. So even if someone hadn't killed Bowers during his murderous rampage — a clear act of self-defense — he would never have worked for the FBME again.
If he'd killed me… I didn't think he would have lived long afterward. Bowers seemed especially conflicted about being a vampire, and a death on his conscience would tip him over the edge. How often had the looks I'd assumed were irritation at me really been self-loathing?
Laughter from the street startled me, and I shook my head to clear my mind. This was insane. Nobody was out to kill either of us. It had just been a couple of terrible coincidences. To arrange something like that would require someone high in the FBME calling the shots.
Except… The neighbor had referred to the vampire who came by earlier as "she". Supervisory Agent Salt had been one of very few vampire agents in town this morning.
By the time the crime scene techs arrived with two male agents I didn't recognize, I hadn't resolved anything. Instead of the suits that agents usually wore out in the field, these two were wearing black windbreakers with FBME in large white letters on the back over more casual clothes. I assumed they'd come straight from the task force meeting in Seattle.
I'd been expecting them to take a statement from me, but the taller vampire waved me off. "We have the scene. You can go."
So I went.