OFFICER KAY BEECHER had been very grateful to find another woman in the hallway with a badge, because she was on her period, and she was afraid she was about to go through her uniform pants. I sympathized as only another woman can, and let her go, taking her place in the doorway. A dark-haired woman in a pink maid’s dress complete with white half apron was partially collapsed on the bed crying into Kleenex from the box beside her.
Beecher had introduced us to each other. “Mona, this is Anita, she’s a U.S. Marshal and she’ll stay with you for just a few minutes.”
I raised an eyebrow at the first names, but Beecher whispered, “She’s really upset, first names help.”
I nodded like that made sense to me, and I guess it did. “Thanks . . . Kay.”
“Just keep her calm until Captain Storr clears her to go home.”
I whispered back, “She the one who put out the fire?”
“Saved the day,” Kay said, and made her power walk in the direction of a restroom that wasn’t in one of the rooms connected to the crime. First-day lecture for crime scenes: you do not use a bathroom that could contain evidence unless someone tells you it’s clear to use. Officer Kay was probably going to have to find a public restroom unless she could get another room opened that didn’t contain someone connected with the crime. I could be here awhile.
Mona snuffled into the Kleenex, looking at me through bleary tear-filled eyes. “What was your name, Anna?”
“Anita,” I said.
She gave a weak smile. “Anita.”
I smiled encouragingly, thinking it was nice to be the comforting presence for once instead of the threat. I rarely got to play good cop for some reason. Oh wait, because I was bad at it, but I smiled and really tried to look as harmless as my size and not as dangerous as all the weapons and body armor I was wearing.
She smiled back.
“It was very brave of you to tackle the fire with just a fire extinguisher,” I said.
She smiled a little more, then shivered, smile fading away. “I didn’t want what happened in New York to happen here.”
“That was bad,” I agreed. “Thanks again for protecting everyone here in the hotel.”
“I saw it on the news, all those poor people.”
“Yeah.” And then because I was never good at waiting around, I asked, “Did you see someone leave the room ahead of you?”
She shook her head.
“Did you have to open a lot of doors before you hit the right one?”
She blinked and looked at me, frowning. “What?”
“It must have been really scary with the fire alarm going off and everyone rushing to get out and you kept your head and looked for the fire.”
She nodded. “I was very scared, but I smelled the smoke, and I knew we had a vampire in the one room, and all I could think of was what happened in New York. I couldn’t let that happen here.”
I thought there was no way she smelled smoke, the carpet had barely begun to burn, but maybe she thought she smelled smoke because once she saw the flames she expected it. Memory is a funny thing, it fills in the gaps with what you expect, not always with what happened. It’s one reason eyewitness testimony is so untrustworthy.
“Did you see the light from the flames under the door?” I asked.
“No, the doors seal tight.”
“I guess it was lucky the New York fire was in your head, so you went right to the vampire’s room.”
“What did you say?”
“The New York fire has been all over the news, so it’s natural that working in a hotel, it would be in your mind.”
She nodded, looking puzzled, or something. I couldn’t read her expression; was she going into shock? It happened sometimes after the emergency was over even if you weren’t hurt. She had been checked for injuries; surely someone had done that.
“Did you get hurt, burned?”
She shook her head, staring at a point in front of her, but I think she wasn’t seeing anything in the room. It was just a direction to stare while she processed what had happened to her.
“Mona, you okay?” I glanced down the hallway, seeing if I could flag another uniform down to send Dolph this way, but everyone was too far away without me yelling. I didn’t want to get Kay in trouble or have to explain why she’d had to leave the area. There might not be a sisterhood among women or even female cops, but I knew how hard it was to be one of the boys when biology meant you’d never really be one. Having a heavy period emergency could ruin whatever street cred Kay had. Or she’d find tampons and pads all over her desk, in her locker, in her squad car, and she’d have to pretend it didn’t bother her, because if she let it show they’d play the joke forever. Hell, they might play it forever anyway. Nope, I would stay here on the door until she got back, or until someone who outranked me joined us, which would be Dolph. As a U.S. Marshal, I wasn’t technically in the chain of command for any local law enforcement. Marshals were sort of like warrant officers in the army; you knew what our rank was, but not where we fit into your power structure, and you were never sure who could give us orders and who we’d ignore.
“I thought they weren’t supposed to move while they burned,” she said in a distant voice, almost like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She was definitely going into some kind of shock or postemergency slump. Had an EMT or some medical someone looked her over?
“Most of the time they don’t move, they just burn,” I said.
She blinked and looked at me with her big, brown eyes showing too much white around the edges. “It moved, it reached out all fire and black bones and it still grabbed for me.”
“While you put it out with the fire extinguisher,” I said.
“Before.”
“Before?” I asked.
She nodded.
“The opened drapes caught the last sunlight of the day; when the sun set the vampire woke for the night,” I said.
“He was all burning, flames, and he still moved, screamed. It was awful.”
“You didn’t put the fire out to save the hotel, you put the vampire out because he came alive while he was on fire,” I said.
She nodded. “He was burning alive. I know he’s dead, but he didn’t seem dead when he cried out in pain. He seemed alive, but he’s dead now, they told me he’s really dead.”
“He’s really dead now,” I said.
“I didn’t know they felt pain like that,” she said.
“Yeah, vampires feel pain just like we do.”
“If it had been in the morning like in New York, would he have felt pain?”
“No, the vampire would have been dead for the day, no pain, no waking up.”
“But that room doesn’t get morning light, so it couldn’t be then.”
Something about the way she said it seemed odd, or maybe I was seeing motive where there was just a normal person dealing with a very abnormal event? I needed another officer here to help me figure out which it was before I formed the wrong conclusions. I didn’t interrogate many regular humans, and I knew that vampires and shapeshifters can react very differently from human normal. The first had centuries or decades longer than most humans to control their expressions and body language. The second could smell fear and anger, and no matter how you controlled your body you couldn’t control the autonomic nervous system. It betrayed you to a shapeshifter’s nose, or their and a vampire’s superior hearing. They both knew the second your pulse rate sped up, sometimes before you did.
I stared at the woman sitting quietly on the bed, the wad of Kleenex forgotten in her hand as she stared at the wall. She was pale, and lightly dewed with sweat; both could be signs of shock. I needed to know if anyone with more medical knowledge than I had had given her a once-over. For all I knew she could have an underlying medical condition. Shit, I just wasn’t used to dealing with normal people. Cops didn’t count, no first responder did; they didn’t react normally to emergencies any more than vampires or shapeshifters did.
“Would the vampire have attacked me if it hadn’t died first?” she asked.
“I don’t know, you were putting out the fire, so you were trying to help him.”
“I didn’t close the drapes,” she said.
“You did the best you could.”
She nodded as if that made sense to her.
I got my phone out and texted Dolph without making a big deal out of it to Mona. I had a moment of trying to decide what to text, but settled for Need you in room with the maid. Something’s not right.
“Do I know you?” Mona asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
She frowned harder at me.
I eased farther into the open doorway so I could see the hallway better and still have a sense of the woman on the bed. I was relieved to see Officer Kay Beecher striding down the hallway like she had a purpose. I saw Dolph come out of the room behind her; he was so much taller that I could watch both of them at the same time without having to choose whom to look at.
Kay came up with a smile and a thank you. Dolph just behind her was blank-faced serious. The officer actually turned back toward him, as if she thought she was in trouble for leaving her post to me. I spoke before she could get herself in unnecessary trouble. “Kay, glad you’re here. Mona, Officer Kay is back, you okay with her for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.” I even smiled when I said it.
Mona nodded, looked at Kay as if she’d never seen her, then went back to staring at the wall. It didn’t look that fascinating to me, just a hotel wall with a chest of drawers and a television set and a mirror. The usual generic hotel arrangement, but then I realized I was wrong; the mirror took up more of the wall than normal. Most cheaper rooms put the mirror on the back of the bathroom door or on the closet’s sliding doors. Most hotels would have put a painting there. Mona wasn’t staring at the wall; she was staring at herself. She was staring as if she didn’t quite recognize herself; maybe it was shock or maybe it was something else.
Dolph was waiting for me in the hallway when I stepped back out. His face was neutral, waiting. He knew I wouldn’t have contacted him without a good reason. I just walked past him a little way down the hall closer to the crime scene with its huddle of people hurrying in and out. I stopped short of it so that no one would overhear us.
“Talk to me, Anita,” Dolph said.
I told him what Mona had said.
“That’s not much,” he said.
“It’s not, and she probably never saw anything this awful before, could be just shock.”
“But you don’t think it is,” he said.
“I’d like a chance to question her and find out.”
“She’s a hero; the media has already gotten a hold of it,” he said.
“So?”
“We need to be sure on this before we change the narrative, that’s all.”
“Change the narrative,” I said. “Wow, Dolph, you have been reading the memos on how to handle the media.”
He smiled, then went back to serious in case someone else was looking. He had a reputation to uphold and that didn’t include smiling at subordinates at crime scenes. “I’m just saying we have to be careful here, Anita. We have a heroic woman, a maid, who saved this hotel from burning down with the New York hotel fire still headline news. The Sunshine Murders have been the leading news story for weeks.”
“I’m aware of all that,” I said.
“Can you be diplomatic in there with our hero?”
“I can be careful, not sure if I’ll ever understand diplomacy.”
“Fair enough,” he said, “we can turn on Officer Beecher’s vest cam so we’ll be on record.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Do you seriously think that this woman is involved in the murder?”
“I don’t know, but something’s off, and before we embrace her as the hero of the story I’d like to find out what that something is.”
“There’s a camera in the hallway,” he said.
“Can we see the footage before we go back in there?”
He nodded. “We can.”
“Do I need to talk to Officer Kay before we go off?”
“I’ll make sure she stays where she’s at, and that no one else lets her go before we’re ready.”
“It’s good to be the boss,” I said.
He gave that small smile again. “Better than not being boss.”
“Amen to that,” I said.
He smiled a little more, then ducked into the room to tell Officer Kay to hold the fort, and then we went to tell everyone else what Dolph wanted them to do. I even let McKinnon trail along with us to look at the security videos; as long as I didn’t use any of my psychic abilities around him we were probably good, and if that changed I’d tell him to get the hell away from me. I might do that anyway for experimenting on me and Jean-Claude with his little charm spell, but first we had a mystery to solve. I could always be cranky later.