Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(31)

“How old is this house?” he asked her. She could hear rummaging upstairs now—Kentworth, going through her bedroom. Claire felt an angry flush in her cheeks, and sat down hard in her chair to clutch her coffee mug. She didn’t like the idea of someone pawing through her things, meager as they might be. And ridiculously, she hated the idea of him seeing the still-messy bed where she and Shane had spent the night. That felt really intrusive and creepy. “This is one of the Founder Houses, right?”

“One of the original thirteen,” she said. “I think only a few of them are still left now.”

“Beautiful place,” he said. “All original construction?”

She immediately felt as if a trap was looming, and covered her pause with a sip of coffee. “No idea,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t been here that long, you know.” She knew that people tended to underestimate her—she was small, and young, and could look very innocent when she wanted to . . . and Simonds didn’t know her very well.

But she could tell that he wasn’t buying it, and as he opened his mouth to ask her something else, probably something a lot more intrusive, he was interrupted by Halling’s sharp voice on the other side of the kitchen door. “Detective! Better come see this!”

He got to his feet fast, the friendly surface of him immediately gone; what was left was all serious business. He pointed at her. “Stay here,” he said, and shoved through the door to join Officer Halling. There was muffled conversation. Claire tried to listen, but she couldn’t quite make anything out . . . and then she heard his footsteps coming back and she retreated fast, to stand next to the kitchen table.

Simonds shoved the door open and gestured for her to join him. She didn’t like the grim look on his face—not at all.

Halling had found something in the basement. As Simonds led the way down the narrow steps into the chilly concrete room where they kept the washer and dryer and the dust-shrouded shelves of storage from generations back, Claire’s mind raced. What could they have forgotten? Shane and Eve were both known to stash things and forget them; what if Shane had overlooked a cache of weapons he’d meant to hide? That wouldn’t be good.

And then she spotted what Halling had found. It wasn’t weapons.

There was a dead body on the floor of their basement.

It was one of the mall cops that had let them in to see Michael. There was a knife sticking out of his chest, a silver-coated one—and it looked familiar. They had lots of those around the house; Shane silver-plated everything for use as anti-vamp weapons.

Claire stopped on the steps and grabbed for the handrail; she felt light-headed, and suddenly needed to sit down and just breathe. It seemed impossible. It was impossible. How in the hell had this man gotten here, gotten in, been killed? She hadn’t done it, and she knew Shane and Eve hadn’t. Couldn’t have.

“He wasn’t killed here. There’s not enough blood,” Halling said, crouching down next to the corpse. The man’s eyes were open and covered with a gray film, and he looked unreal, like a department store dummy. “He’d been dead a few hours, at most.”

“Find out how long he’s been missing,” Simonds said. “And make sure the other guards on the vampires at the mall are still safe. Go!”

Halling headed for the stairs, and Claire scrambled out of the way as the officer’s long legs pushed past. She felt sick and weightless, as if she were falling into an endless black hole. What the hell was going on?

She took out her phone as Simonds moved to inspect the body, and quietly texted Shane not to come home. He sent back a question mark. She replied with an exclamation point, and then quickly put the phone away before Simonds caught sight of it.

“Do you know this man?” he asked her. She shook her head.

“I’ve seen him,” she said. “I saw him at the mall, where they were keeping the vampires. But I don’t know him.”

“Any explanation for why he’d be dead in your basement, Miss Danvers?”

She could only shake her head again. She didn’t have any idea what else to say. Simonds sighed, stood up, and took out his cell phone to make a call. He requested additional units, and a forensic kit—Morganville wasn’t big enough to have an actual forensic team—and then looked up at her. He seemed sorry, she thought. But not very.

“Stand up,” he told her. “Come down to the floor.”

She did stand up, but in that moment she realized that if she let him arrest her, she’d have no chance at all to clear herself. Fallon might well have arranged this—a plot to put them all behind bars and get them out of his way.

She couldn’t take that chance.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached in her pocket and brought out the round shape in her pocket. She yanked the pull ring and tossed the thing down the stairs toward where he stood. “Grenade!”

Shane was right. Nobody waited to see what happened when they heard that word.

She dashed up the steps, and hit the door at the top just as there was a muffled whump below. She looked down to see a cloud of thick white powder spreading over everything, as if she’d thrown a giant bag of flour. Simonds, who’d taken cover at the far end of the basement in a crouch behind an old freezer, coughed and fanned the air as the stuff settled on him.

He was okay.