Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(47)
“Ronnie? Why would anyone kill Ronnie?” He sounded dazed.
“I have no idea. I know this sounds stupid, but did Ronnie have any enemies?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. He just joined the pack; I barely knew him.”
“Okay, well...um...Give it some thought. I might come around later today with that cop to ask you more about him.”
“Yeah. I gotta find his family...” He wasn’t really listening anymore, so I said a polite good-bye and hung up.
The sky was getting light by the time I pulled into my parking garage, and Molly would be dead to the world. Pun intended. I decided not to wake her. Maybe I could grab a couple hours of sleep while I waited for Cruz. But when I finally peeled off my clothes and climbed into bed, my mind was spinning too fast for sleep. I was thinking about the clearing in the woods and the dumpster. It had to be the same killer. Aside from the obvious connection—Ronnie had been at the first crime scene and was the victim at the second—both murders had the same feeling of cruelty and anger, and a null had been present at both scenes. I could understand wanting to kill Abraham to hurt Dashiell, and I could even understand killing the other two vamps to throw off the scent. But why kill Ronnie? It served no real purpose. Ronnie wasn’t powerful or useful or a good tool to hurt someone. He was just a werewolf, low on the totem pole. Then I realized how Ronnie could be connected to the killings.
Through me.
Chapter 18
As soon as the thought struck me, I was doubtful, figuring it was either paranoia or just self-involvement. But the idea nagged at me. Finally, I put on my bathrobe and went downstairs to make a pot of coffee, sitting down at the table to think. I had been summoned to do the cleanup at both scenes. But in both cases, the police had arrived at the scene very quickly, way too soon for me to do anything except maybe get caught holding the bag. It isn’t unheard-of for the cops to simply get to a crime scene before I do—once in a while a crime scene doesn’t get reported to my employers, so they can’t call me in. At that point, a whole different set of strings has to be pulled by Dashiell, and I’m out of that side of it.
But they’d been too fast. Ronnie’s blood had still been all fresh and drippy. Cruz had told me that he happened to be close to La Brea Park when that call came in; otherwise the cops would have been a few minutes later, right when I was up to my elbows in blood. I picked up the phone and dug Cruz’s card out of my wallet.
“Cruz.”
“Hey, it’s Scarlett.”
“I’m going to be a while still. We’re talking to neighbors—”
“It’s fine. Listen, can you find out how the police found the body? I mean, how did you guys know there was a body?”
“Oh, easy. There’s an all-night Starbucks a few blocks away. A couple reported hearing screams as they were walking in the door. Then an anonymous caller also phoned it in fifteen minutes later, must have heard the same thing.”
“What time was the first call?”
“Let me check.” There was a pause, and I waited. “Three fourteen exactly. Took the cops seven minutes to get there.”
I thanked him and hung up, then sent a text to Will: What time was text from Ronnie, exactly?
There wasn’t an immediate answer, so I used the bathroom and threw on some sweats. I wasn’t going to be sleeping anytime soon, and I was determined to go for a run today. After a moment’s hesitation, I dug out my old fanny pack and put the Taser inside. Better to be alive than to be fashionable, I always say. When I checked again, the phone was blinking. Will had kept it short and sweet: 3:17.
I spent a few minutes stretching, then I left Molly’s house at a light jog. The sky was overcast, which had made sunrise more or less pointless, but I knew the route and could have run it in a blackout. I pelted down the hill by Molly’s house, heading for my usual big loop, but my mind was on the case. Ronnie’s murder had happened at 3:14, but the text from Ronnie’s phone came three minutes later, which meant that it must have been from the killer. He or she had wanted me to get to the scene but hadn’t realized that Ronnie’s screaming had alerted other people, who called the cops. The killer gave me fifteen minutes to get there and then called the police himself. I felt a quick burst of that escaped-death kind of adrenaline—if the Starbucks couple hadn’t called the cops, and I’d been at home on the West Side instead of in Orange County, I would have beat the cops to the scene by just a couple of minutes. Again.
“It’s me,” I said out loud, panting. Without really deciding to, I had slowed to a walk and then stopped. But why me? Had I pissed someone off so much that they wanted me in jail? Maybe someone wanted to expose the whole Old World and figured I’d sing like a canary if I got arrested? Well, he was wrong there—if the cops ever caught me, I’d make up a story and do my time. Dashiell would never let me breathe a word about the Old World to the cops, Jesse excluded. I thought about how horrible Ronnie had looked, the welts on his skin. Someone wanted to pin that on me?
I leaned forward, resting my hands on my knees. Welts on his skin. Whoever had killed Ronnie—and I was assuming it was a human, because there was no other reason to use a null—must have subdued him with the null, then tied him up with the silver and sent the null away. With that many silver chains, the killer could have basically laid the chains on top of a werewolf in either form and completely immobilized his victim. Ronnie, panicked and desperate, would have made the painful switch back to wolf form, which is what the werewolves tend to do when they get cornered. It must have hurt like hell, especially covered in silver. That’s how Ronnie’s teeth were pulled out. Then, by command or on his own, the null came back, and Ronnie had switched back to human, where he died. Or, I realized, the null might not have come back, but the bad guy could have killed Ronnie. The thing about werewolves changing back to human when they die, that’s actually true. But it takes a lot to kill a werewolf, even with silver chains.