Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(45)

“Is the lot always this empty?” he asked, feeling conspicuous.

“Every time I’ve been here. People don’t come here to stay very long.”

He parked his car a good fifteen spots away from the tape, unbuckled his seat belt, and looked at Kirsten. “How do you want to handle this?”

She bit her lip for a moment, thinking. “Why don’t I wait here and contact Alice, and maybe you could speak to the officers about what happened. Then you can ask Alice any other questions you may have.”

“I need to see the storage room too,” he said firmly.

Kirsten started to shake her head. “I can’t allow—”

“Bullshit,” Jesse interrupted. “You asked me here. You want my help. I need to see the room that he died for.”

Kirsten stared at him for a long moment, but Jesse met her eyes without flinching. Finally she nodded. “I’ll go talk to the cops,” he said.

Jesse had opened his car door and gotten one leg out when Kirsten grabbed his arm.

“Wait,” she said urgently, “you can’t tell them that Samuel had a storage unit here.”

He pulled his foot back in and closed the door again, holding back a sigh. It was never just easy, dealing with these people. It made him suddenly miss Runa, currently the only person in his life who was drama-free. “Won’t they find his name on the rental records eventually, anyway?”

“No,” Kirsten said. “Nobody associated with Beth Israel is on any paperwork here. It’s a company owned by another company kind of thing.”

He stared at her, and she dropped her arm. “Who owns this building, Kirsten?”

“We do,” she said, and when he raised his eyebrows she waved vaguely. “The Old World. Let’s just say it’s Dashiell’s equivalent in San Diego.”

Jesse felt the balance of power shifting between them. Kirsten now needed something from him as much as he needed information from her. He considered his options. “If you cover all of this up, the people who loved him will never have peace,” Jesse said finally. “You know that, don’t you?”

Tears trickled down her cheek, though she kept her expression neutral. “I know,” she said, her voice miserable. “But if we sent the human police after Olivia, it would only cause more dead bodies that couldn’t be explained properly. And some of them would be policemen.”

Jesse sighed. This went against every cop instinct he’d developed, but he knew she was right. He would just have to add this to the list of things he had to live with.

The cops on the scene didn’t have much information for Jesse, even when they were done teasing him about being pretty enough to be a Hollywood cop. Jesse didn’t bother explaining that he worked out of Southwest Los Angeles; he just blushed and gave them a made-up story about visiting a friend of his aunt’s who was concerned about the rabbi’s death. Jesse was used to the easy gallows humor that homicide cops usually adopted at crime scenes, but to his surprise the three cops seemed genuinely saddened by the murder. Rabbi Samuel had been well-known in the community, they said, and was a great supporter of San Diego PD. He had died of blood loss from a serrated cut across his throat, and there was a lot of blood missing. There were also several new bruises and broken fingers where Samuel had been tortured before his death.

When the senior officer’s radio burped out their new orders, Jesse thanked them and walked slowly back toward Kirsten, giving San Diego PD a chance to get out of there. Before he could fill her in on what he’d learned, however, a dark-red Town and Country van drove slowly into the lot, and Kirsten looked up and waved suddenly. “That’s Alice. She’s going to take us into the collection.”

“Is she a witch too?” Jesse asked. Kirsten shook her head.

The van pulled into a spot two down from Jesse’s sedan, and the driver rolled down her window. “Hey, Kirsten,” she called, in a flat Midwestern accent. She opened the door and climbed down, a fiftyish woman with forty extra pounds around her middle and iron-gray hair. Her eyes were rimmed red, and pink blotches had appeared on her craggy cheeks, but her jaw was set, and she gave Jesse a firm handshake. “Alice Weiss,” she said. “You must be the detective.”

“Jesse Cruz. Jesse.”

“And I’m Alice. Thank you for coming.” The older woman glanced nervously toward Kirsten. “Pardon my bluntness, Kirsten, but are you sure…this is okay? To take him in there?

Kirsten looked speculatively at Jesse for a moment, then nodded to Alice. “He’s okay.”

Alice accepted this without a word and began leading them toward a normal-size door between two of the garage doors. It opened onto a concrete staircase. “We’re on the second floor,” she explained, without turning her head. Through the door at the top of the stairs was a long concrete hallway, as bare and functional as a bunker. Which, Jesse realized, was exactly what it was. Halfway down the hall Alice stopped them at a heavy steel door with no window. Jesse couldn’t help but feel a little excited, as his imagination ran wild with thoughts of possible witch treasures: cauldrons and big, creaky books and stuffed ravens. He was a little disappointed when Alice flicked a light switch and the room burst into ordinary florescent lighting, illuminating an enormous single room with rows and rows of industrial metal shelving. The shelves were stacked with big plastic tubs in mismatched colors. They were the exact same kind that his mother used to store her Christmas decorations.