Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(55)
Problem solved. I pulled back onto the road.
The address that Esther had given me was for a small, weathered-looking cottage on the outskirts of Silver Lake, currently one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. Wait, no, maybe that was last year. I can’t keep track. At any rate, Silver Lake had once been one of LA’s most dangerous areas, then had gone through urban renewal or whatever, so now it was a mix of excessively developed residential areas and neighborhoods that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about cleaning up their act. Spring Boulevard was somewhere in the middle: two blocks from a Coffee Bean but shabby enough to have bars on every window of every building, even the upper floors.
I don’t know what I was expecting Esther to look like—maybe a teenage runaway from a Lifetime movie, with big eyes and an artfully dirty face—but she wasn’t it. When the cottage door opened, the woman inside was plain, skinny as a rail, and bald as Daddy Warbucks. A dark-pink cotton scarf was wrapped around her head, and she didn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows. She looked like she was pushing fifty. Oh. I suddenly understood the situation.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, a little cough clutching at her words.
“Of course. Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. She shook it with a frail grip. Esther was one of the human servants who had hooked up with vampires in hopes that they would turn her. She was dying. Which also explained why she looked so miserable—if her vampire had died, she was out of luck. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I’m a—well, I don’t know what you call it, but I sort of help out a, a vampire?”
A human servant. With the habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. This was just what my day had been missing. “What can I do for you, Esther?”
Her voice broke. “Well, he’s—he’s dead? I mean, he’s really dead. I just came over and he was here and I didn’t know that they even left bodies; I thought they went to dust or something—”
She kept rambling, so I broke in, trying to sound soothing. “It depends on the vampire, Esther. When they’re killed the magic leaves them, the years catch up with them, and their bodies revert to where they should be. So very old vampires do turn into dust, just like in the movies. But new vampires may just look like a slightly rotted dead body, and so on.”
When she answered her voice was very small. “I didn’t know that.”
“Can you take me to the body?” I said gently.
“Oh. Right. This way.” I followed her into the cottage, which was barely furnished at all: a couple of folding chairs and a cheap TV in the living room, a card table in the kitchen. There was no refrigerator, no signs of food. “I don’t eat much,” she said, catching my look. “He’s—the body is down here.”
She opened a door in the kitchen, revealing a set of wooden stairs. A basement. Great. Vampires have a talent for finding the few houses in LA that actually have basements. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is a trap, I told myself. I certainly didn’t feel anything Old World in my radius. But I motioned for Esther to go first.
The downstairs was the opposite of the first floor: wall-to-wall carpeting, gorgeously framed art prints on the walls, a flat-screen TV, couches. Everything was well kept but comfortable looking: someone spent time here. Esther continued toward the back wall, where another door led to a tiny bedroom. I could see the dead body lying in the doorway. “That’s him,” she said unnecessarily.
The body had a sort of mummified look: most of the flesh had wasted away, but a few tendrils of hair and skin still clung to the skeleton—male, judging by the clothes. He was wearing a simple button-down men’s shirt and dark slacks that weren’t new but still contrasted heavily with the decrepit skeleton. He’d also been wearing black loafers, but they’d fallen off when his body shriveled up and were lying on the floor near his feet. In the middle of his chest, a gaping hole had ruined the nice line of the shirt. I looked closely and saw the little wood splinters. He’d been staked. Vampires die when their heads are detached from their bodies, or when their hearts are destroyed, or by fire. You don’t technically need a wooden stake to destroy a heart; that’s just something that worked well in the Middle Ages. We have better weapons now, but the stake is a classic, and a lot of people believe that its long history makes it more powerful.
I looked around, but didn’t see anything stake shaped. I didn’t really smell him, just the faintest whiff of old decay. The vampire had been a vampire for a couple of years, at least. I was pretty confident now that this wasn’t a trap, but I was still glad when Esther hovered near the stairs, staying in my line of vision. I dropped my oversize duffel bag of supplies and crouched down, balancing on my heels as I pulled out a thick, disposable plastic body bag and my surgical gloves. “You found him like this?” I asked. “You didn’t pull the stake out?” Vampires don’t die very often in LA, and when they do, Dashiell has to know about it. If it had been after sunset I would have called him immediately after my first conversation with Esther, but since he’d be unavailable for a few more hours I’d have to remember all the details myself and fill him in later that night.
“No, I think she took it with her.”
“She?” I said. “Do you know who did this?” Excellent. I could simply tell Dashiell and be done with the matter.