Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(30)

“It was dark by the time the firefighters arrived, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sunlight was gone, why would the vampire catch on fire again?”

He frowned, then looked back at the video. The firefighters were on screen now. It took a few minutes, but one of them helped Mona out into the hallway and her hands were empty now; apparently one of them had taken the fire extinguisher from her in the room. She looked as dazed and blank as she had in the room when I’d seen her in person.

“Is Ms. Castel normally that calm under pressure?” Dolph asked.

“No, I mean she’s not bad, but I totally underestimated her.”

“She didn’t have much affect in the room when I saw her, is that normal for her?” I asked.

“Affect?”

“Her face is blank, not much expression, is that her norm?”

“No, no, she’s like the rest of us, I guess.”

“She doesn’t have any preexisting medical issues that you’re aware of?” I asked.

“No, why would you ask that?”

“Captain Storr called me in late and I just wanted to know if someone had checked her out. She seems shocky to me.”

“The firefighter paramedics checked her out,” Dolph said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Mona’s all right, right?” The manager looked up at all of us from his chair. He seemed genuinely concerned; good for him.

“She’s fine,” Dolph said.

The manager looked at me then, and I smiled and said, “I just wanted to be a hundred percent sure she’d gotten some attention, that’s all, but we’re good.”

“You can stop the video now,” Dolph said.

“Thanks for letting us see the video,” McKinnon said.

I smiled and just tried to look pleasant while we left the tiny room and looked for someplace we wouldn’t be overheard while we discussed the idea that maybe our heroine was actually our murderer.





10

THERE IS NO way that a human being smelled smoke through a closed door in an outer hallway before the room’s smoke detector sounded,” McKinnon said.

I leaned against the empty room’s dresser and agreed. “Maybe a wererat would smell it, but I don’t know enough about the sensitivity of smoke detectors to make that call.”

“Why not just shapeshifters, why wererats specifically?” Dolph asked.

“Rats have one of the best noses in the animal kingdom, better than dogs,” I said.

Dolph made a note.

“Well, I don’t know much about shapeshifters, but a human being did not beat the smoke detector,”

McKinnon said.

“She got the fire extinguisher and then entered the room,” I said.

“That’s why she knocked and announced herself first,” McKinnon said.

I nodded. “Just in case the vampire was already awake for the night. If he’d answered she’d have asked if he needed anything, or said she’d come back later.”

McKinnon and I nodded. Dolph just stood there making notes and thinking. I’d begun to suspect that sometimes doodling in the notebook helped him think, but maybe he made in-depth notes. I wasn’t going to arm-wrestle it away from him to check, and without a stepladder I was too short to peek.

“Are we all thinking she opened the drapes and then waited to put out the fire so there was no loss of life other than the victim?” Dolph asked.

McKinnon and I exchanged a look, then turned back to Dolph. I said, “Yes.” McKinnon said, “We are.”

“Let’s go talk to our hero,” Dolph said.





11

I’D HAVE BEEN too direct, or made it complicated, but Dolph just asked Mona Castel to come and make a formal statement. She didn’t call for a lawyer or see the trap in the request. She went with him meek as a lamb, and he stayed beside her looking pleasant and hiding the wolf in his impeccably pressed suit until she was safely in the back of his unmarked car with Officer Kay Beecher beside her. Dolph told her he had to confer with his colleagues and he’d be right back, and then he motioned McKinnon and me to follow him away from the car. He started to talk to us then but noticed people with their cell phones pointed this way. It used to be that the news media had to arrive before you worried about cameras; now everyone was a potential leak about the investigation.

He started to walk back toward the hotel, and we went with him. I felt a knock at my psychic shields that made me look around. There was the crowd of people being kept back behind the police tape, most of them with phones pointed this way, and uniformed officers doing their best to keep the looky-loos contained. Whatever had caught my attention wasn’t there, so I paused and looked through the more distant part of the crowd and then to the parked cars. There, somewhere there.

Dolph had backtracked to be beside me and asked, “What did you see?”

“Not see, feel.” My phone sounded with my text tone, and because I wasn’t sure what I was sensing I checked it.

It was Ethan texting, We’re parked waiting for you. Claudia ordered extra security.

I texted, Good. Was that what I’d felt? It didn’t feel like Ethan, he was tied to me metaphysically, but he was usually quieter in my head than this. Whatever this was, it was much louder in my head.