“Okay, I’m ready,” I said through the mask.
Jackson motioned for the woman and pulled a humongous flashlight from a holder on his belt. The tech opened the bag, Jackson shined the light inside, and Saber put a steadying hand on my back.
I looked down at the long, wickedly curved knife. The handle was intricately carved and had the patina of antique ivory. Two bands of metal crisscrossed the ivory. My stomach heaved from the smell of blood smeared on the blade near the hilt, but my nose twitched from two other odors.
“The blade is silver,” I said, meeting Saber’s gaze over my mask. “It makes my nose itch.”
“Like an allergy?” Jackson asked.
“Yes. I don’t think there’s a super-high silver content, but it’s high enough. The bands may be silver, too.”
“Don’t take this wrong, but Saber says the smell of blood bothers you. You sure that’s not causing the itch?”
“Blood scent makes me dizzy and nauseous. The itchy nose is definitely a reaction to silver.”
“Do you recognize the weapon? The carvings look familiar?”
“It looks like a half-size scimitar, but I’m no expert on weapons. Neil might be able to give an opinion.”
“Who is Neil?”
“An anthropologist for the state of Florida. He lives in St. Augustine.”
Jackson nodded. “Once we see about lifting prints, we’ll have a number of experts look at it. Anything else you noticed?”
I hesitated because I really didn’t want to smell the bag again. But Ike
had
been murdered, and I had the bad feeling Donita was going to be a suspect.
I leaned closer to the bag and sniffed. Yep, it wasn’t my imagination. I smelled the faintest trace of citrus. I stood back, away from the bag, and ripped off the mask. “Citrus, Saber. There’s a citrus smell coming from the knife, and it’s the same scent I smelled in the club and on Laurel.”
“Laurel, the psycho vamp?” Jackson asked.
“The same,” Saber said, his lips set in a grim line. “I should’ve executed her Saturday night.”
“You couldn’t kill her in cold blood. Besides, the cleaning solution scent should’ve faded by now.”
“Would you two fill me in here? What happened Saturday?”
Saber shifted away from the evidence tech, and Jackson dismissed her with a nod.
“Cesca is picking up an odor that’s out of place. She smelled it last week when we served the warrant, and again Saturday when we were here to see a comic perform. Specifically, she smelled the scent on Laurel.”
“Citrus? That’s common enough.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “It’s in everything from perfume to bathroom cleaners. The morning you served the warrant, I thought it came from an air freshener system.”
“Did you ask if Ike had one?”
I looked at Saber, then shrugged. “With all that’s happened, we forgot.”
“Okay, so, go on. Why does this matter?”
“We’re not sure it does,” Saber admitted. “Look, if a normal vampire smells at all, it’s of only two things. Blood and sex. They don’t bother to cover up either one.”
“Which means,” I added, “that unless someone is making artificial blood in a Florida orange flavor, the citrus smell is out of place.”
Jackson almost cracked a grin. “You say Laurel had this scent on her on Saturday?”
“Yes, but Ike had been making her clean the residence. I figured the smell was from a cleaning product on her skin. But why would it be on this knife?”
“Could it be in the blood instead?”
I frowned and thought about that. When Normand had served dinner, had I ever smelled what the servant du jour had eaten the day before? Probably not, since I’d buried my nose in the servants’ skin as I drank. That way I blocked the smell of blood, which blocked a smidge of the taste.
“I doubt the scent is coming from Ike’s blood. Even if he ate food, I don’t see Ike being the orange juice type.”
Jackson shrugged. “It was worth asking. Now, here’s another question. If you’re right about the silver content, does that narrow the field to a human killer?”
Again, Saber and I exchanged a glance.
“Ten days ago, I would have answered an unqualified yes,” Saber said. “Since then, we’ve learned about one vampire who appears to be immune to silver.”
“I take it that vamp isn’t in the club?”
“He’s in Atlanta. Or we’re reasonably certain he’s still there, but I’ll have to check it out.”
“In the meantime, we need to question the vamps inside.” Jackson ran a hand over his military short hair and eyed me. “How about taking a whiff of the vampires while we question them? You can smell for blood and this citrus odor.”
“Not the most appealing offer I’ve had all night, but I’ll do it on one condition.”
“Which is?”
I looked at Saber. “Will you shoot first and ask questions later if Laurel gets in my face again?”
“Hell, I won’t even ask questions later, but I have a condition, too. If you pull Laurel’s aura, you drain her into submission. Clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Good.” He took my elbow. “Let’s go see what we can get out of Donita before we go in.”
Saber and Jackson let me approach first, and I spotted Pandora under the ambulance.
“Donita, it’s Cesca,” I said as I sat beside her. “Can you hear me?”
A full minute passed before she blinked and slowly turned her head to look at me.
“Donita, what happened?”
“I’m going on a trip today,” she said, her voice soft and scratchy. “To meet my girlfriends. We do this every year.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
“I-I went to his office. To tell him I was leaving. He wasn’t there.”
Her hands clenched into trembling fists, and I laid my hand over hers. I meant the touch to be only comforting, not to get sucked into an instant mind connection, not to see Ike through her eyes, not to feel her pain. When the vision rose like a rogue wave, I could do nothing but ride it to the end.
“I unlocked my car. I got in. I saw him.”
Through her mind’s eye and emotions, I saw him, too. Propped with his back to the passenger door. Blood spatter on the windshield and dashboard, and a trickle on his white shirt. His head tilted back to expose the obscene wound. Brown eyes open, staring. Surprise, disbelief, then stark terror ripped through me, and I found myself in Donita tumbling out of the car and onto the pavement, keening in horror.
A fierce squeeze of my hand jerked me back to the moment. Donita’s nails dug into my skin.
“Francesca,” she whispered. “I didn’t get to say good-bye.”
Tears tracked down her face then, and Saber hunkered down to ease her hands from mine.
“Donita, did you see or hear anything when you came outside? Was anyone near your car?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know who could have done this?”
“Laurel was always angry, always pushing.”
“Yes, you told me Saturday you were worried that she was out of control. Did she argue with Ike again?”
“She wanted him to fire me. To stop seeing me.”
“And what did Ike say?”
Her lips tightened. “He told her to mind her own business, not his. I was ready to quit just to have some peace.”
“Do you think Laurel killed Ike?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. God, I’m so cold.”
“Just one more thing. Does the club have some sort of an air freshening system?”
The question jarred Donita. “What does that have to do with someone killing Ike?”
Saber shrugged. “Probably nothing. Just a loose end.”
Donita shook her head. “There’s nothing but central heat and air conditioning that I know of.”
“All right. The paramedics need to take you to the hospital now, but Cesca and I will check on you later.”
“Can we call anyone for you?” I asked. “Your girlfriends?”
“No, I’ll do it.”
She wouldn’t call them, though. I was still just connected enough to hear that she didn’t care about anything at the moment. Who could blame her?
Jackson, who’d stood by and listened, motioned to an officer as the paramedics helped Donita onto a gurney. I knew he was putting the man on hospital guard duty, but I didn’t object. Sure, it was ludicrous to think Donita could’ve taken out a vampire, but she’d been his lover, and she’d found the body. That gave her two tickets to suspect city. We headed for the club’s back entrance, Jackson in the lead. I didn’t see Pandora, but supposed she was on shape-shifter stealth reconnaissance.
“I doubt we’ll get anything useful,” Jackson was saying, “but we’ve seized the computer to check the security feed. I figured you should be here when we questioned the vamps, so my guys took statements from the humans.”
“I suppose no one saw a thing,” Saber said.
“Not that they’d admit to.”
“Have you released them?”
“Yeah, even the waitstaff. We’ll have to question them away from the club, because they’re too frightened to say a word against a vampire.”
When we stepped into the club proper, it was obvious that humans weren’t the only ones who seemed frightened into silence. Tower and Zena, Coach, Suzy, and Ray—the Antonio Banderas look-alike vamp who had been Ike’s attorney—sat at a table in the center of the room. Suzy dabbed her eyes with a napkin, and Ray looked grim, but the rest were deadpan and dead still. That is, except when Laurel, dressed like a slutty biker vamp, brushed behind them as she paced. Then I saw the tiniest twitch of an eye or tightening of a mouth. Ike’s vamps might not be grieving him, but they didn’t look overjoyed that he was forever dead, either. Charles and Miranda weren’t present, but then they had likely gone back to their jobs at Ike’s residence after Laurel was released from punishment. I wondered if Jackson had thought to search the lair.
I’d scanned the men Jackson had fanned out around the room when my skin prickled and I knew Laurel had spotted us.
“Fires of hell,” she screeched, startling half of Jackson’s people into drawing their weapons. “Ike told you two never to come here again.”
From twenty feet away, she flowed across the room in a one-second rush, but I was ready. I pulled hard at her aura, her life force, took it into myself and held it. Laurel, though, stopped fast enough to send a whiplash of energy through the air and through me. I held what I’d already taken and pulled again.
“No!” She threw up a hand and backed up a few paces, her mocha skin gleaming with a fine sheen, bone beads in her cornrows clacking. “You will not humiliate me again, bitch.”
“I don’t want to humiliate you, Laurel.” Which was true, since I’d just as soon see her shipped to the Antarctic. “I don’t want you in my face.”
“And I do not wish you in this club.” Her flat black eyes narrowed. “Why are you here?”
“They’re assisting in the investigation,” Jackson said.
Laurel flipped a hand. “Arrest Ike’s little whore and be done with it.”
“Come on, Laurel,” Saber said as he strolled toward the table of vamps. “Donita didn’t kill your boss.”
Laurel spun on Saber, those damn beads clacking again. “And you presume that why? Because she is a weakling human? Fool. She ensnared the affections of Lord Ike by trickery. She could easily have killed him the same way.”
“You don’t believe that, do you, Tower?” Saber asked.
Jackson and I had taken advantage of Laurel’s distraction to approach the table of vamps from the other side, but no one missed Tower jerk in his chair.
“Lady Laurel is the new mistress,” the ebony-skinned Tower said carefully.
“
Lady
Laurel?” I blurted.
She moved closer to the vamps she now ruled.
“It is not so exalted a title as yours, Princess Ci,” she drawled snidely, “but it is a customary one.”
“It’s also one more reason to move you to the top of the suspect list,” Saber said.
“What do you mean?”
He caught my gaze and jerked his head ever so slightly.
Smell the vamps.
I sensed his message more than heard him, and began a slow pace behind each chair, pausing to sniff, while Saber kept pressure on Laurel.
“How long have you been plotting to kill Ike, Laurel? Since he punished you, or longer than that?”
“You are accusing
me
? Ike’s second-in-command? I was sworn to protect him.”
“You were also supposed to follow his orders, not question them.”
“I advised my lord, as was my duty.”
“Come off it, Laurel. You fought with Ike over Donita. You were so jealous, you reeked of it.”
I completed my circle around the table, and stood behind Suzy as Laurel drew herself tall.
“You are mistaken. I saw that changing the club would not be in Lord Ike’s best interest.”
“And, since he wouldn’t dump Donita, you decided to run the club without him.”
“You plan to arrest me?”
Saber turned to me and arched his brow.
“Suzy.” I lightly touched her shoulder.
She startled and let out a small squeal. “Yes?”
“Has Laurel changed her clothes tonight?”
“N-no. She never changes once she’s dressed for the night.”
I met Saber’s gaze. “I don’t smell Ike’s blood or anything else on any of them. Not citrus, not even sex.”
Saber looked puzzled, and Jackson scowled. I could’ve sworn something furtive crossed Laurel’s face, but then she laughed.
“Did you hear, my nestmates? The great vampire princess came here to smell us like a dog.”
“Arf, arf,” I said. “Now you can thank me.”
“Why should I lower myself to do that?”
“Because, unfortunately, I just cleared your spiteful self of murder charges.”
Laurel gave me a slow blink. “You dare to speak to me like that?”
I shrugged, and Laurel moved.
Saber shouted even as I sucked her energy like a mega Hoover. This time she didn’t block me soon enough. I had her. She faltered, and Saber was on her like lightning, forcing her to the floor, straddling her leather-clad butt. Jackson had drawn his weapon but kept it trained on the unmoving vamps.
“Laurel, vampire of the Daytona Beach nest,” Saber said over her thrashing and the crash of beads in her hair. “You’re under arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. As a duly sworn VPA agent of the United States, I declare you a Rampant, subject to immediate arrest and execution. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to mediation.”