Lost Angeles (20 page)

Capable.

“Are you the monkey?” The words are out of my mouth before I have the chance to stop them.

He pushes away from the door jamb, stepping toward me with one hand outstretched. “No, I’m the dolphin. The name’s Asher.”

I reach out and his big, calloused fingers close around mine. It’s a strong handshake, but not a suave one, at least not in the Tinseltown sense. The rough sandpaper of his palms leaves a little friction burn in its wake, and my eyes wander down his torso to the gun holstered at his waist. All in all, I feel like I’ve taken a pretty good measure of Asher before he finally lets me go.

“You’re late,” Fatty grumbles. “Did Timmy fall down a well again?”

“Bulb burnt out in the Bat Signal, took a while to fix,” Asher says, then adds, “Can I get a minute with the girl?”

Fatty hesitates, wheezing a moment as if loath to leave, but eventually he heads toward the coffee machine in the other room, toting a white mug and a frown. Asher plunks himself down in the vacated chair, leaning back and propping his elbows on the arm rests. He sits like a dude, legs spread and feet sprawled out in front, total power pose. I read an article on those once; apparently, the lazier you look, the more confidence you have. Confident enough to not give a shit about what people think of the way you sit, anyway. His expression is authoritative and a little hard, but when he smiles at me, it tears a decade off his age.

“So what’s your deal?” I ask wryly. “Here to play good cop?”

“Nah,” he says, waving a hand at that. “I’m not a cop.”

“You just play one on TV?” I give him a very ballsy once-over. “I gotta say, you wouldn’t even have to act. Hell, you could paint walls shirtless for two hours, and I’d buy a ticket.”

He flushes at that, clearing his throat and glancing away. “I’m here to talk about the murders. I assume they’ve run you through the usual questions?”

“Yeah, and the meat grinder too.” I gesture to the dot of blood on my neck. “I just want to go home.”

“Well, I don’t know how likely that’s going to be,” Asher tells me. “Do you have any family you can stay with? Back east, maybe?”

I go a little cold at that, because whoever this guy is, he’s done his homework. “Nope,” I say, suddenly wary. “There’s nobody. Just me and my roommate.”

But you knew that.

“Truth is, Ms. Chase,” he says, lifting one hand to scrape at the thick shadow on his chin, “whether Xaine did this or not, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and as much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news—”

“I know,” I cut him off. “I look like them. The murdered girls.”

Eerily, creepily like them. The woman they found at Scion could have been my sister, and the girl they found in Xaine’s pool could have been my
twin
. Their California Driver’s License pictures hang not five feet away from me, clipped to a white board next to crime scene snapshots of their naked, lifeless bodies. Hell, I might suspect Xaine, too, if I hadn’t spent the last twenty-four hours practically in his pocket.

“You certainly bear more than a passing resemblance to the deceased,” Asher agrees, leaning forward. “Which is why it would be safer for you to leave town, at least for a while.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, definite and sure. “And if you’re not a cop, then who are you and why the hell are you here?”

“I’m a consultant,” he tells me. “An expert on the paranormal.” My eyebrows climb my forehead as he goes on to say, “I don’t have a badge, but I help keep the city safe.”

“From vampires?”

“From supernaturals.”

That throws me, because it implies something different. Something more. “As in,
other than
vampires?”

“As in,” Asher says, “including, but not limited to, vampires.”

“So there are different things out there?” To that, he gives a slow nod and my curiosity gets the better of me. “Like what?”

“Like your friend Benicio,” he says, leading me back to the matter at hand. “Does he have a last name?”

“If he does, I don’t know it.”

Asher leans sideways, pulling a small notepad from his back pocket. Obviously a pen didn’t go with the outfit because he reaches over and plucks a writing utensil from the cup on Fatty’s desk. When he returns his attention to me, his dark eyes scour my scanty outfit from head to foot. There’s no lust in it; in fact, he flushes and turns his eyes downward to scribble something on the first piece of paper.

So Batman is shy. Interesting.

“Where did you meet Benicio?” he asks.

“I have a Thirsty Thursday gig at O’Reilly’s. I met him there.”

“You hadn’t seen him before that?”

“No?” The question that is not a question reappears, and I feel its presence acutely. I seem to do that a lot these days, looking to other people to fill in the blanks for all the questions that I can’t seem to answer myself. Like Asher might know how I ended up in the Valley on a Thursday night. “I may have seen him before, but I can’t say for sure. All I have are very hazy memories of blond hair, blue eyes, very broad shoulders. He’s tall, really tall, and…”

“And?”

“And nothing.” I shrug, because I can’t do anything else. “You could ask Xaine for a better physical description. He might be able to tell you more. He seemed to… recover more quickly?”

“Recover from what?”

I try to get the wording exactly right, because I have so little else to give this guy. “It was like I was drugged. My head felt swimmy. And, I kept having…”

When I pause, I glance at his face. Asher’s sitting there as impassive as any statue, a veritable David, all hard lines and chiseled-stone angles. He waits for an entire minute, but I bite the inside of my lip and shut my trap. I almost said too much.

But he’s not about to let me get away with silence, not when I might have case-relevant information to impart. “Kept having?” he prompts.

“Hallucinations, I guess?” I tell him, tiptoeing around the truth.

“Hallucinations.” Asher’s leg’s bounces a bit, the thick, rubber heel of one boot tapping against the floor. “Or something else?”

I know what he’s getting at now: I can’t be trusted because I’m the nutball who had a psychotic break and simply
lost
two months of time. “I’m not crazy. I know what I remember.”

“I believe you.”

“You do.” Now
that
sounds like a statement, go figure.

“Yeah, I do.” Asher leans forward in his chair again, holding the pad loosely in one hand, tapping the pen against it with the other. “There are… people… like Benicio. They have a certain affinity for reading minds. Reading memories. They can actually feed off of your recollections, like emotional vampires. Most of the time, they’re completely harmless. Beneficial, in fact. But sometimes, like vampires, they go a little rogue.”

“So you think one of these rogue memory-readers is stalking girls?”

“Yes, but the question is,
why
?” Asher leans back, his quiet gaze returning to the notepad. “Walk me the through the timeline, starting with the Thursday night gig.”

It takes two shitty cups of coffee, four pages of notes, and a half an hour before he’s verified that the first body dump happened after Motel Night in the Valley, the second after the encounter with Benicio in the hallway at Scion. I’ll give it to Asher, the man is methodical and detail-oriented in a way that teases out vague recollections of Benicio’s heavy cologne, the button-down shirt he was wearing, the fact that he and Xaine tussled hard enough for there to have been DNA transfer.

“Did he ever give you anything?” Asher asks. “Drinks? Pills?”

“No. He only… touched me.”

Far from surprised, Asher only nods. “We’ve found a trace substance on the skin of the victims. Since your tests are still at the lab, we’ll have to wait for the verdict on a match, but the blood screen for the others was pretty conclusive. Both of them had a high saturation level of an unidentified psychoactive substance that seems to have been transferred via skin-to-skin contact and… um… fluid exchange.” Asher rubs a finger alongside his nose, smudging a blot of ink across the skin as he frowns. “I hate to say it, Ms. Chase, but I think you’re the one that keeps getting away. Benicio’s stalking you, and whenever something—or someone—interrupts him, we get a dead Lore-alike.”

“But
why
?”

“These types, the ones like Benicio, they get their kicks off people’s thoughts, their secrets, their little dark corners,” Asher says. “Your worst moments are their best ones.”

“So you’re saying that he’s using these girls for sex and memories?”

“Something like that,” is Asher’s confirmation.

“If he’s so ‘harmless,’ then why are two girls dead?”

He gives me an appraising look. “That’s the bit I’m not sure of. Care to tell me a little about what he might be after, Ms. Chase?”

“What?” I hesitate, eying him warily. “Like…
my
memories?”

He gives a slow nod, and I squirm. My eyes dart toward the elevator at the end of the hallway, and I stare at that silver rectangle with longing, wishing Xaine would reappear like a genie and let me wish myself out of the hot seat.

No dice, so I finally meet Asher’s patient gaze again. Unlike the fat detective, this guy projects an aura of
you can trust me
that I almost want to heed. But there’s another part of me, the one that keeps asking those not-a-question questions, that’s unsure of everything I ever knew. I used to speak my mind, but then they told me it was broken.

“I’m not crazy,” I repeat. “I’m
not
.”

“Okay,” he says easily.

“So if I tell you what I’m thinking about telling you,” I say, “I don’t want someone in a white jacket coming in to haul me away. Got it?”

He lifts a hand and draws an X over his heart. “Swear to die.”

Still, I hesitate. I fought my family and friends, railing and screaming, clawing and trying to convince someone,
anyone
that I wasn’t imagining things. After a while, I began to doubt my own mind. Began to wonder if maybe they were right.

It’s all in your head.

Asher sits in silence, arms crossed over his chest, feet still splayed out. I have to hand it to him, the guy is waiting me out like a pro, and I realize that I’m going to have to cough up something if I want to get Xaine and myself out of here anytime soon.

“Someone picked me up from the record store where I worked with my… well, from the place where I worked.” The words come slowly, haltingly, and I hesitate to tell him anything about Daniel. “It was after-hours, and I was closing up to go home. The last thing I remember is the bell ringing above the door…”

“I’m sorry,” I say, sliding the register back into its place and slowly easing the thing shut. “We’re closed. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

There are two men in the doorway, both of them dressed head-to-toe in black, and sudden panic surges up my spine. The man in front wears a flipped-up hood over his skull, but I can tell it’s shaved short, with the hint of dark stubble along the edge of his forehead. He’s got a septum piercing connected to two separate silver strands, each one strung outward to a hole in the corresponding ear. Both of the delicate chains are hung with little metal tines in the shape of canines, and the entire effect dials the menace up to eleven.

“Lourdes Chase?”

I’m already inching toward the panic button, searching beneath the counter with my fingers, trying to find the little white box that will summon the police. Silver Teeth walks toward me slowly, but his partner deviates, branching off to the side in order to pace down the adjacent aisle. He ducks briefly into the back of the store, banging doors against walls as he checks the practice rooms, the office, the bathroom, then turns back to give a nod in Silver Teeth’s direction.

“Can I help you?” My voice wavers, my hands shake, and I try not to be too obvious about the forays my fingers are making just out of sight.

“Are you Lourdes Chase?”

“Look, I don’t know what—”

Silver Teeth grins, exposing a row of sharp, white incisors, all of them filed into points. It’s like looking into the mouth of a shark, and suddenly I understand.

I will not be home for dinner.